One of the most anticipated, talked about and viewed boxing events in recent history took place over this past weekend. Floyd Mayweather vs. Manny Pacquaio. Starting at $90 to 100 on Pay-Per-View, this event generated hundreds of millions of dollars for HBO and Showtime, not to mention the fighters and others who had a hand in this massively popular event.
Whenever there is a high profile event like this, you can expect that it will be possible to pirate the video from somewhere online. It is one of those things that Hollywood fights against, but also knows it will be impossible to stop completely. Typically, however, this type of pirating is difficult enough to find and set up that the average consumer won’t be able to do it, or won’t find it worth it.
For this fight, however, there were two options to pirate the fight that were exceedingly popular and exceedingly easy. The popular apps Meerkat and Periscope. These two apps allowed people to live stream the video publically, free of charge.
While it was predictable that this would happen, it was somewhat surprising just how little either of the two companies did to prevent it. There were hundreds of streaming options on each app. While they would occasionally take some of them down, it would take just moments to pick another one. Tens of thousands of people are estimated to have pirated the fight over these two popular apps.
What is even more surprising is the reaction by Twitter’s CEO (which owns Periscope). Dick Costolo Tweeted out, “And the winner is…@periscopeco” This is an obvious indication that he was well aware of the fact that Periscope was being used extensively for streaming the fight, and he seemed to be 100% okay with it. Of course, pirating this event was illegal.
It is not clear if there will be any repercussions for the CEO’s tweet. Companies like HBO that potentially lost hundreds of thousands of dollars because of this pirating may be looking to at least get an apology and a promise that more will be done to fight piracy in the future.
It is interesting to look at this from the eyes of a marketer as well. Twitter is, of course, used extensively by people throughout Hollywood to promote their television shows and other events. Virtually every show, movie and event is given its own account and hash tag. In fact, Twitter is widely seen to be the most used social media option by Hollywood. Despite this fact, the CEO of the company basically promotes piracy against them. Costolo may want to be more careful not to bite the hand that feeds him. Without the constant Tweet’s from celebrities, Twitter wouldn’t have nearly the platform that they have today.
