INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Today, there was a little bit of a skirmish between two professional YouTubers
Our dear old friend Logan Paul and KSI had an actual boxing match at the Manchester Arena where 15,000 tickets were sold (!!!!!!!!) for an
event that ultimately ended in a draw and vows for a rematch.
The action onstage wasn''t the only place where viewers could get a look into
the action, there was a $10 pay-per-view stream on YouTube, but more people seemed to end up watching pirated streams on Twitch with boxing
fight streams reaching over a million concurrent users at one point
Streams also popped up on Twitter-owned Periscope and there were a few unofficial streams popping up on YouTube as well.
There is now over
2 million concurrent viewers for the KSI Logan Paul fight
800,000 on the official YouTube stream that cost $10 to watch, and 1.2 million watching for free on Twitch
#KSIvLogan pic.twitter.com/ZZ0FYHLzOn
mdash; Rod Breslau (@Slasher) August 25, 2018
Now, forget the parties involved and the topic and the
motivations for a moment if you can
I understand if it might feel more than a little difficult to feel remorse for the parties involved, that has been a common refrain for
pirated content popping up from whatever group for whatever reason though.
There obviously a big difference between free curiosity and $10
curiosity for an event like this but it seems pretty apparent that having access to a free stream on an easily-accessible mainstream site
probably dissuaded some people from paying for the event on YouTube
While people may have previously scoured the web for pop-up ridden sites to view something like this, Twitch and other services unofficially
served it up on a platter.
There are plenty of events similar to this one, but so often the refrain is made that people have to turn to
pirated streams because the alternative is paying for cable or something that is really against the spirit of these easy-to-access platforms
Well, here an example of something that falls far outside that argument.
It impossible to squash all of the pirated streams, but Amazon
Twitch is a bit too mature to be hosting pirated streams in such rampant numbers without being a little more proactive — instead of just
relying on user reports to police pirated content that was fairly hard to avoid stumbling upon on the platform.
Even as tech companies
continue to try and crack live content, services like Twitch that don''t proactively search out users hijacking streams of big events like
this really serve to complicate and deter their own goals of eventually finding a way to monetize big events like this.
