So, a lot of users in this thread seem to be misunderstanding what Mux is, and how the "soccer pirates" interact with their service. Let me clarify:
Mux is a streaming infrastructure provider. They provide services for companies who want to stream video to their users -- news web sites, video chat services, etc. Kind of like web hosting, but specifically for video. They are not a video content provider; they do not sell subscriptions to end users.
Mux's problem is that pirates will sign up for their service to restream pirated video content, like live sports streams:
Official stream --> pirate --> Mux --> viewers
When this happens, Mux usually gets stiffed on the bill, and if the stream stays up, Mux gets legal nastygrams from the content owners. So it's in Mux's interest that they detect these pirates quickly and terminate service before they run up too much of a bill. The blog post explains how they do that.
There's probably a point here that they offer free credits and other ways for people to get "free bandwidth". So this is a way to avoid less friendly strategies to get pre-payments on this stuff, at least without going through a sales team.
I enjoy being able to sign up and just try a thing without interacting with a sales team, but... I mean. This is a video CDN, not a newspaper subscription. I definitely know what I would do (but I am not a successful business)
In that case, isn't this a similar situation platforms like Twitter or Youtube find themselves in, where they don't want to take full responsibility for moderation or suddenly they're liable for all the harmful content on their platforms, but on the other hand they're forced to moderate just enough to avoid governments forcing them to be on the hook?
Yeah I was one of the confused at first. Throwing my hands up saying who cares pirates going to pirate. But this is different. They are abusing this service to stream illegal content, vs tapping directly from the akamai stream which I've seen in the past.
Sigh... f*ck sports leagues/governing bodies. The reason some honest people pirate streams for sporting events is because they make it so annoying to pay for them. Some examples...
I live in the US.
I briefly took an interest in the EPL. If I wanted to watch all EPL games (or have the option of watching any particular EPL game), I'd have to subscribe to Peacock _and_ Fubo -- and I'm still not sure that gets me all games.
I briefly took an interest in the NHL (this was years ago, granted -- things may have changed). If I would have subscribed to their service, the ONLY team whose home games I couldn't watch would have been the TEAM OF THE CITY I LIVE IN (i.e.: "my" team).
My two favorite sports, though, are Cycling and F1.
I LOVE cycling. To watch every UCI race, I'd have to subscribe to GCN+ (they have the Giro), Peacock (they have the Tour de France and La Vuelta), and Flobikes (they have most of the Classics races).
THE ONLY sports governing body that has figured this out (for sports I like, anyway), is F1. I pay F1.com $80 a year and get MORE content than I would if I watched the races on ESPN. I can see EVERY RACE, EVERY QUALIFYING, EVERY PRACTICE. I can even choose WHOSE car I want to see the first person view from.
If you want to "stop pirates", make it easy for them to give you money and watch their favorite sport.
If you lived in the UK, supported Tottenham and wanted to watch all their games in the 2021/22 season you had to:
Subscribe to Sky Sports (around £50-60 a month) for the Premier League games.
Subscribe to BT Sports (30 a month) for the Saturday early kick off Premier League games and the Europa Conference League games.
Subscribe to Amazon Prime for the 3 random weeks when they are showing the Premier League games instead of Sky.
Subscribe to Premier Sports (£12 a month) to see a Europa Conference League 2 legged qualifier.
And even then you couldn't see all the games legally in the UK because of the 3pm Saturday black out. You are forced to find a stream from another country where they are broadcasting the game.
Then when you are subscriped you get wall to wall gambling adverts during half time. For every other product you subscribe to, it is to avoid ads, but not television.
Exactly this. I am a rabid women's soccer fan. I study and follow the draft like a professional coach, watch as many matches as I can, drive three hours to NWSL matches when I can, try and catch overseas games when possible, and I am continuously frustrated by the broken state of sports streaming. The NWSL shows up on ParamountPlus, unlesss its on CBS, unless its on CBSSN, unless its on Twitch on like three different Twitch channels - it is maddening as a hardcore fan and in no way leads to a casual fan having an easy time to watch.
I am heartbroken too at the amount of historical matches that will be lost because they simply aren't available. NWSL, FA WSL, International Friendlies or International Cups. It will all be lost over time as streaming partnerships change. The key to making better players is a better soccer culture and that means the key is to have them watch the game, love the game.
I have had seasons where I have almost quit as a fan because how frustratingly disorganized it all is. I know partnerships are important, but these leagues need to start pushing for their own streaming infrastructure or unified streaming partner or they will see the sport tip into irrelevance with the general public.
There's a common polycule meme where every new member pays for a different digital media subscription service and it's shared between everyone. If you get together with a few friends it's possible to split the costs of all these services. If you're sufficiently tech savvy, each person can run a VPN from their home so it doesn't look suspicious from the streaming service's end. Here's a video showing how to do this with Netflix [0].
I remember growing up it would be really common for people to split the cost of a PPV fight and VHS recordings would be passed around. It seems pretty similar.
Community-based media sharing is great. I wish it was possible for me to lend all of my Steam games when I'm not using them.
> If you want to "stop pirates", make it easy for them to give you money and watch their favorite sport.
I don't disagree, but that isn't something Mux is in a position to do. They just provide video streaming infrastructure -- they're in no position to demand that various sports broadcast rightsholders change their policies.
As I slowly grow crotchety and old I've really become fed up with the giant corps. I've taught dozens of both older and younger folk how to use a VPN and a torrent client. I've had one parent accuse me of teaching their teenager how to steal. I told them you're damn right, your kid is a sharp young woman and she is learning from the best.
Media companies like to claim that each act of piracy costs them huge sums of money. That isn't true, but I wish it was.
F1 has this absolutely nailed. I fear that if it gets popular enough in the US ESPN will buy exclusive rights and then you'll have to have a cable package in order to watch it.
I hope that whoever the executives are over at the MLB who decided that blacking out games on streaming services was a good idea, are well into their 60s and 70s and will be dying or retiring soon.
I lived a ten minute walk from the Cubs' stadium and really wanted to watch every game. I moved to Chicago the year before they won the world series and got to experience all the build up, so was extremely excited to follow them.
But even though I had a MLB.tv subscription, from T-Mobile, it was completely useless the entire time I lived in Chicago. The Cubs' games were on an over the air network, WGN, for decades, so I had to spend money for a one time expense of an antennae to be privileged to watch some games and the added inconvenience of switching away from my streaming box.
Soon after they won the world series, they moved to a cable only network Marquee. I would have been forced to pay for cable to get the same shitty experience of watching only some games. I ended up only ever watching games I was physically at or when a game aligned with the exact time I happened to be at a bar with it on in the background.
Blackout rules feel like a completely untenable situation if baseball wants anyone under 45 to get in to the sport.
As someone who's in Asia who loves to watch baseball, it is so hard to subscribe to live stream. I have no choice but to resort to illegal streams. MLB.tv outside the US will cost me $24.99 per month. What the fuck. The only option I have right now is Apple TV+ which has Friday Nights Baseball live, thank you Apple.
Considering I just paid $74 to Youtbe TV just so I could watch one month of NBA playoffs, I'm sure $80 per year would get you laughed out of the room. They know exactly what they're doing and exactly how much pain they can inflict on the fans to extract the maximum amount of money. Though I do think that kind of short-term MBA thinking causes long-term damage to their brand and product, but they don't know how to calculate that in their quarterly earnings reports. In my mind the Olympics is an example of where the long-term damage is really starting to accumulate, I know several people that used to be big Olympics fans 10 years ago that couldn't be bothered last time around because of how painful NBC makes it.
100% agree. I watch Bundesliga, with sky Germany over VPN you could watch all games 2/3 years ago, not some of them are on DAZN which also charges. ChampionsLeague used to be sky as well, not its prime. Not to mention English, Spanish and Italian league. I watch 4-5h soccer a week throughout the league based in time and interest. Without pirating I would have to pay several hundreds of dollars. Ridiculous.
> If I would have subscribed to their service, the ONLY team whose home games I couldn't watch would have been the TEAM OF THE CITY I LIVE IN (i.e.: "my" team).
They don't want to cannibalize in-person attendance where fans pay for $300 tickets and $20 pints of beer.
Surprisingly world rally championship is also amazing with this. A very affordable subscription to wrc+ gets you live coverage, summarized coverage, highlights, specials, historical reviews, as much content as you'd want really!
> THE ONLY sports governing body that has figured this out (for sports I like, anyway), is F1.
No. The only ones who figured it out is the NFL. F1 shafted Germany after youg Schuhmacher came into F1 and German Sky bought exclusive rights.
The NFL? Intl Game Pass €190 per season live streams, instant repeats no adverts, various show, dedicated tv apps, no limit on number of devices, high def.
> I briefly took an interest in the NHL (this was years ago, granted -- things may have changed). If I would have subscribed to their service, the ONLY team whose home games I couldn't watch would have been the TEAM OF THE CITY I LIVE IN (i.e.: "my" team).
This is why I won't give the NHL or MLB any money for their video services.
This is a good example of the situation in many sports. The UCI is a governing body, not an event organiser or promoter. Basically anyone can put on race, and they are responsible for making money out of it. So event promoters make their own deals with broadcasters.
Agree 100%. I'm a cycling fan and I refuse to subscribe to 4+ services to pick up the major races. I want the classics and big one-day races, the 3 grand tours, UCI XCO and DH, and all the world champ events.
As best I can tell...
The classics and spring season are spread across Flo, GCN+, and Peacock.
Giro is GCN+.
le Tour is Peacock.
Road worlds is Flo.
Vuelta is Peacock.
And the UCI mountain bike stuff is (mostly) on GCN+ (used to be Redbull, maybe)
I'd happily spend $300/year or so to get it all in one place. Instead, I end up watching highlights on Youtube. I don't torrent because I have an iPad, so I can't (without jumping through hoops) - but I'm tempted to grab a cheap PC just to torrent cycling.
Positively nailed it. Why can’t I just watch gt racing? Who can I just give my money to to watch all the GT and SCCA racing I want? Nobody has it and whoever owns it has made it balls out the hardest thing in the world to watch.
> I LOVE cycling. To watch every UCI race, I'd have to subscribe to GCN+ (they have the Giro), Peacock (they have the Tour de France and La Vuelta), and Flobikes (they have most of the Classics races).
If you were okay with not watching it live, people were torrenting each day's stage of the tour de France in 2004. There is a pretty big overlap between tech industry people and enthusiastic road cyclists.
Now there's whole communities of people sharing the euro broadcasts of just about everything race for worldwide people to watch.
On the other hand, what kind of life do you have if you need to watch every single event/games of at least 4 different sports/league?
I mean I like different sports but I mostly stick to the one I love the most (cycling) and even then I skip most of it and only watch the events that count the most for me (spring classics, a bit of the grand tour in the background especially while working, world champs and MTB world cups). And given the choice to go for a bicycle ride or watch a cycling race, I will always go for the former and do the later only when I am tired, my partner or kids aren't at home or busy doing something else and I feel like lying for a bit on the couch after my own ride. I don't mind the occasionnal motogp, world rallycross, or rally coverage but I have accepted I can't both follow everything and live a decent and happy familial and social life.
Only exception being Paris-Roubaix which is probably one of the only classic that is worth watching from km 0. But even then I didn't watched live this year. I avoided getting spoiled by living mostly offline appart from professionnal stuff for 3 days before dedicating the time to watch it.
It is the same for social medias in fact. Most of them are trying to make you feel bad if you don't see all their content. I deleted my twitter, fb, instagram accounts a while ago and although I keep a bit of presence in mastodon I have accepted the fact that I will just connect to it a few times a week and miss tons of informations/content/jokes. Is my life worse for it? Well, not really.
Yep -- watching cycling stuff is insanely hard. And I can't help but believe this is one of the reasons competitive amateur cycling is dying as well. People like to do what they watch the pros do, but when it's so hard...
I don't watch much cycling stuff, but sometimes I want to sit down and watch a CX race, or maybe one of the MTB races, or the TdF highlights or something... But there's just no one platform for it.
I feel for you. Here, GCN+ (or GCN+ Eurosport as it’s officially branded as a partnership being both owned by Warner Bros. Discovery along with BT Sport) has literally everything - from all the grand tours, to classics and even the most insignificant 1.2 and 2.2 ranked events. And all for a fair price. I didn’t even consider that in other territories the rights might be snapped up piecemeal style. That’s a shame.
I’m with you, including the F1 part, and I’m glad that Liberty Media hasn’t hiked up the prices in the US so far. Even with the $80/year, I still end up watching some races on ESPN because Sky’s broadcast rights won’t allow F1TV to show the interviews with pit wall, Ted/Karun and other small things… still miles better than all other sports.
Yeah I 100% agree. While I DON'T pirate anything, I DO pay for a sh!t ton of services to watch soccer and Cycling. Furthermore, I follow Scottish Soccer, specifically the Glasgow Rangers. So I pay 1. the club for their RangersTV, 2. Paramount+ for their half-ass SPL 'channel' (which btw doesn't show more than 2 games per weak, and rarely even Premier level teams), subscribe (free) to a small Scottish-only-football channel on YouTUbe (PLZ) for news.
On top of that I watch Serie A, Paramount+ has better coverage of this. But then you want to watch UEFA Europa and Champions leagues.
It gets very confusing and very costly.
I don't get why the individual leagues don't get smart and have their own streaming services rather than relying on legacy broadcasting services.
As for Cycling, I am in the same boat with GCN & Peacock. DIdn't know about flobikes so thanks for giving me something else to purchase :)
>THE ONLY sports governing body that has figured this out (for sports I like, anyway), is F1.
Unless you live in Australia, where F1TV gives you live timing and not much else. Foxtel seem to have F1 locked up here - the cheapest option I have is Kayo (an affiliated streaming service) for $25/mth.
I actually feel this should maybe be regulated. Sportsball** seems to manipulate humans at an instinctive level to a degree that most other media doesn’t, stirring up an artificial form of tribalism or patriotism. To then charge a huge amount of money and make people basically do a dance to get the product is gross. Especially when it is so popular among groups with not so much disposable income to throw at it, and when tax dollars are often used to fund sports infrastructure (at least in the US).
**I.e. spectator-focused sports leagues, not leagues regular people actually play in, those don’t have this issue.
For anyone who is low to mildly interested in sports, this is pushing them to consume zero sports. I wonder if they're not shooting themselves in the foot long term.
World Chase Tag has solved this by broadcasting exclusively on ESPN after a slight delay, and then uploading the matches to their own website and to YouTube for free after a slightly longer delay. But they're still in the position of growing their audience, so the free content (and full back catalogue on YouTube) is important. That marketing position might change in time.
Completely agree on F1 - it's super easy and I get more than I could ever consume. Between highlight episodes, multiple commentary tracks, live data, and race archives including seasons 10 years ago they've done a great job. I don't even question buying again each year.
This article could use big improvements in both its tone and organization.
People don't have a lot of love for greedy sports broadcasters, and tech people are often associated with a kind of "information wants to be free" ethos (for better or worse), so starting out your blog post with:
> identify and take action against soccer pirates and other delinquents who try to stream copyrighted content
comes across as pretty tone-deaf for the intended audience. Delinquents? What's next, are they going to tell me not to copy that floppy, or ask if I'd download a car?
What's crazier is that they actually have good justification but don't put it until the end of the article -- that pirates are using the service to broadcast streams that become super-popular (racking up charges) and then don't pay their bills for bandwidth and processing, losing near a million dollars in a year. Talk about burying the lead.
This article is a great example of what not to do. But it's a great learning opportunity for the rest of us. Always start your article with why the article subject matters. Don't wait until the end, don't just assume the reader is on your side.
...And also maybe don't call people delinquents when a decent proportion of your readership probably watches some of these same pirated streams...
Not the author, but I am a Muxer with edit access. I agree that the "delinquent" bit isn't hitting the intended tone there so I went ahead and made a quick edit to at least address that piece. I think the author intended as a reference to the payment kind of delinquency, but I can see why it wouldn't read that way.
I wish they explained the cost model more rather than just vaguely mention they had $750,000 in unpaid bills in 2021. How much does one game game/cost them?
> The contractor can escalate or silence the alert using the buttons on the Slack message. If it is a false positive, they will press “Silence,” which activates another n8n workflow that adds the asset to an allowlist, so it won’t alert again.
So if I were a prospective soccer pirate hoping to take advantage of Mux publishing the specific details of their content moderation system, could I just stream myself harmlessly showing off my soccer jersey collection for an hour to get future alerts ignored and then swap the feed over to soccer when the game starts? Granted I'm sure they'll take notice once they get a DMCA letter, but I imagine it might take awhile for everyone involved to catch on.
You’d be surprised how quickly a decently popular stream get dmca’ed these days (and in some jurisdictions your entire domain is autoblocked by isps). Content owners use automated tooling to scour the web for their IP
Presumably, but they could always add more heuristics like tracking viewership spikes. Sounds like they'd have a way to append more checks and were aiming for "good enough for now".
This already happens to an extent. I've noticed that some live streams will splice in non-football content (lets say a car commercial or sports panel discussion) for 10-20 seconds, then switch back to the live feed. This is done to circumvent the image recognition described in the article.
People pirate streams of soccer matches because it's nearly impossible to pay for legally. The matches for a single team or league are spread out amongst a ton of different streaming providers. Sometimes there is no paid option at all because of region blocking and complicated deals.
I happily pay Apple for MLS matches because there was no reliable way to get them here in New Zealand. It is still stupid because Apple has no idea what they're doing, the announcers are terrible, the audio levels all over the place, random silence, it gets loud, then random cutting between shots... At least it streams well.
But for other leagues? It is cheaper to go buy a ticket to watch the Wellington Phoenix at the stadium than it is to pay for streaming! Even then I can only find some matches.
What about other leagues? I follow Uruguayan soccer... good luck finding a place I could even pay for that which licenses the content in New Zealand.
My only hope is that this post about how to block pirate streaming will help the pirates evade being blocked.
Plenty of people also pirate to avoid paying, or to pay less.
I knew someone in England who ran a pirate football streaming service. He had TV and streaming subscriptions to a rented apartment in Cyprus, and streamed from there to people who paid him in England. Customers were introduced by word-of-mouth, so supposedly it was difficult for the copyright holders to discover.
The same matches were shown in England, but at a higher price.
I have the same problem like the others say in Germany. I have a Bundesliga season ticket for which I pay 360 euros and I see all home matches in person. Away matches are a completely different story. Half of them are shown by Sky, the other half by DAZN, and for some matches they only show highlights during the game. Sky wants 30 euros per month and at least a year of subscription and DAZN wants 25 euros per month.
My life doesn't revolve around football, I don't need to see all matches, just my team's. I would gladly pay 10-12 euros for pay per view, but no, that's apparently not an option.
Back in 2012 (!) I had a streaming package from Rogers that gave me access to most English Premier League and all Champions League games, for about $300. Well worth the price then. The next year, they lost the rights to CL games, didn't announce it to customer and kept charging the same amount!
”If it is a false positive, they will press “Silence,” which activates another n8n workflow that adds the asset to an allowlist, so it won’t alert again.”
So the secret is to first stream a safe video that will purposely trigger a false positive, and then switch to a pirate stream later on.
These pirates are the enemy of civilisation. Thank goodness the average citizens are standing up for the profit margins of the broadcasters and by extension, the overpaid players.
as a UK bloke in the US who supports a non-premier league team (Sunderland, currently in the EFL), i am legit screwed when it comes to wanting to pay to watch my team. it is literally impossible to pay to view while i reside in the USA. i want to pay, but i can't!
hulu told me i could bundle EFL with Disney (!) but i was never able to see any Sunderland games on Hulu so i cancelled.
EFL streams are hard to find, but in the absense of being able to pay to view, i will take anything i can.
> If you had asked me two years ago which sport a video startup needs to be most worried about, I would have said American football or basketball ... It wasn’t until I joined Mux that I found out how much people love soccer…
This is a pretty terrible, sheltered introduction. He didn't realise that American sports aren't the most popular sports outside of America? He feels the need to tell us that in the intro? Did he not do any research before starting his job? Did no one interviewing him pick up on this?
Also note that the detection labels mention "field" but not "pitch" even though a football playing area is by definition called a football pitch. More American-centricity that will ultimately harm them (not that I consider that to be a bad thing in this case).
I don't think that the pitch/field distinction is meaningful (except for cricket, wherein I believe that the pitch is part of the field). For football (all codes thereof), simply use whichever of the two words feels right in your dialect of English.
It's been said that a growing number of individuals are turning to Telegram to stream pirated soccer matches. These streams often have massive viewership, with all of the streaming costs allegedly covered by Pavel Durov. However, it's worth questioning how sustainable this model is, considering that while Pavel is certainly wealthy, it's unclear if he has any incentive to continue footing the bill for illegal soccer streaming infrastructure. What are your thoughts on the future of pirate soccer on Telegram?
Before the paid/pro plan, Telegram was definitely burning a hole in Durov's wallet, but now without knowing how many people have subscribed to the paid plan, it's really hard to say. How do these pirate streams work on telegram? Are people using video chat to steam through the app or are people just sharing links?
please have a look at such a tool and maybe reconsider your addition of defective by design (aka DRM) technology to f1tv streams. It broke on three (!) different playback devices I own.
Being in the middle Mux wouldn’t be able to offer more substantive changes to the service problem. A neat operational fix to a tough event driven problem.
The root cause here is “sports streaming services are garbage.” Mux can’t do anything about that, and likely their “partners” don’t want to hear it anyway.
Part of me would have preferred to technically sweep this under the rug so nobody who cared would notice or be able to complain about it.
From Argentina, the World Cup champions, with love: an army of children find a solution in short time and they don't need to be tech savvy.
Just one story, I remember a children of 10 trying to watch a soccer match but without having a TV plan at home. The solution? Call friends via Discord and have them put the webcam towards the TV! They even have a friends meeting watching a soccer match.
Heh that’s actually kinda brilliant. With good enough engine you can make it almost indistinguishable from irl, hell you can even throw in some better camera angles. I do wonder if that’s going to be 100% legal going forward given potential for abuse here
not just one group, search youtube for any interesting event that happened during a game, maybe for a reply to show your friend who was away, and there are thousands of fifa versions online with matching titles in literally seconds after it happened
There's a big difference between a private copy for your own enjoyment and redistributing that on a larger scale. The first one is consuming something you were not meant to consume, with little or no cost to the rights owners. The second on is giving away something that someone else had substantial costs to produce.
In my mind it's fair game to record and watch anything, if it's an unencrypted, freely available broadcast somewhere (local laws here back me up) - That includes the use of VPNs to access it. Sports broadcasters know this and make the use of VPNs quite hard, still if you get it to work, good for you. That includes other sneaky trickery like VPNing into Switzerland, where rebroadcasting other countries' FTA TV is legal, if you can receive them there (e.g. all of the UK's FTA TV) or setting up a remote controlled TV receiver in the country for you own use.
Making these streams available publicly is a different game. Depending on where you live, passing on streams privately again may be OK - for example the country I live in allows passing on recordings to a handfull of friends.
If at any time during the chain from the broadcast to you there's a need to break an encryption to make this possible: No fair game, pirate!
I'm not trying to change your mind, but "free" TV is paid for by commercials and those commercials are local. If, for example, the whole world watches a pirated Brazilian stream with Brazilian commercials then the Brazilian advertisers have to pay for the whole event. The current system where the event is licensed to local broadcasters in each country shares the cost more evenly and fairly.
The one data element missing seems to be concurrent streams per account? Just seems to me that one account with 200 active streams might be fraudulent.
Can't they find the vast majority of the large streamers by monitoring the reddit/irc/discord groups where the links are posted? That seems like a far more green way to find these things because there is minimal compute required. I know it doesn't sound as sexy as a hierarchy of triage flags and maybe some fancy "AI" dust, but that's how I would do it.
If only people cared as much about dedicating time and resources to education or health care or fighting corruption as they do about sports. What is it about sports that makes people give a shit about something that ultimately doesn't even matter?
You didn’t save anything unless you can show reasonable evidence that they paid properly as a result of your efforts. It’s likely that at least some people never would have paid for the content even if they can’t pirate it.
Didn't read the article didja? Or even click and read the full title?
The $750k figure is the amount of Mux's services they provided in 2021, that were (claimed to be) pirate streams, and were not paid. By taking steps to catch and remove pirates, they are reducing the number of unpaid invoices they have.
Their actual costs are less, yes (in that how much they invoice != their actual costs), but it's reasonable to say saved themselves $750k of their services.
It had nothing to do with converting pirates to paying customers. It had to do with preventing pirates from incurring infrastructure costs for them/making use of their services without paying.
Yeah being pedantic here, but reading the details of the $750k reference, it's (hopefully) nowhere near $750k that they saved:
> That, combined with the fact that these streams usually have large viewership, means we incur a not insignificant cost and have no one to bill. In 2021 alone, Mux had over $750,000 in unpaid invoices due to pirated streams. For an infrastructure company like Mux, this pirating comes with hard costs. Transcoding, storing, and delivering video is not cheap. If these pirated streams were not held in check, they could quickly spiral out of control and have a significant negative impact on our business. By identifying and shutting down these streams, we are able to reduce our costs.
So to actually saved $750k, they'd have to have some combination of:
1. 100% COGS or 0% operating margin. Youch. Probably not, likely closer to 30% COGS, making actual infra/bandwidth cost to them of $750k services closer to $225k
2. Massive growth in attempted abuse. E.g. Their level of attempted abuse grew 3.3x to $2.5M, they stopped all of it, that would have cost them $2.5M x 30% COGS = $750k
But at the end of the day I think they just wrote a clever headline to get upvotes on HN :)
I used to work in IT and one of my responsibilities was managing the company email and TONS of people used their work email for personal stuff. At least 1/3 of the company.
duskwuff|2 years ago
Mux is a streaming infrastructure provider. They provide services for companies who want to stream video to their users -- news web sites, video chat services, etc. Kind of like web hosting, but specifically for video. They are not a video content provider; they do not sell subscriptions to end users.
Mux's problem is that pirates will sign up for their service to restream pirated video content, like live sports streams:
Official stream --> pirate --> Mux --> viewers
When this happens, Mux usually gets stiffed on the bill, and if the stream stays up, Mux gets legal nastygrams from the content owners. So it's in Mux's interest that they detect these pirates quickly and terminate service before they run up too much of a bill. The blog post explains how they do that.
TechBro8615|2 years ago
I'm left wondering if they also forward these details to the copyright holders or the FBI.
rtpg|2 years ago
I enjoy being able to sign up and just try a thing without interacting with a sales team, but... I mean. This is a video CDN, not a newspaper subscription. I definitely know what I would do (but I am not a successful business)
RobotToaster|2 years ago
Doesn't the DMCA give several days to remove the content? At which point any stream will be long gone anyway?
komali2|2 years ago
It seems like such a weird place to be in.
post_break|2 years ago
emacdona|2 years ago
I live in the US.
I briefly took an interest in the EPL. If I wanted to watch all EPL games (or have the option of watching any particular EPL game), I'd have to subscribe to Peacock _and_ Fubo -- and I'm still not sure that gets me all games.
I briefly took an interest in the NHL (this was years ago, granted -- things may have changed). If I would have subscribed to their service, the ONLY team whose home games I couldn't watch would have been the TEAM OF THE CITY I LIVE IN (i.e.: "my" team).
My two favorite sports, though, are Cycling and F1.
I LOVE cycling. To watch every UCI race, I'd have to subscribe to GCN+ (they have the Giro), Peacock (they have the Tour de France and La Vuelta), and Flobikes (they have most of the Classics races).
THE ONLY sports governing body that has figured this out (for sports I like, anyway), is F1. I pay F1.com $80 a year and get MORE content than I would if I watched the races on ESPN. I can see EVERY RACE, EVERY QUALIFYING, EVERY PRACTICE. I can even choose WHOSE car I want to see the first person view from.
If you want to "stop pirates", make it easy for them to give you money and watch their favorite sport.
esharte|2 years ago
Subscribe to Sky Sports (around £50-60 a month) for the Premier League games.
Subscribe to BT Sports (30 a month) for the Saturday early kick off Premier League games and the Europa Conference League games.
Subscribe to Amazon Prime for the 3 random weeks when they are showing the Premier League games instead of Sky.
Subscribe to Premier Sports (£12 a month) to see a Europa Conference League 2 legged qualifier.
And even then you couldn't see all the games legally in the UK because of the 3pm Saturday black out. You are forced to find a stream from another country where they are broadcasting the game.
Then when you are subscriped you get wall to wall gambling adverts during half time. For every other product you subscribe to, it is to avoid ads, but not television.
RollAHardSix|2 years ago
I am heartbroken too at the amount of historical matches that will be lost because they simply aren't available. NWSL, FA WSL, International Friendlies or International Cups. It will all be lost over time as streaming partnerships change. The key to making better players is a better soccer culture and that means the key is to have them watch the game, love the game.
I have had seasons where I have almost quit as a fan because how frustratingly disorganized it all is. I know partnerships are important, but these leagues need to start pushing for their own streaming infrastructure or unified streaming partner or they will see the sport tip into irrelevance with the general public.
TheAceOfHearts|2 years ago
I remember growing up it would be really common for people to split the cost of a PPV fight and VHS recordings would be passed around. It seems pretty similar.
Community-based media sharing is great. I wish it was possible for me to lend all of my Steam games when I'm not using them.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CunwUs08og
duskwuff|2 years ago
I don't disagree, but that isn't something Mux is in a position to do. They just provide video streaming infrastructure -- they're in no position to demand that various sports broadcast rightsholders change their policies.
flangola7|2 years ago
Media companies like to claim that each act of piracy costs them huge sums of money. That isn't true, but I wish it was.
importantbrian|2 years ago
Larrikin|2 years ago
I lived a ten minute walk from the Cubs' stadium and really wanted to watch every game. I moved to Chicago the year before they won the world series and got to experience all the build up, so was extremely excited to follow them.
But even though I had a MLB.tv subscription, from T-Mobile, it was completely useless the entire time I lived in Chicago. The Cubs' games were on an over the air network, WGN, for decades, so I had to spend money for a one time expense of an antennae to be privileged to watch some games and the added inconvenience of switching away from my streaming box.
Soon after they won the world series, they moved to a cable only network Marquee. I would have been forced to pay for cable to get the same shitty experience of watching only some games. I ended up only ever watching games I was physically at or when a game aligned with the exact time I happened to be at a bar with it on in the background.
Blackout rules feel like a completely untenable situation if baseball wants anyone under 45 to get in to the sport.
lawgimenez|2 years ago
downWidOutaFite|2 years ago
whoisstan|2 years ago
_a_a_a_|2 years ago
https://www.theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
vkou|2 years ago
They don't want to cannibalize in-person attendance where fans pay for $300 tickets and $20 pints of beer.
syradar|2 years ago
I can watch all of it on YouTube or Twitch for free.
NikolaNovak|2 years ago
rad_gruchalski|2 years ago
No. The only ones who figured it out is the NFL. F1 shafted Germany after youg Schuhmacher came into F1 and German Sky bought exclusive rights.
The NFL? Intl Game Pass €190 per season live streams, instant repeats no adverts, various show, dedicated tv apps, no limit on number of devices, high def.
programmarchy|2 years ago
monksy|2 years ago
This is why I won't give the NHL or MLB any money for their video services.
nl|2 years ago
This is a good example of the situation in many sports. The UCI is a governing body, not an event organiser or promoter. Basically anyone can put on race, and they are responsible for making money out of it. So event promoters make their own deals with broadcasters.
alistairSH|2 years ago
As best I can tell... The classics and spring season are spread across Flo, GCN+, and Peacock.
Giro is GCN+.
le Tour is Peacock.
Road worlds is Flo.
Vuelta is Peacock.
And the UCI mountain bike stuff is (mostly) on GCN+ (used to be Redbull, maybe)
I'd happily spend $300/year or so to get it all in one place. Instead, I end up watching highlights on Youtube. I don't torrent because I have an iPad, so I can't (without jumping through hoops) - but I'm tempted to grab a cheap PC just to torrent cycling.
dclowd9901|2 years ago
walrus01|2 years ago
If you were okay with not watching it live, people were torrenting each day's stage of the tour de France in 2004. There is a pretty big overlap between tech industry people and enthusiastic road cyclists.
Now there's whole communities of people sharing the euro broadcasts of just about everything race for worldwide people to watch.
prmoustache|2 years ago
I mean I like different sports but I mostly stick to the one I love the most (cycling) and even then I skip most of it and only watch the events that count the most for me (spring classics, a bit of the grand tour in the background especially while working, world champs and MTB world cups). And given the choice to go for a bicycle ride or watch a cycling race, I will always go for the former and do the later only when I am tired, my partner or kids aren't at home or busy doing something else and I feel like lying for a bit on the couch after my own ride. I don't mind the occasionnal motogp, world rallycross, or rally coverage but I have accepted I can't both follow everything and live a decent and happy familial and social life.
Only exception being Paris-Roubaix which is probably one of the only classic that is worth watching from km 0. But even then I didn't watched live this year. I avoided getting spoiled by living mostly offline appart from professionnal stuff for 3 days before dedicating the time to watch it.
It is the same for social medias in fact. Most of them are trying to make you feel bad if you don't see all their content. I deleted my twitter, fb, instagram accounts a while ago and although I keep a bit of presence in mastodon I have accepted the fact that I will just connect to it a few times a week and miss tons of informations/content/jokes. Is my life worse for it? Well, not really.
lmpdev|2 years ago
c0nsumer|2 years ago
I don't watch much cycling stuff, but sometimes I want to sit down and watch a CX race, or maybe one of the MTB races, or the TdF highlights or something... But there's just no one platform for it.
ablation|2 years ago
ceocoder|2 years ago
NiagaraThistle|2 years ago
On top of that I watch Serie A, Paramount+ has better coverage of this. But then you want to watch UEFA Europa and Champions leagues.
It gets very confusing and very costly.
I don't get why the individual leagues don't get smart and have their own streaming services rather than relying on legacy broadcasting services.
As for Cycling, I am in the same boat with GCN & Peacock. DIdn't know about flobikes so thanks for giving me something else to purchase :)
JenrHywy|2 years ago
Unless you live in Australia, where F1TV gives you live timing and not much else. Foxtel seem to have F1 locked up here - the cheapest option I have is Kayo (an affiliated streaming service) for $25/mth.
pfannkuchen|2 years ago
**I.e. spectator-focused sports leagues, not leagues regular people actually play in, those don’t have this issue.
martindbp|2 years ago
TRiG_Ireland|2 years ago
acjacobson|2 years ago
FredPret|2 years ago
crazygringo|2 years ago
People don't have a lot of love for greedy sports broadcasters, and tech people are often associated with a kind of "information wants to be free" ethos (for better or worse), so starting out your blog post with:
> identify and take action against soccer pirates and other delinquents who try to stream copyrighted content
comes across as pretty tone-deaf for the intended audience. Delinquents? What's next, are they going to tell me not to copy that floppy, or ask if I'd download a car?
What's crazier is that they actually have good justification but don't put it until the end of the article -- that pirates are using the service to broadcast streams that become super-popular (racking up charges) and then don't pay their bills for bandwidth and processing, losing near a million dollars in a year. Talk about burying the lead.
This article is a great example of what not to do. But it's a great learning opportunity for the rest of us. Always start your article with why the article subject matters. Don't wait until the end, don't just assume the reader is on your side.
...And also maybe don't call people delinquents when a decent proportion of your readership probably watches some of these same pirated streams...
mmcclure|2 years ago
Thanks for the feedback!
Mashimo|2 years ago
TheHappyOddish|2 years ago
Pirating is illegal and unethical. I do it - most of us do - but pretending it's a moral high ground against "greedy broadcasters" is just weird.
It seems very reasonable for a streaming company to have issue with people who abuse their services and cost them time and money.
wirthjason|2 years ago
63|2 years ago
So if I were a prospective soccer pirate hoping to take advantage of Mux publishing the specific details of their content moderation system, could I just stream myself harmlessly showing off my soccer jersey collection for an hour to get future alerts ignored and then swap the feed over to soccer when the game starts? Granted I'm sure they'll take notice once they get a DMCA letter, but I imagine it might take awhile for everyone involved to catch on.
dilyevsky|2 years ago
VPenkov|2 years ago
Symbiote|2 years ago
rchaud|2 years ago
anarchogeek|2 years ago
I happily pay Apple for MLS matches because there was no reliable way to get them here in New Zealand. It is still stupid because Apple has no idea what they're doing, the announcers are terrible, the audio levels all over the place, random silence, it gets loud, then random cutting between shots... At least it streams well.
But for other leagues? It is cheaper to go buy a ticket to watch the Wellington Phoenix at the stadium than it is to pay for streaming! Even then I can only find some matches.
What about other leagues? I follow Uruguayan soccer... good luck finding a place I could even pay for that which licenses the content in New Zealand.
My only hope is that this post about how to block pirate streaming will help the pirates evade being blocked.
Symbiote|2 years ago
I knew someone in England who ran a pirate football streaming service. He had TV and streaming subscriptions to a rented apartment in Cyprus, and streamed from there to people who paid him in England. Customers were introduced by word-of-mouth, so supposedly it was difficult for the copyright holders to discover.
The same matches were shown in England, but at a higher price.
kioleanu|2 years ago
My life doesn't revolve around football, I don't need to see all matches, just my team's. I would gladly pay 10-12 euros for pay per view, but no, that's apparently not an option.
mig39|2 years ago
I don't condone it, but hypothetically, the $7 a month I pay to stream illegally is a fuck you to the leagues and their rights owners.
rchaud|2 years ago
garbagewoman|2 years ago
standeven|2 years ago
So the secret is to first stream a safe video that will purposely trigger a false positive, and then switch to a pirate stream later on.
wolrah|2 years ago
Or just make it look at a glance like a safe stream: https://www.polygon.com/2017/12/4/16733386/ufc-pay-per-view-...
That strategy would probably work for a lot of major sports.
FridayoLeary|2 years ago
ricktdotorg|2 years ago
hulu told me i could bundle EFL with Disney (!) but i was never able to see any Sunderland games on Hulu so i cancelled.
EFL streams are hard to find, but in the absense of being able to pay to view, i will take anything i can.
disposition2|2 years ago
I’m pretty sure you can watch almost all EFL Championship games via ESPN Plus. You’ll have to download a different app, it’s not on Hulu,
dataengineer56|2 years ago
This is a pretty terrible, sheltered introduction. He didn't realise that American sports aren't the most popular sports outside of America? He feels the need to tell us that in the intro? Did he not do any research before starting his job? Did no one interviewing him pick up on this?
Also note that the detection labels mention "field" but not "pitch" even though a football playing area is by definition called a football pitch. More American-centricity that will ultimately harm them (not that I consider that to be a bad thing in this case).
TRiG_Ireland|2 years ago
pqs|2 years ago
anonymouscaller|2 years ago
prmoustache|2 years ago
kettleballroll|2 years ago
I wonder what this looks like? Everything that isn't Gmail or outlook?
garbagewoman|2 years ago
choeger|2 years ago
please have a look at such a tool and maybe reconsider your addition of defective by design (aka DRM) technology to f1tv streams. It broke on three (!) different playback devices I own.
thank you,
a valuable customer
jwie|2 years ago
The root cause here is “sports streaming services are garbage.” Mux can’t do anything about that, and likely their “partners” don’t want to hear it anyway.
Part of me would have preferred to technically sweep this under the rug so nobody who cared would notice or be able to complain about it.
wslh|2 years ago
Just one story, I remember a children of 10 trying to watch a soccer match but without having a TV plan at home. The solution? Call friends via Discord and have them put the webcam towards the TV! They even have a friends meeting watching a soccer match.
nnntriplesec|2 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
underlines|2 years ago
1. Stream the video game fifa 2023 for the first 2-3 streams until my account gets onto your allowlist.
2. Stream illegal football content, not triggering your n8n flows, due to the allowlist.
throwaway744678|2 years ago
1. Switch to another provider
2. No second step.
theshrike79|2 years ago
It looked good enough so that people actually watched and they got the ad revenue off it :D
Also: perfectly legal, they're just streaming a video game =)
dilyevsky|2 years ago
RugnirViking|2 years ago
garbagewoman|2 years ago
jojobas|2 years ago
airtag|2 years ago
In my mind it's fair game to record and watch anything, if it's an unencrypted, freely available broadcast somewhere (local laws here back me up) - That includes the use of VPNs to access it. Sports broadcasters know this and make the use of VPNs quite hard, still if you get it to work, good for you. That includes other sneaky trickery like VPNing into Switzerland, where rebroadcasting other countries' FTA TV is legal, if you can receive them there (e.g. all of the UK's FTA TV) or setting up a remote controlled TV receiver in the country for you own use.
Making these streams available publicly is a different game. Depending on where you live, passing on streams privately again may be OK - for example the country I live in allows passing on recordings to a handfull of friends.
If at any time during the chain from the broadcast to you there's a need to break an encryption to make this possible: No fair game, pirate!
wmf|2 years ago
m348e912|2 years ago
nightpool|2 years ago
dexterdog|2 years ago
DonHopkins|2 years ago
Rastonbury|2 years ago
shp0ngle|2 years ago
andreareina|2 years ago
Mandatum|2 years ago
Bold.
yowlingcat|2 years ago
With that said, I'm not saying that as a value judgment -- and I guess I'd be curious if you'd be skeptical of making that choice.
quelltext|2 years ago
Why shouldn't it be able to handle the task here?
unknown|2 years ago
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greybox|2 years ago
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fafqg|2 years ago
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breck|2 years ago
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dreampeppers99|2 years ago
matt3210|2 years ago
lostcolony|2 years ago
The $750k figure is the amount of Mux's services they provided in 2021, that were (claimed to be) pirate streams, and were not paid. By taking steps to catch and remove pirates, they are reducing the number of unpaid invoices they have.
Their actual costs are less, yes (in that how much they invoice != their actual costs), but it's reasonable to say saved themselves $750k of their services.
It had nothing to do with converting pirates to paying customers. It had to do with preventing pirates from incurring infrastructure costs for them/making use of their services without paying.
andrenotgiant|2 years ago
> That, combined with the fact that these streams usually have large viewership, means we incur a not insignificant cost and have no one to bill. In 2021 alone, Mux had over $750,000 in unpaid invoices due to pirated streams. For an infrastructure company like Mux, this pirating comes with hard costs. Transcoding, storing, and delivering video is not cheap. If these pirated streams were not held in check, they could quickly spiral out of control and have a significant negative impact on our business. By identifying and shutting down these streams, we are able to reduce our costs.
So to actually saved $750k, they'd have to have some combination of:
1. 100% COGS or 0% operating margin. Youch. Probably not, likely closer to 30% COGS, making actual infra/bandwidth cost to them of $750k services closer to $225k 2. Massive growth in attempted abuse. E.g. Their level of attempted abuse grew 3.3x to $2.5M, they stopped all of it, that would have cost them $2.5M x 30% COGS = $750k
But at the end of the day I think they just wrote a clever headline to get upvotes on HN :)
unknown|2 years ago
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unknown|2 years ago
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NullPrefix|2 years ago
> Is the email address a company domain or a consumer email like Gmail?
Do you actually expect people to use their work email for personal purposes?
duskwuff|2 years ago
Entinel|2 years ago
faeriechangling|2 years ago