Twitch issues 24-hour ban to streamer that broadcast UFC fight while pretending to play

Update: Over the weekend, a streamer managed to get away with streaming a UFC pay-per-view event on Twitch. He successfully dodged moderators at the time by pretending to play the latest UFC video game. The news quickly went viral and as you would expect, it caught up with him, with Twitch passing down a 24 hour ban on the channel.

In a periscope broadcast from his Twitter account earlier today, Adrian Lester confirmed that his UFC broadcast resulted in a 24 hour ban from streaming on Twitch. Now, Lester says he just has to “ride the wave and pray” that nobody tries to sue him. So far, it doesn't seem like anyone at the UFC has noticed though that could always change.

After the stream, Lester has gained several thousand new followers across Twitch, Twitter and YouTube. As long as nobody tries to sue him, it looks like this little stunt may end positively for him, despite the obvious copyright infringement.

Original Story: Over the weekend, one savvy streamer successfully managed to dodge the copyright police on Twitch and streamed an entire pay-per-view UFC event. How did he manage it? Well, he set up a face cam and pretended to be playing the latest UFC video game as the fight was taking place.

Adrian Lester streamed the entire UFC 218 broadcast on Saturday night across multiple platforms, the most notable of which was Twitch. He did so with a PS4 controller in his hands and added some additional commentary to make it appear like he was in fact playing a game. You can see a clip of what was going on below:

How has he pretended to play a ufc fight on stream to avoid getting copyrighted LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL pic.twitter.com/I4ykqwqrTA

— Aaron (@TheRealSMA) December 3, 2017

The fight itself featured UFC featherweight champion, Max Holloway, going up against Jose Aldo. While this did fly under the radar at the time, the story has since gone viral, so Lester has deleted his VOD from Twitch in an effort to avoid stirring up trouble.

Since the stream, Lester's follower count has doubled, so pulling this off seems to have helped him make his mark on Twitch. Prior to this, Lester would stream on a part-time basis and had been stuck at around 2000 followers for several years.

KitGuru Says: Now that word about this has begun to spread, I imagine Twitch will be getting involved in some capacity, though so far nothing has happened. While this may have been a clever one-time stunt I imagine it will spawn some copycats.

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