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The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is forgoing its usual peer to peer attacks this time around and instead is focusing on live streams. It's having particular difficulty with halting those who are rebroadcasting footage from the games via Periscope, but it's sending out hundreds of takedown notices anyway.
As much as the broadcast rights for the Olympics are worth hundreds of millions of pounds, the internet has shown time and again that it's resilient when it comes to streaming and downloading content it wants to watch. That's no different with this year's Olmpics and while the IOC is trying hard to stop it, as usual it's not even close to doing so.
Source: TorrentFreak
This is somewhat surprising, even for TorrentFreak, as it reports that many of the streams the IOC has targeted have only a handful of viewers and are of a terrible quality. Still, in the past week over 1,000 takedown notices have been received by Periscope. Other livestreaming sites may have had similar numbers, but we don't have publicly available figures on them.
Most of the streams appear to be people livestreaming their TV, which is a terrible way to watch anything, but some of the ones taken down have come from people streaming live from the games themselves. That's also forbidden though, so they've been targeted just as much.
It would seem likely however that there are many streams which will have gone unnoticed by the IOC and anyone who really wants to watch the olympics on a poor quality stream will find a way to do so.
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KitGuru Says: Have you watched much of the Olympics? If so, what method did you use?
I understand that people want to watch, but information is not free, nor should it be treated as such (i.e., illegaly streamed). 90% of the revenue made through these broadcasting rights (if we accept that the IOC does not lie outright) is used to fund talent development through the national OCs and the various sports federations. Sure there are managers at all levels who probably make a lot more money than they need to, but without the hundreds of millions of broadcasting rights, it would be almost impossible for national sports federations, especially of smaller countries, to support their athletes. This would be particularly troubling for sports that are not commercially viable. It would be a shame if the Olympics would be an event for rich athletes from wealthy Western countries.
broadcast the Olympic games trough the internet, and not trough on of the companies like BBC that will charge you 150£ for the TV license even when you have no TV. A lot of people would agree to pay for the stream on its own.
I doubt companies like BBC would be happy as it would undermine their business model. They would not pay the licensing fees (or a lot less anyway) if people weren’t forced to watch it with them.
On the other hand, in the Netherlands you do not have to pay a fee and you can watch the Olympics for free online through the public broadcasting website. So I doubt a lot of people watch illegal streams here. Of course, we still pay through taxes, but that’s a different issue 🙂