59 HAPPENING SportsPro OTT Summit Review
IT’S GOING TO TAKE SOME TIME FORESPORTS TOLIVEUPTO ITSPOTENTIAL
PIRATE HUNTERS FEED magazine brought its October anti-piracy issue to the SportsPro OTT Summit, giving free copies (and free subscriptions) to all attendees, with anti- piracy a significant theme throughout the event. A notable percentage of the companies with stands on the trade show floor were showcasing content security solutions, and there were two sessions devoted to combating content piracy. One panel, called The dark side of live sports: investigating large-scale pirate networks, included participation from Marlene Álvarez Vicente, an inspector with the Spanish National Police, specialising in cybercrime. Vicente won an award earlier this year from the Europol Intellectual Property Crime Conference. At SportsPro Summit, Vicente gave a breakdown of her division’s anti-piracy operations and outlined four main challenges that made such investigations particularly difficult: • The diversity of criminal modalities • High tech skills of the suspects • International scope of content piracy • Connections to organised crime • High complexity of the investigations. "The most important part of an anti- piracy investigation is the financial aspect,” she said. “It's ultimately a financial crime." Cameron Andrews, senior legal counsel, Anti Piracy, at Qatar-backed beIN Sports, went into detail about the extraordinary piracy operation of beoutQ, a Saudi-based operation, which has openly stolen and redistributed beIN’s content wholesale, even offering advertising slots and its own set-top boxes. TRIBAL COMMUNITIES Esports also attracted a lot of interest with some coming to the Summit as total noobs and others already developing their own esports offerings. Michiel Bakker, chief executive of GINX Esports TV, gave a run-down of what esports is, how it is expected to grow and how it cannot be ignored. Bakker opened his talk trying to manage expectations: "I would urge a note of caution. It's going to take some time for esports to live up to its potential.”
major broadcast, Black emphasised. He pointed to a recent major sporting event, which encountered substantial technical problems, but never affected the audience’s viewing experience. “We had three significant disruptions, losing primary source on our encoders. But from an end user perspective, no one noticed the difference. You need to look at redundancy and resistance.” He also pointed to other issues with online streaming that have yet to be worked out: “Latency is still a problem. You have to balance quality with safety of the delivery.” A session with Barney Francis, MD at Sky Sports, looked at the opportunities and challenges for traditional broadcasters investing in OTT. Echoing some of the sentiments of NBC Sports’ Eric Black, Francis noted that the big broadcasters can offer what the small players don’t. "The core of our business remains DTH. The best way to deliver with a small amount of latency is through satellite. That's important for UHD.”
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