Background Report on Digital Piracy of Sporting Events
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- 4.2 Widespread live streams
- 5 Case Study: Football
- 5.1 Introduction
- 5.2 Overall Comparison
4 Case Study: Cricket
4.1 IntroductionCricket has a large and passionate fan base in India and Pakistan and is closely followed in England and Australia. Over the last two decades, the sport has seen a significant growth in the number of international matches played within a variety of different formats. New tournaments such as the Twenty20 World Cup and the Indian Premier League have produced an ever-larger audience. 4.2 Widespread live streamsData gathered by NetResult demonstrates that cricket has become the sport most affected by unauthorised streams of live events, particularly in countries such as India and Pakistan where the sport is immensely popular. In early May 2008, a SopCast channel for an Indian Premier League game between Rajasthan Royals and Delhi Daredevils saw over 120,000 viewers watching the game. The highest number of views ever recorded by NetResult for a single P2P stream for cricket was more than 700,000. Since October 2005, NetResult have monitored a number of International Cricket Series and Tournaments including:
During these nine events, the company located 941 cases which involved the unauthorised streaming of live cricket. Of these, 264 cases were dedicated servers used by streaming sites to provide a Unicast stream direct to viewers. A further 228 cases were sites which required a subscription to access the cricket content. Peer to peer streams made up 280 cases but it is clear that this figure and the proportion of peer to peer streaming used in cricket are growing. In 2005, most streams located by NetResult for cricket were unicast streams, for which the provider often required viewers to pay in order to cover the cost of dedicated servers with enough bandwidth to support the direct streaming offered to what may be thousands of simultaneous users. Yet over the last two years, NetResult have found that peer to peer technology has become the dominant method used to stream live cricket through the internet. Not only has the technology become faster and easier to use, but P2P-based streaming services are almost always free at the point of consumption because the costs of re-broadcasting streams are so much cheaper: the technology generally makes use of viewer’s own upstream bandwidth to deliver the content to those within the stream and there is little requirement for fast servers7. The chart below shows the proportion of unauthorised streams located by NetResult which were P2P-based rather than Unicast streams for monitored events between 2007 and 2008. 
 A direct consequence of the growing availability of this level of free P2P-based streaming services has been a reduction in the number of dedicated sites that require users to pay for direct (unicast) streaming access. The graph across shows the changing popularity of different types of streaming offering: the number of P2P-based (free) streams increase over the last three years as paid sites fall in importance.
Streams broadcast with the SopCast service make up the majority (around 60%) of streams of P2P-based live streaming for cricket. Free hosting and streaming sites NetResult have also recently recorded a significant growth in the number of embedded streams or links to streams found on free hosting services, particularly those connected to free blogging hosting. Blogspot (now owned by Google) is a common destination: it takes only a few minutes to set up and post content of any kind to a Blogspot-hosted page. There is no cost and financial penalty if and when a page or site is removed. Relevant subdomains (such as ipl-on-sopcast.blogspot.com) are freely available which help promote each new site and page. Users post comments which update others as to working streams in real-time as a game progresses. As the P2P services have developed clients which can be directly embedded into web pages, streams can also be placed direct in each blog. Before the start of the Indian Premier League event, NetResult had directly monitored and taken action against 74 different Blogspot sites, with that number expected to increase significantly while the IPL matches took place. Cricket has also seen some streams appearing on the free user video streaming services like Justin.tv and Ustream mentioned earlier in this report.
5.1 IntroductionFootball is widely believed to be the most popular sport in the world. 240 million people are reported to regularly play the game. FIFA state that the 2006 FIFA World Cup was shown on television in 214 countries across 376 channels with a cumulative television audience of 26 billion8. The game arouses enormous passion amongst many supporters at national, club, and community level. The national leagues of most European countries have large match attendances and substantial live television audiences. 5.2 Overall ComparisonMonitoring looked at live piracy activity across four major European football leagues: the Premier League, the German Bundesliga, the Spanish La Liga, and the Italian Serie A. The results are summarised in the table below with each league then discussed in detail. Monitoring for La Liga and Serie A comprised a snapshot of games across a weekend to provide an idea of popularity rather than the season-long monitoring conducted for the Premier League and Bundesliga. On average for each of the four leagues, 91 infringing sites were found. However, the Premier League appears to face the worst problem, with 177 sites found by NetResult during season 2007-08 (barring the final weekend). The majority of all sites located were connected to P2P-based streaming – either as a site offering a link or embedding a stream or as a technology developer. Most sites were free to the user (though almost all carried advertising of some sort), though this figure was lower for the Premier League where there were more Unicast sites. It is important to note that the figures for infringing sites count each located site once only: thus a portal site like MyP2P which is likely to feature links to almost all football matches from the four leagues shown below will count only a single time, despite providing links to many hundreds of individual matches. Most viewers of monitored streams were based in China. Audience distribution data is taken from only a small sample of P2P streams for each league but reflects a large enough sample to show the large usage of such services in mainland China. The regional popularity of each league is discussed further below.
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