Our Nightly Baseball Links May Be A Thing Of The Past

[Yankee4Life]

This should be of no surprise to anyone. The NFL and MLB would go after anyone if it meant making an extra five cents. I also would not be shocked when baseball starts again in April that the nightly broadcasts that Mark gave us links to will be a thing of the past.

I believe these broadcasts that we got links to over the season were very beneficial to our international fans in here. It gave them a chance to see live baseball. But hey, what do I know?

How to stop the Web's live sports pirates

Some tech-savvy folks have found ways to broadcast a cable TV feed onto the Web. Sports leagues aim to stop them.

(CNN) -- Log onto popular video streaming websites on a Sunday during football season and you can usually find several channels showing decent-quality live feeds of the games.

This has kicked off a frenzied game of Whack-A-Mole for sports leagues bent on eliminating the pirated video feeds.

These rogue video streams could ramp up considerably in the next week during the World Series -- especially since New York area customers of Cablevision Systems don't have a way to watch those games at home because of an ongoing quarrel between that company and News Corp's Fox.

Fox alleged that Cablevision support representatives were referring customers to websites that were illegally broadcasting baseball games, according to a report in the New York Daily News. Cablevision has since offered its subscribersfree access to the legal MLB.com. A spokesman for Major League Baseball didn't return requests for comment.

A number of websites within the internet's sort-of black market are dedicated to sports piracy. Not surprisingly, they aren't playing ball with the leagues.

But the more visible video streaming services are providing pro sports and Hollywood producers with the weapons they need.

Vobile's Content Identification Platform is a popular copyright-protection service in use by many popular video sites, including Ustream and Justin.tv.

It uses a proprietary technology called VideoDNA, which "fingerprints" frames in a stream in order to identify whether someone has uploaded copyrighted materials.

YouTube developed something similar called Content ID. When the system finds a match from a user-submitted clip, it alerts the copyright owners and gives them the option of removing or selling ads on it. In the acidic Viacom-Google lawsuit, the entertainment company applauded YouTube's eventual filtering efforts, it said in a statement.

Unlike Content ID, Vobile's system is being employed to process and identify video on the fly. Illegal streams can get pulled down after just a couple of minutes, said Ustream President Brad Hunstable. Ustream is helping to develop software that could minimize that time to 30 seconds or less, he said.

During the last football season, the National Football League removed more than 2,800 unauthorized streams, NFL spokesman Dan Masonson wrote in an e-mail to CNN.

In addition to staffing folks to utilize the tools provided by the video sites, the NFL has held meetings demanding Web companies develop new tools to deal with copyright infringement, Masonson said.

"The NFL has committed significant resources to combat the proliferation of unauthorized live streams of NFL games," he wrote. "The scope and breadth of piracy of live sports events dictates that the NFL, like other sports organizations, coordinates a multidimensional attack on online piracy."

With the proliferation of live online video last year, Ustream saw an alarming uptick in piracy in 2009, Hunstable said. That's when more tech-savvy people found a way to connect their cable television to a computer in order to pipe quality live video onto the Web.

"We're being incredibly aggressive here," he said of fighting piracy. "We ingest more bits and bytes per second than any website in the world."

Ustream has relationships with the MLB, NFL, Ultimate Fighting Championship and other leagues, Hunstable.

Justin.tv also has "relationships with most of them," said Joseph Wecker, who heads up the money-making efforts for the company. The site processes 36 hours of video per minute, Wecker said. During some major sporting events, Justin.tv finds itself whacking hundreds of streams, he said.

"There were some jokers trying to stream the World Cup," Wecker said. "Some" is an understatement, because that monthlong event was among the busiest times for anti-piracy efforts.

Another phenomenon around the popularity of pirated sports streams involves people who create what's called "spam channels."

These draw viewers with a static image of, say, the Titans game on Sunday. These images trick people with promises of an actual live feed if they click a link. It's usually a way to bait people into clicking ads or promoting a website.

Justin.tv is putting efforts into stopping these. Meanwhile, some leagues have actually adopted this strategy into their anti-piracy efforts, essentially polluting the pool of videos.

Wecker said his company is careful about how cavalier it gets with shutting down streams it presumes are hosting illegal content. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects websites that host user-generated content, declaring those companies not liable for infringements.

"Under the DMCA, we're in safe harbor," Wecker said. "The moment we start trying to decide what's OK and what's not, then we lose safe harbor."

But not doing enough to thwart pirated streams can also hurt a video provider, Ustream's Hunstable said. So it's about striking a balance.

"If you don't take copyright seriously, a lot of these companies won't work with you," he said.

LINK TO ARTICLE

[MarkB]

They'll never learn, will they?

They tried to stop CD piracy. Fail.

They tried to stop DVD piracy. Fail.

They tried to stop Blu-Ray piracy. Fail.

They tried to stop game piracy. Fail.

They tried to stop illegal music downloads using DRM. Fail.

They tried to stop hardware hacking. Fail.

They'll try to stop this, too, but they won't win. The people who want to do it will almost always find a way to circumvent copyright measures. They might cut a few streams a night and make it a little harder for the average, non-technical, fan to get a game stream. But the people who know how to get to the streams will be more than happy to continue spreading the links to the real game streams, and, when those are taken down, replenishing them with another one.

[Homer]

another example of these companies not getting it.

newsflash: work on getting access to your events and making your product better. the more people who watch, the more popular your product is. i'm a subscriber to mlb.tv, and I can tell you nothing is more annoying than these damn blackout laws. at some point, you think these networks will start to understand that the internet is making their broadcasts obsolete. so instead of blacking it out, make it available online!

christ, i pay mlb.tv because i travel and am not sitting at home all the time to watch tv. if i happen to be travelling to an area where the teams are playing, or want to watch anything on saturdays, i can't because they've blacked it out. i assume they do this to "force" me to watch the tv broadcasts. the only problem is i don't have access to a friggin tv. so instead of being forced to watch your games, i just miss them altogether.

i can tell you first hand that there are many in similar situations as well. guess where they go to watch? believe me that your subscribers don't want to resort to these crappy broadcasts, but if you give them no choice, what do you expect to happen? all you're doing is excluding fans. i've looked at these streams before, and they're not even worth trying to watch. i find it better to just not watch at all. so i suppose if your business plan involves losing viewers, feel free to continue down this avenue.

if you make a good product, people will pay for it. if you decide to get greedy and nickel and dime your customers to death, they'll resort to other avenues. you should address your own issues first before you start blaming others.

[Yankee4Life]

Well, you can't argue with what Homer just said because he was right on the money. And yeah, those blackout rules are terrible. They are the same for the NFL Homer. I have the NFL Sunday ticket just because I want to watch the Raiders and the first thing I did was before I got the Sunday ticket was check Oakland's schedule. If they were going to be playing in Buffalo I would have been screwed out of one week of watching them because the Bills don't sell out unless they are playing against the Patriots, Dolphins and Cleveland Browns (the Browns have a huge following in Western New York and many people from Ohio will go to Rich Stadium to see them.)

The NFL blackout rule is talked about every year because they always say they want to look at it and maybe change it but every year nothing happens. It is because it is a proven money maker and fan-inconvenient rule and it isn't going anywhere.

It is a good thing I am not a Bills fan because I would be looking at a lot of blackouts every year. You have to be past 90 miles of the city where the game is played and where I am we fall just a little under that, so we get blacked out. What die hard Bills fans will do is drive east to Syracuse or towns near there and check in a motel and watch the game that way. Or, for the more computer savvy, they find a feed somewhere on their computers and watch it that way. Personally, I'd rather watch it on my computer. I don't feel like spending money on gas and a motel just to watch a game all because the NFL is greedy.

To sum it up? If the NFL and MLB would come out with a product that didn't have the blackout restrictions and to have the games look as sharp and clear as can be they would see their subscriptions double and they wouldn't have to worry about people that post these kind of feeds.

Yeah I know... wishful thinking.

[angryrat]

Bills Jersey $150

Gas $45

Motel $50

Not having to sit on a mysteriously stained comforter in a sleazy, dank motel room for 3 hours to watch a terrible football team lose its games.

Priceless.

[Yankee4Life]

Bills Jersey $150

Gas $45

Motel $50

Not having to sit on a mysteriously stained comforter in a sleazy, dank motel room for 3 hours to watch a terrible football team lose its games.

Priceless.

No argument from me. I wouldn't spend a nickel on the Bills and I never have.

But then again, only once in recent memory this may have been worth it. Remember that playoff game 17 years ago against the Houston Oilers? The Oilers had a 28-3 halftime lead and then at the start of the third quarter they increased it to 35-3. Then the Bills woke up. They scored 28 points in the third quarter and then won the game 41-38.

This game was not sold out in Buffalo and in my city we did not get the game televised locally. There was a mass exodus out of town as Bills fans drove east to any small motel they could find. For one day only it was worth driving out of town. Even I would have loved to watch this game.

Here is the Wikipedia Link about this game.

[angryrat]

All the money spent on finding ways to watch the game. Not a penny of it went to the NFL. They could have had a piece of that revenue if they wanted.

[Mike Z]

There's similar free alternatives.

[emath2432]

Yeah, this bugs me too. I like watching the Blackhawks whenever I can. Thing is, maybe 30% of their games are on WGN. Not WGN America, just the local over the air WGN. I am 2 1/2 hours away from Chicago, so I can't get the signal here (maybe if I had a special antenna, but I don't).

Anyway, those games I watched on the net last year. This year, I have only been home for one of those games, but the feed was no where to be found. The site I use actually posts games from all over, and finds feeds from many different sites. I am hoping that that was just a one time thing, and I will be able to find them in the future. But now reading this, I am not to confident.