First off, congratulations to Senator Manny Pacquiao for his dominant win over Vargas and for reclaiming the world title. To those who weren’t able to follow the match, good old Pacman took a 114-113, 118-109, 118-109 unanimous victory over Vargas. Okay, having said that let’s move on to the real topic of this article: illegal Facebook livestreams.
I have never seen so many livestreams of a pay-per-view content pop up on my feed ever! I counted how many different pages there were streaming the match and I found up to 10 different pages doing streams. One page was even asking for sponsors. If you sponsor they would include your Facebook URL on the streaming page. The various streams had viewers of anywhere from 15,000 to 80,000 at any given time. Apart from the illegal commercial streams, there were also a lot of people who were doing Facebook live with their smartphone shooting the match playing on the television. This is definitely NOT A GOOD TIME to be in the pay-per-view business.
Moving forward, Facebook should implement stricter rules and create new systems that will protect IP rights of content owners. YouTube has this and it’s the reason why a lot of content creators prefer to work with YouTube versus Facebook (apart from being able to properly monetise). It will be interesting to see how this all plays out in the coming weeks as more content creators see their revenues plummet due to a new form of piracy — from downloading via Torrent to watching it now live.