WATERLOO, ON – Saturday night’s tilt between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor in Las Vegas resulted in a surge of live TV piracy, a.k.a. pirate IPTV, says Sandvine.
In a post entitled Mayweather vs. McGregor: A Technical Knockout for TV Pirates, Sandvine detailed the results of its traffic monitoring at an unnamed fixed access tier-1 network in a major North American city that found that scores of viewers tuned into pirate IPTV services on fight night.
“On a portion of a tier-1 North American fixed access network with over one hundred thousand households, we observed that approximately 8% of subscribers have devices configured to access pirated live TV in their homes”, reads the post. “These services are different than what we reported on in our report on the fully-loaded Kodi ecosystem which focuses on Video on-demand (VoD) content. Pirated Live TV is designed and marketed to subscribers as a replacement for their live licensed television service.”
Based its previous and ongoing research, Sandvine said that on pirated live TV services, no single channel accounts for more than 5% of total bandwidth at any given time. But at its peak on Saturday, the pirated UFC and PPV channels for the Mayweather/McGregor fight accounted for 50% of all pirate TV streams.
Even as a share of total traffic, the pirated boxing match made a dent, continues the post. At the conclusion of the fight, pirated streams accounted for 3.5% of total network traffic, while throughout the broadcast, the boxing pirate streams generated more traffic than Twitch, Facebook, and Instagram together.
