Twitter CEO Says Periscope 'Winner' of Mayweather-Pacquiao Boxing Match After App Used for Unauthorized Live Streams
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said the “winner” of Saturday's welterweight boxing match between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao was the company's Periscope live-stream app, one of several services that were used to transmit unauthorized live streams of the fight. HBO…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
and Showtime charged $100 for pay-per-view access to the fight. HBO, Showtime and Twitter didn’t comment on the use of Periscope as a technology for unauthorized live streams of the fight. HBO and Showtime had successfully sought a court order in advance of the fight against boxinghd.net, sportship.org and entities that are in “active concert or participation with them” to prohibit them from live streaming the fight. The HBO/Showtime injunction request also asked the court to order ISPs used by the websites and associated entities to “suspend all services with respect to Defendants’ Infringing Websites, including all registrars, hosts, name servers, site acceleration providers, providers of video delivery resources, and providers of computer and network resources through which video transits.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation criticized HBO and Showtime Friday, saying in a blog post that “this kind of site-blocking, without real legal process, is essentially one of the worst parts of the ill-conceived, long-dead Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) being brought in through the courtroom back door.” Costolo's remarks were in a Sunday tweet.