Illegal streaming of sports broadcasts

Illegal streaming of sports broadcasts is the illegal streaming of sports events on the Internet is very common nowadays , with hundreds of different sites offering people the chance to watch their favorite team or sport for free.

Football

Since the price of Football tickets have hit an all time high and fans cannot afford to pay the over inflated price of them, more and more people are turning to illegal streaming on the internet. A different motif is the constant increasing price for television sport packages. Finally people also use this method a lot to watch sports which normally wouldn't be available on television in the region where they're living. Besides Football there’s a widespread offering of sports available for which streams are contributed by individuals who share their feed (source) with other viewers.

There are two methods to watch streams online:

P2P streams: This is a technology derived from Torrent. A streamer starts a stream by using an application and viewers receive and seed the signal to other viewers. This method is especially useful to reach high amount of viewers. This technology requires the viewer to first install software on their computer. Most of these applications are developed and maintained in China making it almost impossible for Copyright owners to prevent this kind of streaming. Examples are TVAnts, TVU.

Flash streams: This technology uses the Adobe flash player to stream. For this method no software needs to be installed making if very popular for viewers to instantly watch sports. The quality is mostly a little bit less than P2P streams and it can't handle huge amount of viewers. For this technology are mostly websites used which were rather developed for social webcaming. These websites don't support Illegal streaming of sports broadcasts and therefore try to remove these streams as much as possible. Examples are Justin.tv and Ustream.tv.

Besides these there are also websites who don't provide streams themselves but rather list links to available streams. The most famous website is MyP2P.eu.