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Amazon-owned streaming service Twitch has been criticised for allegedly hosting pirated streams of a boxing match between two YouTube stars.
On Saturday, August 26, the fight, between Logan Paul and KSI, took place in Manchester, UK, ending in a draw.
While the official way to watch the fight online was through a pay-per-view stream on YouTube (costing $10), huge numbers of fans allegedly watched pirated streams.
At one point, more than one million people used live-streaming platform Twitch to watch the match, according to news website The Verge. It added that the largest stream on Twitch had over 400,000 people, but dozens of other unofficial broadcasts brought the tally up.
This compares to the official pay-per-view stream, which peaked at approximately 800,000 viewers, said The Verge.
Speaking to the BBC, Twitch said that it was against the guidelines for users to upload content that they don’t have rights to and that doing so will make their account liable to Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedowns.
“We are responsive to related reports,” added Twitch.
However, some vloggers (video bloggers) have tweeted their disappointment.
“Disappointed in @Twitch today for not actively banning streamers rebroadcasting the #KSIvLogan fight,” tweeted ProSydnicate, who added: “They may have tried but to see that 1,000,000 we’re [sic] still watching it shows they didn’t try hard enough.”
There was also copyright controversy in the aftermath of the fight—as vloggers whose videos reacted to it contained actual footage of the match.
A number of these reaction videos, from YouTube stars, have been removed from YouTube.
Jesse Ridgway (known as McJuggerNuggets) previously posted a video that included footage of the fight which was interspersed throughout the reaction video. This video was removed and re-posted, with all of the match footage taken out.
In a tweet, the YouTuber said: “Re-uploaded the video from yesterday without any clips of the fight...because it got blocked.”
Logan Paul, KSI, YouTube, Twitch, Amazon, piracy, pirated stream, online copyright, YouTubers, vloggers, illegal streaming
