Floyd Mayweather Jr. exchange punches with Manny Pacquiao during their welterweight unification championship bout, May 2, 2015 at MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada.; Credit: JOHN GURZINSKI/AFP/Getty Images
The fight between Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather was over in less than an hour. But the battle over how fans watched the fight will continue for months.
It cost $100, in theory, in order to see the “fight of the century” between Mayweather and Pacquiao but for those who didn’t or couldn’t afford to pay, they had another option: watch live streams of the events via rival smartphone apps, Meerkat and the Twitter-owned Periscope. At one point, 10,000 people tuned into one Periscope video stream. Most viewers admit the quality of the footage wasn’t great, but it allowed them to take part in a very hyped event.
The promoters of the fight demanded the streams be taken down and have threatened legal action, but that's a game of whack-a-mole. The apps are being compared to Napster, the peer-to-peer file sharing Internet service that encoded audio files in MP3 format. Of course, Meerkat and Periscope are different: they let users livestream, not upload content after it's been recorded.
How are providers of live events going to adapt to these new streaming apps? Are some piracy offenses worse than others?
Guests:
Andrew Wallenstein, Co-Editor-in-Chief of Variety
Lance Ulanoff, Chief Correspondent, Mashable