Watching Pay Per View on Ustream
I had an interesting weekend. I keep a couple of search columns on Tweetdeck open for “ustream” and “stickam” looking for interesting feeds(hey, I spent a week watching the Burning Man festival feed). Suddenly there was a lot of activity under “ustream” about “the fight”. It was the Mayweather-Marquez fight that was on pay per view. Sure enough somebody had routed the video into a ustream feed.
pay per view fight on ustream
A quick note: more than 5700 viewers, wow. (I guess if your viewer count is lower than you’d like, start pointing your webcam at HBO)
Not to surprisingly about 25 minutes later:
banned
But there were a couple more feeds using the old fashioned “shoot the camera at the screen” method.
camera screen shot
This guy’s view counter went up to 2662 after the other channel was banned. In-between rounds the camera would swing around and the hosts would responds to the chat room. An interesting way to go.
Here was another camera shot feed, less framed up.
another camera screen shot
We live in interesting times. And suspect there’s an interesting meeting going on at Ustream headquarters today with interesting phone calls being made. And that leads to interesting questions about ways to prevent this, can you prevent this, should you even try. I’ve seen plenty of ustream feeds showing old public domain movies, but this is the first time for this (for all I know, this goes on all the time). But it brings up the you argument of how responsible is the website(publisher) for the activities of it subscribers. Me, I’ll just watch.