M+E Daily

By Stephanie Bohnert, Peer Media Technologies

The 2012 Summer Olympics gold medal match for women’s soccer began at 11:45 AM (PST) on Thursday, August 9th, 2012. While NBC broadcast this event live in the U.S. on television and online at nbcolympics.com, there were several live streams of this game available through presumably unauthorized online streaming websites. In this article we provide an analysis of one of those unauthorized streams, specifically a high-resolution live stream sourced from the BBC that was available on Rojadirecta.me. [For Peer Media Technologies’ analysis of P2P file-sharing of videos from the London games, click here.]

First, some background. Rojadirecta is a sports linking website that offers users links to external sites where streams of live sporting events are hosted, generally with Spanish or English audio. This site has a fairly high global Alexa ranking of 2,425 (even higher in Spanish speaking countries — 303 in Mexico, for example). During the 2012 Summer Olympic Games, this site allowed users to find streams of most, if not all, live events including 12 streams (4 English, 8 Spanish) of the women’s gold-medal soccer match on August 9th. The gold-medal match was also available for online streaming from Ucaster.eu, Mips.tv, Castamp.com, Yocast.tv, and Stream4U.eu. The image below is a screenshot of the 12 links available for this game on Rojadirect.me.

We focused on the stream with the highest listed bandwidth, “Vertigo Sports,” for our analysis. While Rojadirecta had this link listed as streaming at 1,826 Kbps, we observed this stream using a network protocol analyzer on our internal servers at roughly 1,113 Kbps. Despite this discrepancy, the quality was relatively high quality and definitely watchable as can be seen from the screenshot below of the medal ceremony following the game.

Using tools available to our network protocol specialists, we analyzed many aspects of this stream. First, this stream appeared to have been sourced from the live coverage feed from the BBC Sports network and was hosted by Veemi.com. The ISP behind the Veemi.com stream is the Bluemile, Inc., a U.S. company headquartered in Ohio. The stream itself is a RTMP stream utilizing Adobe’s Flash Media Server v3.5.4.210 to serve the content. Additional attributes of this video stream are listed in the table below.

Another item of note is that this stream was monetized by several ads. Running AdBlock software on this stream allowed us to analyze which ad networks were present. In total, we viewed five ad networks present on this Rojadirecta stream, including ad.adnetwork.net, ad.harrenmedianetwork.com, pagead2.googlesyndication.com, partner.googleadservices.com, and adcash.com. Due to its relatively decent Alexa ranking, we can speculate that Rojadirecta gets decent CPMs for its ads. It is likely that popular events like the 2012 Summer Olympics women’s gold-medal soccer match increased the site popularity of Rojadirecta, which in turn drives revenue from ads placed on the site.

The 2012 Summer Olympics have clearly been deemed a resounding success from a media coverage standpoint. However, despite the widespread availability of legitimate offerings on multiple devices and platforms—for example, MVPDs have reported close to 10 million new user account activations for TV Everywhere services specifically for access to the Olympics in the U.S. alone—high-quality streams were readily available from obviously pirate sites. We understand the economic incentive for the pirate sites (ad revenue), but what is the incentive for the pirate viewers if legitimate offerings are widely available and adequately marketed? We are left wondering, and would be interested to engage content distributors in further conversation about the impact of piracy on legitimate offerings.

About Peer Media Technologies, Inc.

Peer Media Technologies, Inc. is a leading provider of content protection, copyright enforcement and peer-to-peer and web measurement services for companies in the entertainment industry including major motion picture studios, record labels, gaming companies, software publishers and television networks. For more information, go to www.peermediatech.com or email [email protected].