Crossing the streams: How affiliates can use technology to avoid using illegal streaming sites

Back in the early days of the web, the excitement surrounding the sudden ability to share information led to a blurring of the lines when it came to IP infringement. When Napster launched, the blurred line between copyright and public domain was all but rubbed out completely. This led to a sustained period of “internet entitlement” where everyone seemed to expect everything for free.

Over the past few years, largely thanks to hackers, virus writers and malware authors, perceptions have changed and, by and large, most of us now accept that nothing is really free any more or, if it is, it usually comes with unwanted baggage!

The one area that has perhaps weathered this better than most is that of streaming live events.  This is most probably due to the fact that livestreaming ties in nicely with commercial advertising and affiliate referral opportunities, specifically with football and especially in the gambling niche.

In an age where the rights to broadcast live events are bordering on the ridiculous, this has led to increased scrutiny from the rights holders. This was highlighted recently when the Russian-owned Rambler Group sued Twitch for over £2bn for showing illegal streams that supposedly breached Rambler’s broadcasting rights.  We have clients who have received strongly worded letters regarding their “support” of illegal streaming websites. We know that the Bundesliga in Germany is particularly hot on this but also keen to try and be of assistance in cleaning up the problem.

Tricky task

The difficulty for our industry is three-fold: firstly, affiliates do not declare the illegal streaming sites when applying to an affiliate programme. Secondly, the affiliate links are often only scheduled to appear while the live event is in progress making them very hard to track down and, thirdly, these sites often only have a short life span being replaced with new URLs at fairly irregular intervals.

To be fair, most rights holders should recognise that this job is not an easy one.  Some will probably also be relying on advertising or sponsorship income from the very same operators that these affiliates are promoting, so the take-down requests are often accompanied by wording alluding to using one’s “best endeavours”. The bottom line, however, is that as long as these sites can remain anonymous and make income from offering the streams, they will continue to do so.

On a positive note, technology can help immensely here. I’m sure we are not the only company to have a “live” monitoring product to scan a pre-defined list of these illegal streaming sites during scheduled live events every weekend.  And while two hours is restrictive when you need to scan hundreds of thousands of pages, when programmed well it can scan the more prominent content and regular re-visits at scheduled times will help identify links missed on the previous scan.

Another advantage is the ability for software to cross-reference the affiliate IDs used on illegal streaming sites with those used in other more traditional campaigns on social media or affiliate sites. Even when a link is “cloaked”, it is not always that difficult to track each redirect that it sends a user through and hook out any affiliate codes in the process, meaning operators can often attribute the illegal sites to “known” affiliates where applicable.

The challenge is keeping on top of the illegal sites which come and go so quickly but there are several sources for finding these sites. Some police forces hold a list (we use the UK’s Metropolitan Police ‘Infringing website List’ as one example) and the rights holders themselves are usually only too willing to share them with proactive companies. We currently have over 10,000 “illegal” streaming sites listed in our database but a huge number of these will be gone by the time you read this, often to be replaced by others.

Ian Sims is the founder of Rightlander, a state-of-the-art affiliate compliance platform that allows affiliates and operators to identify potentially non-compliant content in regulated jurisdictions. Prior to establishing Rightlander, Sims was an egaming affiliate for 13 years.