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IKOLI VICTOR
doha
The beIN MEDIA GROUP has said its public advocacy efforts to shine a light on the illegal Saudi Arabia-based pirate service beoutQ which has targeted beIN Media Group's business by offering illicit transmissions of premium sports and entertainment content are yielding dividend following recent condemnation by a host of independent and international rights-holders, whose rights ultimately are being stolen in Saudi Arabia. However, more is needed to be done as the industrial-scale piracy being carried out by beoutQ, and distributed on Riyadh-based satellite provider, Arabsat, continues brazenly every day.
Speaking at the Financial Times' Future of Football Summit in Doha, David Sugden, Director of Corporate Affairs & Communications at beIN Media Group, said that the international broadcaster has employed three principal ways to tackle beoutQ since the now-renowned Saudi-based pirate service began illegally broadcasting beIN's content: technological, legal and advocacy.
"We have been focused on public advocacy most recently because the significant legal measures we have brought are inevitably slower to fruition. Advocacy measures can be more instantly impactful and as a result of which we have seen a range of public statements of condemnations coming from organisations such as the Premier League, FIFA, UEFA, Ligue 1, LaLiga, the NBA, the governing bodies of world tennis, and others. That has been helpful because it exerts more pressure on Saudi Arabia to put an end to its State-supported illegal broadcast piracy."
UEFA and FIFA have issued statements condemning the beoutQ piracy, as has Formula 1 motor racing.
"At beIN Media Group we have employed all kinds of anti-piracy measures to try to combat beoutQ. The fundamental difficulty we are facing is that beoutQ is not just a streaming website but it is a hybrid satellite and streaming operation, whose channels are distributed on Arabsat and whose set top boxes also have embedded within them an IPTV app this is far more sophisticated, far-reaching and damaging than your standard piracy, which is typically done via streaming only. Nevertheless, we have deployed a whole range of counter-measures which have had some success, which is why we have seen beoutQ pirating other feeds such as from NBCUniversal Telemundo and ELEVEN SPORTS.
"However we also have a series of legal challenges ongoing at the moment. The most recent and significant of which is the investment arbitration that we launched a couple of weeks ago, under which we are claiming damages for over US$1 billion that we have suffered having been unlawfully driven out of the Saudi market and subjected to what has been described as the most widespread piracy of sports broadcasting that the world has ever seen in the form of beoutQ. And we are very confident in the prospects of that legal case."
Some of the most internationally-renowned sports and entertainment brands in the world have fallen victim to the Saudi-backed piracy from Hollywood movie studios, the NBA and NFL, Formula 1 and the Olympic Games, to bodies across world tennis and world football including UEFA, the Premier League and LaLiga prompting, in a unique step, FIFA to appoint legal counsel in July to take action in Saudi Arabia, with others considering the same while increasingly also taking a public stand to denounce any Saudi politicisation of sport.
Sugden added that in the past year the sports, entertainment and media giant is 17 percent down on its MENA business targets as a direct result of the blockade and beoutQ, principally through loss of revenue through advertising and subscription, and the costs incurred technologically and legally trying to combat beoutQ.
He added that while beoutQ's concerted piracy attack was at first aimed at targeting beIN, due to the captive audience for near-free premium sports and entertainment content that has now been created in Saudi Arabia and across the world, the whole industry was at risk as the inevitable consequence was that broadcasters simply would not pay for rights that cannot be protected.
