We are in a poky flat in a Scandinavian suburb, without a millionaire sportsman in sight. But if things go according to plan during the next 90 minutes, we will join the scourge of the richest sport leagues in the world.
Using Windows on a cheap laptop, with only rudimentary IT skills, we are about to upload a stream of a football match and broadcast it online. I am told it is easy, and we have a step-by-step guide. We also have the anonymity of the internet. What we don’t have, however, is permission: we paid none of the £5.1bn it cost Sky and BT Sport to screen Premier League matches in the UK.
In the eyes of some pretty powerful corporations, we are pirates, stealing copyrighted content and unlawfully profiting from its redistribution. As a result, my friend is touching the buttons and he will remain unnamed. However, others contend that we are simply freeing sport from the clutch of big business and returning it to the public who most deserve it. The cost of watching the action is out of control, they say.
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During the past few years, as the cost of TV rights for sporting events has escalated apparently without limit, so has the ease by which conventional broadcast methods can be circumvented. Despite the best efforts of global authorities, including the City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU), the proliferation, accessibility and reliability of sport streaming sites have only increased.
On any game day in any sports league across the world, thousands of people do precisely what I have flown to Scandinavia to witness, and broadcast untold numbers of sporting events online. Meanwhile, in living rooms across the world, people are watching more live sport than ever, whether or not they have paid for it. The audience of unauthorised streams is estimated in the millions. As Sunday’s Community Shield heralds the start of another Premier League season, it’s a safe bet that more people than ever will be watching it illicitly. And as the idealists who first took on football’s behemoths find themselves increasingly hijacked by commercial operations with their eye on a quick buck, football’s black market will grow.
On 1 January, a site named Wiziwig – by far the most popular aggregation platform through which users could access thousands of streams – closed under the threat of legal action in Spain, where it was based. But other sites quickly stepped in to fill its role. Moreover, a senior Wiziwig moderator told me that they have no intention of remaining in the wilderness.
“All the Wiziwig moderators are still dedicated to our mission of a free and open internet, with free-to-air-programming for all,” the moderator said. He spoke on condition of anonymity – no one associated with Wiziwig has agreed to a mainstream press interview before – and used the language of the renegade that is familiar among internet libertarians: “All we have done and will do in the future is for sports fans anywhere in the world.”
The contention is that broadcasters are holding sport fans to ransom, and it means that this season, football stadiums will again host more than just the on-pitch duels between the nation’s top teams. The Premier League, among numerous other sports organisations the world over, will once again be forced to war against the online streamers. But if recent history offers much indication, they can hope to secure a score draw at best.