Bad news for illegal streamers of Mayweather vs McGregor due to mysterious watermarks
http://www.msn.com/en-gb/sport/boxin...cid=spartandhp
Bad news for illegal streamers of Mayweather vs McGregor due to mysterious watermarks hidden in footage 2/14
Paul Cockerton8 hrs ago
http://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/t...6&q=60&o=f&l=f© Provided by Trinity Mirror Shared Services LimitedEagle-eyed viewers of the Floyd Mayweather vs Conor McGregor spotted a mysterious watermarked code during the superfight.
The sequence of numbers and letters appeared on screen between rounds, when the cameras were focused on the fighters and their trainers in their corner.
It's been suggested that the code, around 20 to 23 digits long, was the Sky TV customer ID of the subscriber who had paid to watch the fight.
Sky TV could then monitor the illegal streams of the fight and work out which customers were illegally rebroadcasting their footage online.
The Torrent Freak website, which broke the story , wrote: Its certainly possible that the sequence of numbers would allow Sky to track the illicit stream back to a subscriber and/or a set-top box tied to a particular account.
|Since that subscriber has then re-streamed that content back online illegally, the code would act as a homing beacon and could spell bad news for the individual involved.
http://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/t...6&q=60&o=f&l=f© Provided by Trinity Mirror Shared Services Limited Credits: Torrent Freak There is no suggestion in the reports that Sky would try to track the viewers of those illegal streams but would instead go after those who provided the stream.
It is estimated that 2,930,598 viewers watched the boxing bout illegally on 239 streams,
Online security firm Irdeto show 67 streams were on pirate websites, 165 were on social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Periscope and Twitch, and 6 were available via illicit streaming plugins for Kodi.
A recent report by the UK's Intellectual Property Office (IPO) estimates that 15% of UK internet users - approximately 7 million people - stream or download material that infringes copyright.
In particular, streaming boxes that can be easily adapted to to illegally stream premium TV content such as sports are now used by 13% of online infringers.
This doesn't just include Kodi, but other platforms like Mobdro as well.
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Re: Bad news for illegal streamers of Mayweather vs McGregor due to mysterious waterm
Simple fix would be to employ some kind of blurring algorithm.
I'm guessing it would be easy to reduce quality to somewhere between VHS and PAL, then these numbers probably wouldn't be legible.
However these days loads of people seem to cry if they aren't watching in 4k.
Re: Bad news for illegal streamers of Mayweather vs McGregor due to mysterious waterm
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Over Carl
Simple fix would be to employ some kind of blurring algorithm.
I'm guessing it would be easy to reduce quality to somewhere between VHS and PAL, then these numbers probably wouldn't be legible.
However these days loads of people seem to cry if they aren't watching in 4k.
It's 2017, I'm not watching sporting events in VHS quality!
Besides I'm not the one uploading it, so watch via a VPN and I certainly won't be on the hit list for an ISP.
Sent from my SM-G920F using Tapatalk
Re: Bad news for illegal streamers of Mayweather vs McGregor due to mysterious waterm
I have seen on sky during F1/Football a blotchy flash of circles and rings across the screen I think this is some sort of encoding for the users ID which is quite cleaver rather than just putting a number up to blur out as people might just think this is a little glitch in the signal rather than some sort of barcoded message.