from Hacker News

We glued together content moderation to stop soccer pirates

by dylanjha on 4/25/23, 10:40 PM with 229 comments

• by duskwuff on 4/26/23, 12:43 AM

  So, a lot of users in this thread seem to be misunderstanding what Mux is, and how the "soccer pirates" interact with their service. Let me clarify:

  Mux is a streaming infrastructure provider. They provide services for companies who want to stream video to their users -- news web sites, video chat services, etc. Kind of like web hosting, but specifically for video. They are not a video content provider; they do not sell subscriptions to end users.

  Mux's problem is that pirates will sign up for their service to restream pirated video content, like live sports streams:

  Official stream --> pirate --> Mux --> viewers

  When this happens, Mux usually gets stiffed on the bill, and if the stream stays up, Mux gets legal nastygrams from the content owners. So it's in Mux's interest that they detect these pirates quickly and terminate service before they run up too much of a bill. The blog post explains how they do that.

• by emacdona on 4/26/23, 12:10 AM

  Sigh... f*ck sports leagues/governing bodies. The reason some honest people pirate streams for sporting events is because they make it so annoying to pay for them. Some examples...

  I live in the US.

  I briefly took an interest in the EPL. If I wanted to watch all EPL games (or have the option of watching any particular EPL game), I'd have to subscribe to Peacock _and_ Fubo -- and I'm still not sure that gets me all games.

  I briefly took an interest in the NHL (this was years ago, granted -- things may have changed). If I would have subscribed to their service, the ONLY team whose home games I couldn't watch would have been the TEAM OF THE CITY I LIVE IN (i.e.: "my" team).

  My two favorite sports, though, are Cycling and F1.

  I LOVE cycling. To watch every UCI race, I'd have to subscribe to GCN+ (they have the Giro), Peacock (they have the Tour de France and La Vuelta), and Flobikes (they have most of the Classics races).

  THE ONLY sports governing body that has figured this out (for sports I like, anyway), is F1. I pay F1.com $80 a year and get MORE content than I would if I watched the races on ESPN. I can see EVERY RACE, EVERY QUALIFYING, EVERY PRACTICE. I can even choose WHOSE car I want to see the first person view from.

  If you want to "stop pirates", make it easy for them to give you money and watch their favorite sport.

• by crazygringo on 4/26/23, 2:52 AM

  This article could use big improvements in both its tone and organization.

  People don't have a lot of love for greedy sports broadcasters, and tech people are often associated with a kind of "information wants to be free" ethos (for better or worse), so starting out your blog post with:

  > identify and take action against soccer pirates and other delinquents who try to stream copyrighted content

  comes across as pretty tone-deaf for the intended audience. Delinquents? What's next, are they going to tell me not to copy that floppy, or ask if I'd download a car?

  What's crazier is that they actually have good justification but don't put it until the end of the article -- that pirates are using the service to broadcast streams that become super-popular (racking up charges) and then don't pay their bills for bandwidth and processing, losing near a million dollars in a year. Talk about burying the lead.

  This article is a great example of what not to do. But it's a great learning opportunity for the rest of us. Always start your article with why the article subject matters. Don't wait until the end, don't just assume the reader is on your side.

  ...And also maybe don't call people delinquents when a decent proportion of your readership probably watches some of these same pirated streams...

• by 63 on 4/26/23, 1:03 AM

  > The contractor can escalate or silence the alert using the buttons on the Slack message. If it is a false positive, they will press “Silence,” which activates another n8n workflow that adds the asset to an allowlist, so it won’t alert again.

  So if I were a prospective soccer pirate hoping to take advantage of Mux publishing the specific details of their content moderation system, could I just stream myself harmlessly showing off my soccer jersey collection for an hour to get future alerts ignored and then swap the feed over to soccer when the game starts? Granted I'm sure they'll take notice once they get a DMCA letter, but I imagine it might take awhile for everyone involved to catch on.

• by anarchogeek on 4/26/23, 3:25 AM

  People pirate streams of soccer matches because it's nearly impossible to pay for legally. The matches for a single team or league are spread out amongst a ton of different streaming providers. Sometimes there is no paid option at all because of region blocking and complicated deals.

  I happily pay Apple for MLS matches because there was no reliable way to get them here in New Zealand. It is still stupid because Apple has no idea what they're doing, the announcers are terrible, the audio levels all over the place, random silence, it gets loud, then random cutting between shots... At least it streams well.

  But for other leagues? It is cheaper to go buy a ticket to watch the Wellington Phoenix at the stadium than it is to pay for streaming! Even then I can only find some matches.

  What about other leagues? I follow Uruguayan soccer... good luck finding a place I could even pay for that which licenses the content in New Zealand.

  My only hope is that this post about how to block pirate streaming will help the pirates evade being blocked.

• by kioleanu on 4/26/23, 5:04 AM

  I have the same problem like the others say in Germany. I have a Bundesliga season ticket for which I pay 360 euros and I see all home matches in person. Away matches are a completely different story. Half of them are shown by Sky, the other half by DAZN, and for some matches they only show highlights during the game. Sky wants 30 euros per month and at least a year of subscription and DAZN wants 25 euros per month.

  My life doesn't revolve around football, I don't need to see all matches, just my team's. I would gladly pay 10-12 euros for pay per view, but no, that's apparently not an option.

• by mig39 on 4/26/23, 2:41 AM

  The best way to encourage pirates is expecting a Canadian viewer to pay $100 or more a month to watch soccer.

  I don't condone it, but hypothetically, the $7 a month I pay to stream illegally is a fuck you to the leagues and their rights owners.

• by standeven on 4/26/23, 3:29 AM

  ”If it is a false positive, they will press “Silence,” which activates another n8n workflow that adds the asset to an allowlist, so it won’t alert again.”

  So the secret is to first stream a safe video that will purposely trigger a false positive, and then switch to a pirate stream later on.

• by FridayoLeary on 4/26/23, 2:39 AM

  These pirates are the enemy of civilisation. Thank goodness the average citizens are standing up for the profit margins of the broadcasters and by extension, the overpaid players.

• by ricktdotorg on 4/26/23, 4:10 AM

  as a UK bloke in the US who supports a non-premier league team (Sunderland, currently in the EFL), i am legit screwed when it comes to wanting to pay to watch my team. it is literally impossible to pay to view while i reside in the USA. i want to pay, but i can't!

  hulu told me i could bundle EFL with Disney (!) but i was never able to see any Sunderland games on Hulu so i cancelled.

  EFL streams are hard to find, but in the absense of being able to pay to view, i will take anything i can.

• by dataengineer56 on 4/26/23, 7:38 AM

  > If you had asked me two years ago which sport a video startup needs to be most worried about, I would have said American football or basketball ... It wasn’t until I joined Mux that I found out how much people love soccer…

  This is a pretty terrible, sheltered introduction. He didn't realise that American sports aren't the most popular sports outside of America? He feels the need to tell us that in the intro? Did he not do any research before starting his job? Did no one interviewing him pick up on this?

  Also note that the detection labels mention "field" but not "pitch" even though a football playing area is by definition called a football pitch. More American-centricity that will ultimately harm them (not that I consider that to be a bad thing in this case).

• by pqs on 4/26/23, 11:45 AM

  It's been said that a growing number of individuals are turning to Telegram to stream pirated soccer matches. These streams often have massive viewership, with all of the streaming costs allegedly covered by Pavel Durov. However, it's worth questioning how sustainable this model is, considering that while Pavel is certainly wealthy, it's unclear if he has any incentive to continue footing the bill for illegal soccer streaming infrastructure. What are your thoughts on the future of pirate soccer on Telegram?

• by kettleballroll on 4/26/23, 6:53 AM

  > Is the email address suspicious looking?

  I wonder what this looks like? Everything that isn't Gmail or outlook?

• by choeger on 4/26/23, 5:58 AM

  Dear Liberty Media,

  please have a look at such a tool and maybe reconsider your addition of defective by design (aka DRM) technology to f1tv streams. It broke on three (!) different playback devices I own.

  thank you,

  a valuable customer

• by jwie on 4/26/23, 11:30 AM

  Being in the middle Mux wouldn’t be able to offer more substantive changes to the service problem. A neat operational fix to a tough event driven problem.

  The root cause here is “sports streaming services are garbage.” Mux can’t do anything about that, and likely their “partners” don’t want to hear it anyway.

  Part of me would have preferred to technically sweep this under the rug so nobody who cared would notice or be able to complain about it.

• by wslh on 4/26/23, 9:31 AM

  From Argentina, the World Cup champions, with love: an army of children find a solution in short time and they don't need to be tech savvy.

  Just one story, I remember a children of 10 trying to watch a soccer match but without having a TV plan at home. The solution? Call friends via Discord and have them put the webcam towards the TV! They even have a friends meeting watching a soccer match.

• by underlines on 4/26/23, 8:41 AM

  Anyone who hosts an illegal stream website (which usually makes them thousands of $$ per day), would immediately try the following:

  1. Stream the video game fifa 2023 for the first 2-3 streams until my account gets onto your allowlist.

  2. Stream illegal football content, not triggering your n8n flows, due to the allowlist.

• by theshrike79 on 4/26/23, 6:42 AM

  There's actually a group that streamed pixelated FIFA-gameplay during games with the correct streams and all.

  It looked good enough so that people actually watched and they got the ad revenue off it :D

  Also: perfectly legal, they're just streaming a video game =)

• by jojobas on 4/26/23, 1:50 AM

  If it's ever broadcast on normal, free-to-watch TV, anywhere in the world, it's fair game in my book to record/restream it. Change my mind.

• by m348e912 on 4/25/23, 11:44 PM

  The one data element missing seems to be concurrent streams per account? Just seems to me that one account with 200 active streams might be fraudulent.

• by dexterdog on 4/26/23, 2:31 PM

  Can't they find the vast majority of the large streamers by monitoring the reddit/irc/discord groups where the links are posted? That seems like a far more green way to find these things because there is minimal compute required. I know it doesn't sound as sexy as a hierarchy of triage flags and maybe some fancy "AI" dust, but that's how I would do it.

• by DonHopkins on 4/26/23, 11:12 AM

  If only people cared as much about dedicating time and resources to education or health care or fighting corruption as they do about sports. What is it about sports that makes people give a shit about something that ultimately doesn't even matter?

• by Rastonbury on 4/26/23, 9:56 AM

  I recall there are ways to trick image recognition in ways undetectable to humans, but maybe too much effort for a pirate

• by shp0ngle on 4/26/23, 7:02 AM

  The reactions here didn’t go how mux expected them to go, heh

• by andreareina on 4/26/23, 5:28 AM

  Kudos on them for using human review

• by Mandatum on 4/26/23, 12:53 AM

  Wow. n8n in production.

  Bold.

• by dreampeppers99 on 4/26/23, 1:44 AM

  thanks for sharing

• by matt3210 on 4/26/23, 12:32 AM

  You didn’t save anything unless you can show reasonable evidence that they paid properly as a result of your efforts. It’s likely that at least some people never would have paid for the content even if they can’t pirate it.

• by NullPrefix on 4/25/23, 11:45 PM

  > Some of the obvious risk factors include:

  > Is the email address a company domain or a consumer email like Gmail?

  Do you actually expect people to use their work email for personal purposes?