FIFA and Premier League Document Saudi Link in BeIN Piracy Fight

Saudi Arabia previously accused beIN of orchestrating “a smear campaign” designed to connect the kingdom with beoutQ’s pirated broadcasts.

BeIN’s top executive said he welcomed the release of Monday’s report, but he also suggested little would change until the Saudi authorities took action.

“We have been monitoring closely and nothing has fundamentally changed,” said Yousef al-Obaidly, the chief executive of Qatar’s beIN Media Group.

The brazen piracy of broadcasts of soccer matches has at times soured relations between beIN and some of the sports organizations and leagues that have benefited from its considerable wealth. In the most extreme case, beIN announced this year that it would take legal action against the Asian Football Confederation after the soccer body unilaterally broke an exclusive contractwith beIN — effectively repossessing rights it had sold to beIN — so it could broadcast games in Saudi Arabia, which has banned the sale of subscriptions to the Qatari network as part of the wider economic blockade of the emirate.

Elsewhere, beIN has threatened to end contracts with leagues and governing bodies that it argues have not provided support to its efforts to end beoutQ’s piracy, or who have signed agreements to bring events to Saudi Arabia while the dispute continues. BeIN officials were enraged when last year, for example, Italy’s Serie A — which has a television rights agreement with beIN Sports — signed a three-match deal for its Super Cup to be played in Saudi Arabia. The first of those matches took place in Jeddah in January.

BeIN has been a loss-making enterprise since its inception, but it said the loss of access to the market in Saudi Arabia, its region’s biggest, was the reason it eliminated hundreds of jobs — representing about a fifth of its employees — in June. A rival network in the Gulf, OSN, has withdrawn from all sports broadcasting except cricket, with its officials blaming piracy as a key factor driving the decision.

BeoutQ is not currently broadcasting over satellite, but it has posted messages on social media reassuring its subscribers that the absence is temporary while it works to restore its signal. The set-top decoder units that carry its broadcast, though, continue to function over the internet. BeoutQ decoders have been found for sale across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe, and even the United States government has taken notice of its operations.

Source: The New York Times

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