Over the weekend, the Mayweather vs Pacquiao boxing match was billed as the biggest fight of the century, but thanks to a few hundred Periscopers, it has also gone down as one of the most pirated events in history.
With this in mind it comes as no surprise that Periscope Co-Founder Kayvon Beykpour was quick to address piracy concerns immediately after stepping onto the TechCrunch Disrupt stage.
"From an operational standpoint we were completely prepared for our partners to reach out to us and request we respect their IP rights," Beykpour explained. "We basically have a team that looks at an email channel and if someone says, 'Hey this stream is violating our copyright,' we take it down."
"We had 66 requests for take down and took down 30 of them all within a matter of minutes," he said. "The ones we didn't take down ended because you can imagine how every stream isn't super long."
Fighting piracy in a new age
Beyond actively hunting down streams that are showing off copyrighted material, Beykpour said Periscope is committed to working on developing new methods to quash live streaming piracy.
"It's a new territory," Beykpour quipped. "The proliferation of all these mobile devices and the fact that I can just take out my phone and stream right now, changes the landscape."
Beykpour was also quick to note that "piracy is not a periscope thing, it's an Internet thing." Aside from taking down streams, the Periscope co-founder believes ease of access can solve most problems as iTunes did for music.
"My personal view on this is that no one wants to watch Game of Thrones on a Periscope," he expounded. "Trust me I love Periscope, but it's not the right way to watch an experience that should be had on a TV with a nice sound system."
Android version coming
Looking forward, Beykpour confirmed his team is looking to add new features like a map view to find streams and an Android version is on it's way - without any hard dates of course.
"We spent a year building the iOS app, we can't just snap our fingers and make an Android app appear," he said, continuing to explain the Android app will not be identical to the iOS version.
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