Illegal boxing streams deleted ‘within minutes,’ says Periscope

Saturday night’s heavily hyped boxing match between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao may have served as a coming out party for live-streaming service Periscope, but the company claims it was quick to clamp down on piracy.

“We took action in response to takedown notices within minutes,” a spokesman for Twitter, which owns Periscope, said in a statement on Monday.

{mosads}The company said that 66 streams of pirated content were reported on Saturday, 30 of which were taken down. The remaining streams “had already ended and were no longer available,” it said.

Saturday night’s “fight of the century” in Las Vegas came with a hefty $100 pay-per-view price tag for high definition, which surely put off some viewers. On top of that, customers around the country reported problems accessing the pay-per-view stream, preventing even those who wanted to pay to watch the bout from doing so.

Amid those obstacles, many appear to have turned to Periscope or Meerket, competing companies that let people easily transmit live streaming videos over the Web with the touch of a button.

Shortly after the fight, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo declared his new service the real winner.

And the winner is… @periscopeco

— dick costolo (@dickc) May 3, 2015

The company has insisted that its service should merely be used as a complement to traditional outlets that have paid for the rights to show content.

“Piracy does not excite us,” Periscope co-founder Kayon Beykpour tweeted.

Piracy does not excite us. Trust me, we respect IP rights & had many people working hard to be responsive last night (including myself)

— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) May 4, 2015

A Twitter spokesman reiterated that streaming others’ copyrighted movies and programs violates Periscope’s policy and that it is working to create “robust tools” to “react expeditiously” to piracy.

Still, it’s not the first time the service has been used to bypass expensive fees from traditional television programmers and surely won’t be the last.

Earlier this year, HBO went on the offense against people using Periscope to broadcast the season premier of its hit show “Game of Thrones.”