Meerket, Inc. and Twitter, Inc.’s Periscope may find themselves at the end of legal action from HBO and Showtime after users flooded both services with illegal streams of the “Fight of the Century” on Saturday evening.

The Pacquiao-Mayweather fight was only available in the United States via cable pay-per-view for a staggering $100, and no online alternative was available for users who didn’t have cable.

Although reports are mixed, it would appear that Periscope users were more prevalent in streaming the bout, with some streams said to have over 6,000 people watching them at given stages; of note, all the streams were of people pointing their phones at a television within their houses, so the quality was not brilliant.

Interestingly, or is that courageously given it will likely be used in any later court action, Twitter’s Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo declared that Periscope was the winner of the fight.

And the winner is… @periscopeco

— dick costolo (@dickc) May 3, 2015

HBO and Showtime had taken various steps leading up to the fight, including threatening sites with legal action who may have streamed it online.

Casual piracy?

The thing of note with the wave of illegal streaming here is that it didn’t appear to be intended in any organized way for profit.

In years gone by (and still available on some foreign sites), sports streaming on services like Ustream, Justin.tv and others was nearly always part of a concerted effort by sites who offered streamed sports for profit, usually through advertising. Those streams also tended to utilize high-quality images as well (say an output from a television or cable box), whereas that’s not the case with Periscope or Meerkat.

Is this a case of casual piracy, one where the majority simply wanted to share the fight with friends for example? Perhaps many sharing it on these services didn’t even realize that streaming the fight was illegal; after all, consider that they had to pay $100 upfront to be able to get the fight to share it in the first place.

Whatever the reason, the likes of HBO and Showtime aren’t the least bit shy in pursuing their legal rights, in particular coming after those who they have perceived to have stolen from them. It’s not a matter of if there will be legal action (in one form of another) against Twitter, but when.

Image credit: Danny Sullivan/ Marketingland Land