Periscope has only been operational for a little over a month and understandably the 100 million dollar newborn is still finding its feet. But there is one area that the live streaming service is already excelling in: piracy.
The boxing match between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao cost between $90 and $100 to watch live and brought in over 400 million dollars for the content's owners: Showtime and HBO.
Though the fight had a staggeringly high revenue, it also had a large volume of pirated live streams through the Periscope app.
Mashable reported that the fight had hundreds of Periscope streams and that some popular individual channels peaked at over 10,000 viewers.
Pirates take over Periscope's ship
This sporting phenomenon was popular on Twitter with the winner taking out over 3.4 million mentions in tweets on Sunday.
But Twitter's ownership of Periscope and the large volume of pirated live-streams put the company between two conflicting objectives, which was evident in some tweets by Twitter and Periscope employees.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo commented "And the winner is… @Periscopeco" following the broadcast and one of Twitter's venture investors Chris Sacca posted "Periscope won by a knockout".
The representatives tweets provoked backlash, with some comments suggesting that the company would suffer from boasting about its profit at others expense.
Considering this is Periscope's second second run in with HBO in as many weeks – there was a similar piracy problem with the latest Game of Thrones episode – Periscopers penchant for piracy may negatively affect Twitters business relationships in the future.
