All 10 games played on the opening weekend of the Premier League last weekend were broadcast on beoutQ, a sophisticated Arab-language channel..
As European soccer’s top leagues begin another season, the world’s biggest pirate television network is back on the airwaves, too.
All 10 games played on the opening weekend of the Premier League last weekend were broadcast on beoutQ, a sophisticated Arab-language channel whose brazen theft of sports broadcasts has emerged as a high-profile battleground in the bitter and protracted dispute between Qatar and a group of its neighbors led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The rights to show Premier League games — as well as those in the UEFA Champions League and France’s Ligue 1, among others — in the Middle East are owned by the Qatar-based beIN Media Group, which has committed billions of dollars to acquire valuable sports properties for its beIN Sports network. The Premier League rights are the crown jewel of the beIN Sports portfolio; the package is among the most expensive sports properties, worth more than $10 billion to the Premier League in each three-year cycle via payments from broadcasters in dozens of countries.
For about a year, those games and others, including matches in the Champions League and all 64 games of this summer’s World Cup in Russia, have been stolen wholesale and retransmitted by the bootleg beoutQ network. BeIN Media Group said this week that tests carried out by three technology firms had revealed what it called “irrefutable proof” of its long-held position linking the beoutQ signal to the satellite provider Arabsat, a Riyadh-based company in which Saudi Arabia is the largest investor.
It has taken months for beIN to persuade many of the sporting organizations that receive its largess to speak out publicly about beoutQ. Now, as the situation enters its second year, many — including FIFA, UEFA and Spain’s La Liga — have started to speak out, in some cases pointing fingers at Arabsat and Saudi Arabia. More recently, the French professional soccer league, which has enjoyed enormous Qatari investment in recent years, has called on Europe’s top trade body to put pressure on Saudi Arabia to shut down the pirate channel.
“Pirate broadcasts, such as those routinely taking place in Saudi Arabia, attack directly at the economic heart of the sport,” said Didier Quillot, the executive director general of the French league, “and we must unite in our struggle against this practice.”
Saudi Arabia and Arabsat have denied any involvement with beoutQ, which claims on its website to be a joint Colombian and Cuban venture. There is mounting evidence to suggest it is a Saudi-based operation: Its website is geolocked, or restricted, to Saudi Arabia, the Gulf’s most-populous country; the set-top boxes embossed with the channel’s logo can be purchased in Saudi cities; and online payments are accepted only in Saudi riyals. Perhaps most damning of all, social media posts promoting the channel provide details on which Arabsat frequencies the channel is available.
“The evidence is irrefutable,” said Sophie Jordan, beIN Media Group’s legal counsel. “On a daily basis it is carrying out — in broad daylight — a mass-scale theft of highly valuable intellectual property rights.”
BeIN officials said tests on beoutQ’s signal were conducted over a number of months by three technology firms: the United States-based Cisco, the Swiss company Nagra, and Overon, a company located in Spain. BeIN is touting the findings a month after Arabsat released a statement claiming seven experts, whom it did not identity publicly, had concluded that its frequencies were not being used by beoutQ.
“The reports speak for themselves,” said Cameron Andrews, the executive responsible for coordinating beIN’s anti-piracy operation. “There’s no possible way these internationally well-known firms would compromise their reputations.”
Arabsat and its outside legal counsel, Squire Patton Boggs, did not respond to a request for comment on the most recent beIN accusations, or the companies’ findings. Saudi Arabia’s media ministry acknowledged receiving a request for comment but did not provide one.
In June, the punishing blockade being enforced by a Saudi-led coalition entered its second year. Last year, the countries in the coalition — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt — accused Qatar of supporting terrorism and criticized its relationship with Iran. In addition to a trade embargo, the countries cut off diplomatic ties, closed borders and set up the blockade of the energy-rich emirate, shutting off Qatar’s access to many of the region’s ports and much of its airspace. Qatar has denied the accusations, and has noted the assistance it has provided to the United States in its battles against terrorism.
Saudi Arabia has also been lobbying international sports organizations to end their agreements with beIN Sports, frustrating those unwilling to be drawn into what they consider a political, rather than a sporting, dispute. In the middle of the World Cup, for example, Saudi Arabia’s sports minister, Turki al-Shiekh, took to Twitter to call on FIFA to break its contract with beIN, before making a personal attack on the European soccer head Alexander Ceferin. Ceferin’s organization, UEFA, had a few hours earlier released a statement saying beoutQ was based in Saudi Arabia and had been pirating its content.
FIFA announced last month that it had hired lawyers to take action specifically in Saudi Arabia, and it said the organization “is working alongside other sports-rights owners that have also been affected to protect its interest.”
BeIN is relying on the help; while it has begun legal actions in the United States and France, it has been unsuccessful in its attempts to find lawyers willing to represent its interests in Saudi Arabia because of the broader embargo.
As it has remained on the air, beoutQ, an operation that experts say would cost millions of dollars a year to operate, has grown increasingly sophisticated and audacious. During the World Cup, it added its own commentary over some of the pirated coverage, and recently it began showing anti-Qatar messaging and personal insults against members of Qatar’s ruling family between its broadcasts.
Its presence has also spread to other parts of the Arab world. BeoutQ set-top boxes, which are able to broadcast the channel over satellite and the internet, have been found across the Middle East. Elsewhere, there is evidence the channel is itself being pirated by other illegal broadcast operations.
And with top soccer leagues in Spain and Italy about to kick off, beoutQ’s appetite for content appears to be growing. Although a majority of its broadcasts are stolen from beIN Sports, it has been bolstering its feed with properties owned by other sports networks too. NBC Universal’s Telemundo and Britain-based Eleven Sports are among those that have complained.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.