What made matters even worse for HBO and Showtime is that countless people who did pay for the fight used their smartphones to re-transmit the fight to users of Periscope and, to a lesser extent, rival app Meerkat. Each stream reached hundreds or thousands of non-paying fans with a picture quality that was shaky and pixilated, yet still quite adequate.
If Twitter CEO Dick Costolo understood the implications of this activity, he sure didn’t show it in a tweet that declared Periscope the “winner” of the night. There’s no question the app got tremendous exposure that will build nicely off the 1 million downloads impressively achieved in just its first 10 days, a fact Costolo made sure to mention in the company’s underwhelming first-quarter results last week.
Source: Periscope Piracy: Mayweather vs. Pacquiao Streams Could Hurt Twitter | Variety