The window of opportunity in elite sport is incredibly narrow, in every sense: careers are short; entire matches turn on split-second incidents; and mass content piracy surges up around a particular event and then disappears again like smoke.

Those first two facts of sporting life, however cruel, are part of the fabric of any game. But the third – the everyday household piracy that drains vast subscription, pay-per-view and advertising revenue from professional sport – is a blight on the business, and it is something we can tackle.

Time, of course, is of the essence. Every time a sporting event takes place that is worthy of being broadcast, there is an online smash and grab. One or many pirate sites prepare to pirate the stream; they publicize it via sites such as Reddit from around 48 hours ahead and share the spectacle in real-time with many thousands of people.

Then it all vanishes until the next time – ghost sites that materialize for the duration of the match and then evaporate, or sometimes shape-shift back into apparently respectable domains.

Like so much on the internet, this activity imagines it is covert, but it actually takes place in plain sight – if you know where to look. A company like ours is able to monitor these pirate feeds: we know where they are, how many people are watching them, who operates them and how they make their money – usually through programmatic advertising, typically from careless legitimate brands whose ads have washed up on the internet’s wilder shores.

In their vengeful fantasies, broadcasters picture themselves simply cutting these streams dead, turning off the spectacle in mid-flow. It seems like a tall order – pirates are clever, and the internet is less controllable than that – but it is an increasingly realistic prospect.

On behalf of broadcasters, we can tackle a real-time pirate event on two fronts, through a strategy of demonetization and de-indexing that uses all the intelligence we pick up from watching the pirates come and go.

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