The Infront Sports & Media agency has curtailed its live coverage of the 2012 Ice Hockey World Championship on video-sharing website YouTube after users were able to access the streams from territories where the free-to-view service should have been geoblocked.
Infront said it took the decision to stop the live coverage and show the remaining games of the tournament with a 30-minute delay after discovering that some users had found a way of bypassing the geoblocking mechanism and were encouraging other YouTube users to follow.
“We deeply regret that we have to take this step, in particular for all the ice hockey followers out there who just want to enjoy the games online on YouTube,” Infront’s executive director of winter sports, Bruno Marty, said. “However, we currently see no other option to protect the existing media rights agreements with our broadcast partners, as some so called fans decided not to play fair and to illegally bypass existing copyright and geoblocking mechanism.”
Infront is the marketing partner of the International Ice Hockey Federation.
The cities of Helsinki in Finland and Stockholm in Sweden are co-hosting the championship, which started on May 4 and will run until May 20.