BeIN Sports lays off 300 Qatari jobs in wake of piracy issues

[AlphaKing]

Doha-based broadcaster BeIN Sports has laid off a fifth of its workforce in Qatar, citing Saudi Arabian piracy for a downturn in revenues.

More than 300 staff have lost their jobs at the network’s headquarters in Doha following a two-year diplomatic and trade row with Riyadh that has resulted in BeIN losing access to its biggest market in the region, Saudi Arabia.

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Since mid-2017, the Qatari media company has been dealing with illegal broadcaster, BeoutQ, pirating its content on an industrial scale and transmitting via Arabsat, a Riyadh-based satellite network.

The rights sports properties stolen have included the Fifa World Cup, Uefa Champions League and Premier League, for which BeIN paid for exclusive access to across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

On 17th June, OSN, another leading broadcaster in the region, announced it was closing down its Pehla entertainment channel, which carries the last of its sports transmissions, as a result of piracy. OSN had already shut down five of its six sports channels back in March.

‘Illegal streaming sites, pirate IPTV decoders within OSN’s licensed territories, has made it difficult for OSN to continue offering Pehla,’ OSN said in a statement.

BeIN subsequently issuing a warning that the broadcast industry was ‘sleepwalking towards a financial precipice unless decisive action is taken against piracy and BeoutQ specifically’.

Confirming the staffing lay-offs, a BeIN spokesperson said in a statement: ‘In light of these challenges we have taken some difficult decisions to right-size our MENA business, but these decisions will secure our business for the future – we are not going anywhere.’

Since coming into existence at the time of the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar two years ago, BeoutQ piracy has spread from operating the Middle East into Europe and parts of the US.

Uefa president, Aleksander Ceferin, has described piracy as a threat to the future of European soccer and a joint legal action has been launched in Saudi Arabia by the Premier League, La Liga and Fifa to halt the theft.

Simon Murray, principal analyst at Digital TV Research, said: “Pay-TV in the MENA region has been hit by a Saudi-led ban on the sale of Qatar-backed BeIN decoders and subscriptions since mid-2017.

“The region is no stranger to piracy, but the sophistication of the BeoutQ operation is beyond anything seen before.

“BeIN is fiercely protesting BeoutQ, with the support of major content owners, especially sports federations. We believe that the situation will be resolved in 2019, given the international pressure to drop the ban and to close BeoutQ’.

Last week a French court ruled that BeoutQ was being carried on the Riyadh-based satellite, Arabsat - in which the Saudi state is a majority shareholder - although the kingdom denies that this is the case.

This was the latest in a series of actions taken by Qatar and BeIN Sports to try and stem the flow of piracy.

In December last year, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) approved Qatar’s request to form a panel that would investigate Saudi Arabia for violating its obligations under the WTO’s guidelines on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights.