Why Arabs are watching a pirated World Cup feed 第102期

How football fans exploit the year-old blockade of Qatar

Jun 21st 2018 | CAIRO

ARABS have little to cheer in this year’s World Cup. The four teams from the region lost all seven of their early matches. Russia and Uruguay beat both Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Morocco beat itself, scoring an own goal against Iran. Tunisia lost to England. The real competition is off the pitch: in the Middle East, even watching the game is fractious.

A Qatari network, beIN Sports, paid a small fortune for the broadcast rights. It had planned to recoup that by charging fees of up to $150 per subscriber. But last year four Arab countries imposed a blockade on Qatar. The embargo excluded beIN from its largest market, Saudi Arabia, where it had 900,000 customers. And it left Saudis wondering how they would watch their team, which had qualified for the first time since 2006.

The answer came from a mysterious group of hackers. In August someone launched a bootleg version of beIN, cheekily known as “beoutQ”. With a cheap decoder, Saudis (and other Arabs) can watch with only a slight delay. Qatar is furious about the piracy. BeIN executives accuse Saudi Arabia of complicity, claiming the hackers are rebroadcasting using Arabsat, a satellite in which the kingdom is the largest shareholder. (Both the Saudis and Arabsat deny that they are helping the pirates.)

The controversy is a preview of 2022, when Qatar will host the tournament. It plans to welcome fans from the Gulf. But if the blockade continues, Saudis might be barred from attending. They might not want to, either. The kingdom has mooted turning part of the border into a nuclear waste dump.

Egyptians have a different problem. Although their government joined the blockade, it did not ban people from subscribing to beIN. Even so, many cannot afford a World Cup package that costs half a month’s average pay. Instead they turn their satellite dishes in a surprising direction. On June 15th fans huddled in a café in Cairo to watch a free broadcast of the Pharaohs playing Uruguay. The commentary was in Arabic—but it came from Israel’s public broadcaster, Kan.

The network denies that it is helping non-Israelis watch the cup free, but Israel’s foreign ministry has enthusiastically promoted the broadcasts in Arabic on social media. Even Cairo taxi drivers can rattle off its satellite co-ordinates. “I’d watch it in Hebrew before I gave money to Qatar,” jokes one fan. Though he might wish he hadn’t watched at all. The Pharaohs lost their first two matches and will probably head home soon.

英文部分选自《经济学人》杂志