DUBAI: Saudi-based pirate broadcaster BeOutQ has now added tennis to its ever growing list of sports, the official rights for which are held by Qatar-based beIN Sport, that it broadcasts with impunity in the region.
The International Tennis Federation, Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) and other bodies called on Thursday for the “immediate closure of the illegal Saudi Arabian-based piracy operation, ‘BeOutQ'”, for broadcasting tennis content across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) without the right to do so.
The statement was issued on the website of the Wimbledon grand slam tournament currently taking place in London, and followed similar complaints from world football body FIFA, European soccer body UEFA, CAF (Africa’s football governing body) and Formula One.
Saudi Arabia’s media ministry however, chose to follow the official line that the authorities in the kingdon have been taking ever since BeOutQ sprun up – that the pirate channel is not getting state patronage. The facts on the ground, however, show the exact opposite, more so since the rogue channel is being rebroadcast off the Riyadh-based Arabsat satellite, which lists the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as its largest shareholder.
The bootlegging network has with impunity been stealing feeds of every game of the ongoing Russia 2018 World Cup and rebroadcasting it onto a MENA footprint via the Arabsat satellite provider.
“Wimbledon’s press release baselessly claims that BeOutQ is based in Saudi Arabia and suggests that Saudi Arabia is somehow complicit in beoutQ’s broadcasts,” Saudi Arabia’s media ministry stated.
The media ministry further claimed that Saudi Arabia had “relentlessly” combated BeOutQ’s activities in the kingdom, and reiterated its “commitment to protecting intellectual property rights”.
To be clear, BeOutQ’s piracy of the World Cup (and UEFA tournaments before that) is a product of regional politics. The root of the problem lies in the fact that it is beIN Sports that holds media rights for all the major sports in the MENA region – that includes FIFA, UEFA, Formula 1 and major tennis events.
BeOutQ sprung up as an in your face pirating TV station with beIN as its chief target in the wake of the declaration by Saudi Arabia (which its allies, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt rubber stamped) in June 2017 that Qatar was sponsoring terrorism in the region. Following the declaration, the Saudi Arabia-led bloc severed diplomatic and transport ties with Doha and imposed an economic blockade on the Gulf state.
After it launched its blockade, Saudi Arabia banned the sale of beIN broadcast boxes and stopped existing customers from renewing subscriptions. Which is what has led to the World Cup not being officially broadcast in the country.
