It’s common for sports channels to use additional watermarks to deter against public rebroadcasting in venues. I’d say that’s exactly what this Live Stream watermark is for. For example, if an audit found a pub was using this stream for their in-house TV’s, they’d be penalised pretty heavily for not paying the premium price for a venue package.
These days they generally leave the domestic versions alone and only watermark the venue versions, usually with a middy glass next to the Fox Sports watermark, or on the bottom left on Optus Sports feeds, to differentiate it.
No, the reason is that they are broadcasting this practice match made for streaming on Kayo on their linear channels as well. The quality is much worse that normal (it’s a livestream), thus they want to make it obvious to the viewer that this isn’t them and their quality. They quickly used an existing add-on watermark (the legacy stream one) to show that it is a livestream.
(Whether that makes English I’m not sure )
These screenshots have come from their Twitter, not Kayo or any other service.
There are sneakier ways to crack down on this that you’ll almost never notice.
I know of one instance where Foxtel managed to figure out which iQ box was being used to stream a Mainevent boxing match. Apparently the boxes have the ability to subtly watermark a feed with a unique code somewhere that Foxtel can look for and then trace. (EDIT Factcheck: I can’t find any evidence of this online, but definitely recall it being a thing. Would’ve been maybe 5-10 years ago).
I also swear a couple of times I’ve seen the middy glass in differing levels of full. What purpose that serves I’m not sure.
This is so that you can’t just work out what it looks like and stick a sticker on the TV. They change the level of the glass, the opacity and the exact location in order to catch this.
There’s certainly the non-subtle version of it where they just flash a very obvious code up on screen, with more control over the boxes I think Foxtel could probably do even better than those - but even if you just flashed it up for a split second and were recording the stream you’d be able to pluck it out.
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