LaLiga debuts a weekly Twitch highlights show

With the popularity of Twitch growing, LaLiga has announced that it would expand its content offering on the streaming site. With this expansion, it will include highlights from the top two divisions of Spanish soccer. This exciting new weekly highlights program will premiere on Mondays and will include summaries of all the matches from each fixture round through LaLiga’s official Twitch channel. Not only that but it will also be an introduction to its host, Rubén Martin.

Last year, LaLiga made history by becoming the first major European soccer league to have its own Twitch channel. In this cooperation with the Mediapro agency, which is also participating in the highlights program, they were able to stream select matches within this account.

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The Basque derby between Real Sociedad and Athletic Bilbao was the first live game on the Amazon-owned site, which took place in April. However, for the 2021/22 season, LaLiga confirms that extra matches will be streaming on Twitch.

Digital Piracy

LaLiga’s decision to increase its highlights video distribution comes as a recent study shows that digital piracy in Spain is dropping. This research is from GfK’s Observatory of Piracy and Consumption Habits of Digital Material’s 2020 report. Within this report, it highlighted that Spain reported a 7% year-on-year decline in access to unlawful online content.

With this, according to GfK research, 71 million soccer matches have been illegally watched in the country last year. This number was down from 87 million in 2019, but still, a considerable number that cost the business $268 million.

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Unfortunately, social media platforms remain a major gateway to unlawful content. The percentage of illegal content accessed through that channel grew from 23% in 2019 to 27% last year. It saw Facebook with 55%, YouTube with 39%, WhatsApp with 34%, Instagram carrying 28%, Telegram with 25%, and Twitter with 24% were the most popular sites for obtaining pirated material.

Between 2019 and 2020, the number of pirate sports content customers in Spain stayed stable. Last season, however, LaLiga’s anti-piracy technology was credited with removing more than 1.5 million unauthorized sources. Spanish soccer teams have obtained banning orders against 23 distinct online domains and complaints against 32 IPTV website providers.