While not all official figures have been released, Saturday night's bout between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao is set to smash all financial records for a fight - including biggest takings from pay per view audiences.
With access to view the fight retailing at $100 (€90) in the US, £24.95 (€33.99) in the UK and €24.95 in Ireland, demand for illegal free streams of the fight was also probably higher than for any previous fight.
As the main event neared, word spread that live-streaming app Periscope was the go-to place to go to see the fight for free.
And the winner is... @periscopeco
— dick costolo (@dickc) May 3, 2015
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has been widely criticised for this tweet suggesting that Periscope was the the real winner of the fight.
Periscope is owned by Twitter and the micro-blogging site is coming off the back of a tough year, and there have been rumours surrounding the future of Mr Costolo as CEO. Both he and the company will hope that getting in early on the recent live-streaming trend will help to keep Twitter relevant in the quickly changing social media landscape.
These pirate streams go back to the roots of digital piracy, with users putting smartphones in front of TV sets like old camcorder-hiding VHS-pirates in cinema screenings.
While established illegal streaming sites can be targeted and either stopped - or forced to crash by the number of viewers logging on - Periscope offers a new ephemeral form of piracy that is harder to stop.
The policing of these streams is legally complicated - while some reproduced TV pictures, others were coming from ringside at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
Periscope says that it received 66 takedown requests from rights holders, 31 of these streams were blocked, while the others had ended by the time they could be dealt with.
The app has only been live for some 6 weeks and this is the second high-profile case of mass piracy that has been reported - the other being streams showing the new episodes of HBO's Game of Thrones as they aired.
Periscope is likely to go through a process similar to YouTube's resolving its early issues with copyright infringement. After years of legal battles it struck deals with key TV stations, film studios, record companies and sports organisations, and now tightly polices the content uploaded to the site.
It has released a statement clarifying that it does not condone the streaming of copyrighted content: "Periscope operates in compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we respect intellectual property rights and are working to ensure there are robust tools in place to respond expeditiously."
It continues: "Broadcasting content that is protected by copyright is a clear violation of our content policy."
While it is likely that Periscope will only get so much traction through the airing of protected content without attraction serious legal action - the real gain from Saturday night could be app downloads and increased brand awareness.
Both holders of the fight rights, HBO and Showtime have declined to comment on the issue of Periscope streams.
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