Live broadcast bar, August 3, The Times reported that as part of the fight against piracy, more than 600,000 illegal live broadcast links were blocked in the Premier League last season. Experts said piracy was a killer in the sports industry.
Since 2019, the number of blocked streaming media has doubled. At that time, 210000 live streaming links were deleted, far higher than 1800 blocked in 2009. Anti-Piracy experts said that the rise in the total reflected the growth of the problem, but also reflected the success of the action to close the live broadcast of piracy.
There are three main types of piracy: illegal streaming media published on social media, websites that provide links to various competitions, and more and more out-cell Internet protocol TV IPTV devices, these devices use the Internet and charge fees to access a series of sports and entertainment channels. Premier League data show that the use of illegal live games in Britain has declined. In spite of this, piracy in the Premier League and European Championship matches and other sports and entertainment activities are still a global problem involving complex organized crime networks.
beIN Sports is one of the most important international copyright holders in the Premier League and UEFA. Cameron Andrews, the company’s head of anti-piracy, said, piracy networks in the Middle East and North Africa alone cost broadcasters $1 billion a year. IPTV equipment is now considered to be the biggest threat to broadcasters and the copyright fees they pay to sports organizations. Andrews said: “It can watch all the channels in the world and tens of thousands of movies and TV plays with very little money. No legitimate player can compete with it. It is parasitic and a potential industry killer. The players behind the scenes were well organized and made a lot of money.”
The Premier League has sued several such networks, including one considered to be the largest organization in Britain, and five people were sentenced to prison in May. Flawless the network charges users a usage fee of 10 pounds per month. The Premier League also blocked more than 250000 illegal streaming media on social media last season and forcibly deleted 200000 links from search engines such as Google and Bing. The Premier League said that the vast majority of fans watched the game through legal channels, and they invested a lot of money to protect their content from being stolen.
Andrews said: “If you ask the Premier League, they will tell you that it is becoming more and more difficult to watch games illegally in Britain. According to their research, the number of people who use piracy to watch the content of the competition is declining. I think this is fair, because in Britain, they have a very comprehensive and effective blocking order, which makes it more difficult to access pirated streaming media during the Premier League.”
The research on piracy in the Premier League shows that the illegal streaming media used by most users are unreliable and often interrupted, but a considerable number of people are willing to endure bad viewing experience. This week Sky TV won a High Court ruling that would force internet service providers to block illegal streaming content for Sky Sports. This is similar to the high court’s ruling on the Premier League, meaning Sky TV can now close pirated websites by providing Internet providers with details of illegal streaming media.
There are different types of piracy, ranging from suspicious information streams posted on social media to specialized websites supported by advertisements of secret encrypted currency and gambling businesses. However, at present, the biggest threat to football and its copyright holders comes from organized networks, which charge low fees to sports and movie audiences around the world through IPTV devices.
About 15 years ago, the emergence of IPTV marked an earth-shaking change in organized crime. Skilled operation planners decrypt content from broadcasters around the world and resell it wholesale. Andrews said: “They provide content to an ecosystem where all content is aggregated with other channels from a large number of broadcasters around the world. Then sell through distributors of different levels.”
The Times contacted a distributor from European countries and agreed to speak anonymously. The dealer said he was connecting an application developed on his network for a customer at the same time. He said, “I can watch the game on my mobile phone”. He claimed that the platform had tens of thousands of customers, and each customer paid a fee ranging from 60 pounds to 100 pounds per year, so that they could access thousands of channels, including all subscription platforms. His network rents servers in dedicated facilities, and its applications can be accessed through IPTV devices, such as Fire Sticks.
He said: “We decoded Fire Stick, which basically means removing the restrictions on the device so that we can add other applications. Then, we provide customers with access codes to the so-called panel so that they can watch anything they want to see. If their network is good enough, they can even watch ultra-high definition TV. For example, when Game of Thrones is broadcast in the United States before it is broadcast in Britain, our customers can watch the episode immediately after it is broadcast.” In 2019, the Italian police shut down the Xtreme Codes IPTV service management system, and the dealer’s network was also affected. The system provided services to about 50 million people.
The Premier League said that most fans watched the game through legal channels, and its offices in London and Singapore invested a lot of money, including lawyers, A team of it experts and investigators protects their content from theft. One of its main weapons is that internet service providers are now required by law to block access from illegal streams. How exactly this blockade works is a secret, and there is even a confidential court order to protect these details from being disclosed. It also cooperated with law enforcement agencies and helped close Modbro, one of the pirated applications, in 2021.
The Premier League also filed a private criminal lawsuit, the latest of which was against operation Flawless. The action resulted in five people being imprisoned and the mastermind Mark Gould was sentenced to 11 years in prison. Flawless had 50000 clients, employed 30 employees, and generated 7 million pounds of income in 5 years. Andrews believes that the number of piracy in the English Premier League is decreasing, but the challenges facing football and international broadcasters are huge. beIN Sports covers the Middle East and North Africa, where law enforcement varies from country to country.
Andrews: “In some markets, we know that the number of people watching our content far exceeds the number of subscribers. For example, this is the case in North Africa and Iraq. It is estimated that the loss in the Middle East and North Africa region exceeds US $1 billion per year.” One of them is Family Box, whose IPTV covers the whole world and plays 7000 channels. Andrews said piracy would directly affect beIN’s payment for sports copyright. It signed a three-year Middle East and North Africa copyright agreement with the Premier League, worth 0.5 billion dollars. Andrews said that YouTube had taken considerable measures to prevent illegal streaming media, but other platforms could do more. “In the past football season, there have been many pirated live sports content on Facebook, because the anti-piracy tools used in Facebook are not effective.”
“We saw less pirated streaming media on Twitter, but the quality and number of viewers of pirated streaming media may be very high. They are also the only major social media platform that still does not provide any tools for content owners to actively prevent pirated streams from being uploaded to the platform. Anyone who accesses content in this way is committing a crime. If you illegally play unauthorized content, the police may follow you.”
Andrews believes that artificial intelligence is expected to be the key to cracking down on piracy in the future: “In some aspects, digital signals are more likely to be pirated. There are challenges in this aspect. Once we start to integrate artificial intelligence, it may really have an impact on piracy, but it will depend on the security and piracy of digital platforms when building these platforms.”
(eagle)