TV piracy has become a big business since the appearance of illegal IPTV platforms on the web that facilitate the distribution, marketing and sale of illegal subscriptions to thousands of channels. Various mafias and small pirates take advantage of this. This pirate business has been going on for years.
Speaking at the mini-conference on the fight against TV piracy, organized by the Dutch trade organization NLconnect, anti-piracy manager Paul Johnson from Markmonitor, said closing the large number of illegal servers (mainly Xtream) last month caused problems for a huge number of illegal platforms IPTV and thus their clients. Apparently, this applies to no less than 50 million pirate customers, but it is not known where this number comes from.
Markmonitor research also showed that the average subscription to a pirated TV service costs 9.70 euros / month, so if the number of 50 million customers is real then we are talking about a multi-million business (50 million customers for almost 10 euros is 0.5 billion euros per month!) .
Paul Johnson also showed how easy it is for viewers to find and subscribe to an illegal service. By showing an example of the IPTV Smarters application, available in both Apple and Google app stores, access to thousands of TV and premium channels is achieved in a few minutes.
Although recent anti-piracy activities have also taken place in the Netherlands, Tim Kuik from the Dutch anti-piracy organization Brein called on Dutch law enforcement to take a more active role in combating TV piracy.
Dutch hosting providers are popular among pirates (not less than 93 servers were shut down during the last raid), not only because they are reliable and have access to excellent internet infrastructure, but I think they don’t really pay attention to what is posted on their servers, may the bill match.
TV piracy is formally a fraud phenomenon in which encrypted TV channels are offered for a fee by pirates without the permission of authorized broadcasters. Pirate TV offer often includes both general TV and premium TV channels, including (paid) sports channels. Pirates have no restrictions here.
Although successful in the fight against TV piracy, it appears to be a “moving target“. In addition to “sharing passwords” hosted on Chinese servers, current forms of piracy also include illegal streaming and illegal TV content on apps, social media and more. Interestingly, everyone knows it, but nobody can do anything, because how to block a Chinese website, where there are thousands of offers to access thousands of channels around the world. You would have to block the Chinese Internet, and nobody would dare.
