European Police Pull Plug on 'Largest' Illegal Streaming Service | Hacker News Reader

European Police Pull Plug on 'Largest' Illegal Streaming Service

barrons.com

11 pointsSirLJ10 comments

To the best of my recollection the bulk of demand from paying customers for pirated live streaming comes from the live sports market.

    Eurojust, the European Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation, estimated that the operation — one of the world’s largest illegal streaming services — generated revenues of roughly €3bn a year and caused combined damages of more than €10bn to the affected broadcast companies.

    “The rate of profit you get from these illegal activities with lower risk is equivalent to that of cocaine trafficking,” Francesco Curcio, the criminal prosecutor who led the investigation, told reporters.

Gives an indication of the scale of annual profits for broadcasting boxing, soccer, horse racing, etc. bearing in mind that siphoning away some €10bn of potential income for broadcasters and clubs and illegally selling that for €3bn hasn't put the primaries out of business (although they are actively gatekeeping what they regard as "theirs").

( potential stressed as it's claimed that had "customers" not been paying pirates less then they would, of course, be paying media barons more for the same .. which is not always the case in reality )

Even if you pay for all the correct networks, pirating is often simply easier.

I'm old, when I was young most sports were "free to air" on public broadcasters .. the entire ecosystem of Sky Sports etc. locking up viewing for pay to view customers only didn't yet exist.

Live sports streaming as it is today is very much a "robber baron" created marketplace getting rich from what was once more or less "commons" (somewhat of a simplification).

It's transformed from "broadcast costs are covered by barely sufficient income" to "profits in the tens of billions are expected".

Even worse is that you can't even follow any one top flight football team now without paying multiple suppliers in the UK. It works out at about 7-8 hours/month of minimum wage to pay the 3 providers required, using figures from last year [1]. A day's wages every monty to watch a single team play the national sport from your own home, using your own internet connection on your own TV while still being subjected to constant adverts is absurd.

[1] https://www.planetfootball.com/quick-reads/football-costs-ev...

Here's the press release from Eurojust: https://www.eurojust.europa.eu/news/crackdown-illegal-stream...

The claim of 250M/month or 3B/year in revenues seems staggeringly high, and doesn't seem to make sense compared to the 1.6M in crypto that was seized.

That number is probably a fantasy, likely an estimate based one the ‘damage’ and ‘lost income’ per stream from people who were probably never going to pay for it anyway.

The film industry is important. It employs millions of people in direct and indirect ways. Yes it’s a business and needs to turn a profit for shareholders, and salaries of people in that industry also pay their mortgages and put food on the table etc. There are 15+ films released every week. Go see one in the cinema, or rent it and your enjoyment helps sow the seed for more content in future. Without it you’re stuck with YouTube influencers and grifters.

https://www.ft.com/content/48f63457-9c6f-4d5e-adfb-d6d47fb71... is a much better link.

> The criminal enterprise used a complex international IT system to “capture and resell” live programming and other on-demand content from companies including sports broadcaster DAZN, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Paramount, Sky and Disney+, prosecutors said in a statement on Wednesday.

https://archive.is/7qeD5

What was the service called? Never heard of it.

Typically a pyramid model - if the EU police here cracked the top tier that were capturing the raw signals then whatever name they gave thmeselves would not be one of the many names used at the base to onsell those illegal captured streams to general punters.

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