The “IPTV Smarters Pro” application is now no longer available on the Play Store. Google has indeed removed it from its application store by court order following a complaint filed by La Liga, the Spanish football league, with the European Commission.
The Spanish first division football league has been waging a war against pirate sites and services for several years. Today, La Liga achieves a victory by obtaining the withdrawal of the application “IPTV Smarters Pro” from the Google Play Store.
War is declared…
La Liga is not the only professional football league to tackle unlicensed live streaming platforms offered for free or at low cost to IPTV users. The British Premier League, the Italian Serie A and in general all rights holders have pirate IPTV offers in their sights.
IPTV can be translated into French as “television by Internet protocol”. This term is used to refer to a video service that broadcasts live television channels on the Internet. Some of its services are completely legal, such as Netflix, Molotov TV or even Disney+. But many other IPTV services illegally broadcast hundreds of channels, some of them paid, for ridiculous prices.
Rights holders who see their content pirated and distributed for a pittance do not hesitate to go to court to have the sites and applications that offer these services closed. Last year, Italian police managed to identify 6,500 users of an IPTV site and shut down 40 Telegram channels where links to such services were shared.
Authorities sometimes manage to block IPTV streaming services by asking operators to DNS-block streaming streams. A very simple limitation to circumvent for users of its services who change DNS or use VPNs.
Video players in the viewfinder
At the beginning of 2022, the Spanish football league submitted to the European Commission 20 IPTV services and 30 streaming sites that did not respect licenses and broadcasting rights. But La Liga went further by naming 80 video player software, many of which are available on app stores like Google Play Store and Apple App Store:
“It is important to note that all these playback applications allow the consumption of a huge amount of audiovisual content such as sports, films, television channels, series, etc. In other words, this problem affects the entire audiovisual industry and entertainment in general. – La Liga.
By submitting these names, the aim is for the European Union to add the apps to its counterfeiting and piracy watch list. For now, only the application IPTV Smarters Pro was selected as offering the possibility of “view the premium TV channels in which La Liga matches were broadcast, among other content. »
The app IPTV Smarters Pro is now unavailable on the Italian and French Google Play Store. The app Smarters Player Lite developers from WHMCS Smarters is however still available on the application store at the time of writing these lines.
TorrentFreak
