Simple to handle, rich in content and often very affordable, pirate IPTV offers are flourishing in Europe, to the point of being at the heart of the concerns of European rights holders.
Forget torrents, since 2018 the nightmare of rights holders (and the haven of amateur pirates) is called IPTV. According to the European Commission, this is not about to change. The annual update of the Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List (or Piracy and Counterfeit Watch List) from the European Commission once again drives the point home, IPTV is the enemy to be defeated.
A market worth one billion euros per year… in Europe
Thus, the study cites a report by EUIPO, the European Intellectual Property Office, of June 2021 which establishes that the pirate IPTV market generates one billion euros in illegal income each year in the European Union. . An amount that was already advanced in 2019… And since we are quoting huge figures, let us point out that the Commission document estimates that 3.6% of the European population uses this type of service. Should this be seen as good news and a decline? Indeed, in 2019, the EUIPO report estimated that almost 10% of the European population used this kind of service?
Be that as it may, to put an end to these figures which make honest taxpayers tremble, by referring to an EUIPO study of May 2021 entitled Monitoring and analyzing social media in relation to IP infringement (Monitor and analyze social media in relation to intellectual property infringement), the Commission projects that “about 35% of public conversations on social networks could be related to hacking […] especially on Twitter and Reddit”which doesn’t leave much time to talk about the weather and hear from Tata Gislaine, we grant you that.
IPTV is obviously not the only “enemy”
Before going any further, let’s take the time to specify that this Watchlist is as much the result of the Commission’s investigation as that of the return of rights holders and lobbies seeking to defend them. There is therefore a political will behind this document, a desire to encourage the strengthening of the resources allocated to the fight against piracy, whether police, technical or legislative.
Now that this clarification has been made, it must of course be remembered that IPTV is not the only means of piracy which exists and which is put forward by the Commission. Thus, link directories and cyber lockersas well as P2P networks, BitTorrent or streaming sites continue to actively participate in piracy.
But regarding IPTV, the study indicates that “new services and trends have been reported, such as services that aid piracy by offering on-demand services to make it easier for would-be hackers to create, operate, and monetize a hacker operation”.
More and more content… and offers
The Commission document thus cites an Indian player: IPTV Smarters. It is a solution that offers anyone who wants a turnkey solution to create a website, custom applications on different platforms and even a payment platform to offer an IPTV service. “The IPTV Smarter App is a fabulous streaming video player that allows your IPTV customers or users to stream content such as live TV, VOD, series or catchup TV that you provide to them, on their Android and iOS devices, their smart TV and even on their macOS and Windows computers »can we read on the official website of the service.
It is obvious that with such tools available, the IPTV market is not about to collapse. The efforts of the national and European police are having great difficulty in stemming the phenomenon.
Thus, the 2022 edition of the Watchlist reminds that “a wide spectrum of sectors, such as music, broadcasting, publishing, broadcasting and software, are subject to piracy”. Only some of them are affected by the success of IPTV, this is particularly the case “sports broadcasters and organizers who show continued and growing concern about the proliferation of operators engaged in setting up unlicensed IPTV services”.
Unlicensed IPTV services, pirates in other words, “provide unauthorized streaming access to hundreds or even thousands of TV channels illegally from legal sources around the world”, recalls the Commission in its document. Before continuing by regretting that the users of its services “have access to all kinds of television content, including content premium (in other words paid, editor’s note)such as blockbusters and sporting events. »
As it should be, the document lists the services which offer this type of service and which are therefore now placed under surveillance. This is the case, for example, of BestBuyIPTV, which offers more than 10,000 channels from 38 countries and 19,000 titles on video on demand in several languages. The serve is “available on multiple platforms and operating systems”notes the Commission, before specifying that the illegal service would have more than 900,000 users, 12,000 resellers and 2,000 re-streamers around the world… And this is one of dozens of others with equally impressive figures .
We immediately understand that to ensure an acceptable quality service on such a scale, resources are needed. Logically, these services are not free and rely on advertising or a subscription. The Commission even indicates (with a certain naivety?) that “many users may not be aware that these services Pay-TV are illegal”.
Great difficulty to control
The offer is not only sprawling but also very difficult to monitor. There are several reasons for this. First of all, the methods of access are very variable. Some services use applications to provide access to their offer, but they are not available for download from the official Google or Apple Stores, they are generally even from the service’s website. Other services encourage their users to download legal streaming applications, like VLC, for example, an excellent free media player if ever there was one. They then explain to them how to stream illegal content.
Next, rights holders and their representatives point out that “the technical infrastructure linked to these services is very complex, making it difficult to identify the sources of content and the operators of illegal services”. Thus, a multitude of actors form a long chain that is not easy to trace. Some operators have made a specialty of copying content from legal broadcasters. Then come other services that will buy this illegally acquired content to resell it to other operators who will aggregate it and resell it to other players… A veritable pyramid, the elements of which are distributed on an international scale, end of which we find the service that sells its service to the end user. So many elements that complicate the location of the actors and the dismantling of the chain set up.
Finally, there is an even more technical element: the use of reverse proxy or to CDNs, like Cloudflare, for example. However, for cybersecurity reasons, reverse proxy hide the IP address of the origin server(s) in order to prevent cyber-attacks. The intervention of this type of service, completely legal, “make it difficult to identify origin servers”explains the Commission study.
This complex, international and protean network “constitutes a parallel black market”, which explains the proliferation of offers and flows. The forces of order and having rights are therefore faced with a technological hydra, with almost infinite ramifications. They therefore know their enemy and 2023 will undoubtedly confirm the growing importance of pirate IPTV, unless a solution is found to thwart this flourishing piracy sector.
TorrentFreak
