Sports stakeholders are becoming increasingly frustrated with the extent of illegal streaming, and fingers are being pointed in different directions.
At the FT’s recent Business of Football Summit, the Chief Operating Officer at UK sports broadcaster Sky, Nick Herm, said that more needs to be done to counter illegal streaming.
The businessman argues that telcos and some big tech firms need to do more, with Amazon cited in particular. This is because Amazon ‘Fire Stick’ digital media platforms are often corrupted to stream pirated sports content.
“People will know you can get jailbroken Fire Sticks and you can access pirated services on them,” he said, as reported by City.am. “There are football fans who literally have shirts printed with ‘dodgy boxes and fire sticks’ on them.
“In addition to telcos, some of the tech giants – Amazon in particular – we do not get enough engagement to address some of those problems where people are buying these devices in bulk, they’re breaking them and sideloading pirated apps on them – and people are just buying them.”
Herm is not the first to raise these concerts and it is highly unlikely he will be the last. Illegal sports streams are a common feature of the modern sports ecosystem, whether broadcasters, clubs and other stakeholders like it or not.
With football such a big money business, the losses as a result of these streams are a big concern for the stakeholders involved. Sky paid £6.7bn for the 2025-29 Premier League rights cycle, so it’s not surprising that the broadcaster isn’t particularly happy about people streaming games illegally.
Across the EU, it is estimated that more than one in 10 EU citizens have illegally streamed sports content, while in the UK there have been some notable legal cases around sports piracy. This is not just contained to football, with MMA and boxing standing out as much sought after illegal streaming products.
As the leagues and sports organisations themselves also lose out to this, these organisations are also voicing options. Speaking at the SPORTEL sports business conference late last year, Javier Tebas, President of LaLiga, compared sports pirates to drug traffickers
Citing figures that 45-46,000 people a day receive illegally transmitted content, he called on big tech firms, telcos, and IT providers like Cloudfare, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google to do more.
“We need to solve the problem that is taking place every single day, and furthermore it seems that solving this problem is impossible,” he said.
“We need to become active in understanding how we can solve this problem. We have the big techs involved, many of them. They are the necessary cooperators to commit fraud.
“They know how to steal a product but also they steal a product, and they earn money out of this form of piracy.”
Tebas went on to accuse big tech firms of essentially being complicit in the theft of official sports content and rights by not doing enough to combat it. A few months later, it seems these concerns remain strong as ever, if Herm’s remarks are anything to go by.
It is also important to note, and this should not be taken as an endorsement of piracy, that the costs of sports consumption are rising with more and more rights increasingly held by pay-TV and subscription streaming platforms.
When this is coupled with rising living costs and inflation across many countries, it will mean that illegal streaming will continue to be an attractive proposition for many sports fans for the foreseeable future.
