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With help from dedicated hardware boxes, live streaming piracy has seen a massive user growth in recent years.
While there are hundreds of free live streaming sites and tools, there's also a huge market for paid pirate services, which charge a fraction of the cost of their legal counterparts.
One company that has kept a close eye on these developments is Irdeto. The anti-piracy outfit has assisted copyright holders and law enforcement on several occasions and has helped bring down some of the largest offenders.
However, the problem isn't going away, not even when criminal law enforcement gets involved. One of the problems is that it's relatively easy for pirate IPTV providers to operate in the open, helped by reputable payment processors such as Visa, Mastercard and PayPal.
This is one of the main conclusions of research published by Irdeto this week.
Source: TorrentFreak
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday August 05 2018, @03:55PM
Arguably "the market" is taking care of it. We grew up in an era of 200M population of which 40M people watch a popular TV show, and that industry is dying faster than brick and mortar retail, where the pinnacle of TV popularity in almost-2020 means 300M+ population where 10M or fewer viewers. Pretty soon you continue that straight line decline and you'll hit zero TV network viewers around mid 2030s. TV's culturally pretty much irrelevant already.
So... all the networks do bankrupt probably after completing their current trend of merging into one giant monopoly. Then what? All the IP laws in the world won't save them if they have no viewers to sell to advertisers. Maybe they'll stick to fake news and propaganda as a service (The new PaaS?) Not too many other revenue options for them, if they have roughly no viewers.