Is the recent surge in illegal streaming an ultimate force for good in sport’s digital age?
08/01/2024
By Tarkan Ates
"Free photo group of friends watching football at home" by gpointstudio on Freepix is licensed under CC BY
Over the years, the televised broadcasting of sport has risen to become a money-making machine, fuelling not only the commercial growth of these sports but also the commercial appetite of the public. Half a century ago, select free-view channels such as the BBC were occasionally responsible for televising special sporting events, with most fans making the effort to go and watch their team play in the flesh. Fast forward to the present day and every single sports television network is desperately fighting to be granted lucrative rights to exclusively broadcast each and every sport live from Champions League football to major boxing fights in a battle to catch the attention of the eyes of the masses. The list is endless: Sky Sports, TNT Sports, Amazon Prime, Viaplay Sports. The sheer number of options is enough to hurt the brain, let alone the bank balance.
As subscription fees for these networks skyrocket and exclusive broadcasting deals limit access, fans have been left with the less-than-ideal dilemma of either reluctantly splashing the cash or simply missing out on the action. It is no wonder that more and more people are turning to the rebellious realm of illegal streaming sites to watch the sports that they love.
With lawmakers grappling with the implications, it is truly worth asking whether illegal streaming is a deserving candidate for criminalisation or simply a symptom of a flawed system which requires drastic reform to ensure that the affordability and accessibility of viewing sport remotely is preserved.
In the past few decades, sport has evolved so much that it has simply become unrecognisable from its humble beginnings. Sports of bygone eras survived through the unwavering love of those deeply dedicated to them. Driven by the purest of passions that money could never buy, sports were controlled by people who, instead of seeking to exploit their value for their own gain, were determined to ensure that spectators, those that fuelled the industry, felt that those sports belonged to them as much as anybody else.
Sport has always attracted major crowds throughout history. Just short of 150,000 raucous football supporters flocked to witness a rare England defeat at the hands of their Scottish rivals in 1939. However, that is nothing compared to the 20 million spectators who remotely tuned in to watch the same fixture in the European Championships some 82 years later - and that was just in the UK. Admittedly, the latter was aired for free on ITV but it still proves how, following the rapid expansion of television broadcasting, sport has quickly become a spectacle, not for the hundreds or thousands, but the millions and, even sometimes, the billions. And with billions of viewers came the opportunity to make billions of pounds for television companies who quickly identified a gap in the consumer market: monetised sports broadcasting.
This newfound gold mine was first exploited in the UK in 1991 by Sky Sports, under the umbrella of British Sky Broadcasting, offering a subscription-based service that allowed viewers to access a wide range of exclusive sports content not available on free-to-air channels. Since then, the platform has expanded its portfolio of sporting rights, gaining sporting deals for a variety of major sporting leagues and events. The most notable is arguably their long-standing deal with the Premier League, whose freshly signed 4-year domestic rights contract with the broadcaster is said to be worth an estimated £6.7 billion, a deal described as the “largest sports media rights deal ever concluded in the UK.”
As the deals get bigger, so do the subscription fees that fans must pay. Since its launch in 1991, Sky Sports subscription prices have more than tripled, meaning the average fan can easily spend upwards of £40 per month. When you consider that newly branded TNT Sports are selling their relatively thin packages for over £30 monthly and Amazon Prime provide a sports broadcasting service available to access for a monthly fee of £15, it is enough to make the eye water. And that is excluding the box office pay-per-view events which usually require a payment in the region of £20 each time. In total, a dedicated sofa sports fan can easily spend more than £100 per month - you could pay for both your gas and electricity bills with that kind of money! With the economic crisis that is facing the West at the moment, fans are finding themselves simply unable to afford all the subscription packages offered to them, and so are being forced to miss out on the action.
From a UK football fan’s perspective, it is sometimes even more difficult to justify these ludicrous prices due to the protected Saturday "3pm blackout", meaning that no domestic matches can be televised to UK audiences from 14:25 to 17:25 on that day, at least until the current deal ends in 2029. This means that over 100 Premier League matches per season will not be available to watch legally. Some argue that this rule is rightfully in place to encourage fans to watch lower-league football, although its results are not proven.
Therefore, the combination of the soaring costs of broadcasters’ subscriptions and the continuation of archaic contractual agreements such as the Saturday afternoon blackout is making it increasingly difficult for financially strapped spectators to remotely watch the sports that they love without turning to the dark depths of illegal streaming. And with the proliferation of high-speed internet and the rise of digital platforms, streaming sport on unauthorised sites has become extremely accessible and popular in recent times. A YouGov poll found that 5.1 million adults in the UK illegally streamed sport in 2023, whilst research from Synamedia found that an alarming 51% of dedicated sports fans in the UK watch illegal sports streaming services at least once a month, while only 16% say they never watch via illegal sources. The consumption of pirated content hosted on these sites rocketed during the pandemic and the number of users has only been going up since, with those consuming content entirely from legal sources already dramatically dropping from 71% in 2021 to 64% in 2022. Whether these figures deteriorated further in 2023 is yet to be confirmed, but the recent price rises in UK broadcasting subscription deals make this seem likely.
While these sites may initially seem enticing due to their lack of charges, there lies a concealed, more ominous truth which needs to be addressed. The lack of security means any personal data shared across a site’s network is out in the open. While the more secure HTTPs are not always a guarantee a site is completely safe, the lack of certification and security protocol are common dangerous signs, making sharing details or sensitive information risky. According to Crimestoppers data, approximately 3.4 million illegal streamers across all markets are infected with computer viruses per year, while 1.5 million had personal details harvested, 1.3 million were hacked and 0.9 million had money stolen online. Also, alarming research carried out by cybersecurity firm Webroot showed examples of crimes carried out by hosts of illicit streams include using a viewer’s device to mine cryptocurrency, stealing personal information leading to fraud and hijacking webcams by tricking users into downloading fake video players. It makes it easy to understand why the sites are free to access - a simple tactic to draw as many potential victims to the platform as possible. There have also been several recent examples of explicit content being hosted on sites, causing extreme risk to those that share devices with children. It does not make for pleasant reading, and immediately raises the question whether this activity is causing more harm than good.
"Free photo hooded computer hacker stealing information with laptop" by master1305 on Freepix. Licensed under CC BY
In an attempt to combat this tendency, politicians have been working alongside security services to better protect both the TV companies and the users of these illegal sites. One of the first examples of lawmakers grappling with the problem was in May 2021, when European legislators adopted a proposal to combat online piracy of live sporting events that includes the option to block illegal broadcasts within 30 minutes. In the UK, efforts to take legal action against individuals for sports content piracy have ramped up in the past year. In early 2023, West Mercia Police knocked on the doors of more than 1,000 individuals to warn them to stop streaming sport illegally via modified boxes, firesticks and subscriptions. In a separate case in May, five individuals were sentenced at Derby Crown Court to a total of more than 30 years in prison for their part in a piracy scheme that earned them more than £7 million.
Although this strategy has not yet proven to be a success on a wider scale, it sends a clear message to hosts of these unlawful streaming sites that the Government is more than willing to enforce newly passed laws to crack down on this unauthorised activity. However, despite the increased surveillance, numbers flowing onto these platforms are not slowing down, and it seems unlikely that global security systems will ever have the resources to be able to keep up with the agility and complexity of the sophisticated measures implemented by hosts to shield themselves from detection and takedown efforts.
Not only are hosts of sports streaming sites directly exploiting users but also the sports which are being broadcast are themselves suffering as a cause of these operations. This form of streaming poses a major threat to sporting organisations which have become increasingly reliant on the income generated through television deals. For example, it is estimated that the streaming epidemic has caused Premier League clubs to lose around £1 million in sponsorship every game. It comes as no surprise that television broadcasters are also facing difficulties with Sky’s revenue dropping for the first time in over a decade in 2022 as a result of viewers cancelling their subscriptions and turning to alternative streaming platforms.
Despite the potential red flags that this trend could signify for the financial stability of commercialised sport, it does expose its dangerously excessive dependence on subscription-based broadcasting as a means of survival. Is this surge in illegal streaming arguably a positively rebellious symptom of the issues present in the traditional broadcasting model? Worldwide illegal streaming simply cannot be eradicated - the ball has been rolling far too long for it to be stopped now. Punishing the streaming sites and their users will only promote the activity even more, progressively pushing fans towards it in an act of defiance towards those in power. It must be accepted that sport has been slowly taken over by the wealthiest in our society, and it will be difficult to push back against that in the long run, yet the recent rise in illegal streaming has posed a relatively potent threat to their financial dominance and should prompt the governing heads of each respective sport to look to take proactive measures.
What is certain is that a thorough review of the current model is imperative, with a focus on making the viewing of sports more easily available to the average fan. The Government should be working with organisations and broadcasters to develop a system which embraces accessibility and affordability, whilst also modernising outdated regulations which are holding these changes back. Considering the allocation of sport broadcasting rights to a limit of a handful of channels could be a transformative first step. Consolidating these rights would not only streamline the viewing experience for fans but also create a more competitive and cost-effective market. The unauthorised streaming of sport will never be the ultimate solution, but the way in which governing bodies aim to combat it may well just be the answer that fans across the world have been hoping for.