Illegal streams might seem like an easy way to avoid subscription charges, but consumers end up paying a whole lot more.
Many have been tempted. They hear all about a new TV show, and find it’s on one of the subscription services that they don’t use. It’s not worth subscribing just for one show… so what’s the harm in watching from one of those dodgy feeds?
It’s a common problem - as the figure of 230 billion illegal streams per year shows - but plenty of viewers find they pay in other ways.
One of the lessons of the Illegal Empire is that those who peddle counterfeit goods or services tend to be criminal polymaths - they get involved in a variety of enterprises, and if they can link those enterprises together all the better.
So, the ‘free app’ which gives access to that TV show or football game can also install malware on the laptop of the unwary user. That turns the roguish-but-harmless piracy into an open door for hackers to steal personal and financial data, to mine cryptocurrency or to be harnessed to create a botnet for cyberattacks - all according to a report from Pay TV specialists, NAGRA.
The report went even darker - NAGRA also discovered that subscribers' internet connections can be turned over to others for illegal activities like accessing child pornography. The illegal streaming subscriptions can also let customers skirt a U.S. ban to watch the channel Al-Manar, a "specially designated global terrorist entity."
And don’t think these are especially extreme examples. Data aggregated by Crime Stoppers International found that, in 2021, 3 million illegal streamers were hacked, nearly 2.5 million were infected with viruses, over 1 million had money stolen as a result and 4.2 million suffered a virus, fraud or data theft.
Paying the TV subscription now looks like a bargain, in comparison.
Not least because it’s not just the viewers who suffer, it’s also the wider industry. Estimates vary wildly as to the ultimate cost to the creative industries, but they start at $30 billion per year, in the US alone, based on 126 billion illegal viewings of US TV each year. If you include music, illegal viewing and listening of copyrighted material is nearly a quarter of the internet’s global bandwidth.
The vicious circle of all that is, of course, that fewer TV series make money, so fewer get made next year. There’s job losses in the TV industry, and there’s the inevitable ironic outcome that people trying to find a cheap way of watching a TV series this year will find that that series is cancelled next year, because there weren’t enough attributable viewers.
Find out more about how Crime Stoppers International is tackling illegal streaming.
