SKY has issued a new warning over “dodgy” Amazon Fire Sticks and called for a fresh crackdown on users.
Nick Herm, chief operating officer at Sky, said that illegal viewing of its subscription content was costing “hundreds of millions of dollars”.
Sky has issued a new warning over ‘dodgy’ Amazon Fire Sticks[/caption]
“People will know you can get jailbroken Fire Sticks and you can access pirated services on them,” he told the FT Business of Football Summit.
“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.
“It’s basically organised crime. We work closely with the police. The sums are huge.
“It’s a battle and you need a lot of people to lean in to solve it.”
Herm pointed the finger at Amazon, saying that the company in particular is not doing “enough engagement to address some of those problems, where people are buying these devices in bulk”.
He also believes that modified Fire Sticks “probably” make up “about half of the piracy” in the UK.
Herm continued: “It’s a problem in all of our markets and we dedicate a lot of time to trying to defeat it.
“It’s a never ending battle because there’s always new technology and forms that emerge that you need to stay across.
“It’s always difficult to put an exact number on it because if you ask people if they pirate or not they’re not always going to be honest with you.
“When you do analysis there’s plenty of evidence to show that it is sizeable.
“How many of those people would convert to a legitimate service if piracy was no longer available?
“I don’t know, but we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars – it’s very substantial.”
Sky wants Amazon to take more action on so-called “jail-broken” Fire Sticks which have unofficial apps “side-load” onto them.
Asked how much piracy was accessed through doctored Amazon Fire Sticks, he said: “It’s a big percentage – probably about half of the piracy.
“And because it is a Fire Stick people think that it’s a legitimate service. They’re giving credit card details to criminal gangs.”
Amazon told the FT that it is “committed to providing customers with a high-quality streaming experience while actively promoting a streaming landscape that respects intellectual property rights and encourages the responsible consumption of content.
“On Fire TV, we’ve always encouraged our customers to use legal channels for accessing content and have included on-device warnings informing customers of the risks associated with installing or using apps from unknown sources.”
Sky’s words come amid a spate of arrests and warnings over illegal streaming.
Last year, a major series of raids across Europe took place leading to a huge network used by 22million people being shut down.
Five addresses in the UK were stormed, along with suspects in Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania, Sweden and Switzerland.
The biggest part was carried out in Italy, where 270 officers searched 89 properties in 15 Italian regions.
It’s believed the network made more than £208million in revenue per month.
At least 29 servers were seized along with around 270 pieces of IPTV equipment allegedly used to facilitate the illegal service, leading to one hundred domains being taken offline as a result.
More recently, an illegal streaming operator from Birmingham was jailed for two years and nine months.
Warning over ‘jailbroken’ Fire Sticks
Illegal streaming can be delivered by a number of devices by one of the most common are ‘jailbroken’ Fire Sticks, which means a third-party media server software has been installed on to it.
The software most commonly used is called Kodi.
It can grant users unrestricted access to new features and apps the normal version of the device wouldn’t allow – but it is not legal to use in the UK.
But it becomes illegal when a box is used to stream subscription channels for free.
It is also illegal to buy or sell these modified devices which have become known as “fully-loaded” – a term that describes how the software has been altered to allow access to subscription-only channels.
“These devices are legal when used to watch legitimate, free to air, content,” the government said at the time.
“They become illegal once they are adapted to stream illicit content, for example TV programmes, films and subscription sports channels without paying the appropriate subscriptions.”
