To the best of my recollection the bulk of demand from paying customers for pirated live streaming comes from the live sports market.
Eurojust, the European Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation, estimated that the operation — one of the world’s largest illegal streaming services — generated revenues of roughly €3bn a year and caused combined damages of more than €10bn to the affected broadcast companies.
“The rate of profit you get from these illegal activities with lower risk is equivalent to that of cocaine trafficking,” Francesco Curcio, the criminal prosecutor who led the investigation, told reporters.
Gives an indication of the scale of annual profits for broadcasting boxing, soccer, horse racing, etc. bearing in mind that siphoning away some €10bn of potential income for broadcasters and clubs and illegally selling that for €3bn hasn't put the primaries out of business (although they are actively gatekeeping what they regard as "theirs").
( potential stressed as it's claimed that had "customers" not been paying pirates less then they would, of course, be paying media barons more for the same .. which is not always the case in reality )
> The criminal enterprise used a complex international IT system to “capture and resell” live programming and other on-demand content from companies including sports broadcaster DAZN, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Paramount, Sky and Disney+, prosecutors said in a statement on Wednesday.
Typically a pyramid model - if the EU police here cracked the top tier that were capturing the raw signals then whatever name they gave thmeselves would not be one of the many names used at the base to onsell those illegal captured streams to general punters.
( potential stressed as it's claimed that had "customers" not been paying pirates less then they would, of course, be paying media barons more for the same .. which is not always the case in reality )
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