Clampdown on TV 'Dodgy Boxes'

Yeah, like the owners and previous owners of Sky.

No-one is going to jail for watching a dodgy box.

Just another scare tactic.

Then the government has a vested interest in the issue? If so they would understand that a cheap, fairly priced service that is convenient doesn't have to fight piracy.

Sky are literally causing their own piracy problem.

The government is very likely to drag its feet on this issue with minimal effort. Sky's more likely to start going through the courts and probably lobbying the European Commission etc.

If you look at the history around say 'deflectors' in the 1980s and 90s or pirate radio in the 70s, the politicians had very little interest in cracking down on anything as there's no public support for doing so.

What you'll most likely get her is "careful now, down with that sort of thing!" and minimal effort technical compliance with whatever it is they're required to do under the law basically - which will probably mean going after the providers directly, not the customers.

I would also suspect that Sky is probably overestimating the problem as they've no real way of measuring how many pirated IPTV subscriptions are out there. My suspicion is they're just subtracting the number of pay-TV households from the number of broadband households, and calculating that some % of those are watching pirated IPTV. That's likely an overestimate given that a lot of households don't watch TV, and a significant % may be very happy to just have Saorview + overspill on Freesat, or may be primarily watching foreign satellite or online tv if they speak other languages too. There are plenty of households that would have zero interest in subscribing to Sky, Virgin or Eir TV etc

some vat being paid on devices, broadband services, electricity, etc etc etc, i.e. tis all good!

There are no votes for them intercepting cigarettes at the ports, but they still do it. There are not votes in getting people to pay a TV license, but you still have to and will end up in court if not.

This is how Ireland works. Politicians get lobbied by Sky / the GAA about lost revenue, politician then starts to act on it.

People are paying the TV license for over 60 years. It's not a big deal for at least 90% of the population.

It's a fairly small percentage that smoke cigarettes these days. So again not a problem.

This thread is a bit ridiculous.

Sky are charging far too much for their product, lots of people can't afford it. Sky are fully responsible for the growth of IPTV.

Some of these people are being offered IPTV at a very cheap rate and can still watch sport and other stuff. Can you blame anyone for taking up the opportunity of watching their favourite shows at a rate they can afford?

Only people that are clueless about internet security will be detected.

Lots of these people are still paying for Netflix and/or one of Disney+ etc. for their kids. They are affordable services.

Comreg is a joke, they wouldn't find wood in a forest.

There is no organisation which has an earthly hope of finding the large majority of IPTV users.

It's the suppliers of the product they have to go after. It'll be hard to find them as well.

Maybe they could look at high electricity usage but I can't imagine they'd stand out that much. The likes of grow houses would use a lot more electricity.

For those that don't know what a grow house is, it's where they grow marijuana etc.

All sky have to do is lower their prices to an affordable rate and a lot of IPTV users will flock back to them. It's that simple.

This crap about it being illegal and comparing it to major crime is ridiculous. It's very minor and the solution to it is obvious. A greedy organisation is not going to win that battle.

If they manage to find people using it the majority of these cases will be struck out in court. The judges will accept any inkling of a reasonable argument to throw it out. If it's not thrown out the worst that will happen to anyone is a fine of no more than €50 which means they made a great saving over the time they used IPTV. I've spent a lot of time in District courts and understand how it works.

If they detect suppliers that's a whole different matter.

I think ultimately, much like music piracy, this is going to come down to a business model issue.

The fundamental problem is the sports rights are far, far too expensive and I think you're going to probably start seeing situations where pay tv operators struggle to keep up with the ever increasing bidding wars.

Effectively, Sky/Comcast are now up against tech companies that have more venture capital than sense, and the sports will probably end up on major streamers before long and not on Sky. Sky themselves squeezed the public broadcasters out of the sports market almost entirely, so it's just the same thing now happening to them years later as they become legacy tech.

There is definitely huge profiteering going on, mostly by the sports organisations rather than the TV companies at this point, but there's a balance to be struck between just pirating what is stolen content and charging a reasonable price.

The music industry had more or less exactly the same issue when technology shifted, and suddenly it was quite easy to make high quality copies of music and ultimately to share it. That industry went after manufacturers who were innovating in technology in the 1980s and basically tried to kill rewritable CDs and successfully prevented formats like DAT, DCC and MiniDisc from ever going mainstream, other than in Japan where a different copyright regime existed in the 90s - you could literally even buy music as downloads from vending machines and print it to your own MDs.

I mean, the music industry even initially went after early FM radio as the fidelity was high, and they assumed it would impact record sales.

All of these things go through phases of copyright monopolies being challenged by technology.

What is needed in this is for the European Commission to really go in hard against the monopolisation of sports rights and drive prices down. The idea that you can just carve up the European Single Market to maximise your profits by retaining old national regions is also utter nonsense and needs to be dealt with.

Yes, there's a problem with a large scale illegal operation, but it's not going to stop just by enforcement and hamstringing the internet to suit rights holders is also not an acceptable or even technically feasible solution.

We've seen exactly the same pattern with music i.e. when streaming services became reasonable, piracy simply became far less of a focus.

I also think the European Commission and others need to look at the cultural value of sports - there needs to be more scope for more events to be on free-to-air and public tv.

In the meantime, I think you can expect a lot of attempts to try to catch water in a sieve.

This has always been a thing though. If you went back to the 1990s there was a continuous issue with Videocrypt and Eurocrypt decoder cards being hacked to access to Sky and other companies' broadcasts too and a widespread market for selling those cards existed at the time time, often jurisdiction hopping and so on - various mail-order mini empires spun up just beyond the reach of authorities. There was also a huge sale of cracked cable decoders in Europe and the US. Comcast itself was constantly up against the dodgy box phenomenon, even in the days of analogue cable.

There were also panics about video libraries and copying of VHS cassettes became a big illegal business for a time too.

1987: https://www.rte.ie/archives/collections/news/21251283-campaign-to-stop-video-pirates/

1984: https://www.rte.ie/archives/2014/1107/657539-pirate-videos-destroyed/ (They used to destroy the cassettes with a giant victorian steam engine — very Fr Ted!)

1984: https://www.rte.ie/archives/2019/0129/1026287-video-pirates/

Do you mean people are paying too much for Sky TV (no sports, movies, premium channel etc) because they are subsiding the cost of the EPL rights?

The alternative is to get a combo box for digital TV and free to air satellite.

It's a workable solution that gives you a decent amount of content but not as easy as just having a Sky box and a dish.