Clampdown on TV 'Dodgy Boxes'

dxhound2005 · 03-02-2026 05:34PM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124202601#Comment_124202601

No, you're thinking about something from 2004. Well remembered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Wouldn%27t_Steal_a_Car

dxhound2005 · 03-02-2026 05:41PM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124202638#Comment_124202638

According to RTE, the stats come from MUSO.

https://www.rte.ie/news/primetime/2026/0113/1552869-data-shows-1m-daily-visits-from-ireland-to-illegal-piracy-sites/

"The figures were provided to RTÉ by piracy monitoring and content‑protection firm MUSO, whose piracy tracking data is used by the European Union Intellectual Property Office and other public bodies to monitor online copyright infringement. Since 2017, almost four billion visits originating in Ireland to piracy-related domains have been recorded, with activity peaking in 2023 at 554 million visits."

https://www.muso.com/

jmcc · 03-02-2026 05:52PM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124202886#Comment_124202886

Very pretty website but no explanation of methodologies. Perhaps you can explain how they track website visits?

dxhound2005 · 03-02-2026 06:13PM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124202917#Comment_124202917

You are the technical expert. Give the figures that you have if you think MUSO are wrong.

jmcc · 03-02-2026 06:20PM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124202975#Comment_124202975

Doesn't work that way. You posted their claim without any supporting data. What's their methodology and how do they derive those "stats" on visits to websites without ISP logs, web server logs, VPN logs, app data etc? Are they estimates?

NIMAN · 03-02-2026 06:24PM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124202994#Comment_124202994

Sounds like stats pulled out of thin air to help make a story.

Benedict XVI · 03-02-2026 06:26PM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124202994#Comment_124202994

MUSO, good enough for the European Union Intellectual Property Office.

But not good enough for jmcc, some spoofer on the internet.

dxhound2005 · 03-02-2026 06:34PM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124202994#Comment_124202994

Either they are sitting at home pulling the figures out of thin air, or they are monitoring illegal streaming. While the 1 Million per day is a nice shorthand for the non technical media, they came up with a figure of 554 million for the full year of 2023. Does it say anywhere that they are estimates? The RTE report says that Clubber's figures are estimates, but not MUSO's.

jmcc · 03-02-2026 06:53PM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124202998#Comment_124202998

Possibly an estimate with no explanation of methodologies or data sources. Estimates based on data are OK but there has to be an explanation. Otherwise they are just Social Science numbers.

jmcc · 03-02-2026 06:56PM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124203022#Comment_124203022

I think that RTE said that it had been shown the figures by MUSO. There was no explanation of how those figures were generated, no explanation of methodologies and no explanation of the data sources. Surely you can see the problem?

Dr Robert · 03-02-2026 07:01PM

If they didn't cite a source assume it's nonsense.

lee_baby_simms · 03-02-2026 07:13PM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124202975#Comment_124202975

No one has the figures. MUSO counts only visits to websites. What the user actually does on the site is not captured. A user looking for a stream for a PL game may visit a dozen sites before finding one that works or just giving up. This would inflate the numbers.

On the other hand MUSO don’t include closed groups like discord or telegram. They don’t include app based piracy on firesticks. They also have no clue how many users are out there and what content is being consumed.

European Union Intellectual Property Office will happily run with the numbers because it’s all they have and they sound high. Their remit is to assist enforcement but it’s the blind leading the blind.

jj880 · 03-02-2026 07:28PM

Maybe a million dodgy box users phoned MUSO to complain about down time. Is Jimmy D the CEO?

jmcc · 03-02-2026 07:41PM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124203139#Comment_124203139

There is an inherent problem with IP addresses and their associated country. The country of the IP address can be changed by the owner of the IP address range. This can be done for a number of reasons. Sometimes it is for search engine optimisation. It may also be done where a VPS or VPN is used. Some AI scrapers out of Singapore and China change the country of IPs to obfuscate their origin. Then there are data centres like those of Amazon, Microsoft and Google that will have IP addresses assigned to different countries. Ireland, for example, had 378,391 gTLD (.COM/NET etc) websites on Irish flagged IPs in January 2026. Many of these are not Irish websites. VPNs regularly assign different countries to their IP ranges. If those website visits are not filtered for search engine spiders, random AI webscrpapers looking for content to feed their models, crawlers measuring the numbers and content of websites, then there is a problem. A visit to a website does not necessarily mean that there was any action performed on that website.

In terms of domain names and "piracy related domain names", there are millions of domain names registered each month and millions deleted. Approximatley 49% of the domain names registered in .COM last year will not be renewed this year. That is tens of millions of domain names that are deleted each year. The January 2026 website count for the gTLDs was 196,521,611. That's just the gTLDs. There are also country code TLDs like .IE, .UK, .DE etc.

dxhound2005 · 03-02-2026 07:48PM

FWIW this is how AI summarises the MUSO methodology.

MUSO measures illegal streaming by crawling, identifying, and analyzing activity across millions of global piracy websites, torrent sites, and streaming platforms in real-time. They use AI-driven, automated technology to monitor billions of piracy, web-download, and stream-ripping instances, providing a data-driven overview of global, unlicensed consumption. Here is a breakdown of how MUSO measures illegal streaming:

Global Crawling and Indexing: MUSO crawls global piracy sites, social platforms, and search engines to detect, map, and track unlicensed content.
AI-Driven Matching: AI and expert analysis are used to identify potential piracy files and match them against official content, ensuring accurate tracking of illegal streams.
Real-time Monitoring: MUSO provides 24/7 scanning of streaming sites, cyberlockers, and torrent sites to identify and remove illegal content, measuring the "visits" to these sites.
Data Analytics (MUSO Discover): The "MUSO Discover" dataset acts as a "bellwether" for audience demand, tracking user behavior on unlicensed sites to provide insights into pirated film, TV, music, and software.
Measurement Metrics: MUSO measures the impact of piracy using specific, tailored metrics, including:
- Visits Disrupted: Tracks the number of visits interrupted by removing illegal links.
- Users Displaced: Estimates the number of users moving away from pirated content.
- Removal Impact Score: Determines the effectiveness of takedowns.

MUSO's data indicates that illegal streaming accounts for the vast majority of piracy, with one report highlighting that 95% of TV content is accessed via unlicensed streaming.

dxhound2005 · 03-02-2026 07:50PM

Some stats and information from MUSO directly.

https://www.muso.com/how-to-protect-your-film-content-from-digital-piracy#:~:text=By%20continuously%20scanning%20websites%2C%20social,have%20the%20infringing%20content%20removed.

"The illegal distribution of film and TV has been increasing year on year. In 2023 MUSO measured 229.4 billion visits to piracy websites. This is a 6.7% increase when compared to 2022 when MUSO measured 215 billion visits. TV piracy increased 4.2% and film piracy increased 6.5% between 2022 and 2023."

jmcc · 03-02-2026 08:04PM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124203239#Comment_124203239

The current population of the planet is 8,272,166,037. MUSO has "recorded" 229.4 billion visits to piracy websites in 2023 from a population of approximately 8 billion people? Are you sure that it was "billion"?

8,272,166,037

dxhound2005 · 03-02-2026 08:22PM

Compared to the figure for Ireland it is very low. Easy to explain given that billions of people live in poor countries. (2023 Ireland 554 million visits, population around 5 million).

"As of 2023–2025, approximately 78%–80% of Burkina Faso's population lives without reliable access to electricity, with rural areas severely underserved. While national coverage, often cited around 20–21%, has seen slight improvements from solar projects, the majority of the population lacks consistent electrical power."

lee_baby_simms · 03-02-2026 08:36PM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124203324#Comment_124203324

I hope muso aren’t monitoring your AI usage. They’ll be working in shifts.

dxhound2005 · 03-02-2026 09:02PM

Do the dodgy box users have some interest in making the numbers lower? My simple brain would say that there is safety in numbers for the lawbreakers.

jmcc · 03-02-2026 09:51PM

1,841,152 households in Ireland according to the 2022 census. And you claim that MUSO "detected" 554 million visits to piracy websites from Ireland in 2023. So breaking down that 554 million "visit" figure, how many is that a day from Ireland? Are these unique visits or are repeat visits counted as well?

Nigzcurran · 03-02-2026 10:56PM

I don't visit any illegal websites to watch a dodgy stream. Like the vast majority of people I get my subscription through an app. Years ago people would go to the likes of the firstrowsports website to watch a game but that was just full of pop ups and all sorts of viruses and malware crap. Ain't no way any of these "authorities" have any real exact figures on people using apps to get their IPTV sub.

Benedict XVI · 04-02-2026 12:23AM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124203889#Comment_124203889

The apps people use for illegal streaming use URLs (websites) to access the illegal streaming network they are signed up to.

So even though it's an app to you it's still going to a website under the hood.

briany · 04-02-2026 12:40AM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124203423#Comment_124203423

In a fair society, it's Sky and the sports leagues who'd be the lawbreakers.

In the society we're in, there's talk of the Gardaí - the publically funded Gardaí - being tasked with protecting their private profits.

Fck them. Keep on dodgying.

lee_baby_simms · 04-02-2026 02:02AM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124204050#Comment_124204050

Not sure what your point is. The user was saying that streaming websites for sport are usually crap.

The URLs used for dodgyboxes are not websites in the tradition sense. If you loaded one in a browser you would just get a load of text. It’s essentially a set of instructions formatted for software to read in a playlist that contains one or many streams. usually m3u extension. Useless in a web browser.

Importantly the boffins over at MUSO don’t include these ‘websites’ in their exhaustive audit. It’s simply inpossible to quantify how many are out there, how many users access them and what they watch. It’s much easier to count pop ups ads and page refreshes as individual hits to come up with a pointless large number and pass that off as indicative of anything.

An educated guess would most likely be far more accurate than MUSOs methodology. They exaggerate the wrong metrics and completely disregard where most streaming occurs.

Boggles · 04-02-2026 09:17AM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124203423#Comment_124203423

Did your "simple brain" consider what benefit a private company like MUSO would gain by making the numbers higher?

dxhound2005 · 04-02-2026 10:15AM

According to the RTE article, referring to the 1 million per day:

"That level of traffic is equivalent to around two visits a week for every internet user in Ireland — on average."

Say 400,000 households out of about 2 million in the country have family members visiting a site. That works out at around 18 visits a week. With so many devices and so many TV channels and other media being pirated, that looks feasible to me.

https://www.corkbeo.ie/culture/family-kids/sky-use-personal-info-track-33150783

"Sky has been in discussions with the Data Protection Commission, the watchdog that covers the collection and use of personal data in Ireland, on how they can use information collected from a range of sources to target piracy networks, the providers of illegal streaming devices and their end users, believed to be as many as 400,000 households in Ireland. Last August, a nationwide sweep included targetted networks in Munster."

dxhound2005 · 04-02-2026 10:15AM

According to the RTE article, referring to the 1 million per day:

"That level of traffic is equivalent to around two visits a week for every internet user in Ireland — on average."

Say 400,000 households out of about 2 million in the country have family members visiting a site. That works out at around 18 visits a week. With so many devices and so many TV channels and other media being pirated, that looks feasible to me.

https://www.corkbeo.ie/culture/family-kids/sky-use-personal-info-track-33150783

"Sky has been in discussions with the Data Protection Commission, the watchdog that covers the collection and use of personal data in Ireland, on how they can use information collected from a range of sources to target piracy networks, the providers of illegal streaming devices and their end users, believed to be as many as 400,000 households in Ireland. Last August, a nationwide sweep included targetted networks in Munster."

dxhound2005 · 04-02-2026 10:16AM

According to the RTE article, referring to the 1 million per day:

"That level of traffic is equivalent to around two visits a week for every internet user in Ireland — on average."

Say 400,000 households out of about 2 million in the country have family members visiting a site. That works out at around 18 visits a week. With so many devices and so many TV channels and other media being pirated, that looks feasible to me.

https://www.corkbeo.ie/culture/family-kids/sky-use-personal-info-track-33150783

"Sky has been in discussions with the Data Protection Commission, the watchdog that covers the collection and use of personal data in Ireland, on how they can use information collected from a range of sources to target piracy networks, the providers of illegal streaming devices and their end users, believed to be as many as 400,000 households in Ireland. Last August, a nationwide sweep included targetted networks in Munster."

dxhound2005 · 04-02-2026 10:19AM

I had a Cloud Flare problem.

Clampdown on TV 'Dodgy Boxes'

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