Clampdown on TV 'Dodgy Boxes'

i don't need to anyone to agree with me. I'm entitled to my opinion just like you are.

The problem with that is that the broadcasters would have to quantify their losses to piracy and that would affect negotiations with the rights holders. Actual piracy levels have always been a closely held secret in most broacasters where they can reliably quantify them.

Previously, with analogue scrambling systems, early digital systems like Sky and Nagra-Kudelski, and digital satellite TV systems there was a buy-in for anyone wishing to pirate services. Until the advent of the early dodgyboxes for digital satellite TV, the equipment requirements acted to limit the piracy on a system in that it was only possible to pirate a service with a modified official settop box. The second generation of dodgybox blew that out of the water. Because the second generation dodgyboxes are ordinary, legitimate equipment, the broadcasters have effectively lost control over their model.

That is the reality of Pay TV with an alternative ecosystem to the broadcaster's own ecosystem (satellite/Internet streaming). It is much easier to give press releases to journalists along with official sounding "statistics" and let them off. Most journalists simply don't have the time to do in-depth research on the subject or the statistics and will repeat them without question. This kind of thing has been going on for decades.

There is unlikely to be any in-depth analysis of the piracy problem in the Irish media. The nearest to that was RTE's piece but the claims from MUSO were accepted at face value and repeated without question. Every Firestick or Android TV device sold is not necessarily repurposed as a dodgybox.

The claims about the number of "visits" to pirate websites is highly problematic from a technical viewpoint (how could they get access to the web traffic, webserver logs, distinguish human visitors from random search engine crawlers and web content scrapers, distinguish ISP traffic from VPN traffic, reliably distinguish domain names use for piracy from ordinary domain names (hundreds of millions of them) etc). Claiming that there were millions and billions of visits to pirate websites is great for press releases but where's the data to support these claims? But in-depth research on these questions might upset the advertisers.

And your pals have been lobbying the European Commission for action. There were even some noises made about it. Do the broadcasters publish verifiable statistics on piracy?

There might be a link to the elusive Grant Thornton report here? I didn't read it yet.

Just absolute blatant link Dumping.

Fair play to you.

You want to understand why you should trust their estimated loss calculations?

Read this right here

Its not belief.

"…“Time and time again, studies and common sense have shown that piracy is the result of a failure in the marketplace to provide what consumers want, in terms of convenience, price and selection..."

"... a number of international, US, and EU studies that all show that users will quickly flock to above-board options when available. Especially given the potential privacy and security risks involved in downloading pirated content from dubious sources..."

There is hard core element that will never pay. But the majority respond to convenience and price.

I'm going to take a leaf from another posters book.

Send us a link to those studies.

That's all well and good but a big driver of dodgy box usage is for live sports.

And you can't replicate the experience of the music business with live sports.

Remember the music business low balled artists with the move to digital.

They get a pittance for every stream/download etc.

The music industry had an easy way to make legal streaming good value.

Live sports don't have an easy way.

The production costs are high and the product has very little value once it's over.

We are actually not that far away from the next rights deal.

The current 4 year deal runs until the end of the 2029 season, and the next deal is usually agreed about 18 months in advance, so late 2027 or so, less than 2 years away.

So in the very near future you could see something as extreme as the EPL taking it in house, or the end of the three o'clock blackout, or maybe nothing at all i.e. the status quo of Sky + TNT. (This would imply that piracy is not as big a deal as some people think).

But whatever happens I think the people here expecting to get everything they want at "a reasonable price" will be disappointed.

As long as the EPL is one of the top leagues in the world it will never be cheap, it's just too valuable.

Sky and Co do not currently deliver team packages.

You cannot get a season pass to a particular club for example. It's a glaring flaw in their model.

The games are always on other channels that Sky etc don't have.

there will still be illegal iptv options after this deal is done, tis all good, we ll still have a cheaper option

Exactly

I'm never surprised by the amount of people who come on here complaining about Sky and they don't even know the simple facts about TV rights.

Same with the poster who said that the epl was cheaper in some regions.