Clampdown on TV 'Dodgy Boxes'

The owners of the sports sold the rights to the highest bidder, i.e. Sky.

Sky didn't take anything they bought it.

If you want to blame someone for sports going away from free TV blame the sports bodies for selling them to pay services.

Look at the example mentioned here a few weeks ago about F1 streaming not being available in places like Ireland, the UK , Germany etc.

It's because the owners of F1 know they can make more by selling the rights to the likes of Sky than selling straight to the customer like they do in other countries.

For me, the EPL is certainly not the driving force. Before they existed, I didnt pay to watch EPL. I lived with a Freesat box and was happy to watch MOTD if I wanted to see highlights of the league. But generally I did not care much for it and often wouldn't see EPL action for months.

For me, I prefer to watch games from other leagues, and the CL. But even that interest is waning as football continues to disinterest me more and more.

For me an iptv sub is best for series and films.

And if it stopped working today, there is zero chance of me paying a penny to watch live football. Id just stick with my Netflix sub and get on with it.

Some people on here will have an orgasm once an end user is fined…210 pages and still nothing in this regard.

tis around a lot longer than that, as long as encrypted broadcasting has been around, but yes, broadcasters have played a major part in this problem, the whole model has failed, and theyre never gonna accept this

It is a lot better reasoned than most of the FUD in the Irish media. If you want to be really upset, read Conor Pope's Q&A article on dodgyboxes that is linked in the article. Make sure to have your smelling salts nearby.

With this form of piracy, it often comes down to the four 'A's: Access, Affordability, Area and Amalgamation.

Access: people want access to content and having it spread over a number of providers means multiple subscriptions to watch all of that content.

Affordability: Those multiple subscriptions can be expensive and that has priced some people out of the market.

Area: The rights market is fragmented because rights holders make more from selling to individual markets than they would selling to a single global market. This is because different regions have different economic dynamics and what would be an acceptable monthly subscription in one country may be too expensive in another.

Amalgamation: This is where rights areas unite into a single region due to the Internet being used as a delivery channel. Previously, piracy was limited by the requirement for a settop box that could decrypt a satellite or cable TV transmission. There were multiple systems and either required a dedicated box per service or a CAM and official smartcard from the late 1990 when Digital TV launched. The rise of broadband and IPTV made this new form of piracy commercially and technologically viable. The availability of low-cost Android devices made it easy for people without any major technical skills to connect these devices. In effect, they made piracy plug and play.

In harsher terms, the Internet made piracy a single market while rights holders are still playing in their broken rights model. The fragmented rights market is a major problem.

I very much doubt if the non-specialist Irish media gurus that you seem to idolise have ever considered the above. The Irish Times article that you linked linked has some very important points.

The advent of Netflix did affect torrenting and other forms of piracy because Netflix was affordable for many people. This is the "cheap Spotify" model for TV.

The success of the Netflix model encouraged others to get into the market (Disney, Amazon etc). The rollout of broadband was also changing the dynamics of the market. That is competition in a market. The fragmented rights market ensures that a monopoly is difficult to achieve. As for sports, too many people are making too much money from the current fragmentation. There is no economic incentive to change. And for the dodgybox prpblem, it is much easier to get the FUD buddies in the media to run doom-laden press releases and speak in hushed tones of all those people watching this programming.

There is always a problem with "research" when it comes to political and commercial lobbying. When the NIS-2 was being foisted on an unsuspecting EU there was a Q&A session with some EU "experts" and the DNS/Internet industry. There was a problem with some of the legislation in the way it was drafted in that it applied to all DNS (the software that resolves domain names to IP addresses). It was too wide-ranging because every modem/router has a DNS. One question was asked at the session: have you quantified the number of DNSes involved? The EU "experts" had not. Then there was the problem of solar panels on houses being "critical national infrastructure" because the owners of the houses feed some of the electricity generated into the grid. Research on DNS Abuse (phishing/spam/CSAM etc) can be even worse. An Italian legal consultancy did some "research" for an EU thingy that was hand-waving rubbish in its conclusions and iffy methodology of measuring abuse. The majority of domain names and websites in the EU are ccTLDs like .IE/DE/UK/FR/ES etc. The characteristics of abuse in these TLDs is very different to that in a global TLD like .COM. While it is possible to get access to the lists of .COM domain names (about 161 million of them), getting access to the lists of ccTLD domain names is much more restricted. So, the abuse analysis part of the research concentrated on the gTLDs like .COM. It upset a lot of EU ccTLD registry operators as they do a lot of good work keeping their TLDs free of abuse.

The thing about a lot of lobbyist "research" is that it is often aimed at prolonging the problem rather than solving it because that's where the money is being made. It can sometimes be in the interests of those sources to make the problem appear larger than it is in reality. Relying on non-specialists like the technology journalists in the non-specialist media to analyse this research is highly problematic. Headlines sell stories and the bigger and more terrifying the better.

Not research. If it didn't have supporting data and methodology, it is just a press release. And that seems to be a characteristic of much of what you claim to be "research".

As for the claims about measuring visits to pirate websites, without web server logs and traffic logs, it is very difficult and has to rely upon advertising. Some of these websites have advertising and that allows for a kind of guesstimates. However, people frequently use adbockers on their browsers so these tracking adverts do not show and furthermore people use VPNs which obscure their country of origin. Even if a tracking advert is shown, it does not mean that the country with which the IP address of the browser is the actual country of the user. As for the extrapolation of this dataset to cover all "visits", it is not reliable. The claims of billions and millions of visits are impressive to non-specialist journalists who don't have any technological knowledge about measurement, IP address geography. But if they are worth their salt, they know a good headline when they read the press release. As with piracy, I do have a very particular set of skills when it comes to IP addresses. I measure gTLD webspace by IP address each month and classify it by country and web hosting provider.

It my be surprising for you to learn that much of the traffic on the Web is from AI web content scrapers (scraping websites for content for their Large Language Models (LLMs)) and search engines. These AI scrapers are often quite sophisticated and will load Javascript and adverts in order to mimic a human user. Their origin can be obscured and the data centres from which most of them operate can assign specific IPs to various countries. This is often done to avoid countermeasures by the website operators to restrict access on a geographical basis. Some of these scrapers use compromised devices on ISPs and that might even include compromised dodgyboxes as outlined in the genuine research linked on the Krebs On Security website on that Kimwolf botnet.

And these points have been made repeatedly to you: research without supporting data and methodology is just a press release. A visit to a website does not necessarily result in a subscription and the visitor may not even be a real visitor.

Was that dxhound2005?