The war on IPTV continues to grow as two new IPTV owners have been sentenced to Prison in Belfast Crown Court in the United Kingdom. This comes as the two were found guilty of selling IPTV services and pirate boxes designed to give illegal access to TV programs.
The two men were accused of selling devices that came with IPTV services built in to get free TV. These devices let people watch TV for a fraction of the cost of a cable TV subscription.
Padraig McVicker was sentenced to eight months and six in prison for running an IPTV. These sentences will run concurrently. His accomplice, Gary Doherty, was sentenced to 175 hours of community service. According to a report from TorrentFreak. This comes as both men admitted to “selling, distributing or letting for hire or exposing for sale or hire an unauthorized decoder.”
IPTV services often look like legal services but sell access to live TV channels like ESPN and HBO without paying for the rights. This allows them to sell access to these channels for a fraction of what legal services pay.
This comes as ACE, or the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, announced last month that it has shut down three large IPTV services that streamed live sports online. ACE is made up of many major media companies including Amazon, Apple TV+, NBCUniversal, Netflix Studios LLC, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Paramount, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, and Warner Bros.
Late last month, in synchronized arrests on August 28 and 29, Egyptian police and the Egyptian Ministry of Internal Affairs arrested two operators of the live TV streaming services. These services had an average of nearly 18 million visits monthly. This comes as earlier this year, Egyptian authorities shut down other sites that averaged 5.9 million monthly visits and 2.3 million monthly unique visitors.
As cord cutting grows, media companies are increasingly looking for ways to cut their losses by cracking down on illegal IPTV services. Just this year dozens of services have been shut down and a growing number of owners of IPTV services have been going to jail.