Piracy, 'Premflix' & 3PM blackout: Can fans win illegal streaming war?

0:02Andy Hughes:This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:05Adam Leventhal:Everyone knows someone who streams sport illegally. Maybe you do. In fact, almost 5 million people streamed live sport illegally in the UK in the last six months alone. Is it a crime? Yes, it is. But most people don't like to think of it like that. The data theft, cybercrime, an underworld that makes millions for criminal activity worldwide. But it's cheap, more affordable than every subscription you'd need to catch all the games in the UK. And a nifty three o 'clock blackout loophole too. So what's the solution? Would a PremFlix-style streaming service work? Is the 3pm blackout outdated or is it sacred?

0:41Adam Leventhal:And with more games being moved to unfamiliar TV slots, what strain does that put on an already stretched UK police force? Welcome to the Sports Agents.

0:59Andy Hughes:The Sports Agents with Gabby Logan and Mark Chapman.

1:05Adam Leventhal:Hello, it's just me. Today, in a moment, we're going to dive into the underworld of illegal streaming with Andy Hughes from our sister podcast, The Crime Agents, and The Athletic's Adam Leventhal, whose report into the scale of the problem raised more than a few eyebrows last week. In other news, we talked about it last week, it's actually happening. Anthony Joshua against Jake Paul has been confirmed for Miami in December. A massive coup for Netflix and something, of course, that we went into ahead of the Chris Eubank Jr. Conor Benn fight at the weekend. So you can go back and listen to that on YouTube, Global Player, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:39Adam Leventhal:And what a performance from George Ford at the weekend and Henry Pollock, who's since been nominated for World Breakout Star of the Year in England's huge win against New Zealand. You can check out our past interviews with Ford, Pollock and Captain Maro Itoji. Make sure you hit subscribe and follow so you never miss an episode and leave a review if you can as well. Get in touch, thesportsagentsatglobal.com on email or you can message us on social media or via the link in the episode description. So for many of you listening, illegal streaming will feel like a victimless crime. And in order to watch every game your team plays, even a necessary one.

2:14Adam Leventhal:So how do we fix it? More on that next with Andy Hughes, co-host of The Crime Agents and The Athletic's Adam Leventhal.

2:21Andy Hughes:The Sports Agents.

2:23Adam Leventhal:Andy, Adam, thank you so much for coming in to discuss a topic we actually have not touched on in a couple of years of doing the sports agents almost so how big is the problem, Adam?

2:34Gabby:I suppose it's how you look at it you know, consumers love the fact that they have lots of different options now and you know, the direction of travel towards illegal streaming is worrying for the industry the industry themselves are worried but they don't necessarily want to talk about it too much because then that will feed into people thinking, right, well, they're really worried about it. It must be a big thing. So in terms of...

3:01Adam Leventhal:Quantify it then in terms of how many streams are being watched illegally, how much that's costing.

3:07Gabby:Well, in terms of what the Premier League did just last year, they shut down or blocked 600 ,000 different illegal streams. And those are the ones that they could find and identify and actually shut down.

3:21Adam Leventhal:How are they doing that? And how much is that costing them?

3:25Gabby:Well, that's the question. They're spending millions of pounds to basically play a whack-a-mole game to try and stop one, but then five more will pop up elsewhere. Internationally, because we looked at this sort of globally, the amount of money that's being lost to piracy, and that's why it's being called an existential threat, is, according to the Motion Picture Association, who have sort of waged the decades-long war against piracy, is$28 billion. So that's what they know.

3:58Adam Leventhal:On Premier League football?

3:59Gabby:No, on sports streaming. On sports coverage. Sports streaming, yeah. I mean, yeah, for the Premier League, that certainly would be existential. Exactly. But in terms of sort of global sports piracy, then that's the amount that is out there.

4:12Adam Leventhal:Okay. So this is, I think we could say, huge in terms of the money that is leaving legally, if you like. And you can't say that everybody who's illegal streaming would necessarily, you know, if it was a crime that was treated very, very seriously, would then buy the streams. But clearly a lot of them would. And there's lots of other arguments as to why nobody really wants to get involved in this. So should we address a couple of those, do you think, Andy, in terms of as a crime, how easy this is to crack down on? And is there any desire to do so?

4:44Andy Hughes:Well, this is it. I think the really tricky thing for the authorities when it comes to something like this and what the police and authorities are always thinking about are do they have the support of the public? Now, with something like this, this is always being called a victimless crime. And they're constantly fighting against this Robin Hood mentality, right? Robbing from the rich, giving to the poor. When you ask police officers and the authorities who actually crack down on this, you've got the National Crime Agency and you've got the City of London Police. they have this own intellectual property unit which track down these these illegal streamers where it gets murky is where in recent years the organized criminal gangs they've actually got involved in this just like anything any other crime if it starts to make money the organized crime groups will say right we want part of that and then how they kind of run it in a way it's kind of like a drug operation where you've got the head honchos you've got the people who are bulk buying, wholesaling, and then they have, in the drugs operation, they will have the drug dealers.

5:43Andy Hughes:But in piracy, they will have the resellers. So people have a job to sell. Yes. Like they would sell drugs. Yeah. Yeah, basically, yes. But these people who are doing the reselling, they probably don't know that they're part of an organized crime operation. And this is where it gets murky. And then if you ask Joe Bloggs on the street, someone who just wants cheap football or cheap movies, do you want the police cracking down on that? they will say no because they just want the chip so they're buying a fire stick or something

6:11Gabby:like that well it's it's not you know you don't necessarily need hardware now because and it's worth pointing out that you know the fire stick has become a sort of a catch-all phrase for any device that you plug into your tv it's not the actual hardware it's the it's the apps that are loaded on to the hardware i mean in terms of the resellers that's really interesting because I was sort of keen to find out about the culture, but also the criminal side of things. And it's very easy to actually not only buy the app and, you know, get the code to give you your service, but actually to become part of a criminal network.

6:50Gabby:It's very, very easy. And that's what I was able to get to the cusp of doing, because some of these organisations are running themselves in a very sort of polished way. they are giving people an opportunity to become a reseller and you can do that very very easily and you know i hate to promote it but most of the platforms are platforms whereby you can watch all of the sports all of the time and it will also come catchphrase for a channel i can't but also you will get you know films and series and all that sort of stuff that comes with it but in terms of the actual transaction all it is is going online contacting a whatsapp number that is very freely available getting a code downloading an app onto your fire stick and then away you go and then you will there will be a transaction of maybe i don't know 60 quid for the year rather than a month in terms of the resellers they get hold of a load of codes you can buy the codes and then you sell them on for a profit so you can buy them for 20 20 pounds and then you'll sell them for 60 so you make 40 pound profit so you know that that's the sort of the levels of it and it's like your cash presumably as well those kinds of transactions generally no not necessarily they're easy to trace yes and that's the point that there is there is also you know there's digital breadcrumbs as the people in the industry say and you know a footprint and you know above that as you go further above it then there's the sort of big amounts of crypto that are part of the the organized crime networks and the money laundering and so let's go deep into a bit of

8:25Adam Leventhal:that show should we because as we all know if we watch narcos or anything like that behind that you know is a trail of crime that leads back to some pretty horrible tawdry stuff are we are we comparing

8:36Andy Hughes:yeah i mean i think it's a bit more complex than that in in terms of i think quite a lot of the people who are doing this and making a lot of money from this aren't really criminals they're just people who technically they are but they will not be seen by society as criminals for example there was a guy jailed just earlier this year he actually made a million quid off it he had no links to organized criminality or anything he was just a bloke who spotted an opportunity bit of a tech geek and thought oh there's a loophole here i'm going to make some money that backfired when he got arrested and jailed for three years but there's the other more sinister

9:10Adam Leventhal:elements where the organized yeah go on he must have known he's making money selling stuff to people so they didn't have to buy the products right yeah yeah but the point i was making is

9:20Andy Hughes:He didn't have any links to proper organised crime. He didn't have a history of criminality. Yes. So where it becomes sinister is when the organised crime groups become involved because they are making this money, just say, like this bloke did, a million quid in a year. But that money is then being used for serious criminality such as drug trafficking, human trafficking, money laundering. And really it's these groups that police want to go after. This is just one element. This is just one slice of the pie that organized crime groups will be involved in. They've got hundreds of these different types of operations that kind of fuels their real criminality.

9:59Andy Hughes:So on the face of it, piracy, victimless crime, people are saying, actually, this money can be used, that you're paying for, can be used for serious crime. A lot of people don't know that. People don't see it that way because they don't care. People just want cheap games. A lot of people would be completely unaware. And some people, well, a lot of people can't afford to pay for a Sky subscriptions. They will see an opportunity to watch their team on a Saturday at 3pm.

10:24Adam Leventhal:Well, yeah, let's get a bit further into that because that's what you've looked into and you spoke to fans. Why do they do it?

10:30Gabby:It's pretty simple, really. The cost is, first of all, the contrast between getting an illegal service for, you know, 60 quid a year rather than 60 quid a month is quite clear. the convenience not having to get multiple subscriptions the frustration of trying to track down exactly where you can watch certain game if you know you've got one place where you can watch all of them then bingo in terms of in terms of the quality of what you're watching

10:55Adam Leventhal:and yeah in terms of presentation and what's going on around it what are they actually seeing

11:01Gabby:well on on the whole they're seeing what they would see if they had a legitimate subscription however commentary and they might not be hearing the commentary in their language all that's all in their own language all of the time um for example during the documentary i went and watched um an illegal stream of someone that i know accessed was able to watch it and it was very clear that the feeds were coming from multiple different countries due to the graphics that you could see on the on the screens but also one of the big elements as well is the 3 p.m blackout and a lot of people because they can't watch that game they know they can't watch that game at 3 p.m they want the optionality to be able to do that and those are the three main reasons why they do it

11:43Adam Leventhal:and they presumably they would say they they can't watch the game on tv but also they can't go to the game because obviously as we know most every premier league game is sold out and they

11:52Gabby:can't get tickets yeah that's one of the reasons as well i think it's i think it all feeds into a frustration that a frustration for fans sort of being priced out of a lot of elements of it and you know previously i did a documentary with the same prefix the underground world of fake football shirts so it's another it's sort of a similar theme but this one because it's all connected to media rights which underpin the the finances of football it feels and why people use words like existential because if you have to recalibrate the finances behind all of this due to piracy then there might need to be a bit of a change in terms of how things are funded maybe the players might need to take a cut of their wages, shock horror.

12:35Gabby:That would be really harsh for them to sort of halve from 500 grand.

12:38Adam Leventhal:So piracy could be the needle that bursts the bubble, potentially.

12:41Gabby:There's people within the game, you know, broadcast side, league side, that will say, oh, it's not as bad as this. We've got a handle on it and we're planning for the future. But ultimately, if the direction of travel continues away from legitimate streams and the funding stops and broadcasters say, well, hang on a minute, why are we paying all of this money? then, yeah, it's going to lead to it. It happened in the music industry. And when I say it leads to it, the bubble's going to burst. Maybe the bubble could just sort of deflate a little bit.

13:12Adam Leventhal:What about the Jeff Stelling argument, giving three o 'clock kickoffs, that, you know, if this is one way around it, if every game potentially was available to view, you'd lose out, lower down the football pyramid, effectively.

13:24Gabby:And frankly, the fact that the Premier League or whoever it is are saying that they're worried about illegal streaming,

13:30Andy Hughes:So what? So what? Tell the TV companies to cut the price of subscriptions and that will stop people streaming things illegally instead. They've got to start to look after the lower league sides. If Grimsby are playing Morecambe Saturday afternoon when it's cold, wet and miserable and Manchester United against Manchester City is on TV live at three o 'clock,

13:53Gabby:how many people are going to go to Grimsby against Morecambe? I can tell you how many. A big fat zero. and that will be the end of clubs at a lower level. I think until you do it, then you won't know and then that's obviously the risk factor. But I think that when it was brought in and when it was first thought up back in the 60s, it's a completely different time. When it was first used in the 80s, a different time altogether. Consumers now, they're more nimble online. They just, you want to be able to watch the game when you can. And yet there might be a bit of a hit on crowds at a lower level, but at the same time, crowds at a lower level and, you know, further down the pyramid, National League and even further down, they're strong at the moment.

14:38Gabby:And the EFL figures are strong as well. And there is currently options for you to watch those 3pm games technically, legally in the EFL because they have blackout games available via their international rights, which some people might use a VPN to access and things like that so there is already the option and the health of the the attendances is is pretty strong at the moment so yes there's a risk it is a stick that's used to to beat the argument but all the movements of the industry are let's move as many games away from 3 p.m 66 down to 33 last season and the threshold for actually having the the blackout hasn't been met having done match the