Even in the wake of dozens of operations aimed at disrupting illegal IPTV services, people looking to purchase IPTV packages containing thousands of channels remain confused.
At $10 / €10 / £10 per month, be it or not, illegal subscriptions are extremely cheap compared to those offered by legal broadcasters. But for hackers determined not to pay for anything, free alternatives are also available. They tend to be unreliable but can actually offer a full subscription-like service at no cost, albeit for limited periods.
Sports leagues and broadcasters like the Premier League and beIN would like to see both disappear for good, a position shared by the Anti-Piracy Coalition. IBCAP And its partners working in the same field – ACE, MPA, AAPA and AVIA, for example.
Lists of services that cause specific problems have recently been identified in reports submitted to the US government. It remains to be seen if they will be categorized as “notorious markets”, but it will be interesting to see which platforms may face unexpected pressures in the coming months and years.
Note: Italicized text is direct citations from submissions
Premier League: Free Streaming Sites
All of the premium IPTV providers give the Premier League problems, but a number of its recommendations focus on free-to-air streaming platforms, most of which have no barriers to entry.
Lalastreams/istream2watch.com (Germany)
Lalastreams/istream2watch.com is a family of streaming websites that has amassed nearly 60 million global hits so far in 2022. Almost 20 domains are redirecting to istream2watch.com.
As the Premier League points out, there is certainly no shortage of forwarding domains; alastreams.me, stream2watch.club, stream2watch.one, stream2watch.sx, and streamgaroo.com are just a few examples.
The Premier League says it detected more than 1,000 offending live streams on istream2watch.com over the course of the 2021/22 season. It also claims to have traced the “potential operator” of the platform to Germany.
Livekoora. online
Livekoora is an Arabic language live streaming website that provides links to live football matches from all over the world, including the English Premier League. The site provides a list of offending streams for each match, allowing users to select what they want to watch and play the stream within the website.
Livetv.sx – (Cyprus / Kazakhstan / Russia)
Livetv.sx is a streaming website that historically operated through multiple domains to provide an index of links to live streams for a very wide range of sporting events, including live matches.
According to a Premier League investigation, Livetv.sx had 125 million visits from its global audience in 2022 alone. The Football League also reveals that despite “successful” legal action brought by other rights holders, the site continues operations.
Soccerstreams / Weakstreams (Egypt)
Soccerstreams was originally a subreddit on Reddit that has attracted over 400,000 subscribers. After pressure from a number of legitimate content owners, including the Premier League, the thread was suspended by Reddit in January 2019.
Shortly thereafter, a website with the same brand name appeared, claiming to be “by the founders of /r/SoccerStreams”.
soccer It was once the UK’s most popular hacking site with a global reach of over 25 million hits per month.
Traffic seems to be down today by around three million per month, but the Premier League thinks Weakstreams.com is likely linked as it drives traffic to SoccerStreams. Overall, domains are estimated to have pulled in 230 million visits so far in 2022.
Totalsportek (Poland)
Totalsportek12 is a major pirate sports streaming website that provides links to many live sporting events. the location It only posts links about an hour before each live football match starts and when you do, it provides an index of up to 40 links.
The site attracted more than 150 million global visits last year (October 2021 – September 2022). The English Premier League believes that this site is operated by an individual in Poland.
English Premier League: Premium IPTV Providers
BestBuyIPTV Already listed by the USTR as a “Notorious Market”. The Premier League claims that the service carries channels from all over the world, including channels that carry Premier League content. After an investigation, the Premier League said it had located the service operator in Vietnam.
However, this does not appear to have affected the availability of the service. BestBuyIPTV is happy to sell Subscriptions To the public ($70 per year / 7,300 channels / 9,600 video-on-demand titles), distributors and streamers alike.
Other IPTV providers listed in the Premier League include Chaloos (Iraq), EV pad (Hong Kong/China), Globe IPTV (Lebanon), and redline (turkey).
Free M3U IPTV Playlists
Earlier this year, the English Premier League complained to the European Commission about so-called “open web piracy”, meaning content that can be accessed for free on the web without users having to pay anything.
In their joint submission to the USTR, sports broadcaster beIN and Miramax (formerly controlling) list a plethora of IPTV-related services that are mostly covered in one form or another. However, the companies are also calling attention to what they say is a “serious and rapidly growing problem”.
Operators in the IPTV ecosystem who provide content rather than consume it often have access to management dashboards. Known simply as “panels”, these interfaces distribute IPTV channels and select access controls. They can also create “playlists” in the form of small portable text files, usually in .M3U format.
These files are appearing online more than ever before, and since they often hold login credentials, access to pirated IPTV platforms is basically free. They can be opened in programs like VLC but unlike torrent files, playlists can be disabled remotely at any moment.
Playlists are fast and cheap, but while also unreliable, beIN would like those distributing them to be labeled “notorious” when the USTR publishes its report.
These temporary playlists have, in recent years, been distributed online by a number of sources, and this has become a very popular way to access pirate sports content, in particular, since the playlists are available shortly before games start. Some of the forums dedicated to sharing these illegal IPTV playlists, which are notorious for piracy, include:
• https://iptvlistm3u.com/
• https://m.tousecurity.com/
• https://usa.m3uiptv.com/
• https://artiptv.net/
• https://www.dailyiptvlist.com/
• http://iptvhit.com/freeiptv
• https://best.freeiptv.life/
• https://www.iptvsource.com https://m3u.bestfreeiptv.com/
• https://dwdvb.com/all-country-free-iptv-channel-links-m3u-playlis-2022/
• https://talysports.com/free-iptv-channel-links-m3u-playlist/
Finally, it is interesting to see which sites and services are candidates for work but at the same time, some very large platforms are not put forward by rights holders at all. It seems unlikely that they are unaware of their existence, and this raises the question as to why they are absent from the list.
Information like that isn’t made public, but since transmissions are given, maybe it’s a matter of not rocking the boat during sensitive periods or just waiting until the time is right.
Three offers related to IPTV to USTR (1,2,3) can be found here
Image credit: Pixabay/Geralt