Amazon Fire Sticks allows “billions of dollars” of piracy in streaming, according to a report today in Enders analysis, a research firm on media, entertainment and telecommunications. Technologies from other media conglomerates, Microsoft, Google and Facebook, also allow the report’s authors to consider an “industrial flight scale”.
The report“Video Piraty: Big Tech is clearly not willing to solve the problem,” focuses on the European market, but highlights the global growth in the piracy of streaming services because they are increasingly acquiring live programs, such as sporting events.
Speak BbcThe report indicates the availability of several simultaneous illegal flows for major events that attract tens of thousands of hacker viewers.
Enders’ report imposes a certain blame on Facebook for having displayed advertisements for access to illegal flows, as well as Google and Microsoft for the alleged “continuous depreciation” of their digital rights management systems (DRM), respectively, Widevine and Playready. Ars Technica contacted Facebook, Google and Microsoft to comment but did not receive an answer before the publication.
The report echoes complaints shared throughout the industry, especially by the largest European football streamer in the world, Dazn. Piracy in streaming is “almost a crisis for the sports rights industry”, the Dazn World Rights Head, Tom Burrows, said At the Financial Times’ Business of Football Summit in February. During the same event, Nick Herm, COO of the European telecommunications company belonging to Comcast Sky Group, estimated that hacking cost its company “hundreds of millions of dollars” in income. At the time, Enders co-founder Claire Enders said that hacking sporting events represented “around 50% of most markets”.
Jailbreake fire sticks
Friday’s Enders report appointed Fire Sticks as an important contributor to streaming hacking, calling the equipment a “hacking facilitator”.
Enders’ report highlighted the security risks that pirate viewers face, in particular by providing information on credit cards and email addresses with unknown entities, which can make people vulnerable to phishing and malicious software. However, the reports of phishing and malicious software resulting from streaming piracy, which occurs through various methods in addition to a television stick, seem quite limited.
