Digital piracy: live streaming of content is driving the sector
Italia and France are leading the way in the fight against piracy, but efforts across Europe are uneven and there is a risk of collateral damage to legal streaming services
The new frontier of digital piracy is the live streaming of content, particularly in the case of sport. This is a well-established and economically resilient market, against which Italia, together with France, has the most advanced anti-piracy system in Europe. This is revealed in a European Parliament report, ‘Countering online piracy of sports and broadcasts in the EU’, which focuses in particular on IPTV, the technology that allows users to watch TV via the internet. According to the report, this service is organised in such a way as to replicate the legitimate offering of pay-TV.
From the consumer’s point of view, in fact, the existence of a fixed-term subscription, access to dedicated applications and a large number of television channels make it difficult to distinguish between those offering an illegal service and those operating in accordance with the regulations.
In 2019, according to data from the European Parliament, piracy services based on monthly payments from subscribers were worth 522 million euros. Since then, the sector has continued to grow: both the scale and the level of sophistication on offer have increased. Demand is driven by low costs, but also by the desire to avoid the fragmentation of content that characterises legally authorised streaming platforms.
The situation in Italia
In Italia in 2024, according to a study by Fapav and Ipsos cited in the report, 38 per cent of adults had watched pirated films, TV series, sports events or TV programmes at least once. Over the course of the year, there were reportedly 295 million instances of piracy. Sport plays a significant role in this context: around 15 per cent of adults, in fact, watch it illegally live. The most popular sport is football, followed by Formula 1, tennis and MotoGP. Digital piracy, the Fapav analysis concludes, costs Italia around 2.2 billion euros and puts more than 12,000 jobs at risk.
According to the EU Parliament’s report, however, two years on from the adoption of the anti-piracy law and the launch of the Piracy Shield platform, 71 per cent of Italians are aware of the law, whilst 62 per cent consider it effective. Furthermore, 70 per cent consider the shield to be a useful tool: according to Agcom data, more than 122,000 illegal websites have been blocked, with a negligible error rate of 0.0057 per cent.
