Liv McMahonTechnology reporter
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The world’s biggest destination for illegal streams of live sports events has been shut down, according to a leading anti-piracy group.
The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) said on Wednesday it had teamed up with police in Egypt to close down Streameast, which had been visited more than 1.6 billion times in the past year.
It allowed millions to access pirated streams of sports such as Premier League football matches, Formula One races and Major League Baseball games.
ACE chairman Charles Rivkin said it was a “resounding victory in its fight to detect, deter, and dismantle criminal perpetrators of digital piracy”.
“With this landmark action, we have put more points on the board for sports leagues, entertainment companies, and fans worldwide,” he said.
The clamp down comes after a report earlier this year found illegal sports streaming was taking place at an “industrial scale”.
Sports broadcasting is big business, with the total value of media rights across the world passing the $60bn (£44bn) mark last year.
With rising costs of rights deals being passed onto to fans at home – and compounded by the need for subscriptions to multiple platforms showing different matches – some have resorted to illegal streams.
According to ACE, traffic to Streameast’s various domains had originated primarily from the UK, US, Canada, Philippines and Germany.
The Athletic reported two men had been arrested in El-Sheikh Zaid, near Egypt’s capital Cairo, by police on suspicion of copyright infringement.
It said authorities had seized laptops and smartphones suspected of being used to operate the sites during a raid, as well as cash and credit cards.
Police also found links to a shell company in the UAE which had allegedly been used to launder £4.9m of advertising revenue since 2010, as well as £150,000 in cryptocurrency.
‘Game of whack-a-mole’
Ed McCarthy, chief operating officer of sports streaming platform DAZN Group, welcomed its take-down.
“This criminal operation was siphoning value from sports at every level and putting fans across the world at risk,” he said.
People trying to access Streameast domains or sites will now be redirected to an ACE web page suggesting channels they can “watch legally”, it said.
Ben Woods, an entertainment analyst at Midia Research, said the site’s shut-down may be a win for broadcasters, but would ultimately fail to stop the “game of whack-a-mole” facing those trying to tackle live sports piracy.
He told the BBC the high costs people face to watch sports legally were among a “cocktail of forces” continuing to fuel illegal streams.
And he said a younger generation of sports fans had become accustomed to getting content for free on social media, who may not have the job security or cash to pay for access.
“Cracking down on pirates directly is just one part of the solution,” Mr Woods said.
“Only by exploring ways to make live sport more accessible will this issue become less of a problem for major sports leagues.”