In his 32 years as a police officer, John McGowan oversaw investigations into murders, drug deals and terrorism. These days, most of his sleuthing involves watching soccer in pubs and hotels.
After retiring 15 years ago as a police superintendent in Scotland, McGowan began working for a company that hunts for unauthorized broadcasts of soccer games and other sports events — a job that has gotten more complex lately with growing sales of set-top boxes that can be hooked directly to televisions to show pirated games and films.
“There’s a lot of old-style detective work,” said McGowan, director of operations for Glasgow ID Inquiries, which does investigations for the English Premier League.
“Walking around, going into pubs to see what they’re showing; paying attention,” he said.
Sales of the devices, which can cost as little as US$30 for a box plus a year of programming, have surged in recent months, according to researcher Irdeto USA Inc. Irdeto says the number of Web sites selling them has more than doubled since November last year to almost 450 and that new sites are popping up daily.
More than 2.4 million illegal boxes are in use worldwide, Irdeto estimated.
The growth threatens revenues of soccer leagues and of broadcasters such as Sky Plc and BT Group PLC, which in February agreed to pay £5.1 billion (US$7.8 billion) for the UK rights to live English Premier League soccer for three years. If everyone with an illegal box were to buy a full-price subscription, broadcasters would see at least US$553 million a year in new revenue, Irdeto estimated.
A hacked box can be purchased online, typically from vendors in China. When it arrives, getting it to work involves little more than plugging one cable into the TV and another into the Internet. The suppliers set up the box to automatically — and illegally — receive content from pay-per-view companies such as Sky or Spain’s Promotora de Informaciones SA, or Prisa, which broadcasts Spanish matches.
The vendors usually pay for a single legal subscription to the broadcasts, feed that into a server somewhere — often in China or the former Soviet Union — and then route the programming to anyone who buys their boxes. That gives users access to matches of the likes of Manchester United and Real Madrid without subscribing to Sky or Prisa, which charge as much as £47 per month for their sports programming.
Until about two years ago, most piracy was done via streaming to a computer, Irdeto vice-president Rory O’Connor said. The set-top boxes offer several advantages: They do not flood the screen with pop-up ads, TVs are not vulnerable to the viruses that can threaten PCs, and the signal does not jump and freeze as much as Internet broadcasts do.
“People can get high-definition services that are more stable than Internet streaming, and it can be very difficult to tell a pirate service from a legal one,” O’Connor said.
In recent years, police and courts in dozens of countries have shut down Web sites that rebroadcast live programming without permission — the English Premier League says it blocked 45,000 sites worldwide last season — but the pirates often resurface with different names.
People who buy the boxes for home viewing face some legal risks, though they are small, according to Samuel Parra, a Spanish attorney who specializes in cyberlaw.
“It’s very difficult to go after the user, but the law is being worked on in Spain and other parts of Europe to make it easier,” Parra said.
Set-top boxes open up a new front in the fight against piracy. The shift shows that those who sell illegal broadcasts are seeking new business models and taking steps to make viewing even easier for buyers, according to Alex Martinez Roig, general director for content at Prisa.
“These pirates don’t play by the rules,” Martinez Roig said. “We haven’t yet found a way to react to them. This is newer and more dangerous than streaming.”
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