Tech

Football streaming: ARCOM wants to automate the blocking of pirate sites

To strengthen the fight against illegal streaming sites that broadcast football matches, ARCOM (a new entity made up of Hadopi and the CSA) plans to automate the blocking of these pirate sites. This automated procedure will be implemented with the operators.

soccer streaming sites
Credits: Unsplash

For several years now, sports channels like beIN Sports or Canal+ have been waging a fierce fight against illegal streaming sites. Recently, the two channels won a battle. A few days before the broadcast of the PSG – Real Madrid clash of February 15, 2022, Canal+ and beIN Sports obtained blocking new streaming sites who illegally share Champions League matches.

According to the decision of the Paris court, operators will therefore have the obligation to block access to identified fraudulent sites as soon as possible, targeting DNS in particular. If this procedure has the merit of discouraging the general public, the most tech-savvy people can easily circumvent it by modifying their DNS. Another black spot, blocking by ISPs takes far too long, several hours on average.

Read also: IPTV – a pirate is fined 200,000 euros for selling 3,000 subscriptions

Automatic blocking of illegal streaming sites

Today, blocking takes several hours. So if a site appears at 9 p.m., we are unable to block it before the end of the match”, explains Michel Combot, director general of the French Telecoms Federation, in the columns of the newspaper l’Équipe. He pursues : “We are therefore going to set up a fully automated mechanism, with a single interface for all players, in order to act almost in real time once ARCOM has pressed the button to block a site”.

As a reminder, ARCOM is a new control and regulation entity, product of the merger between Hadopi and CSA. It came into operation on January 1, 2022 and it has greater prerogatives than Hadopi as the systematic blocking of mirror sites for example.

The only downside is that this automated blocking process could be expensive, several hundred thousand euros per ISP according to ARCOM’s first estimates. On this subject, discussions should take place soon with the chains to share these costs. If illegal streaming sites represent a certain threat, this is also the case with IPTV boxes. Recently, a seller of boxes was ordered to pay €145,000 in damages to Swedish TV channels.

Source: The Team

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