An illegal IPTV bouquet, USTVGO, has just closed its doors. The site now announces a simple message: “sorry, we are closed”. The same message is displayed on the service’s alternate URLs. USTVGO, which broadcast more than a hundred American television channels, including ABC, CBS, ESPN, SyFy, HBO and NBC, recorded 16 million visits each month. The service was the subject of a copyright infringement claim.
IPTV services are in the sights of all rights holders and their representative associations. In France, war is declared. ARCOM, the telecom watchdog in France, has signed a collaboration agreement with Internet service providers and the Association for the Protection of Sports Programmes). The goal is to block services that broadcast sporting events (football, motorsport, etc.).
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Across the Atlantic, same trend. The fight is organized around ACE (Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment), a world-class organization where all kinds of audiovisual companies meet: production studio, television channels, streaming platform. According to a survey carried out by an American site, the ACE would have allowed the disappearance of 600 domains over 5 years of activity, including fifty in December.
An illegal streaming giant in the United States disappears
And the fight continues this year, of course. One of the first victims of the year is called USTVGO. It is one of the largest US-based IPTV portals. The portal aggregated more thana hundred American television channels. Among these, big names like ABC, CBS, HBO, NBC, MTV, Disney Channel, ESPN, Fox, FX, Freeform, History, Lifetime, Paramount, Showtime, Starz, SyFy or WWE Network.
USTVGO is therefore inactive today, as well as all its alternative URLs, according to the news site TorrentFreak. If you try to connect to it, you arrive on a page with a simple message: ” sorry, we are closed “. The disappearance of this portal is relatively sudden and is, officially, unexplained. No statements from site managers have been posted as of this writing. And the site’s social networks were also shut down.
However, it is easy to guess why the portal is no longer accessible. Even if the administrators of USTVGO have always claimed that the rebroadcasting of the channels is legal, the rights holders were not of the same opinion. The portal has undergone of a complaint from several channels for copyright infringement. In addition, Alianza, an association of Anglo-Saxon networks, placed the site on its list of illegal streaming sites from 2021. It seems obvious to us that the pressure from rights holders got the better of the will of the owners of USTVGO.
Source: TorrentFreak