ARCOM is delighted: the audience of pirate sports streaming sites has drastically decreased in recent months. But the authority still wants to intensify the blockages.
At the end of September, Roch-Olivier Maistre, president of the Authority for the regulation of audiovisual and digital communication (ARCOM), announced to the Senate a sharp reduction in sports piracy in France thanks to the new prerogatives which have been attributed to him.
Sharp fall in audience for pirate sites
These encouraging results have been confirmed by a report which has just been published by ARCOM on its official website. According to this study, between January and June 2022, the overall audience of illicit live sports streaming sites halved (-49%).
With the new measures put in place by ARCOM, which allow it to organize a much faster and more reactive action, ” 40% of Internet users using illegal live streaming sites have experienced at least one blockage during the first half of 2022.
Of this share of users, nearly half (46%) have turned to other illicit services to illegally consume sports images. In contrast, ” 37% of them have stopped their illicit practices and 15% have turned to a legal offer », rejoices the ARCOM.
ARCOM wants to continue the repression
The entity born of the merger between the CSA and Hadopi notes, however, that the use of illegal viewing of sports content remains very popular. ” 21% of French Internet users say they have watched
illegal sports content, and 13% in particular on live streaming sites “, says the report. Above all, 44% of consumers
of illegal sports live streaming started these practices less than a year ago
year, alerts ARCOM. The practice thus attracts new users, despite the repression.
” The protection of sports content therefore calls for increased vigilance, by strengthening cooperation through agreements between Internet service providers and sports rights holders, by improving technological blocking solutions and, more broadly, by involving all technical intermediaries in the Internet ecosystem, such as domain name system (DNS) providers, virtual private networks (VPN) or hosting services for example, in this fight against piracy concludes ARCOM.
However, the institution has no word on the splitting of TV rights which is creating a headache for sports fans, who cannot afford to subscribe to multiple platforms.
Source : ARCOM
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