What industrialised illegal streaming is costing the industry in 2026
In this clip from her keynote fireside chat at Streaming Media Connect 2026, Verimatrix Director of Product Management Maria Malinkowitsch offers a snapshot of live-streaming piracy in 2026, what it’s costing major sport rightsholders, why the fragmentation of sport rights and the cost burden on fans is making the industry susceptible to pirates, and how the industrialisation of illegal streaming and the rise of “piracy as a service” are adding fuel to the fire and making antipiracy efforts more challenging than ever.
How Piracy Has Evolved
Streaming Media Editor-in-Chief Steve Nathans-Kelly opens the conversation by saying, “Streaming piracy I think is often described as a moving target or, even more colorfully, as a game of whack-a-mole. And the pirates are always doing whatever they can to stay out of your way or a step ahead of you.” He asks Malinkowitsch to talk about how piracy has evolved, how much money the industry loses to illegal streaming, and what these factors have meant for anti-piracy strategies.
Malinkowitsch says that the streaming industry is losing $67 billion to illegal IPTV platforms these days. “And if you want to compare it to something apart from it being the whole budget of a small- to mid-size European country, it actually, funny enough, equals exactly the amount which is estimated in 2026 for sport rights globally. So basically the money you make for sport rights is in parallel being completely stolen by pirates,” she notes. “We can also clearly state that piracy has mostly moved away—when it comes really to a high- and premium-level content—from the torrents.”
Torrents and downloadable content have decreased by more than 40% over the last few years, Malinkowitsch says, with a shift toward even “pay TV” offerings coming from piracy along with an excellent user experience. Streamers need to follow “how the user behaviour changes. … And looking at how segregated [the] sports market has become, specifically when it comes to European football—soccer—or also other rights where you really need a bunch of subscriptions to watch all the matches you would like to see, that’s leading to a lot of frustration with the subscribers,” she explains. “Most pirates, when asked why they’re using these piracy offerings, it’s not price anymore. It’s really convenience and user experience.”
It’s Easier and Cheaper to Be a Pirate Now
Nathans-Kelly brings up the concepts of “the industrialisation of illegal streaming” and “piracy as a service.” He asks, “Can you describe a little bit about what that is, what it means, and how it complicates anti-piracy?”
Malinkowitsch notes that 10 or 15 years ago, “you had to be a hacker to start piracy as a business. Nowadays, you really can go on the dark web and acquire a complete platform with most beautiful recommendation engines, layout, and a platform which looks like the best in class like Netflix and Disney+. And what you get in this platform would be thousands of channels, all of the sports you want in brilliant quality, 4K, everything, and starting at as little as say five bucks per month, which is kind of in no relation to what you pay for potentially five sports channels and some premium VOD.”
The new methods for retrieving and stealing content have facilitated this shift. It’s now “popular to take the content directly from the content delivery networks, from the CDNs, and make the legitimate content provider whom you are stealing the content from pay for the traffic,” Malinkowitsch says. Pirates keep their costs low; they are only paying “the hacker for running the platform.
Companies Have Difficulty Competing
“And so as long as this goes on, legitimate streamers can’t compete with that, really,” Nathans-Kelly laments
“It is enormously hard really to compete,” Malinkowitsch agrees. She points to the differing legislation surrounding piracy around the world. “So for instance, in Switzerland, using piracy is not even illegal. And from that perspective, people, when really watching these piracy streams, they don’t feel like they’re committing a crime. They even push back by saying, ‘Listen, you made it so hard for me. You made me pay, I don’t know, 150 bucks in five different subscriptions. And the only thing I have from that, I cannot find the stream I want to watch.’ So it’s really kind of pushing the conscience to be on the right side.
Malinkowitsch concludes, “And in the end, obviously that leads to enormous revenue losses, because when we think about the fight with churn, with the cost of a subscriber acquisition and then losing all of that to platforms which are so much cheaper, is really bitter for the companies running it, indeed.
Join us August 11–13, 2026 for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media Connect 2026! Registration is open!
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Given the vast array of hacks available to stream-stealers and pirates in 2026, reactive antipiracy measures only go so far, identifying or even pinpointing the problem after the fact without preventing it, and often providing little legal recourse against pirates operating outside the regional regulatory environment where a rightsholder can pursue them. In this clip from her keynote fireside chat with Streaming Media's Steve Nathans-Kelly from Streaming Media Connect 2026, Verimatrix' Maria Malinkowitsch explains the difference between reactive and proactive antipiracy measures, and how rightsholders and publishers can pursue more effective approaches to take down illegal streams while they're happening—or at least reduce the number of pirates to "a chasable amount."
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