Clampdown on TV 'Dodgy Boxes'

No I'm a sky customer with broadband with them, I have copied the channels onto other firesticks around my house, would that degrade my signals

And there are probably many more like you in the same boat.

When these clampdowns happen, a much more honest headline would be, "Thousands temporarily inconvenienced."

If you are using it on multiple devices at the same time your supplier is more than likely blocking you.

At a minimum, change your dns settings to something like Google dns or 1.1.1.1

tivimate is very good, €29.99 or so for a full license gives you 5 devices. never looked back.

I'm using smarters which is free, works grand

For people asking and wondering about apps and providers, message me about the former. But as for hardware, I use iriwns megastore online, go for the formuler boxes, they range from €100 to €150. They're a fantastic bit of kit with a custom rom that comes with mytvonline3 app, by far my favourite app for IPTV, it's solid, as is the hardware. If you're in the market for something and someone recommends a fire stick, just don't bother, there's a reason firesticks are basically free. Get proper hardware. I can point in the direction of a provider. No issues in ten years no matter what broadband I use and no, I don't need a VPN.

What's gas about this whole "illegal" debate is, if I've a sky problem, or a virgin problem or any issue at all it's a lot of fannying around on phone calls and at the end of the day they'll send an engineer out within two weeks who may or may not fix the problem. With "dodgy"box I just Whatsapp my provider directly, 24/7 service, get him to add a channel I need or an particular episode of season thats missing and boom, as I have the app opened it's up. If anything, legal providers can learn something from those dirty criminals providing affordable TV for people.

Had the lads over last weekend, noticed kerrang TV wasn't on the service, one Whatsapp, 5 minutes later the guy not only gave me kerrang but several other alt rock channels on my box.

$ky could learn a thing or two, drop your prices, let us speak to a human being, provide a fūcking better service.

I did anyway, mostly for greater control over things like DNS, VPN, spam filtering and so on. My home network is somewhat more elaborate than most though.

My experience over the years with ISP routers though is that they're generally crap - the eir F2000 and Sky's very very restricted router springing to mind. Had a NTL one years ago that lots of people had bother with in the office because it wouldn't let the company VPN through. No issues on my own one though.

Currently using an Asus XT8 with Sky 500 Fibre and it's a great piece of kit.

From someone who earns over 100K in IT your talking out your hole, From my home broadband on a 1GB connection I could probably give 100 customers IPTV if i wanted to. Its no different than the Amazon doorbell that you can access on your 4G or 5G mobile phone.

If I wanted to get a data center connection with 50 10GB links I could If i put my mind to it, data centers don't give a **** what your using it for, especially the dodgy ones!!!

So if it all.gets too complicated and technical for the end user then It's easier to sign up for pay TV.

If ease of use is such a big deal the number using dodgy IPTV would be much less than it is. Cost is much more likely to be the driving factor.

As for VPN costs ….. considering the huge 'savings' made using dodgy IPTV the cost of the VPN would not be a large factor. Most VPN providers these days make it simple to use their services.

As for locked routers … yes there are a few broadband providers who do this but the majority do not, and even some that do will provide sufficient info to set up your own.

But none of that explains by what means you believe that such IPTV streams will be "clamped down on".

I would genuinely like to hear what you think will happen or more to the point how it will happen.

I don't think that they will clamp down on iptv from a technical point of view. What will be the death of it is if they ever come up with a competing product, legally, at a fair price.

Look at music piracy, Spotify basically killed it because it was a good service and fair price for consumer (even if the musicians are getting screwed). Technically it's easy to pirate music, but the vast majority of people won't now.

Whether something like that ever happens in the live sports arena is another question though...

You can't ever rule out anything.

If the likes of Apple, Amazon or Netflix aggressively went after marquee sporting rights and priced it keenly people would certainly switch.

A spotify type deal for football at least would kill it completely, you would have the most supported teams earning the most and a massive drop off to everyone else.

No one saw LIV coming and they have absolutely fractured the sport of professional Golf and harmed it's commercial viability.

Similar would have happened with the European Super League but the fans fought back.

What the international broadcasters and streamers want is not the rights to the Premier League or Champions League, they want the exclusive broadcast rights to Man United, Real Madrid, PSG, etc.

Some of the money men at the clubs want this too.

When you are dealing with greed and vast sums of money, anything can happen in the future.

If Sky or Now TV had a package that was a flat rate of €15 month for Sky Sports (and Extra) in HD on multiple devices, I think that would be an attractive price point.

I know with offers you can get close (well, closer) to this pricing on Now TV - but not everyone is aware of this. I believe the standard pricing for sports on Sky is €69 per month on top of any existing basic TV services and extras (ad skipping, UHD, multiroom). Before you know it, you could be paying €100 - €120 per month with guaranteed annual increases. Plus, your broadband, Netflix, Disney+ etc. on top of this again.

Then you have the drama of trying to cancel services with Sky - which really should be investigated by the CCPC. If you can sign up online, you should be able to cancel online.

This is what annoys people and turns them to illegal IPTV. Sky themselves are not helping the situation at all.

In saying that, IPTV is now very mainstream. There will be a tipping point where Sky and the other broadcasters will be forced to tackle it in some creative new way. I do accept it’s a difficult issue though, especially when IPTV operators are well resourced due to making so much money from it.

Firstly people need to stop blaming Sky for the price of EPL rights, it's the EPL who controls the rights, what can be shown and at what time, not Sky or BT.

And the EPL are also the ones who set the price, so that price people pay for Sky or TNT or Now TV is primarily dictated by the EPL, the clubs, not the broadcaster.

Amazon have a very limited package in the current rights deal but didn't pursue a new one for the next deal.

But there has to be some context around why they didn't pursue a package.

The EPL for the upcoming rights deal extended the duration of the deal and also reduced the amount of packages available while increasing the amount of games available.

Amazon had a very small package last time and it seems were not interested in getting a bigger, longer package this time.

So the idea that the regular streaming services are chomping at the bit to get into EPL broadcasting may not be the case.

What the EPL did with the recent rights package was keep the illegal IPTV streaming wolf from the door for another few years.

They increased the amount of games being broadcast, included all Sunday games, they made the contract a year longer and reduced the number of packages thus you now just have two broadcasters involved rather than three.

EPL rights have been on the decline since BT got on the Sky payment platform a number of years ago, that killed the Sky BT bidding war.

The cost of rights if calculated per game has been reducing since 2016

The 2016/17 – 2018/19 deal was approx £10.19m per game, the current deal (which was rolled over during COVID) is £8.11m per game, and the new deal is £6.2m per game.

The EPL prevented the auction being a s**t show this time by increasing the number of games, reducing the packages and increasing the length of the contract.

There was talk that the broadcasters might try and lowball the EPL this time because of the threat of illegal streaming but the EPL prevented that by doing what I mentioned above.

What they pay per game is moot, they don't charge per game anymore.

The pertinent figures are how much they paid in total and how this is reflected in the sub.

IPTV offer all 360 games on dozens of channels. SKY/BT won't win by offering more choice, because that is impossible.

No it's impossible, because it is impossible to exceed 360.

Another perk to the dodgy box. All the 3pm kick offs. Another thing it does that $ky can't.

What device you going for?

My 3 firesticks all run iptv fine, zero issues. Each cost 30-40 in sale and power off the tv so out of sight.

I appreciate there's some serious hardware out there but a firestick isn't bad.

Chipped. Havent heard that in a long time. So your sky box is taken and then returned to you? Or do you get a new device? Id be interested to know whats being charged and what you get access to.