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Live TV piracy now ‘a multi-billion’ industry as Kodi boxes and streaming sites explode in popularity

Popularity for streaming and IPTV boxes often referred to as “Kodi boxes” has soared across the UK and internationally.

These devices help people watch live sport like the Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather fight or new episodes of television shows like Game of Thrones free of charge.

They are inadvertently making pirates around $800 million (£600 million) in the US alone and costing the television industry “billions”.

A report released by Sandvine, a networking company that monitors how people are using the internet, found that a 6.5 percent of households in the US are accessing pirated live TV services every month, which they claim will cost service providers $4 billion (about £3billion) in revenue this year.

This is in addition to the one million Kodi boxes which are in use across the UK, according to the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT).

Further, a quarter of the British public access content illegally online and is one of the worst nations for nabbing free telly.

So-called “Kodi box” owners were warned that their actions may not be confined to their living rooms.

Kodi developers aren’t happy that people are using it to nick TV shows, and are creating ways to put people off.

They have created spying apps that can spot when someone is using an add-on that lets them stream the naughty stuff and will flashing a cease-and-desist style notice until they remove it.

Source: The Sun