The Golden Age Of Illegal TV Streaming

West Bromwich Albion's Salomon Rondon in action with Liverpool's Joel Matip last weekend.
Reuters / Phil Noble




Something very sudden and very weird has happened to sport on TV in the past few weeks. Viewers have stopped watching it:


In the UK, the TV audience for Premier League games fell by 19%
through early October.

In the US, TV ratings for NFL games
slipped by 10% over the first four weeks of the season.

Audiences for last season's UEFA Champions League action on BT Sport plummeted
to less than a fifth
of those from the year before.

Of course, the number of people paying for cable and satellite TV has been declining for years
, according to data gathered by BI Intelligence
. But that decline is slow, by a few points a year. It's not a sudden drop of 10% or 20% annually.

Internet TV On the other hand, a huge number of people are now watching illegal TV streams on the web, from sites like Putlocker, 123Movies, SportStreamTV, FirstRow, Rojadirecta, Live TV, Drakulastream, and Cricfree, and over devices like the Kodi Android box.

Is it possible that illegal TV streaming has become so widespread — and of such high quality — that it vpn is, at last, putting a real dent in the traditional pay-TV business?

It is difficult to put numbers on how big illegal TV streaming has become — it's illegal, after all. But it is clearly huge. TV Online The BBC reported early this year that some individual sites are publishing 8 million TV streams a month
. The Daily Mail has reported that 1 million people a month are watching the Premier League illegally on streaming Internet TV sites
.