Faced with the increase in sports subscription prices, many fans decide to go through illegal sites in order to watch a sports competition. This mode of consumption is a real problem for television channels.
For several years, the Audiovisual and Digital Communication Regulatory Authority (Arcom) has been waging a real war to reduce as much as possible the consumption of programs via illegal means of streaming, particularly for football. Many sites have been closed in recent years. If Arcom had recorded a significant drop in traffic on illegal sites between 2021 and 2023, in a report published this Tuesday, April 30, the body reveals a slight increase in streaming and illegal downloading of sports competitions. This necessarily constitutes a huge shortfall for broadcasters, but also for institutions like Ligue 1, which seeks to promote its product, but which undoubtedly loses significant turnover because of this mass piracy. Because the figures revealed are incredibly high.
Ligue 1 still suffers 8.5 million pirates in France
Arcom explains that this increase is probably due to users of virtual private networks (VPN), which are used to bypass paid channels and which broadcast content for free via another server while hiding the identity of pirates. The same goes for IPTV. Arcom claims that 57% of VPN users do so illegally. Because if illegal streaming has decreased compared to the consumption of films, this is not the case for sports competitions. If 11.7 million people went through illegal sites between 2021 and 2023, the figure has fallen, but there are still 8.5 million pirates in France. Ligue 1, which is on the cusp of a major change with its naming contract with McDonald’s and the negotiation of TV rights for the period 2024-2029, hopes that this war will end up turning in favor of the official broadcasters, even if t seems obvious that completely stopping piracy is impossible.
