The world’s biggest illegal sports streaming platform just got shut down
Where piracy is concerned, authorities are playing an almost never-ending game of “whack-a-mole.”
Just as some of the world’s biggest sporting competitions are starting back up after summer breaks, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment said it’s teamed up with Egyptian authorities to shut down Streameast, the world’s biggest illegal sports streamer, with two men arrested and detained.
The platform, which clocked a whopping 1.6 billion site visits over the past year and (infamously) counted LeBron James among its vast user base, was taken offline in what ACE chairman Charles Rivkin described as a “resounding victory” in the authority’s battle against online piracy.
Still, an analyst at Midia Research said that governing bodies might be playing a “game of whack-a-mole” in their fight to stop subscription dodgers streaming sports online for free; if the wider, ever-expanding world of internet piracy is anything to go by, they might have a point.
Indeed, search interest in content piracy sites, while intense, is often fleeting — Streameast is no exception. According to data from Google Trends, Streameast interest peaked just under a year ago, around the start of the NFL season and the final games of the MLB calendar. Predictably, a flood of other illegal sites and platforms are already filling Streameast’s place.
