If you've read the first part in this blog series, you'll be aware that NAGRA recently interviewed a pirate to gain first-hand insight into the motivations, methods and results of pirate activity. If you missed part one, where I explored a pirate's human motivation, you can catch-up here.
The Hidden Foe in Plain Sight
Today's video streaming landscape is heavily fragmented. Multiple services all offer specific content and if you're after a particular genre of content, no matter how niche, there's a service for you. However, this increased competition among service providers is not the end of the story. Hard pressed consumers are also sourcing their favorite content from pirate services - meaning legitimate services are competing with their pirate foes.
In the smartcard era, faced with complex hardware-based cryptography, piracy was technically complex although, as the pirate points out, the overheads were low. A simple script did the job and when a vendor countermeasure was deployed, the same script needed updating. Fast forward to the IPTV/ streaming era and the situation is different.
Pirates are now software experts and have larger overheads, estimated to be about 30% of their revenue'. Equally, we learn that they have their own, hard to come by datacenters that can handle the illegal traffic being routed through them. At a technical level, the pirate industry has a cast of contributors that rivals those of the premium content they seek. Originally it was a technical exercise to just access the content. The pirate told us, I thought I can write website code, I can modify that script, I'm going to have my own website.' This has subsequently expanded with the average pirate network relying on business, marketing and technical professionals through which to create highly realistic services that lure consumers in with a promise of low prices and infinite levels of content.
If You Can't Stand the Heat...
Today's pirate enterprises can be vast in size. Often starting as a simple website that has 1,000 subscribers, they can scale to become major organizations. They grow through syndicating services (for a percentage of revenue) to resellers who in turn sell to more subscribers. This means a single pirate enterprise can quickly support tens of thousands of subscribers. When this is scaled further, some of the largest pirate organizations support millions of subscribers through the same approach. However, the pirate is quick to point out that with scale comes pressure - both financial and legal. Put another way, the larger your pirate enterprise gets, the more it costs to run and the more attention it receives from anti-piracy organizations who represent an industry intent on stopping this illegal activity. Success, the pirate tells us, depends on the level of heat you can bear. He mentions that large pirate IPTV organizations with full marketing organizations simply imploded as they couldn't handle the external industry pressure. That's good news for the industry as it shows deterrent and investigative techniques deliver results. But what about the smaller providers that may be operating under the radar?
The Barber Shop Guy
If subscribers don't engage with pirate services online, they're just as likely, we learnt, to purchase services at local outlets such as their local barbershop or corner store. Pirates build distribution networks which rely on effective marketing and the re-sellers often have scant knowledge of what's technically going on under the hood. This is deliberate as if the marketing end of the operation gets shut down, the technical operations can re-launch elsewhere. This means that your average barbershop or corner store can be selling multiple pirate services and can quickly adapt if they need to. One example is the KboxServ operation in Switzerland that sold boxes for $160 through retail stores and was successfully shut down through a Canal+ and NAGRA operation.
Pirate Business Models
In the main, pirates make money from selling too-good-to-be-true offers for illicit gain. Within the pirate economy however, there are a multitude of business models driven by a pirate's motivation. Some are experts in a particular group of channels and undertake to always keep them on-air'. Some focus on re-selling to others and take a percentage of the re-sellers' revenues. Others front the pirate service with highly functional websites that may even include subscriber support options. Then there are those who blend broader cybercrime with piracy. Here, as part of the subscriber's service enablement they will also deploy hidden malware onto devices which mine identity and financial information that's then traded on the dark web. We also asked if, given all the different approaches, pirates competed. They do and we were surprised to learn that this also includes pirating pirate content which in the streaming era is a lot more commonplace than it was in the smartcard era; largely due to how accessible content is. Each of these approaches demonstrates the scale of the pirate ecosystem intent on damaging our industry. In other words, the services that are advertised on the internet are the tip of the pirate iceberg.
Intelligence-Led Investigations
In looking at the motivations and ecosystem of a pirate, it's clear that the deterrent offered by the industry today does deliver results. Solutions such as forensic watermarking and anti-piracy intelligence help to heap the pressure onto pirate organizations who, as the pirate explained, may simply implode under the pressure. However, for those that don't, different approaches are required.
NAGRA Anti-Piracy services are designed to generate intelligence on pirate operations, explore the
Most recent headlines
11/12/2025
Dalet, a leading provider of cloud-native, end-to-end media workflow solutions, ...
20/11/2025
LONDON The winners of the Rise Awards 2025, which recognize women and companies whose achievements have stood out in the media technology industry, have been an...
20/11/2025
SANTA MONICA & NEW YORK Lionsgate's Worldwide Television Distribution Group and Debmar-Mercury have launched MovieSphere Gold in more than 30 million homes....
20/11/2025
ALAMEDA, Calif. Clear-Com has introduced its four-channel HelixNet beltpack, a next-generation advancement of its widely used two-channel model, and anticipates...
20/11/2025
NEW PROVIDENCE, N.J. Streaming technology and services provider Kiswe has launched Kiswe Core, a next-generation cloud-based platform designed to simplify the s...
20/11/2025
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. Dolby Laboratories has signed on as an official signature partner of the Bay Area Host Committee (BAHC) for the 2026 Super Bowl and the we...
20/11/2025
STUTTGART, Germany 3 Screen Solutions (3SS) has announced that the Canadian multiservice operator Telus has launched its Telus TV+ entertainment platform on Sam...
20/11/2025
Major League Baseball has announced deals with ESPN, NBCUniversal and Netflix covering 2026-2028 that make ESPN the exclusive rightsholder of MLB.TV, see regula...
20/11/2025
Berklee Presents Holiday Extravaganza: Duke Ellingtons The Nutcracker Suite and ...
19/11/2025
Sphere Sound Kicks Up Its Heels at Radio City Music HallUltra-immersive system from the singular Las Vegas venue is also ready for sportsBy Dan Daley, Audio Edi...
19/11/2025
The Future of Stadium and Arena Video Control Rooms: Tech Leaders Talk 4K, IP, a...
19/11/2025
One Year at Intuit Dome: Walking Through the Stunning Arena's Advanced Video...
19/11/2025
SVG Sit-Down: IMG's Francois Westcombe Goes Inside IMG's Annual Digital ...
19/11/2025
Inside Brighton & Hove Albion's fan-first media machine By George Bevir
Tuesday, November 18, 2025 - 10:10
Print This Story
Brighton & Hove Albion'...
19/11/2025
Rock Chalk Rebuild, Part 1: Kansas Athletics Brings New Production Power to Rebu...
19/11/2025
Rock Chalk Rebuild, Part 2: A Pro's Guide to Kansas Athletics' New Video...
19/11/2025
MLB Media Rights Shakeup: NBC Inks Three-Year Deal for Sunday Night Baseball, Pe...
19/11/2025
Rohan Parashuram Kanawade attends the premiere of Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears) at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival at Egyptian Theatre on January 26, 2025, in Pa...
19/11/2025
Awards season is heating up, and the International Documentary Association just ...
19/11/2025
Aerojet Rocketdyne President Ken Bedingfield and Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders were joined by state and local officials to celebrate the groundbreaking o...
19/11/2025
L3Harris and PentenAmio formalise their teaming agreement at MilCIS 2025, streng...
19/11/2025
Calrec gives Phoenix Broadcast Solutions its full support in strategic multi-year enterprise partnership New Singapore OB company invests in Calrec technology f...
19/11/2025
October brings a larger audience in front of TV screens. The cooler autumn weather and the continuation of new programming schedules brought increases in both t...
19/11/2025
IRVING, Texas Nexstar Media Group and Tegna filed applications on Nov. 18 with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) seeking its consent to transfer broad...
19/11/2025
Vitec has acquired Datapath, a developer of real-time video processing for large-scale video walls, AVoIP content distribution and KVM control in mission-critic...
19/11/2025
NEVADA CITY, Calif. Telestream has introduced ARGUS Version 2.3, which introduces Live Look, a feature that lets operators inspect live and on-demand streams vi...
19/11/2025
STAMFORD, Conn. and NEW YORK Charter Communications, Inc. has announced a major deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) that establishes AWS as one of Charters stra...
19/11/2025
TOKYO Atomos has announced a major firmware update that brings integrated camera control to the Ninja TX GO and Ninja TX its new CFexpress-based monitor-recor...
19/11/2025
Berklee's Signature Series Reimagines the Musical and Visual Artistry of Col...
19/11/2025
PlayBox Neo departed the NAB Show New York 2025 on a high note. The company's all-new PlayBox Neo Suite made a splash on the show floor, drawing strong inte...
19/11/2025
AAVBR (American Audio Visual Baton Rouge), a leading full-service event production company serving Louisiana and the Gulf Coast region, has enhanced its product...
19/11/2025
In its mission to deliver live event services combining advanced engineering with a creative approach to captivating live sports and entertainment experiences, ...
19/11/2025
NEW YORK Short-form vertical video has exploded across platforms like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, but a new survey commissioned by Media.net, a provider of c...
19/11/2025
NEW YORK YES Network, the regional sports network home of the New York Yankees and Brooklyn Nets, and CAMB.AI have struck a partnership they said will leverage ...
19/11/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has issued detailed guidance on filings that were disrupted by the government shutdown. While many of those fil...
19/11/2025
NEW YORK The popularity of NFL games is largely responsible for continued seasonal momentum in TV viewership into October (measured Sept. 29-Oct. 26), according...
19/11/2025
DirecTV has announced that its MyFree DirecTV streaming service has added seven new channels. Those include four sports services, NBA FAST, Red Bull TV, DAZN Ri...
19/11/2025
SURREY, U.K. Mark Roberts Motion Control (MRMC) has launched Flair Bridge, a compact device that transforms how operators control the company's motion-contr...
19/11/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission, which is continuing to rapidly ramp up its operations after the end of the federal government shutdown, has se...
19/11/2025
IRVING, Texas Nexstar Media Group and Tegna filed applications on Nov. 18 with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) seeking its consent to transfer broad...
19/11/2025
Martin Freeman, Jessie Buckley, Wu-Tang Clan's Raekwon, Eddie the Eagle and ...
19/11/2025
Rohde & Schwarz collaborates with Broadcom to enable testing and validation of n...
19/11/2025
Back to All News
Innato, starring Imanol Arias and Elena Anaya, arrives on Netf...
19/11/2025
Back to All News
Guillermo del Toro Sits Down With Troll 2 Director Roar Uthaug...
19/11/2025
Some projects feel monumental from the moment the first phone call comes in. When BCE, the host broadcaster appointed to coordinate the national coverage, asked...
19/11/2025
November 19 2025, 08:00 (PST) BAY AREA HOST COMMITTEE AND DOLBY PARTNER TO DELIVER IMMERSIVE FAN EXPERIENCES
During the Week of Football's Biggest Game...
19/11/2025
Michael D. Higgins: Ireland's Ninth President features RT Archives footage and interviews across seven decades
Watch Wednesday 19 November at 9:35pm on RT...
19/11/2025
Scripps Research scientists receive $1.1 million to advance AI modeling for HIV vaccine development New AI system helps scientists rapidly pinpoint the most pro...
18/11/2025
Independent media across Central America are operating under intensifying financial pressure, yet there is a clear appetite for models that can sustain both ind...
If you've read the first part in this blog series, you'll be aware that NAGRA recently interviewed a pirate to gain first-hand insight into the motivations, methods and results of pirate activity. If you missed part one, where I explored a pirate's human motivation, you can catch-up here. 
