Italy’s Guardia di Finanza carried out a major operation in September 2019 that ended with the dismantling of everything related to the Xtream Codes portal, which was dedicated to offering pirated IPTV on payment. This service offered a “Professional” plan, which cost 59 euros per month, and that offered unlimited content, and another Minimal, with somewhat more limited content for a price of 15 euros.

The crash of Xtream Codes did no good

From Xtream Codes they claimed to offer their services to 50 million clients with their more than 18,000 servers, with an international presence in Italy, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Greece and Bulgaria. At first, it seemed like a severe blow against pirated IPTV by making global traffic drop 50% at the end of September.

Nobody can deny that it was effective in the short term, with the Internet forums flooded with messages and complaints about the lack of service. Many users had gone “in the dark” overnight and resellers were unable to provide satisfactory solutions. However, as the days and weeks went by, everything was returning to normal and right now it’s like nothing happened

Since then, operations against pirated IPTV have been repeated without much success. Those responsible are usually affected, but both the users and the top of this entire market, continue as if nothing. The first because they get another subscription in a matter of minutes, since they are offered in all corners of the Internet. The second because they are almost never directly involved in the business, with resellers being the most exposed.

An affordable legal offer, the only medicine

Piracy in series, movies or music has fallen notably in recent years. The landing of Netflix or Spotify, among others, has been key for users to see payment for a service with good eyes. The price is affordable and the options much more spacious.

However, pirate IPTV continues, above all, because of the sports. Soccer is still a very expensive sport to watch on television and users are looking for alternative methods of not missing their favorite team matches. There is a lack of more flexible options that do not force the hiring of unnecessary products or that even allow you to see only the games of a specific team.

Until the legal offer is satisfactory for users, the fight against pirated IPTV will remain unsuccessful. In addition, the audiovisual industry must take into account that there will always be a percentage of users who do not intend to pay for legal content, whatever its price.

As long as the same people who are providing the internet infrastructure (cable/cell/satellite providers) this will continue to stagnate. Imagine if the candle makers held a monopoly on producing light sockets. Sure some people would jury rig their own sockets (pirate tv today) and of course the candle makers would still sell a few sockets just to keep the cutting edge users and independent startups from producing them, but their main business would remain candles.

This is sort of a situation where I wonder if the governments need to split companies between pure service providers (internet, hosting (?)) and content providers (tv carriers, streaming services, etc). Some companies like Apple, Sony, Disney, Netflix ... are big enough to sort of push their services out there but most aren't. Not only that how many of those that I just mentioned are own the carriers in whole or part?

It's not a conspiracy, the business has evolved this way. but now those people with the vested interest in you buying your TV channels in packages because their business model depends on it are not interested in being downgraded to the status of public utility.