Legal Sports Streaming is Becoming A Problem In Europe

Convenient, affordable, and, above all, well-functioning legal offers are considered the best remedy against piracy. Spotify is certainly a good example here. If a streaming service doesn’t work, then that’s “advertising” for illegal offers.

And exactly the latter happened recently in both Italy and Spain: Because the new football season started there in mid-August, the Spanish LaLiga and the Italian Serie A also carried out campaigns in which the respective associations urgently warned against piracy have warned offers.

But as TorrentFreak reports, that’s exactly what happened a little later. Because fans are raving about illegal streaming offers in droves. The special thing about it: It was anything but voluntary and only an emergency solution for the pirates. Because the users were customers of legal offers who could not access their subscriptions or streams due to technical problems and server overload.

Problems in France too

But the troubles in Spain and Italy were no exception, with the same thing happening again last week, this time in France. On Wednesday, Paris club PSG and Juventus faced each other in the Champions League. The game was supposed to be streamed via MyCanal from Canal+, and that worked initially.

But shortly after the kick-off, that was no longer possible, the French media company’s login servers were no longer letting any subscribers through. At least Canal+ reacted transparently and admitted that they are currently struggling with it. The problem: An hour later, i.e. at the end of the half-time break, it was still not possible to log in.

The result was that the disappointed users looked for illegal alternatives, of which there were plenty, and these worked perfectly. According to a report by Radio France, there were several streams on Twitter, among other things, and around 50,000 people watched each offer in this way. Twitter deleted some of them, but alternatives quickly emerged.