People who stream games illegally on their Amazon Fire Stick may face a lot of trouble. The tech giant aims to crack down on people using the Fire Stick for that purpose.
athletic, which is a part of new York Times, Reported on the news as part of a podcast on illegal streaming. The Athletic worked with YouGov Sport and found that approx. 4.7 million adults watched illegal streams In the UK alone, and the Fire Stick was a common tool in that effort. Previous versions of the Fire Stick used open developer software, meaning users could side-load illegal streaming platforms and play those streams on their television.
Amazon told The Athletic that its latest version of the Fire Stick will crack down on piracy through a new operating system and the inability to load apps that aren’t in Amazon’s store.
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Why is this such a big deal? Because sports streaming involves huge sums of money. In an age where our attention is as divided as ever, sports is the closest we have to monoculture. Take the NFL in America, for example. Every single one of the top 10 most watched telecasts last year was an NFL game. And NFL games were 32 of the top 50.
So, as we’ve covered in depth at Mashable, broadcasters get ahead of themselves by paying billions of dollars to buy a piece of the NFL’s broadcast offerings. This is so bifurcated that it will cost a user at least $810.86 to watch each game. Illegal streams would, at least in theory, devalue that very expensive product. But now it has become even more difficult to access those illegal streams.