Expression – The Daily – Piracy has increased the audience of beIN Sports in Africa

FIFA made a new statement about beoutQ, the pirate TV package that has been offering beIN Sports and other international channels for several months since Saudi Arabia, with impunity. "FIFA observes that the pirate entity beoutQ continues to illegally use the broadcast signal of the FIFA 2018 World Cup. As a result, FIFA has asked its counsel to take legal action in Saudi Arabia and is working in parallel with other affected rights holders to protect its interests. FIFA is urging the authorities of Saudi Arabia and the various countries where these illegal activities have been observed to support the fight against piracy. "FIFA, beIN Sports and the other rights holders, however, seem powerless at what still looks like more to an economic war.
In a study on the hearings of the World, published by Kantar TNS, the company specialized in data analysis media credited beIN Sports with 18% of audience shares on the broadcast of the Cup in some countries of French-speaking Africa. Trouble, the Qatari operator does not even operate in Sub-Saharan French-speaking Africa
In fact, the beIN Sports signal is regularly hacked by unscrupulous operators. In this connection, on July 11, FIFA announced that it had instructed legal counsel in Saudi Arabia to initiate proceedings against beoutQ. The operator hackers for several weeks the signal of beIN Sports.
In sub-Saharan Africa, many pirate decoders decrypting the signal of beIN Sports are also marketed.
If justice is absent in Africa, it is not not in Europe and some operators are legally fighting against piracy. This week, a Swedish court has issued a landmark decision imposing jail terms and fines on the hacker network Advanced TV Network AB (ATN), the largest provider of pirated content in Arabic. The three defendants were tried for various crimes, under the Swedish decoder law, including for violation of the Copyright Act, among other charges, having been sentenced to prison terms ranging from one year to the next. two and a half years, to also pay a total of 18.8 million euros in damages to the InMedia group and 1.4 million euros in damages to Digitalb Sh.A, the two legitimate broadcasters who been victims of piracy. ATN is based in Malmö, Sweden, but also has operations in the United States, Greece, Denmark and Canada. Its activities consist in appropriating the reception and decoding, conditioning and retransmitting television programs to its paying customers. The hacker network has provided its customers with access to illegal hacked feeds of more than 2,000 channels, focusing on channels from the Middle East and Turkey.