More than half of the people illegally streaming TV in Britain do it on social media. More than twice as many as are using a dodgy Firestick or a paid illegal subscription.
That’s one of the findings in new research published today by BeStreamWise, the cross-industry campaign against illegal streaming, which puts the number of UK adults who’ve watched something illegally in the past three months at 16.8 million. Almost one in three of us. Nearly half of them do it every single week.
And the numbers underneath that get more surprising. This isn’t really a football story at all, it turns out, with far more illegal streamers watching drama and comedy than live sport.
More than four in ten of them agree that what they’re doing is ethically wrong. Over half of those say they’re going to carry on doing it anyway.
And the household most likely to be streaming illegally in Britain isn’t a student flat. It’s one with young children in it.
Almost One In Three, And Nearly Half Of Them Weekly
The report is called The Price of Piracy, and its prevalence figure comes from a poll of 2,501 UK consumers carried out by JL Partners between February 3 and February 11 this year.
It was commissioned by BeStreamWise, a campaign whose partners include Sky, FACT and other broadcasters, film bodies and sports rightsholders, and written up by the consultancy WPI Economics.
It found 31% of UK adults had used illegal streaming in the previous three months. Of those, 27% had illegally accessed films and TV shows, and 18% had illegally accessed live sport.
Nor is this occasional behaviour. Among people who stream illegally, 76% do it at least once a month, and 46% do it weekly.
For nearly half of that 16.8 million, an unofficial stream is just part of the normal weekly TV routine, not an emergency measure when the football’s on a channel they don’t have.
For context, the last time I looked at UK piracy numbers it was through the government’s own Online Copyright Infringement Tracker, which put overall infringement at 29% in 2024 and live sports piracy at a record 38%.
The two studies use different samples, age ranges and definitions, so it’s not a clean year-on-year comparison. But nobody’s finding that the problem is shrinking.
It’s Not The Dodgy Firestick Any More
Asked how they access illegal content, a clear majority of illegal streamers – 54% – said social media platforms. Only 26% said purchased devices and illegal subscription services.
Unofficial websites accounted for 28%, torrents and cloud sharing 15%, and buying logins or passwords for legal services just 7%.
That ordering is almost exactly the reverse of where the UK’s anti-piracy effort has spent the last two years.
If you’ve followed this story at all, you’ll know the shape of it. The “dodgy Firestick” – a normal Amazon Fire TV Stick with unofficial apps sideloaded onto it, sold on an online marketplace as “fully loaded” or “jailbroken” – became the public face of British piracy.
Sideloading just means installing an app from outside the official store, and for years Fire TV allowed it.
IPTV means television delivered over the internet rather than through an aerial or a dish – Netflix and iPlayer are IPTV too. There’s nothing illegal about the technology itself.
What makes it piracy is the content being pushed through it, and that content doesn’t care whether it arrives via a modified Firestick or a clip embedded in a social media post.
Sky’s chief operating officer claimed in February 2025 that Fire TV Sticks accounted for “probably about half” of Premier League piracy in the UK. What followed was a sustained campaign against that one device.
Amazon started blocking known piracy apps across all Fire TV devices, working with the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, a coalition of more than 50 entertainment companies including Netflix, Disney, Sky and the Premier League.
It then launched its new Vega operating system and confirmed its latest sticks wouldn’t support sideloading at all. FACT, meanwhile, emailed and texted more than 1,000 named individuals, warning them to stop or face prosecution.
But now we find out that all of that targeted a route roughly a quarter of illegal streamers use. The biggest single route, used by more than half of them, is scrolling past a pirated stream on a social network.
The report is fairly blunt about why that gap exists. Buying a modified box feels illegal, because you have to go looking for it and hand over money.
Watching a match on a social platform doesn’t feel illegal at all, because it looks exactly like everything else you do on that app. As the authors put it, some methods “may not feel illegal to the user – even though they are – because they are similar to their regular behaviours.”
To be fair to the crackdown, the 26% buying devices and subscriptions are the commercially serious end of this. The report says 28% of active illegal streamers pay for access, generating around £1.2 billion a year that flows straight to the people selling it.
Shutting that down matters. But if the goal is reducing how many people watch pirated content, we may have spent two years guarding the wrong door.
It’s Not Really About Football Either
The second assumption the report takes apart is that this is a sports problem.
Almost nine in ten illegal streamers – 88% – illegally stream films and TV shows. Only 60% illegally stream live sport. Television shows are the single most pirated category at 72%, with films right behind at 69%.
Break the TV numbers down and it gets less dramatic still. Among people pirating television, 56% are watching drama and 52% are watching comedy and entertainment. Reality TV is 34%, documentaries 32%.
There’s a clear split by gender, too. Women who stream illegally are considerably more likely to pirate drama than men are – 62% against 44% – while men are far more likely to pirate sport, at 63% against 26%.
Football does dominate the sports side, with 91% of people who pirate sport watching it, followed by boxing at 40%, Formula 1 at 36% and tennis at 34%.
But sport is the smaller half of this story, and the public conversation around it has been shaped almost entirely by the Premier League’s enforcement budget rather than by what most people are actually watching.
Young Adults, And A Lot Of Parents
Age works roughly as you’d guess. Just over half of 18 to 24 year olds – 51% – are active illegal streamers, dropping to 15% of 55 to 64 year olds and 11% of over-65s.
The gender gap is small: 29% of men against 25% of women.
Then there’s the number that stands out. Two in five people with children aged 10 or under in the household – 40% – reported streaming illegally, against just 23% of households with no children at all.
The households most likely to be streaming illegally in Britain are the ones with young kids in them.
They Know It’s Wrong. They’re Doing It Anyway.
The attitude data is the most uncomfortable part of the report, and it’s where the campaign’s own strategy runs into trouble.
Unsurprisingly, 73% of people who don’t stream illegally think it’s ethically wrong. Rather more surprisingly, 42% of the people who do stream illegally also think it’s ethically wrong.
And more than half of that 42% say they’re likely to carry on anyway. Across all active illegal streamers, 52% say they’ll keep going.
So this isn’t a problem of people not knowing. Roughly four in ten already agree with the moral argument, and it isn’t changing what they do on a Tuesday night.
What they offer instead is mostly price. The most common justification, at 38%, was simply that illegal streaming is cheaper.
Convenience came second at 31%, wanting to avoid subscriptions third at 24%, and difficulty accessing certain content in the UK fourth at 15%.
That lands in a particular month. Netflix put the price of every UK plan up at the start of September, with Standard with Ads jumping from £5.99 to £7.99 and Premium going from £18.99 to £20.99. Paramount+ raised its UK prices across all tiers in August.
The polling for this report was done back in February, before either of those landed – but streaming price increases are an annual habit now.
What It Costs The People Doing It
If the ethical argument isn’t working, the report’s own data suggests a more persuasive one. This is also the section worth forwarding to anyone in your house who’s tempted.
More than a third of illegal streamers – 37% – said they’d been exposed to negative or dangerous content through it. That breaks down as 30% exposed to malware, viruses and pop-up ads, and 11% exposed to content they considered inappropriate.
WPI estimates UK consumers lose £270 million a year to scams, theft and identity theft connected to illegal streaming, with individual losses in the research running up to £5,000.
One case study describes a football fan who upgraded an unofficial streaming service through PayPal, then had £2,500 taken from his account in unauthorised transactions.
None of this will be new to anyone who’s followed this area – Amazon’s Fire TV boss made much the same point about malware earlier this year.
But it bears repeating, because the security risk is the argument people respond to, while “you’re hurting the industry” is the one four in ten of them already accept and ignore.
What It Costs Everyone Else
The number BeStreamWise is leading on is £1.35 billion. That’s WPI’s central estimate of what illegal streaming costs the UK economy in lost revenue every year, split into £700 million from live sport and £653 million from film and TV.
WPI models that as 10,400 fewer jobs across the economy, 4,200 of them in broadcasting and media production, plus £366 million a year in tax the Exchequer never sees.
The report then converts that tax figure into the sort of comparisons designed for a front page: 9,400 NHS nurses, 10,100 Police Community Support Officers, 140 million free school meals.
It’s worth being clear-eyed about what that number is, though. It’s a modelled estimate built on survey answers, not a measured loss, and the authors themselves describe it as “at least” £1.35 billion.
It also rests on the assumption that a meaningful chunk of people who stream illegally would pay for the same content if they couldn’t – which is not necessarily the case.
Matt Hibbert, Group Director Anti-Piracy at Sky, said the report “shows the scale of what is being lost to piracy and why Government and industry need to work together to protect British creativity, jobs and consumers.”
What Happens Next
BeStreamWise wants two things from government. The first is for official channels to amplify consumer awareness campaigns about the risks of piracy.
The second is a voluntary, cross-sector framework committing platforms, connectivity providers and content services to work together on cutting the availability of illegal streams.
That word “platforms” is doing some quiet work, given what the report found about social media.
The campaign does have one number on its side. Asked whether a government-backed strategy that made illegal content harder to find would change their behaviour, 34% of active illegal streamers said they’d be likely to stop.
That’s a third of them. Set against the 52% who say they’re carrying on regardless, it’s either an encouraging sign or a measure of how much ground there is to make up, depending on how your week is going.
Nick Sumner, Investigations Manager at FACT, said the figures show “just how serious illegal streaming is”, adding that anyone buying access to loaded Firesticks or similar subscriptions can face criminal prosecution in the UK. That’s still true, and the sentences handed down in recent years haven’t been trivial.
But the report’s own numbers suggest the harder problem isn’t the bloke selling boxes at a car boot sale. It’s the 54% who aren’t buying anything from anyone, and who mostly don’t think of what they’re doing as a crime at all.
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No mention is made of those who paid for digital download copies of films/tv shows and found their digital libraries were wiped after reorganisation of the provider, being told that having paid for their digital copy they did not own it, therefore if paying for a copy doesn’t mean you own it then piracy isn’t stealing.
what their not telling you is the benefits of piracy to everyone, piracy keeps the cost down to us all, if the capitalists could exclude piracy they would put prices up, as it is the alternative preference for piracy is factored into the cost of the product, the higher the cost, the more of us would prefer to pirate content
so what these figures are really telling us is there is massive dissatisfaction with the cost of content, probably because the profits are already seen as massively excessive
Global piracy dropped to all time low when Netflix first came out. Because it was convenient.
There have already been other articles about this. It’s all about what is the most convenient.
When Netflix had everything in one place it became more convenient than piracy.
Then Disney, HBO, Apple, Amazon etc decided they wanted a piece of the pie and pulled all their licences back.
When once you could get everything you ever wanted on Netflix for 9.99 a month. Now you would have to pay over 100 a month to get all the streaming services.
So piracy levels rose again. As others have said .. it’s all because of corporate greed.
If the content was available all in one affordable place, then piracy levels would take a nosedive again as they did before. People want convenience and reasonable cost. They won’t tolerate being abused and ripped off.
Exactly. Well said
For the consumer there are two main problems:
1) the cost to access legal content, which increases unjustified every year
2) legal content is spread across multiple providers. This leads to increased costs for the consumer.
Consumers need one platform at a lower cost without annual price hikes. Illegal streaming meets the consumers needs. The industry has forgotten about the consumer
The companies are factoring in these illegal viewers into their advertising figures.
They companies that advertise do not care if a viewer is legal or illegal.
They just want their audience to see the advertisements and therefore buy the products
Maybe it’s time people stopped boasting about what they’ve been doing on these surveys.
It just brings a whole new set of laws and regulations down on everybody’s heads, as if we haven’t got enough already.
Here’s the thing, once upon a time, Netflix had just about every show you could want, without ads, and for a reasonable price. Piracy fell. I hung up my tricorn hat I’m that period too.
Then the cable companies decided that they were pulling all their shows to their own platforms, and charging the same as Netflix but for a fraction of the content. Then everyone started putting ads in. And the price went up. Then the price rose again. And again.
So naturally, consumers said “no thank you” and hoisted the flag once more, except it’s not just those of us who were teenage pirates, we’ve grown up and know what to do, as have our kids.
The companies are cutting their own throats through planned enshittification, and they don’t like that consumers are ditching them, so they force out scare stories.
If Sky had kept sports prices sensible and distributed money fairly to leagues too, people wouldn’t mind paying, but it’s astronomical, and it all flows one way. To tax dodging multinational corporations.
Hoist that flag chaps!
Too many providers.
Inconvenience to have a box and an input under the tv for each one.
Most of the tv stolen or not is still crap.
No move on after 4k in terms of quality.
And above all price in an underreported financial crisis that western governments seem to have no answer.
One plus point. The local park don’t charge yet to walk the dog.
Hear hear
It’s dreadful. These poor Premier league players could get a decent wage if people weren’t pirating! People expect these poor guys to pay all their household bills on 150 grand a week! Poor things.
The reason piracy plummeted was because cheap all-in-one streaming services arrived. Now you have to have 10 subscriptions to separate services to watch everything that you used to watch on one service like Netflix, but because all the movie and TV companies are greedy bastąrds and went and pulled all their content from Netflix and Amazon to put on their own streaming services, piracy has now increased to more than it was before because nobody wants to pay that much for what they had before.
I’d pay £20 a month for Netflix if it contained everything I want to watch from Sony, Disney, Paramount, MGM+, WBMax, Peacock in one place. I’m certainly not going to pay £60+ for all these services just to watch one series on each of them.
The more they increase the prices and divide the content, the more eyepatches, peg-legs and tricorn hats there are going to be.
100%!
Good luck getting that genie back in the bottle. Just look how well governments stopped torrents, and the control they have over the ‘dark web’, man I hate that phrase.
The absolute trash that media companies put out as entertainment these days no wonder people aren’t willing pay well over £100 a month to access a couple shows they watch.
“Lost tax revenue”
Netflix paid £15M in taxes to the UK last year on revenue of £1.8B made in the UK.
The reason people feel its morally wrong but are willing to continue doing it is because the big corporations are stealing from the public everyday. People are sick of them not paying taxes and trying to milk every last penny from them. It’s not surprising that families are the most likely to do it since they’re most likely to have less disposable income.
Why would tbey pay for a
tv licience the crap that they are showing on tv is absurd all repeats from 20 years ago and tbey keep putgjng the tv licience up to watch compkete rubbish on tv
No wonder people are doing it
They zbould be ashamed of them selfs for makeing people pay to watch complete garbage
The industry figures assume that those pirating would otherwise pay for their content. In many, if not all, cases it’s likely they wouldn’t have paid at all, and just gone without watching the content. Perhaps the industry should be asking if their product is actually valuable to the public.
Sky, Netflix etc.. charging crazy prices, then you wonder why people go down the dodgy stick road!
If they cut their prices and change packages to suit viewers, alot would probably go back to them!
But as times are hard for most, so people will take the gamble of the cheaper dodgy sticks, no brainer!!
People wouldn’t be doing it at all if the TV license charge wasn’t so excessive and mainstream sports too costly. It’s their own greed working against them. Cry me a river.
You cannot seriously be suggesting that piracy is on the increase because of TVL cost??
If that was the case people would just use iPlayer without getting TVL.
You need a TV licence to watch iPlayer.
You need a TVL to watch iplayer anyway
Going after the firestick users is however likely more lucrative than the social medoa viewers as those users have at least shown intent to pay money for service, meaning a percentage might actually divert cash if thwarted. The social media users…. good luck on that one.
you had me until you mentioned nhs nurses, police and school meals 🤦 lets face it this government don’t give a single t*ss about any of them…
The UKs lost economy? I don’t stream illegally but I can certainly see why people do if those amounts are lost. Clearly this is about greed. Not on the part of illegal streamers. Those figures clearly show the greed of the people who would be making all that money. I’d say it’s like everything else, if you charge less, people buy more. If you are constantly ripping people off then they’ll look for alternatives.
“Home taping is killing music.”
Well somethings killed it!