The company has joined global anti-piracy initiatives and backed enforcement. But live sport exposes a harder problem: an illegal stream only has to survive until the final bell.
LONDON – DAZN does not need another lecture about piracy. The company already knows how serious the problem is. It joined the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment in 2023. It helped establish a dedicated Sports Piracy Task Force. Its chief executive, Shay Segev, publicly described live-sports piracy as an industry problem that required a global, coordinated response.
The difficult question is no longer whether DAZN understands the threat. It is whether the company can stop illegal distribution fast enough to protect the commercial value of a live event.
That distinction will matter again on Saturday, when Moses Itauma faces Filip Hrgovic in London for the vacant IBF heavyweight title. DAZN is offering the fight as a pay-per-view event. It is exactly the type of premium product for which exclusivity matters most and exactly the type of event that illegal IPTV networks want.
Live sport is economically unforgiving. A film can continue earning money for years. A boxing pay-per-view may derive most of its value from a window measured in hours. The pirates understand this. They do not need to build a permanent legal alternative to DAZN. They only need the stream to remain available while viewers still care about the result.
Real-Time Disruption Is Possible
That changes the standard by which anti-piracy operations should be judged. If an illegal service is closed a month after a fight, law enforcement may have scored a success. But the broadcaster has not recovered the customers who watched that fight without paying. In commercial terms, the intervention came after the decisive moment.
DAZN’s own leadership has acknowledged the need for effective action. When the company joined ACE in May 2023, Segev said intellectual-property theft involving live sport harmed the industry and fans and required a global concerted effort. His comment was not a vague corporate statement: it was made while DAZN was helping launch a task force specifically designed to disrupt and shut down sports-piracy operations. That makes the present question sharper, not softer. DAZN has identified the problem. It has joined the organizations. It has backed enforcement. What results can it produce during the event itself?
Italy shows why that question is reasonable. In December 2023, prosecutors and police announced an operation that immediately interrupted illegal IPTV and live-streaming flows carrying content from DAZN and other major platforms. Twenty-one people were investigated. Authorities described an organized transnational network generating millions of euros in monthly profits.
The following year, Italy’s Piracy Shield system demonstrated the potential scale of rapid blocking. La Repubblica reported that more than 1,000 illegal sources were blocked during one Serie A round alone. None of this means piracy has been solved. Operators replace domains, infrastructure moves and new distribution channels emerge. Every successful block can produce a new workaround. But it does destroy one convenient argument: that meaningful real-time disruption is impossible. It is possible. The remaining argument is about consistency, speed and scale.
The Metrics That Matter
DAZN should therefore be able to answer a basic set of questions after every major pay-per-view event. How many unauthorized streams were identified? What was the median detection time? How many were interrupted while the event was still live? How many source subscriptions were traced? How much illegal audience was actually displaced?
Those numbers would provide a more useful measure of anti-piracy effectiveness than the number of websites closed months later. This is not a demand for a piracy-free internet. It is a demand for measurable performance around an asset for which broadcasters and rights holders spend enormous sums.
The issue also goes beyond DAZN. Sky, Amazon, football leagues, fight promoters and every major sports platform face the same structural problem. The difference is that DAZN has made piracy part of its public agenda. Its chief executive has already called for effective programs of action. The standard is therefore the one the company helped set for itself.
Can DAZN make piracy materially harder while its most valuable content is still live? If the answer is yes, it should show the results. If the answer is no, rights holders and paying subscribers deserve to know why. Because for a live event, tomorrow’s takedown can still mean tonight’s pirates won.
Sources
- DAZN, Moses Itauma vs Filip Hrgovic PPV FAQs, August 2026
- DAZN Group, ACE Launches Sports Piracy Task Force, Welcomes DAZN as Newest Member, May 8, 2023
- La Repubblica, Pirateria, per il pezzotto 21 indagati…, December 19, 2023
- La Repubblica, Capitanio (AgCom): Il calcio dei pirati oscurato in 30 minuti, March 8, 2023
- La Repubblica, Pirateria, scudo Agcom esordisce anche in Champions e nel basket, February 15, 2024
