Sky accuses Amazon of failing to prevent piracy on Fire Sticks
Sky has accused Amazon of not doing enough to prevent the piracy of its sports rights via “jailbroken” Fire Sticks.
Sky’s group chief operating officer Nick Herm said that illegal viewing of its subscription content, which includes Premier League football, Formula 1 and boxing, was costing “hundreds of millions of dollars” and that “about half” was through manipulated Amazon Fire Sticks.
“People will know you can get jailbroken Fire Sticks and you can access pirated services on them,” he told the FT Business of Football Summit. “There are football fans who literally have shirts printed with ‘dodgy boxes and fire sticks’ on them.
“In addition to telcos, some of the tech giants – Amazon in particular – we do not get enough engagement to address some of those problems where people are buying these devices in bulk, they’re breaking them and sideloading pirated apps on them – and people are just buying them.
“It’s basically organised crime. We work closely with the police. The sums are huge. It’s a battle and you need a lot of people to lean in to solve it.”
Sky’s business model has long depended on subscribers to its live sport and its willingness to pay more than its rivals has helped sustain English football’s envied rights bubble.
It took four of the five packages on offer for the next round of domestic rights to the Premier League, which fetched £6.7bn and covers the period 2025-29.
Jailbroken Fire Sticks ‘half of piracy’ say Sky
Piracy threatens to severely damage the value, however, and sport streaming platform Dazn’s global head of rights Tom Burrows called it “almost a crisis”.
Herm added: “It’s a problem in all of our markets and we dedicate a lot of time to trying to defeat it. It’s a never ending battle because there’s always new technology and forms that emerge that you need to stay across.
“It’s always difficult to put an exact number on it because if you ask people if they pirate or not they’re not always going to be honest with you. When you do analysis there’s plenty of evidence to show that it is sizeable.
“How many of those people would convert to a legitimate service if piracy was no longer available? I don’t know, but we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars – it’s very substantial.”
Asked how much piracy was accessed through doctored Amazon Fire Sticks, he said: “It’s a big percentage – probably about half of the piracy.
“And because it is a Fire Stick people think that it’s a legitimate service. They’re giving credit card details to criminal gangs.”
In response, Amazon said it was “committed to providing customers with a high-quality streaming experience while actively promoting a streaming landscape that respects intellectual property rights and encourages the responsible consumption of content”.
It added: “On Fire TV, we’ve always encouraged our customers to use legal channels for accessing content and have included on-device warnings informing customers of the risks associated with installing or using apps from unknown sources.”