Sky takes piracy shot at Amazon
February 27, 2025
Sky has accused Amazon of not doing enough to stop piracy of its sports rights via so-called ‘jailbroken’ Fire Sticks.
Sky’s group COO, 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 “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. “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,” added Herm.
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”.
“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,” said Herm.
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