You’ll have to just imagine the casino pop-up ads in the middle of a naked bootleg play now. The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) announced yesterday that the largest illegal sports streaming platform, Streameast, is dead…just in time for the NFL 2025 season kickoff today.
It garnered over 1.6 billion visits in the last year and averaged roughly 136 million monthly visits, according to ACE. The coalition said it worked with Egyptian authorities to shut down Streameast and its 80 associated domains:
- The network illegally streamed a huge range of matches and games from Europe’s Premier League and Champions League, as well as those from the NFL, NBA, and MLB.
- Streameast also showed pirated F1 races, MMA fights, and boxing matches.
Authorities raided Streameast’s offices and took three laptops, four smartphones, $123,000 in Visa cards, and roughly $200,000 in crypto wallets.
Maybe you would steal a car. It’s hard to slap a number on just how much digital piracy costs broadcast companies, but one 2025 survey from Brand Finance found that 43% of 14,000 people in 13 countries considered using an unofficial streaming service to watch games. A 2023 study from YouGov found that 11% of adults did actually pirate content in the last year, with about half of them saying they’d done so because the cost was otherwise too high.—MM
This report was originally published by Morning Brew.