The Digital Citizens Alliance said it wants the U.S. government to investigate how illegal IPTV services are helping Al-Manar, a channel designated a global terrorist entity, to "skirt" a U.S. ban on the service and get into millions of U.S. homes.
That is one of the offshoots of a report DCA released last week with NAGRA, a company that provides legal online video distribution platform services.
DCA said that in the course of putting together the report NAGRA monitored hundreds of pirate IPTV services and found that almost half of them included Al-Manar in their channel lists. Al-Manar was labeled a terrorist organization in 2004 and banned from the U.S. and several European countries.
The report, "Money for Nothing," asserts that illegal piracy in IP subscription services is a billion-dollar business, with an estimated 9 million fixed "subs" using pirated IPTV service from some 3,500 storefront websites, social media pates and online marketplaces. The figure grows even more when the sale of pirate streaming devices is included.
Then there is the extra money pirates get by teaming up with hackers to install malware in the free pirate video apps, the report points out, malware that can lead to theft of personal data, cryptocurrency mining, adware, ransomware, and botnets launching denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.
