Streameast, one of the largest sports piracy platforms in the world, has been shut down according to the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), an antipiracy group that counts NBC Universal, Netflix, and Disney among its members.
ACE announced in a statement that it worked alongside Egyptian authorities to shut down the “notorious” platform, and The Athletic reports that after a year-long investigation Egyptian law enforcement carried out a sting on August 24th which disrupted the platform’s streaming infrastructure. ACE claims that Streameast drew more than 1.6 billion visits across 80 domains over the past year, making it “the largest illicit live sports streaming operation in the world.”
The outage has already been noticed by fans over the past week, timed as it was to coincide with the new soccer season in Europe, not that I would know anything about hunting down streams for Premier League games that don’t get televised in the UK. It’s probably also no coincidence that today’s announcement comes the same week the NFL season starts.
It’s not clear how effective the bust has been though — at the time of writing you can find plenty of Streameast sites seemingly alive and well, listing streams for today’s MLB fixtures. ACE told The Athletic that it’s aware of these “copycat” sites and is investigating whether they’re related, or made by Streameast impersonators.
