More than one million visits from Ireland each day are being made to websites offering pirated TV, film and sport, according to new data that highlights the scale of illegal streaming activity.
The figures were provided to RTÉ by piracy monitoring and content‑protection firm MUSO, whose piracy tracking data is used by the European Union Intellectual Property Office and other public bodies to monitor online copyright infringement.
Since 2017, almost four billion visits originating in Ireland to piracy-related domains have been recorded, with activity peaking in 2023 at 554 million visits.
That level of traffic is equivalent to around two visits a week for every internet user in Ireland — on average.
A visit refers to a single instance of a user accessing a piracy-related website, with repeat visits counted separately.
MUSO says the data it compiled shows there has been a change in trends in Ireland in recent years.
Visits to piracy websites fell steadily between 2017 and 2020, before dropping more sharply during the pandemic, when the release of new films and television content slowed.
As new releases returned and new platforms like Disney+ and Apple TV entered the Irish market, piracy levels rebounded in the years that followed.
While overall traffic peaked in 2023, the most recent figures suggest piracy activity has stabilised at a level above pre-pandemic norms.
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The majority of piracy-related traffic relates to television content, which accounted for 2.3 billion visits over the period analysed. Publishing content accounted for 647 million visits, with music and software making up smaller shares.
Breaking the television category down further, around 71% of visits relate to films and TV shows, while anime accounts for over 14%. Live sport, though a smaller share overall, accounts for more than one in ten visits, or 12%.
According to the analysis, the most accessed TV title in 2025 was the second season of the anime series Solo Leveling, while the most pirated film was Sinners, starring Michael B Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld and Jack O’Connell.
Sinners, starring Michael B. Jordan, was the most pirated film in Ireland in 2025
Why piracy persists
Taken together, the figures point to a level of piracy activity that has remained consistently high, even as the legal streaming market has continued to expand.
Dr Margaret Samahita, a behavioural economist at University College Dublin, points to a combination of rising costs, market fragmentation and low perceived risk for users as key factors behind the use of pirated content services.
“There’s now an increasing number of streaming platforms available. And while on paper this seems like a good thing, in reality, it just means that the market is becoming more fragmented,” Dr Samahita said.
“From a purely economic perspective, illegal streaming is a rational and value-maximising response to a market that’s become too expensive and too complicated,” she added.
Beyond cost and complexity, Dr Samahita says three behavioural factors also play a significant role in shaping how people think about illegal streaming.
“The first one is that the benefits are immediate and salient, so free content right now, while the costs are quite abstract and distant. There’s the social element as well – when you know that everyone else is doing it, the moral boundaries start to blur,” Dr Samahita said.
“The fairness element might be the biggest driver. People might not see it as stealing in the traditional sense, but rather as correcting an imbalance. They might feel like they’re being charged unfairly high prices for something like watching sport, and so illegal streaming feels justified.”
Dr Margaret Samahita is Assistant Professor at the School of Economics in UCD
Dodgy boxes
Those dynamics are particularly visible in the emergence of so-called ‘dodgy boxes’ — internet-connected devices and apps that provide access to pirated television channels and live sport, often through low-cost subscription services.
Dodgy boxes, also known as IPTV services, are typically sold online through social media or messaging apps and are designed to mimic legitimate streaming platforms. While they appear similar to legal services, the content they provide is pirated.
Dodgy boxes are designed to appear similar to legal services
Groups promoting the sale of the devices advertise special offers, customer support and other features intended to make the services appear legitimate and easy to use.
While precise figures on the number of people using illegal IPTV services are difficult to quantify, the volume of traffic to piracy websites suggests the practice is widespread.
The devices typically rely on the same piracy websites and servers tracked in the MUSO data, meaning their use is reflected in overall traffic figures.
Jimmy Doyle, the CEO and founder of streaming service Clubber, estimates the practice is costing his business a substantial share of its potential revenue.
Clubber broadcasts live coverage of more than 1,500 club GAA matches each year, as well as selected swimming events and club-level soccer and rugby fixtures in the UK.
“We’re conservatively thinking that we’re in the 40% range [of potential revenue] right now. That’s into, certainly, hundreds of thousands of people in this country,” Mr Doyle said.
He notes his service has been made available illegally by IPTV distributors, undermining subscription income relied on to fund production and coverage.
“I’m a small business trying to get off the ground. We rely on the income that we get from subscribers to ultimately keep the service going. We have to pay the commentators and the videographers to actually deliver the games for us,” Mr Doyle said.
“If we can get to 50 or 60 people who are willing to pay for a game, it covers our core costs. And so if people want that to continue, they have to think hard about, is it fair or not to actually pay us? Because if they don’t, we can’t sustain it and we can’t continue to deliver the service,” he added.
Jimmy Doyle, the CEO and founder of streaming service Clubber
Industry response
While Clubber operates at one end of the market, major broadcasters and rights-holders say piracy is no longer a fringe issue, but a system that is draining revenue from the industry as a whole.
One group representing many of those broadcasters, including Sky, DAZN and the Premier League, is the Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance (AAPA).
“What the pirates are doing is actually stealing someone’s property,” Miruna Herovanu, the AAPA’s Executive Director told RTÉ.
“We made a study that said that 17 million Europeans use illegal IPTV monthly. These numbers translate into, for example, in Germany, the losses to the industry were €1.8 billion in 2022,” Ms Herovanu added.
“They [consumers] think it’s a victimless crime, that they’re stealing from the rich. They’re consuming stolen content and they’re consuming it at the price of the same content they’re consuming because there needs to be investment in premium content.”
Miruna Herovanu, the AAPA’s Executive Director
Shadow consumption
Despite industry warnings about the scale of losses and other risk factors, UCD’s Dr Samahita says many users continue to justify illegal streaming on the basis of convenience and rising costs.
“There are more subscriptions, different rights and regulations and people get subscription fatigue. They get tired of managing all the logins, all the bills and decisions. For them, shadow consumption might make sense,” Dr Samahita said.
Shadow consumption refers to the use of goods or services outside the legal market, where demand exists but is met through informal or illegal channels.
“We’re living under a cost-of-living crisis. For many, discretionary spending like entertainment is one of the easiest things to cut. Many people still want to watch their favourite TV shows and see live sports as a right rather than a luxury. Instead of watching less as prices rise, they’re going to try and look for alternatives, potentially illegal ones,” Dr Samahita added.
‘Wake-up call’
For Mr Doyle and Clubber, the question is not whether people understand the legal arguments around piracy, but whether smaller services can survive if shadow consumption continues to grow.
“Like any business out there, you need to be able to keep revenue coming in in order to keep the costs going. Otherwise, you run out of business,” he said.
In recent weeks, Mr Doyle said efforts to counter piracy have included deliberately posting streams of older games that were subsequently picked up by illegal IPTV services. He said the move was intended to disrupt pirated feeds – but it also prompted a backlash.
Mr Doyle said he received phone calls from people using dodgy boxes, complaining that they were no longer able to access the correct games.
“The amount of activity we got on was pretty significant in terms of people ultimately calling us out and asking us, in fairly colourful language, what’s going on in our service. We obviously had the correct game going to all our subscribers,” Mr Doyle said.
“That amount of noise was a bit of a wake up call to us to realise that just how many people are actually accessing the games from illegal sites.”
A report from Jack McCarron and Aaron Heffernan on piracy and illegal streaming is broadcast on the 13 January edition of Prime Time at 9.35pm on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player.