Amazon has confirmed that it’s going to clamp down on and put a permanent stop to all piracy on its Fire TV streaming sticks, having come in for heavy criticism for doing very little about it previously.
A spokesperson for the company told The Athletic that it has already begun blocking apps used for pirated TV streams, including live sports, movies and TV shows. It has started in Germany and France, and will roll out the same policy to other countries soon, it said.
According to the spokesperson, Amazon has always worked hard to block piracy apps from its own app store, but they conceded it has done very little about third-party applications in the past. But that is changing.
“We’ll now block apps identified as providing access to pirated content, including those downloaded from outside our app store,” the spokesperson said. “This builds on our ongoing efforts to support creators and protect customers, as piracy can also expose users to malware, viruses and fraud,"
Amazon’s new effort to combat piracy appears to be the result of heavy pressure faced by the company over its previously lax stance on the problem. Earlier this year, the analyst firm Enders Analysis published a report that launched a scathing attack on Amazon, along with Google and Microsoft. It called out Amazon’s Fire TV devices as a “facilitator” of piracy.
The company’s Fire TV sticks have become one of the main channels for pirated content, with some companies preloading them with apps that provide access to illegal content streams and advertising the fact that they allow users to watch live sports and the latest Hollywood blockbusters free of charge.
The Athletic said that in the U.K., Amazon’s Fire TV devices are responsible for more than 30% of all pirated content watched in the country.
While those who view pirated content do so because it’s free, experts warn that they could pay for it in other ways, due to the lack of security on these “jailbroken” devices. Many of the security features of the Fire TV platform are disabled to enable the pirated applications to run on them, potentially exposing users to hackers.
It’s not clear exactly how Amazon intends to block the third-party piracy apps from running on Fire TV devices, but some newer devices won’t be able to sideload any apps at all. Last month, Amazon revealed its transitioning the Fire TV platform away from the underlying Android operating system to a brand new foundation, known as VegaOS, which prevents users from downloading any application that’s not available through the company’s official app store.
