A damning report by Enders Analysis has called on big tech companies to crack down on piracy issues.
The research, written by Gareth Sutcliffe and Ollie Meir, says that Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are all enabling “industry scale theft” of video services.
According to the report, the sports broadcasting industry is the biggest contributor to this issue. That’s because it is becoming more and more expensive to access legally.
Much of the piracy can be attributed to users buying illegal Amazon Fire TV Sticks sold via Meta’s platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp.
According to data for the first quarter of this year, provided to Enders by Sky, 59 per cent of people in the UK who admitted to watching pirated material in the last year while using a physical device said they had used a Amazon Fire product.
But illegal streaming sticks are not the only problem here.
Fire TV Sticks can run sideloaded Android apps, as the Fire TV operating system is based on Android; so users can install apps not found in the official app stores.
This is also possible on Android TV and Google TV devices.
The research adds: “Big tech is both friend and foe in solving the piracy problem. Conflicting incentives harm consumer safety by providing easy discovery of illegal pirated services, and reduced friction through low-cost hardware such as the Amazon Firestick.”
An Amazon spokesperson told the BBC: "Pirated content violates our policies regarding intellectual property rights, and compromises the security and privacy of our customers."
The company has made changes to its Fire devices to make it harder for people to stream pirated content, they added.
Another development that could improve the problem is Amazon's promise to switch to its in-house Vega OS for Fire TV Sticks. This transition will require developers to rebuild all apps and would stop the ability to sideload Android apps.
Google and Microsoft are also in the firing line of the report, which says that the Digital Rights Management solutions provided by the companies “are in steep decline”.
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