Big change coming to Amazon Fire Sticks that will block all illegal EFL Championship streaming | OneFootball

A big change is coming that will restrict the practice of illegally streaming EFL Championship matches, but it won't kill the practice off altogether.

A big change is coming to Amazon Firesticks that will end the practice of using them to illegally stream Championship matches, but it won't end the practice altogether.

One of the consequences of live televised football moving to pay-TV in recent years has been a vast increase in the number of people circumventing the need to actually pay to watch. The Premier League, the EFL and even the National League are all tied to deals with broadcasters which are lucrative, but these contracts require people to pay for subscriptions in order to make this method of funding the game viable.

One of the most common ways to get around these paywalls has been to use Amazon Firesticks - devices which plug into the back of a television and allow the streaming of services such as YouTube, Prime Video and BBC Iplayer - in order to do so. But now those days might be coming to an end, on the devices that have become the most popular among those who choose to do so, at least.

The latest generation of Amazon Firesticks will help to prevent the illegal streaming of Championship matches

Ladbible has reported that those who use Firesticks to illegally stream live televised football may no longer be able to do so on Amazon devices. The reason for this is fairly straightforward. Firesticks aren't designed to allow people to illegally stream matches. In order to do so, they have to be "jailbroken." This is a straightforward process which allows users to download install their own software onto them which does allow for the illegal streaming of matches, a process called "side-loading."

But when the latest generation of Firesticks were announced by Amazon last week, one important change to them had been made. From this generation on, owners will no longer be able to jailbreak their Firesticks and download their own software onto them, which will make it impossible to use them to illegally stream matches.

Illegal streaming has long been a game of cat and mouse

As football broadcasting has moved towards online streaming, so the allure of Firesticks has been too much for a lot of fans to resist. There have even been businesses which have been closed down, with those running them sent to prison, for providing the hardware required, but for also running their own streaming services for a relatively small monthly fee. Some of these businesses have been found to be linked to organised crime, including money laundering.

Earlier this year, the Financial Times reported that the use of such devices had gone "through the roof", with Emma Warbey, detective chief inspector and head of the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit at the City of London Police, telling them individual users of these services were highly unlikely to get into trouble over it because police resources were focusing their resources on the providers rather than the end users. One YouGov poll in 2023 found that 9% of those polled had used illegal means to watch streaming sports events in the six months prior to the poll, with 39% of those using a Firestick or similar device to do so.

But vested interests have been applying all the pressure they can for this to change. The concerns of football's governing bodies are obvious. The more people use illegal services to watch matches, the less they pay for the legitimate services, and that could negatively impact the value of broadcasting contracts when they come up for renewal.

The news that Amazon are removing the ability to side-load your own software onto them will be a big blow to those for whom they've become so useful. It remains the case, however, that the illegal streaming of matches will probably continue. The Firestick's days of usefulness to illegal streamers may be coming to an end, but there are plenty of other ways for those are determined to do so, and these may grow in popularity in the months and years to come.

The relationship between broadcasters and illegal streamers has always been a game of cat and mouse, and it's long been the case that the pirates have had the upper hand. Closing this loophole will make illegal streaming more difficult, but it's highly unlikely to cut the practice out altogether.