The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) called Streameast “the largest illegal sports platform anywhere.”
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“Our global alliance will stay on the field as long as it takes to identify and target the biggest piracy rings across the globe,” ACE chairman Charles Rivkin said in a statement.
Unauthorized attempts to access free streams of sporting events spike each fall with the return of top-level club soccer and the NFL. ACE said site traffic to the affected domains originated primarily in the U.S., as well as Canada, the UK, the Philippines and Germany.
Streameast established a foothold among American fans, frequently cited as an alternative to paid viewership options on fan messaging platforms and social media. In August 2024, individual domains associated with the network were seized by U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, a division of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). However, the network’s operators responded quickly, claiming that Streameast had more than 400 alternative website names it could use for its hosted streams.
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“Our fight will continue until sports become affordable for everyone,” a site administrator posted on Discord soon after last year’s enforcement action. “We promise that once this is achieved, we will permanently shut down all Streameast services.” Late last month, users on X were hopping between Streameast sites hosted in different regions, though often finding little success. Complaints spiked on Thursday and Friday as the college football season got underway.
Occasionally other nefarious actors would create their own webpages with similar domain names. Streameast’s impacted sites now redirect to ACE’s “Watch Legally” information hub, the coalition said.
Two men were arrested outside Cairo on suspicion of copyright infringement on August 24, The Athletic reported. Authorities also found links to more than $6 million in related money.
ACE previously teamed with Egyptian authorities to shut down soccer-focused streaming group Livehd7. Late last year, ACE also claimed to help shut down hundreds of Vietnam-based sites. Consumers of the content rarely face legal consequences.
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“RIP streameast and crackstreams,” one X user posted on Saturday, “you’ll be missed.”
ACE was founded in 2017, bringing together traditional media companies and digital platforms, including Amazon and Netflix, to address piracy occurring around the globe through a mix of civil litigation, collaboration with local law enforcement and coordination with internet platforms. Tech companies and free speech activists previously fought against a 2011 proposal that promised to give U.S. law agencies more power to combat copyright infringement.
Some sporting bodies have more recently urged legislators to improve the tools available to limit the distribution of pirated content. Live games are particularly vulnerable to theft because the content’s value quickly depreciates after an event is over, leaving authorities with a small window to shut down individual broadcasts. The Motion Picture Association hired former FBI official Larissa Knapp in 2024 to help ACE work with law enforcement agencies around the world.
A 2023 study found that 11% of U.S. adults (roughly 23 million) pirated content in the previous year. The NFL says it does not track illegal viewership of its games, though the league believes that new legal avenues to consume its broadcasts—such as direct-to-consumer streaming services, in addition to traditional TV packages—are lowering the reliance on unauthorized methods.
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