English Premier League launches anti-piracy campaign to deter Hong Kong’s illegal streamers
- The world’s most popular league opened its APAC offices in 2018 to ‘fight piracy’ and ‘support regional broadcast partners’
- A survey concludes 26 per cent of respondents who watch pirated content stopped because they got viruses or malware
The English Premier League launched an anti-piracy initiative in Hong Kong on Sunday in an effort to convince viewers to stop illegally streaming matches ahead of the new campaign.
The league’s inaugural “Boot Out Piracy” campaign, which aims to shed light on the substandard viewer experience and the potential threats of malware and ransomware, was launchedsix days ahead of the start of the 2020-21 season. Local broadcaster Now TV holds the official television and digital broadcasting rights for the coming season.
According to a survey of 1,000 people in Hong Kong, run by London-based research consultancy Populus, 71 per cent of respondents trying to watch football “via illicit means had experienced disruption or unreliability most if not all of the time”, the Premier League said in an official release.
The survey, in December 2019, revealed that 26 per cent of those who had previously watched pirated channels said they stopped doing so after their device became infected by a virus or malware.
Players such as Tottenham Hotspur’s Son Heung-min, Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah and Manchester City’s Raheem Sterling – along with managers such as Manchester United’s Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola and Chelsea’s Frank Lampard – will feature in a forthcoming anti-piracy campaign, also launched in Malaysia and Indonesia, before the league starts. They will focus on the problems that come with illegally streaming matches, which include delays, broken links, pop-up advertisements and other threats that “often lead to data theft and fraud”.
Two online Chinese-language poster campaigns included slogans such as “No need to buffer, no need for huge delays, English Premier League must be watched in high-definition”, and “No need for broken links, no need for illegal links, English Premier League must be watched in high-definition”.