Amazon’s Evil Pirate Fire Stick Survives 18 Months of Free Viral Advertising

Aggressive pricing led to Amazon's Fire TV Stick being installed in millions of homes. By tearing down a key barrier to entry, Amazon hoped to profit from subsequent sales of premium content. Two decades earlier, Jeff Bezos stressed the importance of strong branding to fend off copycats. In 2023, that theory would be put to the test when one of Amazon's strongest brands was dumped in mud, then dragged through it for the next 18 months.

 On a Saturday afternoon when everything runs to plan, the referee blows his whistle and for the next 105 minutes, nothing matters more than this game in this magnificent stadium.

Yet, viewed from almost any other vantage point, top tier professional football faces problems in every direction.

At the Financial Times’ Business of Football Summit on Wednesday, DAZN’s head of global rights Tom Burrows spoke of the sports rights industry “getting to the stage where it’s almost a crisis.” Coming from a company that has already spent billions on TV rights and plans to spend billions more, “crisis” takes a different shape when considering the £8.7 billion deficit in DAZN’s latest set of accounts.

Broadcasting rights are necessary but, as costs cascade from rightsholders to broadcasters and ultimately down to the fans, prohibitively high prices eliminate loyal fans from the top-tier football business equation. At a time of “almost crisis” when the majority of clubs continue to report losses, ideally fans should be traveling in the other direction.

Unsustainable business models have a direct effect on fans’ ability to financially support the game. At clubs around Europe, the cause of today’s crisis is clear, and something on which they all agree: the root of the industry’s woes is rampant online piracy.

What caused piracy to run rampant in the first place is rarely discussed. Fans, on the other hand, consistently cite the same motivations to pirate, year in and year out.

Piracy is Illegal and Simply Has to Stop

Expecting fans to comply with the law is not unreasonable but, since prevention is better than cure, shaping public perceptions in advance is also an option for rightsholders.

In Italy, public awareness campaigns are a legal requirement but, with so many moving parts, whether these efforts make much difference is up for debate. Even if an awareness campaign moved an entire nation to tears, a couple of 30-second videos are no basis for the scale and persistence of change the situation demands.

According to the FT report, the piracy situation in the UK is “not believed to be as bad” as those faced in Spain, Italy, France, and Germany. Sky Group COO Nick Herm nevertheless spoke this week of a “never-ending battle”, while initially declining to put a figure on the cost to the business.

When asked to estimate how much piracy costs the business, Herm said it was difficult to quantify as very few people are willing to admit accessing pirated content. He nevertheless added that “hundreds of millions of dollars” go ‘missing’ from the company’s revenue streams due to piracy.

An estimate in the low hundreds seems to fit the bigger picture. Determining the nature of this ‘gray’ audience would help to separate potential lost sales from the folly of chasing lost causes.

Making Piracy Attractive

From any UK vantage point outside a Premier League stadium mid-Saturday afternoon, matches are unavailable to view live, at any price. The ‘3pm blackout’ is regularly cited as a prime reason for fans turning to illegal streams.

When the Premier League broadcasts 3pm games and every other game in countries including Canada, the prices are significantly lower than those available to fans in the UK, for a more restricted content offering. UK fans clearly have an issue with that, but the bigger question is whether the policy contributes to overall piracy.

When the Premier League denies access to live broadcasts of some of the most significant games, that creates demand for a highly desirable product that doesn’t exist in the UK. This not only acts as an incentive to supply pirated content to an underserved market, but also provides the conditions for profit.

People have spent time in prison in the UK for fulfilling that demand. And since pirate IPTV packages aren’t only available for use on Saturdays, those who ‘beat the blackout’ have zero incentive to maintain any legal package for viewing during the week.

Adjusting Customer Attitudes to Match Terms of Supply

Crafting an awareness campaign to mitigate the Canadian example above would face obvious hurdles, yet with decades of experience, probably not impossible for a company like Sky. The BeStreamWise anti-piracy campaign involving Sky, Premier League, BBC, ITV, DAZN, and others, launched in September 2023.

The campaign’s focus on malware provided no specific advice. With no security vendors on board to add credibility to its claims, any awareness raised seemed limited to the claims, not the underlying threats. None of the threats were publicly named for awareness or avoidance purposes, but it didn’t take long for an innocent sore thumb to stand out as a possible scapegoat.

Throwing the Baby Out With the Bathwater

Amazon’s Fire TV Stick hit the market in 2014 and was soon recognized as the cheapest way to transform an existing dumb TV into something smarter. Amazon was happy to see its competitors’ products competing alongside its own on Fire TV. Streaming market leader Netflix went head-to-head with Prime Video, while Spotify jostled for business against Amazon Music, for example.

Reportedly sold close to cost to maximize sales, Fire TV Sticks lowered the barrier to entry for legal consumption of movies, TV shows, music, and apps.

Yet, in common with most Android-based devices on the market, Fire Sticks were capable of a much more. Since they were comparatively cheap, well-made and in constant supply, Fire Sticks became the go-to device for pirates and non-pirates alike.

At a time when Amazon held the rights to show a limited number of live Premier League matches, and was gifting them to Prime customers for no additional cost, the demonization of ‘firesticks’ stepped up a gear. With plenty of assistance from elements of the UK tabloid media, an entirely legal Amazon product found itself elevated to pirate boogeyman status.

DANGER: LEGAL STREAMING

In what would become a recurring theme, public warnings concerning piracy found themselves coupled with serious but non-specific malware threats. Then by coincidence or design, references to Fire TV Stick-based devices and even Amazon itself became embroiled in the ongoing controversy.

The Importance of Branding

That Amazon’s valuable brand had become synonymous with piracy was countered in some articles with a note that “‘firesticks’ aren’t illegal in their own right” and only jailbreaking is illegal. There has never been a requirement to jailbreak Fire TV Sticks. Sideloading apps from repositories outside Amazon’s ecosystem was always straightforward via a toggle in the device’s menu. And herein lies the problem.

TF became aware of a potential mismatch between rightsholders expectations and Amazon’s right to run its own business over a year ago. In general terms, it was felt that the success of the Fire TV Stick meant that Amazon should consider the positive impact of taking some type of action. A logical assumption might see sideloading prevented, for example, but that would be easily fixed and might also prevent legal use of legal apps.

At the Business of Football Summit on Wednesday, details emerged of why a legal device is considered such a threat, and details of the measures requested and subsequently denied by Amazon.

#1 Threat: Amazon Doesn’t Help, Fans Think Its Funny

Sky Group COO Nick Herm revealed that ‘jailbroken Fire Sticks’ represent the #1 piracy threat in the UK, with Amazon branding playing a leading role.

“The Amazon FireStick is a big problem here,” Herm said. “We think it accounts for about half of the piracy in the UK. People think that because it’s a legitimate brand, it must be OK. So they give their credit card details to criminal gangs. Amazon is not engaging with us as much as we’d like.”

Rightsholders reportedly asked Amazon to prevent sideloading of third party apps or impose restrictions on functionality for software originating from outside its ecosystem. Other problems include customers buying firesticks in bulk, with rightsholders arguing in favor of restrictions on sales.

Other issues may have drawn inspiration from Sky’s anti-piracy awareness and enforcement campaigns in Ireland.

“There are football fans who literally have shirts printed out that say Fire Sticks on them,” Herm said.

Biting the hand that feeds

With fans apparently turning up at games dressed in shirts like these, and even getting snapped on TV, websites appear to be cashing in too.

Perhaps one shouldn’t take these things so seriously, but this is Ireland’s national team strip. The team is sponsored by Sky but clearly its logo has been replaced here for comic effect with limited shelf life. Genuine shirts are available from Sky for just €91, confirming that this is one big joke that isn’t funny at all.

The Finale: Did the Campaign Work and Is Piracy On the Wane?

The answer to both questions is the same: we don’t know.

Mentions of an “almost crisis” and calling out Amazon in public suggest that not enough progress has been made on the piracy front. Whether the BeStreamWise campaign was a success or not, seems to depend on its purpose. If the main goal was to reduce consumption of pirated content, we don’t know.

If the point was to raise awareness, we can’t say for certain either way. The Google Trends chart below shows the popularity of searches for “firesticks” and “malware” during the course of the campaign. While unlikely to provide much insight, these entirely separate searches may offer a surprise. When searches for “firesticks” peak, searches for “malware” have a tendency to reduce at exactly the same time.

Another unexpected outcome is outlined below. Lack of information to support the claims in the BeStreamWise campaign motivated us to find out more about the intersection of piracy and malware. Scores of hours were subsequently spent tearing apart popular and unpopular pirate streaming apps, mostly on Android but some on iOS, to find out if the bare claims made in the campaign are substantially true.

Worse Than Expected

While some apps may be completely benign, nearly all apps randomly tested generated money from ads, and not necessarily good ones. Many apps were wide open to specific exploits so glaring, the question of intent seems more pressing than one of incompetence. Permissions appear to be an area of real concern; broad requests for permission to access deep into user devices should be denied by default, not willingly accepted without a second thought as appears to be the case here.

Other ‘useful’ features discovered include the ability to silently turn on cameras and microphones without alerting the user, while extracting photo albums to servers linked to facial recognition services.

A baked-in capability to do almost anything with users’ devices, wherever and whenever that’s required, may not directly evoke the church scene in Kingsman, but as an awareness campaign, money in the bank.

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