Iniquitous Cord-Cutting: An Analysis of Infringing IPTV Services

Large scale, subscription based, Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) media piracy is occurring despite current copy-right enforcement efforts. Cybercriminals are abusing legitimate services to setup and maintain illegitimate business operations offering pirated media content on a subscription basis. Due to the underground aspect of these pirated IPTV operations, these services are not well understood and so current enforcement action against them appear to not be effective. In this paper, we empirically measure the network infrastructure, payment, and order intermediary services that are used by a subset of the infringing IPTV ecosystem. We demonstrate how the measurements we make in this paper give insight into the business behind subscription based pirated media. Lastly, we show how these measurements can lead to potentially more informed policy decisions and intervention measures against subscription based IPTV piracy.