Interesting thread. As always there are several sides to it.

I believe cost of living crisis has shot up the popularity of these types of services - many can no longer afford the ever-increasing subscription costs. I have several friendship groups from different areas of my life (school, uni, prior jobs, work) with really mixed demographics and loads of them have these. Loads. If you are a football fan who wants to watch all the televised Premier League and Champions League matches you need subscriptions to Sky Sports, TNT and Amazon Prime. That's best part of £50 a month! For a great many people in the UK that is just too much. That's crazy when we are largely talking about people who work full time. Life is becoming (and has become in some cases) so incredibly joyless when large masses of our population work multiple jobs and still have no time or disposable income to enjoy anything. Even the simple pleasure of watching your team play a match on TV.

Now, if someone offers you a service for £40-60 for a full year, you get all the games, plus 3pm KOs, choice of channels with different pundits, plus full library of TV series and films from all the streaming providers... Very tempting.

Look at the current state of policing and law enforcement in the UK. People can't get the police interested in theft of bikes and vehicles, significant crimes - because they are underpaid, too busy, and not enough of them. Does anyone really believe police officers are en masse visiting people's homes to crack down on them watching telly? There are many stories of people investigating their own cases and gathering evidence for the police in recent years, especially collection of CCTV evidence. Even when that is brought directly to them often the case goes nowhere.

Next up is the media. You'll notice a pattern with these stories - they are typically written as if FACT is a government body with law enforcement powers. It's not. It's basically a cartel set up by TV/streaming companies. The link posted by Wiley has not a single comment from an official source or spokesperson for the police or government. Only from FACT. They only care because it's money out of their pockets - after they've been bleeding customers dry and skyrocketing their own profits for years. There are regularly stories released in the media like this from FACT - if you Google you will see the articles are almost always identical... Funny what happens when the people who run a media company want to push a campaign to frighten people.

No individual in the UK has ever been prosecuted for viewing these types of services. Not one. There have been a handful of people who have been prosecuted for running large operations to deliver the services.

Aside from all that... Even Harry Kane has one!

https://x.com/aaroncikaya/status/176...331138335?s=20

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