As Gulf markets invest heavily in premium sport, the ability to defend live rights in real time is becoming part of the value proposition—not an afterthought.
ABU DHABI / LONDON — When Moses Itauma and Filip Hrgovic meet in London on Saturday for the vacant IBF heavyweight title, DAZN will be selling something whose commercial value is unusually fragile: a few hours of exclusivity. The fight is being offered by DAZN as a pay-per-view event in several markets. For the broadcaster, the proposition is straightforward. It acquires or distributes premium rights, provides the production and platform, and asks viewers to pay for legitimate access.
For illegal IPTV operators, the economics are very different. They do not need to finance the rights. They only need to capture the signal and keep an unauthorized stream available long enough for the event to finish. That imbalance has turned live-sports piracy into more than a copyright dispute. It is increasingly a question about whether broadcasters can protect the economic value of the rights they buy.
This matters well beyond Europe. The Gulf has become one of the most ambitious sports markets in the world. Rights holders, leagues, promoters, broadcasters and investors increasingly operate across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the wider MENA region. As those investments grow, so does the importance of effective digital rights protection.
DAZN Has Already Acknowledged the Threat
DAZN is not new to the problem. In 2023, it joined the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment and helped launch the ACE Sports Piracy Task Force. At the time, DAZN Group chief executive Shay Segev said the theft of live-sports intellectual property was an industry-wide issue requiring a global and coordinated response. He described ACE as the natural home for the task force because of its record and experience in delivering effective programs of action.
That statement provides an important benchmark. DAZN’s leadership has publicly recognized both the scale of the problem and the need for effective enforcement. The question now is what “effective” means when the product is live.
A successful takedown weeks after a boxing match may remove an illegal service from the market. It does not recover the pay-per-view purchases that were lost while the fight was happening. For live sport, speed is not one metric among many. It is the central metric.
Italy Shows What Rapid Intervention Can Look Like
Italy offers a useful case study. In December 2023, an operation coordinated by prosecutors in Catania and Italy’s postal police led to 21 people being investigated and the immediate interruption of illegal IPTV and live-streaming flows distributing content from platforms including DAZN, Sky, Mediaset, Amazon Prime and Netflix. Italian authorities described a structured transnational organization earning millions of euros per month.
Italy then moved further toward real-time enforcement. The Piracy Shield system was designed to enable rapid blocking of illegal sports streams. La Repubblica reported in February 2024 that 1,019 illegal sources had been blocked during a Serie A round, with more than 100,000 households losing access to those unauthorized broadcasts.
Those examples matter because they demonstrate that large-scale disruption is possible. They do not prove piracy can be eliminated. No credible broadcaster can make that promise. But they do show that the difference between passive enforcement and rapid intervention can be substantial.
The Question Is Now Operational
For DAZN, therefore, the issue is no longer whether piracy exists or whether the company opposes it. Both are established.
The relevant questions are operational. How quickly are unauthorized streams detected? How rapidly can source accounts be identified? How many illegal distribution points are interrupted before an event ends? What proportion of the pirate audience is displaced back toward legitimate access?
Those are the metrics rights holders increasingly have reason to ask for. They are also metrics that matter to markets such as the UAE, where the value of global sports properties is rising and where rights protection is becoming part of the infrastructure surrounding premium events.
The industry’s traditional anti-piracy narrative has focused on arrests, legal actions and websites closed. Those outcomes remain important. But the business of live sport creates a harsher standard. If the pirate stream stays online until the final bell, the commercial damage has already occurred.
DAZN has publicly committed itself to coordinated anti-piracy action. The challenge for its leadership is to demonstrate that those commitments translate into measurable real-time protection of the events on which the platform’s business is built. For a rights market increasingly measured in billions, that capability is becoming part of the asset itself.
Sources
- DAZN, Moses Itauma vs Filip Hrgovic PPV FAQs, August 2026
- DAZN Group, ACE Launches Sports Piracy Task Force, Welcomes DAZN as Newest Member, May 8, 2023
- La Repubblica, Pirateria, per il pezzotto 21 indagati…, December 19, 2023
- La Repubblica, Capitanio (AgCom): Il calcio dei pirati oscurato in 30 minuti, March 8, 2023
- La Repubblica, Pirateria, scudo Agcom esordisce anche in Champions e nel basket, February 15, 2024
