December 18, 2019
Italy’s Federation for the Protection of Audiovisual and Multimedia Content (FAPAV) announced two new members: Netflix and the Italian football (soccer) league Lega Serie A.
Read the FAPAV news release in English (via Google Translate)
Read the original FAPAV news release (in Italian)
Why it matters
Netflix has quietly taken steps over the past year to address piracy, by joining the Motion Picture Association (MPA) – and now, by joining FAPAV. Netflix is also a founding member of ACE. At the outset of 2019, financial analysts had estimated that Netflix would invest upwards of $20 billion for original programming and spend as much as $3 billion for the marketing of that programming by year’s end. Netflix executives have also hinted at steps the company is taking against credential abuse.
The fact that Lega Serie A has joined FAPAV should come as no surprise, both because both organizations are based in Italy, and because sports programming is the most widely stolen. The most notorious example of sports piracy seen by the European media industry has been the ongoing theft of beIN Media’s content by beoutQ, which beIN Media estimates to be the equivalent of billions of dollars per year.
A study done for FAPAV by Ipsos earlier in 2019 had estimated that as many as 22 million acts of sports streaming piracy occurred between 2017 and 2018, by about 5 million Italian consumers.
