UKTVEverywhere, a pirate streaming service targeted toward UK consumers residing in the United States and elsewhere, has been redirected to the legal Britbox service; a joint venture of the BBC and ITV.
Previously, the pirate service offered a full range UK television programming via a subscription model. It’s ironic that the site had the good conscience not to identify some of its programmers by name, “due to trademark restrictions,” given that this was a pirate service.
A notice authored by the BBC and ITV now appears on the UKTVEverywhere site, and simply clicks through to Britbox.
In another irony, UKTVEverywhere’s Twitter feed was still active, and was being used for promotion by another illegal service; at least at the time of this writing
Why it matters
Rather than posting a “this site has been shut down” notice and being done with it, a legitimate distributor with rights to distribute UK television programming legally has used an illegal streamer’s domain to convert users to legal consumption. This is right on multiple levels: it’s legitimate, it’s a selling tool, and it doesn’t threaten site users who may have used this site without realizing that they were consuming the programming illegally.
Technically speaking, while credential theft and forensic marking have been the most widely touted anti-piracy countermeasures, one of the tools used in the pursuit of UKTVEverywhere was geo-location.