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Watching pirated sports content just became more difficult as 2024 came to a close.
MethStreams and the latest incarnation of CrackStreams—two top major pirate sites—went offline Monday, the latest illegal streamers to go dark amid a push from leagues, media companies, regulators, and law enforcement.
MethStreams got some mainstream attention last month when ESPN NFL insider Adam Schefter posted a clip of a Thursday Night Football game that originated from the illegal streaming site. A source told Front Office Sports that the clip—which included a MethSteams watermark—was pulled from another Twitter account and Schefter wasn’t watching the Amazon game on MethStreams.
Schefter jokingly replied to the news of MethStreams’ demise with a neutral face emoji on Monday.
The exact reason for the pirating sites going dark isn’t clear. But earlier this month, the Motion Picture Association–backed Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment helped take down one of the largest live sports piracy rings in the world.
The organization said in a release that it had identified a Vietnam-based ring responsible for 812 million visits in 2024 and successfully asked the ring’s operators to transfer dozens of domains to ACE.
Among 138 domains taken down was the prior domain for CrackStreams.
“ACE’s live sports members face a unique threat when it comes to digital piracy, as live sports broadcasts lose substantial commercial value once the game ends,” Motion Picture Association executive Larissa Knapp said in a statement after the Vietnam-based sites were shut down. “The takedown serves as a warning to piracy operators everywhere—including operators in live sports piracy—that ACE will identify and shut down their illegal operations.”
The NFL, NBA, and UFC said in a joint letter to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last year that illegal streams cost the global sports industry “up to $28 billion in additional potential annual revenue.”
When illegal streams began to pop up in the early 2000s, pay-per-view events were the largest targets. But as cord-cutting picked up in recent years and sports content began to be offered on streaming services like ESPN+, Peacock, and other paid services, pirated sites sprung up all over the world. They even invented a type of illegal bundle, with some paid pirated sites selling subscribers access to thousands of channels of entertainment and live sports content for a low monthly fee.
While end users in the U.S. are breaking the law by watching illegal streams, the people behind those streams are the priority for investigators and prosecutors.
In June, five men were convicted by a federal jury in Las Vegas for running a paid pirate streaming site. In November, two brothers were indicted by federal prosecutors in New York after they allegedly made more than $7 million running 247TVStream, another paid pirate service.
Sentencing in the Las Vegas case is scheduled for February.
It’s not immediately clear if ACE was involved in MethStreams and CrackStreams going offline. Messages left with ACE were not immediately returned.
One of the sites that was part of ACE’s Dec. 19 takedown announcement was crackstreams.dev. That same day, the person purportedly behind MethStreams and CrackStreams posted on Discord that another CrackStreams domain “has been locked down by our domain provider.”
CrackStreams described itself as “a free streams live sports website” where users could “get Every streams (CQ) in HD for Soccer, NBA, UFC / MMA, Boxing, MLB, WWE and more!”
As often happens with piracy sites, the site’s domain was changed to crackstreams.in. The same Discord user who goes by “methstreams” posted on Monday that they were “taking a break from live streaming.” A Discord direct message to methstreams wasn’t returned.
Both methstreams.com and crackstreams.in were registered with Tucows, the world’s second-largest domain registrar. A representative from Tucows told FOS that the company did not take action against either domain.
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