ACE Takes Down Electro TV Sat Pirate Streaming Service

ACE (Alliance for Creativity) has forced Electro TV Sat offline following a crackdown operation in Morocco, where the pirate streaming platform was based.

Electro TV Sat was one of the largest pirate platforms of this kind, featuring 6,000 channels and 200,000 movies and TV series episodes. 

This content was provided to roughly 90,000 subscribers, most of them coming from French-speaking countries. 

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ACE is a powerful rights-holders coalition consisting of CANAL+, Netflix, Amazon, Sony, ViacomCBS, Walt Disney, Apple TV+, and many more notable members. 

Electro TV Sat was infringing the copyrights of almost all of ACE’s 34 members, with the most affected being the France-focused CANAL+ Group. 

ACE has conducted an investigation on the ownership of Electro TV Sat, and found that it was operated by two individuals from the city of Oujda, in northeast Morocco. 

All four domains belonging to the pirate platform have been transferred to ACE and are now redirecting visitors to the “Watch Legally” section of its website. 

Reacting to this success, Céline Boyer, Head of Content Protection at CANAL+ Group, has made the following statement: 

CANAL+ Group has fought for years against audiovisual piracy, and our presence within ACE proves our involvement in this campaign. The many successes of ACE in the Maghreb region and CANAL+ Group’s consistent focus on French-speaking markets highlight a new dynamic in the global fight against piracy, which should be of great concern to pirate IPTV resellers. 

This is the first time that a pirate platform in Morocco is getting uncloaked and shut down, which is an excellent example of ACE’s worldwide reach and enforcement capabilities. 

It’s also the second time in a year that ACE takes down a pirate IPTV service in Africa. In September 2020, the coalition took action against Akfasat, an Algeria-based pirate service that offered its subscribers access to 3,500 live channels and over 26,000 movies and TV shows. 

Pirate media platforms in countries that don’t care to enforce copyright protection laws assume they have some form of atypical impunity, but the bigger ones can’t fly under the radar of international law enforcement or content protection entities for long.

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To apply pressure to countries that are lagging behind in legislation or enforcement, the Office of the US Trade Representative publishes a ‘Notorious Markets for Piracy’ report each year, to highlight the worst platforms and call out “outlaw” regions.