The latest figures on piracy in the UK should be a wake-up call for media and entertainment businesses. New industry research estimates that illegal streaming is costing the UK £1.35 billion a year, with 16.8 million UK adults, almost one in three, having accessed illegal streams in the past three months.
For rights holders, the significance goes beyond lost revenue. These figures point to a digital threat that is increasingly sophisticated, commercially organised and capable of adapting faster than traditional enforcement approaches.
At Corsearch, our intelligence and enforcement data over the past two years shows that piracy is not disappearing as legitimate streaming has grown. Instead, the ecosystem is evolving alongside it.
A bigger commercial threat
Pirated content now competes directly with legitimate services across TV, film, live sport, music, software and publishing. Our most recent traffic monitoring recorded an average of around seven billion visits a month to infringing sites. The piracy websites monitored globally recorded 87 billion visits during 2024, with 2025 tracking similar trends.
For businesses investing heavily in premium content, this presents a significant commercial challenge. Unauthorised streams can divert revenue, undermine licensing models and weaken the value of exclusive content.
This is particularly acute for live sport, where commercial value is concentrated into a short window. If pirated coverage is available during an event, removing it days later does little to recover the lost opportunity.
The technology behind piracy is evolving
The technology underpinning infringement is becoming more sophisticated, with artificial intelligence accelerating that evolution. Our threat researchers are seeing bad actors use AI to replicate legitimate website designs, scrape and republish content, automate distribution and generate translated captions at scale. This reduces the time and technical expertise required to operate sophisticated piracy services.
For rights holders, enforcement technology therefore needs to keep pace with the technology being used by infringers. Identifying an infringing URL and requesting its removal remains important, but it is increasingly only one part of the picture.
From takedowns to intelligence-led enforcement
At Corsearch, we are seeing the value of combining automated detection with human intelligence to understand the networks behind infringement. Rather than simply identifying individual pieces of pirated content, investigators can map connections between websites, social channels, marketplaces, hosting infrastructure and closed communities.
In some cases, this means infiltrating invite-only piracy communities and dark web forums to gather evidence and identify the infrastructure supporting infringement.
This intelligence can help rights holders move beyond a reactive cycle of finding and removing individual links towards disrupting the wider ecosystem.
Speed is becoming critical
The increasing speed of piracy is also changing what effective enforcement looks like.
AI can help infringers replicate legitimate websites and distribute stolen content faster than ever. For rights holders, the ability to detect and act quickly is therefore becoming as important as the volume of enforcement actions completed.
This is particularly relevant for live sport, where the commercial value of content can be measured in minutes rather than days. Enforcement after an event has finished may demonstrate activity, but it does not necessarily protect the underlying commercial value of the content.
The objective needs to be earlier detection, faster intervention and a better understanding of the infrastructure supporting infringement.
Piracy requires a business-wide response
Tackling piracy cannot sit solely with content protection teams. Technology, legal, commercial and senior leadership teams all have a role to play in understanding the risks and building resilience into digital content strategies.
For rights holders, the questions should extend beyond "How much content are we taking down?" to "Where is our content being infringed? Who is behind it? How quickly are they adapting? And what infrastructure allows the infringement to continue?"
Answering those questions requires a combination of technology, data and human intelligence.
Piracy has always evolved alongside technology. The difference now is the speed at which it can do so. As AI lowers the barriers to creating and distributing infringing content, rights holders need content protection strategies that are equally dynamic – identifying emerging threats early, understanding the networks behind them and acting at speed to protect the commercial value of their content.