ACE (Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment) is back to fighting pirates and shutting down IPTV services, and this time it is “T.KO TV” and “DripTV” that reached the end of the road. The powerful anti-piracy coalition has moved behind the scenes once again, managing to shut down the two IPTV suppliers without making any announcements or publishing details. Trying to visit either of the platforms’ domains will display a message of seizure. They redirect to the ACE website, where instructions on how to access content on legal channels of distribution are provided.
DripTV was offering over five hundred channels from various platforms at a subscription cost of just $19.99 per month. Moreover, it was blatantly promoting its services on YouTube, with customer “testimonials” that spoke about its awesomeness. T.KO TV was offering a more sizeable package, with 3,200 channels through 4K TV boxes and sticks running Android. The service even claimed to provide “award-winning customer service,” as if there’s any credible entity out there that would award a pirate streaming platform for its outstanding helpfulness. Finally, T.KO TV offered a trial period of seven days, something that indicates comfort stemming from a significant volume of operations.
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$19.99 Monthly 500+ ChannelsDripTv is a service that lets you watch your... https://t.co/wozWNRtERB
— DripTV (@tv_drip) September 11, 2016
ACE seized four popular pirate IPTV domains last March, four in October 2019, and another two in November 2019. Possibly, there have been more crackdown actions that didn’t register on our radars, so it’s clear that the coalition remains active and eager to satisfy its members. The question that arises is, how effective all this shutting down action is, considering it’s seldom accompanied by the arrest of the pirate website operators. The straight answer to this is, not much. The goal of ACE isn’t to wipe all pirate platforms in existence but to make piracy an obnoxious experience.
Obviously, those who paid for subscriptions on DripTV and T.KO TV will receive no refunds, so it is unlikely that they’ll trust a pirate IPTV service again. Also, the seizures of the domains are forcing people to look elsewhere, and the number of available illegal channels of distribution is gradually getting smaller. Raising the access bar to make joining IPTV services a total kerfuffle would be enough to discourage people from looking towards that direction, and ACE is doing fine on that part so far.