A man who streamed English Premier League matches live across the internet has been jailed for a couple of years by the Sheffield Crown Court.


 The fellow, named Kevin Broughton, apparently got a little greedy as he was charging viewers up to £29.99 for a season to watch the matches online. This isn’t a bad little earner when you consider he had about 10,000 customers. This works out to a cool £299,000 a year doesn't it?

The games he streamed originated from Sky and of course this is a no-no since the television company has the exclusive rights to show the matches. The Premier League found out about Broughton’s illegal activities and filed an official complaint with the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) back in January of 2012.

The organization looked into the matter as did the East Midlands Police and this spelled bad news for the 30-year-old Broughton and he ended up facing various fraud-related charges. Investigators found he had been stashing the subscription money in an offshore bank account down in Belize.

FACT said criminals are running profitable and sophisticated illegal online operations and stated, “We continue to work to protect our members’ intellectual property and to ensure that they can continue to invest in exciting new ways to watch sports, films and television programs."

The East Midlands police added, “Our element of the investigation found Broughton’s crime made a significant difference to his income in a very short period of time.  Broughton quickly developed the size and sophistication of the website, increasing his customer profile and making vast sums of money. He was able to deposit tens of thousands of pounds into an overseas bank account and set up an offshore company registered in the Central American country of Belize, intended to launder his proceed.”

While Broughton was clearly in the wrong here and making a hell of a lot of money from illegally streaming games, it’s still a little odd that people would pay to watch a game on the internet when there are still so many free streams around. Perhaps they thought since they were paying for a subscription then everything was above board. The Premier League has tried to shut a couple of websites down, but they can still easily be found as the extension of the address is simply changed fro .eu to .org for example. The FBI has also tried to seize some sites and haven’t really had much success either.

One wonders why the criminal wasn’t fined and/or forced to hand back the money though.