Football fans sent huge warning about use of fire sticks as authorities admit they could get 'swept up' in investigation

Fans using fire sticks to stream football and other sports have been sent a fresh warning.

Over the last few years, the cost of watching live sports has increased massively.

With different sports being shown across broadcasters such as Sky Sports and TNT Sports, as well as streaming platforms like Amazon Prime, Netflix and DAZN, fans have been forced to look for alternate ways to watch their favourite teams or athletes.

As a result, we have seen the rise of IPTV, full name Internet Protocol Television.

IPTV can be used on fire sticks, which are easily accessible through Amazon.

According to the Daily Mirror, a seller offered 'all Sky channels, all sports channels, all football events, Netflix, HBO, Disney +, Amazon Prime and Apple' for just £2.50 a month.

However, the chairman of the Federation Against Copyright Theft, Kieron Sharp, has stated that fans could face prosecution as they are breaking the law by using IPTV.

Sharp said: "This has been a problem forever, since the days of pirated video cassettes and DVDs. But the rise of streaming has made things easier for the criminal in the same way as it has made things easier for the legal consumer. Is it any more of a problem than it was years ago? That’s very difficult to say. There’s no complete picture of the landscape.

"We have adopted the attitude over the years that we would rather not criminalise the end user. If we take out a gang and they have a customer database, we would normally write to the consumers on that customer list telling them ‘What you are doing is breaking the law and you will have to stop’. We would like to think that they would start paying for that content."

He added: "But it is entirely possible that consumers could get swept up in our investigations. It would be a discussion for everybody involved in the business to see if that is an area that we would want to go down. It could happen, it really could.

"I would never say to any of the consumers through the messaging that we do that they are not going to get prosecuted because that just isn’t correct."