Joel Julien

David Jack, 35, is a self -pro­claimed scep­tic.

So it was with scep­ti­cism he ap­proached the is­sue of buy­ing an An­droid box.

"When I first heard about it I found it sound­ed too good to be true, be­cause I was told that I would be say­ing good­bye to month­ly ca­ble bills and al­so get­ting to see movies for free," Jack said.

The even­tu­al sell­ing point for Jack, how­ev­er, was when his friend, Steve, who al­ready had an An­droid box, told him that he would be able to watch al­most every foot­ball game he want­ed.

Jack de­cid­ed to give it a chance and bought an An­droid box.

He bought a "ful­ly loaded" one off Ama­zon and paid around $1,000 for it.

Jack at­tached the box to his tele­vi­sion.

"The rest as they say is his­to­ry," Jack said.

Jack has had the box over a year now and is hap­py with it.

He has since dis­con­tin­ued his sub­scrip­tion with his ca­ble provider.

"To be hon­est, I don't see the need for pay­ing that month­ly fee any more since I'm get­ting to watch what I want with­out any has­sle," Jack said.

Jack has just one of the 80,000 An­droid box­es that are be­lieved to be cur­rent­ly in use in this coun­try.

But while Jack is fol­low­ing his favourite foot­ball us­ing his An­droid box, he is in fact en­gag­ing in an il­le­gal ac­tiv­i­ty. Jack is a pi­rate.

Some of the con­tent he is stream­ing, in­clud­ing some of the foot­ball games his team is play­ing in, are il­le­gal con­tent.

Javier Figueras, the cor­po­rate vice pres­i­dent of HBO Latin Amer­i­ca Group, said pira­cy was not the "vic­tim­less crime" that many be­lieve it is.

The main "vic­tim" when Jack streams his foot­ball are the tele­vi­sion broad­cast­ers who pay for the rights to show the games.

Funds gen­er­at­ed from the sell­ing of foot­ball rights are of­ten fil­tered down to the foot­ball clubs in the league.

Small ca­ble tv broad­cast­ers' busi­ness­es de­stroyed

An­droid box­es are al­so said to be af­fect­ing the bot­tom line of paid tele­vi­sion sub­scribers.

An­nie Baldeo of the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of T&T (TATT) said rev­enue for paid tele­vi­sion fell from $183 mil­lion in the last quar­ter of 2016 to $164 mil­lion in the first quar­ter of 2017.

One of the rea­sons for the de­clin­ing rev­enue was be­cause of the in­crease in An­droid box­es, Baldeo said.

Gen­er­al man­ag­er of Di­recTV Bernard Pan­tin es­ti­mat­ed that ap­prox­i­mate­ly $30 mil­lion worth of pos­si­ble tax rev­enue to the Gov­ern­ment is be­ing lost on a year­ly ba­sis as cus­tomers have cho­sen to pur­chase An­droid box­es in­stead of be­com­ing paid tele­vi­sion sub­scribers.

"There is a new free kid in town—the An­droid box­es, you nev­er have to pay an­oth­er month­ly fee in your life, you are get­ting some­thing ful­ly loaded, all red flags if some­body is of­fer­ing you that," he said.

TATT is sched­uled to start con­sul­ta­tions for the reg­u­la­tion of An­droid box­es be­fore the end of the month.

"We have per­sons in the in­dus­try who ques­tion the im­por­ta­tion and the sale of these de­vices and how it threat­ens the liveli­hood of many providers, we have had small ca­ble tv broad­cast­ers in­di­cate that An­droid box­es have de­stroyed their busi­ness and they are opt­ing out of the sub­scrip­tion tele­vi­sion mar­ket," TATT's Karel Dou­glas said.

"We have been asked time and time again what is TATT the reg­u­la­tor do­ing about these de­vices and why is it that we the reg­u­la­tor is al­low­ing An­droid box­es to be open­ly im­port­ed and sold to the pub­lic at the ex­pense of the in­dus­try. Well we have heard you and the au­thor­i­ty will soon be­gin the process of hold­ing con­sul­ta­tions on the is­sue of An­droid box­es."

One av­enue that is be­ing pro­posed to ad­dress the is­sue is the pos­si­ble ban­ning of An­droid box­es be­ing im­port­ed in­to the coun­try.

In­ter­net Ser­vice Providers (ISPs) in this coun­try are ac­tive­ly con­sid­er­ing team­ing up and block­ing cer­tain web­sites so cus­tomers will be pro­hib­it­ed from il­le­gal­ly stream­ing con­tent.

Stephane David, the chief pro­gram­ming Of­fi­cer at Lib­er­ty Latin Amer­i­ca/Flow said this was one of the so­lu­tions that the coun­try’s In­ter­net Ser­vice Providers are con­sid­er­ing as an op­tion to deal with the prob­lems they are cur­rent­ly fac­ing as a re­sult of a pro­lif­er­a­tion of An­droid box­es.

The ISPs al­ready have the soft­ware avail­able to block the web­sites but are ten­ta­tive about us­ing that op­tion if there is not con­sen­sus by all.

“We need the lev­el of com­fort that no­body is go­ing to take us to court for us hav­ing blocked these streams and then we lose and then we go back ten years be­hind,” David ex­plained.

'The prod­uct is pret­ty amaz­ing'

A lo­cal dis­trib­u­tor of an An­droid Box who chose not to be iden­ti­fied said the prod­uct is "pret­ty amaz­ing."

"What we sell are ful­ly loaded An­droid Box­es. It is up to the in­di­vid­ual what they want to use it for, not every­thing that can be streamed is il­le­gal. So the choice is yours what you use the box for.

"An­droid box­es are more than a pi­rate's trea­sure chest, they do so much more than just stream il­le­gal con­tent," he said.

Apart from paid tele­vi­sion sub­scribers be­ing af­fect­ed, free-to-ai tele­vi­sion is al­so said to be di­rect­ly af­fect­ed by pira­cy.

"Un­wit­ting­ly, the lo­cal reg­u­la­tors failed to pro­tect the FTA mar­ket and the mar­ket has col­lapsed over the last two years, with lay­offs at the three biggest sta­tions," Pan­tin said.

This can have a dead­ly im­pact on democ­ra­cy, he said.

"If our FTA tele­vi­sion sta­tions do not have mon­ey to hire good qual­i­ty re­porters or do good qual­i­ty cov­er­age and give us at least two com­pet­ing news­casts every night, then our democ­ra­cy is po­ten­tial­ly in per­il, and I be­lieve that is a pol­i­cy po­si­tion that needs to be ad­dressed," Pan­tin said.

Sab­ga: Pro­tect free-to-air providers

Guardian Me­dia Lim­it­ed's Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor Nicholas Sab­ga called for TATT to stand up and pro­tect the free-to air providers

"As a free-to-air provider we have been re­ceiv­ing the raw end of the stick, and we should have changed our mod­el years ago and ad­mit­ted­ly we will hold up our hands and say we should have ad­dressed some of the is­sues back in the day and we con­tin­ue to do so, but we need the reg­u­la­tors to stand up and not just un­der­stand," Sab­ga said.

Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer of One Caribbean Me­dia Dawn Thomas said it has tak­en TATT too long to ad­dress the prob­lem and they need to act quick­ly now.

"In the case of the free-to-air ser­vice providers we are in­vest­ing in pro­gram­ming for the sta­tions and with this is­sue of pira­cy we are los­ing not on­ly eye­balls but we are los­ing ad­ver­tis­ing which is ex­treme­ly im­por­tant to al­low our free-to-air sta­tions to con­tin­ue to be vi­able. It is putting a lot of fi­nan­cial pres­sure on both the free-to-air ser­vice providers and the ca­ble ser­vice providers.

"Pira­cy can­not be al­lowed to con­tin­ue, it is il­le­gal and it needs to be dealt with."
An­droid pro­gram­mer Ha­keeb Nan­dalal said state­ment that the An­droid box­es are com­ing "ful­ly loaded" im­plies "that the soft­ware on these box­es are some ex­ot­ic hard-to-get spe­cial­ized apps on­ly the An­droid Box man­u­fac­tur­ers have ac­cess to."

"Noth­ing can be fur­ther from the truth. The pri­ma­ry app on these box­es is called “Ko­di” and it’s avail­able freely on the web. There are ver­sions for every op­er­at­ing sys­tem, not just An­droid, in pop­u­lar use. Apart from that, there’s al­so Ter­rar­i­um TV, Movies HD, Mob­dro and TapTV to name a few free apps freely avail­able on the web.

"Al­ter­nate­ly non-stream­ing apps like Bit­Tor­rent have been free, around for many years, ex­treme­ly re­li­able and grow­ing in pop­u­lar­i­ty. Many le­git­i­mate soft­ware and en­ter­tain­ment providers use this plat­form to dis­trib­ute their dig­i­tal con­tent. Even with­out a ded­i­cat­ed stream­ing app there are web­sites like Put­lock­er, Xmovies8 and Movies123 that are ac­ces­si­ble with web browsers like Fire­Fox and Chrome," he stat­ed