This $20 device makes piracy almost too easy

Summary

Amazon Fire Sticks replaced torrents for piracy, costing billions.
Jailbroken Fire Sticks enable users to access pirated sports content easily.
AI makes piracy even more accessible by providing step-by-step jailbreaking instructions.

For as long as there has been media, there has been piracy. I’m old enough to remember the rise and fall of torrents and specifically the website The Pirate Bay, which was one of the most well-known channels for piracy in the early 2000s. And though torrenting still exists, it’s nowhere near as ubiquitous as it was a decade ago. Instead, it has been replaced with something more convenient for data thieves: Amazon Fire Sticks.

According to a new report out of the UK from Enders Analysis, so-called “jailbroken” Fire Sticks have become a massive problem, with 59% of people who watched pirated material in the UK over the last year doing so using a Fire Stick. The report says that the device enables “billions of dollars in piracy” overall, with most piracy efforts aimed at accessing sports content without a cable or streaming subscription.

So how exactly do Amazon’s little streaming devices enable wide-scale content theft? Well, it starts with unauthorized software.

I stopped using my Fire Stick, and this $30 gadget ensures I’m never going back

My Fire TV Stick is staying unplugged.

1

What is a jailbroken Fire Stick?

Android OS makes “jailbreaking” easy

fire-tv-stick-art — Pocket-lint / Amazon

Pocket-lint / Amazon

Put simply, a “jailbroken” Fire Stick is simply a regular Fire Stick that runs unauthorized software. However, unlike other devices that are referred to as jailbroken, which often use custom OSes and require some technical know-how, aspiring pirates don’t actually need a lot of specialized knowledge to run apps outside what’s readily available on the Amazon Appstore, as the current iteration of Fire Stick uses Android OS, which allows easy sideloading third-party apps.

Though the “jailbreaking” process is relatively straightforward, in reporting on this trend, TechSpot notes that a sort of mini-industry that has popped up in the UK around selling already jailbroken Fire Stick devices, similar to how, in ye olden times, “HBO boxes” floated around local flea markets providing unauthorized access to the cabler (back when set-top boxes were a thing). So even though the process is easy, for those who are looking for the plug and play functionality of a Fire Stick with all the leading piracy apps pre-loaded, the process is even simpler.

Amazon won’t tell you about this downside of owning a Fire Stick, but I will

The Fire TV Stick has a glaring issue.

2

AI makes the illegal easy

Google Gemini doesn’t mind telling you how to break the law

A mockup of Gemini Advanced running on a phone.

Google

I’m not a huge fan of generative AI as it often steals content, and repackages it without compensation to creators like authors, artists, or designers. So perhaps in a perverse way, it makes sense that AI is more than happy to tell you exactly how to pirate content using an Amazon Fire Stick. While researching this very article all I had to do was Google some very broad search terms and Google’s AI overview helpfully provided me with step-by-step instructions not only for how to jailbreak a Fire Stick, but several links to help me on my piracy journey.

To be clear, I don’t own a Fire Stick, do not pirate content, and I won’t be mentioning any of the search terms I used or websites I was referred to, but it is interesting that piracy is being directly enabled by AI tools, which themselves only exist because of theft (per The Verge).

Putting a VPN on a Fire Stick is the easiest way to supercharge your streaming

Secure your device and be done with anyone trying to see what you’re watching.

3

Fire Sticks are super cheap

Get access to whatever for less than the price of a meal out

Pocket-lint

In addition to being easy to use, getting your hands on a Fire Stick with the intention to jailbreak it yourself isn’t exactly hard, as Amazon routinely sells its little streaming devices for as low as $20, which is a very low barrier to entry when it comes to potentially gaining access to hundreds of thousands of dollars in stolen content in a matter of minutes

It is unknown how much Amazon is aware of this device’s popularity in accessing stolen content, but they may be working behind the scenes to stop this trend with future iterations of the Fire Stick, which are rumored to be ditching the piracy-friendly Android OS. But even if that change came tomorrow, thousands of devices already exist running illegal piracy software, so this is one problem that likely isn’t going away any time soon.