ACE forces LiveNetTV pirate app shutdown after Istanbul police raid

This successful enforcement action demonstrates the increasing efficacy of cross-border legal cooperation and local police interventions in dismantling long-running piracy operations. By targeting the infrastructure and operators directly in international hubs like Turkey, rights holders are moving past simple device-level blocking strategies that developers routinely circumvent. The transition of domain ownership directly to the Motion Picture Association permanently eliminates the brand's digital footprint rather than allowing it to resurface under new hosting. Moving forward, the industry should watch whether this coordinated raid model accelerates enforcement timelines against other prominent sideloaded IPTV applications currently operating on Android-based streaming sticks.

The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment has intensified its global enforcement campaign against pirate streaming services throughout 2025 and 2026, combining local law enforcement raids with civil litigation to achieve permanent domain transfers. In June 2026, ACE, UEFA, and Mexican authorities disrupted a major PirloTV-linked sports piracy ring targeting Latin America, seizing 44 associated domains that collectively generated more than 950 million visits worldwide each year. The operation marked the first collaboration between ACE and the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property under a recently signed Memorandum of Understanding, demonstrating the coalition's strategy of building formal government partnerships in key jurisdictions before executing coordinated takedowns.

The Motion Picture Association, which receives transferred domains from ACE enforcement actions, has been expanding the coalition's geographic reach into regions that historically served as safe harbors for pirate operations. The LiveNetTV Istanbul raid follows a pattern established in earlier ACE actions, including the September 2023 shutdown of Uptobox and Uptostream in France and the United Arab Emirates, which ended a decade-long piracy operation that had logged more than 1.5 billion visits over three years. In both cases, ACE combined cross-border law enforcement coordination with legal settlements that transferred domain ownership directly to the Motion Picture Association, permanently eliminating the brand's digital footprint.

ACE's enforcement model has evolved from targeting individual apps to dismantling the backend infrastructure supporting multiple pirate services simultaneously. The coalition, whose governing board includes Amazon, Apple TV, Netflix, Paramount Global, Sony Pictures, Universal Studios, The Walt Disney Studios, and Warner Bros. Discovery, draws on more than 50 member companies worldwide. TV Tech's coverage of ACE enforcement actions documents a sustained cadence of takedowns, including the shutdown of Germany-based Streamzz, which had more than 7 million monthly visits, and France's Extreme-down, which ceased operations and turned over all domains to the coalition. The LiveNetTV action extends this pattern to Turkey, a jurisdiction that has served as a hosting hub for pirate IPTV operations targeting European and Middle Eastern audiences.