CINEOS Intelligence Report · IndiaEdition · July 2026

The State of Sports Piracy in India

What a live cricket match actually looks like from inside the piracy networks — measured, not estimated, from CINEOS's live monitoring of Telegram, the open web, CDNs and on-chain wallets.

2026-07-17 · figures from CINEOS live monitoring · a lawful-review assessment, not a legal determination

12.8×

Piracy isn't ambient — it's an event. In the peak match hour, the number of channels pushing live streams jumps 12.8× over the between-match baseline, then collapses back.

51 distinct channels in the peak hour vs a baseline of 4 · across 10 matches, 150-day window

01 The numbers

A snapshot from CINEOS's monitored corpus — 3.3 million captured messages across 4,055 tracked channels, growing ~63,182 messages a day. Within the live sports slice:

442

leaked live-stream URLs captured — 20 of them live, tokenized broadcaster credentials (revocable in real time)

distinct operator networks spanning 53 channels, 23.1 lakh combined reach

infringements packaged as court-ready §63 BSA-2023 certified evidence

rights holders exposed in-sample — JioHotstar, SonyLIV, Prime Video

51→4

peak-hour vs baseline channel count — the match-window signature

150d

of activation history — piracy tracks the fixture list, not the calendar

02 Finding — the pirate and the bookmaker are one operator

Take down a handle and it respawns overnight. The network survives because it isn't held together by a stream — it's held together by shared money infrastructure.

Largest network mapped

19 channels · 18.7 lakh combined reach · one operator

The single biggest cluster CINEOS mapped isn't linked by a CDN or a stream server. It's linked by shared betting domains — the same sites appear behind channel after channel. The live-cricket stream is the funnel; the betting rail is the business. Piracy and illegal betting are not adjacent problems in India — they are the same operators, and CINEOS is uniquely positioned to see both.

shared hard identifiers binding the network: domain:cricxbet99.xyzdomain:tiger365.prophoneWhatsApp

03 The match-window signature

Distinct channels pushing streams, per peak match hour

Each bar is one tracked match window. The peak bar (51) is the busiest single hour observed; the dashed line is the between-match floor. Computed from captured-message timestamps — CINEOS live data.

04 Where the leaks land

Piracy is territorial. Of the captured stream leaks CINEOS could attribute to a broadcaster CDN (the strongest, court-ready evidence), the distribution by feed:

Broadcaster feed / territory	Captured leaks	Share
SonyLIV / Sony Ten · India	17
Willow TV · Canada / US	10
Amazon Prime Video · Global	3
JioHotstar · India	1
StarHub · Singapore	1

The bulk of raw links route through throwaway restream/aggregator hosts with no broadcaster signature — attributable only by live origin-probing during the match. Broadcaster-CDN leaks above are the subset carrying hard, court-ready origin evidence.

05 Why these numbers are trustworthy

Source, not surface. Most "piracy monitoring" scans the open web and finds people talking about piracy. CINEOS reads inside the Telegram channels where streams are actually distributed — the operations themselves — and correlates them with domain/WHOIS, CDN origins and on-chain wallet flows.

Evidence-grade capture. Every certified incident carries a §63(4)(c) Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam 2023 certificate ID and a SHA-256 hash taken at the moment of capture — built to stand up in a Delhi High Court dynamic+ injunction, not just a dashboard.

Honest scope. These figures describe CINEOS's monitored corpus (3.3M messages, 4,055 channels), not a census of all Indian piracy. Attribution links are shared hard identifiers — an assessment for lawful investigation and rights-holder notice, never a determination against any named person.