As Itauma Fights for a World Title, DAZN Faces Another Contest Outside the Ring

The British heavyweight’s title fight is a major night for boxing. For DAZN, it is also a test of whether illegal streams can be disrupted before the value of the live event disappears. LONDON — Moses Itauma’s attempt to become a heavyweight world champion is expected to draw enormous attention to the O2 Arena on

The British heavyweight's title fight is a major night for boxing. For DAZN, it is also a test of whether illegal streams can be disrupted before the value of the live event disappears.

LONDON — Moses Itauma's attempt to become a heavyweight world champion is expected to draw enormous attention to the O2 Arena on Saturday night. But while the British fighter faces Filip Hrgovic in the ring, DAZN will be fighting a very different opponent online. Illegal sports streaming has become one of the most persistent threats to the economics of British and European sport.

DAZN is offering Itauma-Hrgovic as a pay-per-view event. Legitimate viewers will pay for access to a premium broadcast. At the same time, illegal IPTV operators will attempt to redistribute the same pictures without purchasing the underlying rights.

For boxing, the problem is particularly acute. A fight's value is concentrated in the hours before and during the contest. Once the result is known, much of the premium attached to watching live disappears. That means traditional anti-piracy enforcement can arrive too late even when it eventually succeeds.

DAZN Has Publicly Committed to Action

DAZN has been explicit about the threat before. When the company joined the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment in 2023, DAZN Group chief executive Shay Segev said the theft of live-sports intellectual property was an industry problem that harmed sport and its fans and required a coordinated global response. DAZN also helped launch ACE's Sports Piracy Task Force, giving the company a direct role in an international effort to disrupt illegal sports services.

That history makes Saturday an interesting test. The question is not whether DAZN cares about piracy. Its involvement in enforcement demonstrates that it does. The question is whether modern anti-piracy systems can move at the speed of a live boxing event.

A Race Against Time

Italy has shown what aggressive intervention can look like. In December 2023, an investigation coordinated by prosecutors in Catania resulted in 21 people being investigated and the immediate interruption of illegal IPTV and streaming flows distributing content from DAZN and other major platforms. A national rapid-blocking system later increased the focus on speed. In February 2024, La Repubblica reported that 1,019 illegal sources had been blocked during one Serie A round, affecting more than 100,000 households using unauthorized services.

Britain has its own long history of blocking orders and enforcement against illegal sports streams. Yet the underlying challenge remains similar across borders: operators move quickly, services reappear and consumers can often find replacement access with little effort. For a broadcaster, that creates a race against time.

The meaningful measure is not simply whether an illegal domain disappears eventually. It is whether viewers lose unauthorized access while there is still time for them to purchase the legitimate event.

What Should Be Measured

That is why broadcasters should be judged on operational metrics that rarely reach the public domain. How quickly are pirate streams detected? How quickly are they disabled? Can the legitimate account feeding an illegal restream be identified? How often does blocked infrastructure return under a different address? And how much of the illegal audience is actually prevented from watching the full event?

For boxing promoters and fighters, those questions matter because broadcast revenue helps determine the economics of the sport. For paying customers, they matter because a market in which piracy becomes normalized can push more of the financial burden onto legitimate subscribers. For DAZN, they matter because the company has made premium boxing a central part of its global identity.

Segev's 2023 statement was clear about the ambition: piracy required coordinated and effective action. The industry has since developed faster blocking systems and more sophisticated investigative tools. The challenge now is proving that those systems work where it counts most — during the live event itself.

On Saturday night, the official result will be decided in the ring. DAZN's anti-piracy result will be decided online, minute by minute.

Sources