If someone at a Dutch birthday party has offered you “all the channels for the price of a pizza”, you are in large company: a new industry estimate says roughly one in seven Dutch adults used illegal IPTV last year. On Monday Stichting Brein, the Dutch anti-piracy foundation, told Tweakers it has knocked about 200 reseller sites offline this year, and it wants the police to start doing the heavy lifting.
That matters today because the person most likely to lose out is not a crime boss. It is the viewer who paid twelve months upfront to a website that may not exist by Christmas.
Quick answer
- The number: an October 2026 report for the Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance (AAPA) estimates 15% of people aged 16 to 74 in the Netherlands used illicit IPTV in 2025, about 1.96 million people. Brein says that is up from 8% in 2021. Belgium is put at 10.1%.
- Is it a headcount? No. It is a model built on EU survey data, and Tweakers itself says the figures are probably not fully accurate because people do not always answer honestly.
- Brein’s response: about 200 reseller sites offline so far in 2026, against roughly 50 a year before, mostly through civil action. It wants more criminal cases like the FIOD takedown of 2023.
- Will Dutch viewers be fined? Brein’s director does not expect Dutch authorities to go after consumers. The real risks are lost money, malware, phishing and, says Brein, extortion by sellers.
What Brein actually said
The interview, by Kevin Krikhaar, went up on Tweakers on 9 November 2026 at 06:00 Dutch time (05:00 UK). Brein director Bastiaan van Ramshorst gave two reasons for the rise: people drifting from torrents to streaming, and far more sellers, because “AI and other automation make it easier to put a website online to sell illegal IPTV”.
So the technology Silicon Valley sells us as “productivity” is now productively churning out pirate shopfronts. Brein says it automates too, to find them faster. Hence roughly 200 sites taken down this year by demand letter or ex parte court order, against about 50 a year previously. Back on 28 August Brein’s count was 104, which it said was already more than 2024 and 2025 combined.
It is cat and mouse, Van Ramshorst admits. When Brein finds an owner, it gets them to sign an abstention declaration with penalties for repeat offences. In a case published on 27 October, the seller hid behind false registration details, so Brein asked the payment provider and SIDN, the .nl registry, who was really behind it. He came forward, signed, and now faces €500 a day for any future infringement. It is an old playbook; I covered pirate IPTV sellers signing abstention agreements under pressure from Brein back in 2018. The difference now is volume.
Why Brein wants the police, not just lawyers
“There really are criminal organisations behind it, and you don’t see them at the front,” Van Ramshorst said. Brein mainly does civil enforcement; chasing those organisations needs special powers, such as wiretaps.
According to Brein, those organisations are often anonymous and based far away, in places such as Russia and China, but rent servers in Europe, often from Dutch hosts. “The Netherlands is a big hosting country,” he said, and Brein wants know-your-customer rules so hosts know who their server customers are. For once “no questions asked” is the problem rather than the selling point.
Brein would like more cases like the one in 2023, when the FIOD, the Dutch fiscal investigation service, took down a service with more than one million subscribers, but says the FIOD lacks the capacity and funding to do this consistently. On 30 October Brein backed a letter to four Dutch ministers from NPO, Talpa, DPG Media (RTL and Videoland) and the trade groups Streamingdiensten Nederland and NLConnect, asking for a national, coordinated approach. Some criminal enforcement already happens, Brein says, “but not enough”.
About that 15%: read the small print
I went through the AAPA report itself. It does not count anyone. It multiplies the share of people who watch internet-streamed TV (Eurostat survey data, 75% in the Netherlands against an EU average of 48%) by the share who admit using illegal online sources (EUIPO surveys). A footnote even concedes that the latest EUIPO survey was done online, and the absence of an interviewer “may have led to more respondents admitting” it than in the earlier phone survey.
On that model the Netherlands is third in Europe at 15%, behind Ireland (16.2%) and Malta (15.6%). Belgium is at 10.1%, about 860,000 people. For British readers, the UK is at 12.3%, about 6.3 million people, the biggest number of any country in the report.
The money figures need a bigger pinch of salt. The report puts illicit IPTV revenue in the Netherlands at €161 million a year and potential losses to legal pay TV at €240 million. Tweakers points out this assumes every illegal streamer would otherwise have bought legal subscriptions, the kind of maths only a trade body could love. Tweakers also discloses that its parent company, DPG Media, is one of the broadcasters asking for government help. That does not make the interview wrong, but you should know who is in the room.
What this means if you watch TV in the Netherlands or Belgium
Brein starts with the law: Van Ramshorst points to a 2017 ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union which, as Tweakers summarises it, found that using media players with IPTV subscriptions also infringes copyright. His comparison: if a stranger offers you a bike for a tenner, alarm bells should ring.
The part the scary headlines will skip: Brein is not calling for fines on Dutch viewers. “I don’t see Dutch authorities going after consumers any time soon,” he said; he would rather criminal law was used on the sellers. Tweakers notes that Italy can fine customers up to €5,000 under its Piracy Shield law and that France has been fining IPTV subscribers since this year. For Belgium, the sources I read give a usage figure and nothing more, so I am not inventing a Belgian crackdown for drama.
No prosecution risk is not the same as no risk. These are the ones Brein lists:
- Your money disappears. An illegal subscription is always paid upfront, Brein says, and when the service goes offline the money goes with it. In the 28 August case all subscriptions were stopped and customers lost what they paid. A pirate “lifetime subscription” means the lifetime of the website, not yours. That webshop also sold flavoured vapes without age checks, which tells you everything about its customer service ethos.
- Your details go to criminals. Contact usually happens over WhatsApp, so your number and payment details end up with the people running the operation, and Brein says they get misused.
- Extortion. Brein says it has seen sellers extort customers, including, per Tweakers, pressuring them over WhatsApp to renew.
- Malware and phishing in IPTV apps and boxes. I am not naming or linking any service or app here; that is rather the point.
Legal ways to watch instead
Van Ramshorst accepts that watching everything legally is expensive. His answer: a provider package that lets you switch streaming service monthly, which is either a solution or homework, depending on how much you enjoy cancelling things.
In the Netherlands the legal options include NPO’s own streaming service, Videoland, the TV apps of providers such as KPN and Ziggo, and Netflix, Disney+ and Prime Video. In Belgium, the broadcasters’ own apps plus the same global platforms. No prices from me: they change by plan and month, so check the official sites. If you already have lawful sources, my list of official empty players is in Best IPTV Players 2026: Official Downloads by Platform. Empty means no channels come with the app.
Update and what to watch next
Update 10 November 2026: as of about 09:15 UK time (10:15 in Amsterdam), I found nothing newer from Brein than its 30 October statement on the ministers’ letter; the Tweakers interview of 9 November is the latest on-the-record word from its director. If that changes, this line changes.
What to watch next:
- Whether the four ministries answer the letter with more money or capacity for the FIOD or police.
- Where Brein’s 2026 total ends up after about 200 reseller sites so far.
- Any move on know-your-customer rules for Dutch hosting providers.
- Whether the Netherlands or Belgium ever follows Italy and France in fining subscribers. Brein does not expect that in the Netherlands.
The rest of Europe is not exactly sitting still. Finland recently brought its first illegal IPTV criminal charges, which I covered in Finland’s Pirkanmaa IPTV charges, and further afield Delhi Police arrested an alleged reseller after the Maya IPTV raids.
How to get a VPN (for privacy, not for piracy)
A VPN is useful for privacy and security on public Wi-Fi, in hotels and on trains. It does not make an unlicensed stream legal, and it will not help against a seller who already has your WhatsApp number. With that asterisk in place, these are the services I point people to: NordVPN, Surfshark, IPVanish, CyberGhost, PureVPN and Ivacy. And if your passwords are your cat’s name plus 123, NordPass will do more for you than any streaming app ever will.
Sources for this piece (read 10 November 2026): Tweakers, “Nederland streamt vaker illegaal: Stichting Brein over haar strijd tegen IPTV” (9 November 2026); Stichting Brein, “Gebruik illegale IPTV gestegen; brede mediacoalitie vraagt de overheid hulp bij aanpak” (30 October 2026), “Valse registratie weerhoudt handhaving IPTV niet” (27 October 2026) and “BREIN haalt illegale vapes en IPTV verkoper offline” (28 August 2026); AAPA, “Illicit IPTV in Europe and North Africa: Economic Report 2026” (October 2026). Quotes are my translations from Dutch. Images: Ridderzaal, Binnenhof, The Hague by Frans Berkelaar (CC BY 2.0) and Keizersgracht by night by Ashu Mathura (CC BY-SA 2.0), both via Wikimedia Commons, used as illustrative location photos.
If you want a living-room box for NPO, Videoland, Netflix and proper empty players, these are the ones I keep recommending. None of them come with channels, and none of them turn a reseller subscription into a legal one.
Best IPTV boxes to buy
These are media boxes and sticks that can run players and licensed apps. The first six are Google certified Android TV or Google TV devices with Google Play. The three Fire TV Sticks run Amazon’s own systems with the Appstore instead of Google Play: the 4K Max and 4K Plus run Fire OS, which is Android based, while the new Fire TV Stick 4K (2026) runs Vega OS, which does not allow sideloading Android apps, only Appstore apps. The last one, the Formuler, runs its own Android and is not certified. They are not pirate hardware. They do not come with channels or playlists. I am not claiming I personally lab-tested every SKU this month.
Pick a Google TV box when you want Play Store apps on a proper TV OS or a dedicated player behind the sofa. Pick a Fire TV Stick when Prime Video and the Appstore already cover what you watch. If you need an Android player from outside the Appstore, skip the Vega OS stick.
- NVIDIA SHIELD TV Pro: the premium pick, a certified Android TV player with AI upscaling, Dolby Vision/Atmos and Gigabit Ethernet for the main living-room telly. Amazon UK | Amazon US | Amazon DE | Amazon FR | Amazon IT
- Google TV Streamer 4K: solid Google TV living-room default with Ethernet, 32GB storage and Dolby Vision/Atmos. Amazon UK | Amazon US | Amazon DE | Amazon FR | Amazon IT
- Xiaomi TV Box S (3rd Gen): Google TV box with 32GB storage, Wi-Fi 6 and Dolby Vision/Atmos, the cheaper box route than the Streamer. Amazon UK | Amazon US | Amazon DE | Amazon FR | Amazon IT
- Xiaomi TV Stick 4K (2nd Gen): budget Google TV stick with Wi-Fi 6 and Dolby Vision/Atmos when you want HDMI-simple, not a full box. Amazon UK | Amazon US | Amazon DE | Amazon FR | Amazon IT
- Budget Google TV 4K player: a cheaper certified Google TV player for a second telly. The model differs by store, so each link names the one you get there. MECOOL KD3 (Amazon UK) | onn. Google TV 4K Streaming Box (Amazon US) | Strong LEAP-NOVA-X (Amazon DE) | Strong LEAP-NOVA-X (Amazon FR) | Strong LEAP-NOVA-X (Amazon IT)
- MECOOL MEon1: Google TV certified 4K box with AI upscaling and 32GB storage for a dedicated player behind the sofa. Amazon UK
- Fire TV Stick 4K Max: the most powerful Fire TV Stick, with Wi-Fi 6E, Dolby Vision/Atmos and 16GB storage. It runs Fire OS, which is Android based, so you get Appstore apps and can still sideload an Android player. Amazon UK | Amazon US | Amazon DE
- Fire TV Stick 4K Plus: the older Fire OS stick with Wi-Fi 6 and Dolby Vision/Atmos. It is being phased out, so buy it only while stock lasts. Like the Max, it can still sideload Android apps. Amazon UK | Amazon US | Amazon DE | Amazon FR | Amazon IT
- Fire TV Stick 4K (2026): the newest and slimmest 4K stick, with a new remote. It runs Vega OS, which does not allow sideloading Android apps, only Appstore apps, so check your player is in the Appstore before you buy. Amazon UK | Amazon US | Amazon DE | Amazon FR | Amazon IT
- Formuler Z12 Ultra SE: the newest Formuler box, built around MYTVOnline 4 for IPTV playlists. It runs Formuler’s own Android rather than certified Google TV, so there is no Netflix in HD and no Google certification. Formuler Z12 Ultra SE (Amazon UK) | Formuler Z12 Ultra SE (Amazon US) | Formuler Z12 Ultra SE (Amazon DE) | Formuler Z12 Ultra SE (Amazon FR) | Formuler Z12 Ultra SE (Amazon IT)
Whichever you pick, check that the app you need is in its store before you pay. And none of these boxes or sticks magically make unlicensed streams legal.
Would one legal app with everything in it at a fair price get you to drop the dodgy subscription, or is the industry’s maths right for once? Tell me in the comments.
Written by Dr Husham Memar
