What is a dodgy box?

A dodgy box is an ordinary streaming device, usually an Android TV box or an Amazon Fire TV Stick, with an illegal TV subscription loaded onto it that streams pay channels without paying the people who own them. The box itself is legal; the subscription isn’t, and in 2026 Irish users started getting cease-and-desist letters over it.

You’ve heard the term at work, at a match, or from a lad who “knows a lad”. Here’s what a dodgy box actually is, what it costs, and why the ground has shifted under it in the last year.

What it actually is

IPTV just means television delivered over the internet. Legal services like RTÉ Player, NOW and DAZN do it every day. A dodgy box delivers pay channels the same way, but the person selling the subscription has no right to any of them.

The box is legal. The subscription is not. That distinction matters, and we’ll come back to it.

What’s on it

The pitch is “everything”. Sky Sports, TNT, the Premier League, the Champions League, films still in the cinema, every kids’ channel known to science, all for a flat fee. In practice, what you get is a list of channels of varying quality that work until they don’t. When the High Court extended the Premier League blocking order in July 2025, the Irish Times reported Sky’s evidence that the proportion of illegal streams disrupted is “very significant”. That’s the polite way of saying the stream dies in the 89th minute.

What it costs

Irish reporting puts the price of a dodgy box subscription somewhere between about €40 and €150 a year:

Compare that with the full legal bundle. The Irish Examiner quoted users in March 2026 paying “nearly €2,000 a year” for Sky, Netflix, Disney+ and Prime combined.

Put like that, it’s obvious why people buy one. The problem is that nobody needs everything. Most households watch two or three things and pay for the lot. The whole point of this site is the bit in the middle, and the finder works it out for you.

How many people have one

A lot. A Sunday Independent poll, reported by Newstalk in January 2026, found around one in five Irish households admitted to using a dodgy box, a figure widely reported as roughly 400,000 users. Piracy analytics firm MUSO, reported by RTÉ Prime Time in January 2026, put Irish visits to piracy sites at about a million a day. Newstalk reported in June 2026 that 318,000 unique Irish IP addresses were traced to illegal streams of a single Champions League match.

If you have one, you’re far from alone, and you’re not invisible either. Which brings us to the bit that’s changed.

Why 2026 is different

For years the risk sat almost entirely with the sellers. Garda sources have said end-user cases are effectively a civil matter, and a UCC law lecturer told the Irish Examiner in July 2025 that individual cases are “very hard to prove”.

Then Sky went after a Wexford-based reseller. The Irish Times reported in July 2025 that the High Court entered judgment for €480,000 in damages plus around €100,000 in costs. In March 2026 the same court ordered a payment provider to hand over the names and addresses of 304 subscribers. In May 2026, around 200 of those households got a cease-and-desist letter from Sky, and in July, Sky and the anti-piracy body FACT served legal warnings on ten more suspected sellers in seven counties. We cover the whole sequence on the crackdown page and what a letter means on got a letter?.

The short version: the “sure, they only go after the sellers” line has stopped being true.

The other stuff nobody mentions in the pub

Price and legal risk get the headlines. There’s a quieter list:

• No refunds. When the service vanishes, and they do, your €100 goes with it. The anti-piracy body FACT put it plainly in July 2026: users “have no formal route to support or a refund”.
• Your card details. Research published by BeStreamWise Ireland in March 2025 found illegal streamers lost an average of €2,302 to scams, against €382 for everyone else.
• The box itself. A 2023 Bournemouth University study found 32 of 60 illicit IPTV links tested were malicious. Security firm Ekco told the Irish Examiner in March 2026 that these boxes “fail most or all basic security tenets”.

The full list is on the risks page.

What to do instead

Keep the box, if it’s a proper branded one. A Fire TV Stick or Google TV Streamer is a grand legal device once the pirate subscription is gone. Then work out what you actually watch.

Most of what people think they need a dodgy box for is either free or cheap for part of the year:

• The Irish channels are free. RTÉ, Virgin Media and TG4 come through Saorview with an ordinary aerial. Every channel and number.
• The UK channels are free too. BBC, ITV and Channel 4 by satellite, from a dish you may already have.
• Catch-up is free. RTÉ Player, Virgin Media Play and TG4 Player run on the same streaming stick.
• Sport is seasonal. The Premier League runs August to May, so you subscribe for those months and cancel.
• The finder does the sums. Tell the finder what you watch and it lists the cheapest legal way, and when to cancel.

No aerial, or one that’s seen better days? Get up to three installer quotes, free.

Put the dodgy box down. Then let’s see what you actually need.

Ready to move on from it? How to switch to legal TV is a first-week plan. And if the question is about the hardware itself: is a Fire Stick illegal?