Over the years, along with the increasing demand for watching international sports tournaments, a significant scale of illegal sports broadcasting websites has formed in Vietnam. Among them, Xoi Lac TV is considered one of the prominent platforms, operating in the form of a network of many domain names and constantly changing to maintain user access.
According to data previously published, Xoi Lac TV appeared on the Internet from around 2016 and quickly attracted a large number of accesses thanks to illegal broadcasting, free football matches with Vietnamese commentary. In major tournaments such as the World Cup, Euro or matches of the Vietnamese national team, the number of viewers on this type of website usually increases sharply.
From a single website, the Xoi Lac TV system later developed into a multi-website "mirror" model. When a domain name is blocked or removed, other pages with similar interfaces and content are immediately put into operation to replace it. According to some statistics previously mentioned in the media, the system related to Xoi Lac TV alone used about 20 different domain names at one point to maintain operation.
Besides Xoi Lac TV, users in Vietnam can also easily encounter many other illegal sports broadcasting websites such as S**Live, V** TV, T*** TV, L*** TV... These sites often apply a similar model: collecting broadcast signals from copyrighted television sources, then broadcasting them online for free on the Internet. Most websites operate by inserting advertisements or leading viewers to online betting platforms.
According to some statistics from traffic measurement tools cited by the media, dozens of illegal sports broadcasting websites common in Vietnam can attract tens of millions of visits per month. During peak periods of major tournaments, the traffic to these websites can even reach hundreds of thousands to millions of views per day.
A common feature of illegal broadcasting websites is that they frequently change domain names. When network operators block access to the domain address, administrators can quickly register a new domain name and transfer all content to another address. Thanks to this mechanism, many website systems can still maintain operations for a long time even when continuously being put on the blocked list.
In addition to websites, illegal broadcasting platforms also maintain a viewer community through social network channels, messaging applications or match share groups. This helps users quickly access new addresses when the old website is blocked.
According to information from digital content copyright infringement monitoring organizations, in recent years, hundreds to thousands of websites violating online content copyright have been detected and handled in Vietnam, most of which are related to the broadcasting of football and sports events.
The existence of a network of illegal broadcasting websites for many years is considered a major challenge for the sports copyright market. In the context that domestic businesses have to spend large sums of money to own broadcasting rights for international tournaments, the illegal re-broadcast of content will certainly affect the business model of legitimate platforms.
From another perspective, the development regardless of legal violations of these websites also shows that the demand for online sports viewing of Vietnamese users is still very large, especially for international football tournaments with wide appeal.
According to statistics from Similarweb, in Vietnam, the 2022-2023 football season recorded about 70 pirated websites, including 5 leading groups such as xoilac, cakhia... with many different website addresses. The websites of these groups reached 7.7 million users, 1.5 billion views. In the period from August 2022 to August 2023, Vietnamese authorities blocked nearly 1,000 football pirated websites.
In 2024, the Creative and Entertainment Alliance (ACE), the world's leading organization in combating copyright infringement, announced that it had successfully dismantled a large-scale live sports copyright infringement broadcast line based in Vietnam.
According to ACE, websites belonging to this ring recorded a total of 812 million visits in the past 12 months, becoming one of the largest global sports copyright infringement networks and the largest that ACE has ever cracked down on.
According to research by cybersecurity professor Paul Watters, copyright-infringing streaming platforms are becoming a favorable environment for cyberattacks. He warned Vietnamese users to face many risks when accessing illegal content websites, which often contain malware, fraudulent ads and tools to steal personal data.
