About ACE
What is the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE)?
The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment is the world’s leading anti‑piracy coalition, powered by the Motion Picture Association (MPA). It brings together leading companies across film, television, streaming, and sports to address digital piracy at scale.
ACE operates across regions and industries to detect, deter, and dismantle the most significant sources of illegal content distribution, protecting the integrity of the global creative marketplace.
What is ACE’s mission and how does it protect the global creative ecosystem?
ACE’s mission is to detect, deter, and dismantle digital piracy worldwide. The coalition combines intelligence, enforcement, and consumer awareness to disrupt piracy networks and hold operators accountable. By working with industry partners and authorities, ACE targets illegal services at their source while helping audiences understand the risks of piracy.
This coordinated approach helps protect creators, support legitimate distribution, and sustain a thriving global content ecosystem.
Who are ACE’s members and what types of organizations does ACE represent?
ACE brings together global media and entertainment companies across the creative industries, including major studios, streaming platforms, broadcasters, and sports rights holders.
These members span the full content lifecycle—from creation to distribution—and include globally recognized organizations such as Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, NBCUniversal, and DAZN.
Together, ACE forms a unified front committed to protecting content and strengthening the legitimate digital marketplace.
What is 360 Strong and how does it pertain to ACE?
What makes ACE different from other anti-piracy organizations?
ACE’s strength lies in its scale, alignment, and operational focus. It unites the resources and expertise of the world’s leading content companies with the MPA’s experience in global content protection. With a global footprint, ACE is uniquely positioned to address piracy at scale and support enforcement actions against criminal organizations operating across multiple jurisdictions.
Through shared intelligence, coordinated enforcement, and partnerships with law enforcement worldwide, ACE dismantles complex piracy ecosystems—not just individual sites. This integrated approach enables more effective action against organized, cross‑border piracy networks, while also targeting the infrastructure, enabling services, and criminal enterprises that profit from piracy on a global scale.
What We Do
How does ACE identify and take action against digital piracy networks?
We develop intelligence, identify targets, make referrals, provide evidence and technical support, and coordinate with the authorities that take those actions. By targeting both services and the infrastructure behind them, ACE disrupts piracy at its source and helps prevent repeat activity.
What kinds of piracy does ACE target (e.g., streaming sites, IPTV, apps, devices)?
ACE targets all major forms of digital piracy, including illegal streaming websites, IPTV services, mobile apps, peer‑to‑peer networks, and illicit streaming devices. Its work covers both on‑demand content such as films and television, as well as live programming, including major sports broadcasts. This broad focus allows ACE to detect, deter, and dismantle piracy across the full range of digital distribution channels.
How does ACE collaborate with governments, regulators, and international partners?
ACE works closely with law enforcement, regulators, and international partners to address piracy on a global scale. These partners support joint investigations, share intelligence, and contribute technical expertise to enforcement actions that span borders, including coordinated raids and prosecutions.
These partnerships enable ACE to address piracy networks that operate across multiple jurisdictions.
Impact & Enforcement
What are some of ACE’s most significant enforcement actions and successes?
ACE has led and supported some of the most impactful anti‑piracy actions against illegal content networks worldwide. Recent successes include the dismantling of the FMovies network, widely described as one of the largest global piracy operations, which generated 6.7 billion visits between January 2023 and June 2024 and operated a web of related sites before being shut down in coordination with Vietnamese authorities.
ACE also worked with international law enforcement to shut down Streameast, the world's largest illegal live sports streaming operation, which attreacted an average of 136 million monthly visits annually across 80 domains.
In the Middle East and North Africa, ACE supported the takedown of LaRoza, a major regional piracy platform with an average of 52 million monthly users.
These actions—alongside efforts against IPTV services and other large-scale networks—demonstrate ACE's ability to attack piracy operations at scale, often through coordinated global enforcement.
How does ACE measure success in the fight against piracy?
Success means making piracy more difficult to sustain and less accessible to consumers over time.
ACE evaluates success based on the real‑world impact of its efforts to detect, deter, and dismantle piracy. This includes site shutdowns, infrastructure seizures, and enforcement actions against operators. The coalition also looks at broader outcomes, such as reduced access to illegal content and increased resilience across legitimate distribution platforms.
What trends is ACE seeing in digital piracy, including the rise of live sports streaming?
Digital piracy is becoming more organized, adaptive, and technologically sophisticated. ACE is especially concerned about the strong growth in live sports piracy, where illegal streams reach large audiences in real time.
Piracy networks are also increasingly built around apps, IPTV systems, and distributed infrastructure, requiring faster, coordinated responses to detect, deter, and dismantle them effectively.
ACE Membership Tiers
What levels of membership does ACE offer?
Full Access
The Full Access Tier is ACE’s comprehensive operational membership for organizations that need broad protection across content categories but do not require a governance seat.
This tier is designed for companies with persistent piracy exposure across live sports, live channels, news, entertainment programming, original productions, FAST channels, streaming libraries, and on-demand catalogs. Where Governing Board members help set the strategic direction of the alliance, Full Access Tier members receive broad access and support in pursuit of that direction.
Associate
The Associate Tier is a limited participation pathway for organizations that provide strategic regional value to ACE. It is most appropriate for non-U.S. or regionally significant organizations that can strengthen ACE’s local market reach, rights coverage, enforcement relationships, intelligence, or credibility in priority markets.
Associate Tier members may receive access to selected ACE research, analytics, landscaping, updates, and meetings, and may participate in relevant discussions or initiatives where their regional role supports ACE priorities. The tier does not provide governance rights, broad portfolio-wide operational access, or the full enforcement support available through Full Access or Governing Board participation.
Live Tier
The Live Tier is a focused offering for organizations whose primary enforcement priority is protecting rights for live and time-sensitive content including sports. It gives sports-focused rights holders access to ACE’s coordinated, intelligence-led enforcement capability in a way that aligns with their core business needs.
The Live Tier is narrower by design. It is appropriate for sports leagues, federations, and rights holders whose principal need is live sports enforcement, and whose non-live content needs are limited, handled elsewhere, or not central to their ACE participation.
Why is live sports piracy uniquely challenging compared to other forms of piracy?
How does ACE work with sports leagues, broadcasters, and law enforcement to combat live piracy in real time?
Why Our Work Matters
How does digital piracy impact the entertainment and sports industries, and why does it matter?
Digital piracy diverts revenue from creators and legitimate services, reducing investment in new content and innovation. It also affects jobs and economic activity across the creative industries, weakening the broader ecosystem that supports film, television, and sports. Addressing piracy is essential to sustaining a healthy and competitive global marketplace.
What risks do consumers face when using illegal streaming services?
Membership & Getting Involved
What benefits do organizations receive by joining ACE, including the Live Tier?
ACE members gain access to shared intelligence, coordinated enforcement strategies, and collaboration with a global network of content owners, broadcasters, technology partners, and law enforcement agencies. Membership enables organizations to participate in large-scale, cross-border efforts to detect, disrupt, and dismantle piracy operations, while strengthening their own content protection capabilities through access to industry expertise, best practices, and enforcement resources.
For organizations combating live piracy, the ACE Live Tier provides additional support tailored to the unique challenges of live event protection. Participants benefit from real-time intelligence sharing, monitoring capabilities, rapid enforcement coordination, and specialized tools designed to support the rapid disruption of unauthorized streams and the dismantling of the criminal ecosystems behind them as events unfold. These capabilities help support both immediate enforcement actions and longer-term efforts targeting the infrastructure, enabling services, and transnational networks that facilitate live piracy at scale.
How can companies or rights holders join ACE or get involved?
Organizations can engage with ACE by exploring membership opportunities. ACE continues to expand globally, bringing together companies from across the creative industries to strengthen collective action against digital piracy. Joining ACE enables organizations to contribute to coordinated efforts to detect, deter, and dismantle piracy worldwide. For further details about ACE membership, please contact partnership@alliance4creativity.com.
