Acestream – is it legal?

Acestream is a streaming platform that is basically legal. However, you have to be careful not to consume any illegal content.

Acestream is legal – but beware of illegal streams

If you search for streaming services on the internet, you will often come across Acestream. However, one question remains: is the service legal or illegal? Acestream enables the transfer of multimedia content between PCs in real time. For example, TV shows can be received over the internet. Acestream is particularly popular for live football broadcasts.

• Since AceStream only allows connections between clients, servers, streamers, forwarders and users, the service itself is legal. However, AceStream can be misused for illegal purposes.

• So if football matches – especially Champions League matches that would otherwise only be shown on pay TV – are shared via AceStream, it is highly likely that this is illegal.

• A pay-TV broadcaster will hardly allow anyone to make this broadcast available to the public free of charge. So it is obviously an illegal source.

• This means that both streaming and forwarding and receiving the football match are illegal in this case.

This is how Acestream works

If you take a look behind the concept of Acestream, it also explains why the platform itself is legal, but there may be problems with the content.

• Acestream works like this: there are clients and servers. As a server, you either provide media content yourself or forward content. Clients are recipients of media content, but can in turn forward it or stream new content.

• Together, clients and servers work as a network. Servers and clients represent nodes that send, receive or forward content. This principle of not storing data centrally, but of transferring it from PC to PC in a decentralized manner via intermediate servers in a network is also called the peer-to-peer (P2P) principle. Acestream uses Bit-Torrent as a protocol.