Acestream is a streaming platform that is basically legal. However, you must be careful not to consume illegal content.
Acestream is legal – but be careful of illegal streams
If you search for streaming services on the Internet, you often stumble upon Acestream. However, one question remains: Is the service legal or illegal? Acestream allows you to transfer multimedia content between PCs in real time. For example, television broadcasts can be received over the Internet. Acestream is particularly popular for live football broadcasts.
- Since Acestream only enables connections between clients, servers, between streamers, forwarders and users, the service itself is legal. However, Acestream can be misused for illegal purposes.
- So if football broadcasts – especially Champions League games that are otherwise only shown on pay TV – are shared via AceStream, it is most likely illegal.
- A pay-TV broadcaster is unlikely to allow anyone to make this broadcast available to the public free of charge. So it is obviously an illegal source.
- This means that streaming as well as forwarding and receiving the football game 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 can 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 further new content.
- Clients and servers work together as a network. Servers and clients represent nodes that send, receive or forward content. This principle of not storing data centrally, but rather transmitting it decentrally in a network from PC to PC via intermediate servers, is also called the peer-to-peer (P2P) principle. Acestream uses Bit-Torrent as a protocol.