Obtaining the Sky signal by paying only ten euros per month is illegal: here is what the pezzotto subscription is and how it works
The recent arrest of a 35-year-old Palermo man who, according to the State Police, had managed to put pirated streaming of the Sky, Dazn and Netflix signal to as many as 11 thousand customers throughout Italy has brought to light the huge business of the “pezzotto”. At the man’s home, the police found 186,900 euros in cash, gold bars and two cryptocurrency wallets. The Palermo man had hidden the money even in the garbage and the toilet.
But what is the pezzotto? What does the word mean? Pezzotto is a Neapolitan term, to be precise an adjective before being a noun, which derives from “appezzottato” and means false. Equivalent to the Sicilian “tarocco”, which has now become part of the Italian language, pezzotto also indicates something falsified. The pezzotto, by definition, is something illegal: from CD pezzotto to films appezzottati, any type of pezzotto is a forgery. In the case of Sky piracy, however, it is a very sophisticated forgery and requires (for the transmission of the pirated signal) good hardware equipment and an excellent Internet connection.
How Sky pezzotto works
The principle at the base of all TV channels, satellite or streaming appezzottati is always the same: you use a decoder (or a subscription, in the case of Netflix and the like) original and legitimate to decode the encrypted signal and then, through the well-established (and completely legal, if it is not used to convey pirated content) IPTV technology, it is sent in streaming through the Internet to their “customers”. The Palermo man arrested, for example, had 57 Sky decoders at home, each of which was used to decrypt a single channel to be sent illegally in streaming.
Why Sky is illegal
Each of the 11 thousand customers of the streamer from Palermo paid an average of 10 euros per month to see soccer matches, sporting events and other content whose broadcasting rights are in the hands of Sky or other platforms. An “appealing” customer, therefore, is one less customer for TV platforms. For this reason, the law considers it a crime both to transmit pizzotti content and to receive it: a sentence of the Court of Cassation in 2017 imposed a 2,000 euro fine and 4 months of imprisonment on a pirated Sky user. And it also went well for him: the law provides for this offense from 2,582.29 to 25,822.26 euros fine and from six months to three years imprisonment for the “customer”.