A pirate in the city of Kviv has been handed a three-year prison sentence for creating an illegal network and stealing content from Volia, Ukraine’s leading cable operator.
Commenting on the development, Zhanna Kitaeva, CFO of Volia, said: “Piracy is now a great problem for Ukraine. And one can be really glad that the fight against it in the telecommunications field has started at the state level. Law enforcement agencies are more proactive in damaging cable networks using illegal connections. And from next year, Ukraine will take another step in this direction and from January 2020 it will not be possible to illegally receive television programmes of Ukrainian TV channels from satellite.”
She added: “Our company operates in the legal field and pursues a policy of legal content and counteraction to “pirates”. In cities where the activity of “experts” in illegal connections is noticed, we conduct a network audit, which allows us to detect interference with our system. Subscribers themselves inform the provider about the facts of illegal connections, because they deteriorate the quality of services due to theft of the signal. The problem of piracy must be overcome by the whole world”.
Volia says that it supports the Clean Sky Initiative and shares its principles.
It adds that statistics show that today in Ukraine over 30% of consumers are ready to pay for quality content, and a year ago this figure was only 13%.