Why most takedown notices fail

The headline numbers

Between January 2024 and June 2025, 26.2 million takedown notices were sent to intermediaries by rights holders and their vendors, according to Grant Thornton and the Live Content Coalition. 89 percent of them did not result in the illegal stream being suspended.

Read those numbers together and the conclusion is unavoidable: sending notices is a solved problem, and it is not the same problem as getting content taken down.

Where notices actually die

A takedown notice is the opening of a conversation, not the end of one. In practice, the failure points come after the send:

• The notice reaches the wrong intermediary, or lands in an abuse queue already buried under thousands of others.
• The intermediary replies with a dispute or a request for further proof, and nobody answers it before the event ends.
• The notice lacks the evidence the intermediary’s process requires, so it is rejected on form.
• The stream moves. By the time the notice is processed, the same content is being served from a different address, and the process starts again from zero.

The follow-through problem

The most consequential of these failures is the unanswered reply. Intermediaries are entitled to push back: they carry legal risk if they take down legitimate content, and their compliance teams ask questions for good reasons. But a notice that goes unanswered after the first reply is functionally abandoned, and during a live event, an answer that arrives tomorrow is an answer that never arrived.

This is why notice volume is such a misleading metric. A vendor reporting a million notices sent has reported effort. The metric that matters is the fraction of enforcement actions that complete, during the event, with the pushback answered.

The intermediaries are casualties of this too

It is tempting to read the 89 percent as intermediary indifference. The truth is less comfortable for the sending side. An abuse desk at a hosting provider or network operator sits at the receiving end of those 26.2 million notices, and a large share of them arrive misrouted, duplicated, missing the evidence their own process requires, or pointing at content that moved before the notice was opened. Those desks are processing the industry’s output quality, and much of that output is poor. Low-quality notice volume buries the notices that deserve action, and the teams doing the burying are rights holders and vendors, not pirates.

So it is worth saying plainly to the compliance teams doing this work: the desks that read carefully, ask for proof, and refuse to act on a weak claim are not the obstacle. They are the part of the system that is working. Their questions are what keeps enforcement honest, and honest enforcement is the only kind that survives contact with a court. The answer to the 89 percent is not for intermediaries to lower their bar. It is for the sending side to meet that bar, completely, the first time, every time.

What fixes it

The fix is unglamorous: treat every notice as a thread to be closed, not a message to be sent. Route each notice to the intermediary and channel where it will actually be processed. Attach the evidence their process needs the first time. Answer questions immediately, in the same thread, with the record that supports the claim. Track outcomes per intermediary, and reserve escalation for the minority that ignores the process entirely, with the documentation to support it.

At live-sport volumes, roughly 52,000 reports per matchday in Randy labs’ operations, none of that can be done by people alone. The conversation has to be automated, and the automation has to be able to answer every question with the record behind it.