ACE takes down Spain’s largest piracy service
May 19, 2023
By Colin Mann
Anti-piracy coalition the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), has confirmed it has shut down Spain’s top illegal streaming and torrent service, AtomoHD.
AtomoHD was launched in 2020 by a group of individuals, some of whom had prior convictions in Spain for intellectual property infringement and to evade justice, fled to Andorra. AtomoHD enabled users to illegally stream and download content from a VoD library of more than 13,000 movies and 4,500 TV series in Spanish and other languages. The pirated content impacts all ACE members.
Since its inception, the site logged 235 million visitors, averaging 9.7 million monthly visits and 484,000 unique visitors. Ninety per cent of the online traffic originated in Spain, followed by the United States, Germany, and France. AtomoHD was operating via 60 website domains.
“This takedown represents yet another major victory by ACE over illegal content distributors,” declared Jan van Voorn, Executive Vice President and Global Content Protection Chief of the Motion Picture Association and Head of ACE. “It is increasingly clear that major criminal operators like AtomoHD are not immune from ACE’s enforcement actions.”
The domains are being transferred to ACE and will be redirected to the ‘Watch Legally’ page of the ACE website.