The pezzotto has also arrived at Treccani

"Typical carpet of the craftsmanship of Valtellina", "light square veil, usually white, with a lace border, which Ligurian women wore, starting from the 17th century" and from today also "Particular decoder used to illegally access the contents of Italian and foreign pay-TV channels". With this definition, the Treccani dictionary has decided to add the term Pezzotto to its neologisms section, thus giving official status to a word that has now entered fully into everyday speech. Originally born in the Neapolitan dialect to indicate the 'wedge used in carpentry' and the 'patch in tailoring', in recent times it has come to mean all those abusive and illegal systems that allow access to pay-per-view contents without paying, especially those that broadcast Serie A and Champions League football matches. And if before these techniques were the prerogative of computer and hacking experts, now it is possible to purchase a complete and ready-to-use package at a significantly lower price than the various subscriptions. Hence the increasingly frequent use, and the consequent news about it even in major Italian newspapers that have started using the term consistently, effectively turning it into a commonly used word.

An illegal business that now amounts to 2 billion euros per year, equivalent to 821 million euros of GDP and 377 million euros of tax revenue, and which has been addressed by several anti-piracy legislative decrees that have tightened controls and sanctions in an attempt to reduce a problem that is becoming structural. According to a recent survey by the Federation for the Protection of Audiovisual and Multimedia Content Industries (FAPAV), 23 million Italians have watched pirate content at least once in 2023 and 11.8 million Italians access content through illegal IPTV, bypassing the need to manually search for pirate sites. An illegal mechanism that is causing no small problems for the television rights sector for sports, notoriously in crisis and forced to increasingly expensive prices, which currently remains the main source of revenue for the League and clubs. Perhaps the latter will not be so happy to see the term Pezzotto appear in the Treccani dictionary, further publicity and institutionalization for their worst enemy, who currently seems to be winning the streaming game.