The FA Premier League has ordered YouTube, the video-sharing website, to pull down clips of top-flight matches as it seeks to defend the value of television rights from erosion by online bootleggers.

Amid worries that the illicit use of its content online will dilute future rights deals, the football body has employed NetResult, a specialist in protecting intellectual property online, to police the web for illegal clips of Premiership action.

A spokesman for the Premier League said that it had “put YouTube on notice” and written to the company demanding an explanation for the thousands of copyrighted clips.

From next season, online rights for Premiership footage will be transferred to NTL, the cable group, which flagged the right to show “near live” coverage as a cornerstone of its internet strategy.

However, the League admits that the plethora of illicit footage online, ranging from brief clips to live streaming of Saturday fixtures, risks compromising its entire portfolio of TV rights packages, worth some £1.8 billion from 2007 to 2010.

NetResult, which also works for Germany’s Bundesliga, UEFA, and Formula 1 racing, employs a team of three people solely to hunt out pirated Premiership content.

It says that it enjoys a good working relationship with YouTube, which has been forced to remove hundreds of hours of television.

However, the manual solution is being seen as a stopgap measure as YouTube works on an automated system to block illicit clips after coming under pressure from rights owners.

This week MySpace.com, the social networking site, said that it had licensed technology from Gracenote, the online music database, which will aim to block copyrighted tracks being posted on its site. MySpace is owned by News Corporation, parent company of The Times.

Last week, Comedy Central, the Viacom-owned US television group behind South Park and The Colbert Report, demanded that YouTube remove thousands of clips of its material from the site. The move followed the withdrawal from YouTube of about 30,000 Japanese videos.

Other media companies have relented on their threats. Universal Music threatened to sue YouTube, complaining that the website was slow to remove copyright content — only to strike a licensing deal three weeks later.

Viacom may also change its mind about Comedy Central. The company is believed to be reconsidering its position, and hinted as much by saying to the industry blog RedHerring.com: “We want our audiences to be able to access our programming on every platform and we are interested in having it live on all forms of distribution in ways that protect our talented artists, our loyal customers and our passionate audiences.”

YouTube was bought last month for $1.65 billion by Google. Until then the start-up had little money, meaning that content owners had little incentive to sue.

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