TheImpressiveXFive Men Convicted of Operating Massive, Illegal Streaming Service That Allegedly Had More Content Than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Prime Video Combined
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shortwavesurferItās sad that these people got taken down. Maybe the next people to do it will do it from a country that does not have extradition with the United States, so they would be safe.
Edit: As for payment providers attempting to take such a service down, Monero would be the answer to this.
WilshireFive Men Convicted for Operating Major Illegal Streaming Service
A federal jury in Las Vegas convicted five men this week for their roles in running one of the largest unauthorized streaming services in the United States, which generated millions of dollars in subscription revenue while causing substantial harm to television program copyright owners.
āThe group used āsophisticated computer scriptsā and software to scour piracy servicesā
They used the basic tools that most pirates used today like sonarr and radar??
redistribution = service?
Why would they work for free?
Not gonna pretend like this aint illegal but i don't cry over some IP owners losing money... EVER, fuck 'em
Oh I donāt care that the IP owner donāt get money.
IDK, I just donāt like the ethics of pirating media for profit, the entire idea is that it should be accessible to everyone, not just those with money. Cover your operational cost? Sureā¦Making millions in subscriptions? That is an asshole move IMO. If youāre paying, you might as well pay the people who are making the media in the first place instead of some rando that had nothing to do with it.
All fair points.
I think the issue is that IP owners are mega corps, ie people who made the content don't own it and can't provide it anyway.
KoboldCoterieThis doesnāt seem that different from paying for usenet. Itās not like theyāre making DVDs of pirated movies and selling them on the street corner; they were basically just aggregating content and the service they were providing was making it easily searchable and accessible, not doing the actual pirating, from the sound of it, unless Iām misunderstanding the situation.
This doesnāt seem that different from paying for usenet.
i would think it would be a little different from usenet, considering that usenet would be a service that you pay for, and people who use that service would host content on it, so that other users can download that content. Which effectively removes the immediate liability that you would have in this case, where you are explicitly hosting a pirated streaming service, and then charging for it, for the explicit purpose of streaming said pirated content.
Yeah, I suppose I should clarify - that was in response to the objection to paying for pirated content; itās different from the service providerās point of view, but from the end userās point of view, theyāre paying for pirated content either way.
yeah, from an end user perspective, itās the same.
But i was referring mostly to the legal technicalities there, where one would be significantly more spicy than the other.
Nice root instance btw, getting jumpscared by pawb.social is a rather funny timeline to live in.
I donāt have an issue paying my ISP to access pirated content, thatās the same as paying for Usenet IMO. Iām paying for network access for a lot of different things, pirated content just happens to be part of it.
Y|yukichigaiGuessing they used Sonarr, Radarr, qBittorrent, maybe an NZB clientā¦
Would you look at that, Iām sophisticated now.
Maybe even Jellyseerr
Yes. Charging money for sharing content like that makes them little better than grifters
I donāt understand why you would pay for an illegal service when the other options are to pay legally or pirate.
My guess is because they did all the pirating for you so you didnāt have to worry about dealing with the technical hurdles of doing so.
If a service like this came around that allowed me to pay with Monero and did not require any personally identifiable information, I would totally fucking use it.
My guess is Itās probably cheaper and has much greater variety. You can watch anything from any streaming service through one single interface at the price of one service.
piracy is a service issue.
also, fuck IP owners, pigs got too fat while cutting on service.
because piracy is a service problem
if a pirate service legitimately offers a better service than netflix, hulu, vudu and prime video combined, why would you pay for any of those four?
because IPTV is like $6 per month and has every single channel known to earthā¦ itās a tiny fraction compared to any cable especially if you watch sports (the only real reason to pay for cable anyway)
Because all the legal services are incredibly anti-consumer and are offering less services, with (more) ads, for more money every year.
A_Random_IdiotThe entire system exists for the benefit of business, not customers.
Just look at what happens with accused theft in a store. You get accused of theft? Cops are there in no time, take you to the ground, throw you in the back of the cop car. only after theyāve gotten the humiliation and brutalization in might someone come and take your proof that you didnt steal anything.
You accuse the store of stealing from you? Due to not following their own policy on returns, or overcharging and an item and not fixing it Police wonāt even show. just tell you its a civil matter and to suck it up.
Access to Usenet providers is not free
I dont subscribe to any streaming service (except the occasional free prime trial, to be full disclosure), not even the one in the news storyā¦ but I can still answer your questionā¦
Because I want to pay a single service to watch everything. Like Netflix used to be. Watch everything I want, for one monthly price that was reasonable.
But its not like that anymore. Every company looked at how well Netflix used to do, went āFuck them! I want all that money for my self!ā and took their content off Netflix, and made their own streaming services.
Now if you want to consume any media, You have to subscribe to 50 different subscription services, for hundreds of dollars a month, Which is just Cable 2.0 but with worse service and options.
Pirating implies some knowledge and effort some people may not have or want to get into
Paid Legal services are so enshitified some people may think they are getting ripped up
Paid illegal services are often HUGE bang for buck value (no enshitification, no limits, no nonsense and often better customer service)
You pay like $5/Mo for the content of all streaming services and more instead of the $500/Mo it would cost to subscribe to each of them individually. Plus youāre not taking any legal risk as a customer.
The majority of piracy is not free.
Iāve paid for usenet, seed boxes, private servers, and more recently torrent cache services.
You pay because itās much cheaper than commercial services and a better experience with more content.
Darkassassin07Because the legal options are garbage.
The pirates provide a better service with more content for cheaper than the legal options; and pirating yourself takes effort as well as cost (hardware, trackers, usenet, etc).
Some people are happy to just pay for decent service; others like to learn about the process, then setup and run their own servers.
To each their own.
In addition to other things people responded with, piracy services tend to not collect users data or prevent us from watching with a VPN enabled.
Alphane Moon183,200 TV episodes is pretty modest compared to alternative ānon-approvedā sources.
One datapoint is one source (that has a rule against any TV/show content released in the last 5 years) has a total number of 19.5K shows and TV movies/specials, with ~80 K releases. For many shows a single release can be a full season.
I run a massive streaming service too, which is always way bigger than all the streamers combined. Itās just only distributed over my private home network. Jellyfin for the win!
Youāre under arrest!
Gsus4Maximum security with this national menace!
Not without paying licencing fees for Hannibal Lecter first!
What a terrible shame it would be to have a friend over to watch the telly without a loicenseā¦š§
TimLovesTechYou ever heard of a man Hannibal Lecter he was a ānice guyā.
- Donald J Trump
Great late Hannibal Lecter*
Love my Jellyfin server, but I have 2 gripes over just using VLC.
-
Canāt use the scroll wheel for volume. Itās a pain aiming for the volume from across the room on the couch.
-
JF wonāt boost volume past 100% like VLC.
Know of any fixes?
Are you playing directly on your server?
For the first one at least you could solve it by running JF with a Chromecast or similar device.
Feels cleaner than a wireless mouse in the living room too, IMO
You can run your Jellyfin connection inside of Kodi which has a ton of configuration options like the volume control.
tabularCanāt right click to pause the video in VLC ;c
Use kodi for last mile?
VLC is great as a file playing app, terrible as a home serverā¦
ripcordItās weird to me that anyone would use a PC hooked up to a TV from a couch in 2024, but Iām sure it (otherwise) works for you.
Why is weird?
Instead of using a streaming or other settop device? Thatād be far, far more normal for the use cade.
I find it convenient, but Iāve had pcās hooked to tvās since broadband became a thing. I can watch anything, download anything, play games, check banking, ect.
Fair enough.
TrickDacyI have one of those Google streaming devices but I hate giving up my privacy. Also, I saw fast food ads on the deviceās home screen one day and I couldnāt disable those. That was the last straw.
So now I use a raspberry pi 5 running arch with Firefox to stream everything to my TV. I even got a remote working with it that works fairly well, moves the mouse and everything. It was a lot of work but now I own my experience and donāt have to give Google my data in that particular way anymore.
Iām using a wall-mounted TV as a 2nd monitor.
From a couch, though? That was the use case here.
I have one of those as well for one desktop system. And I will stream to TVs as a second monitor from laptops sometimes. But I donāt think thatās the setup they have.
Which of course is a good setup if it works for them! Or for you :)
Already back in the 00s you could get a media player box, with a remote, that hooked to you TV and played video files from any share in your network or an HDD hooked up to it.
Nowadays you can get an Android TV media player box with Kodi on it (or you can install it), again with a remote and hooked to your TV to do the same as that 00s media player box but looks a lot more fancy.
Or instead of an Android TV you can get a Mini PC or older laptop, ideally with Linux, with an HDMI output which you connect to your TV, install Kodi on it and get a wireless air-mouse remote (if you get one with normal remote buttons rather than the stupid āfor Googleā ones, the buttons seamlessly integrate with Kodi so you donāt really have to use the air-mouse stuff).
Alternativelly if you want to avoid Android but donāt want to spend 150 bucks on a mini PC, you can get one of those System On A Board devices like one of the Orange Pi ones, put LibreElec on it (small Linux distro built around Kodi) and do the wireless remote thing with it.
The back end of any of this is either files on a NAS, on a share on a PC, a harddisk connected directly to the device or even something like Jellyfin running somewhere else (which can be outside your home network) or even any of the many IPTV services out there.
It has never been this easy to put together a hardware and software solution, entirely under your control - read: just as easy to use for corporate streaming services as for āpersonalā media - to watch media in your living room with the same convenience as purpose built devices for that, and it has never been this convenient to use or looked this good.
I think itās just easier to use a cheap computer. You can use your vpn, adblockers, takes zero setup time to watch whatever you want to watch.
The 00ās comment, I modded the original xbox to run xbox media center (XBMC) which turned into Kodi. My friends where blown away I could download movies and watch them on my tv.
Well, the easiest IMHO is the Android TV box (mainly because it comes with a remote) but I personally have a cheap Mini-PC because I used it to do a lot more than just being a media box and it still just sits in the living room in the TV stand.
Way back when I started (trying to have something in my living room, rather that absolute started which was way before that) all that I had was a cheap media box with an interface that was basically a file browser, accessing files over Samba.
Stuff is way fancier nowadays AND you can do it with much cheaper hardware if you want to.
itās not weird at all, for one, you get to use a keyboard, for second, you get to use actual real hardware that isnāt spying on you and selling your data. You also get to use a real QWERTY based, or whatever other layout you want that isnāt ABCDE what a fucking abomination that layout is.
plus you get a whole desktop OS if you please, or if not you can cold roll something specifically for a TV. You just have so many more options, than you do when using a smart tv or generic streaming box.
I donāt watch on my computer, thatās just where itās hosted. I watch mostly on my AppleTV using Infuse (also great for other Apple products as well)
geogleJF wonāt boost volume past 100% like VLC.
For when you need to take it to 11
Couldnāt you just make 10 louder?
And then add 11
You light want to consider streaming it on your TV. Modern TVs should have a Plex app at the least. Or use a Chromecast or other setup. I watch on my couch with the TV remote. Its the same experience as watching Netflix.