I purchased a cracked Adobe product DVD there (Disclaimer: I actually had a license at the time, but didn't have it installed on that particular laptop). I had trouble installing it, so I went back. I got my money back and help installing an alternative on my laptop. Best service!
PS: Also, Odessa is very beautiful, and I say that as someone who has lived in some beautiful places. -- https://youtu.be/G-BkuEOFGKI (Odessa Walking Tour - Ukraine's Most Beautiful City in 4K -- and this is still missing the many wonderful inner courtyards, and the entire long wonderful beach and park, which would be another equally long video)
The illegal bushiness apparently has incentives to keep their customers, while the legal ones rest on their legal monopoly-laurels.
I'd imagine if we had a market where every service had access to every piece of content, so no exclusivity, this problem would go away. Then they'd compete on the quality of service rather than their selection of content they've held hostage. But as long as individual services can opt to not never share their content with anybody else, they can just hold their customers hostage, since they cannot get their good from anywhere else, so the only options are buy or don't buy.
Shouldn't music streaming services be an example for a market where each service offers pretty much the same products and they compete on price and product alone.
Not everyone uses every service equally, nor need the same from each service. "Listening to music" is a broad spectrum of activities in reality, and when I use streaming services, I almost exclusively use them for discovery and to find new music, and music I actually listen to more than once is bought rather than streamed. So while for me the single most important question for me is "How easy does this service make it for me to find new music?", for others, the question might be "What service streams the highest quality?". This is besides the whole legal thing with "What music is available there vs here" that others already mentioned.
But they don't offer the same products. The UX and tools are largely the same, or similar enough, but the product is not the same. The product for streaming services is by and large the content catalog they offer.
Each streaming service has their own exclusive deals with publishers and offer a completely different catalog of music/movies.
This is why pirate sites are far superior, because they don't have those artificial limits on the product catalog offered.
"Exclusive deals" in this context as analogous to "monopolistic deals", the former term sounds less bad, but in terms of consumer effect, "monopolistic" is a much more apt word to use.
If i'm not mistaken the people behind Spotify were also some of the people behind The Pirate Bay, so they may have had some seriously good insights on how to treat your customers.
Yes. Although there are some gaps, you have to go fairly far out there to find them. Most everything is on every music streaming platform. The music industry got that memo after MP3 piracy became rampant.
But the video streaming platforms haven't gotten that memo yet and prefer to dig themselves into a larger and larger hole, both as far as normal Netflix style on-demand streaming, and IPTV style streams for sports and such. Hence why piracy of both are growing, with torrents on one side and IPTV pirate streams on the other.
Not that the music business has had some very shady business in the past, but my guess is that the movie industry is even more shady. Didn't the Harry Potter movies make a gigantic loss on paper? Steve Jackson had to sue the company to get his Lord of The Rings money, if i'm not mistaken.
Yup, "hollywood accounting" at its finest. It's exploitative AF - established actors and other key staff can demand percentage of gross revenue, everyone else gets either a fixed amount or, worse, net revenue percentage. But as there is always a fresh supply of new desperates, you either take what is offered or you go hungry.
Even the big unions have failed to put an end to this unholy mess.
20 year long patents are a large factor for it, designed for a very different world where progress was extremely slow. It's borderline absurd to keep them going today, they can restrict the usage of a technology for more than the entire duration of its usefulness before it's superseded by something better, which is patented again, giving you a series of sequential monopolies instead of a competitive market. I'm glad that at least the Chinese dgaf about patents so there is still some competition in practice even if questionably legal.
These kind of pirated IPTV services are very popular in middle eastern countries. You message some guy on whatsapp, pay him a couple bucks and receive a link to an APK file + login info. The app gives you access to basically any channel in every country. They have to do everything through word of mouth because its high risk, obviously, and even in developed countries you can get sent to jail pretty quickly for running something like this. I was expecting esoteric OPSEC lessons from this post, because if thats not the highest priority, its pretty stupid to even consider doing this.
Good OPSEC is surprisingly simple and boring. Essentially, it just boils down to using tor and not accidentally exposing sensitive information, which is how Ross Ulbricht got caught. (okay, it is more than that but in essence it is true)
There are probably many people in prison right now because tor is awfully slow. If you don't have the patience for tor you probably also don't have the patience for prison.
in what we would consider "non-developed countries", the powers-that-be might not care about copyrights, but about getting their cut/bakshish. Particularly the "illegal" world doesn't take kind to outside "invaders" making money on someone else's turf.
it's the same thing in western Europe, piracy IPTV is a very popular thing since few years now, you get that through discord servers or really a simple query on aliexpress and you can buy a yearly account for 30$.
If anyone has any general questions (it seems like my little “startup lessons” page is as popular as the others) I’m be happy to answer them as long as they’re not too technical or financial. However, the specifics of the technical side of my site are best found on TorrentFreak, and in short: curl commands.
You wrote about "small, honest teams" - the older I get the more I get the hunch that small teams/companies are a great way to go for me. Basically, choose some field you enjoy working in, with people you like. Any thoughts on how to find something like this? I feel like its the kind of thing you have to start yourself, but I can't take much risk.
My experience in finding one (15 people at the company I’m currently at, and I’m one of 3.5 engineers) (.5 because founder still codes more than we’d like him to) was effectively reaching out to companies that I knew didn’t have job postings up, and was the size that I’d fit into. I learned quickly that not every vacancy is posted publicly.
> I used to think ethics were a set of rules to follow. Now I think they're more like tests—constant ones—that you run against your own motivations.
Is the big one. And interestingly, single guys doing stuff that is ethically defensible are at a larger risk of ending up in trouble with the law than big corporations doing far worse stuff. So the lesson at a personal level is a completely different one than at the corporate level, there it is 'what we can get away with' versus 'what we should do to be good citizens'.
I recently learned that, just like most other businesses, a lot of free pirate streaming sites are actually powered by a few big content aggregators[1][2][3]. They don't do much beyond providing a nice-looking frontend to an unauthenticated API that those aggregators expose.
One could probably spin one of these up in an afternoon (if making money was not the goal). The barriers of entry to this ecosystem are a lot lower than I ever imagined.
Those aggregators serve their own ads (what you get through the API is a link to a web player embed, not to the video directly). I suspect that bigger sites get some kind of kickback for bringing in traffic to those players.
I found the whole site a very interesting (and fairly quick) read. I don't really have anything else to add, but I'm glad the owner manages to be honest and take good lessons from the whole thing.
It's interesting to me how from his account, everyone is fairly sympathetic to him regarding his charges (he mentions his employer showing up to his interview in a sports jersey in reference to his charges!), and how he mentions he knows several actual sports players used his site. It really goes to show the state of modern streaming.
The vast majority of pirate stream sites are monetized in some way. If I was going to use one I'd probably prefer to pay some small amount rather than deal with the hellish ads the 'free' ones use.
Geofencing (you can't watch this sport from this location because fuck you), devices blacklisting (you can't watch this sport on your mobile device because fuck you), rights expiring (you can't watch this match anymore despite you have "bought" it because fuck you), screen limiting (you are logged in on both your TV and iphone so fuck you), etc. All for $19.99.
In contrast, you pay like $9.99 and you can watch anything, anywhere, anytime.
Remember when music piracy died? When Steve Jobs removed friction between me and my music.
No DRM issues (like same quality on every device, no extra privileges), one application for everything, runs everywhere, no UX issues (e.g., long scrolling to continue watching series, no autoplay and no spoilers in the thumbnail). It's worth paying for such an experience, which the first parties don't provide.
(Speaking in general here, this includes Jellyfin.)
I don't have cable or IPTV, but I do pirate other stuff that I paid for:
Anything that has intrusive DRM has no place in my computer.
If it's for work, I will still pirate while holding the license, just for the stability alone.
For music stuff stability is paramount and I'd rather not deal with things that magically stop working from time to time (IK Multimedia is notorious for that).
I'm personally not into piracy, but with paid pirate sports streaming websites, you often get a better user experience and way more choice for cheaper than with the legal options. You only need to pay once and you don't need to jump between apps.
I don't condone it but if you're in the UK and you want to legally watch every premier league game last season...
Sky Sports - £35/month
TNT Sports - £32/month
Amazon Prime - £9/month
And then in the UK there is a legal peculiarity whereby 3pm Saturday games are illegal to broadcast on television, so you don't even get that slot. It's the most common slot with about a third of the weekends games.
v.s. Paying someone on discord £8/month for all the games
You can often get a deal if you threaten to cancel, go through with it, and then wait for a retentions offer, but since Sky was acquired by Comcast that's happening less and less, especially for the superior Sky Q satellite service - you can get great deals on their Sky Stream service, but it's plagued with issues, and you no longer have the ability to time shift by having the main box record directly off the satellite feed.
You also can't skip ads unless you pay them, versus the ability to pause, fast forward etc. on the Satellite service.
IPTV in Western Europe is becoming more popular because it's decently priced for what you get. Say you want to watch football, but don't give a shit about anything else sports related. Well, you're probably still paying for everything else in a giant package for 50-100+ USD a month.
Especially for someone who only cares about their team, watching two games a month, that's a really bad deal. Even more so if your local offer is burdened with bad commentators or ads you can't get away from. Scale that problem up to someone who watches a few different sports, but none are available as one single package, and the value for money gets worse, while the experience grows worse as well, being you're now divided between several services. Add in DRM and bad app experiences, and you get people who just can't be arsed to do things properly any more, given they are functionally being punished for doing so.
Or you could pay a shady guy a few quid a month, but the service is good, and you get everything under the sun, moon, sky, and maybe even the stars. Can't blame them for wanting an experience that isn't trying to wring them dry.
It's so funny how much that reminds me of working in a university acquired by a large for-profit corporation.
After the MBAs arrived, the whole thing was about selling shitty packages for students.
- The college was somehow legally allowed to charge a minimum, so people only needing one single class was still paying for 3.
- They would push high distance learning for anything they legally could, showing the same video of the same teacher to all their 10 universities and paying "tutors" a minimum wage to moderate hundreds of Moodle classes (if not putting Masters students to do it for half the minimum wage). So 80 students paying $1000 on average to take a 5 class, and some of those cost on average $2000 + server costs. What a business.
- Of course classes that had 10 people in it suddenly had 40. And for when there wasn't 40 people to attend, they would consolidate classes with another group and half would have to go to the other side of town for the one class that, if they didn't attend, would set back their tuition by one year.
But yeah, sure it makes more money.
When you don't even have to compete on quality, that's what happens.
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is that you dont have to deal with re-authentication just because you decided to watch it at a different location.
There are many small papercuts that legal providers subject customers to.
I rented a movie recently on Amazon and it refused to play in high definition because they didn't like the device I was streaming it to. Bullshit like that.
A lot of the pirate stream sites I've run into break entirely if you have an adblocker enabled. I'd guess it's a combination of filter lists not being tested on them along with much more aggressive ads (from sketchier ad networks).
Use a good adblocker. I'd never do anything illegal, of course, but a friend of my friend has been successfully using all sorts of pirated content sites for years, and swears he barely sees any ads.
Or, you know, don't. The less popular these sites are, the longer they stay around.
You always pay for piracy or it is bad experience. You have to pay in your resources (private torrent trackers) or in cash (derbit, usenet). Alternatively you use unstable and low quality stream.
Because of philosophy I prefer sharing resources more than cash.
I never paid a cent and always found what I looked for, just type whatever you're looking for + "torrent" on yandex and you'll hit something relevant very quickly
Stremio + torrentio for me is a very good setup personally. It just works but I know of other mechanisms too.
One of these was to actually download a torrent and use torrentfs or something similar and you can stream a video directly from the mirror without downloading it fully and on linux, I really appreciate its simplicity and I love it ngl
From what he says in the post I think this guy was selling pirated livestreams of sports - something that people want to watch as it is happening, not as a torrent after the event.
You have to go pretty far out there to find shows and movies that aren't on public trackers. I definitely can find gaps if I go looking for them, especially if we start counting not finding a blu-ray rip while a DVD rip is easily found, or not finding a 4K rip but a 1080p one is out there, but for most anything friends would have asked me to dig up, a high quality rip is easily found. Not to mention that once found, it can just stay on a hard drive and be easily retrieved for next time.
The only exception I can think of are local shows, but I don't watch them, specifically because they're only on Actual TV™, which I haven't watched in years, they only recently got onto the local streaming services. They should still be on local private trackers, which I can definitely agree is a hassle, but depending on how bad your local streaming service is, they can definitely a be a tempting prospect.
I would call it a hero-site. That's what they are - they are heroes for unrestricting information.
Take ublock origin. Now, many say it is an ad-blocker; the ublock origin author says the extension is a generic content blocker. I agree with that but I go further: I call ublock origin a hero-blocker, or better, a heroic blocker. It blocks unwanted things in general. For similar reasons I think the term "piratebay" is old. It made more sense in the 2000s. Now I would call it herobay.
People may wonder about those terms, but I think it is important to use better terms than old terms. The old terms often were hijacked by the law system and mega-corporations with their own particular interests. It is time that the people re-define the law. Law should serve the people.
Preventing someone from getting value out of their work is theft - not matter how it is done. Copying a dead person's work isn't theft because a dead person can't create value, but stealing a dead person's car is still theft, because something of value is gone.
Stealing a car you were never going to buy and making an exact replica of a car you were never going to buy is two entirely different things.
This is a monetized streaming site that spams reddit users. This is the hero in your mind? Is your philosophy that as long as the legal IP holders don't get paid it's great?
> My copywriting was tongue-in-cheek and self-deprecating. It was all me, no bullshit. I treated every message—even transactional emails—as an opportunity to build trust.
What does this mean? what is this 'trust' that is built ? how does an email build 'trust' Is this to do with whether I beleive the email came from where it says it does ? or somethign else. A lot of this article seemed a little vague in the business buzzword bullshit type way.
Bro, you gotta just build Trust(tm) for this one growth hack(tm)
> My proudest growth hack involved Reddit's API. I filtered posts mentioning phrases like "NBA League Pass," "blackouts," or "where to" on team-specific subreddits. Then I gave my users lists of those posts and encouraged them to comment—transparently—about why they liked HeheStreams, including their referral link.
Any goodwill I felt towards this guy evaporated at the end. Reddit spam, unraveling the social trust in user recommendations, is a scourge. I’m sorry he wasn’t sent to jail longer.
And as with most criminal cases, it’s astonishing how little money he made for his trouble.
Yeah, thank you for breaking reddit. After their nuclear ban of flagged accounts and disabling non-residential IPs I don't bother to create account anymore.
I’m sorry you got the idea that my users were spamming Reddit with referral links. It was hardly like that and I personally checked that every user was being tasteful, and sent “don’t spam” only a handful of times.
That probably doesn’t change your perception—I, too, feel like Reddit is pretty bad these days—but I felt the need to say something anyway. I ran a pretty tight ship and had placed a lot of importance on perception.
Yeah the whole endeavor was pretty pointless no matter how much the author is trying to glorify it as some kind of legitimate, special, important business.
Big "Our amazing journey" vibes with this one. Except the journey ended up in prison and all they have left to talk about is how proud they were to spam Reddit with pirate stream links.
> Specifically, in multiple communications with MLB employees, STREIT claimed that he knew MLB reporters who were ‘interested in the story,’ and stated that it would be bad if the vulnerability were exposed and MLB was embarrassed.
Oh man, such a stupid thing to do. This turned a $150k bounty into extortion.
> Streit indicated his work was worth $150K but was also informed there was no ‘bug bounty’ program at the baseball league.
Sounds like a bug that would have been better off anonymously leaked for the other IPTV providers to pick up, after said bug was valued at 0 in greyhat dollars.
It still amazes me that these kind of 'illegal business models' usually have a far better customer support than legal business models :)
Many years ago I spent two months in Odessa, Ukraine. I lived in a rented apartment not far from the pretty famous half open-air book (and CD/DVD) market (https://wanderlog.com/place/details/10511015/books-market).
I purchased a cracked Adobe product DVD there (Disclaimer: I actually had a license at the time, but didn't have it installed on that particular laptop). I had trouble installing it, so I went back. I got my money back and help installing an alternative on my laptop. Best service!
PS: Also, Odessa is very beautiful, and I say that as someone who has lived in some beautiful places. -- https://youtu.be/G-BkuEOFGKI (Odessa Walking Tour - Ukraine's Most Beautiful City in 4K -- and this is still missing the many wonderful inner courtyards, and the entire long wonderful beach and park, which would be another equally long video)
Ukrainian here. Odessa is indeed a city on another level. Easily the best city in the country and incredibly nice in the summer. Glad you liked it! <3
The illegal bushiness apparently has incentives to keep their customers, while the legal ones rest on their legal monopoly-laurels.
I'd imagine if we had a market where every service had access to every piece of content, so no exclusivity, this problem would go away. Then they'd compete on the quality of service rather than their selection of content they've held hostage. But as long as individual services can opt to not never share their content with anybody else, they can just hold their customers hostage, since they cannot get their good from anywhere else, so the only options are buy or don't buy.
Shouldn't music streaming services be an example for a market where each service offers pretty much the same products and they compete on price and product alone.
Not everyone uses every service equally, nor need the same from each service. "Listening to music" is a broad spectrum of activities in reality, and when I use streaming services, I almost exclusively use them for discovery and to find new music, and music I actually listen to more than once is bought rather than streamed. So while for me the single most important question for me is "How easy does this service make it for me to find new music?", for others, the question might be "What service streams the highest quality?". This is besides the whole legal thing with "What music is available there vs here" that others already mentioned.
But they don't offer the same products. The UX and tools are largely the same, or similar enough, but the product is not the same. The product for streaming services is by and large the content catalog they offer.
Each streaming service has their own exclusive deals with publishers and offer a completely different catalog of music/movies.
This is why pirate sites are far superior, because they don't have those artificial limits on the product catalog offered.
"Exclusive deals" in this context as analogous to "monopolistic deals", the former term sounds less bad, but in terms of consumer effect, "monopolistic" is a much more apt word to use.
Music catalogs are nearly identical identical. Much different from video streaming services where the divergence is dramatic from one to another.
> Each streaming service has their own exclusive deals with publishers and offer a completely different catalog of music
What? If a piece of music is on one streaming service, it's on all of them.
They are, and that's exactly why music piracy fell off a cliff in the streaming era and movie/tv piracy didn't.
"Piracy is a service problem" -- Gabe Newell
If i'm not mistaken the people behind Spotify were also some of the people behind The Pirate Bay, so they may have had some seriously good insights on how to treat your customers.
it was what.cd, which is how they got their original comprehensive catalog so fast
The music streaming services are also the easiest way to pirate music.
Yes. Although there are some gaps, you have to go fairly far out there to find them. Most everything is on every music streaming platform. The music industry got that memo after MP3 piracy became rampant.
But the video streaming platforms haven't gotten that memo yet and prefer to dig themselves into a larger and larger hole, both as far as normal Netflix style on-demand streaming, and IPTV style streams for sports and such. Hence why piracy of both are growing, with torrents on one side and IPTV pirate streams on the other.
Not that the music business has had some very shady business in the past, but my guess is that the movie industry is even more shady. Didn't the Harry Potter movies make a gigantic loss on paper? Steve Jackson had to sue the company to get his Lord of The Rings money, if i'm not mistaken.
Yup, "hollywood accounting" at its finest. It's exploitative AF - established actors and other key staff can demand percentage of gross revenue, everyone else gets either a fixed amount or, worse, net revenue percentage. But as there is always a fresh supply of new desperates, you either take what is offered or you go hungry.
Even the big unions have failed to put an end to this unholy mess.
that's partly how music streaming is so cheap (or even free with ads)
What would be the incentive to pour millions of dollars into a product,only to have virtually no way to make money or get your investment back?
What would stop much larger companies, with more resources, to just keep taking anything good from smaller companies/startup?
This idea would last in the short-term, and once money dried up, result in a nonexistent market.
Piracy sites are competing with other piracy sites and the only differing factor is support.
20 year long patents are a large factor for it, designed for a very different world where progress was extremely slow. It's borderline absurd to keep them going today, they can restrict the usage of a technology for more than the entire duration of its usefulness before it's superseded by something better, which is patented again, giving you a series of sequential monopolies instead of a competitive market. I'm glad that at least the Chinese dgaf about patents so there is still some competition in practice even if questionably legal.
These kind of pirated IPTV services are very popular in middle eastern countries. You message some guy on whatsapp, pay him a couple bucks and receive a link to an APK file + login info. The app gives you access to basically any channel in every country. They have to do everything through word of mouth because its high risk, obviously, and even in developed countries you can get sent to jail pretty quickly for running something like this. I was expecting esoteric OPSEC lessons from this post, because if thats not the highest priority, its pretty stupid to even consider doing this.
Good OPSEC is surprisingly simple and boring. Essentially, it just boils down to using tor and not accidentally exposing sensitive information, which is how Ross Ulbricht got caught. (okay, it is more than that but in essence it is true)
There are probably many people in prison right now because tor is awfully slow. If you don't have the patience for tor you probably also don't have the patience for prison.
> and even in developed countries you can get sent to jail pretty quickly for running something like this
This would only happen in developed countries. Nowhere else in the world cares about foreign copyrights being infringed.
This seems like common sense, when you're not fully developed, you spend time caring on the bottom of the necessity triangle, not the top.
MS knows this fairly well, and why they don't go after the low hanging pirates.
in what we would consider "non-developed countries", the powers-that-be might not care about copyrights, but about getting their cut/bakshish. Particularly the "illegal" world doesn't take kind to outside "invaders" making money on someone else's turf.
it's the same thing in western Europe, piracy IPTV is a very popular thing since few years now, you get that through discord servers or really a simple query on aliexpress and you can buy a yearly account for 30$.
Have an example of a search term for non us content, or are they all worldwide with 1000s of channels?
I want one for my MIL who speaks a different language.
Related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794455
Go to any local market place and you will see ads to buy these streaming sticks with everything setup for you, plug and play.
Author here. This is funny to wake up to.
If anyone has any general questions (it seems like my little “startup lessons” page is as popular as the others) I’m be happy to answer them as long as they’re not too technical or financial. However, the specifics of the technical side of my site are best found on TorrentFreak, and in short: curl commands.
You wrote about "small, honest teams" - the older I get the more I get the hunch that small teams/companies are a great way to go for me. Basically, choose some field you enjoy working in, with people you like. Any thoughts on how to find something like this? I feel like its the kind of thing you have to start yourself, but I can't take much risk.
My experience in finding one (15 people at the company I’m currently at, and I’m one of 3.5 engineers) (.5 because founder still codes more than we’d like him to) was effectively reaching out to companies that I knew didn’t have job postings up, and was the size that I’d fit into. I learned quickly that not every vacancy is posted publicly.
His https://prison.josh.mn/self page was remarkably interesting and insightful. Some nuggets:
> Contrast what society says rehabilitation is versus what it actually feels like. How much of it depends on luck, personality, or privilege?
> people want linear redemption stories, but real self-improvement is messy, nonlinear, and impossible to A/B test.
> There's a certain freedom in owning your story publicly. People can't weaponize what you've already made peace with.
> I used to think ethics were a set of rules to follow. Now I think they're more like tests—constant ones—that you run against your own motivations.
Is the big one. And interestingly, single guys doing stuff that is ethically defensible are at a larger risk of ending up in trouble with the law than big corporations doing far worse stuff. So the lesson at a personal level is a completely different one than at the corporate level, there it is 'what we can get away with' versus 'what we should do to be good citizens'.
I recently learned that, just like most other businesses, a lot of free pirate streaming sites are actually powered by a few big content aggregators[1][2][3]. They don't do much beyond providing a nice-looking frontend to an unauthenticated API that those aggregators expose.
One could probably spin one of these up in an afternoon (if making money was not the goal). The barriers of entry to this ecosystem are a lot lower than I ever imagined.
Those aggregators serve their own ads (what you get through the API is a link to a web player embed, not to the video directly). I suspect that bigger sites get some kind of kickback for bringing in traffic to those players.
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/mpa-highlights-rapidly-expanding-hy... [2] http://vidsrcme.ru/ [3] https://streamed.pk/docs
This is relatively new and an interesting business model. There’s also “piracy as a service” https://torrentfreak.com/hollywood-and-netflix-signal-piracy...
I found the whole site a very interesting (and fairly quick) read. I don't really have anything else to add, but I'm glad the owner manages to be honest and take good lessons from the whole thing.
It's interesting to me how from his account, everyone is fairly sympathetic to him regarding his charges (he mentions his employer showing up to his interview in a sports jersey in reference to his charges!), and how he mentions he knows several actual sports players used his site. It really goes to show the state of modern streaming.
> Send fun emails
Yes, do that. Also a tangent: remind me why you're sending me an email if you haven't sent one in many months.
Sometimes I see an interesting project that hasn't launched. They just have an "sign up for news updates".
Then 12 months later I get a standard news email and I have no clue what it is and ignore it.
At least start your email with something like "Hey, 12 months ago you signed up for the mega cool electron thunder splitter. We've launched!"
> refund
ah, it's this kind of pirate streaming
The vast majority of pirate stream sites are monetized in some way. If I was going to use one I'd probably prefer to pay some small amount rather than deal with the hellish ads the 'free' ones use.
Idk if I'm paying anyway, why not the legal way?
Because "legal" way is paved with obstacles.
Geofencing (you can't watch this sport from this location because fuck you), devices blacklisting (you can't watch this sport on your mobile device because fuck you), rights expiring (you can't watch this match anymore despite you have "bought" it because fuck you), screen limiting (you are logged in on both your TV and iphone so fuck you), etc. All for $19.99.
In contrast, you pay like $9.99 and you can watch anything, anywhere, anytime.
Remember when music piracy died? When Steve Jobs removed friction between me and my music.
Exactly.
Netflix is even starting to have problems with Apple's iCloud Private Relay with me, I already had to get in touch with their support.
We live in a world where paid services require us to deactivate security/privacy features to use them. Fuck them.
No DRM issues (like same quality on every device, no extra privileges), one application for everything, runs everywhere, no UX issues (e.g., long scrolling to continue watching series, no autoplay and no spoilers in the thumbnail). It's worth paying for such an experience, which the first parties don't provide.
(Speaking in general here, this includes Jellyfin.)
I don't have cable or IPTV, but I do pirate other stuff that I paid for:
Anything that has intrusive DRM has no place in my computer.
If it's for work, I will still pirate while holding the license, just for the stability alone.
For music stuff stability is paramount and I'd rather not deal with things that magically stop working from time to time (IK Multimedia is notorious for that).
I'm personally not into piracy, but with paid pirate sports streaming websites, you often get a better user experience and way more choice for cheaper than with the legal options. You only need to pay once and you don't need to jump between apps.
I don't condone it but if you're in the UK and you want to legally watch every premier league game last season...
Sky Sports - £35/month
TNT Sports - £32/month
Amazon Prime - £9/month
And then in the UK there is a legal peculiarity whereby 3pm Saturday games are illegal to broadcast on television, so you don't even get that slot. It's the most common slot with about a third of the weekends games.
v.s. Paying someone on discord £8/month for all the games
Amazon Prime introduced ads. The ads will dissapear for some extra money. It made me instantly hate it.
I'm sure Sky is a lot more than £35, is that number just for the Sports package on top of the basic sub?
p.s. great username
Yes - that's for Sky Sports.
You can often get a deal if you threaten to cancel, go through with it, and then wait for a retentions offer, but since Sky was acquired by Comcast that's happening less and less, especially for the superior Sky Q satellite service - you can get great deals on their Sky Stream service, but it's plagued with issues, and you no longer have the ability to time shift by having the main box record directly off the satellite feed.
You also can't skip ads unless you pay them, versus the ability to pause, fast forward etc. on the Satellite service.
IPTV in Western Europe is becoming more popular because it's decently priced for what you get. Say you want to watch football, but don't give a shit about anything else sports related. Well, you're probably still paying for everything else in a giant package for 50-100+ USD a month.
Especially for someone who only cares about their team, watching two games a month, that's a really bad deal. Even more so if your local offer is burdened with bad commentators or ads you can't get away from. Scale that problem up to someone who watches a few different sports, but none are available as one single package, and the value for money gets worse, while the experience grows worse as well, being you're now divided between several services. Add in DRM and bad app experiences, and you get people who just can't be arsed to do things properly any more, given they are functionally being punished for doing so.
Or you could pay a shady guy a few quid a month, but the service is good, and you get everything under the sun, moon, sky, and maybe even the stars. Can't blame them for wanting an experience that isn't trying to wring them dry.
It's so funny how much that reminds me of working in a university acquired by a large for-profit corporation.
After the MBAs arrived, the whole thing was about selling shitty packages for students.
- The college was somehow legally allowed to charge a minimum, so people only needing one single class was still paying for 3.
- They would push high distance learning for anything they legally could, showing the same video of the same teacher to all their 10 universities and paying "tutors" a minimum wage to moderate hundreds of Moodle classes (if not putting Masters students to do it for half the minimum wage). So 80 students paying $1000 on average to take a 5 class, and some of those cost on average $2000 + server costs. What a business.
- Of course classes that had 10 people in it suddenly had 40. And for when there wasn't 40 people to attend, they would consolidate classes with another group and half would have to go to the other side of town for the one class that, if they didn't attend, would set back their tuition by one year.
But yeah, sure it makes more money.
When you don't even have to compete on quality, that's what happens.
The big draw here was bypassing geoblocking that you couldn’t otherwise buy your way out of legally.
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is that you dont have to deal with re-authentication just because you decided to watch it at a different location.
There are many small papercuts that legal providers subject customers to.
Much cheaper and no blackouts. HeheStreams was $100/year for NBA/NHL/NFL/MLB, the NBA's equivalent was $200/year in 2021.
I rented a movie recently on Amazon and it refused to play in high definition because they didn't like the device I was streaming it to. Bullshit like that.
Or you could use an adblocker.
A lot of the pirate stream sites I've run into break entirely if you have an adblocker enabled. I'd guess it's a combination of filter lists not being tested on them along with much more aggressive ads (from sketchier ad networks).
Maybe I’m not using enough of them, because I’ve never had issues with uBo. Or it’s because I use 3rd party script blocking.
Use a good adblocker. I'd never do anything illegal, of course, but a friend of my friend has been successfully using all sorts of pirated content sites for years, and swears he barely sees any ads.
Or, you know, don't. The less popular these sites are, the longer they stay around.
At the time I'm quite certain I was using uBlock Origin pre-MV3. I don't think I also had my DNS-based adblocker yet, though.
> deal with the hellish ads
psst, kid
have you ever heard of adblocker?
Many pirate streaming sites don't work with adblockers.
The Admiral pop-up usually shows up on pirate sites.
You always pay for piracy or it is bad experience. You have to pay in your resources (private torrent trackers) or in cash (derbit, usenet). Alternatively you use unstable and low quality stream.
Because of philosophy I prefer sharing resources more than cash.
I never paid a cent and always found what I looked for, just type whatever you're looking for + "torrent" on yandex and you'll hit something relevant very quickly
Stremio + torrentio for me is a very good setup personally. It just works but I know of other mechanisms too.
One of these was to actually download a torrent and use torrentfs or something similar and you can stream a video directly from the mirror without downloading it fully and on linux, I really appreciate its simplicity and I love it ngl
From what he says in the post I think this guy was selling pirated livestreams of sports - something that people want to watch as it is happening, not as a torrent after the event.
You have to go pretty far out there to find shows and movies that aren't on public trackers. I definitely can find gaps if I go looking for them, especially if we start counting not finding a blu-ray rip while a DVD rip is easily found, or not finding a 4K rip but a 1080p one is out there, but for most anything friends would have asked me to dig up, a high quality rip is easily found. Not to mention that once found, it can just stay on a hard drive and be easily retrieved for next time.
The only exception I can think of are local shows, but I don't watch them, specifically because they're only on Actual TV™, which I haven't watched in years, they only recently got onto the local streaming services. They should still be on local private trackers, which I can definitely agree is a hassle, but depending on how bad your local streaming service is, they can definitely a be a tempting prospect.
> You always pay for piracy or it is bad experience
definitely not my experience
I would not call it a "piracy" streaming site.
I would call it a hero-site. That's what they are - they are heroes for unrestricting information.
Take ublock origin. Now, many say it is an ad-blocker; the ublock origin author says the extension is a generic content blocker. I agree with that but I go further: I call ublock origin a hero-blocker, or better, a heroic blocker. It blocks unwanted things in general. For similar reasons I think the term "piratebay" is old. It made more sense in the 2000s. Now I would call it herobay.
People may wonder about those terms, but I think it is important to use better terms than old terms. The old terms often were hijacked by the law system and mega-corporations with their own particular interests. It is time that the people re-define the law. Law should serve the people.
Pirating of course exists. You might rebrand it, but hardly as hero-, more like theft-. Theftbay would sound good to me.
Copying isn't theft.
Preventing someone from getting value out of their work is theft - not matter how it is done. Copying a dead person's work isn't theft because a dead person can't create value, but stealing a dead person's car is still theft, because something of value is gone.
Stealing a car you were never going to buy and making an exact replica of a car you were never going to buy is two entirely different things.
Down the rabbit hole we go.
Found the villain.
Really? Have you read this post at all?
This is a monetized streaming site that spams reddit users. This is the hero in your mind? Is your philosophy that as long as the legal IP holders don't get paid it's great?
> My copywriting was tongue-in-cheek and self-deprecating. It was all me, no bullshit. I treated every message—even transactional emails—as an opportunity to build trust.
What does this mean? what is this 'trust' that is built ? how does an email build 'trust' Is this to do with whether I beleive the email came from where it says it does ? or somethign else. A lot of this article seemed a little vague in the business buzzword bullshit type way.
Bro, you gotta just build Trust(tm) for this one growth hack(tm)
> My proudest growth hack involved Reddit's API. I filtered posts mentioning phrases like "NBA League Pass," "blackouts," or "where to" on team-specific subreddits. Then I gave my users lists of those posts and encouraged them to comment—transparently—about why they liked HeheStreams, including their referral link.
Any goodwill I felt towards this guy evaporated at the end. Reddit spam, unraveling the social trust in user recommendations, is a scourge. I’m sorry he wasn’t sent to jail longer.
And as with most criminal cases, it’s astonishing how little money he made for his trouble.
Yeah, thank you for breaking reddit. After their nuclear ban of flagged accounts and disabling non-residential IPs I don't bother to create account anymore.
I’m sorry you got the idea that my users were spamming Reddit with referral links. It was hardly like that and I personally checked that every user was being tasteful, and sent “don’t spam” only a handful of times.
That probably doesn’t change your perception—I, too, feel like Reddit is pretty bad these days—but I felt the need to say something anyway. I ran a pretty tight ship and had placed a lot of importance on perception.
Yeah the whole endeavor was pretty pointless no matter how much the author is trying to glorify it as some kind of legitimate, special, important business.
Big "Our amazing journey" vibes with this one. Except the journey ended up in prison and all they have left to talk about is how proud they were to spam Reddit with pirate stream links.
Previously: https://torrentfreak.com/hehestreams-iptv-admin-sentenced-to...
> Specifically, in multiple communications with MLB employees, STREIT claimed that he knew MLB reporters who were ‘interested in the story,’ and stated that it would be bad if the vulnerability were exposed and MLB was embarrassed.
Oh man, such a stupid thing to do. This turned a $150k bounty into extortion.
> Streit indicated his work was worth $150K but was also informed there was no ‘bug bounty’ program at the baseball league.
Sounds like a bug that would have been better off anonymously leaked for the other IPTV providers to pick up, after said bug was valued at 0 in greyhat dollars.
The US sentences seem really crazy coming from Europe - like even violent rapists barely get 3 years here: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/sentence-increased-in-sex...
Your link does not back up your claim.
I don't know the details about this specific case, but to me "violent rapists barely get 3 years" is the crazy side. YMMV.