> It is estimated that the amount of financial damages suffered annually from the illegal service is a massive €10 billion ($10.5B).
I suspect that the actual damages would be (much) lower, as some of the people using this service would not or could not have paid for the official source. This is the same fallacy or intentional misrepresentation that the music industry used in the Napster days.
As we know, if the pricing is reasonable for the market, and more importantly the content is actually _available!_ in that market, people will pay to stream it.
A lot of the time, the content is unavailable in many markets; so users will have to choose between illegal or nothing. If the content is available to stream legally, and its price is too high for the region, then people wouldn't have paid for it no matter what. Thus, the revenue was not lost; the market was simply never captured.
One thing you might be overlooking is that there are often substitutes for the pirated products.
For example back when Photoshop was several hundred dollars a lot of people who could not afford that pirated it to do home and hobbyist photo editing. If Photoshop had not been able to be pirated those people would not have bought it, so that piracy did indeed not reduce Adobe's income.
However there were also programs such as Pixelmator that were more than an order of magnitude cheaper than Photoshop and could do everything those people were using Photoshop for. If Photoshop could not be pirated some of those people would have bought those other programs.
>One thing you might be overlooking is that there are often substitutes for the pirated products.
This works for software tools, but it doesn't work for movies or other artistic works. For example, personally, I'm a firm believer that no one should pirate Windows: if you can't afford it, then you have lots of free options available (namely, countless Linux distros). Same goes for Photoshop: if you can't afford it (or don't want to), there's free alternatives like Krita. These software programs are just tools to accomplish a task; if you can't get access to one, you can likely find something else to do the same thing.
You can't make this argument for watching a movie, though. You can't substitute some crap movie like Gigli or The Room for the experience of a cinematic masterpiece like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Lawrence of Arabia. It's like comparing some 4-year-old's crayon drawing to a painting by one of the masters.
> You can't make this argument for watching a movie, though. You can't substitute some crap movie like Gigli or The Room for the experience of a cinematic masterpiece like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Lawrence of Arabia. It's like comparing some 4-year-old's crayon drawing to a painting by one of the masters.
You can't substitute mspaint for photoshop either, what a weird take.
And you can substitute any capeshit movie for any other capeshit movie since they're all the same.
There is only one Photoshop, just like there is only one 2001: A Space Odyssey.
There are lots of other tools, some of which are free, much like there are lots of other forms of culture and entertainment. Absolute masterpieces come into the public domain every year, and become free for a new generation of people to enjoy.
Why are public domain forms of culture and entertainment insufficient? The list of classics in the public domain vastly outnumbers the list of contemporary classics.
FWIW, I disagree entirely. Copyright infringement is a natural consequence of free market dynamics and the marginal costs of replication of IP being near zero, just like spillage and theft is a natural consequence of physical stores. It’s part of the cost of doing business.
I know plenty of people who manage to substitute some random crap for great movies; they just want something that will pass a few hours, they don't care about having their minds blown.
> “You can't make this argument for watching a movie, though.”
HA! And yet my local library makes this argument all the time.
Context, I had a discussion with the media buyer at my local library about how many DVDs they were de-acquisitioning, and how meager were their new purchases of movies and series. Of course I was referring to A-list material. The library has a contracted online streaming service and the librarian offered this service as equivalent. It’s not. It’s not the Criterion Collection. It’s the equivalent of carob substituted for chocolate.
Whatever you think about DVDs compared to streaming, I like going to my local library. And other libraries in my system have much better collections. It’s just poor management (I’m sure I won’t convince many others who have already committed to going streaming or don’t like their public library. So I’ll just say this, they routinely buy ‘altered to fit your television’ copies of action films. Uggg)
>For example back when Photoshop was several hundred dollars...
>However there were also programs such as Pixelmator...
Photoshop is way older than Pixelmator. In the 90's I would use Paint Shop Pro also known as PSP. People still pirated that - including me - because we were kids with no income just looking to mess with cool computer stuff.
Though honestly, it's in Adobe's best interest to turn a blind eye to individual piracy as it keeps their products the incumbent. Little johnny pirating Photoshop to edit his class photos is of no loss to Adobe. Instead, when johnny is old enough to make a living editing images Johnny will likely reach for Photoshop, this time with an open wallet. So piracy is really the ultimate trial version of software. Of course you have to make a show and lynch a few people in public to keep them fearful just enough to ensure most people pay to play. So you get the stories of some granny or 12yo hung out to dry for piracy.
>If people weren't watching movies, they maybe would be watching people in theaters, which is a plus for me though unlikely.
If movies somehow suddenly became magically unavailable in society, I think it's a certainty that people would be watching live theater like 100+ years ago.
However, the total amount of viewing would be far, far less. People today spend lots of their free time watching movies and TV shows (many of which, these days, are better thought of as multi-volume movies). Take all that away somehow, and people will go back to the really old days before the invention of cinemas, where they occasionally watched a (live) show/play at a theater, but it was certainly not a frequent activity, maybe (guessing) once a week at the very best if they were middle-class or higher, certainly not every night, and probably more like monthly.
So the total amount of economic activity that would be generated by this magical elimination of TV/movies, resulting in better careers for stage actors, musicians (assuming the Great Movie Disappearance also magically eliminated recorded music from plays), and playhouse owners would be dwarfed, I think, by the huge loss of economic activity from all the people in the various businesses of movie/TV entertainment. I could be wrong though, but considering Hollywood entertainment and TV is a huge economic driver in the US today (despite piracy), and playhouses and plays were not a huge economic force in the US in the late 1800s, I think my assumptions are correct.
Keep in mind that this bust was a paid subscription service. That’s how they were netting €250 million per month.
The hypothetical damages amount is moot. They were charging a specific amount of money and people were paying it. That amount was high enough that you can completely ignore any inflated estimates and they were still doing a huge amount of criminal business.
The Gitlab comparison makes it sound more realistic to me. Nobody pays for a subscription to Gitlab, 99% of humanity doesn't know what git is and it is quite plausible that of the remainder 99% don't pay for Gitlab.
Compare that to streaming where at least >20% of the population know what it is and >20% of that seem to pay for streaming as a service. Much bigger market, and being a pirate site seems like it'd give them and an edge in the market because their catalogue would be better than any legal operation.
Obviously a lot of factors are at play for SaaS pricing but that would mean it would be worth at least around 50 billion USD in market cap if it were a legitimate business. Seems highly unlikely.
What would make that unlikely? Sounds like a pretty reasonable valuation. Netflix is $400 Billion USD for ~300 million subscribers and is likely an inferior product to a pirate streaming site (otherwise, obviously, the pirate subscribers would go with Netflix). $50 billion for ~20 million users seems ballpark plausible.
Note that black markets exist because there is enugh demand for a product that it overwhelms the ability of the army/police to enforce the law. This site is obviously going to be doing something economically popular. If it wasn't making a killing, ol' mate running the place would go find some other career.
Yeah but some of these services still offer something that official alternatives do not.
I used to support an apartment building with a lot of residents from India. They all had IPTV boxes with some pirate channel for accessing some in demand cricket comp, and the support requests would all coincide with the streams. And in general they got lots of other local content outside the region locking. Mostly keeping up with India. They got the content for free in india, but paid a small fee to access it remotely, not caring who provided it. They all seemed to believe there was no financially reasonable alternative way to access the content and we never really bothered them about it as its not the carriers job to police IMHO.
Likewise I see tons of yanks complaining about Disney+ not carrying Alien Romulus, when outside of the US its on the app. All self imposed considering Disney owns a large amount of Hulu but is beefing with the remaining shareholders IIRC.
Plainly nonsense region locking seems to be driving piracy. And if someones making 250 million per month circumventing it then it sort of implies the solution doesnt it?
>Likewise I see tons of yanks complaining about Disney+ not carrying Alien Romulus, when outside of the US its on the app. All self imposed considering Disney owns a large amount of Hulu but is beefing with the remaining shareholders IIRC.
That's odd. Disney+ (with ads) is $10/mo on its own. $11/mo for the bundle of D+/Hulu (with ads). Alien: Romulus is on Hulu right now.
> some of the people using this service would not or could not have paid for the official source
If there is demand there would be local distributors who could want a licensing deal and get a cut. There are a bunch of them often in almost every country. Now those distributors see that it would cost them X to license with you but they would make zilch because everybody pirates it anyway.
Now calculate what you lost...
Like if you post art but somebody rips it off and sells something based on it and makes a million. Assume his lawyer says 0% of his buyers would join your patreon. Maybe you don't even have a patreon. But imagine some legit company could suggest a 2 million deal to license your stuff for say toy manufacturing or branding or whatever (like mofu_sand). But they see your stuff pirated all over already and do the math. This is what you lose.
Is the strength of the claim reduced if the damages are exaggerated? Or would (could) the judge simply say "yeah you're right, but you're wildly wrong on your actual damages -- redo and show your work, not counting people who never would have paid you"
Courts do frequently require accurate costings. If a team continually exagerates damages, then the case can get thrown out. However, it is generally left to the judge to choose how egregious it is (if there is proof of intent rather than negotiation).
"Fraudulent exaggeration" may even be punished, depending on the court. (More often seen in civil circles - see insurance.)
> as some of the people using this service would not or could not have paid for the official source.
But what are the actual numbers though? I have friends who are all well off and have no qualm paying subscriptions to illegal streaming sites because "I'm not paying that much for streaming TV."
There was a study a long time back which showed that users are (approx)
* 1/3rd "Pay Never, hardcore pirate."
* 1/3rd "Not invested either way."
* 1/3rd "Could be a legal subscriber."
That said, I've no idea where the numbers come from, but it covers some of the possibilities.
I'm usually mixed. I pay for access to some things. I download copies of some things without paying for them. Some of the latter category are things I just want to check out (software that doesn't offer a demo/that I might mess around with once). Some are things I ostensibly pay for already (ex: movies or shows I get as part of an Amazon Prime subscription but are now frequently interrupted by advertisements). Occasionally I'm just lazy, I'll admit. Sometimes it's just quicker to torrent a movie than to hunt down the best/only place to rent it.
The one thing I won't do is pay (actual) pirates like these for access. I figure it's on me if I watch a movie I didn't pay to rent/stream/whatever. But I'm not supporting god-knows-what sketchy organization with actual money. When I spend money it'll be going to the legit rights owner.
This goes to show people are sick of having to buy 5-10 services just to see all their things, they'd rather get a single pirate stream with them all. Just if you watch US football, you have to subscribe to no less than 5 services to get them all, and international sports are even worse for their football or whatever. Even one of the Seattle Seahawks players got caught watching his own games on a pirate source because even the rich ballers are sick of the all services.
It's just far too easy for me to go download whatever I want to even pay for services, pirate or the real media cartels.
There'd be a market here for a single service for which you could add individual shows from any other streaming service. You'd pay more per show, but that would be perfectly ok for many people.
Unfortunately vested interests within each service would make this impossible due to the level of cooperation required.
There was a brief period of time where Netflix was the absolute peak of online streaming. Most of the major studios were putting their movies and shows there, Netflix was starting to dip their toes in creating original high quality content, and all of it was available for a reasonable monthly price.
Now when I want to watch something I don't even bother trying to figure out what service it's on (if any), I just grab a torrent. Managing subscriptions for a dozen different services and trying to keep track of what I'm subscribed to and why is laughable when it's so easy to get it for free.
These days it's automatic too, the episodes just show up on your hard drive as soon as they're released for whatever you subscribe to or put on your wanted list.
If more people did that, maybe the media cartels will humble some.
Except we didn't. Instead of 500 channels we don't want, we have 10 services with 50 channels. We've managed to actually find the worst of both worlds, which in of itself is an impressive accomplishment.
We wanted a cheaper cable bill when they were 100-150/mo usd, and as you said we got them in the form of all the media cartel services for $10-20/mo each + 50-150/mo internet data. It's still the same problem.
Cable is nothing but a streaming service itself, a cable box is nothing more than a cable modem getting online the same way your data modem does, and streams video the same way as streaming services do, but it's 1000 channels of random crap full of commercials instead of just one media brand in streaming.
Cable tv sucks. It still exists and still sucks. I don’t think anyone was begging for the fragmented options we have now.
Ideally people want to buy what they want to consume/use. Instead they make us pay fees for a bundle of garbage product rather than sell us the actual product we want. Everything as pay per view would be great. Maybe even include dynamic pricing.
If netflix et al only cost $0.50, i'd have no problem subscribing to 10 services.
Really, the whole cable a la carte thing was really a response to false advertising. Cable liked to advertise each channel as being equal - as if you were spending $0.50 per channel when really you were spending $50 on the good channels, and the other junk was free.
I realize this is ancient history, but prior to cable people got Big Ugly Dishes aka C Band dishes and at the time you could subscribe ala carte. When cable came along they practically doubled prices when they also bundled channels ostensibly for convenience but also allegedly due to bundling/license agreements with content providers. The grumbling about unbundling then was due to the price hikes.
I do remember a lot of people complaining about paying for all those channels when all they really wanted was sports. Without realizing that sports was what cost so much, the rest of the channels were almost free.
Yes, true today and the opposite for many: they don't want an expensive bundled subscription to subsidize sports when they don't watch sports themselves.
I dont know why consumers have such a hard-on to blame other consumers. Are you, brandonmenc a cable CEO? Are you make $$$ from gouging subscribers? I highly doubt it. So why the affinity?
Certainly you can see that the cable channels were overcharging, we had 100s of channels like the 'golf channel' with useless programming that were part of 'bundles' you couldn't unbundle and frankly, there were multiple lawsuits of cable companies overcharging incorrectly, not letting people out of contracts etc.
Consumers wanted more choice and control. For the briefest second they got it, but at that very moment when Hulu was independent and Netflix was streaming and GoogleTV was just starting to make a run for it.
At that moment, before Google even thought of chromecast and ABC couldn't give a shit about buying Hulu and telecom executives couldn't not understand dual screen viewing (where you're on your phone and watching TV at the same time) there were massive consulting and strategy meetings about not only recapturing the 'wallet' of spend, but increasing it. Discussing how to bring the spend of a household on cable (say 45-100/mo) to a higher number, to a per person segmentation rather than household.
Even if we did 'beg' for it. I dont think we begged to sift through titles and memberships in a way thats worse than blockbuster some nights.
Source: Was responsible for defining the second screen experience, merchandising shows in real time, etc.
Exactly, on average I watch a movie per week, if not less, I'm not going to spend $25-100/month and sacrifice a goat in the hope that whatever I want to watch on that specific day is available in my region/language. I could rent them but most providers either don't have what I want to watch or only provide it in my local language, which is neither the original version nor my native language.
Sometimes I meet with friends who have all the services and we still end up torrenting because there are issues 50% of the time (technical problems, availability, geolock, subtitles only available in local languages, &c.)
even worse than that is how the sports get blocked out depending on who has sold what rights to who.
Eg . the uk premier league has sold the rights to uk teams to sky and bt but sky and bt won't always show all 10 of the days games.
so you can be in the situation where your team are playing a game you can't get tickets to[all sold out] that you can't pay anyone legally to watch.
yet you go on holiday to Europe and every bar will have Bein or ESPN or whatever showing every.single.match. live
These takes are so overly simplistic. People like free/cheap stuff, no shit. I'm not saying that having lots of subscription services isn't annoying, but your argument could easily apply to lots of things that people pay money for that they would rather get for free if they had the chance.
What I think bastard_op means is that more people would be more likely to pay for a legitimate services if it was a better aggregator of content. Navigating between the X services available to find 'thing you want to watch' is frustrating, time consuming, and expensive.
You appear to be simplifiying it down to only the 'expensive' aspect. And more than likely that's the primary motivator, but the other factors aren't nothing. Additionally, the customers are paying at least something for this service, so it's not free.
In this instance there happens to be an (illegitimate, but still) alternative that's easy enough for 22 million customers to have worked out how to set up, operate, and prefer.
> Navigating between the X services available to find 'thing you want to watch' is frustrating, time consuming, and expensive.
Apple TV and other TV boxes have aggregated services for a long time now. You can search for content across providers from one interface.
Pirate streaming sites aren’t exactly known for their quality, consistency, reliability, and ease of use. I bet it was more frustrating to use the pirate service, especially for those dealing with subtitles and alternate audio.
Steam/GoG and other services disprove this quite clearly. You can pirate games sold on these platforms trivially and safely. In the case of GoG you can often even get signed installers given the trend against drm.
Nonetheless these services are highly successful and profitable. I think one problem is this weirdness of the 21st century where many companies, especially in media, are seen as antagonistic towards their own customers - this provides a major motivation for piracy.
For games, particularly from smaller studios, it's the exact opposite. They generally seem highly concerned with the interest and satisfaction of their players, and so you want to pay them. Many of these studios even sell things like soundtracks (already available in the install folder) as 'pay more' buttons, and plenty of people buy them.
People can pirate games easily, publishers hate paying Steam their 30% cut. However despite this, people still spend a lot on Steam, and publishers still put their stuff out of Steam.
Even though it could be cheaper buying direct, or free by pirating. Turns out the publishers were just either greedy or naive and didn't split the 30% savings to encourage people to move off Steam, and the Steam pricing is low enough that people preferred it.
The same cycle is happening with streaming services, they didn't learn that there is a cutting point where people just dont want to deal with your high priced, abusive shit. Netflix make almost $34 BILLION a year, and yet the most important thing for them is making it really hard for me to help my elderly parents from just using one of my many unused Netflix profiles.
"Nickle and Diming" drives a lot of these folks to figure out an alternative. Because the pirate services aren't going to turn around and restrict my ability to watch on location, or number of streams or decide that they don't like my TV manufacturer anymore and disable the app.
> This goes to show people are sick of having to buy 5-10 services just to see all their things, they'd rather get a single pirate stream with them all.
I don’t understand this desire to do mental gymnastics to ignore the elephant in the room:
The primary driver for these people was not convenience. Pirate services are flakey, don’t always have the content you want, have quirky content, and generally require some work to navigate. These people weren’t seeking convenience.
They signed up because it was cheap. They wanted to save money and they’d give up some of the polish and convenience of a mainstream app and service to save that money.
You're missing a case where the paid option just isn't offered. Sports events in particular are often blacked out in certain areas. Other content is also blocked by region. There are thousands of people who would gladly pay to watch this content legitmately, but it isn't an option. So you find them on a pirate service.
Nope, I've seen these services. You get a box, it has basically every channel imaginable, thousands of movies and shows, and is always available. It's super convenient, and much better UX than trying to find things in the Netflix ribbons that are designed to make you think they have 10x the content they actually do.
You can trade money for convenience. People that simply want stuff for free can waste 5 minutes to figure out how to use a torrent client.
Hell, 20 years ago I had to invest time and trust to get the connections to proper IRC distribution channels to get releases as soon as they were made available by the scene. Yeah, I was a teenager without money to pay for a proper Usenet subscription to download Linux ISOs. :)
As soon as Netflix entered the streaming market in my country, it didn't take long for me to stop sailing the seas.
I bet these pirates got a nice and shiny app to make official streaming platforms envious.
I don't think you (or anyone else) can speak authoritatively on why people were flocking to this particular service.
It could be a thousand different reasons
- As somebody who HAS ACTUALLY lived abroad for years, paying for a streaming service and still being region locked is pretty damn annoying
- Quality of the service. Some pirate sites are flaky, but seedbox style or popcorn time style services are pretty solid. Maybe you're thinking of just a random streaming website?
No way, I don’t believe it. That’s $3.16b yearly - Netflix makes $33b. With no IP holders to pay out to, that would mean they’re making massive profits - they would have to be a household name, and I don’t know anyone who could name many services of this size.
I believe it. I dont think they were one service with a big brand name, just lots of individual high traffic often ad supported services, pirate channels on paid dodgy set top boxes and lots of other nonsense.
> Moreover, the police confiscated cryptocurrencies valued at over €1.65 million ($1.74M) and another €40,000 in cash ($42,000).
That eur250mio / mo number is almost certainly bullshit just going off the above alone.
Not to mention that you can't exactly hide 3 yards annual revenue ... and anyone within a mile of a corporate treasury role will tell you that you can't cash-manage that revenue on 40k eur.
It sounds completely reason when you look at the figures:
> "These broadcasts were resold to 22 million subscribed members via multiple distribution channels and an extensive seller network.
Around €10 a sub per month to get EVERYTHING that's broadcast or streamed? That's an excellent deal for the subscriber.
And for the pirates their overhead is going to be so much lower than any streaming service precisely because they DON'T have to pay and negotiate for rights. If they "went legit" then they'd have to charge a hell of a lot more than around ten Euros a month, they'd cease to be competative, and their profit margin would collapse.
It's just there are layers of implausibility, specifically what the OP is referring to: you are not going to be able to handle that kind of volume for illegal services through the payment card networks (maybe you can if you collude with a payment service provider or own one yourself). And I don't know which cryptocurrency has achieved subscription revenue adoption for one merchant to the tune of $3 billion a year, as cryptocurrencies are push payments by default. Do you think 22 million people are topping up 10 euros of cryptocurrencies per month to pay for this? That itself would be news.
I'm not saying it's impossible just implausible. Interested to see more details on this.
I forget the names of the services, but I've known a few people with a similar $10-20/mo IPTV pirate service that has pretty much every live channel and pay-per-view stream you could want. Local channels for pretty much every major city around the world. Every UFC fight. Every cricket game. Every rugby match. Every boxing match. Sixteen Sky Sports channels. International news channels. International local channels. Every HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, Starz, ScreenPix, MGM, and SkyCinema channels. Five MTV channels.
They also didn't have any hiccups watching the Tyson v. Paul match, which was also available.
They would even sometimes have access to the raw sports streams before the ad injection, so sports games would cut to stylized "Ad break in progress" scenes where there would have otherwise been ads injected for your region.
Pretty much all of these channels in a decent bitrate 1080p stream. You would somehow tie it into Plex so it shows up as if it was a cable box. Plex can handle transcoding for whatever target device you're wanting to watch it on. You didn't need any kind of odd front-end app from the IPTV provider.
That there are a few dozen million people around the world willing to shell out $10-20 to get practically every cable channel like this isn't too surprising to me.
I don’t think you grasp how wide these networks are. In Europe it’s common for people to buy a physical Firestick preconfigured for this and you pay a local guy your subscription fee. It’s huge business in Europe.
That's starting to make more sense. The article is light on details and we do not really have an equivalent of that in the USA (at least, not as widespread).
I think some of us were assuming this is some Streamlord equivalent with a payment tier. IE. Something that would be difficult to centralize illegal payment volume in the billions towards.
Not something with a decentralized network of distributors each collecting payment on their own.
I used to run a TV show torrent tracker and we processed well over $1m/year through PayPal. We had our own account exec. They didn't give a fuck for some reason. They even had their own login to the site.
They were styled as "donations" towards the running costs. In exchange people got to boost their upload/download ratio in their favor, or get a fancy star next to their name, etc.
While the bulletproof hosting we had wasn't cheap, we were still making an enormous profit.
I read the article, and then the source press release from the postal police.
My Italian is not good, but I suspect this is a case of the "journalists" writing the article using Google translate, with their brains in neutral. My reading of the relevant sentence is that it is the "illegal streaming industry" that "generates EUR 3B annually" and causes 10B damage to the media rights holders (they say, presumably). This is where the "250M/mo" comes from -- a figure that never appears in the actual press release. They also say they seized 1.6M in crypto and 40K in cash. So...TFA is BS.
> Sono stati sequestrati oltre 2500 canali illegali e server che gestivano la maggior parte dei segnali illeciti in Europa, con i quali i presunti frodatori hanno realizzato un giro illegale di affari di oltre 250 milioni di euro mensili.
Google translate offering
> Over 2,500 illegal channels and servers were seized that managed the majority of the illicit signals in Europe, with which the alleged fraudsters achieved an illegal turnover of over 250 million euros per month
I know someone who paid for a pirate streaming service. They said it had anything and everything, and was only $15/month. That’s less than I’m paying for HBO now, and I only get access to the hbo catalog.
I've got MAX, Fubo, Amazon and the biggest cable package but I still pirate ~80% of what I watch just because it is easier, more convenient, no ads or commercials and everything is available. A lot of movies, especially older movies, aren't available as part of the package on any streaming service. They want me to pay an additional fee to "buy" the movie. Except I won't own the movie, I will have a temporary license to watch the movie on their streaming service, which is still laden with ads and other nonsense. No thanks.
Some paid pirate services actually do offer good value for the money. I’ve used a torrent caching service that has any torrent that lets me cap my gigabit connection for any torrent that has been crawled by them or user-uploaded, in practice this is a lot, and if they don’t have it, they will act as a client and acquire it for you, including seeding it for as long as you’d like. It costs $1-2 USD a month, well worth it for me.
Paid pirate IPTV streams can have better speeds, better reliability, and less or no ads.
I don’t personally watch live TV so I don’t use these services, but if I did I would definitely pay a small amount for the conveniences above.
Can anyone explain on technical terms what Real Debrid is? I tried Googling and all I get are layman explanations like "provides access to premium hosts" which doesn't make any sense.
Also what a terrible name it is. Why Real? Is there an original Debrid? And I can't not associate the word with debridement (don't google if you can't handle gore)
That explanation kinda linked together concepts I'd previously read about "debrid" services.
My summary of what they do (from further down the thread) was: Aggregator of premium access to a selection of file hosting sites, plus caching of content that's popular amongst their Customers.
I'm not sure of the applications of their service outside of streaming (copyrighted material), so I'd be a little bit wary of their potential for longevity of service. Never bet on centralised piracy.
I think the point is more that the noose is now tightening on these kinds of services. Real Debrid was the first top be targetted because they appear to be the biggest / most popular (from what comes across my monitor anyway), so I'd assume that wherever the bulk of those specific customers move to will be the next target.
(I don't totally grok what service 'Debrid' provides, but various people seem to rave about it. Currently looking up more information. Summary: Aggregator of premium access to a seclection of file hosting sites, plus caching of content that's popular amongst their Customers)
Sure, but each case has to be tried on its own merits. It’s a cat and mouse game, not a certainty of enforcement.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see that behavior of pirate streaming sites such as clones and (modified) limited hangouts as aspects of strategies to combat enforcement while segmenting the market to increase profits and/or limit exposure to downside risks.
Debrid services act as a shared cache of requested torrents/magnet links as well as digital locker services sold as upsells on a premium tier. It’s facilitated as a WebDAV API and/or direct HTTPS downloads generated via unique hashlists that encode magnet links.
It can be incorporated into search addons for things like Stremio or Kodi or Jellyfin or Plex so it’s basically just-in-time streaming from a cache that just-in-time downloads a torrent or digital locker file, backed by a time-based cache that usually is provided by the debrid provider, similar to how paid newsgroup providers advertise retention, but also with downward pressure to avoid long-lived links to avoid DMCA takedowns.
In my country, people can't pay internationally, so their only option (especially for sports coverage) is pirated IPTV networks which are very popular in here and are sold everywhere.
I don't watch live television myself so I don't know how good and reliable these services are.
Less expensive yes, but more importantly much more convenient. When 'all' the shows exist on a combination of Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, Paramount, Disney+, and Max... you can easily get to $100/mo+ if you were to subscribe to all of them. Then, if you want to watch something from an international viewership, it might not even be available in your region. In addition, you now have to figure out which service offers what program... which for certain not-current shows can be maddening (some seasons on some services, some on others, some not even available).
As GabeN has stated: piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem.
I think the answer is that is not nearly as convenient as original service providers would claim it is. I am in US and we just went through a crazy period of everyone and their mother trying to start their own streaming service. Good portion went under, some consolidated, but the market fragmentation leading to actual content you want to see being spread across multiple services is an annoyance.
I will provide a concrete example. My buddy got into anime and was raving about one specific title so I checked Hulu for it, but Hulu, for some unfathomable reason starts that anime at season 4.. If I want to legally Stream season one, I would need to try the Sony owned anime thing, which I refuse to do for reasons not related to streaming wars. I ended up buying a dvd ( cheap and good enough quality for me ).
And pirates... have everything and, unless you are looking for newest releases, is of superior quality.
I used to run one of these. People would pay because (a) we had TV shows that literally were not available through any streaming service, (b) people wanted real downloads they could hoard.
Not the OP, but when you go down the illegal route, it is much easier to find whatever you want to watch, watch it on any device with no limitations, etc. The fragmentation and limitations of the usual big services is a nuisance.
Over here it's a fair bit less expensive because it just has everything. On normal streaming platforms dubbed shows aren't always there and because the market is small a lot of things are just not available anywhere legally
paying per mo is certainly more convenient I guess. but once you are in, there isn't a cost to stay in. Some trackers might boot you if you don't log in once every 3-6 mo.
It is literally the specification to send live tv over IP. The fact some services also support on demand movies is irrelevant to the fact the service in question is for live tv.
I never said it doesn't support live tv. But I was trying to point out that people who pay for the above service are not _necessarily_ interested in the live tv feature. I.e. it's not the reason for some. I'd guess convenience.
Convenience, I guess. I'm not that deep into the piracy world that I even know of all my alternatives, to be honest.
I pay a reasonable subscription fee, download the app on all my devices, and watch whatever I want.
The app is compatible with all of my devices, isn't broken, there are no unreasonable limits or restrictions, and no ads. That's a lot more than I can say for the 5 or 6 subscriptions it replaces.
Seemed a bit odd to me the postal police took the lead on this, but apparently on top of regular interfering with the regular mail, the postal police in Italy also have a mandate that covers: "Cyber fraud and scams, Online copyright infringement, Unauthorized access to computer systems, Digital piracy"
Indeed, apparently there is also a connection in Italy to the TV license, that was historically issued by the post office and I guess for a period of time peoples TV licenses where inspected by the post police, or something. I didn't dare go any further down the rabbit hole.
Even if it was taken down completely it will likely be replaced by a clone in very short order to take advantage of the established customers. All the big streaming pirate sites have a million splinter sites with similar but slightly different URLs.
I pay for almost all
Streaming services via promo offers and visit pirate websites too. Yet I rarely use either rather just watch things on YouTube, TikTok or instagram reels. All offer short form content and they know what I like to watch and keep feeding me such. Long form content at times I found hard to sit through now.
How so? I think it's indicative that YouTube and TikTok are the biggest streamers out there and are changing how we consume media not Netflix, max, etc. especially for the younger generation tho I'm almost 50.
police should protect people, not whining corporations. A bike and streaming tv are completely incompatible analogies. No one is deprived of their property by folks streaming the soccer match via IPTV because they cant afford the nightmarish subscription bundles from inescapable monopolies.
> No one is deprived of their property by folks streaming the soccer match via IPTV because they cant afford the nightmarish subscription bundles from inescapable monopolies.
Or even worse, no one is deprived of their property by folks streaming the soccer match via IPTV because the owner simply doesn't offer it on any service in their country.
I was going to play devil's advocate and say that sports team budgets would suffer but maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing.
Maybe if movies weren't about making so much money we'd have better movies instead of cash grabs. Sure we wouldn't have big budget CGI movies but that's a sacrifice I'd be willing to make
When you steal a bike or shoplift, there are actual atoms that change place, change ownership, and the legitimate owners don't have access to those real atoms anymore.
Piracy isn't like that. Copying doesn't remove the original copy.
> It is estimated that the amount of financial damages suffered annually from the illegal service is a massive €10 billion ($10.5B).
Oh boo hoo, some billionaires are getting a couple billions less than they could have. How sad. And what a disingenuous framing to call it “financial damage” as if it somehow affected any ordinary people.
My limited understanding is most content gets reinvested in creating more content. That is $10.5B that won't be used to create new movies, tv shows, etc.
That line of argument assumes that all of this money would have actually gone to streaming sites.
That's a lie they tell. People buy services from/use pirate site because either they could not afford it in the legal way, or contents weren’t available to them at all.
The $10.5B number is bullshit. It assumes every piracy stream user would've been a paying customer (which is false), and they would have paid the full, non-sale value (also false).
For subscriptions, they usually add up the cost over at least 12 months. Sometimes longer.
We should be concerned about AI because one of its consequences in our current world is that it may make it harder for people to make a living.
However, that's not a failing of AI, it's a failing of our current world. Homeless people aren't all artists, you know. Ideally you shouldn't have to be an artist, or anything else, to just be allowed to live.
So I don't see a contradiction in those statements. We should be concerned about the effect of AI, but the solution is not to shut down AI but to fix our society so that the (inevitable) rise of AI won't cause starvation or homelessness. The easiest fix available to us right now is UBI.
The real "financial damage" here is depriving ordinary people of an affordable alternative to the increasingly exorbitant cost of streaming services. We just want our bread and circuses while the world burns, is that too much to ask?
If you want to watch your favourite sportsball team, there are jurisdictions where you need 4+ different subscriptions (and still won't have access to all games).
I am currently trialling IPTV because my legit subscriptions (i) do not allow me to login on more than x devices, which is an unnecessary restriction and incredibly inconvenient, (ii) have broken functionality in their app that I rely on, (iii) no longer support my device, despite it being perfectly capable, so the app has been automatically deleted from it, (iv) ads.
I remember when Netflix first appeared and there was a shift away from piracy and all of its risk, quality issues, illegality, etc to the convenient, affordable, legal alternative. Unfortunately we have reached a point now where these media companies have recaptured their power and control, and are wasting no time screwing over paying customers in the most cynical, usurious ways they can invent. The equilibrium is shifting back to piracy, where the consumer has the power, and the big players offer custom apps, great quality, no ads, reasonable restrictions, etc.
> Catania Prosecutor's Office and the Italian Postal Police
I was always wondering what are the competences of all these Italian police forces: Guardia di Finanza, Polizia Municipale, Polizia di Stato, Polizia Stradale, Carabinieri. They are all over the place, driving around, while Italian mafia bosses are oftentimes "hiding" their whole lifetime in their home villages nearby. Then here it is, yet another one! Polizia Postale!
I suspect that the actual damages would be (much) lower, as some of the people using this service would not or could not have paid for the official source. This is the same fallacy or intentional misrepresentation that the music industry used in the Napster days.
As we know, if the pricing is reasonable for the market, and more importantly the content is actually _available!_ in that market, people will pay to stream it.
A lot of the time, the content is unavailable in many markets; so users will have to choose between illegal or nothing. If the content is available to stream legally, and its price is too high for the region, then people wouldn't have paid for it no matter what. Thus, the revenue was not lost; the market was simply never captured.