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Comment by dvfjsdhgfv | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how these plugins actually works. With traditional pirate sites, the business model is usually clear cut: webistes get income from ads, uploaders get money from hosting services and the latter get the money from user buying their premium accounts. With torrents, there is some exchange, too - each downloader is a seeder. But in the case of plugins?

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For live sports it's typically just scripts that extract media from the flash player sites like firstrow. They piggyback off the content from the ad-sustained websites, but without showing the ads. The sites like firstrow can't do anything about it because they are not actually hosting the streams themselves, they're just embedding players from various live streaming services.

For movies, etc., my understanding is that it's P2P a la popcorntime.

OK, so if it's P2P, wouldn't it actually make the plugin users liable for making copyrighted content available (in contrast to simply downloading the stream)?

I did some digging and I think I was wrong above when I made that distinction about live and recorded content.

P2P can be done for live sports via sopcast/acestream/etc, and (as far as I can tell) this seems more popular than the method I described above (eg: ripping content from live stream websites) for live sports, due to the quality difference.

In addition, P2P addons for movies a la popcorntime do exist, but the biggest addons that I have heard of: Genesis and Exodus, just rip content from file host sites.

But yes, if they're doing P2P, they're definitely liable to get letters. I think people overestimate the frequency of people getting caught for p2p file sharing, especially for live things that appear and disappear quickly.

They're ripping from sites that are ad supported. So the site doesn't get the ad impressions, and the plugin developer could (if they put ads in the plugins). Site operators hate it, and are constantly blocking them.

Basically, they reach out to about 80 sites and scrape for links, then resolve those. It's a pretty insane process, but they've got it working just well enough.

Wouldn't a simple "log in to see the links" approach solve this problem?

Better to make some money from the people watching your streams on a computer without an adblocker, than it is to hide the stream and have people hit their back button and find one of the dozens of other sites.

The cost to run one of those sites is being overestimated here. They don't actually serve any of the video streams, just embedding from the dozens and dozens of little-known free live streaming services.

But, those little known free streaming services are also losing money here. It's those sites that are really losing.

Any site that tried this would be replaced immediately by another that didn't.

Well there are subscription based "pirate content" providers, most of them are listed (even with reviews) on reddit.com/r/IPTV/ and almost all of them work as a Kodi-Addon and even some have on-deman high-quality content.

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