Cable TV’s Password-Sharing Crackdown Is Coming | Hacker News Reader

Cable TV’s Password-Sharing Crackdown Is Coming

bloomberg.com

66 pointsuptown101 comments

The Netflix policy here is a good compromise: limit the number of concurrent streams for each account and then turn a blind eye to password sharing. That way sharing passwords is allowed in practice, but also has a clear consequence - you may be blocked from playback if too many of your family members (or friends) are watching simultaneously.

Implmenting stream limits is tricky, as there are edge cases that are hard to get right. However, common DRM services like Widevine and Playready have adopted the extensions necessary to implement stream limits, so there are already "of-the-shelf" solutions.

In short, this is a non-issue with available technical solutions.

Full disclosure: I'm an engineer at Netflix who works on cable set-top boxes.

I don't think it's that easy technically. The TV everywhere auth + stream limiting seems like a uniquely terrible problem to solve compared to the Netflix version.

The HBO 3rd party app streams + the xfinity app streams + the ESPN app streams + the USA Network app streams [ + 30 other channel-specific apps ] all have to report to a single central place for each cable provider, if you're going to do this effectively, right?

It's just a counter. Also, you can shard based on a hash of the account letting you scale without limit.

It's just a counter that has to be implemented properly between dozens of third party partners each with much weaker incentives than you have. It's gonna take a while, especially if you're waiting for things like smart-TV-side apps to get updated.

Sorry, you're right, though, I chose the wrong word: it's not a mainly technically challenge e.g. for scaling, it's a process/implementation/people one.

I assume they are already tightly coupled systems as you need a single login, but you're probably right it's 3rd party systems that would be an issue.

Yeah, I haven't worked directly on these sorts of systems either, but my hunch is that it looks something like this, from working on some conceptually-similar areas, and playing around with the implementation some (and hitting certain limits but not others):

To watch something in ESPN app: 1) user visits ESPN app 2) espn kicks user to cableco login embed to verify what channels they're allowed to watch 3) some sort of account-based rights info exchange 4) [everything past this point is ESPN-platform-mediated stream limiting only, and this part is analagous to what Netflix, etc, does as well, but they don't seem to be checking in to the same central place as other partner apps]

Cause doing some account sharing in the past, I noticed there would sometimes be problems if we were all trying to use the same app with the same cable creds, but that me watching ESPN and Alice watching Fox Sports and Bob watching TBS didn't seem to interfere with each other at all.

It's all OAuth and SAML on the backend. The player asks for authorization to play content from the cable company (since it has to check against a few dozen criteria like entitlements, parental controls, concurrent stream limits, etc.) and is either given authorization or an error. It's honestly pretty simple.

That still seems incomplete. How does e.g. the cable company know when I stop watching a piece of content through the ESPN app in this scenario, and so have that stream available for [other person on my account] to watch through the TBS app?

E.g., still seems like you have to have a central heartbeat if you're centralizing your stream limits.

And more directly, why can my parents watch more stuff if using multiple separate apps on their shared cable account than if they're both watching through their UVerse app?

You do need a central heartbeat; the cable company is the party that bills you for service, so they're the ones determining if you have access to the content. The content owners (i.e. TBS) send start/stop data to the cable company via their app, there's a timeout if the heartbeat is lost, plus the DRM keys expire pretty frequently (every few minutes I think, though it depends on what streaming service the content is hosted on) so if they're not renewed you can't keep playing the video. Add a little logic to this flow and you can see how it works.

Not every app implements this properly, but it's all part of the decade-old spec. If this sounds like a lot of work, you're right -- the vast majority of content owners outsource all this work to Adobe's hosted TVE platform that maintains integrations with multiple cable companies.

Edit: also, cable companies definitely collect and resell viewing data for advertising purposes. Shouldn't surprise anyone, but they've had this capability for at least 20 years (STB channel change used to be sent on out-of-band RF back then but it's all IP now). In fact, with nothing more than an IP address, you can usually target quite a few attributes at the household level.

Great info, thanks!

That’s not how it happens now, but that is how it could work, sure! Now the only thing that’s couple is the auth, once you are logged into XYZ app, the cable company isn’t consulted until the auth expires.

They aren’t. The only thing coupled is the auth, from there on it’s the app’s data provider giving the stream, not one universal stream source for some piece of content.

This happens today and has for about 10 years. Each piece of content consumed hits an API endpoint at the cable company with an OAuth token requesting access to the content. If it's granted, a DRM key is sent. If it's rejected, it's not. The video players send metrics back to the cable companies and refresh the key periodically.

So I tried out a service called "Playstation Vue" a while back, and I'm very inclined to believe that "stream limits are tricky"

There were dozens of times in the 2 months that I had the service that I was unable to stream, because I had hit a "concurrent streams" limit.

Switching between devices, having my browser auto-login (which would take up a "slot"), And the fun bug they had for a while where if I started a stream on my phone, then "cast" it to a chromecast, it would count as 2 streams, and due to a limitation where playstations were given their own dedicated "slots" meant that 2 people couldn't watch on a chromecast at any given time even though I should have had 5 simultaneous streams allowed.

I ended up canceling the service because of it, and I appreciate the limits that Netflix has much more.

IME, pretty much all the over-the-top cable alternatives right now, are, unfortunately, crappily enough designed that they're most effective as a way of generating a set of credentials to plug into the ESPN, Fox, etc, standalone apps and never using them directly. Which makes the only advantage compared to a "traditional" cable account be the price... Which, to be fair, is still a nice advantage, if you don't get the benefit of sweet bundle discounting anyway for whatever reason.

The only exception I found was YouTube TV.

However the channel selection is pretty limited, and they are still only available in a few areas (luckily I am one of them)

The better solution would be to always start the new stream, but disrupt the oldest one.

...and a counter for how many times a new stream started so that you can send warnings to an account for bad behavior?

...and then the customer complaining that their poorly-behaving device keeps getting interrupted?

Disrupt the oldest one, sure, but make sure to have some sort of clear indication of what happened and why.

That's interesting. I've been using Playstation Vue since April and didn't even know it had a concurrent stream limit. I watch on my phone, laptop, Apple TV, and/or PS4.

PS Vue uses MLBAM's streaming infrastructure, which if I'm not mistaken is pretty highly regarded for its quality and stability.

Sony has never really handled their online game service stuff well. This sounds incredibly bogus.

I actually liked the mindset you presented - "sharing passwords is allowed in practice". In other threads on HN in the past, I've seen people complain about why we are still using passwords and the like; but as I was reading your comment, it made me think that we lost sight of the purpose of passwords along the way.

Obviously, safeguards for personal things is important, but the other way you see passwords used (at least in fiction) is for groups - secret door knock, "What's the password?" said by some bouncer through an eye slit in a door [1]. In this perspective, password sharing is a norm. It can be seen as a means to signifying your membership in a group... that shares Netflix.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU5hCMAH-o4

Richard Stallman is also a proponent of sharing passwords

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2002/09/msg01810.html

Why GNU `su' does not support the `wheel' group ===============================================

(This section is by Richard Stallman.)

Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the rest. For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and keeping it secret from everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn't know how to do that in Unix.)

However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone. Under the usual `su' mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes with the ordinary users, he or she can tell the rest. The "wheel group" feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power of the rulers.

I'm on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers. If you are used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you might find this idea strange at first.

I swear at that stupid Netflix policy at least once a week. It means I have to track down the app that has misbehaved (usually by losing its connection to the Chromecast) or the tablet that the kids started and abandoned but left running. You really need a mechanism to remotely stop one of the other streams.

You can also pay the extra few $'s a month to have more concurrent streams.

But they don't even want more streams.

the OP said it was a hassle to track down. I don't disagree, but instead of tracking down the problems, you can just spend the few dollars extra every month and ignore the problem.

I don't disagree being able to stop streams remotely would be a great feature, I'm just saying there is another way to avoid the hassle of tracking down the offending devices.. ;)

And this is why I don’t pay for a Netflix subscription.

What is it with engineers willing to brainwash themselves regarding what constitutes a “good compromise” within the context of what their paycheck depends on?

Brainwash?

Enforcing reasonable limits on a service seems.... reasonable.

Except... the very premise of the service isn’t particularly reasonable.

You won’t change my mind, so don’t bother replying.

One way to solve this is to look to Spotify. They changed their restriction: only playing music out of one device; into a feature: you can now control your music from any device. In addition to this, they used things like playlists, the discover weekly recommendations and other strategies in order to make it annoying to share an account. WHILE also having the barrier to getting your own account to the point where the annoyances (listening to ads, or paying $7.99 a month) are still better than pirating (possibility of low quality, no seeders, sketchy websites).

Of course this isn't to say this is how cable companies should exactly go about solving their problem, but by cracking down on their PAYING subscribers, they will drive more people NOT less to either pirate, or share passwords.

They did this while also shoving out Family Plans which are by far best bang for your buck in Spotify subscription plans, amortized over 4 or 5 friends.

Spotify's way of handling is completely terrible and i am very tempted to cancel. I have a bunch of Echo's around my house and the Spotify family plan which i share with my wife . My wife can't play music on our the Amazon Echo if i am using Spotify elsewhere on my phone, or laptop because of the one account one stream rule Spotify implements..

You can't create fake accounts for your Echo's, they actually make an effort to verify you actually exist with some identity database. All to prevent a legitimate customer from being able to use their service.

Have you even tried searching your problem..?

https://www.spotify.com/us/family/

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/Family-Premium-mul...

My Sonos is logged into Spotify with my own creds. So if I'm driving around using Spotify and my wife fires up the Sonos with my creds saved to it, it stops playing in my car.

She's got her own account on our family plan, but she's not going to change the username/password to hers every time she uses the Sonos (and me do the reverse).

I suppose I could generate a "dummy" family member account used just for the Sonos, but then it wouldn't have my playlists....

I’m fairly certain that Sonos allows multiple streaming accounts for each provider. I currently have three Apple Music accounts registered on my Sonos, and have had multiple Spotify accounts registered in the past.

They support multiple accounts. Maybe you need to contact support.

https://en.community.sonos.com/controllers-software-228995/m...

> I suppose I could generate a "dummy" family member account used just for the Sonos, but then it wouldn't have my playlists....

They really do need to set the stream limit for the whole family plan rather than 1 per account, but at least as a workaround: Can't you share playlists?

Spotify design and ui is so hopelessly bad that I switched to Google play. I want a music player not an integrated whatever social piece of crap that sometimes, if I am lucky, plays music.

On the one hand, being able to control spotify on any device, from any device is nice. On the other hand, it's kind of bullshit that they don't allow at least 2 simultaneous streams. Two is too few to password share meaningfully, but it would save the hassle of my roommate having to log into his account to play music in the living room because I'm listening in my room.

> "The CEO has said that one unidentified channel owner had 30,000 simultaneous streams from a single account."

This is more about bad implementation (and possibly design) than anything else, then. ALL of the other online services I've worked on have had a reasonable and enforced policy here. It's not that hard to do (there are harder corner cases if you do allow customers to do things like family sharing, but it's still not rocket surgery).

No problem. I want to stream the Olympic Channel, and I even pay $100 for a cable subscription that includes it.

Oh, I can't stream it though. Uverse only lets me stream from 3 of the NBC Sports channels, and not that one. Guess I am going to just cancel the cable I pay for and use someone else's Comcast login instead.

I don't mind paying for streaming service, and when HBO cracked down I bought a subscription that night. But some services you can't even pay for if Comcast doesn't run cable to your house.

I don't like pirating content. I feel it's akin to stealing even though nothing physical is "stolen". (not trying to impose this on anyone else, this is just a personal belief of mine)

However there is one exception, and it's when a company will not allow me to purchase a tv show or movie.

All too many times I've watched seasons 1-4 of a show on something like Netflix, only to find that the most recent 4 episodes of season 6 are on a cable "on demand" service, and season 5 is only available as a DVD box set purchase, with the first half of season 6 literally 100% unavailable anywhere.

I want to pay for their product, they have the product, in most cases they created the product! But they aren't selling it because of reasons that I honestly don't care about any more. I will happily steal that content without remorse.

The BBC is an excellent example of doing it wrong, and giving me the choice between nothing, and piracy.

Have you looked at https://acorn.tv/

Thanks, I agree that’s one of the best ways to access that content, but they can do so much better!

The vast majority of currently-airing shows are available to view on-demand. They're just not always available in the format you want.

Generally, shows available to purchase on DVD are also available to purchase as season passes on for-pay services like iTunes, Xbox Video, Google Play Video, and Amazon Instant. Same goes for back episodes of current seasons. Hulu also has some shows(from a few networks) that are in-season but have fallen out of the cable service on-demand window.

The exception to this rule is sports (which are a whole different can of worms) and shows on "premium" cable networks (HBO, Showtime, etc.) which require you to pay a separate subscription to watch anything in-season before it's released as a box set or as a for-pay stream.

Here in Europe it’s even worse, in my country the only streaming services are Netflix and a Russian-only equivalent (I don’t speak Russian). It’s no surprise that pirating content is so prevalent here, it’s not that people don’t want to pay (although it’s not really fair that the average wage being 4x less than the U.K., Netflix is more expensive here), it’s that they aren’t even given a choice. Most of the time I use a VPN to access U.K. streaming services.

I can only see a crackdown on this as resulting in inconvenience for paying customers. There are so many options for piracy that people will probably find another way to watch streams almost immediately.

I suspect that if you invited friends to sit on your couch and watch a broadcast with you, the content companies would claim that as piracy too, since your friends are not necessarily paying subscribers.

Right, in most cases, esp with live sports, these things are already restreamed. In some cases, I have paid for the official streaming service and used the pirated one because it was more performant.

> About one-third of internet users stream cable TV without paying for it by using credentials of someone they don't live with

There is no way this is true. Not saying that it isn't a problem, but statements like the above are approaching the same level of BS as when the ad industry says most people would prefer to trade their privacy for the privilege of being manipulated by targeted ads.

Maybe "one third of internet users WHO stream cable TV do so without paying for it" ?

> But the prevalence of password sharing suggests many of those customers [...] are watching popular shows [...] for free, robbing pay-TV providers and programmers of [...] advertising dollars.

Can someone help me understand how it is robbing them of advertising dollars? I understand it's robbing them of fees (though I don't like the double-dip model and especially loathe the concept of retransmission fees). But I don't understand how more "free" eyeballs are costing advertising dollars. In fact, I would think more eyeballs would be an advertiser's goal.

They probably get advertising dollars per subscriber. The people stealing passwords arent counted as subscribers so they dont get revenue for those.

Ah, so they are being "robbed of advertising dollars" because they assume that password stealers would otherwise be legitimate subscribers? Ha. In the meantime, a non-subscriber viewing something isn't technically taking anyone's money and this type of weasel-wording keeps public opinion against them.

Also, they would be wise to get advertising dollars per viewer as TV streams are often legally multiplexed in a household. This had traditionally been the case in the pre-digital world w/ Nielsen ratings.

This is a false premise, if they actually sell that way.

Newspapers used to estimate IIRC that each paper was viewed by an average of three people, therefore the advertising “reach” was standardized as such.

It’s all a bit arbitrary, in the case of paying for eyeballs, as opposed to clicks.

The only revenue they are losing that is real revenue is subscription revenue.

This could work, but only if they treat the people affected as customers and potential customers rather than as criminals.

- make it easy for the legitimate customers to actually watch their streams. Instead of "too many streams in use", try "click on this link in your email to start watching"

- make it easy for free-loaders to watch. Instead of "too many streams", say "click here for an instant 3 month free trial!"

Or something like that. You have people who want to watch your stuff. That's a very valuable lead, don't throw it away by offending them.

>> click on this link in your email to start watching

How would that work with my Roku?

use the smartphone in your pocket to click the link?

So I now need two devices to watch something on my TV? I would need to wait for said email to show up to click the link? What if my email server is down, no TV?

What if I use an email address I share with my friends and family which defeats the purpose?

If you don't have a readily available email address for things like password resets and two step verification, can you please tell us how you managed to travel back in time to 1998?

I do have such a thing, don't be willfully obtuse. Those that you mention are for things that require security for me and my stuff, not to watch TV.

Won't work for my parents.

Pointless. If you crack down on this successfully, people will just find another way. If they don't find another way, they'll move to different content. Too little too late. We're way past game over.

Password sharing is a symptom of cable companies inability (or indifference) to innovate on either content or price. They are driving millions of people a year away from their services and the idea that cracking down on password sharing will bring people back to them is quite silly.

Speaking anecdotally, I cut the cord years ago and do have some shared password access that I use, but purely "because it's there". I got along fine without it and will continue to do so if this crackdown gets me.

I think you're confused about the role of the cable companies in all this.

The cable companies are just the pipe. Cable company margins on video are low. Content providers control the content production and price.

Unless you're suggesting the solution to the problem is more vertical integration (a la Comcast NBCUniversal)?

From the article:

"The chief executive officer of Charter Communications Inc., which sells cable TV under the Spectrum name, is leading an industrywide effort to crack down on password sharing."

Seems to me the cable companies are heavily involved. Which makes sense because they would like to sell the cable TV access just as much as the Internet access. If customers only need streaming and no cable TV then I would imagine they would stand to lose quite a bit of revenue.

I was responding to this bit:

>Password sharing is a symptom of cable companies inability (or indifference) to innovate on either content or price

Because video is barely profitable and HSD is very profitable, cable companies definitely do not like to sell TV as much as they like to sell HSD. Cord cutting is not as big a deal for the cable companies' profitability as most people think. If anything, the bandwidth required for streaming (now in HD but soon in 4k and then in VR) is so high DSL becomes less viable as a competitor and cable companies can raise prices for HSD even faster.

by "content" I was mostly referring to how that content is packaged and delivered. Cable customers are paying huge premiums for channels they don't want but have no other choice.

That is by the design of the content providers

This is mostly correct.

For cable/satellite/OTT, most of the package (Viacom, Time Warner, NBCUniversal, etc) content providers bundle content and get a large lump sum up-front per annum from each distributor. However, premium a la carte content providers (HBO, Showtime, etc) receive a small lump sum plus a a bulk of the per subscription fee.

For Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime - content is bundled and paid for up-front per annum on a multi-year contract. For example, Paramount/MGM/Lionsgate/EPIX distributed solely through Netflix thru 2014 and then switched sole distribution to Amazon Prime.

Hollywood traditionally likes cash up front because production and marketing costs are "bursty" rather than evenly distributed. And this is because the success to failure rate (risk) of entertainment products is too abysmal to easily obtain reasonable financing rates from lenders or reasonable terms from investors.

>The more the practice is viewed with a shrug, the more it creates a dynamic where people believe it’s acceptable. And it’s not.

This kind of diktat is actually pretty comical. Social consensus is pretty clear on how little people care about this, but for cable companies isn't not only a profit impact but a deep moral wrong. Might they not have more success by understanding exactly this disconnect in mentalities over streaming services, rather than trying to pump petulant propaganda?

> Might they not have more success by understanding exactly this disconnect in mentalities over streaming services

There's no disconnect, because they don't actually believe this. It's just the line they're using, and the line that their lobbyists and lawyers will use. Until there's a robust technical solution (maybe facial registration?), they need to try social and legal ways to maintain and boost their margins.

The screams of a slowly dying business model. This is what I expect them to be very effective at shutting down sharing streams, and then getting a small boost of new subscribers, followed by an increase in the rate at which subscribership goes down. And as the revenue falls, and contracts expire, more and more companies will skip the 'middle man' of the cable provider and offer their stuff on aggregating services like Apple TV, Roku, or Amazon Video.

Most of the money you pay into your cable company goes to the broadcasters and not the cable company. Thats why cable companies have so many strange fee's. Thats about the only way they can make profits. -Not saying its right, or that I support their model. Nor do I agree with how much profits they are garnering off people with no choice in most places.

Is that mostly going to broadcasters of things I actually want to watch, or the ocean of random channels that I have no interest in but are always included?

Actually, if you dig into the documents, you'll discover that cable companies make thin margins on their television/content broadcasting, but they make orders of magnitude worth of margins on providing broadband internet service. I pay Spectrum about $90/month for something which costs them literally just over a single dollar/month.

If they cut the shit and stop splicing the same 3-4 minute ad cut into their on-demand streams every five minutes, maybe we can talk. Especially if they cut the ad providers that go ass-over-bean-box on 50% of their loads, forcing you to reload the stream, and rewatch the same show about eight times to get to the end, because they have disabled fast-forwarding and seeking.

I am going to cancel my cable if I have to reenter my password more often. It's already a huge pain in the ass.

> About one-third of internet users stream cable TV without paying for it by using credentials of someone they don’t live with, according to Parks Associates.

I call bullsh*t.

This is absurd: I pay for two simultaneous streams on Netflix and thats what they give me. What businesses is it of theirs who is watching them? My car has two seats: it's none of the manufacturer's business who sits in which seat.

We shouldn't let these self-righteous selfish neanderthals try to justify their egregious rent-seeking.

I watch any live sporting event I fancy, for free.

Once you know where to look, the cost is about a minute of your time to pick which particular feed, among many, to watch.

Do you want the home-team's broadcaster, the visiting team broadcaster, and do you want that in another language, maybe? It's à-la-carte.

A cable company password is never involved.

In the future, the old-fashioned companies we know today who don't "get" it will not exist. This Bloomberg article illustrates why, albeit indirectly.

If your theory is that in the future people will field expensive teams for sporting events surrounded by high quality cameras and informed commentators who will send out engaging content streams without anyone paying for it you may wish to examine your premise.

It's funny you say that, I grew up with that very system for decades before streaming became a thing. We had multiple choices of entertainment to watch on TV for completely free. Yes, that's right! Completely free!

The only cost was the TV and the time to watch commercials.

> the time to watch commercials

Indeed.

The difference was that in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, baseball players (for example) made between $5,000 and $100,000 a year. Even with inflation, that's nowhere close to the $500,000 to $30 million they make today.

Great, I’m fine with that. While we’re at it can taxpayers stop paying for stadiums?

You're gonna need more rational / less worried taxpayers for that one. ;)

The cause and effect is backwards here. Player salaries haven't driven up the cost of broadcasting. Being able to make money from broadcasts has driven up player salaries. And the biggest change was the move to cable subscriber fees for dedicated sports networks in addition to pure ad-revenue supported OTA broadcasts (with the NFL being a bit of an exception, as the infrequency of the games and the overlapping times makes its OTA broadcasts much more valuable than other leagues').

The bigger a subscriber fee you can charge as a cable channel -> the more you can bid on the rights for the local team -> the more the team receives -> the more the team can bid on players.

I think we agree here. Your analysis is correct in how it got to be this way, but my point is that it's basically impossible to reverse the situation. If you get rid of your team's TV contract, you'll never sign another free agent ever again. Even if every MLB team colluded to get rid of the TV contracts, the NPB and KBO would become the new MLB.

It's not impossible. The CBAs in the capped leagues aren't going to grow the cap as much. In cases like the MLB, you'll just see a larger separation between owners willing to lose a lot of money and those not willing. Some of the MLB TV contracts (like Fox Sports Southwest for the Rangers) are for 20 years and the MLB doesn't even give them global streaming rights. It'll be the TV companies not upping their bids as high next go round. In the meantime, they will milk it for all they can, and you see more innovative and subtle ad placement (compared to traditional commercials and signage) already as a result of this.

Also, just this past week, ESPN sucked up all of these regional Fox channels and are on the hook for these contracts. There is a real bubble in sports salaries right now, and it won't be supported by viewer eyeballs forever.

No, you didn't grow up with that sort of system. I was there too, and I remember the details you're leaving out.

How do you think you watched the average college football game in 1980? The answer is: you didn't. It wasn't broadcast. A handful of games a week were broadcast anywhere. Cable slowly increased the number of games available over a few decades, but it was no longer free. There simply weren't enough broadcast channels, or enough interested eyeballs, in order to justifying broadcasting the average Oregon State @ Utah random weekly matchup anywhere before big cable bundles with lots of expensive ESPN and regional sports networks.

Same for local pro sports: the 90s gradually saw more and more of my home teams' games being available on TV, but not purely on free over the air TV, the economics of that rarely made sense. Regional sports networks were the driver here, and they collected subscriber fees. The amount of advertisements shown saw some big increases too, to help recoup the costs with both revenue streams. You didn't use to always have the dude with the red hat stepping onto the field to stop play for TV timeouts nearly as much.

You sure as fuck did not watch "any live sporting event I fancy, for free." That poster is living in a dream world if he thinks that will continue to happen without people paying for the goddamn content.

Did I watch every single possible sports event for free on TV when I was a child? Of course not, but I do recall seeing quite a lot of it. I recall pro sport games in football, basketball, baseball, and hockey. I recall college games in football, basketball, and baseball. I even recall local high school games in football and baseball. All on broadcast TV before cable; for that matter after cable because we still got our local broadcast channels via cable with the exact same content. Did I get to watch high school football from three states over? Nope, I admit to that one. Did some people experience broadcast blackouts? Yes, but that was done to get the locals to actually buy tickets to go to the game. Was it the utopia of sports we have today? Nope, and I claimed no such thing.

As for today, if there's money in it then they'll do it. There wasn't as much money in sports at the time. There's money there now. If they wish to continue that revenue by exploring a free streaming model with commercials, then they will find a way. Many creators said "we'll never do that" in many things over the years, and then they eventually do when they decide to not turn the money away. The only constant is that things change.

In the end, if people don't want to contribute to the costs of entertainment via payment or ads, then that entertainment dies. But the model is there, has been there for years, and it's up to the content creators decide how they wish to move forward.

>but I do recall seeing quite a lot of it.

NBA Playoff games used to be on tape delay when they were even televised.

Usually when people use the term "get it" on this topic, they're referring to a better business model that sustainably supports all the participants in the marketplace. You don't seem to be using the term that way. Rather, you seem to describing ordinary theft.

What exactly is there to "get" from your comment? That you're gleefully infringing copyright? If so, yes, we already know you exist. You're not adding anything to this conversation.

(By the way, this comment also applies to ad blockers in web browsers. If you don't like ads, that doesn't mean you still get to view the content without ads, any more than you still get to attend a concert whose ticket prices are too high for you.)

Actually, I think to your point about blocking ads, if your server sends me data I am entitled to render it any way I choose, omitting any element I am not interested in (ads, etc). Similar to how it is not infringing copyright to leave the room or not look at the screen during a commercial break on broadcast television.

If you don't want ad blockers to view a site then find a technical means to prevent it. You are not going to convince me that I have a moral obligation to consume psychologically manipulative content that is unrelated to what I am seeking to view.

Don't be surprised when that happens. Entire websites sent as a single PNG, or Widevine increasingly determining how/whether you view content. It didn't have to be this way.

You can frame this as civil disobedience against duress, or attack a strawman of morality (which I never brought up). It's not that complicated or subjective. It's a business transaction. I'm saying if you don't like the store, don't patronize it. You're saying that if you don't like the store's prices or how they do business, then you get to take the goods without paying.

> Entire websites sent as a single PNG,

Interesting. Are there any sites that you know which do this?

I think the reference is to how crappy the experience is when you pay for the product.

Just like the old days of pirating MP3s that's mostly gone by the wayside because they've figured out how to make the business work. If I could choose to watch any sporting event with any announcer for $1 or $5, it wouldn't be worth my time to pirate.

FWIW, I actually don't share cable TV passwords; I'm technically a cord cutter although I have a cable TV subscription that's not plugged into the TV (I use an antenna) because Comcast charges me less for internet service if I agree to let a cable box rot in a box in my attic.

I pay for the NFL.com Game Pass streaming thing, have Netflix UHD and Amazon Prime Video, and maybe 3-4 times a year I use my own cable creds to watch something on HBO.

That's the point I hoped was being made, and I agree with that observation -- when the free experience is better than the paid experience, don't be surprised when people who can easily pay still don't. I didn't actually see that point, though.

Anyway, this is a good check on the monopoly of copyright. You've been granted this incredible power to sell copies that you can manufacture for free. But you still have to deliver a good experience; you're not the DMV.

Pretty dumb, like most "anti-piracy" time wasting. They should start releasing video DRM-free, if they want to do anything positive about it.

Expected, after the VPN crackdown.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com