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Comment by tmaly | Hacker News Reader

Who pays for the video storage and streaming costs? The same person with the site?

There's a section titled "Streaming and Hosting Affiliation" in the article that answers that. Fly-by-night file hosts that pay for hits and serve a billion malware popups to visitors.

Based on what he wrote, it seems like he's just guessing and doesn't actually know where this stuff is hosted.

An anecdote but I've seen exactly that. Sites that stream foreign films that you can't buy using hosts that will open 10 tabs of ads the moment you click on a video, weird redirects, and a bunch of user-hostile stuff.

Usually I go to the network tab and pull a direct stream to the file hosted, but some even go as far as streaming using specialized clients that chop up the video and apply encryption (which I assume is easy to defeat but not worth the hassle when the whole point is to avoid the hassle of ads)

What you describe looks like the other type of shady sites. The ones that don't have any content, they just redirect you between fake pages and websites indefinitely. Sometimes it will ask to subscribe with your card or install a streaming software (always a malware). It's all a scam, there is nothing to watch.

Author here. The list is the first paragraph of the section, there is no guessing.

Except that some of them (rapidgator, keep2share, mega, ul.to etc) have legs. They've been around a while now and dont use ads, at least not ads that arent easily blocked by 99% of users. They are shady, but thepiratebay is still a thing. Being shady doesnt mean you are unreliable or your existance fleeting.

tpb could for what its worth run from aws free tiers. The site is, with the exception of search, entirely do-able static html. It doesn't cost much money to operate, only thing you need is solid provider for hosting and a couple hundred grands for lawyers...

That's doubly wrong. The sites cycled between subscriptions and ads, historically. None has been around for a full decade in the same form.

On other sites I've seen they usually rely on a list of mirrors across several free video hosting sites that get cycled out as takedowns are issued. I've even seen some use Google Drive to host movies.

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