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Comment by omega3 | Hacker News Reader

This looks like an illegal streaming service hiding behind a beautiful website.

It sure does, uploads are scene/torrent releases. On the other hand this is how you do business in Central/Eastern Europe.

For example www.cda.pl. Owners, father and son, build OdSiebie.com mega like pirate content sharing website in 2008 and got raided by Police/BSA in 2009. One year was enough to earn so much money to lawyer up and win unwinnable court case :o. With this experience and first class legal team they started another pirate streaming website www.cda.pl with small twist - DMCA submit form (triggering instant reupload of reported content from one of many bot accounts, so no loss for the portal). Progressively paid Premium option started sharing revenue with legit Movie distributors, instead of DMCA you could claim your content and join profit redistribution program. In 2012 they made $10K profit, 2013 $300K, 2014 >$1. Today CDA makes >$1mil legal profit per quarter and is listed on the stock exchange with $80mil capitalization. This is towering over other local options like Netflix and Amazon. They are ranked higher than twitch, netflix or pornhub in traffic and attention.

https://www.marketscreener.com/CDA-S-A-58002347/

Polish source https://technologia.dziennik.pl/internet/artykuly/504361,cda...

> On the other hand this is how you do business in Central/Eastern Europe.

Honestly, I don't see it. This approach you've highlighted is the same one that YouTube took in the early days (excl. the bot accounts) there is nothing except perhaps for lax regulation and enforcement that made it possible in CEE.

Not only Eastern Europe, Crunchyroll started out the same way. At the beginning they were an illegal streaming site with fansub translations, and gradually they transformed into a fully legit anime streaming service.

Damn, thanks - I always wonder how they managed to survive all these years.

Where else would you find original, non English content? They keep that behind their iron media curtains for some reason and there's no other way to discover or get them.

I think these sites do more for Eastern European cinema than whatever else it is they do there.

> iron media curtains

You mean like itunes, hbo, netflix catalogues in countries outside US? It's just that there is no interest in seeing these movies.

That's of course a very America-centric view. You don't think those countries have their own (smaller) Netflix competitors that make it nigh impossible to get the content outside of the country? The budgets of these competitors are also very, very different.

There is also interest, otherwise sites like these wouldn't pop up.

You can find many east european movies on youtube. Try doing the same for Adam Sandler's netflix movie.

You could even watch Memories of Murder on youtube just until Parasite won an oscar. Then they started carring. And this is a relatively new movie of a known director.

Distribution is a problem but saying this isn't blatant piracy is wrong.

private torrents, this a parasite website built on the hard work of people who took great time and effort to archive these movies.

Why does hosting what was privately distributed before make it "parasitic"? Sounds a lot like gatekeeping to me.

Criterion Channel and MUBI are two streaming services I can think of off the top of my head, plus there's a much wider selection of physical releases. Nothing is "behind their iron media curtains".

Plus the movies aren't that high in quality - many are only in SD when 2K or even 4K restorations are available, and many are marked as HD even though they are clearly upscaled from SD. If you really wanna watch them, just pirate them and watch them in better quality and do not support this shady website.

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