Illegal movie streaming service Popcorn Time shuts down
engadget.com
engadget.com
It appears that they use the same setup - put terabytes of encrypted video files on platforms that offer some kind of free storage (hello, Github) and have a simple website hosted in a piracy-friendly country that loads these files, decrypts them on-the-fly and plays the video. If you open such a site without an adblocker, you may find some truly ingenious monetization "schemes". Like opening a target site in a background window, scrolling it programmatically and clicking on ads in a "natural" way, while the user is busy watching.
The funniest part though is that the market for it only exists due to the greed and stupidity of the legal "platforms". Many people would happily buy (as in pay once, play forever) films and TV shows, many others would find it reasonable to pay $20-50/month for a single streaming service covering 90% of the things you would want to watch. But having relevant movies splintered over a multitude of competing platforms with a combined rent approaching what you could pay for a small apartment is a complete non-starter. So, people are back to piracy.
does that actually work? what you're describing shouldn't work due to same-origin.
You can do this, physically or digitally.
Digitally, the "forever" part doesn't actually work that great in practice [1]. Unless you can download the movie and store or yourself.
[1] https://www.slashfilm.com/560987/you-still-own-movies-on-app...
I know of three sources: VHX, Vimeo On Demand, and GOG. Although upon looking it appears VHX is now owned by Vimeo, so there are really only two.
From my experience as a 30-something guy in South/West EU, the "market" for the sites you mention is mostly made of high school/university students who are unwilling or unable to put any money into home entertainment content.
> many others would find it reasonable to pay $20-50/month for a single streaming service covering 90% of the things you would want to watch
But in the EU, $20-50/month get you 2-4 (if not 5) subscriptions from the main content providers. At that point, you are either at that 90% or pretty close. I agree that having multiple services is subpar, but so is looking for movies on the sites you mention (especially without a good adblocker).
And I am pretty sure that we will just end up either reinventing cable (ugh), or having smart TVs that subscribe/unsubscribe you from streaming services based on your watch list to keep your monthly expenses at a minimum.
> Viewers in Germany have access to 43.1% of the films available online in the EU, while in Slovenia, for example, only 0.3% are available.
From recently published https://www.fuen.org/en/article/Borderless-Media-Consumption...
I think a lot of people miss this. A lot of pirating declined when Netflix became popular. Then there were a ton of platforms and pirating came back. But I feel pirating is different now. It's because there's one compelling show on the small platforms and so those get pirated. A certain amount of centralization is good but too much makes it difficult.
The Medelin drug cartel story. I wonder what monopolistic entities are working effectively yet we don't realize it.
I'll unsub once my kids grow tired of their (mostly awful) cartoons.
I just use prime and rent movies that aren't free on it. It covers well over 90% of what I want to watch, and I spend well under $50/mo on it. After the $10 subscription, $40/mo for the rentals is like 2-3 seasons of a show, or 10+ movies (in addition to the included stuff). Legal cheap solutions exist, you just have to be willing to rent movies and shows like in the blockbuster days.
After spending $50 on the hardware, you're lucky to get 2 months service. For that price, you might as well just buy Netflix.
1. lack access to credit cards or internet-purchase enabled debit cards (or banking altogether). they can purchase those devices with cash;
2. simply don't understand how it works or that it may stop working in the future;
3. can justify spending money on a physical device, but cannot justify spending money on digital goods or services (according to their value systems)
4. they either ignore, or are fine with, the fact that they are paying for pirated content, which IMHO is the worst form of piracy.
Also, point 3. does not hold up if they pay a monthly fee on top of the cost of the physical device.
I'd also like to extend your point 4 (or perhaps add a point 5), that some of these people aren't even aware they're pirating content or that they're breaking a law somewhere.
You pay around 5 dollars to get access to a US Netflix account per month. Credit Card infra is still bad here, and the local Netflix is not worth it even when you can pay. Also, no Access to the others.
But I know quite a few that use this kind of devices to get cheaper access to football matches, series and general paid television content. When the supplied configuration fails they just change to another dealer. For them it's cheaper to pay 50€ for the device and a few euros every 2-3 months than paying over 120€ a month for the full package (football matches access is only available at that price range).
When services are cheap most people that want them just pay since they're convenient.
I understand torrents (they are distributed) but do the plugins also use distributed content sources?
The idea was that I'd control the list of peers that it could connect to, and all the peers would be verified, authorized, owners of the media being shared.
The whole goal is to create a wide spread distribution system without having to pay a cloud provider, and to make the service as cheap as possible for the users.
IIRC there were at least a couple of these floating around, it was probably too much of a headache to figure out which were legitimate and which were malware.
Corollarious question, why would a pirate pay on your site when they can just...pirate it for free elsewhere? Seems like the value proposition for your site for pirates is worse than current piracy.
> Its original developers took the service down and abandoned the project merely a few days after it launched in 2014. But since the project was open source, other developers were able pick up where they left off, and it's been killed and revived a few more times ever since.