Sky Asked Govt. To Target Pirate IPTV Resellers via New Dedicated Police Unit
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
I am talking about Sky Sports here for example. Also in Germany for example. Last I checked, they wanted 30 euros per month and a yearly subscription when I want to see a Bundesliga match every x months. I have a season ticket for my team so I see all matches live and away games sometimes on TV. Even if I were to justify the price (it’s exactly the same price as my season pass), it’s not guaranteed that they show the match, it may be shown by DAZN, who also want 30 euros per month, but at least don’t ask for a year’s commitment. Neither service sells pay per view - I would gladly pay 5 - 10 euros per match seen
In the UK at least Sky offer this. You can buy a 'day pass' and get full access to all their sports channels for a day. It's about £12. Or you can pay £34.99 for the monthly plan. In reality they constantly offer deals and when you try to cancel they offer huge discounts. I think I've been paying about £20 per month for the full sports package for the last couple of years. It's wildly more accessible now than it was when you had to buy their satellite package etc. and commit for multiple years.
It is an absoultely brutal experience, and drove me back to streaming.
I bought a game last year, first i couldn't watch it on my computer (linux) next i realised that i had to pay extra for HD.
Paying extra to have sport in HD? Fuck, and i cannot stress this enough, That.
Paying extra for HD/surround sound is annoying but tbh it has no impact on me watching sport. Unless I'm watching hockey, I can see everything just fine in 720p.
Oh and when (not if) your stream connection drops, you will have to watch their ads again.
That’s how SportsNet is in Canada for the NHL. It isn’t terrible, but it’s pretty bad and they’re obviously taking advantage of their monopoly (for broadcast rights) to foist a low quality, premium priced service onto the public.
ESPN+ in the US costs half of what we pay for SportsNet in Canada and it’s better quality. I can’t coax a 60fps stream out of SportsNet while a 720p60 ESPN+ with upscaling on an Nvidia Shield looks very good.
So, in Canada you don’t have any good options. You either pay for the legit service that’s terrible quality or you get something that’s grey market (ESPN+ via VPN) or flat out piracy.
Over the last 3 years I’ve spent more on piracy than what a SportsNet subscription would cost. My money is there for them to take if they can ever deliver a product that’s not absolute trash.
This drove me away from their service. It seemed insane to me. I also ran into this issue with some foreign channels where they would show infomercials instead of the actual, early AM game. That drove me nuts.
So now we use an alternative, and very happy with the result.
For a Champions League match from time to time, Amazon Prime may be worth it: https://www.amazon.de/salp/championsleague/
Suggesting the stream operators will hack your bank account. Reminds me ot the "pirate media will ruin your VCR/CDDVD Player fake propaganda. Ironically... the virus came from a big reputable corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk....
A lot of industries would be in for some criticism and bad PR after that. But not these guys. They don't give a shit about reputation.
This has so much opportunity for improvement. ex: Blatant Lies Let Stupidity In
Bizarre that so many at the top will label ordinary people who don't like the idea of being gouged to watch their favorite team play as criminals.
It's pretty ridiculous
Take for example, Wes Anderson movies. They aren't ranking in the billions after a successful weekend, but they don't have too because the folks involved recognize it's a passion project. I mean the cast alone is indicative that they're willing to take on a role that pays maybe a quarter of what they normally receive in other flicks.
The amount of law enforcement resources we dedicate to piracy compared to, say, death threats, illegal weapons trade, etc seems completely disproportionate.
Is this a good position?
Why or why not?
See Steve Albini’s open letter to the music industry for the full accounting…from the nineties when labels made their artists •really• dance for their shekels…
Best example I know of Lawful Evil…
You keep using words that inherently equivocate between transfer-of-property acts and copying-of-property acts. Choose your words more carefully, and then make the same argument.
No, I don't think my sense of morality inherently has anything to say about downloading an mp3, one way or the other. There's no instinct in humans that pattern-matches on the idea of copying information that someone else created being a particular "cultural touchstone" or "human right", nor of it being "disgusting" or "taboo."
But something being "not immoral" doesn't make it okay. Without a clear sense of moral value to an action, that action's worth comes down to an ethical question — a question that has to be resolved with ethical arguments, questions of utility and harm and fairness and "the curtain of ignorance" and so forth.
And my point is that you're failing to make those arguments.
This does not pertain to downloading an MP3.
Like I said: make an ethical argument, not a moral argument. Stop attempting to rely on moral intuitions; there are no good moral intuitions for this, any more than there are good moral intuitions for e.g. the ethics of someone who can "fork off" copies of their mind, forcing those copies to merge back together with them. It's just not something that ever came up in our evolution!
What, exactly?
Doesn't EPL rights sell at around 5B per year?
Those are...a lot of 30$ subscriptions to sell and it excludes production costs...
Regardless, there have been an absorbent amount of studies on this subject, with various inconclusive results.
More reading here: https://techpolicyinstitute.org/publications/intellectual-pr...
Also here: https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/asi....
But that's the problem: people want to send a "this should cost less" signal, forcing broadcasters to make these deals for less, forcing the sports organizations to accept less. There's no cheaper alternative that people can legally buy to send that signal; so the only alternative that actually does signal price sensitivity, is pirating the thing.
Insurance fraud is run along the same lines, all insurers contribute towards IFED which is a part of the City of London police tasked with tackling insurance fraud. If this relied on public funding I doubt anything but the most extreme cases of insurance fraud would be investigated.
So if politicians won't sell a corp the LEO they want, the corp can just purchase them directly.
This would entirely fall on the Irish taxpayer (me) to foot the bill.
Might write to my TD to specifically tell them to oppose the idea for the craic.
I had a relative contact me a couple of years ago to ask if the little black box her grandson had helpfully connected to the TV was "dodgy".
It starts off as a prompt and becomes an html tag. It's like how my father-in-law begins a joke that ends as a riddle.
To even get the system to work, you have to VPN out of the UK or Ireland to start with.
I think the police might have some difficulty.
Seems absurd that the police need to be involved at all.
Also, decoupling it from telecom connection packages (that, at least, in Spain)
To watch all the televised football games in the UK you need Sky Sports, TNT and Amazon Prime.
Even then you can only see half the games whereas in other countries almost all Premier League matches are televised meaning that geographical licensing restrictions are also in play.
I would happily pay a fairly significant fee to watch all matches conveniently, but it’s simply not available to buy.
I just get Sunday ticket and head to the pub on the occasion that my team is playing a game not covered by that or antenna TV.
The NFL is good about letting local fans see their team. The monetary pain comes if you want to see out of market games.
Pirated streams may not cost $$, but they cost time, labor, and its risky to set up (virii, installing bloatware, etc). So there's a cost to them.
A hybrid model that is low cost and low labor, simply approximates the real value to the consumer.
If someone is not paying Sky 30 EUR per month, but is paying a random reseller the equivalent of 3 EUR/mo, then the question is, why doesn't the content provider sell that value to the end user?
But you could also charge nothing - you don't really have costs because you aren't paying anyone. I distinctly remember the days of P2P and BitTorrent where pirated content actually was being provided for free[0]. So in my mind, charging any amount of money for pirated content feels like a grift.
[0] Or at the very least, using an internal scrip denominated in bytes transferred to encourage people to host the content
If I could get the same user experience for the same price legally then I would, but the legal experience is both too expensive and too shit. There was a golden year or two where it really was easier to do it legally. Now you need ten different subscriptions, and half the things you want to watch cost extra money on top of that.
Many of the servers are operated in locations which have cooperation agreements with law enforcement and authorities in other countries.
Go after a bigger provider, obtain records of their customers and you have “caught many people in the act” — you get access logs with IPs to control panels, any other logs in infrastructure (all those things they may do to make it easier to use a seedbox are also potential evidence of crimes committed), payment instruments to trace you.
You’re paying £15 and gambling a bit that this won’t happen, or that the Crown Prosecution Service and Police don’t care. But the UK keeps revising the Digital Economy Act, and changing/increasing the penalties for copyright infringement, so they’re spending valuable legislative time on this (somewhat indicating it may become a prosecution priority). There’s always the specter of a coordinated, multinational operation to disrupt piracy because it’s a great headline that authorities care about intellectual property.
If you are caught and they do make an example of you, the penalties (a criminal record; a significant fine like £50,000; or even a short jail stint) seem to dramatically “cost more” than the savings.
It might be worth understanding what logs your seedbox provider keeps external to the system they’re renting you, what’s on the box itself, what duration all these logs are kept for, how long do they keep records of your payments (the authorities will inevitably argue this is a criminal enterprise and you’re supporting organised crime).
But perhaps you’re paying through cryptocurrency from wallets the clean side of a tumbler/mixer and you only ever access this all via VPN and have perfect OpSec!