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Comment by stewx | Hacker News Reader

These illegal offshore "IPTV" operators are taking over the streaming market in my area. They have succeeded in marketing themselves to ordinary people via word of mouth and local resellers, and have apparently built enough of a reliable platform that they keep customers.

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This is a very accurate statement. Especially when I have non-technical family members buying them and bragging to me about it.

Reminds me of the 90's with those cable black boxes that gave you free HBO etc.

This is also becoming and issue on the ISP side. These IPTV services are causing support calls for slow speeds and tv freezes when in reality it is just the pirate streams having issues.

The ISPs are throttling UDP traffic. In my country they’re known to work with local TV provider to block or cripple streams.

A service I am aware of has HTTP streams. Video on Demand streams are rate limited by the server to a fixed rate, which is sometimes significantly under the peak bitrate of the file; and the recommended player device doesn't have a large enough buffer for that.

That's 100% a service provider issue.

Live streams have some issues too, but I haven't debugged those. On the other hand, ESPN+ live streams aren't exactly five nines of quality either.

The pirate IPTV streams are not UDP, they’re HLS vis HTTPS. Often behind Cloudflare.

Not on my side. We dont throttle anything.

How is that going to work with QUIC?

Some people think it's legit because they pay for the service and the decoder (firestick with a app) is sold in a real store.

yeah I've talked to those cell phone shop guys that sell them, just for fun to see how it works, and they definitely dont explain what it actually is to you

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