Police bust pirate streaming service making €250M per month
bleepingcomputer.com
bleepingcomputer.com
I suspect that the actual damages would be (much) lower, as some of the people using this service would not or could not have paid for the official source. This is the same fallacy or intentional misrepresentation that the music industry used in the Napster days.
As we know, if the pricing is reasonable for the market, and more importantly the content is actually _available!_ in that market, people will pay to stream it.
A lot of the time, the content is unavailable in many markets; so users will have to choose between illegal or nothing. If the content is available to stream legally, and its price is too high for the region, then people wouldn't have paid for it no matter what. Thus, the revenue was not lost; the market was simply never captured.
For example back when Photoshop was several hundred dollars a lot of people who could not afford that pirated it to do home and hobbyist photo editing. If Photoshop had not been able to be pirated those people would not have bought it, so that piracy did indeed not reduce Adobe's income.
However there were also programs such as Pixelmator that were more than an order of magnitude cheaper than Photoshop and could do everything those people were using Photoshop for. If Photoshop could not be pirated some of those people would have bought those other programs.
I am a performer whose work is done live anyway, but people have to take out time in the day to visit and play.
If movies somehow suddenly became magically unavailable in society, I think it's a certainty that people would be watching live theater like 100+ years ago.
However, the total amount of viewing would be far, far less. People today spend lots of their free time watching movies and TV shows (many of which, these days, are better thought of as multi-volume movies). Take all that away somehow, and people will go back to the really old days before the invention of cinemas, where they occasionally watched a (live) show/play at a theater, but it was certainly not a frequent activity, maybe (guessing) once a week at the very best if they were middle-class or higher, certainly not every night, and probably more like monthly.
So the total amount of economic activity that would be generated by this magical elimination of TV/movies, resulting in better careers for stage actors, musicians (assuming the Great Movie Disappearance also magically eliminated recorded music from plays), and playhouse owners would be dwarfed, I think, by the huge loss of economic activity from all the people in the various businesses of movie/TV entertainment. I could be wrong though, but considering Hollywood entertainment and TV is a huge economic driver in the US today (despite piracy), and playhouses and plays were not a huge economic force in the US in the late 1800s, I think my assumptions are correct.
This works for software tools, but it doesn't work for movies or other artistic works. For example, personally, I'm a firm believer that no one should pirate Windows: if you can't afford it, then you have lots of free options available (namely, countless Linux distros). Same goes for Photoshop: if you can't afford it (or don't want to), there's free alternatives like Krita. These software programs are just tools to accomplish a task; if you can't get access to one, you can likely find something else to do the same thing.
You can't make this argument for watching a movie, though. You can't substitute some crap movie like Gigli or The Room for the experience of a cinematic masterpiece like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Lawrence of Arabia. It's like comparing some 4-year-old's crayon drawing to a painting by one of the masters.
There are lots of other tools, some of which are free, much like there are lots of other forms of culture and entertainment. Absolute masterpieces come into the public domain every year, and become free for a new generation of people to enjoy.
Why are public domain forms of culture and entertainment insufficient? The list of classics in the public domain vastly outnumbers the list of contemporary classics.
FWIW, I disagree entirely. Copyright infringement is a natural consequence of free market dynamics and the marginal costs of replication of IP being near zero, just like spillage and theft is a natural consequence of physical stores. It’s part of the cost of doing business.
You can't substitute mspaint for photoshop either, what a weird take.
And you can substitute any capeshit movie for any other capeshit movie since they're all the same.
Your analogy makes no sense.
HA! And yet my local library makes this argument all the time.
Context, I had a discussion with the media buyer at my local library about how many DVDs they were de-acquisitioning, and how meager were their new purchases of movies and series. Of course I was referring to A-list material. The library has a contracted online streaming service and the librarian offered this service as equivalent. It’s not. It’s not the Criterion Collection. It’s the equivalent of carob substituted for chocolate.
Whatever you think about DVDs compared to streaming, I like going to my local library. And other libraries in my system have much better collections. It’s just poor management (I’m sure I won’t convince many others who have already committed to going streaming or don’t like their public library. So I’ll just say this, they routinely buy ‘altered to fit your television’ copies of action films. Uggg)
>However there were also programs such as Pixelmator...
Photoshop is way older than Pixelmator. In the 90's I would use Paint Shop Pro also known as PSP. People still pirated that - including me - because we were kids with no income just looking to mess with cool computer stuff.
Though honestly, it's in Adobe's best interest to turn a blind eye to individual piracy as it keeps their products the incumbent. Little johnny pirating Photoshop to edit his class photos is of no loss to Adobe. Instead, when johnny is old enough to make a living editing images Johnny will likely reach for Photoshop, this time with an open wallet. So piracy is really the ultimate trial version of software. Of course you have to make a show and lynch a few people in public to keep them fearful just enough to ensure most people pay to play. So you get the stories of some granny or 12yo hung out to dry for piracy.
The hypothetical damages amount is moot. They were charging a specific amount of money and people were paying it. That amount was high enough that you can completely ignore any inflated estimates and they were still doing a huge amount of criminal business.
Putting that into perspective, Gitlab is on track to do around just 580MM USD this year and is valued at 8 billion dollars in market cap.
Something tells me that their revenue isn't is 10% of Netflix.
Compare that to streaming where at least >20% of the population know what it is and >20% of that seem to pay for streaming as a service. Much bigger market, and being a pirate site seems like it'd give them and an edge in the market because their catalogue would be better than any legal operation.
Note that black markets exist because there is enugh demand for a product that it overwhelms the ability of the army/police to enforce the law. This site is obviously going to be doing something economically popular. If it wasn't making a killing, ol' mate running the place would go find some other career.
And given the comments below indicating that it was a mistranslation, it's a moot point- it was wrong after all.
No chance they were making 250M and were able to stash it away so neatly and so fast that they found so little money
I used to support an apartment building with a lot of residents from India. They all had IPTV boxes with some pirate channel for accessing some in demand cricket comp, and the support requests would all coincide with the streams. And in general they got lots of other local content outside the region locking. Mostly keeping up with India. They got the content for free in india, but paid a small fee to access it remotely, not caring who provided it. They all seemed to believe there was no financially reasonable alternative way to access the content and we never really bothered them about it as its not the carriers job to police IMHO.
Likewise I see tons of yanks complaining about Disney+ not carrying Alien Romulus, when outside of the US its on the app. All self imposed considering Disney owns a large amount of Hulu but is beefing with the remaining shareholders IIRC.
Plainly nonsense region locking seems to be driving piracy. And if someones making 250 million per month circumventing it then it sort of implies the solution doesnt it?
That's odd. Disney+ (with ads) is $10/mo on its own. $11/mo for the bundle of D+/Hulu (with ads). Alien: Romulus is on Hulu right now.
"Fraudulent exaggeration" may even be punished, depending on the court. (More often seen in civil circles - see insurance.)
If there is demand there would be local distributors who could want a licensing deal and get a cut. There are a bunch of them often in almost every country. Now those distributors see that it would cost them X to license with you but they would make zilch because everybody pirates it anyway.
Now calculate what you lost...
Like if you post art but somebody rips it off and sells something based on it and makes a million. Assume his lawyer says 0% of his buyers would join your patreon. Maybe you don't even have a patreon. But imagine some legit company could suggest a 2 million deal to license your stuff for say toy manufacturing or branding or whatever (like mofu_sand). But they see your stuff pirated all over already and do the math. This is what you lose.
That said, I've no idea where the numbers come from, but it covers some of the possibilities.
I'm usually mixed. I pay for access to some things. I download copies of some things without paying for them. Some of the latter category are things I just want to check out (software that doesn't offer a demo/that I might mess around with once). Some are things I ostensibly pay for already (ex: movies or shows I get as part of an Amazon Prime subscription but are now frequently interrupted by advertisements). Occasionally I'm just lazy, I'll admit. Sometimes it's just quicker to torrent a movie than to hunt down the best/only place to rent it.
The one thing I won't do is pay (actual) pirates like these for access. I figure it's on me if I watch a movie I didn't pay to rent/stream/whatever. But I'm not supporting god-knows-what sketchy organization with actual money. When I spend money it'll be going to the legit rights owner.
But what are the actual numbers though? I have friends who are all well off and have no qualm paying subscriptions to illegal streaming sites because "I'm not paying that much for streaming TV."
It's just far too easy for me to go download whatever I want to even pay for services, pirate or the real media cartels.
We got exactly what we begged for.
Ideally people want to buy what they want to consume/use. Instead they make us pay fees for a bundle of garbage product rather than sell us the actual product we want. Everything as pay per view would be great. Maybe even include dynamic pricing.
I really really don't want this. I want a flat monthly rate for all the things.
“which one”
“the Papacy one”
“you mean pay-per-view”
that had ALL The content
instead we got ~25 different streaming services that varies from country to country, and end up costing more than cable tv, if you want them all.
So lets round and say $0.50 a channel.
If netflix et al only cost $0.50, i'd have no problem subscribing to 10 services.
Really, the whole cable a la carte thing was really a response to false advertising. Cable liked to advertise each channel as being equal - as if you were spending $0.50 per channel when really you were spending $50 on the good channels, and the other junk was free.
Cable is nothing but a streaming service itself, a cable box is nothing more than a cable modem getting online the same way your data modem does, and streams video the same way as streaming services do, but it's 1000 channels of random crap full of commercials instead of just one media brand in streaming.
Certainly you can see that the cable channels were overcharging, we had 100s of channels like the 'golf channel' with useless programming that were part of 'bundles' you couldn't unbundle and frankly, there were multiple lawsuits of cable companies overcharging incorrectly, not letting people out of contracts etc.
Consumers wanted more choice and control. For the briefest second they got it, but at that very moment when Hulu was independent and Netflix was streaming and GoogleTV was just starting to make a run for it.
At that moment, before Google even thought of chromecast and ABC couldn't give a shit about buying Hulu and telecom executives couldn't not understand dual screen viewing (where you're on your phone and watching TV at the same time) there were massive consulting and strategy meetings about not only recapturing the 'wallet' of spend, but increasing it. Discussing how to bring the spend of a household on cable (say 45-100/mo) to a higher number, to a per person segmentation rather than household.
Even if we did 'beg' for it. I dont think we begged to sift through titles and memberships in a way thats worse than blockbuster some nights.
Source: Was responsible for defining the second screen experience, merchandising shows in real time, etc.
Hey, I like the golf channel.
I'm not sure what the complaint is here. People wanted individual channels.
Now at last they can buy just the Disney channel for ten bucks a month and get all the latest lame Star Wars miniseries without yucky sports.
How is this not a deal? Is that not what everyone wanted?
If people are now saying they want to just like, pay a dollar for a single Star War, well, good luck.
You appear to be simplifiying it down to only the 'expensive' aspect. And more than likely that's the primary motivator, but the other factors aren't nothing. Additionally, the customers are paying at least something for this service, so it's not free.
In this instance there happens to be an (illegitimate, but still) alternative that's easy enough for 22 million customers to have worked out how to set up, operate, and prefer.
Apple TV and other TV boxes have aggregated services for a long time now. You can search for content across providers from one interface.
Pirate streaming sites aren’t exactly known for their quality, consistency, reliability, and ease of use. I bet it was more frustrating to use the pirate service, especially for those dealing with subtitles and alternate audio.
This really does come down to expense.
The great ones, that gets a lot of word of mouth recommandations, are definitely better in my experience.
Nonetheless these services are highly successful and profitable. I think one problem is this weirdness of the 21st century where many companies, especially in media, are seen as antagonistic towards their own customers - this provides a major motivation for piracy.
For games, particularly from smaller studios, it's the exact opposite. They generally seem highly concerned with the interest and satisfaction of their players, and so you want to pay them. Many of these studios even sell things like soundtracks (already available in the install folder) as 'pay more' buttons, and plenty of people buy them.
Even though it could be cheaper buying direct, or free by pirating. Turns out the publishers were just either greedy or naive and didn't split the 30% savings to encourage people to move off Steam, and the Steam pricing is low enough that people preferred it.
The same cycle is happening with streaming services, they didn't learn that there is a cutting point where people just dont want to deal with your high priced, abusive shit. Netflix make almost $34 BILLION a year, and yet the most important thing for them is making it really hard for me to help my elderly parents from just using one of my many unused Netflix profiles.
"Nickle and Diming" drives a lot of these folks to figure out an alternative. Because the pirate services aren't going to turn around and restrict my ability to watch on location, or number of streams or decide that they don't like my TV manufacturer anymore and disable the app.
Unfortunately vested interests within each service would make this impossible due to the level of cooperation required.
TV content producers wouldn't want to put themselves in a similar position if they can avoid it.
I don’t understand this desire to do mental gymnastics to ignore the elephant in the room:
The primary driver for these people was not convenience. Pirate services are flakey, don’t always have the content you want, have quirky content, and generally require some work to navigate. These people weren’t seeking convenience.
They signed up because it was cheap. They wanted to save money and they’d give up some of the polish and convenience of a mainstream app and service to save that money.
It could be a thousand different reasons
- As somebody who HAS ACTUALLY lived abroad for years, paying for a streaming service and still being region locked is pretty damn annoying
- Quality of the service. Some pirate sites are flaky, but seedbox style or popcorn time style services are pretty solid. Maybe you're thinking of just a random streaming website?
etc. etc.
Hell, 20 years ago I had to invest time and trust to get the connections to proper IRC distribution channels to get releases as soon as they were made available by the scene. Yeah, I was a teenager without money to pay for a proper Usenet subscription to download Linux ISOs. :)
As soon as Netflix entered the streaming market in my country, it didn't take long for me to stop sailing the seas.
I bet these pirates got a nice and shiny app to make official streaming platforms envious.
Now when I want to watch something I don't even bother trying to figure out what service it's on (if any), I just grab a torrent. Managing subscriptions for a dozen different services and trying to keep track of what I'm subscribed to and why is laughable when it's so easy to get it for free.
If more people did that, maybe the media cartels will humble some.
Sometimes I meet with friends who have all the services and we still end up torrenting because there are issues 50% of the time (technical problems, availability, geolock, subtitles only available in local languages, &c.)
Eg . the uk premier league has sold the rights to uk teams to sky and bt but sky and bt won't always show all 10 of the days games.
so you can be in the situation where your team are playing a game you can't get tickets to[all sold out] that you can't pay anyone legally to watch. yet you go on holiday to Europe and every bar will have Bein or ESPN or whatever showing every.single.match. live
Is it much less expensive?
As GabeN has stated: piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem.
I will provide a concrete example. My buddy got into anime and was raving about one specific title so I checked Hulu for it, but Hulu, for some unfathomable reason starts that anime at season 4.. If I want to legally Stream season one, I would need to try the Sony owned anime thing, which I refuse to do for reasons not related to streaming wars. I ended up buying a dvd ( cheap and good enough quality for me ).
And pirates... have everything and, unless you are looking for newest releases, is of superior quality.
Movies, apple TV, netflix, Amazon, Disney, hbo, sports PPV
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Protocol_television
I pay a reasonable subscription fee, download the app on all my devices, and watch whatever I want.
The app is compatible with all of my devices, isn't broken, there are no unreasonable limits or restrictions, and no ads. That's a lot more than I can say for the 5 or 6 subscriptions it replaces.
Paid pirate IPTV streams can have better speeds, better reliability, and less or no ads. I don’t personally watch live TV so I don’t use these services, but if I did I would definitely pay a small amount for the conveniences above.
You can even self-host your own:
https://github.com/debridmediamanager/zurg-testing
Lots more debrid info, services, and tools here:
(I don't totally grok what service 'Debrid' provides, but various people seem to rave about it. Currently looking up more information. Summary: Aggregator of premium access to a seclection of file hosting sites, plus caching of content that's popular amongst their Customers)
I wouldn’t be surprised to see that behavior of pirate streaming sites such as clones and (modified) limited hangouts as aspects of strategies to combat enforcement while segmenting the market to increase profits and/or limit exposure to downside risks.
Debrid services act as a shared cache of requested torrents/magnet links as well as digital locker services sold as upsells on a premium tier. It’s facilitated as a WebDAV API and/or direct HTTPS downloads generated via unique hashlists that encode magnet links.
It can be incorporated into search addons for things like Stremio or Kodi or Jellyfin or Plex so it’s basically just-in-time streaming from a cache that just-in-time downloads a torrent or digital locker file, backed by a time-based cache that usually is provided by the debrid provider, similar to how paid newsgroup providers advertise retention, but also with downward pressure to avoid long-lived links to avoid DMCA takedowns.
Also what a terrible name it is. Why Real? Is there an original Debrid? And I can't not associate the word with debridement (don't google if you can't handle gore)
That explanation kinda linked together concepts I'd previously read about "debrid" services.
My summary of what they do (from further down the thread) was: Aggregator of premium access to a selection of file hosting sites, plus caching of content that's popular amongst their Customers.
I'm not sure of the applications of their service outside of streaming (copyrighted material), so I'd be a little bit wary of their potential for longevity of service. Never bet on centralised piracy.
aspenmayer also had somewhat of an explanation downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42293386
I don't watch live television myself so I don't know how good and reliable these services are.
That eur250mio / mo number is almost certainly bullshit just going off the above alone.
Not to mention that you can't exactly hide 3 yards annual revenue ... and anyone within a mile of a corporate treasury role will tell you that you can't cash-manage that revenue on 40k eur.
> "These broadcasts were resold to 22 million subscribed members via multiple distribution channels and an extensive seller network.
Around €10 a sub per month to get EVERYTHING that's broadcast or streamed? That's an excellent deal for the subscriber.
And for the pirates their overhead is going to be so much lower than any streaming service precisely because they DON'T have to pay and negotiate for rights. If they "went legit" then they'd have to charge a hell of a lot more than around ten Euros a month, they'd cease to be competative, and their profit margin would collapse.
I'm not saying it's impossible just implausible. Interested to see more details on this.
I think some of us were assuming this is some Streamlord equivalent with a payment tier. IE. Something that would be difficult to centralize illegal payment volume in the billions towards.
Not something with a decentralized network of distributors each collecting payment on their own.
They also didn't have any hiccups watching the Tyson v. Paul match, which was also available.
They would even sometimes have access to the raw sports streams before the ad injection, so sports games would cut to stylized "Ad break in progress" scenes where there would have otherwise been ads injected for your region.
Pretty much all of these channels in a decent bitrate 1080p stream. You would somehow tie it into Plex so it shows up as if it was a cable box. Plex can handle transcoding for whatever target device you're wanting to watch it on. You didn't need any kind of odd front-end app from the IPTV provider.
That there are a few dozen million people around the world willing to shell out $10-20 to get practically every cable channel like this isn't too surprising to me.
My Italian is not good, but I suspect this is a case of the "journalists" writing the article using Google translate, with their brains in neutral. My reading of the relevant sentence is that it is the "illegal streaming industry" that "generates EUR 3B annually" and causes 10B damage to the media rights holders (they say, presumably). This is where the "250M/mo" comes from -- a figure that never appears in the actual press release. They also say they seized 1.6M in crypto and 40K in cash. So...TFA is BS.
https://www.commissariatodips.it/notizie/articolo/comunicato...
Google translate offering > Over 2,500 illegal channels and servers were seized that managed the majority of the illicit signals in Europe, with which the alleged fraudsters achieved an illegal turnover of over 250 million euros per month
How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?
How do you keep a wave upon the sand?
How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?
While the bulletproof hosting we had wasn't cheap, we were still making an enormous profit.
If the fraud involved any form of mail (checks, documents, etc) postal inspector seem to get involved.
Or us secret service with finance crimes.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/1h25wp9/comment/lzl...
Maybe this too: https://www.reddit.com/r/Annas_Archive/comments/1h2404j/the_...
Might also be linked: https://www.reddit.com/r/JDorama/comments/1h18s6v/to_those_t...
so bike thieves or shoplifters are just safe now?
Or even worse, no one is deprived of their property by folks streaming the soccer match via IPTV because the owner simply doesn't offer it on any service in their country.
Maybe if movies weren't about making so much money we'd have better movies instead of cash grabs. Sure we wouldn't have big budget CGI movies but that's a sacrifice I'd be willing to make
Piracy isn't like that. Copying doesn't remove the original copy.
Also, "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't theft."
> It is estimated that the amount of financial damages suffered annually from the illegal service is a massive €10 billion ($10.5B).
Oh boo hoo, some billionaires are getting a couple billions less than they could have. How sad. And what a disingenuous framing to call it “financial damage” as if it somehow affected any ordinary people.
For subscriptions, they usually add up the cost over at least 12 months. Sometimes longer.
They probably haven't made 250m/mo for 4 years, but they probably have also been operating longer than 4 years.
and some avg streaming service monthly cost
and then you get 10 billion
but that doesnt mean all the users would have spend money on netflix instead... loads of people who pirate arent potential customers to begin with.
and does it take into account the price difference from different countries? i doubt it
That's a lie they tell. People buy services from/use pirate site because either they could not afford it in the legal way, or contents weren’t available to them at all.
If you want to watch your favourite sportsball team, there are jurisdictions where you need 4+ different subscriptions (and still won't have access to all games).
I am currently trialling IPTV because my legit subscriptions (i) do not allow me to login on more than x devices, which is an unnecessary restriction and incredibly inconvenient, (ii) have broken functionality in their app that I rely on, (iii) no longer support my device, despite it being perfectly capable, so the app has been automatically deleted from it, (iv) ads.
I remember when Netflix first appeared and there was a shift away from piracy and all of its risk, quality issues, illegality, etc to the convenient, affordable, legal alternative. Unfortunately we have reached a point now where these media companies have recaptured their power and control, and are wasting no time screwing over paying customers in the most cynical, usurious ways they can invent. The equilibrium is shifting back to piracy, where the consumer has the power, and the big players offer custom apps, great quality, no ads, reasonable restrictions, etc.
Also HN: "Why should I have to pay for creative content?"
We should be concerned about AI because one of its consequences in our current world is that it may make it harder for people to make a living.
However, that's not a failing of AI, it's a failing of our current world. Homeless people aren't all artists, you know. Ideally you shouldn't have to be an artist, or anything else, to just be allowed to live.
So I don't see a contradiction in those statements. We should be concerned about the effect of AI, but the solution is not to shut down AI but to fix our society so that the (inevitable) rise of AI won't cause starvation or homelessness. The easiest fix available to us right now is UBI.
I was always wondering what are the competences of all these Italian police forces: Guardia di Finanza, Polizia Municipale, Polizia di Stato, Polizia Stradale, Carabinieri. They are all over the place, driving around, while Italian mafia bosses are oftentimes "hiding" their whole lifetime in their home villages nearby. Then here it is, yet another one! Polizia Postale!