That is a lot of money, which bank/payment processor is processing that much? Does it not send alarm bells? Do the bank get fined?
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.
While the bulletproof hosting we had wasn't cheap, we were still making an enormous profit.
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?
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.