Lessons from Growing a Piracy Streaming Site
prison.josh.mn
prison.josh.mn
If anyone has any general questions (it seems like my little “startup lessons” page is as popular as the others) I’m be happy to answer them as long as they’re not too technical or related to my finances. However, the specifics of the technical side of my site are best found on TorrentFreak, and, in short: curl commands.
Thanks for this insight, hopefully would help me.
Also, love the bit "small, honest teams". Aligns really well with my biases.
I really didn't have any significant demand for these. One of my litmus tests, besides demand, was "okay, can this be as good as the other sports' implementations?" I was always concerned about feature parity—I could have provided radio feeds for MLB but not for NBA, and that would cause people to say "well they have radio feeds for x but not y" and create confusion as to what is what. Being consistent in this regard was important.
The run-of-the-mill IPTV requests came and went, and I just wasn't interested in that. Ultimately I made the site for me so I could watch sports, I just had some other people watching with me.
There must be safer ways to make good money?
I'd imagine if we had a market where every service had access to every piece of content, so no exclusivity, this problem would go away. Then they'd compete on the quality of service rather than their selection of content they've held hostage. But as long as individual services can opt to not never share their content with anybody else, they can just hold their customers hostage, since they cannot get their good from anywhere else, so the only options are buy or don't buy.
But the video streaming platforms haven't gotten that memo yet and prefer to dig themselves into a larger and larger hole, both as far as normal Netflix style on-demand streaming, and IPTV style streams for sports and such. Hence why piracy of both are growing, with torrents on one side and IPTV pirate streams on the other.
Even the big unions have failed to put an end to this unholy mess.
"Piracy is a service problem" -- Gabe Newell
Each streaming service has their own exclusive deals with publishers and offer a completely different catalog of music/movies.
This is why pirate sites are far superior, because they don't have those artificial limits on the product catalog offered.
What? If a piece of music is on one streaming service, it's on all of them.
The ones that aren’t available on Spotify tend to be self-released but otherwise there isn’t much of a pattern. Albums not on Bandcamp, though, tend to be mediocre at best.
And that’s not even mentioning bands that are pulling their music from Spotify in protest…
In the US, this song is unavailable on Spotify where I found it, but available on YT music. Preface by Man Without Country. Given another 5 minutes, I could also find a song that is not listed on one but available on another.
https://music.you tube.com/watch?v=bvWjybBBFYs
My GF's Spotify makes great playlists, but they deleted my account twice and I'd never go back. So in that sense I'm willing to pay extra for customer service, which many of them don't care for. That's an interesting differentiator.
What would stop much larger companies, with more resources, to just keep taking anything good from smaller companies/startup?
This idea would last in the short-term, and once money dried up, result in a nonexistent market.
Piracy sites are competing with other piracy sites and the only differing factor is support.
Tell that to the music industry. That is not without its fault, but the products on offer are much better than the movie industry has. The market is smaller than it once was, i.e. there's less money flowing through the system, because the consumer isn't being squeezed from every side. The customer is being provided a better product for less money. That's a good thing in my opinion. Having the market be artificially inflated because everyone's got their own small realm no-one else is allowed to touch without paying a hefty licence fee is not a good thing in my opinion.
> This idea would last in the short-term, and once money dried up, result in a nonexistent market.
I purchased a cracked Adobe product DVD there (Disclaimer: I actually had a license at the time, but didn't have it installed on that particular laptop). I had trouble installing it, so I went back. I got my money back and help installing an alternative on my laptop. Best service!
PS: Also, Odessa is very beautiful, and I say that as someone who has lived in some beautiful places. -- https://youtu.be/G-BkuEOFGKI (Odessa Walking Tour - Ukraine's Most Beautiful City in 4K -- and this is still missing the many wonderful inner courtyards, and the entire long wonderful beach and park, which would be another equally long video)
That reminds me of the time I had moved to another city. I still had my old apartment but had brought most of my things and was more or less officially moved and moved-in. Of the stuff that I did still have at the old place was a lot of food (non-perishables, oil, eggs) because it had been better to leave it there for the time being instead of moving it all (because food). When I was back in my old city to take care of some business there and showed up to my old apartment in the late morning one Sunday, I decided to make a big brunch to use up a lot of the consumables. I needed a measuring cup, though, and I no longer had one there. (It happens that the one I did have at my new apartment was also cracked (in the physical sense) from moving, so it actually wouldn't have been any help, because even though I was going to fix it, I hadn't gotten around to it.)
I went to the store and lifted one (same brand), since I knew I had once already paid for one once.
I also, again already having paid for the original license years before, got a cracked Warcraft III Russian edition (offline only, no BattleNet, obviously), so if you want to tell more stories to show what a bad person I am, here is one more to add.
I did watch a lot of movies in my life that I never paid for though, so there is that. If they ever have one reasonable ad-free subscription that covers them all (also across borders, like Asian anime) I promise to sign up for that. Haven't watched anything at all in over a decade though, except for the occasional Twitch or Youtube. I don't even have a TV.
I guess for some people making sure everybody follows the rules is more important than anything else. I admit that I am the occasional rule breaker, including as a pedestrian crossing a red light when I feel stopping all traffic just for little me when there are plenty of large gaps in traffic is more reasonable.
So yes, thanks for pointing that out, I'm not a model citizen. I don't even feel bad about it. Also, physical goods are obviously exactly the same, so your made-up story is totally relevant, and nobody asks the question why you changed it from a virtual to a physical good when you had complete artistic freedom. Maybe your story would not be as convincing?
You never know if your search is get you what you want, bring up a pop-up of HotLonelyBabes4U (when you're looking for kids cartoons), or take you to a scam site that wants you to download a "helper."
Aside from that, the experience is rarely terrible - like the trad video streaming sites that give you endless horizontal scrolling lists sorted very broadly by topic, kind of, with an entertaining randomness about the categories.
To be fair, a good adblock is MANDATORY on these streaming sites.
You can't build a playbook for friendliness, and people have bad days which they certainly can drag into work. I am guilty of this, too. The proceeding week after my mom died I was rather terse, and have some uncomfortable memories of being short and not living up to my own standards. I went so far as to tell the person my situation and they told me that because I'm providing a service I have to do better. This user in particular was relatively new. If I recall correctly, he churned.
IMHO that's an asshole and not somebody you want as a customer anyway.
I want one for my MIL who speaks a different language.
I'd imagine the situation is much the same in other places.
This would only happen in developed countries. Nowhere else in the world cares about foreign copyrights being infringed.
MS knows this fairly well, and why they don't go after the low hanging pirates.
Go to any local market place and you will see ads to buy these streaming sticks with everything setup for you, plug and play.
There are probably many people in prison right now because tor is awfully slow. If you don't have the patience for tor you probably also don't have the patience for prison.
> Contrast what society says rehabilitation is versus what it actually feels like. How much of it depends on luck, personality, or privilege?
> people want linear redemption stories, but real self-improvement is messy, nonlinear, and impossible to A/B test.
> There's a certain freedom in owning your story publicly. People can't weaponize what you've already made peace with.
Is the big one. And interestingly, single guys doing stuff that is ethically defensible are at a larger risk of ending up in trouble with the law than big corporations doing far worse stuff. So the lesson at a personal level is a completely different one than at the corporate level, there it is 'what we can get away with' versus 'what we should do to be good citizens'.
The last quote in particular is rather timely: on Wednesday I "came out" to the entire company that I work for with a cheeky slideshow, which started as an "about me" during an all-hands ("look, we have a new employee!") and then was like, "oh yeah also..."
Being able to shape the narrative and tell my side of the story before someone sees some of the slanted reporting has continued to prove helpful. I even went so far as to say "I know people Google their colleagues sometimes and that's cool just be aware that the truth is usually in the middle of what the DOJ says and what actually happened."
Don't overestimate your success. I remember reading the original prison post and (a) seeing how thick the attempt to do that sort of "shaping" was, and (b) still coming away thinking, "Just... wow" (not in a good way).
Even if it seems like you're winning because all you're seeing is people falling over themselves to tell you how awesome your story is and how awesome you are, take a look around the room. If it's a room of 10 and the praise is really only coming from 6 people, don't neglect to account for the fact that there are 4 other people in the room who are also capable of thought, and they probably have thoughts (and the fact that they can see the other 6 people reacting the way they are can be a factor in whether to voice them).
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It's interesting to me how from his account, everyone is fairly sympathetic to him regarding his charges (he mentions his employer showing up to his interview in a sports jersey in reference to his charges!), and how he mentions he knows several actual sports players used his site. It really goes to show the state of modern streaming.
Yes, do that. Also a tangent: remind me why you're sending me an email if you haven't sent one in many months.
Sometimes I see an interesting project that hasn't launched. They just have an "sign up for news updates".
Then 12 months later I get a standard news email and I have no clue what it is and ignore it.
At least start your email with something like "Hey, 12 months ago you signed up for the mega cool electron thunder splitter. We've launched!"
Occasionally I'd get replies saying that the person looked forward to me automatically emailing them. That was a good litmus test.
Eh... I lean towards "no" on that point, unless you can do it well. I've received far too many reddit-tier fellow kids/omg so random/cringe emails, and I hate it. An example from Queal (a Soylent-style meal powder):
Winter is coming in Westeros and you must prepare by stocking up on food. Who knows if Drogon will fly by and burn your storage of snacks. Or the Night King will come to reign in the long winter. So prepare to receive a package from *REDACTED* with tracking ID: *REDACTED*
You can keep an eye on the progress of your package with this tracking link *REDACTED*.
People in the Seven Kingdoms still use carrier pigeons, so please note it could take up to a full workday for the link to become active.
Autumn will end soon enough, be prepared!
The closest to that was the quarterly newsletter: I'd highlight the awful and frustrating bugs that nobody saw, and some of the funny emails I got.
One could probably spin one of these up in an afternoon (if making money was not the goal). The barriers of entry to this ecosystem are a lot lower than I ever imagined.
Those aggregators serve their own ads (what you get through the API is a link to a web player embed, not to the video directly). I suspect that bigger sites get some kind of kickback for bringing in traffic to those players.
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/mpa-highlights-rapidly-expanding-hy... [2] http://vidsrcme.ru/ [3] https://streamed.pk/docs
I would call it a hero-site. That's what they are - they are heroes for unrestricting information.
Take ublock origin. Now, many say it is an ad-blocker; the ublock origin author says the extension is a generic content blocker. I agree with that but I go further: I call ublock origin a hero-blocker, or better, a heroic blocker. It blocks unwanted things in general. For similar reasons I think the term "piratebay" is old. It made more sense in the 2000s. Now I would call it herobay.
People may wonder about those terms, but I think it is important to use better terms than old terms. The old terms often were hijacked by the law system and mega-corporations with their own particular interests. It is time that the people re-define the law. Law should serve the people.
If yes, then it can be stolen.
If no, then it is fine to take any source code, any photo, any information, and do whatever I want with it, right?
Stealing a car you were never going to buy and making an exact replica of a car you were never going to buy is two entirely different things.
No, it's not. You (or random large media corps) do not get to unilaterally redefine words of the English language like that.
Pass whatever laws you want about it, enforce them however you feel is appropriate, but don't try to redefine language itself to push your agenda.
Furthermore, English is not prescriptive; dictionaries are a lagging reference of observed use... so yes, the users of English absolutely do get to redefine language. That's how all modern English words originated.
And finally, if your dictionary doesn't account for "IP theft", you have simply found an incorrect dictionary, because that usage is undeniably widespread -- whether or not you agree with the concept politically.
Good thing I don't recognise the existence of that. We live in a society that does, and I despise that. At least the EU has the sense to not recognise software patents, so 'intellectual property' is not all-encompassing. Maybe one day they can loosen the grip further.
> As another valid example, see "identity theft".
'Identity fraud' is a much better term for what this is. Someone using my name, phone number and my mother's maiden name to get money in my name is not stealing my name and phone number; it's just fraud. It's much closer to lying than stealing.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/intellectual_property https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/theft
Between these two pages, you should be able to understand why "ip theft" is a bogus term. It's specifically called out in the intellectual property article.
"Unlike other forms of property, intellectual property can be used by infinitely many people without depriving the original owner of the use of their property."
Whereas theft has this definition: "Theft is the taking of another person’s personal property with the intent of depriving that person of the use of their property."
My not-a-lawyer understanding is that we use a common law system in the USA. This means that the definitions for things are based on history, previous cases, and the statutes that have been codified into law. This is a good thing because redefining words can make previously legal actions become illegal. Allowing that to happen at the pace slang develops in the modern era means we will hold people to different standards based on how "hip" they are.
- murder
- kidnapping
- ddosing their site so they can't sell things
- carpet bombing their reviews with 1 star
- filing an injunction blocking the sale of their product on bogus ip claims (aka copyright trolling)
- gaslighting them to the point where they think the idea is worthless
- being the owner of IP that prevents them from selling their IP
Probably others but I think that's enough to show your definition is wrong.
I'm not trying to make a definition, just trying to convey my opinion. I suggest we discuss our opinions rather than trying to codify English
If you spend years of your life writing some software and then it accidentally gets revealed to the world by mistake, anyone can copy it and use it as their own? Because copying isn’t theft, theft they haven’t stolen anything from you, so you have nothing to complain about?
This does not hold true for copyright infringement. When I copy Die Hard 3: The Expendables' Return of the Jedi, the original owner/copyright holder still has it. As they still have it, I have not deprived them of their work or good, and calling it theft makes about as much sense as me making a copy of the milk in your fridge and taking that copy.
Thanks for putting it in plain text.
No, colloquial English doesn't require this. e.g. "Identity theft"
I think you just finished a circle there, so I don't think there's much reason to continue this line of enquiry, given neither of us is going to change our stance.
"so you have nothing to complain about" incorrect. Copyright infringement is it's own crime with it's own penalities.
The terminology section of this Wikipedia article is quite informative on why copying is not theft according to the US Supreme Court.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement
A big difference in theft vs copyright infringement is if you go to jail or not (criminal vs civil). Again, not a lawyer.
It's a breach of intellectual property rights owner.
This is a monetized streaming site that spams reddit users. This is the hero in your mind? Is your philosophy that as long as the legal IP holders don't get paid it's great?
Oh man, such a stupid thing to do. This turned a $150k bounty into extortion.
Sounds like a bug that would have been better off anonymously leaked for the other IPTV providers to pick up, after said bug was valued at 0 in greyhat dollars.
There's a lot of nuance, and what was ultimately reported about the bug isn't how things played out—there's tons of context missing. I won't talk more of the bug, or the handling of situation. I realize it was the leading headline (more so than the "guy had streaming website") but it was, in my opinion, also the most far-fetched.
ah, it's this kind of pirate streaming
Or, you know, don't. The less popular these sites are, the longer they stay around.
(Speaking in general here, this includes Jellyfin.)
Especially for someone who only cares about their team, watching two games a month, that's a really bad deal. Even more so if your local offer is burdened with bad commentators or ads you can't get away from. Scale that problem up to someone who watches a few different sports, but none are available as one single package, and the value for money gets worse, while the experience grows worse as well, being you're now divided between several services. Add in DRM and bad app experiences, and you get people who just can't be arsed to do things properly any more, given they are functionally being punished for doing so.
Or you could pay a shady guy a few quid a month, but the service is good, and you get everything under the sun, moon, sky, and maybe even the stars. Can't blame them for wanting an experience that isn't trying to wring them dry.
After the MBAs arrived, the whole thing was about selling shitty packages for students.
- The college was somehow legally allowed to charge a minimum, so people only needing one single class was still paying for 3.
- They would push high distance learning for anything they legally could, showing the same video of the same teacher to all their 10 universities and paying "tutors" a minimum wage to moderate hundreds of Moodle classes (if not putting Masters students to do it for half the minimum wage). So 80 students paying $1000 on average to take a 5 class, and some of those cost on average $2000 + server costs. What a business.
- Of course classes that had 10 people in it suddenly had 40. And for when there wasn't 40 people to attend, they would consolidate classes with another group and half would have to go to the other side of town for the one class that, if they didn't attend, would set back their tuition by one year.
But yeah, sure it makes more money.
When you don't even have to compete on quality, that's what happens.
Sky Sports - £35/month
TNT Sports - £32/month
Amazon Prime - £9/month
And then in the UK there is a legal peculiarity whereby 3pm Saturday games are illegal to broadcast on television, so you don't even get that slot. It's the most common slot with about a third of the weekends games.
v.s. Paying someone on discord £8/month for all the games
p.s. great username
You can often get a deal if you threaten to cancel, go through with it, and then wait for a retentions offer, but since Sky was acquired by Comcast that's happening less and less, especially for the superior Sky Q satellite service - you can get great deals on their Sky Stream service, but it's plagued with issues, and you no longer have the ability to time shift by having the main box record directly off the satellite feed.
You also can't skip ads unless you pay them, versus the ability to pause, fast forward etc. on the Satellite service.
NFL Sunday Ticket ($150-204/season) - Out-of-market Sunday afternoon games
Amazon Prime Video ($9/month) - Thursday Night Football
Peacock Premium ($10.99/month) - Some exclusive games on NBC
ESPN Unlimited ($29.99/month) - Monday Night Football on ESPN/ABC
Fox One ($19.99/month) - Fox Sunday games
Paramount+ ($7.99/month) - CBS Sunday games
Netflix - Two Christmas Day games
There are many small papercuts that legal providers subject customers to.
Geofencing (you can't watch this sport from this location because fuck you), devices blacklisting (you can't watch this sport on your mobile device because fuck you), rights expiring (you can't watch this match anymore despite you have "bought" it because fuck you), screen limiting (you are logged in on both your TV and iphone so fuck you), etc. All for $19.99.
In contrast, you pay like $9.99 and you can watch anything, anywhere, anytime.
Remember when music piracy died? When Steve Jobs removed friction between me and my music.
Netflix is even starting to have problems with Apple's iCloud Private Relay with me, I already had to get in touch with their support.
We live in a world where paid services require us to deactivate security/privacy features to use them. Fuck them.
Anything that has intrusive DRM has no place in my computer.
If it's for work, I will still pirate while holding the license, just for the stability alone.
For music stuff stability is paramount and I'd rather not deal with things that magically stop working from time to time (IK Multimedia is notorious for that).
psst, kid
have you ever heard of adblocker?
Because of philosophy I prefer sharing resources more than cash.
One of these was to actually download a torrent and use torrentfs or something similar and you can stream a video directly from the mirror without downloading it fully and on linux, I really appreciate its simplicity and I love it ngl
definitely not my experience
The only exception I can think of are local shows, but I don't watch them, specifically because they're only on Actual TV™, which I haven't watched in years, they only recently got onto the local streaming services. They should still be on local private trackers, which I can definitely agree is a hassle, but depending on how bad your local streaming service is, they can definitely a be a tempting prospect.
I personally don't "get" sports, but I understand that people who do, want it to be a shared experience where everyone is watching the same game and feeling the same emotions at the same time. Even ten seconds of extra latency is bad because you can hear your neighbours cheering before you see the goal get scored, and if you were to download and watch the game 12 hours later, the "magic of the moment" would be gone - might as well just google what the final score was.
This comment was rate-limited.
The first purchase was for $100 on a "pay what you think it's worth" model, and after watching the value that others were willing to pay, I had a good idea as to what I would ultimately charge.
Any goodwill I felt towards this guy evaporated at the end. Reddit spam, unraveling the social trust in user recommendations, is a scourge. I’m sorry he wasn’t sent to jail longer.
And as with most criminal cases, it’s astonishing how little money he made for his trouble.
Big "Our amazing journey" vibes with this one. Except the journey ended up in prison and all they have left to talk about is how proud they were to spam Reddit with pirate stream links.
That probably doesn’t change your perception—I, too, feel like Reddit is pretty bad these days—but I felt the need to say something anyway. I ran a pretty tight ship and had placed a lot of importance on perception and reputation. Building trust was important to my operation, from both a growth standpoint and a customer service standpoint. When shit broke (as it often did, considering I operated as the mouse instead of the cat), my users took my word that an attempted fix was in the works.
2. Paying commenters to spread positive buzz is worse. The term for that is astroturfing
3. Scumbag
the reason noreply addresses exist is to avoid endless autoreply loops caused by poorly programmed mail software
What does this mean? what is this 'trust' that is built ? how does an email build 'trust' Is this to do with whether I beleive the email came from where it says it does ? or somethign else. A lot of this article seemed a little vague in the business buzzword bullshit type way.
Bro, you gotta just build Trust(tm) for this one growth hack(tm)
By presenting myself as, well, myself, having an informal tone (I mentioned to another user that I talked to everyone as if they were a friend of a friend), and always closing with "if you need anything just reply :)," it was a good way to reach users and to establish the human element.
Personally I'd rather have no emails of either type. Too many emails these days about everything. No I don't want to review X, or provide content for you (not you) for Y. I guess some people like it though.
>I gave my users lists of those posts and encouraged them to comment
A service doing this would instantly be on my shit list. I'm trying to buy a service in exchange for money, not get spammed about being someone's guerilla marketing team for free / and or getting roped into a referral scheme.
I don't mind organically advocating for things I've had a good experience with but not like this
In short, I made sure that the subject matter was right—"how can I stream the Lakers when I am in Los Angeles"—and that there was no schilling. I ensured that users were otherwise active in the communities that they were posting in, and that it wasn't just spamming referral links. Everything had to be tasteful or I'd kick them off the platform, which happened once after the person told me they were going to do it anyway.
Maybe this is a personal hangup my side but not a fan of paid services trying to extract additional value via other routes too - whether that's selling your data, taking up attention by bombarding me with marketing, cross-selling, showing me ads...or asking me to do guerilla marketing.
The closer companies stick to "I give you money, you give me service" the better I judge them. Maybe I'm just jaded...
Most people would just ignore it and move on if they didn't want to participate. Sweating the small stuff is no good for one's health. I personally don't dedicate any brain cells to a shit list. Sounds stressful.