Everyone Is Stealing TV
theverge.com
theverge.com
More from Krebs: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/11/is-your-android-tv-strea...
> You won’t find apps for either service on Google Play or any other app store; users who have tried report that it’s impossible to run them on any other third-party device, suggesting that they were custom-built by or on behalf of the makers of SuperBox and vSeeBox.
If the vendor is insisting that you use their box and locks the application to that, that is suspicious; it clearly indicates they are not really serious about the service and really want that specific box in your home for some reason unrelated to the service. Huge red flag.
Everyone normal who wants to sell a service would much rather just sell you the service for $200, without that having to include any hardware; dealing hardware is a hassle. Except in one sense in that you can sell a validated total configuration that requires less support.
I would much prefer a world where people installed communications privacy tools of their own volition, forming a critical mass of users that creates market pressure against companies that demand ever-invasive surveillance. But since that is apparently too much self-actualization to ask for, then I will settle for the world in which people are unwittingly induced to set up privacy tools for others, by dodgy companies promising free TV.
I find the attitude that one is entitled to entertainment media fascinating.
People like to say that it’s not stealing because there is no physical product the producer is being deprived of, which is factually true, but even so why are you entitled to it at no cost?
NFL games aren’t water or food.
"You can just do things." Public airwaves? Consumer owned compute enabling adversarial consumption and interoperability? Good luck.
Mission Accomplished: NFL to Hit Goodell’s $25B Revenue Goal - https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/mission-accomplished-nfl-h... - February 2nd, 2026
Do people need to watch the content? No. Are people entitled to the content? Is it "stealing" or not? That last one is probably up for date.
Regardless, the answers to those questions don't matter in the end. The public has made its demands clear time after time. The rightsholders can either deliver a convenient experience at a reasonable* price, or they can play whack-a-mole with pirates forever. Spotify managed to do it; Steam managed to do it. Only video media companies are so stubborn these days.
*There is always much debate on what constitutes a "reasonable" price, but it is certainly no more than a consumer is willing to pay. If that's less than the cost of producing the product, then perhaps the business model simply isn't viable.
So maybe it's just that. Life feels like it should be better although it's the best it's ever been in many first-world countries. I am sure that entitled attitude is very common among rich people too.
You need this thing called an 'antenna' which captures invisible radio waves and decodes them into a picture with audio. You can't pause or rewind, and you have to be in front of the TV at specific times, so it is not precis the same, but you can access TV this way.
(Personally I only use OTA for sports)
Technically it was "1080p HD", but in reality it was more like 720x480 upscaled and smoothed.
It used to be that you'd pay one company a little extra, and get all the extra channels you actually wanted. Now you pay multiple companies _a lot_ extra, and still might miss out on what you want.
Many people still remember the original deal.
When there is only one streaming service, being subscribed to that streaming service means you get everything. Now there are 15 different ones to choose from, each licensed to show a different set of content.
Watching NHL hockey in Canada is a strange situation right now, but I'm not sure how it compares to the original cable situation.
HN Search: enshittification - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Every single video they post is full of comments about how short the video is, how it didn't replay this or that important moment, and finishes with an ad for Stan.
Compared to 20 years ago where the only highlights you could get for free were in a news program that might spare 1 minute for just the most important match if you were lucky, these videos are incredible.
Well, the major services like Google and Facebook provide content without requiring payment because they extract value from their surveillance of user behavior, plus ads. The users have now accepted that they are the product, but they get little kickback in the form of entertainment. Why should TV be any different?
* Continually remove good content
* Continually produce 'new and exciting' series only to cancel them after 1-2 seasons
* Continually raise the price
* Continually split off into ever more services - so instead of having 1 or even 3 good streaming services, there are dozens of them with limited content
I would not mind paying for 1-3 good, well-made services with a reasonable price tag. As it stands, I would need to pay for more like 8+ to get coverage of what I want to watch, and their prices are all $20+ a month. And almost every month I'd find something I really enjoy has been taken down. I'm not paying $160 a month for streaming that I barely use. I cancelled all of mine.
I can understand someone jumping to piracy. These services are terrible and don't need to be - they're that way because of absurd greed.
Frankly, IP should last 7 years, 14 at the most.
Why are we paying for Alf year after year, decade after decade?
Why are we required to pay for stuff while also being advertised to and having our data sold?
Now when you do buy something, you're buying a revokable license you can't even buy it and own it.
We'll if buying isn't ownership, then pirating it isn't stealing it. Plain and simple.
Could you not make enough money in the first 15 years to justify? We don't let other professions profit for 15 years after they do the work (except landlords). People can touch there pipes after there installed. They can read and lend a book after they read it. Digital stroage is essentially free but makes air tight copyright and that is problematic.
It's weird that we give such board lasting complete ownership of the collective stories of society. Maybe the correct timeline is 15 years or 30 years but Life + 70 seems like it way overvalues the creative works and I think steals money from new creative works by making consumers choice between the "classics" and the new. This is not to say you cannot charge for TV service where you store and distribute but that is a service rendered. If you want to do it yourself why is the law so protective here? To me it feels like society is selling out its rights for higher marginal returns for a very small segment of people.
Since I mostly put the TV on to have background noise this solution works perfectly. It's really nice to turn the TV on and see random x-files, mst3k, max headroom, cowboy bebop, futurama, and so on 24/7. And most of it is in SD or ripped from TV/VHS which doesn't bother me at all, in fact, it adds charm and character via those artifacts of the past.
Consumers are reacting
Maybe also an alternative if you want to participate in the boycotts until the CEOs stop cozying up to the US admin (emperor)
I've said this for years but most people probably don't watch more than 2 streamers / month every month. Pay for one month at a time and be pleasantly surprised at how many months you don't pay for 1 or more that you're paying for now.
Do you really think we're worse off today? Is anyone paying close to a 90's cable bill for their various streaming services? And is the quality the same as we endured back then?
Because the Spotify business model, so far, does not play silly games releasing, then removing content.
It is very frustrating to pay money to streaming services and they remove content you're watching or they have partial content
They have a better example in Spotify, or will causation go the other way?
But on a technical level how can a federated "shadow Netflix" operate out in the open and pull in that kind of revenue without ringing all kinds of alarm bells. They need infrastructure and obviously storing/streaming copyrighted content is against the policy of virtually every cloud provider. I also doubt these guys are bootstrapping & setting up their own datacenters. I would love a speculative analysis on how all of this works that goes in the weeds.
[1] https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/iptv-market...
The problem that Sky has is that most premium sports content is available in other countries with less effective copy protection, so that's where the pirate streams originate, and Sky can't do anything about them.
You're right that none of this affects the end-users.
This also doesn't account for the fact that there might be another proxy pirate in the middle who would relay the stream without the ID to the box (this and the first pirate might as well be the same person). This way even if you have the box you cannot find out which subscriber specifically the stream originates from, as the ID is gone before the stream is sent to the box.
To be 100% sure nothing is pirated, the streaming provider would have to either MITM the traffic from the ISP to the end-user (not legally possible) or just plain old show up at a place of a non-subscriber and inspect the equipment (again legally questionable).
As an aside, in some cases they do - see CDN leeching: https://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/ReadArticle.as...
https://www.antennasdirect.com/big-game-tv-station-list.html
https://www.wgal.com/article/consumer-super-bowl-2026-antenn...
"There are no 6K TVs available for sale to consumers"As I understand it, the difference is sports channels. Sportsball stars’ high salaries are paid from TV rights, and the subscription cost reflects that.
Growth is slow but collapse is fast because it takes decades for those people to build, earn their status.
With our eggs in one basket, a small group of elders, they all die off within just a decade or so of each other. A much faster process than the 30-40 years it took to for them to grow their worth to trickle down on us.
Entropy tears apart all structure. Its mechanism for tearing apart society is generational churn.
Time is non-linear. No thing has the same epoch and erodes at the same tick. Endless linear economic growth will never be because once dead belief the elders were rich has to be rethought.