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Comment by y-c-o-m-b | Hacker News Reader

I'm seeing "average" people adopt piracy at astonishing levels because of these decisions. I went over to a friend's house the other day and his relative sent him one of those Android TV devices with access to all the pirated content you could ever want. I would never have imagined him to be ok with it. This has been happening in my social circle at an accelerating rate. People that would have scolded me for doing the same 10 years ago are now doing it.

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Friends don't let friends use those shady streaming boxes

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/11/is-your-android-tv-strea...

The pre-stuffed, pre-configured, plug-n-play, extra-spooky-box method described in the article is just one of many methods.

Someone I know buys cheap "IPTV" service by the year. Access is paid for by buying potted plants or something else that looks random on some web store and is delivered in the form of a .m3u playlist that hides behind a username/password pair.

The usual way they use it is with slimey-feeling closed-source sideloaded apps on mass-market streaming devices from such unknown companies as Amazon and Google, or directly on a smart TV itself. Wherein: Despite the dingy back-alley ambience of the subscription and installation processes, the UI is snappy and responsive in use.

And the slimey software is also avoidable. Since it's all based around a playlist that is hiding behind basic http auth, it also works with open-source projects like Dispatcharr, which in turn can emulate an HDHomeRun network-connected OTA TV tuner. This combination can then present new possibilities, like live streaming TV for Plex users.

(It'd all be very interesting to me if I had any motivation to sit down and absorb live television like a slug, but I didn't do much of that even when I worked for a cable company and got the uber-premium package for free as a perk.)

> People that would have scolded me for doing the same 10 years ago are now doing it.

I can see how they could tell themselves it's not the same. This is a device that just shows a library of content that they can watch. There's no needing to know that P2P, warez, torrents, seeding, etc even exist let alone know what they are or how they work. They couldn't sell these devices if it was illegal, right?

This will be what makes companies start pursuing legal action. Once it's not mostly people in poor countries who are pirating, companies will try to reclaim that lost revenue. I'm not sure if they can do anything about torrenting, but I would be surprised if TV devices like what you mentioned are still available in a couple years.

Those things are probably infected with malware.

https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber/alerts/2025/home-inter...

The unfortunate reality is this is why we have residential botnets. Your friend is probably paying for his free TV by attacking things over the Internet.

And assumably a lot of these same people are also on the anti-AI "training AI is theft" bandwagon, which makes it ironic.

Oh no, that's terrible! Please send me an example of one of those devices so I know what not to buy.

You don't need a special (often compromised) device, and usually there is a service you will have to pay for as well.

Search up IPTV on any social media and you'll start getting loads of ads for these services, for like $25 a month for a trillion channels, a catalog of VOD content, etc. You can use a simple client like Chillio on Apple TV as the client and have a safe stack.

I subscribed to one. And just to be clear, I subscribe to and pay $ for every streaming service available in Canada, and a maxed out cable plan. My cable company (Cogeco) serves up some pixelized dogshit low bitrate/obsolete codec feed for both NFL football and F1 racing. Via some dodgy IPTV provider (there are a million names and resellers but they're all ostensibly the front for the same service) I get amazingly crisp, excellent visuals, better accessibility, etc. It's crazy. Technically and usably an infinitely better option, at a fraction of the price.

"Oh but you might fund organized crime!" -- yeah, when most media empires are oligarchs pushing their politics and kleptocracy on people, I have more faith in those organized criminals than I do garbage like the Ellison family.

> Via some dodgy IPTV provider (there are a million names and resellers but they're all ostensibly the front for the same service) I get amazingly crisp, excellent visuals, better accessibility, etc. It's crazy. Technically and usably an infinitely better option, at a fraction of the price.

Your dogshit provider must be better than the one I was using. Live sports was usually good, but sometimes very flaky. Video on demand files were served with uniform rate limiting that was too low to handle scenes with people on horseback riding through confetti parades. Also, no bandwidth adaptation (which wasn't a real issue for me, but is needed for many users). Captioning was very weird... IIRC I would have to either have no captions or all captions, there was no option for captions only for non-english you're supposed to read to follow the plot.

I went through a few IPTV providers, but the channel list and services seemed identical across them, and I am pretty certain they are largely just fronts on the same network/backend.

But the quality across many channels were extraordinary (for some reason primarily the European channels were top tier - Sky, BBC, France channels, etc), and far above anything my cable co offered. Skysports F1 was 4K and just perfection, and just obliterated the trash TSN feed of F1. NFL games were spotless, where they are an overcompressed pixelated mess on my cable cos high cost feed, which I am paying approximately 8x as much for.

There was a lot of junk as well. Like a lot of the VOD content was a mess (a lot of it would "compress" the content by dumping frames, which is just crazy. A 12FPS movie is just ridiculous).

I guess mileage varies.

As one aside, I notice that Chillio that I mentioned before actually got removed from the app store, apparently because they use a plug-in system that Apple forbids. So that recommendation might not hold. It was far and away the best IPTV client in my experience, and hopefully that gets sorted.

I mean, you really don't. They are mostly infected with malware, it will probably try compromise as many devices on your network as it can to make them part of a botnet and try to access as many files as it can.

https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber/alerts/2025/home-inter...

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