Everyone Is Stealing TV

https://www.theverge.com/streaming/873416/piracy-streaming-boxes

by naves • 6 months ago

54 82 6 months ago

theverge.com

rideontime• 6 months ago

This doesn't seem sustainable.

joriJordan• 6 months ago

The old economy is never sustainable because the people it props up die.

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.

functionmouse• 6 months ago

Can't the cable company just include steganography with the subscriber ID encoded into the video stream, so that when NFL appears on one of these streaming boxes, they can just kill that subscriber's service and thus the pirate streams also?

sparrc• 6 months ago

This would be much easier said than done, most video segments are served up by CDNs, so it would have to be done via processing on CDN edge nodes. Cloudflare might support something like this but most CDNs don't as far as I'm aware. Doing it server-side would kill CDN cache hit rates and massively increase cost.

elzbardico• 6 months ago

You don't need to serve it all the time. A couple hundred frames here and there maybe would do the trick.

toomuchtodo3• 6 months ago

Filter it out with some combination of ffmpeg and LLMs? Super easy if it's being served using HLS and .ts files. Also, in the case of over the air, you can just pull the signal locally out of the air at no cost. You can easily forward that local over the air signal to a private group (using ATSC to IP gateways and converters), and create a mesh if you have folks distributed geographically, each hosting an antenna and shipping an IP stream (which Plex and other systems can consume, not sure if Jellyfin supports this though).

https://www.antennasdirect.com/big-game-tv-station-list.html

https://www.wgal.com/article/consumer-super-bowl-2026-antenn...

https://www.silicondust.com/hdhomerun/

MoonWalk2• 6 months ago

No, because they'd have to decompress and then recompress every stream. This would reduce already-lame quality (not that they'd particularly care) and require a bunch of resources.

mavamaarten• 6 months ago

Nah that's not how it works. Streaming video is usually cut up into small segments. By having a couple of variants per segment, they can serve you a unique and identifiable sequence of segments without having to decompress (and encrypt) them for each user.

1317• 6 months ago

i think normally they just display a number on the screen

beAbU• 6 months ago

This is exactly how netflix DRM works. Every device gets a unique stream, and if that stream pops up on the high seas, the account and device is blacklisted.

nkrisc2• 6 months ago

I too got tired of paying so much for TV so I canceled and just stopped watching it.

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.

toomuchtodo3• 6 months ago

NFL does ~$23B/year in revenue, and is targeting ~$25B/year by 2027, there is no victim for those not paying them. In various US markets, the content is free over the air. To take the other side of the "entitlement" argument, I am fascinated by the "Felony Contempt of Business Model" mental model.

"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

ronsor• 6 months ago

Desire, convenience, and price are always in tension. Someone may desire to watch something, but it's too inconvenient. It may also be that there is not enough convenience for the price being paid. We see this issue regularly with DRM.

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.

bobro• 6 months ago

For me, it’s not that I feel entitled to it. It’s that it’s available, and I don’t feel any moral problems with taking it.

sharts2• 6 months ago

The entitlement comes after being ripped off.

hnthrow0287345• 6 months ago

Gonna need quite a large swing back in the favor of regular people since we're being squeezed by endless subscriptions already before I have any sympathy for the multi-billion dollar corporations.

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.

EtienneDeLyon• 6 months ago

In some areas, you can 'pirate' live TV directly from the sky!

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.

nkrisc2• 6 months ago

Yes, I’m well aware of that. I spent much of my childhood adjusting the antenna to get better reception. But I don’t see how that’s relevant.

badc0ffee• 6 months ago

You can even use something like HDHomeRun to watch this content on your phone/tablet.

(Personally I only use OTA for sports)

IncreasePosts• 6 months ago

It's not piracy if the people who have the rights to the content are distributing it like that.

jackhackett3• 5 months ago

Not ATSC 3.0 channels. People very far from large urban areas don't have many channels to choose from.

subpixel• 6 months ago

I've given up on tv and while I still pay Netflix for kids programming, I pay ... other people who have a better understanding of the actual value of this sort of entertainment _and_ the way I like to consume it.

ghusto• 6 months ago

I don't think people feel entitled to free entertainment, they're just tired of being so badly ripped off.

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.

doubled112• 6 months ago

Yes, I remember when Netflix was going to "save" us all from the cable company.

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.

magarnicle• 6 months ago

They very much do. There's an Australian streaming service called Stan that bought the rights to the English Premier League this year. They post highlights videos to YouTube.

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.

46493168• 6 months ago

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?

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?

Night_Thastus• 6 months ago

It can be a bit frustrating that these services:

* 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.

disease• 6 months ago

Even worse than cancellation is when there's sloppy writing that is very obviously in place to push the series into another season while a bunch of plot threads go unresolved. It's like the corporate greed is being placed front and center of the content itself.

dyauspitr• 6 months ago

I watch cable TV only in hotels and it is infuriating. Almost every channel has 5 min long ad breaks. It’s almost impossible to watch anything since you’re constantly switching channels. I don’t remember it being this bad when I was a kid.

behringer• 6 months ago

That's because we do feel entitled to it. This century is the first in human history where people in power have decided that once something is created it's IP that belongs to the creator for well over a hundred years and maybe even forever.

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.

Der_Einzige• 6 months ago

Information wants to be free. All gatekeepers of information are ontologically evil. Aaron Swartz was a saint and he'd smile on current GenAI systems.

xphos• 6 months ago

I think its Copyright rules make people feel this way. US copyright last for author life + 70 years. That makes no sense, not only will the author be dead but there children are likely to be dead before the those terms end. Corp duration is 95 years since publication. Why? Are they saying they will be so unable to innovate and generate new content that unless that last 95 years they cannot make profit. I think there revenue positions beg to differ.

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.

m463• 6 months ago

I think it's just a war with two sides. Media fighting for funds, consumers fighting for respect. Both feel entitled to some degree.

stubish• 6 months ago

Entertainment we watch becomes part of our culture. It is absorbed and forms part of our thoughts. It becomes part of our self, and more often than not that part is owned by someone else. NFL is a great example. It is part of shared American culture. Of course people are pissed when someone wants to charge rent on some part of their identity. The rights are very much on the side of producers, and not enough on the side of consumer rights. Maybe society will address this and grant itself the rights it seems to want.

jackhackett3• 5 months ago

I grew bored with Television over 4 years ago, I bought a 86" Tv 4 years ago also and I've never cared enough to take it out of it's box. If I get bored enough I'll watch something using free streaming services. I just buy physical discs of anything I might want to watch. Friends tried to get me to watch football and other sports but it's just too boring. I know the rules but it's just people chasing a ball back and forth. To enjoy sports you have to care who wins, and I don't care, who wins or loses means nothing to me.

uslic001• 5 months ago

I stopped watching all TV 2 years ago. Unfortunately my family won't let me cancel all our streaming apps.

verdverm2• 6 months ago

Well, they unbundled stuff into streaming, then went around and made exclusive deals and forced us back into the same monthly amounts, if not more

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)

tehwebguy• 6 months ago

went around and made exclusive deals and forced us back into the same monthly amounts

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.

mikepk• 6 months ago

Made me think, is there an opportunity to build a management layer for this? Handle subscribing and cancelling automatically when you want to watch certain things? Would probably be blocked pretty fast but amusing to think about.

standardUser2• 6 months ago

A decent cable package was around $150/mo in the 90's, before streaming took hold. That's for scheduled programming only, and always with lots of ads.

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?

verdverm2• 6 months ago

I never crossed $100 / month with cable + internet, that sounds like the package with many extras

the_snooze• 6 months ago

It's not just exclusive deals. It's piecemeal deals. Just look at what you have to do to stream all of Pokemon. https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...

jrgaston• 6 months ago

You can live just fine without tv. Better, in fact. Read books -- they are a lot more interesting.

MoonWalk2• 6 months ago

Paywalled.

sharts2• 6 months ago

This is the reason people steal lol

Uhhrrr• 6 months ago

https://archive.ph/t9pIW (heh)

kazinator3• 6 months ago

Tired of subscriptions everywhere, readers are embracing trogue archive services.

Aurornis• 6 months ago

The article buries the important part further down: These boxes are often used as botnet nodes and join residential proxy networks. The TV feature is a trojan horse to get it into your house. The high price makes it feel legitimate.

kazinator3• 6 months ago

Maybe you don't have to use their box. The article mentions that their streaming apps don't even come preinstalled on the box. That means users have to go through some activation and installation procedure that they could probably do on a mainstream, commercial Android box. Or maybe the malware is in the streaming app itself, in which case the box is irrelevant?

xethos• 6 months ago

You would think so, but:

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.

mindslight2• 6 months ago

Oh no, not residential proxy networks. Gasp.

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.

stuxnet79• 6 months ago

It is estimated that all these pirate streams combined bring in more revenue than Netflix & other established media companies[1]. Margins are of course pretty incredible as capex and opex is effectively zero since the content is "free". Such a great business that it's attracted organized crime.

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...

jsnell• 6 months ago

That does not sound like credible estimate, and your link does not make any such claim.

1e1a• 6 months ago

  "There are no 6K TVs available for sale to consumers"

This seems to be incorrect. What about the Samsung TQ65QN900FTXXC, which is claimed to have a resolution of 7680 x 4320 (8K)?

guidopallemans• 6 months ago

I think the point the article wants to make is that specifically 6K isn't used by consumers, whereas indeed 4K and 8K are.

juujian• 6 months ago

Even now living in the states, I cannot comprehend how someone can end up paying hundreds of dollars a month for tv streaming. Can someone enlighten me?

MisterTea2• 6 months ago

Live TV streaming such as Youtube TV is just cable TV packaged as an internet streaming service which costs something like $80 USD per month. In addition you have a $10-20+ Netflix subscription, Disney+/Hulu, Paramount, HBO etc. All that on top of your $50-$100+/month internet service. I know people spending over 250/month on multiple streaming services.

michaelt• 6 months ago

Google ‘more fios tv’

As I understand it, the difference is sports channels. Sportsball stars’ high salaries are paid from TV rights, and the subscription cost reflects that.

jabroni_salad• 6 months ago

If you subscribe to cable or satellite, your bill will somehow trend up to around $300/mo for what the CSRs inform you are perfectly good reasons unless you play the 'pretend to threaten to cancel' game every now and then. It's a form of market segmentation.

worik• 6 months ago

TV and movies, but no longer music?

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?

xcrjm• 6 months ago

Weird! This went from the home page to completely gone from the list in the time it took me to read a few paragraphs of the article...

gfody• 6 months ago

I noticed this as well, presumably nuked from orbit by a hoard of Superbox

MisterTea2• 6 months ago

Going back I dumped all the streaming platforms as most of their new programming was not at all interesting. Turns out I was watching reruns of shows I downloaded years ago that were still sitting on my server. So I made my own cable channel by dumping every downloaded TV show into a single playlist then turn shuffle on. I have a low power PC hooked to my TV running Debian. The power is low enough that I just turn the TV off and leave the PC running.

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.

laleck• 6 months ago

There are a couple projects dedicated to making "tv channels" from media servers like jellyfin. See: https://ersatztv.org or https://www.quasitv.app

AshesOfOwls• 6 months ago

I've been working on my own flavor of this but it's digital media instead of local files, https://react.tv

jackhackett3• 5 months ago

I've read a few articles that claim a large part of the reason ATSC 3.0 is supported by broadcasters is the potential money to be made from marketing. All information about what you watch, and any personal details stored in the box, will be totally available to broadcasters. Supposedly they will be able to change the commercials shown to each viewer based on your information they get from the box. If your box has a dvr function they will able to change and update the commercials in any programs you have recorded. DRM is broadcasters way of finding more ways to sell people items or services they don't need or want.

Everyone Is Stealing TV

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