Lessons From Growing a Piracy Streaming Site

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.

(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.

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

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.

There are many small papercuts that legal providers subject customers to.

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).

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

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.

I'd imagine the situation is much the same in other places.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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?

To be fair, a good adblock is MANDATORY on these streaming sites.

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.

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?

It's a breach of intellectual property rights owner.

2. Paying commenters to spread positive buzz is worse. The term for that is astroturfing

3. Scumbag