Who remembers the era of filesharing when lots of people downloaded all kinds of copyrighted digital material, music and movies from the Internet? It never went away, with operators becoming more commercially driven and slick with electronic programming guides, subscriptions and quality live and on-demand content via a growing number of Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) sites.
IPTV providers get busted fairly regularly. A few days ago the European Union’s umbrella organisation for police cooperation, Europol, announced the results of a huge, two-year long operation in nine EU countries and the United Kingdom.
Over 112 houses were searched, 11 people are under arrest, and 102 suspects were identified as being part of the illegal IPTV network. Their streaming infrastructure was fairly substantial too, although the technical details are scarce: 100 domains were taken down, 29 servers seized in the Netherlands, Romania and Hong Kong, and 270 pieces of IPTV gear was confiscated.
If the police figures are correct, illegal IPTV is a big business in Europe. The EU prosecutors and police reported some serious numbers like the monthly turnover of €250 million which annualised would be somewhere in the NZ$5.4 billion range.
Europol said that content from over 2500 TV channels was pirated, and served up to more than 22 million users worldwide illicitly. The IPTV operators also had a network of 560 resellers, and the cops seized drugs, weapons and €1.6 million in cryptocurrency.
How the Europol forces and rightsholder organisations worked out the monthly turnover wasn’t explained, but the Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance (AAPA) reckon the operation was the world’s largest.
Reading the Italian postal police statement it looks like the operation was very distributed across the country in 36 cities, as well as in several EU nations.
The business was organised kind of like IPTV-as-a-service, with associates marketing the copyrighted content from big streamers such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Paramount, Disney, and Sky in internet forums, blogs and messaging apps.
Italy’s anti-mafia authorities were involved in the operation as well; with revenue numbers such as the above, you can see why criminal organisations are interested in the IPTV business, and perhaps too nation-state threat actors wanting to bring in foreign exchange.
How much of an impact the EU anti-illegal IPTV operation will have is hard to say but it looks like a game of whack-a-mole for the authorities. In March this year, a Canadian IPTV operator was busted, and ordered to pay C$7.1 million in penalties for running the Beast TV service. Tyler White had a good chunk’o’change in his bank accounts, C$744,000 and owned two rental properties plus more investments, suggesting the business was doing well.
Last year, the Flawless TV operators in London were sentenced, after reaping some £7 million from thousands of subscribers keen to watch Premier League football for £10 a month. One person received an 11-year prison sentence.
A year ago, Britain's Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) and Sky pulled the plug on 47 illegal IPTV providers selling subscriptions; there are many more recent examples.
Big demand means big money to be made satisfying what users want. An IPSOS survey commissioned by a Norwegian anti-forgery and anti-piracy organisation suggests lots of people think it’s fine to illegally stream copyrighted material, no matter that it leads to financial losses for those producing the content.
Norway like most other Western nations have an endless amount of options for legal, Internet-delivered content; however, piracy is seen as a good way to save money because it is expensive for users to subscribe to multiple streaming services to access the content they want. This and the Internet being one giant copying machine are possibly hints as to where the problem lies.
13 Comments
"Piracy is a service problem" - Gabe Newell (Valve).
Geoblocking and exclusive distribution rights are the service problem. Content disappearing from platforms is a service problem. Google charging brand-new prices for 40-year old content is a service problem.
Only reason I haven't returned to pirating content (We used to pirate simply because the content was not distributed to NZ yet- I much prefer to pay) is due to not having a fixed internet connection.
Years ago when there were VCR recorders one could record a TV program for viewing later. With a stock digital recorder and encrypted 500GB to 1T hdd you can only keep so much. Probably need a few terabyte hdd on the recorder if you want to keep many TV movies/serial shows. Not sure if you can copy the encrypted recorder hdd to an external hdd as a backup. If not then when the recorder hdd croaks gone are all your movies.
I'm not surprised people turn to piracy when what you want is not available to purchase on a dvd.
My purchased dvds are backed up in case the originals get damaged and are unplayable.
It went form Piracy because you couldnt find anything and there was no easy way to watch things
Then we got one or two good streaming services and everyone gave up piracy
Now we have so many different platforms, you pay but still get ads, they remove the stuff you want to watch and for Steam games, you dont actually own them.
So now we have gone back to pirating things or even better, streaming. Putlocker is one I have heard is good.
The cat is so out of the bag here. Piracy is far worse than people think. It will need a global strategy like Spotify to make it not worth the effort. Yes there will be less money for the artists for industry, but let's face it actors etc are grossly over rewarded for their contrubution to society. No cancer is cured, or fusion energy tech created etc etc.
I suspect the other tech event coming is AI generated actors that are indistinguishable from real actors. Think the gollum character with no human required, but using historical humans as reference, but in bits and pieces to avoid copyright.
Have you tried streaming to a smart TV from one of the 'free TV' internet sites?
MS Edge will let you stream a browser tab or the PC's full screen to a smart TV with ease.
Select '...',
select 'more tools',
select 'cast to device',
select the source to be either 'tab' or 'screen',
and then click the TV to connect.
Easy as.
Image quality will be pretty good if you select 1080 or above on the internet TV site. 720 less so on a big TV but if the Smart TV has good upscaling software it's not too bad if you sit further way.
Many browsers and web sites will do this. I just used MS Edge as an example.
(We watched the 1973 version of The Three Musketeers on bitchute.com a few days back - the kids loved it. And we watched the original 1980s TV series of Shogun from a hi-def link some fan had made public. One of the kids is now reading the book - WIN!)
BTW - this was done on an internet connection of just 50 MB (Fibre 50). Most people buy 100 MB or more nowadays.
With the security of those TVs and sites, no just no. no no no no no. But the time you have it on your network it is likely to already be slated for a botnet leaking your private data worse then a paper bag with a hole so big it is just a tube.
You could achieve a better result with a large computer screen, an hdmi cable and a device that has actual security systems & privacy checks in play. remotes for them are easy to get so you never need to leave your couch slump even when installing games, playing games, doing work & streaming at the same time.
Step 1 plug in screen and device.
Step 2 attach the cable between them.
Step 3 sit back with your remote and let the better app availability & security amaze you over these dumb tvs that have no benefits over existing computer devices.
Even accessibility in closed captions is far better then over our tv services now. If you are just using the tv as a screen why not go for the massive price discount, the better security & privacy management, the more configurable displays and the better device & tool support. Why have a tv at all.
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