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.
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?
> 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.
I'm lucky that I use a greymarket app for Japanese TV that runs on mainstream consumer boxes.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
You don't need to. During premium streams the clients are frequently rekeying. So you cancel the streamer's subscription and the stream soon stops. The streamer also loses the rest of the month's subscription and goes onto a blacklist. This is already a thing with, for example, Sky in the UK.
This works as long as each of these boxes connects directly to the streaming provider's servers. With pirate streams often there's a pirate streaming provider with a legitimate subscription, whose STB handles the rekeying, then the already-decoded AV stream is captured and redistributed. The end-users never actually stream from the streaming company, they stream from the pirate. That's often how sports are pirated, and your best bet is going to everyone's homes and checking that they're not watching your streams without a license.
Right? Each legitimate stream, including the pirate's, includes a unique ID. The content protection company subscribes to the pirate stream, gets the ID, and shuts down the pirate. This works today.
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.
Sure, you can buy a box and inspect that stream, but if there's a multitude of pirate streams it's an eternal whack-a-mole game. You cancel one pirate's subscription, the streams redirect to another, in the meantime the first pirate somehow gets access to another legitimate stream and so on.
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).
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
As I understand it, the difference is sports channels. Sportsball stars’ high salaries are paid from TV rights, and the subscription cost reflects that.
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.
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.
More from Krebs: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/11/is-your-android-tv-strea...
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?
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.
I'm lucky that I use a greymarket app for Japanese TV that runs on mainstream consumer boxes.
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 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.
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.
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.
Isn’t this every “disruption” story in a nutshell? The value being converted into consumer benefit is always a temporary situation.
"Disruptor" = temporarily embarrassed monopolist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
HN Search: enshittification - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[dead]
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
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.
You can even use something like HDHomeRun to watch this content on your phone/tablet.
(Personally I only use OTA for sports)
It's not piracy if the people who have the rights to the content are distributing it like that.
ATSC 3 will fix that loophole.
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.
The entitlement comes after being ripped off.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
There are a couple projects dedicated to making "tv channels" from media servers like jellyfin. See: https://ersatztv.org or https://www.quasitv.app
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)
> 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.
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.
[dead]
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-...
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?
I never crossed $100 / month with cable + internet, that sounds like the package with many extras
You can live just fine without tv. Better, in fact. Read books -- they are a lot more interesting.
https://archive.ph/t9pIW (heh)
Tired of subscriptions everywhere, readers are embracing trogue archive services.
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...
That does not sound like credible estimate, and your link does not make any such claim.
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?
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.
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.
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.
You don't need to serve it all the time. A couple hundred frames here and there maybe would do the trick.
Good luck finding the person streaming it and proving that they did. The days of BBC TV license vans are long over.
You don't need to. During premium streams the clients are frequently rekeying. So you cancel the streamer's subscription and the stream soon stops. The streamer also loses the rest of the month's subscription and goes onto a blacklist. This is already a thing with, for example, Sky in the UK.
This works as long as each of these boxes connects directly to the streaming provider's servers. With pirate streams often there's a pirate streaming provider with a legitimate subscription, whose STB handles the rekeying, then the already-decoded AV stream is captured and redistributed. The end-users never actually stream from the streaming company, they stream from the pirate. That's often how sports are pirated, and your best bet is going to everyone's homes and checking that they're not watching your streams without a license.
>The end-users never actually stream from the streaming company
As an aside, in some cases they do - see CDN leeching: https://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/ReadArticle.as...
Right? Each legitimate stream, including the pirate's, includes a unique ID. The content protection company subscribes to the pirate stream, gets the ID, and shuts down the pirate. This works today.
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.
Sure, you can buy a box and inspect that stream, but if there's a multitude of pirate streams it's an eternal whack-a-mole game. You cancel one pirate's subscription, the streams redirect to another, in the meantime the first pirate somehow gets access to another legitimate stream and so on.
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).
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.
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/
i think normally they just display a number on the screen
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...
I noticed this as well, presumably nuked from orbit by a hoard of Superbox
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
This doesn't seem sustainable.
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.
Paywalled.
This is the reason people steal lol