> Moreover, the police confiscated cryptocurrencies valued at over €1.65 million ($1.74M) and another €40,000 in cash ($42,000).
That eur250mio / mo number is almost certainly bullshit just going off the above alone.
Not to mention that you can't exactly hide 3 yards annual revenue ... and anyone within a mile of a corporate treasury role will tell you that you can't cash-manage that revenue on 40k eur.
It sounds completely reason when you look at the figures:
> "These broadcasts were resold to 22 million subscribed members via multiple distribution channels and an extensive seller network.
Around €10 a sub per month to get EVERYTHING that's broadcast or streamed? That's an excellent deal for the subscriber.
And for the pirates their overhead is going to be so much lower than any streaming service precisely because they DON'T have to pay and negotiate for rights. If they "went legit" then they'd have to charge a hell of a lot more than around ten Euros a month, they'd cease to be competative, and their profit margin would collapse.
It's just there are layers of implausibility, specifically what the OP is referring to: you are not going to be able to handle that kind of volume for illegal services through the payment card networks (maybe you can if you collude with a payment service provider or own one yourself). And I don't know which cryptocurrency has achieved subscription revenue adoption for one merchant to the tune of $3 billion a year, as cryptocurrencies are push payments by default. Do you think 22 million people are topping up 10 euros of cryptocurrencies per month to pay for this? That itself would be news.
I'm not saying it's impossible just implausible. Interested to see more details on this.
I forget the names of the services, but I've known a few people with a similar $10-20/mo IPTV pirate service that has pretty much every live channel and pay-per-view stream you could want. Local channels for pretty much every major city around the world. Every UFC fight. Every cricket game. Every rugby match. Every boxing match. Sixteen Sky Sports channels. International news channels. International local channels. Every HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, Starz, ScreenPix, MGM, and SkyCinema channels. Five MTV channels.
They also didn't have any hiccups watching the Tyson v. Paul match, which was also available.
They would even sometimes have access to the raw sports streams before the ad injection, so sports games would cut to stylized "Ad break in progress" scenes where there would have otherwise been ads injected for your region.
Pretty much all of these channels in a decent bitrate 1080p stream. You would somehow tie it into Plex so it shows up as if it was a cable box. Plex can handle transcoding for whatever target device you're wanting to watch it on. You didn't need any kind of odd front-end app from the IPTV provider.
That there are a few dozen million people around the world willing to shell out $10-20 to get practically every cable channel like this isn't too surprising to me.
I don’t think you grasp how wide these networks are. In Europe it’s common for people to buy a physical Firestick preconfigured for this and you pay a local guy your subscription fee. It’s huge business in Europe.
That's starting to make more sense. The article is light on details and we do not really have an equivalent of that in the USA (at least, not as widespread).
I think some of us were assuming this is some Streamlord equivalent with a payment tier. IE. Something that would be difficult to centralize illegal payment volume in the billions towards.
Not something with a decentralized network of distributors each collecting payment on their own.
I used to run a TV show torrent tracker and we processed well over $1m/year through PayPal. We had our own account exec. They didn't give a fuck for some reason. They even had their own login to the site.
They were styled as "donations" towards the running costs. In exchange people got to boost their upload/download ratio in their favor, or get a fancy star next to their name, etc.
While the bulletproof hosting we had wasn't cheap, we were still making an enormous profit.
I read the article, and then the source press release from the postal police.
My Italian is not good, but I suspect this is a case of the "journalists" writing the article using Google translate, with their brains in neutral. My reading of the relevant sentence is that it is the "illegal streaming industry" that "generates EUR 3B annually" and causes 10B damage to the media rights holders (they say, presumably). This is where the "250M/mo" comes from -- a figure that never appears in the actual press release. They also say they seized 1.6M in crypto and 40K in cash. So...TFA is BS.
> Sono stati sequestrati oltre 2500 canali illegali e server che gestivano la maggior parte dei segnali illeciti in Europa, con i quali i presunti frodatori hanno realizzato un giro illegale di affari di oltre 250 milioni di euro mensili.
Google translate offering
> Over 2,500 illegal channels and servers were seized that managed the majority of the illicit signals in Europe, with which the alleged fraudsters achieved an illegal turnover of over 250 million euros per month
I know someone who paid for a pirate streaming service. They said it had anything and everything, and was only $15/month. That’s less than I’m paying for HBO now, and I only get access to the hbo catalog.
I've got MAX, Fubo, Amazon and the biggest cable package but I still pirate ~80% of what I watch just because it is easier, more convenient, no ads or commercials and everything is available. A lot of movies, especially older movies, aren't available as part of the package on any streaming service. They want me to pay an additional fee to "buy" the movie. Except I won't own the movie, I will have a temporary license to watch the movie on their streaming service, which is still laden with ads and other nonsense. No thanks.
Some paid pirate services actually do offer good value for the money. I’ve used a torrent caching service that has any torrent that lets me cap my gigabit connection for any torrent that has been crawled by them or user-uploaded, in practice this is a lot, and if they don’t have it, they will act as a client and acquire it for you, including seeding it for as long as you’d like. It costs $1-2 USD a month, well worth it for me.
Paid pirate IPTV streams can have better speeds, better reliability, and less or no ads.
I don’t personally watch live TV so I don’t use these services, but if I did I would definitely pay a small amount for the conveniences above.
Can anyone explain on technical terms what Real Debrid is? I tried Googling and all I get are layman explanations like "provides access to premium hosts" which doesn't make any sense.
Also what a terrible name it is. Why Real? Is there an original Debrid? And I can't not associate the word with debridement (don't google if you can't handle gore)
That explanation kinda linked together concepts I'd previously read about "debrid" services.
My summary of what they do (from further down the thread) was: Aggregator of premium access to a selection of file hosting sites, plus caching of content that's popular amongst their Customers.
I'm not sure of the applications of their service outside of streaming (copyrighted material), so I'd be a little bit wary of their potential for longevity of service. Never bet on centralised piracy.
In my country, people can't pay internationally, so their only option (especially for sports coverage) is pirated IPTV networks which are very popular in here and are sold everywhere.
I don't watch live television myself so I don't know how good and reliable these services are.
Less expensive yes, but more importantly much more convenient. When 'all' the shows exist on a combination of Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, Paramount, Disney+, and Max... you can easily get to $100/mo+ if you were to subscribe to all of them. Then, if you want to watch something from an international viewership, it might not even be available in your region. In addition, you now have to figure out which service offers what program... which for certain not-current shows can be maddening (some seasons on some services, some on others, some not even available).
As GabeN has stated: piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem.
I think the answer is that is not nearly as convenient as original service providers would claim it is. I am in US and we just went through a crazy period of everyone and their mother trying to start their own streaming service. Good portion went under, some consolidated, but the market fragmentation leading to actual content you want to see being spread across multiple services is an annoyance.
I will provide a concrete example. My buddy got into anime and was raving about one specific title so I checked Hulu for it, but Hulu, for some unfathomable reason starts that anime at season 4.. If I want to legally Stream season one, I would need to try the Sony owned anime thing, which I refuse to do for reasons not related to streaming wars. I ended up buying a dvd ( cheap and good enough quality for me ).
And pirates... have everything and, unless you are looking for newest releases, is of superior quality.
I used to run one of these. People would pay because (a) we had TV shows that literally were not available through any streaming service, (b) people wanted real downloads they could hoard.
Not the OP, but when you go down the illegal route, it is much easier to find whatever you want to watch, watch it on any device with no limitations, etc. The fragmentation and limitations of the usual big services is a nuisance.
Over here it's a fair bit less expensive because it just has everything. On normal streaming platforms dubbed shows aren't always there and because the market is small a lot of things are just not available anywhere legally
paying per mo is certainly more convenient I guess. but once you are in, there isn't a cost to stay in. Some trackers might boot you if you don't log in once every 3-6 mo.
It is literally the specification to send live tv over IP. The fact some services also support on demand movies is irrelevant to the fact the service in question is for live tv.
I never said it doesn't support live tv. But I was trying to point out that people who pay for the above service are not _necessarily_ interested in the live tv feature. I.e. it's not the reason for some. I'd guess convenience.
Convenience, I guess. I'm not that deep into the piracy world that I even know of all my alternatives, to be honest.
I pay a reasonable subscription fee, download the app on all my devices, and watch whatever I want.
The app is compatible with all of my devices, isn't broken, there are no unreasonable limits or restrictions, and no ads. That's a lot more than I can say for the 5 or 6 subscriptions it replaces.
That eur250mio / mo number is almost certainly bullshit just going off the above alone.
Not to mention that you can't exactly hide 3 yards annual revenue ... and anyone within a mile of a corporate treasury role will tell you that you can't cash-manage that revenue on 40k eur.