[handfuloflight]

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.

[vel0city]

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.

[qeternity]

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.

[handfuloflight]

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.