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Stremio+TorBox are the two words. ($3/month)
That's not what these things are. They come preloaded with apps that stream pirate broadcast streams and on-demand servers operated out of China.
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There are a ton of legitimately free IPTV streams. You can watch them through most media players like VLC without having to download anything shady. https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv
That is chock-full of pirated content.
It is paid for via ads or subsidies, so there's no reason to block access to the stream, so they just don't bother, and make life easier for anyone building streaming devices wanting to integrate their channel.
Someone accessing the stream directly is not the originally intended use case, but it isn't any different from someone accessing it via their smart tv.
I bet this is much broader than we all realized because just earlier today I was reading on https://gist.github.com/probonopd/3ad6b7777caea1503f00d5fe77... in order to tinker with a cheap (like really cheap) Android video projector : "Device: Magcubic HY300 Pro Android Projector (ui_Veng.projector) Issue: Device was being used as a residential proxy node without consent, causing thousands of suspicious DNS requests a…
Oh no! Not the advertising networks!
> generic TV boxes that promise unlimited content streaming for a one-time fee I don't want to blame the purchasers of these things - who are some of the victims - but at the same time, it does seem like a Too Good To Be True situation.
It's worth separating the two populations:
My users had money and had considered legal subscriptions. They paid me because the legal product was worse—in my case, sports blackouts, a bunch of different apps, etc. They knew what they were buying into and they had weighed the risk. I can tell you right now some of my former users have bought into this market.
Then there's the unwitting: a person buying one of these devices at a too-good-to-be-true price is treating it as a hardware purchase from Amazon, where the actual monetization isn't inferable from the listing. Calling it too good to be true assumes the buyer can see what shit they're standing in. They can't. There's no visible market here. It's just a product page with reviews.
To add to this: the proxy exit is exactly why these cost so little. Demand for residential IPs is booming (check some of the proxy subreddits to see what I mean).
The ironic part is that there's a chance the person who bought one of these boxes to watch pirated sports was the exit node I was using to acquire the feeds in the first place.
Defrauding ad networks doesn't seem like a bad thing, although using my internet connection as a proxy is obviously terrible. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that my connection is being sold as a VPN service by the vendor.
Fraud is also bad, even if you aren't fond of those being defrauded.
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why is running a proxy a bad thing? someone profiting off it could be bad maybe, but even that is good if it pays for my subscription. but compare running tor nodes, and especially exit nodes. that surely would be a good thing, so at least if you think tor is good then running a proxy should be the same and it should be normalized. doing it in secret without the user knowing is what's bad
https://lwn.net/Articles/1080822/ Do you really want to be a part of the scraper problem?
Anyway, the box is powerful enough to do several things. You can install a IP tv if you want. If you don't, you still have a pretty good media center (you can hook up an external hd on it)