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Everyone Is Stealing TV

theverge.com

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Re: Everyone Is Stealing TV

#11

Post by elzbardico »

sparrc wrote: post #5
functionmouse wrote: post #3

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?

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.

Re: Everyone Is Stealing TV

#12

Post by 1317 »

functionmouse wrote: post #3

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?

i think normally they just display a number on the screen

Re: Everyone Is Stealing TV

#13

Post by joriJordan »

rideontime wrote: post #2

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.

Re: Everyone Is Stealing TV

#15

Post by tehwebguy »

verdverm wrote: post #7

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.

Re: Everyone Is Stealing TV

#16

Post by toomuchtodo »

nkrisc wrote: post #4

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.

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

Re: Everyone Is Stealing TV

#17

Post by mavamaarten »

MoonWalk wrote: post #10
functionmouse wrote: post #3

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.

Re: Everyone Is Stealing TV

#18

Post by ronsor »

nkrisc wrote: post #4

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.

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.

Re: Everyone Is Stealing TV

#19

Post by Aurornis »

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...

Re: Everyone Is Stealing TV

#20

Post by standardUser »

verdverm wrote: post #7

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)

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?

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