61–70 of 89 posts
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?
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 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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, a…
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…
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).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
HN Search: enshittification - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, a…
As an aside, in some cases they do - see CDN leeching: https://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/ReadArticle.as...
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?
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...
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 th…