Five Men Convicted of Operating Massive, Illegal Streaming Service That Allegedly Had More Content Than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Prime Video Combined
https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/five-men-convicted-jetflicks-illegal-streaming-service-1236044194/Open linkView original on lemmy.ml837
Comments389
Proving Netflix could be replaced by five hard working people.
Things are easier if you can steal stuff. And operate on a small scale.
They didn’t need the army of lawyers to get license deals, so that’s not a fair comparison.
Its almost like its unecessary shit made up in order to keep profits away from working people artificially
Yeah its almost like if we didn't keep extending copyright protections a bunch of stuff would be in the public domain and any streaming service could offer it without having to deal with licensing.
I mean that's all well and good, but then how would the very deserving shareholders get dividends?
Won't somebody think of the shareholders!?
PLS KEP LNE GOE UUP
maybe if they actually invested some money somewhere they would make some money for once.
It's true that Hollywood is corrupt and csuite pay is absurd, but those deals are the only mechanism by which ANY money makes it to the writers, actors and staff who deserve it
It's the exclusivity bullshit that gets me.
It could be: New movie is released! Anyone who pays the price tag gets to stream it!
But no, we must bidding war gouge.
On top of that, X Y and Z services exist in America, but not in other countries, so in this other country, everything is on Netflix, while I had to jump between three different services at one point just to watch Stargate
Hey, you're just salty that you didn't get in on the ground floor when Stargate was being exclusively streamed in a dedicated Stargate streaming service
Stargate+ Maxx Ultraviolet
Or fund new content
Their scale was also an insignificant fraction of what Netflix has, making the point even more irrelevant.
The best figure I could find on Jetflicks user count was 37k, where as Netflix has 269 million users.
Prices should go down with scale not up though.
There's initial investment on the initial servers (and the software), and afterwards it should be a linear increase of server costs per user, with some bumps along the way to interconnect those servers.
The cost also scales per content. Because that means more caching servers per user and bigger databases, and licenses.
So this service has less users and more content, it should be way more expensive. The only reason they are cheaper is because they don't pay those licenses.
The cost of storage in this case is more or less irrelevant - traffic is what matters here. You're also not getting any mentionable bulk discount on the servers for that matter.
The key is that you can engineer things in completely different way when you have trivial amounts of traffic hitting your systems - you can do things that will not scale in any way, shape or form.
If we get rid of the licensing we get rid of the lawyers.
If you get rid of licensing you get rid of the content
Certain types of content. But YouTube's own existence started because people made content without licensing rights.
Technically YouTube exists because three horny nerds wanted a dating site with video integration. It only turned into a video sharing site when they realized they couldn't find the clip of the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction and they decided they wanted to build that platform instead.
I wonder what youribe would have been like if they didn't sell to google
probably redtube
I don't think YouTube really compares to Netflix
Not really. I can undersgand licensing but at this point it's become a distopian practice completely separated from the basic need to monetize the content an make a profit. That's why those companies become such gargantuans monsters.
Nope. People will still make content. It'll be on far less of a budget, but that didn't stop the Film School generation of independent films in the 1970s (before which you had to sell your life and soul and beating heart to a studio). In between all the schlock were the occasional arty films we consider classics today.
And then there's government subsidization of art projects, as per the National Endowment of the Arts.
I think the MCU movies, the DC movies, the many studio iterations of Spiderman have shown us what capitalism eventually churns out. Sony actually chose this path content as product the same resort to formula that plagued the music industry in the 1980s (and drove the Hip Hop Independent movement of the next half-century).
We just need to empower artists. Make sure they don't have to moonlight as restaurant wait staff in order to eat and pay rent while they create, and make sure they have access to half-decent (not necessarily high end) hardware with which to do their thing. And yes, as Sturgeon observes, most of it will be schlock, but through sheer quantity of content we'll get more gems than Hollywood is putting out.
If you take away the ability to own and control your intellectual property, then you won't be empowered.
Licensing art allows creators to earn a living off of their hard work.
Not in the US or the EU. If you make music in the States, then RCA or Sony owns your content, not you, and when they decide they've paid you enough (which is much less than they're getting) then they still own your stuff. Also, if you make an amazing film or TV series ( examples: Inception, Firefly ) and the moguls don't like it, they'll make sure it tanks or at least doesn't get aftermarket support, which is why Inception doesn't have any video games tie-ins, despite being a perfect setting for video games.
Artists are empowered in their ability to produce art. If they have to worry about hunger and shelter, then they make less art, and art narrowly constrained to the whims of their masters. Artists are not empowered by the art they've already made, as that has to be sold to a patron or a marketing institution.
No, we'd get more and better art by feeding and housing everyone (so no one has to earn a living ) and then making all works public domain in the first place.
Intellectual property is a construct, and it's corruption even before it was embedded in the Constitution of the United States has only assured that old art does not get archived.
I think yes, an artist needs to eat, which is why most artists (by far) have to wait tables and drive taxicabs and during all that time on the clock, not make art. The artists not making art far outnumber the artists that get to make art. And a small, minority subset of those are the ones who profit from art or even make a living from their art, a circumstance that is perpetually precarious.
But I also think the public needs a body of culture, and as the Game of Thrones era showed us, culture and profit run at odds. The more expensive art is, the more it's confined to the wealthy, and the less it actually influences culture. Hence we should just feed, clothe and home artists along with everyone else, whether or not they produce good or bad art. And we'll get culture out of it.
You can argue that a world of guaranteed meals and homes is not the world we live in, but then I can argue that piracy (and other renegade action) absolutely is part of the world we live in and will continue to thrive so long as global IP racketeering continues. Thieves and beggars, never shall we die.
Sorry, I'm not going to read all that, but it seems like you're upset about the shitty deals made by record labels and other large corporations, not intellectual property rights.
If you save the cheerleader you save the world.
If you save the cheerleader then the creepy serial killer will join the team.
If you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to ask for a glass of milk.
Precisely. So much added expense for zero, or rather negative, added value.
The only reason all companies prices go up these days is for CEO pay packages
I think it’s more for major shareholders (which includes CEOs, of course)
Like Boeing's CEO making 300 million.... imagine 300 people who worked their ass off could make million. Or 1500 hard workers could be making 200k. But nah, let's just drag these huge bags of money into this one asshole's account. Oh there were a couple of crashes right? 👍 Our thoughts and prayers 🙏. But not our money wagons.
Regulate monopolies and eat the rich.
but wait.. there's more
astronauts
Did they make the shows too?
Does Netflix make shows? Or does it slam its name onto filmmakers it pays to make content? If so, one of those things simply requires throwing cash at people, which I think is a skill that most people can learn.
Did the pirate site pay anyone to make new shows?
They had to operate under the radar to avoid the law, so you know the answer to your question
So Netflix actually pays for shows to get made, so when everyone pays for Netflix, it lets everyone enjoy them. Pirate sites only extract value from the hard work of the producers, without paying them.
producers don't make the content, they speak to the right people in their exclusive circles to finance it, put their name on it, and then pay the directors and actors a tiny fraction of what it earned
Okay, now tell me how pirate sites contribute to creation of said content
Does Netflix? Or do they pay production companies for content?
They use the subscription money to pay production studios. What did the pirate site use the subscription money for?
Servers, electricity, bandwidth, blackjack and hookers.
“substantial harm to television program copyright owners,”
Give me a fucking break
Love how they make this sound like some incredible feat. When you aren't bound to license agreements, turns out it's actually very easy to have a "massive" content library. Literally the only hurdle is storage space.
I mean, distributing it isn't a small feat. Plus you need to manage subscriptions, billings, CMS, a front end to navigate the content, etc.
That's no small amount of work, even if they used out of the box solutions for many layers.
All of those things already exist. Typically it's just a Plex server running on a cloud service.
Yeah like... Netflix has peering agreements and whatnot but.. It's not 2005.
5 people could do it though.
Depends how many users.
But yeah a lot.
Both Wikipedia and Stack Overflow just have a few dozen fast servers despite being some of the world's highest trafficked websites
The entire content of the wikipedia fits in a pen drive.
Streaming video is a lot more expensive than text and images.
That is just the text content, Wikipedia has pictures and videos as well. Not to mention the other Wikimedia projects
I doubt Wikimedia streams even 0.1% of what netflix does.
Not only that, stackoverflow does it using windows! (or used to, at least)
Yeah it costs, depending on quality of course.
My 14 TB disks are filling up faster than I expected and I am not close to Netflix’s catalogue.
Yeah, I got a 14tb drive back in February and it's 90 percent full already. My media collection will always grow to fill the space available.
You guys wouldn't happen to have any tips on DVD ripping would you? I'd like to go all digital but I just can't make Handbrake work.
This is my fork of an existing solution
https://github.com/JustAnotherIdea/MakeMKV-Auto-Rip-Concurrent-Ripping-and-Blu-Ray-Fix
I've never gotten Handbrake to do anything I wanted. DVD Shrink, on the other hand, is one of my top five most-used apps. It's quite old, but DVD encryption hasn't changed since its release.
https://www.dvdshrink.org/download.php
I couldn't either... I ended up using dd, though it's probably not the best way by a long shot.
Nobody gives a shit, you're not doing enough to punish trump for his obvious, literally filmed and recorded crimes.
This is the equivalent of the cops celebrating after beating peaceful college protesters while pissing their pants and freezing while the uvalde kids were slaughtered and psychologically tortured.
You're focusing on the non victory and ignoring the failures. Cowards.
That's not true, they successfully did their job of protecting capital and the owner class. Same reason they don't go after Trump. He's in the owner class, so their job is to serve and protect him.
When cops only legal responsibility is to enforce the law, and the laws are written to protect corporate interests, of course they will stand outside the school and arrest protesters. SCOTUS has ruled that way so many times that "to serve and protect" is literally gaslighting.
Police don't even really have a duty to enforce the law, at least not in the USA:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
They don't even have a duty to know what the law is.
Say it again, friend.
Nobody gives a shit, you're not doing enough to punish trump for his obvious, literally filmed and recorded crimes.
This is the equivalent of the cops celebrating after bearing peaceful college protesters while pissing their pants and freezing while the uvalde kids were slaughtered and psychologically tortured.
You're focusing on the non victory and ignoring the failures. Cowards.
say it again, friend, but in french
say it again, friend, but in dutch
Non
well alright, but I'm going to have to report this
This guy GETS it.
Guessing they used Sonarr, Radarr, qBittorrent, maybe an NZB client....
Would you look at that, I'm sophisticated now.
Maybe even Jellyseerr
redistribution = service?
Why would they work for free?
Not gonna pretend like this aint illegal but i don't cry over some IP owners losing money... EVER, fuck 'em
All fair points.
I think the issue is that IP owners are mega corps, ie people who made the content don't own it and can't provide it anyway.
This doesn't seem that different from paying for usenet. It's not like they're making DVDs of pirated movies and selling them on the street corner; they were basically just aggregating content and the service they were providing was making it easily searchable and accessible, not doing the actual pirating, from the sound of it, unless I'm misunderstanding the situation.
i would think it would be a little different from usenet, considering that usenet would be a service that you pay for, and people who use that service would host content on it, so that other users can download that content. Which effectively removes the immediate liability that you would have in this case, where you are explicitly hosting a pirated streaming service, and then charging for it, for the explicit purpose of streaming said pirated content.
Yeah, I suppose I should clarify - that was in response to the objection to paying for pirated content; it's different from the service provider's point of view, but from the end user's point of view, they're paying for pirated content either way.
yeah, from an end user perspective, it's the same.
But i was referring mostly to the legal technicalities there, where one would be significantly more spicy than the other.
Nice root instance btw, getting jumpscared by pawb.social is a rather funny timeline to live in.
Yes. Charging money for sharing content like that makes them little better than grifters
I run a massive streaming service too, which is also way bigger than all the streamers combined. It's just only distributed over my private home network. Jellyfin for the win!
You’re under arrest!
Throw this national menace into federal max security solitary confinement, next to Hannibal Lecter >:/
Not without paying licencing fees for Hannibal Lecter first!
What a terrible shame it would be to have a friend over to watch the telly without a loicense...🧠, wouldn't you say?
You ever heard of a man Hannibal Lecter he was a "nice guy".
Great late Hannibal Lecter*
Love my Jellyfin server, but I have 2 gripes over just using VLC.
Can't use the scroll wheel for volume. It's a pain aiming for the volume from across the room on the couch.
JF won't boost volume past 100% like VLC.
Know of any fixes?
Are you playing directly on your server?
For the first one at least you could solve it by running JF with a Chromecast or similar device.
Feels cleaner than a wireless mouse in the living room too, IMO
For when you need to take it to 11
Couldn't you just make 10 louder?
And then add 11
You can run your Jellyfin connection inside of Kodi which has a ton of configuration options like the volume control.
I don’t watch on my computer, that’s just where it’s hosted. I watch mostly on my AppleTV using Infuse (also great for other Apple products as well)
Use kodi for last mile?
VLC is great as a file playing app, terrible as a home server…
apparently this is supposed to be coming in the 9.0 feature release. So soon™ I'd have to look to be sure, but apparently it's coming.
Volume is weird, i feel like i'd almost like either a "volume target" option, to match volume levels between content, or some sort of fixed audio boost level. Idk.
Adding replaygain tags to your content could help here, but it's a manual process, particularly since it's not normally included in released videos. And I'm not sure if jellyfin supports replaygain tags from video (presumably it does for audio only files).
mpv definitely does support it at least, with "--replaygain=track".
Of course, none of this helps with OPs situation, because enabling replaygain will actually lower the volume on most files, so it can account for high dynamic range content.
yeah considering i have literal terabytes of youtube content on my jellyfin, i think i'll probably abstain, unless i do some really dirty automation on it, in which case i might not, because that would be funny.
What platform are you on that you need to use VLC?
Windows PC. I'm wired from my 50" TV monitor to a 55" on the wall.
You use MPV as the player instead of VLC.
You might want to consider streaming it on your TV. Modern TVs should have a Plex app at the least. Or use a Chromecast or other setup. I watch on my couch with the TV remote. Its the same experience as watching Netflix.
Plex isn’t Jellyfin though. Lots of TV’s/TV OS’s have Jellyfin app but it’s pretty basic. I’d recommend an AppleTV with Infuse, it’s super built out with all sorts of great features. It’s a better app than all of the streaming services
Ew Apple
I know this might sound crazy, but I use both Apple devices AND non-Apple devices! Oh the horror!
Ew Apple
Macbooks beat the shit out of any comparable windows laptop. And iPads beat the shit out of any android tablet. And AppleTV is the best TV OS by far. Life must be hard when you just hate things because its popular to hate them.
I am streaming to my TV. 50" TV on my desktop for a daily driver, 55" (wired) on the wall for media.
I guess what I meant was to run it on a TV-native platform that you control with your remote, instead of streaming your PC display to the TV and still using the mouse and keyboard. Xbox has a Jellyfin app for example. I use Plex and my TV has an app for it. Also I can use Chromecast and throw it up from my phone or PC and control that with the remote.
It's weird to me that anyone would use a PC hooked up to a TV from a couch in 2024, but I'm sure it (otherwise) works for you.
Why is weird?
Already back in the 00s you could get a media player box, with a remote, that hooked to you TV and played video files from any share in your network or an HDD hooked up to it.
Nowadays you can get an Android TV media player box with Kodi on it (or you can install it), again with a remote and hooked to your TV to do the same as that 00s media player box but looks a lot more fancy.
Or instead of an Android TV you can get a Mini PC or older laptop, ideally with Linux, with an HDMI output which you connect to your TV, install Kodi on it and get a wireless air-mouse remote (if you get one with normal remote buttons rather than the stupid "for Google" ones, the buttons seamlessly integrate with Kodi so you don't really have to use the air-mouse stuff).
Alternativelly if you want to avoid Android but don't want to spend 150 bucks on a mini PC, you can get one of those System On A Board devices like one of the Orange Pi ones, put LibreElec on it (small Linux distro built around Kodi) and do the wireless remote thing with it.
The back end of any of this is either files on a NAS, on a share on a PC, a harddisk connected directly to the device or even something like Jellyfin running somewhere else (which can be outside your home network) or even any of the many IPTV services out there.
It has never been this easy to put together a hardware and software solution, entirely under your control - read: just as easy to use for corporate streaming services as for "personal" media - to watch media in your living room with the same convenience as purpose built devices for that, and it has never been this convenient to use or looked this good.
I think it's just easier to use a cheap computer. You can use your vpn, adblockers, takes zero setup time to watch whatever you want to watch.
The 00's comment, I modded the original xbox to run xbox media center (XBMC) which turned into Kodi. My friends where blown away I could download movies and watch them on my tv.
Well, the easiest IMHO is the Android TV box (mainly because it comes with a remote) but I personally have a cheap Mini-PC because I used it to do a lot more than just being a media box and it still just sits in the living room in the TV stand.
Way back when I started (trying to have something in my living room, rather that absolute started which was way before that) all that I had was a cheap media box with an interface that was basically a file browser, accessing files over Samba.
Stuff is way fancier nowadays AND you can do it with much cheaper hardware if you want to.
Instead of using a streaming or other settop device? That'd be far, far more normal for the use cade.
I find it convenient, but I've had pc's hooked to tv's since broadband became a thing. I can watch anything, download anything, play games, check banking, ect.
Fair enough.
I have one of those Google streaming devices but I hate giving up my privacy. Also, I saw fast food ads on the device's home screen one day and I couldn't disable those. That was the last straw.
So now I use a raspberry pi 5 running arch with Firefox to stream everything to my TV. I even got a remote working with it that works fairly well, moves the mouse and everything. It was a lot of work but now I own my experience and don't have to give Google my data in that particular way anymore.
I'm using a wall-mounted TV as a 2nd monitor.
From a couch, though? That was the use case here.
I have one of those as well for one desktop system. And I will stream to TVs as a second monitor from laptops sometimes. But I don't think that's the setup they have.
Which of course is a good setup if it works for them! Or for you :)
it's not weird at all, for one, you get to use a keyboard, for second, you get to use actual real hardware that isn't spying on you and selling your data. You also get to use a real QWERTY based, or whatever other layout you want that isn't ABCDE what a fucking abomination that layout is.
plus you get a whole desktop OS if you please, or if not you can cold roll something specifically for a TV. You just have so many more options, than you do when using a smart tv or generic streaming box.
Can't right click to pause the video in VLC ;c
How many PBs you got and how many clients (humans)?
How much traffic across your network in terms of a daily average?
Do you have a local recommendation system running? For example I found a last.fm clone, self-hosted hut I haven't found much for video
Uh it’s just me and whoever is on my local network. I don’t port anything or have any users outside my home. When I go on trips I just download movies and shows from my network to my devices
It probably also had better user experience than all of them
The only thing I'm pisseed about is the fact that I was unaware of its existence. Fuck the system
They're here doing everyone a service. Why are there resources to prosecute this but not like elon musk's insider trading?
You gotta be stupid as shit to run something like this from the US and keep a financial tail of credit card payments to you.
You also gotta be stupid as shit to actually pay 10 bux for this.
It ran functionally uncontested for ten years. And it would hardly have been the first underground streaming service to pivot legit and cash out.
Napster was sold for $85M back in 2002. Justin.tv rebranded as Twitch in 2011. Hell, AWS has it's share of pirate hosted files.
Wait, is that actually Twitch's history - Justin.tv?
It is. Until recently it actually still used the domain to serve assets.
Wild. What an obscure piece of internet history to have missed out on as an old Justin.tv user.
Yeah but megaupload was legit but was still shutdown despite being massive
They had their servers seized, but were later returned and the service came back as mega.nz, legit and all.
Yeah uh no. that's not the whole story, Mega is a new company, the difference is it's encrypted so the theory was they'd have no way to scan for pirated content. Mega was also seized people think, it's unclear who or what currently opperates it. And Kim Dotcom's extradition case is ongoing.
Yeah uh no. that's not the whole story, Mega is a new company, the difference is it's encrypted so the theory was they'd have no way to scan for pirated content. Mega was also seized people think, it's unclear who or what currently opperates it. And Kim Dotcom's extradition case is ongoing.
It's sad that these people got taken down. Maybe the next people to do it will do it from a country that does not have extradition with the United States, so they would be safe.
Edit: As for payment providers attempting to take such a service down, Monero would be the answer to this.
Jetflicks, which charged $9.99 per month for the streaming service, generated millions of dollars in subscription revenue and caused “substantial harm to television program copyright owners,
The ownership class will tremble before a communist revolution!
Yeah that competition really did demonstrate what an awful service all those media monopolies provided.
To be fair, the service they provide isn't hosting the videos, it's making them, which I assume costs a bit more
Netflix service started as hosting only.
correction.. Netflix started by mailing DVDs, even before Redbox was a thing
Ah. Analogue hosting. But they definitely didn't start producing content.
Yeah, imo it was also a bit more difficult then. But yeah as others said, the licensing was hard too
To be fairer nobody asked them to produce content. They decided to create it because it's cheaper that licensing the actual good stuff.
eh some of it is good, I personally wouldn't want to just watched licensed shows from 50 years ago
Hence why copyright was originally in the 10-20 year range.
Movie star isn't supposed to be a dream job that makes you fabulously rich, but a decent living.
Interestingly, musical artists who work off the web will do exactly that: Tour and make hundreds of thousands instead of millions (in the aughts and 2010s, so pre-inflation), rather than rolling the dice with the record labels.
I mean, supposed to according to who?
Capitalist ideologues, for one. I remember in Macroeconomics class that wealth desparity will destroy your economy and then your civilization if you let it get out of hand.
So when (for example) we have eight guys that own more than the poorer half of the world population, that's a bad sign for every economy on the planet, and is going to cause way more problems than merely discontent and social unrest.
The service they provide (from a perspective external to obligatory capitalism) is less about making them, but providing a framework by which people engaged in artistic expression and development get paid and permitted to survive.
As the COVID-19 Lockdown furloughs demonstrated to us, art manifests so long as people are fed and need something to do. Healthy humans can't couch-potato for two weeks without fidgeting and whittling wood into bears. And the great resignation that followed showed that enough people were able to make it lucrative (that is, work out marketing and fulfillment enough to make it profitable enough to quit their prior job) that it lowered worker supply that we were able to contest the shit treatment, low pay and toxic work environments that were normal before the epidemic.
It gets worse in other industries like big pharma in which the state provides vast grants for R&D of drugs and treatments, but the company keeps all the proceeds. Contrast the space program, which is why memory foam (the material) is in the public domain, as is a fuckton of electronics and computer technologies.
If it is art that other people value then that framework already existed(and there are many others who created similar tools for it) so I don't see it as particularly valuable.
There is a compelling argument that tens of billions of dollars being used productively to research anything would have at least some useful results. Memory foam, cordless drills, etc could have been developed much more cheaply than the Apollo program, GPS is extremely valuable, but Apollo wasn't a necessary precursor to geostationary orbit.
If it is art that other people value then that framework already existed
From Wikipedia on Vincent Van Gogh: Van Gogh's work began to attract critical artistic attention in the last year of his life. After his death, Van Gogh's art and life story captured public imagination as an emblem of misunderstood genius
The art we get from pre-made frameworks emerged because people figured out they like art, and then someone capitalized on that. Or in cases of monarchs and governments, they created a fund to allow artists to do their thing instead of waiting tables.
There is a compelling argument that tens of billions of dollars being used productively to research anything would have at least some useful results.
For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14. Feel free to look for other investments, but big science really has proven itself.
I don't really understand how this follows from what I said.
Do you have a source for that? (And what that claim actually means), afterall, plenty of "essential" inventions in the modern day(including the base of modern rocketry) came from weapons development- does that make war a good investment? (Of course its not 1-to-1 because war is destructive, but my point is putting a lot of effort and smart people into almost anything will lead to a lot of innovation)
I don’t really understand how [The bit on Van Gogh -- that he was only posthumously appreciated in the art sector] follows from what I said.
My following paragraph is about that. Art often happens before the framework made to create it. In fact, when we have set up studio, they're already doing knock-offs, trying to repeat prior successes.
For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14
Do you have a source for that?
This came up during a TED talk on the benefits of investing in big science. On an unrelated research effort, I found the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 which Eisenhower signed during his freak out over Sputnik, and the big grant to Fairchild Superconductor which kicked off the electronics boom in Silicon Valley (~San Jose, California), so the $14 value is certainly plausible.
As per Das Kapital our industrialists always move to capture regulation and seek to eliminate competition, which are the two aspects that can make capitalism work for the public. Then you have what we have today, late stage capitalism which is about tiers of rent, so everything is both shoddy and expensive.
That's how Disney and Warner Brothers (Warner Sister too!) end up owning all the franchises. It's how Sony owns all the music and sues to take down dancing baby videos.
The EU and California have both made in-roads to slowing down the steady takeover of regulatory bodies and the mulching and mass merging of megacorps into monolithic monopolies, but they can't stop it, and both are seeing the bend into precarity that is symptomatic of late stage capitalism.
That said, true post scarcity communism is realistically a pipe dream well beyond a few great filters we've yet to navigate, but we will see small victories, of which piracy -- what is essentially crime against ill-gotten gains -- offers more than a few.
To be fair, the service they provide isn't hosting the videos, it's making them, which I assume costs a bit more
Maybe? People willing to copy and distribute this content will always be around and you will never catch them all. People willing to pay a discount or seek not and find said content will always be around. And there will be those who will watch a show or a movie because it is freely available, who would never pay a dime for it.
They will never end piracy and I'd argue it might actually be bad for business if they did.
Get your communism here! Only $9.99 a month, or just $99.99 for a year!
cringe
If they had more content on offer than the big legal streaming services combined, should that not tell us something about the quality of legal offers?
What's there to learn that isn't already widely known? Existing (copyright) laws are asinine and all corporations eventually become consumed by greed. That's America in a nutshell.
It's not even copyright laws, it's everyone insisting on exclusive contracts. There's no reason a piece of content couldn't be on Netflix and Disney+ at the same time. It would be a lot better for consumers if streamers could compete on price and service instead of which content they managed to create/licence.
Music streaming has proven this for years now, all the major brands have massive collections that make its super easy to pay and listen to just about anything.
Early Netflix proved this when everything was readily available for an affordable pricre.
Me in the 90s and 00s: yarrrr!
Me in the 10s: it feels good to be legit
Me in the 20s: YARRRRRRRRR!
It felt good to live in a world where being legit was reasonable.
Yep, you choose between Spotify, Tidal, etc based on price and how well the app works, not because one service has the band you like while the other one doesn't (not that music streaming isn't its own shitshow for other reasons, of course).
The situation is a lot better with music, but it's not perfect. There's still issues with region locking content, and content only existing on one service and not another.
There are also issues paying creators instead of rights holders
Exactly. I like Netflix's service, but Disney's content. Why can't I just pay for a Disney bundle on Netflix? Likewise with Max, Peacock, etc.
Lawyers are why we can't have nice things.
Capitalism wherever it is found. Not just the USA.
Farewell heroes. I may not have heard of you before, but I shall mourn your departure nevertheless.
It harmed no one and nothing.
TV and Film are just angry that competition did it for a reasonable price and provided a superior service for it.
I have 0 sympathy for the studios/distributors but they also did not pay the licensing fees.
then i guess the studios should stop enshitifying streaming and make a service thats affordable and worth using, huh?
This is despicable. What specific service was this? So I know how to avoid it if it should resurface.
“Sophisticated scripts to scour pirate sites”.
I think we’ve just found a new tagline for radarr and sonarr.
So they used some variant of Sick Beard?
nah probably the arr stack
Sonarr: (Automatic TV series downloads)
Radarr: (Automatic movie downloads)
Tdarr: (Automatic transcoding of media, can help save you a lot of disk space)
Bazarr: (Companion app to Radarr and Sonarr, manages subtitles)
Prowlarr: (A replacement for Jackett from the Arr team)
Lidarr: Music
Readarr: Books
Mylar3: Comic books
Plex-Meta-Manager: (Automatic collections and metadata)
Overseerr: Request tracking and website front-end
Ombi: Let users request both movies/tv shows from a simple web interface.
Dopplarr: Discord bot to make movie/tv/anime requests
Pulsarr: Browser extension for adding movies to Radarr or Series' to Sonarr while browsing IMDB or TVDB.
That's a new one to me, I'll have to check that out. Thanks!
Been doing conversions via Emby, but it's not a very powerful tool for that.
not all heroes wear capes. thx homie
If you're using sickbeard, switch to medusa. The originally developer of sickbeard is a nut case. He took the project back from the team that was doing development so they forked it and renamed Medusa.
Why didn't you nerds tell me about this, I'm over here hoofing it with this got damn 2tb ssd
only 2tb? that's the size of my cache drives
Impressive, how many inches is your clit?
Bruh, I might have to steal this
As long as you always respond to their answer with 'OHHH SCISSOR ME TIMBERS'
... LARC cache? Ha! Get on my level, 1.2TiB RAM BB
Realdebrid + stremio just google those you'll be happy friend
It is really good.
Depending on your TV, you can probably stream video directly to it from your computer.
22tb emby server. For my home videos and pictures.
Your mom is very proud or at least that's what I think she said.. either that or don't be too loud 🤔
Always cool to meet someone good with a ouija board.
I summon her with hard dick and bubblegum
My condolences. She was a terrible bitch but if you're into that sort of thing.
I'm a terrible motherfucker so we vibe no cap
If there is no need,such places would not exist
If five people can maintain a service bigger than all those combined, then the big streamers need to buck their fucking ideas up.
They probably used Sonarr and Radarr and called it a day (or similar off-the-shelf tools available on GitHub). It's not very sophisticated at all. That combined with Jellyfin and a VPN (or Usenet or a country that doesn't care about piracy) and you have your own up and running. You could also just use free sites with an ad blocker instead of paying $10/mo like the service this article is about charged.
Unrelated to all of this: https://rentry.co/megathread
Yeah, I've got one of those too. Plex is great.
Streaming services become required by law like insurance
We already have the private copying levy in Germany and some other countries, where you have to pay a fee for several products (printers, scanners, storage media like HDDs, SSDs, SD cards and thumb drives...) due to the potential that you could do (legal!) private copies of copyrighted media on them. The copyright collectives can set the amount of the fees freely (and it's ridiculously high).
This comes shockingly close to the concept already.
I'm not sure about other countries, but here in Czech we actually have a mandatory subscription, that's absolutely bullshit.
So far, the law is that if you own any TV or radio, you have to pay monthly fee for public service broadcasters (national Czech TV). It's bullshit, the channels are full of ads anyway, and the shows they run and create is insultingly bad. Sure, it is important to have public service broadcasters that are not dependent on the state (because state-owned TV is reeaallly bad idea), but FFS can they just reduce costs and stick to news, instead of doing another stupid series, and stop forcing us to pay for something I don't care about or use?
You could just not pay the fee, if you state you don't have a TV capable of receiving it (which I don't). But now, they are changing the law that everyone who has any kind of internet-capable device has to pay the monthly fee, while also rising prices to something like 6 EUR per month. Fuck that and fuck them.
5 times the content. Where do I sign up?
Check out Softwarr "for free" or Real Debrid and Stremio/Kodi if you wanna spend some well spend money, the latter guarantee more content than Netflix etc, the former everything that could ever exists on the internet.
It's called notjetflix.org.gov
They solved a problem people had after the fragmentation :)
My guess is because they did all the pirating for you so you didn't have to worry about dealing with the technical hurdles of doing so.
If a service like this came around that allowed me to pay with Monero and did not require any personally identifiable information, I would totally fucking use it.
piracy is a service issue.
also, fuck IP owners, pigs got too fat while cutting on service.
because piracy is a service problem
Because all the legal services are incredibly anti-consumer and are offering less services, with (more) ads, for more money every year.
The entire system exists for the benefit of business, not customers.
Just look at what happens with accused theft in a store. You get accused of theft? Cops are there in no time, take you to the ground, throw you in the back of the cop car. only after they've gotten the humiliation and brutalization in might someone come and take your proof that you didnt steal anything.
You accuse the store of stealing from you? Due to not following their own policy on returns, or overcharging and an item and not fixing it Police won't even show. just tell you its a civil matter and to suck it up.
My guess is It's probably cheaper and has much greater variety. You can watch anything from any streaming service through one single interface at the price of one service.
Because the legal options are garbage.
The pirates provide a better service with more content for cheaper than the legal options; and pirating yourself takes effort as well as cost (hardware, trackers, usenet, etc).
Some people are happy to just pay for decent service; others like to learn about the process, then setup and run their own servers.
To each their own.
because IPTV is like $6 per month and has every single channel known to earth.... it's a tiny fraction compared to any cable especially if you watch sports (the only real reason to pay for cable anyway)
I dont subscribe to any streaming service (except the occasional free prime trial, to be full disclosure), not even the one in the news story... but I can still answer your question..
Because I want to pay a single service to watch everything. Like Netflix used to be. Watch everything I want, for one monthly price that was reasonable.
But its not like that anymore. Every company looked at how well Netflix used to do, went "Fuck them! I want all that money for my self!" and took their content off Netflix, and made their own streaming services.
Now if you want to consume any media, You have to subscribe to 50 different subscription services, for hundreds of dollars a month, Which is just Cable 2.0 but with worse service and options.
The majority of piracy is not free.
I've paid for usenet, seed boxes, private servers, and more recently torrent cache services.
You pay because it's much cheaper than commercial services and a better experience with more content.
You pay like $5/Mo for the content of all streaming services and more instead of the $500/Mo it would cost to subscribe to each of them individually. Plus you're not taking any legal risk as a customer.
Pirating implies some knowledge and effort some people may not have or want to get into
Paid Legal services are so enshitified some people may think they are getting ripped up
Paid illegal services are often HUGE bang for buck value (no enshitification, no limits, no nonsense and often better customer service)
In addition to other things people responded with, piracy services tend to not collect users data or prevent us from watching with a VPN enabled.
Man this one chaff's me the most. I way a paying Netflix customer like 8 years ago. I had IPv6 setup as a 6rd tunnel through HE (Hurricane Electric) because my ISP didn't offer IPv6. Netflix treated that as a VPN and blocked me as a paying customer... Even though I lived/payed from the same fucking locale. It's not like I was using a VPN to bypass a Geoblock. I was just making IPv6 available to myself. I cancelled because of that. You do not get to tell me how I access the internet at large, especially when I'm not even being shady about it.
Access to Usenet providers is not free
its amazing how good services can be if some just skip the corporation-obligatory adding of enshittification. i remember an article about a downloadable (but not very legal) DVD with an installer for a (worthless but very popular) OS that included heaps of expensive industry software and the installer was point-klick what you want and then all is done in background and fully usable once done. reading that article it seemed to be a better installer than ever produced by any company for any product.
however as that payed streaming service seemingly leaves huge amount of bank records and ran for such a long time, i guess it would have been easy to stop their customers from paying them. it rather might seem that the real intentions of content corporations might not truely be what they officially claim. maybe we learn in 25 years that the content corporations really were behind such services, maybe like "better get money from ALL markets!" or such.
Did someone leak their Jellyfin credentials?
Not all heroes wear capes, but some have a sidegig as firefighters
And wear a sexy mustache?
I mean probably?
Excellent!
Teoretically speaking, asking for a friend who's doing research, how would you access such a service? :)
There’s plenty of services like this that people use a firestick to connect too.
My friend uses one but I forget the name of it. You can find them online but people usually buy a package of say 20 connections and then sell them to friends and family. I’ll try and remember what to search for and come back.
Edit: IPTV is a good search term.
Legend
IPTV is the name of the pirated cable TV streams. Personally, I consider commercialized piracy to be a bit distasteful compared to the free and open source route, and I have the know how to self host my own streaming service.
Although it's not piracy, another free option to consider for live TV, if you're within range of TV broadcasters, is a digital TV antenna. I'm looking into that since not only is it free and legal, it's also the best picture quality, not compressed like IPTV (legit or pirated) or even cable.
I'm in the UK, so loads of live TV over the air.
Nah just a regular dude trying to help others when I can.
The poor copyright holders. Won’t someone think of the corporations for once?
"When a hero comes along . . ."
Direct link
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/five-men-convicted-operating-major-illegal-streaming-service
I wonder how that compares to my own collection...
I haven't found a source for the size of Netflix/Amazon/Hulus libraries; but I haven't looked all that hard either.
Impressive porn collection you got there.
I'm gonna need a lot more lotion...
It’s probably all just Harry Potter fan fiction tbh.
These two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
You gotta pump those numbers up
Storage is expensive :/
That's already almost 36tb, after conversion to HEVC which compressed it ~40%
Storage is cheaper than it’s ever been if you get HDDs
Cheaper, but it's still not cheap and I really don't have a whole lot of disposable income rn.
You can get 12tb renewed drives for $100. A lot will even have decent warranties. If you’re lying for like, 3 streaming services, and cancel all three in favor of saving your own media locally it pays for itself quickly. Especially if you download stuff from like HBO Max.
This is doubly true now that streaming services have started raising prices and pay walling content.
really large hdds are still really expensive, the prices have somewhat plateaued at this rate. Nobody really needs such massive drives, and their isn't exactly an incentive to produce larger drives, especially now that everyone seems to be moving to ssds.
They aren’t though, price per GB on renewed storage with warranty is less than 10 cents a GB. That’s insanely low compared to just five years ago.
that's also renewed storage, and i guess compared to the last decade it's pretty good.
But even then compared to the continual creep of file sizes, it's debatable. I mean 4k took off the last 5-10 years. I have yt videos ranging from 1-20 GB for 4k content now.
How did you convert to hvec? I'd love to do that on my entire library but don't know where to start. I'd also love to burn subtitles into some foreign films since Plex is generally terrible at doing subtitles...
Up until now, I've been using the convert tool in Emby server. You can select a whole library and convert it, or individual items/playlists/collections; with options to automatically convert new media as it's added.
Tbh, I've been having a bit of trouble with it re-converting media it's already done, so I was looking for another solution.
Someone in this thread mentioned tdarr, so I'm going to be looking into that this weekend. Seems like a much more manageable tool with more powerful options.
/edit; I should also mention, this is a long process. Using an rtx4080, it was almost 3 full months non-stop to convert my entire media library from mostly h264 -> h265.
and if you're looking to do software conversion you're easily looking at years, but considering how long most media servers will be up for, it might actually be worthwhile to aggressively automate that so it just runs in the background while you aren't looking. Also eats up additional CPU time which might be a benefit for someone.
Cool, I'll check out tdarr. My server is sitting idle most of the time so I'm fine with it taking it's time doing it in the background.
Edit Up and running. Pretty easy to config and get going. See you in about a year when everything is done...
i definitely wasn't the one to recommend tdarr, but it seems like a pretty good solution, and rather flexible at that. So there's that.
Just slap them on the wrist and send them on their way.
No, slaps on the wrist are only for rich people. If you inconvenience rich people, that's unforgivable.
183,200 TV episodes is pretty modest compared to alternative "non-approved" sources.
One datapoint is one source (that has a rule against any TV/show content released in the last 5 years) has a total number of 19.5K shows and TV movies/specials, with ~80 K releases. For many shows a single release can be a full season.
Not trying to sound elitist, but...all the content combined still isn't worth $10. Mind you the last TV show I liked was Better Call Saul, the last Hollywood movie I liked was...let me think...The Irishman, I guess?
Since 2000 the amount of TV shows I truly enjoyed watching and would watch again was maybe 8. The amount of movies maybe 20. So less than one per year.
And because I don't have to watch stuff when it comes out, but am totally fine with watching things years later, when it's cheap or free, I'd wager I spend less than $10 per year on TV and movie entertainment.
I think the shows have been better than the movies
Succession was really good, for example
Yes, they have been. But Succession is an example of a show which I thought I would like, and did for one season, but never finished, because the writing was so lazy and repetitive, and what's worse constantly pretending huge things happened while nothing actually happened.
its a character study, not a bombastic thriller. Same as the shows most folks rave about: Sopranos, Mad Men, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Arrested Development.. its fine to not like anything but I'm not sure why you'd take time to write about how you don't like anything. Do you find posts about, say, an art heist and post about how you haven't liked any paintings in a couple centuries
Quite a lot happened in the Wire TBF (also I think it's the strongest of the ones you've mentioned, largely for that reason..)
I guess.. a lot of the time it was Landsman eating Arby's at his desk
Ouch, comparing Succession to an absolute masterwork like the Sopranos hurts...and shows that you probably don't actually watch those shows but have them on in the background. And if Succession is such a character study, why do the writers pretend it's something else? It was a really bad show, man.
what you dont know could fill a book I wouldnt put succession on the same tier as sopranos (very little comes close), all I was saying is its not about crazy plot twists, and more about the way the emotionally crippled kids of logan roy cosplay as human beings. I enjoyed it- jeremy strong and brian cox did a great job imo
All my favorite movies this year have been on youtube.
Most of them by Joel Haver.
Sire!
Tony Ladruzo?
Huzzah!
Hollywood has been sucking ass lately, but lots of small indie films have been kicking ass. Everything from A24 has been fantastic recently. Lots of good foreign films too
Even A24 has a track record of 1 in 10, getting worse.
Yes, making movies is not an easy feat. But there's plenty of good stuff coming out. Don't know what to tell you.
You don’t sound elitist, just a little boring.
I'll take that as a compliment. It's the 2nd time someone told me this, the first time was when a girl found out I didn't have any tattoos.
Hey, look! They had a cookbook on tyranny...
All the comments in here are so damn tedious. Copyright is a mess, but holy shit, people tie themselves in knots to make excuses for pirates being careless and stupid