7 ms·

Sky Asked Govt. To Target Pirate IPTV Resellers via New Dedicated Police Unit

99 points by gslin 3y ago

ta1243 3y ago
It's been a long time since I used dos/windows, but is it really "C:/>" at the prompt nowadays? Used to be "C:\>" back in my day
- tjpnz 3y ago
  I feel old.
- TonyTrapp 3y ago
  No, and you also don't end your commands with </. Really weird, I doubt many people in the intended target audience of the ad would know what it's supposed to mean. It's not even a random bunch of JavaScript code that looks remotely like "hacking".
  - BLKNSLVR 3y ago
    They couldn't afford Bobby Tables' consulting fee
  - Symbiote 3y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the streamers are older people, perhaps with help from a relative to set things up. I had a relative contact me a couple of years ago to ask if the little black box her grandson had helpfully connected to the TV was "dodgy".
  - PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
    They probably just opened Command Prompt and noted the first thing they saw, then in proofing someone thought the lack of it on the other side is an error as they probably saw it in HTML.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > is it really "C:/>" at the prompt nowadays? Used to be "C:\>" It starts off as a prompt and becomes an html tag. It's like how my father-in-law begins a joke that ends as a riddle.
  - inefficient 3y ago
    Man I wanna hear those jokes that end as a riddle. Sounds way better than this.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  It's C:￥> and nobody can tell me otherwise!
irusensei 3y ago
> ilegal stream let criminals in Suggesting the stream operators will hack your bank account. Reminds me ot the "pirate media will ruin your VCR/CDDVD Player fake propaganda. Ironically... the virus came from a big reputable corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk.... A lot of industries would be in for some criticism and bad PR after that. But not these guys. They don't give a shit about reputation.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  >> illegal stream let criminals in This has so much opportunity for improvement. ex: Blatant Lies Let Stupidity In
  - ChoHag 3y ago
    [dead]
- incahoots 3y ago
  >let criminals in Bizarre that so many at the top will label ordinary people who don't like the idea of being gouged to watch their favorite team play as criminals. It's pretty ridiculous
  - ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
    Piracy is a crime regardless of the morality of it.
    - incahoots 3y ago
      I suppose we should treat jaywalking with the same hard line approach. The justification for both only benefits those who can push such laws.
      - ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
kioleanu 3y ago
I very very rarely use streams but what Sky fails to understand is that I wouldn’t buy their service even if there wasn’t any stream available. It is simply too expensive. I am talking about Sky Sports here for example. Also in Germany for example. Last I checked, they wanted 30 euros per month and a yearly subscription when I want to see a Bundesliga match every x months. I have a season ticket for my team so I see all matches live and away games sometimes on TV. Even if I were to justify the price (it’s exactly the same price as my season pass), it’s not guaranteed that they show the match, it may be shown by DAZN, who also want 30 euros per month, but at least don’t ask for a year’s commitment. Neither service sells pay per view - I would gladly pay 5 - 10 euros per match seen
- basisword 3y ago
  >> I would gladly pay 5 - 10 euros per match seen In the UK at least Sky offer this. You can buy a 'day pass' and get full access to all their sports channels for a day. It's about £12. Or you can pay £34.99 for the monthly plan. In reality they constantly offer deals and when you try to cancel they offer huge discounts. I think I've been paying about £20 per month for the full sports package for the last couple of years. It's wildly more accessible now than it was when you had to buy their satellite package etc. and commit for multiple years.
  - Mindwipe 3y ago
    They offer it in Germany too under the WOW brand (previously Sky Ticket). I don't think they offer the day pass but they certainly offer the single month for the sports channels.
    - kioleanu 3y ago
      Just checked, it’s only month to month for 30 euros
  - youngNed 3y ago
    The per game is through their brand now https://www.nowtv.com/ https://www.nowtv.com/ It is an absoultely brutal experience, and drove me back to streaming. I bought a game last year, first i couldn't watch it on my computer (linux) next i realised that i had to pay extra for HD. Paying extra to have sport in HD? Fuck, and i cannot stress this enough, That.
bluescrn 3y ago
If we can afford a new 'dedicated police unit', how about targeting burglaries, shoplifting, and/or knife crime?
- alexriddle 3y ago
  I suspect the unit would be funded directly by Sky - the advantage to doing it that way is that they have access to the CPS and police intelligence, as well as all the powers the police have which they wouldn't if it was done in house. Insurance fraud is run along the same lines, all insurers contribute towards IFED which is a part of the City of London police tasked with tackling insurance fraud. If this relied on public funding I doubt anything but the most extreme cases of insurance fraud would be investigated.
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    > I suspect the unit would be funded directly by Sky So if politicians won't sell a corp the LEO they want, the corp can just purchase them directly.
    - Joker_vD 3y ago
      Well, I imagine it's about ROI and cost effectiveness: sometimes it's cheaper to buy the politicians already in-place, sometimes it's cheaper to buy the elections for newly-elected ones, and sometimes it's cheaper to just go straight to the executive branch and buy a small part of it instead.
  - fullspectrumdev 3y ago
    Yeah that’s not how things work in Ireland. This would entirely fall on the Irish taxpayer (me) to foot the bill. Might write to my TD to specifically tell them to oppose the idea for the craic.
darkwater 3y ago
The day they understand that for sports events there is definitely a big enough audience willing to pay single matches instead of being forced to buy the entire season... Also, decoupling it from telecom connection packages (that, at least, in Spain)
kmeisthax 3y ago
One of the things that really boggles the mind here is that there even is people paying for piracy.
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
  I don't think its that mind boggling. Everyone pays -in some way- for value. Pirated streams may not cost $$, but they cost time, labor, and its risky to set up (virii, installing bloatware, etc). So there's a cost to them. A hybrid model that is low cost and low labor, simply approximates the real value to the consumer. If someone is not paying Sky 30 EUR per month, but is paying a random reseller the equivalent of 3 EUR/mo, then the question is, why doesn't the content provider sell that value to the end user?
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    Right, but this is copyright brained "lost sale" logic. Sky costs 30 EUR/mo because everyone involved in the value chain can only produce their creative works if they can charge that much. The resellers are charging 3 EUR specifically because they cut the publishers and creators of that work out of the profit. Of course you can charge 3 EUR for something you didn't have to pay for. But you could also charge nothing - you don't really have costs because you aren't paying anyone. I distinctly remember the days of P2P and BitTorrent where pirated content actually was being provided for free[0]. So in my mind, charging any amount of money for pirated content feels like a grift. [0] Or at the very least, using an internal scrip denominated in bytes transferred to encourage people to host the content
- mathieuh 3y ago
  I'm paying £15/month to rent a seedbox on which I have a media centre application and a torrent client installed. If I could get the same user experience for the same price legally then I would, but the legal experience is both too expensive and too shit. There was a golden year or two where it really was easier to do it legally. Now you need ten different subscriptions, and half the things you want to watch cost extra money on top of that.
benjaminwootton 3y ago
I think sports suffers from fragmentation in the same way as other content. To watch all the televised football games in the UK you need Sky Sports, TNT and Amazon Prime. Even then you can only see half the games whereas in other countries almost all Premier League matches are televised meaning that geographical licensing restrictions are also in play. I would happily pay a fairly significant fee to watch all matches conveniently, but it’s simply not available to buy.
- fullspectrumdev 3y ago
  In Ireland (where this article is discussing) there is no legal option for some sports content at all.
- wombat-man 3y ago
  Yeah, same for American Football. If you really want to watch everything you need Sunday Ticket, some TV sub that includes ESPN, Amazon Prime and NFL+. This is definitely on purpose. I just get Sunday ticket and head to the pub on the occasion that my team is playing a game not covered by that or antenna TV. The NFL is good about letting local fans see their team. The monetary pain comes if you want to see out of market games.
randomcarbloke 3y ago
It should generally be a civil matter, like trespass. Seems absurd that the police need to be involved at all.
OnlyMortal 3y ago
The resellers I’m aware of, who advertise a “Scandinavian” set of channels that include Sky UK/Ireland, are based in the Philippines and the Stalker server is/was in Russia. To even get the system to work, you have to VPN out of the UK or Ireland to start with. I think the police might have some difficulty.
heroprotagonist 3y ago
Sounds like they just don't want to pay for mercenaries.

99 points by gslin 3y ago

It's been a long time since I used dos/windows, but is it really "C:/>" at the prompt nowadays? Used to be "C:\>" back in my day

tjpnz 3y ago
I feel old.
TonyTrapp 3y ago
No, and you also don't end your commands with </. Really weird, I doubt many people in the intended target audience of the ad would know what it's supposed to mean. It's not even a random bunch of JavaScript code that looks remotely like "hacking".
- BLKNSLVR 3y ago
  They couldn't afford Bobby Tables' consulting fee
- Symbiote 3y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the streamers are older people, perhaps with help from a relative to set things up. I had a relative contact me a couple of years ago to ask if the little black box her grandson had helpfully connected to the TV was "dodgy".
- PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
  They probably just opened Command Prompt and noted the first thing they saw, then in proofing someone thought the lack of it on the other side is an error as they probably saw it in HTML.
WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
> is it really "C:/>" at the prompt nowadays? Used to be "C:\>" It starts off as a prompt and becomes an html tag. It's like how my father-in-law begins a joke that ends as a riddle.
- inefficient 3y ago
  Man I wanna hear those jokes that end as a riddle. Sounds way better than this.
kmeisthax 3y ago
It's C:￥> and nobody can tell me otherwise!

irusensei 3y ago

> ilegal stream let criminals in Suggesting the stream operators will hack your bank account. Reminds me ot the "pirate media will ruin your VCR/CDDVD Player fake propaganda. Ironically... the virus came from a big reputable corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk.... A lot of industries would be in for some criticism and bad PR after that. But not these guys. They don't give a shit about reputation.

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
>> illegal stream let criminals in This has so much opportunity for improvement. ex: Blatant Lies Let Stupidity In
- ChoHag 3y ago
  [dead]
incahoots 3y ago
>let criminals in Bizarre that so many at the top will label ordinary people who don't like the idea of being gouged to watch their favorite team play as criminals. It's pretty ridiculous
- ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
  Piracy is a crime regardless of the morality of it.
  - incahoots 3y ago
    I suppose we should treat jaywalking with the same hard line approach. The justification for both only benefits those who can push such laws.
    - ThrowawayTestr 3y ago

kioleanu 3y ago

I very very rarely use streams but what Sky fails to understand is that I wouldn’t buy their service even if there wasn’t any stream available. It is simply too expensive. I am talking about Sky Sports here for example. Also in Germany for example. Last I checked, they wanted 30 euros per month and a yearly subscription when I want to see a Bundesliga match every x months. I have a season ticket for my team so I see all matches live and away games sometimes on TV. Even if I were to justify the price (it’s exactly the same price as my season pass), it’s not guaranteed that they show the match, it may be shown by DAZN, who also want 30 euros per month, but at least don’t ask for a year’s commitment. Neither service sells pay per view - I would gladly pay 5 - 10 euros per match seen

basisword 3y ago
>> I would gladly pay 5 - 10 euros per match seen In the UK at least Sky offer this. You can buy a 'day pass' and get full access to all their sports channels for a day. It's about £12. Or you can pay £34.99 for the monthly plan. In reality they constantly offer deals and when you try to cancel they offer huge discounts. I think I've been paying about £20 per month for the full sports package for the last couple of years. It's wildly more accessible now than it was when you had to buy their satellite package etc. and commit for multiple years.
- Mindwipe 3y ago
  They offer it in Germany too under the WOW brand (previously Sky Ticket). I don't think they offer the day pass but they certainly offer the single month for the sports channels.
  - kioleanu 3y ago
    Just checked, it’s only month to month for 30 euros
- youngNed 3y ago
  The per game is through their brand now https://www.nowtv.com/ https://www.nowtv.com/ It is an absoultely brutal experience, and drove me back to streaming. I bought a game last year, first i couldn't watch it on my computer (linux) next i realised that i had to pay extra for HD. Paying extra to have sport in HD? Fuck, and i cannot stress this enough, That.

bluescrn 3y ago

If we can afford a new 'dedicated police unit', how about targeting burglaries, shoplifting, and/or knife crime?

alexriddle 3y ago
I suspect the unit would be funded directly by Sky - the advantage to doing it that way is that they have access to the CPS and police intelligence, as well as all the powers the police have which they wouldn't if it was done in house. Insurance fraud is run along the same lines, all insurers contribute towards IFED which is a part of the City of London police tasked with tackling insurance fraud. If this relied on public funding I doubt anything but the most extreme cases of insurance fraud would be investigated.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > I suspect the unit would be funded directly by Sky So if politicians won't sell a corp the LEO they want, the corp can just purchase them directly.
  - Joker_vD 3y ago
    Well, I imagine it's about ROI and cost effectiveness: sometimes it's cheaper to buy the politicians already in-place, sometimes it's cheaper to buy the elections for newly-elected ones, and sometimes it's cheaper to just go straight to the executive branch and buy a small part of it instead.
- fullspectrumdev 3y ago
  Yeah that’s not how things work in Ireland. This would entirely fall on the Irish taxpayer (me) to foot the bill. Might write to my TD to specifically tell them to oppose the idea for the craic.

darkwater 3y ago

The day they understand that for sports events there is definitely a big enough audience willing to pay single matches instead of being forced to buy the entire season... Also, decoupling it from telecom connection packages (that, at least, in Spain)

kmeisthax 3y ago

One of the things that really boggles the mind here is that there even is people paying for piracy.

IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
I don't think its that mind boggling. Everyone pays -in some way- for value. Pirated streams may not cost $$, but they cost time, labor, and its risky to set up (virii, installing bloatware, etc). So there's a cost to them. A hybrid model that is low cost and low labor, simply approximates the real value to the consumer. If someone is not paying Sky 30 EUR per month, but is paying a random reseller the equivalent of 3 EUR/mo, then the question is, why doesn't the content provider sell that value to the end user?
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  Right, but this is copyright brained "lost sale" logic. Sky costs 30 EUR/mo because everyone involved in the value chain can only produce their creative works if they can charge that much. The resellers are charging 3 EUR specifically because they cut the publishers and creators of that work out of the profit. Of course you can charge 3 EUR for something you didn't have to pay for. But you could also charge nothing - you don't really have costs because you aren't paying anyone. I distinctly remember the days of P2P and BitTorrent where pirated content actually was being provided for free[0]. So in my mind, charging any amount of money for pirated content feels like a grift. [0] Or at the very least, using an internal scrip denominated in bytes transferred to encourage people to host the content
mathieuh 3y ago
I'm paying £15/month to rent a seedbox on which I have a media centre application and a torrent client installed. If I could get the same user experience for the same price legally then I would, but the legal experience is both too expensive and too shit. There was a golden year or two where it really was easier to do it legally. Now you need ten different subscriptions, and half the things you want to watch cost extra money on top of that.

benjaminwootton 3y ago

I think sports suffers from fragmentation in the same way as other content. To watch all the televised football games in the UK you need Sky Sports, TNT and Amazon Prime. Even then you can only see half the games whereas in other countries almost all Premier League matches are televised meaning that geographical licensing restrictions are also in play. I would happily pay a fairly significant fee to watch all matches conveniently, but it’s simply not available to buy.

fullspectrumdev 3y ago
In Ireland (where this article is discussing) there is no legal option for some sports content at all.
wombat-man 3y ago
Yeah, same for American Football. If you really want to watch everything you need Sunday Ticket, some TV sub that includes ESPN, Amazon Prime and NFL+. This is definitely on purpose. I just get Sunday ticket and head to the pub on the occasion that my team is playing a game not covered by that or antenna TV. The NFL is good about letting local fans see their team. The monetary pain comes if you want to see out of market games.

randomcarbloke 3y ago

It should generally be a civil matter, like trespass. Seems absurd that the police need to be involved at all.

OnlyMortal 3y ago

The resellers I’m aware of, who advertise a “Scandinavian” set of channels that include Sky UK/Ireland, are based in the Philippines and the Stalker server is/was in Russia. To even get the system to work, you have to VPN out of the UK or Ireland to start with. I think the police might have some difficulty.

heroprotagonist 3y ago

Sounds like they just don't want to pay for mercenaries.