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What about all the pirate websites? There's hundreds of them all around the world, some supported with ads, others with subscriptions. How do they manage the ba

What about all the pirate websites? There's hundreds of them all around the world, some supported with ads, others with subscriptions. How do they manage the bandwidth problems?

justsomehnguy 3y ago
a) you don't waste money on the licensing in the first place b) you find the hosting where you can just pay for bandwidth c) the bandwidth is actually cheap, until you hit petabytes of traffic or dozens gb/s of BW d) you don't scale for millions, you scale for hundreds, maybe thousands EDIT: e) most users of such sites aren't demanding for quality nor service, therefore you can compress a lot more and if you overloaded they would come to other sites (which could be operated by the same people just serving from the other place)
- golergka 3y ago
  > e) most users of such sites aren't demanding for quality nor service, therefore you can compress a lot more and if you overloaded they would come to other sites (which could be operated by the same people just serving from the other place) Actually, the opposite is true. If you live a country where piracy is persecuted and these services aren't available and you want to watch Silo, you don't have a choice — you have to pay for Apple TV. If you want to watch Stranger Things, you have to pay for Netflix. But if those services are available to you, then you would have those shows on any of dozens of pirate services, and you can switch between them anytime. At which point they actually start to compete on other qualities, like streaming. In fact, many of them have much better quality, at least in the areas where their audience lives.
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    > Actually, the opposite is true. It's not 'opposite', it's some people care but most are don't. You can cater for those who care, but that means costs in services and people, or you can ignore all that noise and print money from Regular Joe, who bought 15-in-1 DVD mere a decade ago.
- bmicraft 3y ago
  c) and d) don't make much sense Bandwidth might be cheaper in absolute terms, but you're not paying less per user than if you scaled higher. How do you go from there to "the business model is to not scale up"
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    > but you're not paying less per user than if you scaled higher Except you need more money thrown in the hardware to be able to utilize that bandwidth. It doesn't scale linearly. At some point it's easier to setup another node to handle another 10Gbit and while you now pay double the node cost , now you can actually scale horizontally, because it's easier to serve the same content to different people from many nodes than from one big fat one. Also, you need clients who would watch your content and would give you ad views and hence money. If you pay $1000/m more for another 10Gbit for each node in the first place then it's another $1000/node you need to get each month. Remember, this is not enterprise customers, with $/user costs, this is profiteering from a highly fluctuating and risky market of solving the service problem... without paying the IP holders anything. Though that's a B2B service problem too, but it wouldn't be solved till corporations' greed would exist.
EamonnMR 3y ago
For them, content is free.
- kenhwang 3y ago
  Sometimes bandwidth too if they have clever peer-to-peer setups.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  I still don't get how so many 123movies clones can keep popping up with seemingly every TV show and movie there, with probably nearly all users using ad-blockers and very few possible advertisers in the first place. They get taken down regularly then presumably deal with the effort of moving elsewhere. They don't seem to be p2p either, they have some server. Maybe it's stolen infra.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    A lot of the pirate streaming services I see are either using torrents on the backend or they're abusing normal video hosting services and just replacing links that get taken down so that when the sites/apps themselves die they only need a new domain/app to point at the the same files on those same services instead of moving TBs of files around
  - wingworks 3y ago
    Most don't host the content themselves. They iframe or whatever other hosts.
  - subtra3t 3y ago
    They embed other hosts, most of the websites usually use the same hosts but with different frontends slapped on top.
- autoexec 3y ago
  99% of the content is free for twitch and youtube too.
  - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dexwiz 3y ago
For them the viewer may actually be the product if they are distributing malware, mining coins in the background, or hijacking bandwidth. One reason to pay for a service is avoiding being a product. Rich people will pay out the nose for discretion because information about them has serious value.

What about all the pirate websites? There's hundreds of them all around the world, some supported with ads, others with subscriptions. How do they manage the bandwidth problems?

justsomehnguy 3y ago

a) you don't waste money on the licensing in the first place b) you find the hosting where you can just pay for bandwidth c) the bandwidth is actually cheap, until you hit petabytes of traffic or dozens gb/s of BW d) you don't scale for millions, you scale for hundreds, maybe thousands EDIT: e) most users of such sites aren't demanding for quality nor service, therefore you can compress a lot more and if you overloaded they would come to other sites (which could be operated by the same people just serving from the other place)

golergka 3y ago
> e) most users of such sites aren't demanding for quality nor service, therefore you can compress a lot more and if you overloaded they would come to other sites (which could be operated by the same people just serving from the other place) Actually, the opposite is true. If you live a country where piracy is persecuted and these services aren't available and you want to watch Silo, you don't have a choice — you have to pay for Apple TV. If you want to watch Stranger Things, you have to pay for Netflix. But if those services are available to you, then you would have those shows on any of dozens of pirate services, and you can switch between them anytime. At which point they actually start to compete on other qualities, like streaming. In fact, many of them have much better quality, at least in the areas where their audience lives.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  > Actually, the opposite is true. It's not 'opposite', it's some people care but most are don't. You can cater for those who care, but that means costs in services and people, or you can ignore all that noise and print money from Regular Joe, who bought 15-in-1 DVD mere a decade ago.
bmicraft 3y ago
c) and d) don't make much sense Bandwidth might be cheaper in absolute terms, but you're not paying less per user than if you scaled higher. How do you go from there to "the business model is to not scale up"
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  > but you're not paying less per user than if you scaled higher Except you need more money thrown in the hardware to be able to utilize that bandwidth. It doesn't scale linearly. At some point it's easier to setup another node to handle another 10Gbit and while you now pay double the node cost , now you can actually scale horizontally, because it's easier to serve the same content to different people from many nodes than from one big fat one. Also, you need clients who would watch your content and would give you ad views and hence money. If you pay $1000/m more for another 10Gbit for each node in the first place then it's another $1000/node you need to get each month. Remember, this is not enterprise customers, with $/user costs, this is profiteering from a highly fluctuating and risky market of solving the service problem... without paying the IP holders anything. Though that's a B2B service problem too, but it wouldn't be solved till corporations' greed would exist.

EamonnMR 3y ago

For them, content is free.

kenhwang 3y ago
Sometimes bandwidth too if they have clever peer-to-peer setups.
hot_gril 3y ago
I still don't get how so many 123movies clones can keep popping up with seemingly every TV show and movie there, with probably nearly all users using ad-blockers and very few possible advertisers in the first place. They get taken down regularly then presumably deal with the effort of moving elsewhere. They don't seem to be p2p either, they have some server. Maybe it's stolen infra.
- autoexec 3y ago
  A lot of the pirate streaming services I see are either using torrents on the backend or they're abusing normal video hosting services and just replacing links that get taken down so that when the sites/apps themselves die they only need a new domain/app to point at the the same files on those same services instead of moving TBs of files around
- wingworks 3y ago
  Most don't host the content themselves. They iframe or whatever other hosts.
- subtra3t 3y ago
  They embed other hosts, most of the websites usually use the same hosts but with different frontends slapped on top.
autoexec 3y ago
99% of the content is free for twitch and youtube too.
- 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dexwiz 3y ago

For them the viewer may actually be the product if they are distributing malware, mining coins in the background, or hijacking bandwidth. One reason to pay for a service is avoiding being a product. Rich people will pay out the nose for discretion because information about them has serious value.