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Police bust pirate streaming service making €250M per month
- ipsum2 2y agoIt's weird that they didn't name the service. Anyone have any ideas?
- jaco6 2y agoThe service was intentionally left unnamed to avoid driving traffic to it.
- unsnap_biceps 2y agoif it was taken down as the article suggests, there's no site to drive traffic to? or was this just a partial raid?
- StanislavPetrov 2y agoEven if it was taken down completely it will likely be replaced by a clone in very short order to take advantage of the established customers. All the big streaming pirate sites have a million splinter sites with similar but slightly different URLs.
- shiroiushi 2y ago"The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
- qingcharles 2y agoThis is all I could dig up: https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/1h25wp9/comment/lzlbtc0/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/1h25wp9/comment/lzl... Maybe this too: https://www.reddit.com/r/Annas_Archive/comments/1h2404j/the_partner_servers_have_been_taken_down_by_their/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Annas_Archive/comments/1h2404j/the_... Might also be linked: https://www.reddit.com/r/JDorama/comments/1h18s6v/to_those_that_watch_on_dramacool_all_there/ https://www.reddit.com/r/JDorama/comments/1h18s6v/to_those_t...
- ipsum2 2y agoNice find! So it could be: fmovies, Anna's Archive (hosted on same servers?), Dramacool.
- Winblows11 2y agoThat is a lot of money, which bank/payment processor is processing that much? Does it not send alarm bells? Do the bank get fined?
- SnorkelTan 2y agoCould also have been inserting commercials from video ad companies? Wonder if anyone pays for pirate streams directly
- kaikai 2y agoI know someone who paid for a pirate streaming service. They said it had anything and everything, and was only $15/month. That’s less than I’m paying for HBO now, and I only get access to the hbo catalog.
- StanislavPetrov 2y agoI've got MAX, Fubo, Amazon and the biggest cable package but I still pirate ~80% of what I watch just because it is easier, more convenient, no ads or commercials and everything is available. A lot of movies, especially older movies, aren't available as part of the package on any streaming service. They want me to pay an additional fee to "buy" the movie. Except I won't own the movie, I will have a temporary license to watch the movie on their streaming service, which is still laden with ads and other nonsense. No thanks.
- OkayBuddy44 2y agoThe one I use (one of the biggest) only takes crypto, either directly or by paying with your card through Moonpay.
- itake 2y agoJW, why pay for these services? Private trackers are still free and have all the content..
- neom 2y agoSeemed a bit odd to me the postal police took the lead on this, but apparently on top of regular interfering with the regular mail, the postal police in Italy also have a mandate that covers: "Cyber fraud and scams, Online copyright infringement, Unauthorized access to computer systems, Digital piracy"
- tehlike 2y agoKind of like mail fraud here & USPS. If the fraud involved any form of mail (checks, documents, etc) postal inspector seem to get involved. Or us secret service with finance crimes.
- TylerE 2y agoThat’s literally what the secret service was founded to do, though. The VIP security role didn’t come until decades later.
- neom 2y agoIndeed, apparently there is also a connection in Italy to the TV license, that was historically issued by the post office and I guess for a period of time peoples TV licenses where inspected by the post police, or something. I didn't dare go any further down the rabbit hole.
- Timwi 2y agoAnother win for the copyright mafia. > It is estimated that the amount of financial damages suffered annually from the illegal service is a massive €10 billion ($10.5B). Oh boo hoo, some billionaires are getting a couple billions less than they could have. How sad. And what a disingenuous framing to call it “financial damage” as if it somehow affected any ordinary people.
- itake 2y agoMy limited understanding is most content gets reinvested in creating more content. That is $10.5B that won't be used to create new movies, tv shows, etc.
- AzzyHN 2y agoThe $10.5B number is bullshit. It assumes every piracy stream user would've been a paying customer (which is false), and they would have paid the full, non-sale value (also false). For subscriptions, they usually add up the cost over at least 12 months. Sometimes longer.
- itake 2y agoThe article says they made 250M euro/mo or 3b/yr. If they operated for 4 years, that would be 12B of money lost. They probably haven't made 250m/mo for 4 years, but they probably have also been operating longer than 4 years.
- BLKNSLVR 2y agoI think the $250m per month is included in the "number is bullshit" description, given that the $10B is an extension of the $250m/mo.
- Ar-Curunir 2y agomaybe now they'll spend money thinking about what to produce, instead of producing tons of slop, most of which is not viewed by anybody.
- bhouston 2y agoIs this what is powering all those Android TV boxes you can buy?
- defrost 2y agoMore HN discussion four days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42260231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42260231
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bastard_op 2y agoThis goes to show people are sick of having to buy 5-10 services just to see all their things, they'd rather get a single pirate stream with them all. Just if you watch US football, you have to subscribe to no less than 5 services to get them all, and international sports are even worse for their football or whatever. Even one of the Seattle Seahawks players got caught watching his own games on a pirate source because even the rich ballers are sick of the all services. It's just far too easy for me to go download whatever I want to even pay for services, pirate or the real media cartels.
- brandonmenc 2y ago"Why can't I just buy cable channels à la carte?!" - everyone circa early 2000s We got exactly what we begged for.
- Pigalowda 2y agoCable tv sucks. It still exists and still sucks. I don’t think anyone was begging for the fragmented options we have now. Ideally people want to buy what they want to consume/use. Instead they make us pay fees for a bundle of garbage product rather than sell us the actual product we want. Everything as pay per view would be great. Maybe even include dynamic pricing.
- flir 2y ago> Everything as pay per view would be great. I really really don't want this. I want a flat monthly rate for all the things.
- inopinatus 2y ago“shall we watch that new show?” “which one” “the Papacy one” “you mean pay-per-view”
- atrus 2y agoExcept we didn't. Instead of 500 channels we don't want, we have 10 services with 50 channels. We've managed to actually find the worst of both worlds, which in of itself is an impressive accomplishment.
- joegibbs 2y agoNo way, I don’t believe it. That’s $3.16b yearly - Netflix makes $33b. With no IP holders to pay out to, that would mean they’re making massive profits - they would have to be a household name, and I don’t know anyone who could name many services of this size.
- yellow_lead 2y agoThere's probably some strange math going on here, like 1 view = 1 lost subscription.
- abrookewood 2y agoHave to agree - I don't know a single person who is paying for pirated content subscriptions. Seems highly unlikely.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- protocolture 2y agoI believe it. I dont think they were one service with a big brand name, just lots of individual high traffic often ad supported services, pirate channels on paid dodgy set top boxes and lots of other nonsense.
- michaelteter 2y ago> It is estimated that the amount of financial damages suffered annually from the illegal service is a massive €10 billion ($10.5B). I suspect that the actual damages would be (much) lower, as some of the people using this service would not or could not have paid for the official source. This is the same fallacy or intentional misrepresentation that the music industry used in the Napster days. As we know, if the pricing is reasonable for the market, and more importantly the content is actually _available!_ in that market, people will pay to stream it. A lot of the time, the content is unavailable in many markets; so users will have to choose between illegal or nothing. If the content is available to stream legally, and its price is too high for the region, then people wouldn't have paid for it no matter what. Thus, the revenue was not lost; the market was simply never captured.
- tzs 2y agoOne thing you might be overlooking is that there are often substitutes for the pirated products. For example back when Photoshop was several hundred dollars a lot of people who could not afford that pirated it to do home and hobbyist photo editing. If Photoshop had not been able to be pirated those people would not have bought it, so that piracy did indeed not reduce Adobe's income. However there were also programs such as Pixelmator that were more than an order of magnitude cheaper than Photoshop and could do everything those people were using Photoshop for. If Photoshop could not be pirated some of those people would have bought those other programs.
- atrus 2y agoIf someone pirates Photoshop, Pixelmator should be suing? Honestly, I'm surprised they don't try and add that into the super believable damages.
- aspenmayer 2y agoThey were simply describing the impact of relative costs on substitute goods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitute_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitute_good
- puppycodes 2y agowhat a waste of money, time and energy that could be spent on preventing real harm to real people. cops are cops.
- Refusing23 2y agoSo police should only prevent crimes that directly hurt people? so bike thieves or shoplifters are just safe now?
- puppycodes 2y agopolice should protect people, not whining corporations. A bike and streaming tv are completely incompatible analogies. No one is deprived of their property by folks streaming the soccer match via IPTV because they cant afford the nightmarish subscription bundles from inescapable monopolies.
- shiroiushi 2y ago> No one is deprived of their property by folks streaming the soccer match via IPTV because they cant afford the nightmarish subscription bundles from inescapable monopolies. Or even worse, no one is deprived of their property by folks streaming the soccer match via IPTV because the owner simply doesn't offer it on any service in their country.
- jack_pp 2y agoI was going to play devil's advocate and say that sports team budgets would suffer but maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing. Maybe if movies weren't about making so much money we'd have better movies instead of cash grabs. Sure we wouldn't have big budget CGI movies but that's a sacrifice I'd be willing to make
- TiredOfLife 2y agoIn US shoplifting and car theft are already essentially legal. Nobody prosecutes.
- throwaway8754aw 2y agoI pay for almost all Streaming services via promo offers and visit pirate websites too. Yet I rarely use either rather just watch things on YouTube, TikTok or instagram reels. All offer short form content and they know what I like to watch and keep feeding me such. Long form content at times I found hard to sit through now.
- asynchronous 2y agoReading this spooks me in a weird way.
- max_ 2y agoGen-Z TikTok induced ADHD
- throwaway8754aw 2y agoI'm almost 50
- throwaway8754aw 2y agoHow so? I think it's indicative that YouTube and TikTok are the biggest streamers out there and are changing how we consume media not Netflix, max, etc. especially for the younger generation tho I'm almost 50.
- lifestyleguru 2y ago> Catania Prosecutor's Office and the Italian Postal Police I was always wondering what are the competences of all these Italian police forces: Guardia di Finanza, Polizia Municipale, Polizia di Stato, Polizia Stradale, Carabinieri. They are all over the place, driving around, while Italian mafia bosses are oftentimes "hiding" their whole lifetime in their home villages nearby. Then here it is, yet another one! Polizia Postale!
- tacker2000 2y agoWell, in the US some universities even have their own campus police forces, so…?
- lifestyleguru 2y agoIn US even copyright thugs have their own police, doesn't mean it's an excuse for other countries.
- xenospn 2y agoI refuse to believe someone making this much money is unable to buy their way out of trouble.
- JimmyWilliams1 2y ago[dead]