I happily pay for games on Steam, and for music on Apple Music. Those are easy and reasonably-priced one-stop-shops for all my gaming and music wants. I don't have to waste time with crack executables and tagging MP3 files like I did back when I sailed the high seas.
It'd be great if there were something similar for TV and movies. The streaming landscape is too damn fragmented these days with confusing exclusivity deals, libraries shrinking, and prices rising.
Look at rideshare apps. They made hired cars cheap and easy to access but fell foul of existing taxi companies and regulations.
Whether he is in the right or not is decided in a court of law. However Disney et al have deeper pocketed lobbyists than municipal taxi companies.
There will always be a type of entrepreneur who flouts laws they don’t agree with, whether it’s copyright law or taxi regulations or whatever. The enforcement of those laws ultimately determines what the market looks like after the fact.
That's not a very different argument from saying people will steal merchandise and sell it on the corner because consumers prefer to pay less and not walk the aisles.
> But for some, the financial toll is enormous. Shan Chandrasekar, the president of the Asian Television Network, the Toronto-based operator of 54 channels that show everything from Bollywood movies to cricket matches, said his company has been financially gutted by piracy.
> In 2011, he said ATN had its best year, earning revenues of more than $26 million. That number plummeted to just $9 million last year due to a long, slow decline in subscribers.
> He said popular channels from overseas that ATN was paying high licence fees and royalties to broadcast in Canada were being pirated "left, right and centre."
> "Piracy became rampant from the year 2012 onwards, and in the year 2017 it spread like wildfire," he said.
That's a LOT of crying for an exec in an industry that's seen massive growth over the last decade+. I don't buy for a second that piracy has blown up since 2017. This sounds like a skill issue and way to cover his ass.
I'm unsure about the Canadian market particularly but i can name half a dozen people I know personally who have "Steaming boxes". Most are tech illiterate so I doubt they fully know what it is or how they work but I'm sure they know its illegal.
Piracy isn't as rampant as the Kazza/Limewire days but it seems to have taken off again in a big way.
Maybe splitting everything off in to 12 different services and plastering ads over the top of the lot wasn't the masterful MBA plan it first seemed.
This is, once again, the story of piracy. Getting an M3U to put into whatever client of your choice is a soooooo much better experience than using whatever garbage IPTV app polluted with tracking most of the major players offer. DVR? My client offers that… I don’t need to pay some BS “DVR Fee” for that. Want channels not offered by that provider? No problem, mux them together into a unified M3U using something like xTeVe. Don’t want 10000 channels of the same reality show with slightly different themes? Just delete them using the same tools.
Recently my TV provider has decided to put all their DVR features in the cloud. So I have a huge DVR with hard drives sitting under my TV that's now completely useless as far as they are concerned.
Instead I get laggy replay functionality in their cloud that doesn't even work right and fails to record new episodes every so often.
And of course it prevents fast forwarding through ads, which I'm sure is why they went with this bullshit solution.
What's funny is most radio stations use pirate services to get music... And it's completely legal.
They can count how many people listened to each pay, and send payment per estimated listeners, and it's legal.
I can also buy sheet music for $popularsong, perform it in public. And if I pay mechanistic reproduction rights per listener, it's legal.
We need something similar for video content. That would allow a mega-aggregator to get everything, and pay royalties per play. And if they start charging stupid money, any new company can build it!
I mean -- that's essentially what TikTok and YouTube have been doing, right? They let anyone upload any music and then figure out where the rights payments go. That's the main reason I use YouTube Music over all the others: because they have ultra rare shit that some dude in Kazakhstan found on a CD in a Dumpster in 1991 that wouldn't make it into Apple Music.
> "There is a TON of money to be made in IPTV and i'm just getting started!" Activeits wrote on March 14, 2018, later dismissing concerns he would get sued or sent to jail. "Everything i do, i do carefully."
Seesh. Rule 1 of comitting crime. Don't brag about it on the internet.
> He said popular channels from overseas that ATN was paying high licence fees and royalties to broadcast in Canada were being pirated "left, right and centre."
That means that the fees are too high and should be renegotiated.
Another Youtuber called "Omi in a Hellcat" - he owned properties and a large collection of nice cars which he parked outside his large McMansion and had a IPTV solution he sold via Firesticks.
The Feds eventually arrested him and took all his assets as restitution, and he got a 5 years sentence.
Ignorance of the law is no defense as he found out.
The US justice system have a very long reach - just ask the crypto bros who thought they were safe in some Eastern European country (i.e Andrew Tate) or some tropical island.
Probably the only safe heaven is Russia or North Korea.
[+] [-] Eddy_Viscosity2|2 years ago|reply
I'm not saying this guy is in the right. But neither is Disney or the motion picture association. Lots of wrongs adding up here.
[+] [-] the_snooze|2 years ago|reply
It'd be great if there were something similar for TV and movies. The streaming landscape is too damn fragmented these days with confusing exclusivity deals, libraries shrinking, and prices rising.
[+] [-] qingcharles|2 years ago|reply
It took a minute, but the BBC themselves finally came through: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BritBox
[+] [-] mikrl|2 years ago|reply
Whether he is in the right or not is decided in a court of law. However Disney et al have deeper pocketed lobbyists than municipal taxi companies.
There will always be a type of entrepreneur who flouts laws they don’t agree with, whether it’s copyright law or taxi regulations or whatever. The enforcement of those laws ultimately determines what the market looks like after the fact.
[+] [-] lupire|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jobs_throwaway|2 years ago|reply
> In 2011, he said ATN had its best year, earning revenues of more than $26 million. That number plummeted to just $9 million last year due to a long, slow decline in subscribers.
> He said popular channels from overseas that ATN was paying high licence fees and royalties to broadcast in Canada were being pirated "left, right and centre."
> "Piracy became rampant from the year 2012 onwards, and in the year 2017 it spread like wildfire," he said.
That's a LOT of crying for an exec in an industry that's seen massive growth over the last decade+. I don't buy for a second that piracy has blown up since 2017. This sounds like a skill issue and way to cover his ass.
[+] [-] swarnie|2 years ago|reply
Piracy isn't as rampant as the Kazza/Limewire days but it seems to have taken off again in a big way.
Maybe splitting everything off in to 12 different services and plastering ads over the top of the lot wasn't the masterful MBA plan it first seemed.
[+] [-] teeray|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tetris11|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beeboobaa3|2 years ago|reply
Instead I get laggy replay functionality in their cloud that doesn't even work right and fails to record new episodes every so often.
And of course it prevents fast forwarding through ads, which I'm sure is why they went with this bullshit solution.
[+] [-] xydone|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pierat|2 years ago|reply
They can count how many people listened to each pay, and send payment per estimated listeners, and it's legal.
I can also buy sheet music for $popularsong, perform it in public. And if I pay mechanistic reproduction rights per listener, it's legal.
We need something similar for video content. That would allow a mega-aggregator to get everything, and pay royalties per play. And if they start charging stupid money, any new company can build it!
[+] [-] lupire|2 years ago|reply
It is not something that the music rights owners voluntarily created.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/115
[+] [-] qingcharles|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bawolff|2 years ago|reply
Seesh. Rule 1 of comitting crime. Don't brag about it on the internet.
[+] [-] gwbas1c|2 years ago|reply
That means that the fees are too high and should be renegotiated.
[+] [-] tibbydudeza|2 years ago|reply
The Feds eventually arrested him and took all his assets as restitution, and he got a 5 years sentence.
Ignorance of the law is no defense as he found out.
The US justice system have a very long reach - just ask the crypto bros who thought they were safe in some Eastern European country (i.e Andrew Tate) or some tropical island.
Probably the only safe heaven is Russia or North Korea.