Author here. This is funny to wake up to. A version of this microsite was posted previously (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45434062) though it didn't have much of the content that exists here.
If anyone has any general questions (it seems like my little “startup lessons” page is as popular as the others) I’m be happy to answer them as long as they’re not too technical or related to my finances. However, the specifics of the technical side of my site are best found on TorrentFreak, and, in short: curl commands.
I was just just interested in how your "say no" lesson came from the streaming site. I am sure they asked you for all sorts of channels, but from their perspective, I kind of understand it. I had really wondered what kind of crazy of stuff you were shooting down. I didn't expect anyone to go too crazy on expecting feature requests on a pirate site.
You wrote about "small, honest teams" - the older I get the more I get the hunch that small teams/companies are a great way to go for me. Basically, choose some field you enjoy working in, with people you like. Any thoughts on how to find something like this? I feel like its the kind of thing you have to start yourself, but I can't take much risk.
My experience in finding one (15 people at the company I’m currently at, and I’m one of 3.5 engineers) (.5 because founder still codes more than we’d like him to) was effectively reaching out to companies that I knew didn’t have job postings up, and was the size that I’d fit into. I learned quickly that not every vacancy is posted publicly.
I purchased a cracked Adobe product DVD there (Disclaimer: I actually had a license at the time, but didn't have it installed on that particular laptop). I had trouble installing it, so I went back. I got my money back and help installing an alternative on my laptop. Best service!
PS: Also, Odessa is very beautiful, and I say that as someone who has lived in some beautiful places. -- https://youtu.be/G-BkuEOFGKI (Odessa Walking Tour - Ukraine's Most Beautiful City in 4K -- and this is still missing the many wonderful inner courtyards, and the entire long wonderful beach and park, which would be another equally long video)
The illegal bushiness apparently has incentives to keep their customers, while the legal ones rest on their legal monopoly-laurels.
I'd imagine if we had a market where every service had access to every piece of content, so no exclusivity, this problem would go away. Then they'd compete on the quality of service rather than their selection of content they've held hostage. But as long as individual services can opt to not never share their content with anybody else, they can just hold their customers hostage, since they cannot get their good from anywhere else, so the only options are buy or don't buy.
Shouldn't music streaming services be an example for a market where each service offers pretty much the same products and they compete on price and product alone.
But they don't offer the same products. The UX and tools are largely the same, or similar enough, but the product is not the same. The product for streaming services is by and large the content catalog they offer.
Each streaming service has their own exclusive deals with publishers and offer a completely different catalog of music/movies.
This is why pirate sites are far superior, because they don't have those artificial limits on the product catalog offered.
"Exclusive deals" in this context as analogous to "monopolistic deals", the former term sounds less bad, but in terms of consumer effect, "monopolistic" is a much more apt word to use.
In the US, this song is unavailable on Spotify where I found it, but available on YT music. Preface by Man Without Country. Given another 5 minutes, I could also find a song that is not listed on one but available on another.
That may be true for bigger artists on major labels, but for smaller independent bands it’s not always the case. I am a heavy user and fan of Bandcamp for listening to and purchasing music but I use Spotify for listening in the car and sharing playlists. I often find albums that are only available on either Spotify or Bandcamp but not both.
The ones that aren’t available on Spotify tend to be self-released but otherwise there isn’t much of a pattern. Albums not on Bandcamp, though, tend to be mediocre at best.
And that’s not even mentioning bands that are pulling their music from Spotify in protest…
I used to be a big digital music hoarder. I hate Spotify, YouTube is the thing that killed music downloading for me. It has pretty much everything worth listening to, it's free, AdBlock keeps it usable, and it has a great diversity of other content.
If i'm not mistaken the people behind Spotify were also some of the people behind The Pirate Bay, so they may have had some seriously good insights on how to treat your customers.
Not everyone uses every service equally, nor need the same from each service. "Listening to music" is a broad spectrum of activities in reality, and when I use streaming services, I almost exclusively use them for discovery and to find new music, and music I actually listen to more than once is bought rather than streamed. So while for me the single most important question for me is "How easy does this service make it for me to find new music?", for others, the question might be "What service streams the highest quality?". This is besides the whole legal thing with "What music is available there vs here" that others already mentioned.
Yes. Although there are some gaps, you have to go fairly far out there to find them. Most everything is on every music streaming platform. The music industry got that memo after MP3 piracy became rampant.
But the video streaming platforms haven't gotten that memo yet and prefer to dig themselves into a larger and larger hole, both as far as normal Netflix style on-demand streaming, and IPTV style streams for sports and such. Hence why piracy of both are growing, with torrents on one side and IPTV pirate streams on the other.
Not that the music business has had some very shady business in the past, but my guess is that the movie industry is even more shady. Didn't the Harry Potter movies make a gigantic loss on paper? Steve Jackson had to sue the company to get his Lord of The Rings money, if i'm not mistaken.
Yup, "hollywood accounting" at its finest. It's exploitative AF - established actors and other key staff can demand percentage of gross revenue, everyone else gets either a fixed amount or, worse, net revenue percentage. But as there is always a fresh supply of new desperates, you either take what is offered or you go hungry.
Even the big unions have failed to put an end to this unholy mess.
20 year long patents are a large factor for it, designed for a very different world where progress was extremely slow. It's borderline absurd to keep them going today, they can restrict the usage of a technology for more than the entire duration of its usefulness before it's superseded by something better, which is patented again, giving you a series of sequential monopolies instead of a competitive market. I'm glad that at least the Chinese dgaf about patents so there is still some competition in practice even if questionably legal.
The other large factor is copyright. If we had 21 year copyright terms for shows and movies, I'd imagine someone would have set up a streaming service with every show and movie under the sun that they could fit into that, and people would eat it up, since they often just want to half-watch Seinfield, Friends, Star Trek, et cetera, since its their comfort show. A service that can provide that without being hostile is quite a lot of what many people look for in a streaming service.
> This idea would last in the short-term, and once money dried up, result in a nonexistent market.
Tell that to the music industry. That is not without its fault, but the products on offer are much better than the movie industry has. The market is smaller than it once was, i.e. there's less money flowing through the system, because the consumer isn't being squeezed from every side. The customer is being provided a better product for less money. That's a good thing in my opinion. Having the market be artificially inflated because everyone's got their own small realm no-one else is allowed to touch without paying a hefty licence fee is not a good thing in my opinion.
I don't think "tell that to the music industry", an industry where it is notoriously near-impossible for the people who actually _create_ music to earn a living from their work without signing a deal with a tiny handful of record companies, is the ringing endorsement of "customer getting service for pennies is good actually" that you are portraying it as.
I have often found that the illegal sites have much better UX for finding movies to watch. I can filter by review score, year of release, genre, country of origin, or half dozen other variables and in all combinations. And then they're presented in a big readable table rather than five options I have to scroll endlessly through one at a time.
Not true. My experience is the UX is okay to good, but often there's click-bait ad-serving friction and distraction.
You never know if your search is get you what you want, bring up a pop-up of HotLonelyBabes4U (when you're looking for kids cartoons), or take you to a scam site that wants you to download a "helper."
Aside from that, the experience is rarely terrible - like the trad video streaming sites that give you endless horizontal scrolling lists sorted very broadly by topic, kind of, with an entertaining randomness about the categories.
I've thought about this a lot. My takeaway is that it's incredibly hard to scale personality—which I have in spades—and even more difficult to give the freedoms for each customer support individual to operate equally as themselves.
You can't build a playbook for friendliness, and people have bad days which they certainly can drag into work. I am guilty of this, too. The proceeding week after my mom died I was rather terse, and have some uncomfortable memories of being short and not living up to my own standards. I went so far as to tell the person my situation and they told me that because I'm providing a service I have to do better. This user in particular was relatively new. If I recall correctly, he churned.
That was one of the lessons I took away was that not every customer is a good customer. While I did have really accessible customer service, I didn’t want to be everything to anyone, even if it left money on the table. The quirks and features of the site where enough for the typical Reddit user (at the time) to discern, more so than those who were accustomed to official services, sports or otherwise.
These kind of pirated IPTV services are very popular in middle eastern countries. You message some guy on whatsapp, pay him a couple bucks and receive a link to an APK file + login info. The app gives you access to basically any channel in every country. They have to do everything through word of mouth because its high risk, obviously, and even in developed countries you can get sent to jail pretty quickly for running something like this. I was expecting esoteric OPSEC lessons from this post, because if thats not the highest priority, its pretty stupid to even consider doing this.
in what we would consider "non-developed countries", the powers-that-be might not care about copyrights, but about getting their cut/bakshish. Particularly the "illegal" world doesn't take kind to outside "invaders" making money on someone else's turf.
it's the same thing in western Europe, piracy IPTV is a very popular thing since few years now, you get that through discord servers or really a simple query on aliexpress and you can buy a yearly account for 30$.
Good OPSEC is surprisingly simple and boring. Essentially, it just boils down to using tor and not accidentally exposing sensitive information, which is how Ross Ulbricht got caught. (okay, it is more than that but in essence it is true)
There are probably many people in prison right now because tor is awfully slow. If you don't have the patience for tor you probably also don't have the patience for prison.
The last quote in particular is rather timely: on Wednesday I "came out" to the entire company that I work for with a cheeky slideshow, which started as an "about me" during an all-hands ("look, we have a new employee!") and then was like, "oh yeah also..."
Being able to shape the narrative and tell my side of the story before someone sees some of the slanted reporting has continued to prove helpful. I even went so far as to say "I know people Google their colleagues sometimes and that's cool just be aware that the truth is usually in the middle of what the DOJ says and what actually happened."
> I used to think ethics were a set of rules to follow. Now I think they're more like tests—constant ones—that you run against your own motivations.
Is the big one. And interestingly, single guys doing stuff that is ethically defensible are at a larger risk of ending up in trouble with the law than big corporations doing far worse stuff. So the lesson at a personal level is a completely different one than at the corporate level, there it is 'what we can get away with' versus 'what we should do to be good citizens'.
I found the whole site a very interesting (and fairly quick) read. I don't really have anything else to add, but I'm glad the owner manages to be honest and take good lessons from the whole thing.
It's interesting to me how from his account, everyone is fairly sympathetic to him regarding his charges (he mentions his employer showing up to his interview in a sports jersey in reference to his charges!), and how he mentions he knows several actual sports players used his site. It really goes to show the state of modern streaming.
This one was really important to me. Even the transactional emails were a bit fun to read. I kept them informal, as if I was talking to a friend of a friend. I certainly swore in them, too (at myself), when I was apologizing for things not working right.
Occasionally I'd get replies saying that the person looked forward to me automatically emailing them. That was a good litmus test.
Eh... I lean towards "no" on that point, unless you can do it well. I've received far too many reddit-tier fellow kids/omg so random/cringe emails, and I hate it. An example from Queal (a Soylent-style meal powder):
Winter is coming in Westeros and you must prepare by stocking up on food. Who knows if Drogon will fly by and burn your storage of snacks. Or the Night King will come to reign in the long winter. So prepare to receive a package from *REDACTED* with tracking ID: *REDACTED*
You can keep an eye on the progress of your package with this tracking link *REDACTED*.
People in the Seven Kingdoms still use carrier pigeons, so please note it could take up to a full workday for the link to become active.
Autumn will end soon enough, be prepared!
Please just fucking stop. I really like their product, but their emails make my blood boil. Don't be like Queal.
I recently learned that, just like most other businesses, a lot of free pirate streaming sites are actually powered by a few big content aggregators[1][2][3]. They don't do much beyond providing a nice-looking frontend to an unauthenticated API that those aggregators expose.
One could probably spin one of these up in an afternoon (if making money was not the goal). The barriers of entry to this ecosystem are a lot lower than I ever imagined.
Those aggregators serve their own ads (what you get through the API is a link to a web player embed, not to the video directly). I suspect that bigger sites get some kind of kickback for bringing in traffic to those players.
I would call it a hero-site. That's what they are - they are heroes for unrestricting information.
Take ublock origin. Now, many say it is an ad-blocker; the ublock origin author says the extension is a generic content blocker. I agree with that but I go further: I call ublock origin a hero-blocker, or better, a heroic blocker. It blocks unwanted things in general. For similar reasons I think the term "piratebay" is old. It made more sense in the 2000s. Now I would call it herobay.
People may wonder about those terms, but I think it is important to use better terms than old terms. The old terms often were hijacked by the law system and mega-corporations with their own particular interests. It is time that the people re-define the law. Law should serve the people.
If copying isn’t theft then I guess we can stop worrying about open source licensing. Anyone, including corporations, would be able to take open source code and copy it into their own products, reselling it without consent or releasing their changes because they haven’t stolen anything, just copied it, right?
If you spend years of your life writing some software and then it accidentally gets revealed to the world by mistake, anyone can copy it and use it as their own? Because copying isn’t theft, theft they haven’t stolen anything from you, so you have nothing to complain about?
I can't tell if you're sarcastically describing the world we live in or if you genuinely haven't realized all these things happen regularly. Poe's law I guess.
Preventing someone from getting value out of their work is theft - not matter how it is done. Copying a dead person's work isn't theft because a dead person can't create value, but stealing a dead person's car is still theft, because something of value is gone.
Stealing a car you were never going to buy and making an exact replica of a car you were never going to buy is two entirely different things.
"IP theft" is not counter to that definition. Intellectual property is a 'something'. That definition, does not require depriving someone else of something. As another valid example, see "identity theft".
Furthermore, English is not prescriptive; dictionaries are a lagging reference of observed use... so yes, the users of English absolutely do get to redefine language. That's how all modern English words originated.
And finally, if your dictionary doesn't account for "IP theft", you have simply found an incorrect dictionary, because that usage is undeniably widespread -- whether or not you agree with the concept politically.
This is a monetized streaming site that spams reddit users. This is the hero in your mind? Is your philosophy that as long as the legal IP holders don't get paid it's great?
The UI of some piracy streaming sites are better than legit sites with much less hoops to jump through than torrents/Usenet or region locked legal services for rare stuff.
It started as a proof of concept and graduated to a free site, and eventually I put a paywall up to see if anyone would be willing to pay. Internally, I hoped nobody would—I wanted to have a social life and not be beholden to old men telling me their ghetto streaming site was broken—and I expected nobody would.
The first purchase was for $100 on a "pay what you think it's worth" model, and after watching the value that others were willing to pay, I had a good idea as to what I would ultimately charge.
The vast majority of pirate stream sites are monetized in some way. If I was going to use one I'd probably prefer to pay some small amount rather than deal with the hellish ads the 'free' ones use.
A lot of the pirate stream sites I've run into break entirely if you have an adblocker enabled. I'd guess it's a combination of filter lists not being tested on them along with much more aggressive ads (from sketchier ad networks).
Use a good adblocker. I'd never do anything illegal, of course, but a friend of my friend has been successfully using all sorts of pirated content sites for years, and swears he barely sees any ads.
Or, you know, don't. The less popular these sites are, the longer they stay around.
Geofencing (you can't watch this sport from this location because fuck you), devices blacklisting (you can't watch this sport on your mobile device because fuck you), rights expiring (you can't watch this match anymore despite you have "bought" it because fuck you), screen limiting (you are logged in on both your TV and iphone so fuck you), etc. All for $19.99.
In contrast, you pay like $9.99 and you can watch anything, anywhere, anytime.
Remember when music piracy died? When Steve Jobs removed friction between me and my music.
No DRM issues (like same quality on every device, no extra privileges), one application for everything, runs everywhere, no UX issues (e.g., long scrolling to continue watching series, no autoplay and no spoilers in the thumbnail). It's worth paying for such an experience, which the first parties don't provide.
(Speaking in general here, this includes Jellyfin.)
DRM issues are why I cancelled and won't renew Paramount+. Their damn Google TV app running on a completely stock/factory Chromecast w/ Google TV, plugged in via HDMI to an unmodified TV, frequently (always on the same shows, especially newer Star Trek series) refuses to recognize the validity of my setup and reverts to an incredibly annoying color tint rotation that cycles between extremes. It took me quite a while to figure out what the hell was happening.
I'm personally not into piracy, but with paid pirate sports streaming websites, you often get a better user experience and way more choice for cheaper than with the legal options. You only need to pay once and you don't need to jump between apps.
I don't condone it but if you're in the UK and you want to legally watch every premier league game last season...
Sky Sports - £35/month
TNT Sports - £32/month
Amazon Prime - £9/month
And then in the UK there is a legal peculiarity whereby 3pm Saturday games are illegal to broadcast on television, so you don't even get that slot. It's the most common slot with about a third of the weekends games.
v.s. Paying someone on discord £8/month for all the games
You can often get a deal if you threaten to cancel, go through with it, and then wait for a retentions offer, but since Sky was acquired by Comcast that's happening less and less, especially for the superior Sky Q satellite service - you can get great deals on their Sky Stream service, but it's plagued with issues, and you no longer have the ability to time shift by having the main box record directly off the satellite feed.
You also can't skip ads unless you pay them, versus the ability to pause, fast forward etc. on the Satellite service.
I don't have cable or IPTV, but I do pirate other stuff that I paid for:
Anything that has intrusive DRM has no place in my computer.
If it's for work, I will still pirate while holding the license, just for the stability alone.
For music stuff stability is paramount and I'd rather not deal with things that magically stop working from time to time (IK Multimedia is notorious for that).
IPTV in Western Europe is becoming more popular because it's decently priced for what you get. Say you want to watch football, but don't give a shit about anything else sports related. Well, you're probably still paying for everything else in a giant package for 50-100+ USD a month.
Especially for someone who only cares about their team, watching two games a month, that's a really bad deal. Even more so if your local offer is burdened with bad commentators or ads you can't get away from. Scale that problem up to someone who watches a few different sports, but none are available as one single package, and the value for money gets worse, while the experience grows worse as well, being you're now divided between several services. Add in DRM and bad app experiences, and you get people who just can't be arsed to do things properly any more, given they are functionally being punished for doing so.
Or you could pay a shady guy a few quid a month, but the service is good, and you get everything under the sun, moon, sky, and maybe even the stars. Can't blame them for wanting an experience that isn't trying to wring them dry.
It's so funny how much that reminds me of working in a university acquired by a large for-profit corporation.
After the MBAs arrived, the whole thing was about selling shitty packages for students.
- The college was somehow legally allowed to charge a minimum, so people only needing one single class was still paying for 3.
- They would push high distance learning for anything they legally could, showing the same video of the same teacher to all their 10 universities and paying "tutors" a minimum wage to moderate hundreds of Moodle classes (if not putting Masters students to do it for half the minimum wage). So 80 students paying $1000 on average to take a 5 class, and some of those cost on average $2000 + server costs. What a business.
- Of course classes that had 10 people in it suddenly had 40. And for when there wasn't 40 people to attend, they would consolidate classes with another group and half would have to go to the other side of town for the one class that, if they didn't attend, would set back their tuition by one year.
But yeah, sure it makes more money.
When you don't even have to compete on quality, that's what happens.
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is that you dont have to deal with re-authentication just because you decided to watch it at a different location.
There are many small papercuts that legal providers subject customers to.
I rented a movie recently on Amazon and it refused to play in high definition because they didn't like the device I was streaming it to. Bullshit like that.
You always pay for piracy or it is bad experience. You have to pay in your resources (private torrent trackers) or in cash (derbit, usenet). Alternatively you use unstable and low quality stream.
Because of philosophy I prefer sharing resources more than cash.
I never paid a cent and always found what I looked for, just type whatever you're looking for + "torrent" on yandex and you'll hit something relevant very quickly
From what he says in the post I think this guy was selling pirated livestreams of sports - something that people want to watch as it is happening, not as a torrent after the event.
Stremio + torrentio for me is a very good setup personally. It just works but I know of other mechanisms too.
One of these was to actually download a torrent and use torrentfs or something similar and you can stream a video directly from the mirror without downloading it fully and on linux, I really appreciate its simplicity and I love it ngl
You have to go pretty far out there to find shows and movies that aren't on public trackers. I definitely can find gaps if I go looking for them, especially if we start counting not finding a blu-ray rip while a DVD rip is easily found, or not finding a 4K rip but a 1080p one is out there, but for most anything friends would have asked me to dig up, a high quality rip is easily found. Not to mention that once found, it can just stay on a hard drive and be easily retrieved for next time.
The only exception I can think of are local shows, but I don't watch them, specifically because they're only on Actual TV™, which I haven't watched in years, they only recently got onto the local streaming services. They should still be on local private trackers, which I can definitely agree is a hassle, but depending on how bad your local streaming service is, they can definitely a be a tempting prospect.
I'd absolutely hate being on the receiving end of some of these. e.g.
>I gave my users lists of those posts and encouraged them to comment
A service doing this would instantly be on my shit list. I'm trying to buy a service in exchange for money, not get spammed about being someone's guerilla marketing team for free / and or getting roped into a referral scheme.
I don't mind organically advocating for things I've had a good experience with but not like this
> A service doing this would instantly be on my shit list.
Most people would just ignore it and move on if they didn't want to participate. Sweating the small stuff is no good for one's health. I personally don't dedicate any brain cells to a shit list. Sounds stressful.
In short, I made sure that the subject matter was right—"how can I stream the Lakers when I am in Los Angeles"—and that there was no schilling. I ensured that users were otherwise active in the communities that they were posting in, and that it wasn't just spamming referral links. Everything had to be tasteful or I'd kick them off the platform, which happened once after the person told me they were going to do it anyway.
> My copywriting was tongue-in-cheek and self-deprecating. It was all me, no bullshit. I treated every message—even transactional emails—as an opportunity to build trust.
What does this mean? what is this 'trust' that is built ? how does an email build 'trust' Is this to do with whether I beleive the email came from where it says it does ? or somethign else. A lot of this article seemed a little vague in the business buzzword bullshit type way.
Bro, you gotta just build Trust(tm) for this one growth hack(tm)
It's a bit vague, I'll admit. Users in this space are typically plagued by poorly written emails, or emails that are still, "Hello," if any greeting at all; they also often come from noreplys and close you off from the operator.
By presenting myself as, well, myself, having an informal tone (I mentioned to another user that I talked to everyone as if they were a friend of a friend), and always closing with "if you need anything just reply :)," it was a good way to reach users and to establish the human element.
I suppose its a manifestation of the old adage the people do business with people. You are presenting as 'you', a human, an individual that will give the personal touch. Not some corporation that has 'departments' and acts as a faceless churn machine.
Personally I'd rather have no emails of either type. Too many emails these days about everything. No I don't want to review X, or provide content for you (not you) for Y. I guess some people like it though.
> Specifically, in multiple communications with MLB employees, STREIT claimed that he knew MLB reporters who were ‘interested in the story,’ and stated that it would be bad if the vulnerability were exposed and MLB was embarrassed.
Oh man, such a stupid thing to do. This turned a $150k bounty into extortion.
> Streit indicated his work was worth $150K but was also informed there was no ‘bug bounty’ program at the baseball league.
Sounds like a bug that would have been better off anonymously leaked for the other IPTV providers to pick up, after said bug was valued at 0 in greyhat dollars.
The bug couldn't have had less to do with streaming, and in the wrong hands would have been worth a significant amount of money—exponentially more than what the Shopify CVE calculator spit out and I replied with at the time. There's more here: https://prison.josh.mn/charges
There's a lot of nuance, and what was ultimately reported about the bug isn't how things played out—there's tons of context missing. I won't talk more of the bug, or the handling of situation. I realize it was the leading headline (more so than the "guy had streaming website") but it was, in my opinion, also the most far-fetched.
That is not what it says. They only said they had no bounty program to attract people to try and find bugs. That does not mean companies are not willing to compensate you if you find and report a bug in their system. I think 150k was well worth it, but the guy just worded it in the worst possible way.
> My proudest growth hack involved Reddit's API. I filtered posts mentioning phrases like "NBA League Pass," "blackouts," or "where to" on team-specific subreddits. Then I gave my users lists of those posts and encouraged them to comment—transparently—about why they liked HeheStreams, including their referral link.
Any goodwill I felt towards this guy evaporated at the end. Reddit spam, unraveling the social trust in user recommendations, is a scourge. I’m sorry he wasn’t sent to jail longer.
And as with most criminal cases, it’s astonishing how little money he made for his trouble.
Yeah the whole endeavor was pretty pointless no matter how much the author is trying to glorify it as some kind of legitimate, special, important business.
Big "Our amazing journey" vibes with this one. Except the journey ended up in prison and all they have left to talk about is how proud they were to spam Reddit with pirate stream links.
Yeah, thank you for breaking reddit. After their nuclear ban of flagged accounts and disabling non-residential IPs I don't bother to create account anymore.
I’m sorry you got the idea that my users were spamming Reddit with referral links. It was hardly like that and I personally checked that every user was being tasteful, and sent “don’t spam” only a handful of times. I had alerts setup for each source of referrer (via analytics) and for each one that came from reddit (parsed by the ID of the post) I'd individually check to ensure that it wasn't "bad," and that the user wasn't just schilling—if an unreasonable (see: 3) last comments were slinging a referral link, I'd straight up ask them to remove them.
That probably doesn’t change your perception—I, too, feel like Reddit is pretty bad these days—but I felt the need to say something anyway. I ran a pretty tight ship and had placed a lot of importance on perception and reputation. Building trust was important to my operation, from both a growth standpoint and a customer service standpoint. When shit broke (as it often did, considering I operated as the mouse instead of the cat), my users took my word that an attempted fix was in the works.
Author here. This is funny to wake up to. A version of this microsite was posted previously (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45434062) though it didn't have much of the content that exists here.
If anyone has any general questions (it seems like my little “startup lessons” page is as popular as the others) I’m be happy to answer them as long as they’re not too technical or related to my finances. However, the specifics of the technical side of my site are best found on TorrentFreak, and, in short: curl commands.
I was just just interested in how your "say no" lesson came from the streaming site. I am sure they asked you for all sorts of channels, but from their perspective, I kind of understand it. I had really wondered what kind of crazy of stuff you were shooting down. I didn't expect anyone to go too crazy on expecting feature requests on a pirate site.
You wrote about "small, honest teams" - the older I get the more I get the hunch that small teams/companies are a great way to go for me. Basically, choose some field you enjoy working in, with people you like. Any thoughts on how to find something like this? I feel like its the kind of thing you have to start yourself, but I can't take much risk.
My experience in finding one (15 people at the company I’m currently at, and I’m one of 3.5 engineers) (.5 because founder still codes more than we’d like him to) was effectively reaching out to companies that I knew didn’t have job postings up, and was the size that I’d fit into. I learned quickly that not every vacancy is posted publicly.
Were you aware of the risk you were getting yourself into when you built heheStreams? Did you take any precautions and how did you sleep at night?
It still amazes me that these kind of 'illegal business models' usually have a far better customer support than legal business models :)
Many years ago I spent two months in Odessa, Ukraine. I lived in a rented apartment not far from the pretty famous half open-air book (and CD/DVD) market (https://wanderlog.com/place/details/10511015/books-market).
I purchased a cracked Adobe product DVD there (Disclaimer: I actually had a license at the time, but didn't have it installed on that particular laptop). I had trouble installing it, so I went back. I got my money back and help installing an alternative on my laptop. Best service!
PS: Also, Odessa is very beautiful, and I say that as someone who has lived in some beautiful places. -- https://youtu.be/G-BkuEOFGKI (Odessa Walking Tour - Ukraine's Most Beautiful City in 4K -- and this is still missing the many wonderful inner courtyards, and the entire long wonderful beach and park, which would be another equally long video)
Ukrainian here. Odessa is indeed a city on another level. Easily the best city in the country and incredibly nice in the summer. Glad you liked it! <3
I heard "was". due to destruction from russian attacks.
Well, summer or not, it's not really comfy to walk around a city during explosions happening right over your head. Been there, done that.
The illegal bushiness apparently has incentives to keep their customers, while the legal ones rest on their legal monopoly-laurels.
I'd imagine if we had a market where every service had access to every piece of content, so no exclusivity, this problem would go away. Then they'd compete on the quality of service rather than their selection of content they've held hostage. But as long as individual services can opt to not never share their content with anybody else, they can just hold their customers hostage, since they cannot get their good from anywhere else, so the only options are buy or don't buy.
Shouldn't music streaming services be an example for a market where each service offers pretty much the same products and they compete on price and product alone.
But they don't offer the same products. The UX and tools are largely the same, or similar enough, but the product is not the same. The product for streaming services is by and large the content catalog they offer.
Each streaming service has their own exclusive deals with publishers and offer a completely different catalog of music/movies.
This is why pirate sites are far superior, because they don't have those artificial limits on the product catalog offered.
"Exclusive deals" in this context as analogous to "monopolistic deals", the former term sounds less bad, but in terms of consumer effect, "monopolistic" is a much more apt word to use.
Music catalogs are nearly identical identical. Much different from video streaming services where the divergence is dramatic from one to another.
> Each streaming service has their own exclusive deals with publishers and offer a completely different catalog of music
What? If a piece of music is on one streaming service, it's on all of them.
That's unfortunately not true.
In the US, this song is unavailable on Spotify where I found it, but available on YT music. Preface by Man Without Country. Given another 5 minutes, I could also find a song that is not listed on one but available on another.
https://music.you tube.com/watch?v=bvWjybBBFYs
That may be true for bigger artists on major labels, but for smaller independent bands it’s not always the case. I am a heavy user and fan of Bandcamp for listening to and purchasing music but I use Spotify for listening in the car and sharing playlists. I often find albums that are only available on either Spotify or Bandcamp but not both.
The ones that aren’t available on Spotify tend to be self-released but otherwise there isn’t much of a pattern. Albums not on Bandcamp, though, tend to be mediocre at best.
And that’s not even mentioning bands that are pulling their music from Spotify in protest…
They are, and that's exactly why music piracy fell off a cliff in the streaming era and movie/tv piracy didn't.
"Piracy is a service problem" -- Gabe Newell
I used to be a big digital music hoarder. I hate Spotify, YouTube is the thing that killed music downloading for me. It has pretty much everything worth listening to, it's free, AdBlock keeps it usable, and it has a great diversity of other content.
If i'm not mistaken the people behind Spotify were also some of the people behind The Pirate Bay, so they may have had some seriously good insights on how to treat your customers.
it was what.cd, which is how they got their original comprehensive catalog so fast
Citation?
The music streaming services are also the easiest way to pirate music.
Not everyone uses every service equally, nor need the same from each service. "Listening to music" is a broad spectrum of activities in reality, and when I use streaming services, I almost exclusively use them for discovery and to find new music, and music I actually listen to more than once is bought rather than streamed. So while for me the single most important question for me is "How easy does this service make it for me to find new music?", for others, the question might be "What service streams the highest quality?". This is besides the whole legal thing with "What music is available there vs here" that others already mentioned.
Yes. Although there are some gaps, you have to go fairly far out there to find them. Most everything is on every music streaming platform. The music industry got that memo after MP3 piracy became rampant.
But the video streaming platforms haven't gotten that memo yet and prefer to dig themselves into a larger and larger hole, both as far as normal Netflix style on-demand streaming, and IPTV style streams for sports and such. Hence why piracy of both are growing, with torrents on one side and IPTV pirate streams on the other.
Not that the music business has had some very shady business in the past, but my guess is that the movie industry is even more shady. Didn't the Harry Potter movies make a gigantic loss on paper? Steve Jackson had to sue the company to get his Lord of The Rings money, if i'm not mistaken.
Yup, "hollywood accounting" at its finest. It's exploitative AF - established actors and other key staff can demand percentage of gross revenue, everyone else gets either a fixed amount or, worse, net revenue percentage. But as there is always a fresh supply of new desperates, you either take what is offered or you go hungry.
Even the big unions have failed to put an end to this unholy mess.
that's partly how music streaming is so cheap (or even free with ads)
20 year long patents are a large factor for it, designed for a very different world where progress was extremely slow. It's borderline absurd to keep them going today, they can restrict the usage of a technology for more than the entire duration of its usefulness before it's superseded by something better, which is patented again, giving you a series of sequential monopolies instead of a competitive market. I'm glad that at least the Chinese dgaf about patents so there is still some competition in practice even if questionably legal.
The other large factor is copyright. If we had 21 year copyright terms for shows and movies, I'd imagine someone would have set up a streaming service with every show and movie under the sun that they could fit into that, and people would eat it up, since they often just want to half-watch Seinfield, Friends, Star Trek, et cetera, since its their comfort show. A service that can provide that without being hostile is quite a lot of what many people look for in a streaming service.
What would be the incentive to pour millions of dollars into a product,only to have virtually no way to make money or get your investment back?
What would stop much larger companies, with more resources, to just keep taking anything good from smaller companies/startup?
This idea would last in the short-term, and once money dried up, result in a nonexistent market.
Piracy sites are competing with other piracy sites and the only differing factor is support.
> This idea would last in the short-term, and once money dried up, result in a nonexistent market.
Tell that to the music industry. That is not without its fault, but the products on offer are much better than the movie industry has. The market is smaller than it once was, i.e. there's less money flowing through the system, because the consumer isn't being squeezed from every side. The customer is being provided a better product for less money. That's a good thing in my opinion. Having the market be artificially inflated because everyone's got their own small realm no-one else is allowed to touch without paying a hefty licence fee is not a good thing in my opinion.
I don't think "tell that to the music industry", an industry where it is notoriously near-impossible for the people who actually _create_ music to earn a living from their work without signing a deal with a tiny handful of record companies, is the ringing endorsement of "customer getting service for pennies is good actually" that you are portraying it as.
I have often found that the illegal sites have much better UX for finding movies to watch. I can filter by review score, year of release, genre, country of origin, or half dozen other variables and in all combinations. And then they're presented in a big readable table rather than five options I have to scroll endlessly through one at a time.
Not true. My experience is the UX is okay to good, but often there's click-bait ad-serving friction and distraction.
You never know if your search is get you what you want, bring up a pop-up of HotLonelyBabes4U (when you're looking for kids cartoons), or take you to a scam site that wants you to download a "helper."
Aside from that, the experience is rarely terrible - like the trad video streaming sites that give you endless horizontal scrolling lists sorted very broadly by topic, kind of, with an entertaining randomness about the categories.
It sounds like we used different sites.
To be fair, a good adblock is MANDATORY on these streaming sites.
With usually the best reviews compared to Rotten Tomatoes et.al.
I've thought about this a lot. My takeaway is that it's incredibly hard to scale personality—which I have in spades—and even more difficult to give the freedoms for each customer support individual to operate equally as themselves.
You can't build a playbook for friendliness, and people have bad days which they certainly can drag into work. I am guilty of this, too. The proceeding week after my mom died I was rather terse, and have some uncomfortable memories of being short and not living up to my own standards. I went so far as to tell the person my situation and they told me that because I'm providing a service I have to do better. This user in particular was relatively new. If I recall correctly, he churned.
> I went so far as to tell the person my situation and they told me that because I'm providing a service I have to do better.
IMHO that's an asshole and not somebody you want as a customer anyway.
That was one of the lessons I took away was that not every customer is a good customer. While I did have really accessible customer service, I didn’t want to be everything to anyone, even if it left money on the table. The quirks and features of the site where enough for the typical Reddit user (at the time) to discern, more so than those who were accustomed to official services, sports or otherwise.
These kind of pirated IPTV services are very popular in middle eastern countries. You message some guy on whatsapp, pay him a couple bucks and receive a link to an APK file + login info. The app gives you access to basically any channel in every country. They have to do everything through word of mouth because its high risk, obviously, and even in developed countries you can get sent to jail pretty quickly for running something like this. I was expecting esoteric OPSEC lessons from this post, because if thats not the highest priority, its pretty stupid to even consider doing this.
> and even in developed countries you can get sent to jail pretty quickly for running something like this
This would only happen in developed countries. Nowhere else in the world cares about foreign copyrights being infringed.
This seems like common sense, when you're not fully developed, you spend time caring on the bottom of the necessity triangle, not the top.
MS knows this fairly well, and why they don't go after the low hanging pirates.
It may not be the copyright they care about so much, but strict Muslim countries might find western shows criminally objectionable on moral grounds.
in what we would consider "non-developed countries", the powers-that-be might not care about copyrights, but about getting their cut/bakshish. Particularly the "illegal" world doesn't take kind to outside "invaders" making money on someone else's turf.
it's the same thing in western Europe, piracy IPTV is a very popular thing since few years now, you get that through discord servers or really a simple query on aliexpress and you can buy a yearly account for 30$.
Have an example of a search term for non us content, or are they all worldwide with 1000s of channels?
I want one for my MIL who speaks a different language.
Good OPSEC is surprisingly simple and boring. Essentially, it just boils down to using tor and not accidentally exposing sensitive information, which is how Ross Ulbricht got caught. (okay, it is more than that but in essence it is true)
There are probably many people in prison right now because tor is awfully slow. If you don't have the patience for tor you probably also don't have the patience for prison.
Related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794455
Go to any local market place and you will see ads to buy these streaming sticks with everything setup for you, plug and play.
[dead]
His https://prison.josh.mn/self page was remarkably interesting and insightful. Some nuggets:
> Contrast what society says rehabilitation is versus what it actually feels like. How much of it depends on luck, personality, or privilege?
> people want linear redemption stories, but real self-improvement is messy, nonlinear, and impossible to A/B test.
> There's a certain freedom in owning your story publicly. People can't weaponize what you've already made peace with.
Thanks for the sentiment.
The last quote in particular is rather timely: on Wednesday I "came out" to the entire company that I work for with a cheeky slideshow, which started as an "about me" during an all-hands ("look, we have a new employee!") and then was like, "oh yeah also..."
Being able to shape the narrative and tell my side of the story before someone sees some of the slanted reporting has continued to prove helpful. I even went so far as to say "I know people Google their colleagues sometimes and that's cool just be aware that the truth is usually in the middle of what the DOJ says and what actually happened."
Josh you are a gift to our society. Too bad it's controlled by crooked villains. Don't ever change.
> I used to think ethics were a set of rules to follow. Now I think they're more like tests—constant ones—that you run against your own motivations.
Is the big one. And interestingly, single guys doing stuff that is ethically defensible are at a larger risk of ending up in trouble with the law than big corporations doing far worse stuff. So the lesson at a personal level is a completely different one than at the corporate level, there it is 'what we can get away with' versus 'what we should do to be good citizens'.
I found the whole site a very interesting (and fairly quick) read. I don't really have anything else to add, but I'm glad the owner manages to be honest and take good lessons from the whole thing.
It's interesting to me how from his account, everyone is fairly sympathetic to him regarding his charges (he mentions his employer showing up to his interview in a sports jersey in reference to his charges!), and how he mentions he knows several actual sports players used his site. It really goes to show the state of modern streaming.
> noreply@ is absolutely stupid.
the reason noreply addresses exist is to avoid endless autoreply loops caused by poorly programmed mail software
> Send fun emails
Yes, do that. Also a tangent: remind me why you're sending me an email if you haven't sent one in many months.
Sometimes I see an interesting project that hasn't launched. They just have an "sign up for news updates".
Then 12 months later I get a standard news email and I have no clue what it is and ignore it.
At least start your email with something like "Hey, 12 months ago you signed up for the mega cool electron thunder splitter. We've launched!"
This one was really important to me. Even the transactional emails were a bit fun to read. I kept them informal, as if I was talking to a friend of a friend. I certainly swore in them, too (at myself), when I was apologizing for things not working right.
Occasionally I'd get replies saying that the person looked forward to me automatically emailing them. That was a good litmus test.
>Send fun emails.
Eh... I lean towards "no" on that point, unless you can do it well. I've received far too many reddit-tier fellow kids/omg so random/cringe emails, and I hate it. An example from Queal (a Soylent-style meal powder):
Please just fucking stop. I really like their product, but their emails make my blood boil. Don't be like Queal.Oh, that's gross. Mine weren't that fun. They were more informal and usually self-deprecating (within good taste).
The closest to that was the quarterly newsletter: I'd highlight the awful and frustrating bugs that nobody saw, and some of the funny emails I got.
I recently learned that, just like most other businesses, a lot of free pirate streaming sites are actually powered by a few big content aggregators[1][2][3]. They don't do much beyond providing a nice-looking frontend to an unauthenticated API that those aggregators expose.
One could probably spin one of these up in an afternoon (if making money was not the goal). The barriers of entry to this ecosystem are a lot lower than I ever imagined.
Those aggregators serve their own ads (what you get through the API is a link to a web player embed, not to the video directly). I suspect that bigger sites get some kind of kickback for bringing in traffic to those players.
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/mpa-highlights-rapidly-expanding-hy... [2] http://vidsrcme.ru/ [3] https://streamed.pk/docs
This is relatively new and an interesting business model. There’s also “piracy as a service” https://torrentfreak.com/hollywood-and-netflix-signal-piracy...
I would not call it a "piracy" streaming site.
I would call it a hero-site. That's what they are - they are heroes for unrestricting information.
Take ublock origin. Now, many say it is an ad-blocker; the ublock origin author says the extension is a generic content blocker. I agree with that but I go further: I call ublock origin a hero-blocker, or better, a heroic blocker. It blocks unwanted things in general. For similar reasons I think the term "piratebay" is old. It made more sense in the 2000s. Now I would call it herobay.
People may wonder about those terms, but I think it is important to use better terms than old terms. The old terms often were hijacked by the law system and mega-corporations with their own particular interests. It is time that the people re-define the law. Law should serve the people.
Pirating of course exists. You might rebrand it, but hardly as hero-, more like theft-. Theftbay would sound good to me.
Copying isn't theft.
If copying isn’t theft then I guess we can stop worrying about open source licensing. Anyone, including corporations, would be able to take open source code and copy it into their own products, reselling it without consent or releasing their changes because they haven’t stolen anything, just copied it, right?
If you spend years of your life writing some software and then it accidentally gets revealed to the world by mistake, anyone can copy it and use it as their own? Because copying isn’t theft, theft they haven’t stolen anything from you, so you have nothing to complain about?
I can't tell if you're sarcastically describing the world we live in or if you genuinely haven't realized all these things happen regularly. Poe's law I guess.
It isn't sarcastic. Logically, if you deny intellectual property rights, you are also denying copyleft. Copyleft depends on copyright law.
Preventing someone from getting value out of their work is theft - not matter how it is done. Copying a dead person's work isn't theft because a dead person can't create value, but stealing a dead person's car is still theft, because something of value is gone.
Stealing a car you were never going to buy and making an exact replica of a car you were never going to buy is two entirely different things.
> Preventing someone from getting value out of their work is theft
No, it's not. You (or random large media corps) do not get to unilaterally redefine words of the English language like that.
Pass whatever laws you want about it, enforce them however you feel is appropriate, but don't try to redefine language itself to push your agenda.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/theft
"IP theft" is not counter to that definition. Intellectual property is a 'something'. That definition, does not require depriving someone else of something. As another valid example, see "identity theft".
Furthermore, English is not prescriptive; dictionaries are a lagging reference of observed use... so yes, the users of English absolutely do get to redefine language. That's how all modern English words originated.
And finally, if your dictionary doesn't account for "IP theft", you have simply found an incorrect dictionary, because that usage is undeniably widespread -- whether or not you agree with the concept politically.
Down the rabbit hole we go.
Found the villain.
Really? Have you read this post at all?
This is a monetized streaming site that spams reddit users. This is the hero in your mind? Is your philosophy that as long as the legal IP holders don't get paid it's great?
The UI of some piracy streaming sites are better than legit sites with much less hoops to jump through than torrents/Usenet or region locked legal services for rare stuff.
> refund
ah, it's this kind of pirate streaming
It started as a proof of concept and graduated to a free site, and eventually I put a paywall up to see if anyone would be willing to pay. Internally, I hoped nobody would—I wanted to have a social life and not be beholden to old men telling me their ghetto streaming site was broken—and I expected nobody would.
The first purchase was for $100 on a "pay what you think it's worth" model, and after watching the value that others were willing to pay, I had a good idea as to what I would ultimately charge.
The vast majority of pirate stream sites are monetized in some way. If I was going to use one I'd probably prefer to pay some small amount rather than deal with the hellish ads the 'free' ones use.
Or you could use an adblocker.
A lot of the pirate stream sites I've run into break entirely if you have an adblocker enabled. I'd guess it's a combination of filter lists not being tested on them along with much more aggressive ads (from sketchier ad networks).
Maybe I’m not using enough of them, because I’ve never had issues with uBo. Or it’s because I use 3rd party script blocking.
Use a good adblocker. I'd never do anything illegal, of course, but a friend of my friend has been successfully using all sorts of pirated content sites for years, and swears he barely sees any ads.
Or, you know, don't. The less popular these sites are, the longer they stay around.
At the time I'm quite certain I was using uBlock Origin pre-MV3. I don't think I also had my DNS-based adblocker yet, though.
Idk if I'm paying anyway, why not the legal way?
Because "legal" way is paved with obstacles.
Geofencing (you can't watch this sport from this location because fuck you), devices blacklisting (you can't watch this sport on your mobile device because fuck you), rights expiring (you can't watch this match anymore despite you have "bought" it because fuck you), screen limiting (you are logged in on both your TV and iphone so fuck you), etc. All for $19.99.
In contrast, you pay like $9.99 and you can watch anything, anywhere, anytime.
Remember when music piracy died? When Steve Jobs removed friction between me and my music.
Exactly.
Netflix is even starting to have problems with Apple's iCloud Private Relay with me, I already had to get in touch with their support.
We live in a world where paid services require us to deactivate security/privacy features to use them. Fuck them.
No DRM issues (like same quality on every device, no extra privileges), one application for everything, runs everywhere, no UX issues (e.g., long scrolling to continue watching series, no autoplay and no spoilers in the thumbnail). It's worth paying for such an experience, which the first parties don't provide.
(Speaking in general here, this includes Jellyfin.)
DRM issues are why I cancelled and won't renew Paramount+. Their damn Google TV app running on a completely stock/factory Chromecast w/ Google TV, plugged in via HDMI to an unmodified TV, frequently (always on the same shows, especially newer Star Trek series) refuses to recognize the validity of my setup and reverts to an incredibly annoying color tint rotation that cycles between extremes. It took me quite a while to figure out what the hell was happening.
I'm personally not into piracy, but with paid pirate sports streaming websites, you often get a better user experience and way more choice for cheaper than with the legal options. You only need to pay once and you don't need to jump between apps.
I don't condone it but if you're in the UK and you want to legally watch every premier league game last season...
Sky Sports - £35/month
TNT Sports - £32/month
Amazon Prime - £9/month
And then in the UK there is a legal peculiarity whereby 3pm Saturday games are illegal to broadcast on television, so you don't even get that slot. It's the most common slot with about a third of the weekends games.
v.s. Paying someone on discord £8/month for all the games
Similarly, if you wanted to watch every single NFL game:
NFL Sunday Ticket ($150-204/season) - Out-of-market Sunday afternoon games
Amazon Prime Video ($9/month) - Thursday Night Football
Peacock Premium ($10.99/month) - Some exclusive games on NBC
ESPN Unlimited ($29.99/month) - Monday Night Football on ESPN/ABC
Fox One ($19.99/month) - Fox Sunday games
Paramount+ ($7.99/month) - CBS Sunday games
Netflix - Two Christmas Day games
Amazon Prime introduced ads. The ads will dissapear for some extra money. It made me instantly hate it.
I'm sure Sky is a lot more than £35, is that number just for the Sports package on top of the basic sub?
p.s. great username
Yes - that's for Sky Sports.
You can often get a deal if you threaten to cancel, go through with it, and then wait for a retentions offer, but since Sky was acquired by Comcast that's happening less and less, especially for the superior Sky Q satellite service - you can get great deals on their Sky Stream service, but it's plagued with issues, and you no longer have the ability to time shift by having the main box record directly off the satellite feed.
You also can't skip ads unless you pay them, versus the ability to pause, fast forward etc. on the Satellite service.
I don't have cable or IPTV, but I do pirate other stuff that I paid for:
Anything that has intrusive DRM has no place in my computer.
If it's for work, I will still pirate while holding the license, just for the stability alone.
For music stuff stability is paramount and I'd rather not deal with things that magically stop working from time to time (IK Multimedia is notorious for that).
IPTV in Western Europe is becoming more popular because it's decently priced for what you get. Say you want to watch football, but don't give a shit about anything else sports related. Well, you're probably still paying for everything else in a giant package for 50-100+ USD a month.
Especially for someone who only cares about their team, watching two games a month, that's a really bad deal. Even more so if your local offer is burdened with bad commentators or ads you can't get away from. Scale that problem up to someone who watches a few different sports, but none are available as one single package, and the value for money gets worse, while the experience grows worse as well, being you're now divided between several services. Add in DRM and bad app experiences, and you get people who just can't be arsed to do things properly any more, given they are functionally being punished for doing so.
Or you could pay a shady guy a few quid a month, but the service is good, and you get everything under the sun, moon, sky, and maybe even the stars. Can't blame them for wanting an experience that isn't trying to wring them dry.
It's so funny how much that reminds me of working in a university acquired by a large for-profit corporation.
After the MBAs arrived, the whole thing was about selling shitty packages for students.
- The college was somehow legally allowed to charge a minimum, so people only needing one single class was still paying for 3.
- They would push high distance learning for anything they legally could, showing the same video of the same teacher to all their 10 universities and paying "tutors" a minimum wage to moderate hundreds of Moodle classes (if not putting Masters students to do it for half the minimum wage). So 80 students paying $1000 on average to take a 5 class, and some of those cost on average $2000 + server costs. What a business.
- Of course classes that had 10 people in it suddenly had 40. And for when there wasn't 40 people to attend, they would consolidate classes with another group and half would have to go to the other side of town for the one class that, if they didn't attend, would set back their tuition by one year.
But yeah, sure it makes more money.
When you don't even have to compete on quality, that's what happens.
Because netflix has decided my netflix 4k account shouldn't stream anything higher than 1080p in chrome.
The big draw here was bypassing geoblocking that you couldn’t otherwise buy your way out of legally.
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is that you dont have to deal with re-authentication just because you decided to watch it at a different location.
There are many small papercuts that legal providers subject customers to.
Much cheaper and no blackouts. HeheStreams was $100/year for NBA/NHL/NFL/MLB, the NBA's equivalent was $200/year in 2021.
I rented a movie recently on Amazon and it refused to play in high definition because they didn't like the device I was streaming it to. Bullshit like that.
Can't play in HD because I don't use Windows or OSX. At the torrent store, I can play back any resolution I want.
> deal with the hellish ads
psst, kid
have you ever heard of adblocker?
Many pirate streaming sites don't work with adblockers.
The Admiral pop-up usually shows up on pirate sites.
You always pay for piracy or it is bad experience. You have to pay in your resources (private torrent trackers) or in cash (derbit, usenet). Alternatively you use unstable and low quality stream.
Because of philosophy I prefer sharing resources more than cash.
I never paid a cent and always found what I looked for, just type whatever you're looking for + "torrent" on yandex and you'll hit something relevant very quickly
From what he says in the post I think this guy was selling pirated livestreams of sports - something that people want to watch as it is happening, not as a torrent after the event.
Stremio + torrentio for me is a very good setup personally. It just works but I know of other mechanisms too.
One of these was to actually download a torrent and use torrentfs or something similar and you can stream a video directly from the mirror without downloading it fully and on linux, I really appreciate its simplicity and I love it ngl
You have to go pretty far out there to find shows and movies that aren't on public trackers. I definitely can find gaps if I go looking for them, especially if we start counting not finding a blu-ray rip while a DVD rip is easily found, or not finding a 4K rip but a 1080p one is out there, but for most anything friends would have asked me to dig up, a high quality rip is easily found. Not to mention that once found, it can just stay on a hard drive and be easily retrieved for next time.
The only exception I can think of are local shows, but I don't watch them, specifically because they're only on Actual TV™, which I haven't watched in years, they only recently got onto the local streaming services. They should still be on local private trackers, which I can definitely agree is a hassle, but depending on how bad your local streaming service is, they can definitely a be a tempting prospect.
> You always pay for piracy or it is bad experience
definitely not my experience
I'd absolutely hate being on the receiving end of some of these. e.g.
>I gave my users lists of those posts and encouraged them to comment
A service doing this would instantly be on my shit list. I'm trying to buy a service in exchange for money, not get spammed about being someone's guerilla marketing team for free / and or getting roped into a referral scheme.
I don't mind organically advocating for things I've had a good experience with but not like this
> A service doing this would instantly be on my shit list.
Most people would just ignore it and move on if they didn't want to participate. Sweating the small stuff is no good for one's health. I personally don't dedicate any brain cells to a shit list. Sounds stressful.
I replied to another comment about further context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845763
In short, I made sure that the subject matter was right—"how can I stream the Lakers when I am in Los Angeles"—and that there was no schilling. I ensured that users were otherwise active in the communities that they were posting in, and that it wasn't just spamming referral links. Everything had to be tasteful or I'd kick them off the platform, which happened once after the person told me they were going to do it anyway.
> My copywriting was tongue-in-cheek and self-deprecating. It was all me, no bullshit. I treated every message—even transactional emails—as an opportunity to build trust.
What does this mean? what is this 'trust' that is built ? how does an email build 'trust' Is this to do with whether I beleive the email came from where it says it does ? or somethign else. A lot of this article seemed a little vague in the business buzzword bullshit type way.
Bro, you gotta just build Trust(tm) for this one growth hack(tm)
It's a bit vague, I'll admit. Users in this space are typically plagued by poorly written emails, or emails that are still, "Hello," if any greeting at all; they also often come from noreplys and close you off from the operator.
By presenting myself as, well, myself, having an informal tone (I mentioned to another user that I talked to everyone as if they were a friend of a friend), and always closing with "if you need anything just reply :)," it was a good way to reach users and to establish the human element.
I suppose its a manifestation of the old adage the people do business with people. You are presenting as 'you', a human, an individual that will give the personal touch. Not some corporation that has 'departments' and acts as a faceless churn machine.
Personally I'd rather have no emails of either type. Too many emails these days about everything. No I don't want to review X, or provide content for you (not you) for Y. I guess some people like it though.
Previously: https://torrentfreak.com/hehestreams-iptv-admin-sentenced-to...
> Specifically, in multiple communications with MLB employees, STREIT claimed that he knew MLB reporters who were ‘interested in the story,’ and stated that it would be bad if the vulnerability were exposed and MLB was embarrassed.
Oh man, such a stupid thing to do. This turned a $150k bounty into extortion.
> Streit indicated his work was worth $150K but was also informed there was no ‘bug bounty’ program at the baseball league.
Sounds like a bug that would have been better off anonymously leaked for the other IPTV providers to pick up, after said bug was valued at 0 in greyhat dollars.
The bug couldn't have had less to do with streaming, and in the wrong hands would have been worth a significant amount of money—exponentially more than what the Shopify CVE calculator spit out and I replied with at the time. There's more here: https://prison.josh.mn/charges
There's a lot of nuance, and what was ultimately reported about the bug isn't how things played out—there's tons of context missing. I won't talk more of the bug, or the handling of situation. I realize it was the leading headline (more so than the "guy had streaming website") but it was, in my opinion, also the most far-fetched.
That is not what it says. They only said they had no bounty program to attract people to try and find bugs. That does not mean companies are not willing to compensate you if you find and report a bug in their system. I think 150k was well worth it, but the guy just worded it in the worst possible way.
The US sentences seem really crazy coming from Europe - like even violent rapists barely get 3 years here: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/sentence-increased-in-sex...
I don't know the details about this specific case, but to me "violent rapists barely get 3 years" is the crazy side. YMMV.
Your link does not back up your claim.
> My proudest growth hack involved Reddit's API. I filtered posts mentioning phrases like "NBA League Pass," "blackouts," or "where to" on team-specific subreddits. Then I gave my users lists of those posts and encouraged them to comment—transparently—about why they liked HeheStreams, including their referral link.
Any goodwill I felt towards this guy evaporated at the end. Reddit spam, unraveling the social trust in user recommendations, is a scourge. I’m sorry he wasn’t sent to jail longer.
And as with most criminal cases, it’s astonishing how little money he made for his trouble.
Yeah the whole endeavor was pretty pointless no matter how much the author is trying to glorify it as some kind of legitimate, special, important business.
Big "Our amazing journey" vibes with this one. Except the journey ended up in prison and all they have left to talk about is how proud they were to spam Reddit with pirate stream links.
Yeah, thank you for breaking reddit. After their nuclear ban of flagged accounts and disabling non-residential IPs I don't bother to create account anymore.
I’m sorry you got the idea that my users were spamming Reddit with referral links. It was hardly like that and I personally checked that every user was being tasteful, and sent “don’t spam” only a handful of times. I had alerts setup for each source of referrer (via analytics) and for each one that came from reddit (parsed by the ID of the post) I'd individually check to ensure that it wasn't "bad," and that the user wasn't just schilling—if an unreasonable (see: 3) last comments were slinging a referral link, I'd straight up ask them to remove them.
That probably doesn’t change your perception—I, too, feel like Reddit is pretty bad these days—but I felt the need to say something anyway. I ran a pretty tight ship and had placed a lot of importance on perception and reputation. Building trust was important to my operation, from both a growth standpoint and a customer service standpoint. When shit broke (as it often did, considering I operated as the mouse instead of the cat), my users took my word that an attempted fix was in the works.
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