'Everyone is Stealing TV' (theverge.com)
- Reference: 0180731220
- News link: https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/26/02/04/1826249/everyone-is-stealing-tv
- Source link: https://www.theverge.com/streaming/873416/piracy-streaming-boxes
The two dominant players -- SuperBox and vSeeBox -- are manufactured by opaque Chinese companies and distributed through hundreds of American resellers at farmers markets, church festivals and Facebook groups, according to a report by The Verge. The hardware is generic and legal, but both devices guide users toward pirate streaming apps not available on any official app store.
vSeeBox directs users to a service called "Heat"; SuperBox points to "Blue TV." One user estimated access to between 6,000 and 8,000 channels, including premium sports networks and hundreds of local affiliates. A 2025 Dish Network lawsuit against a SuperBox reseller alleged that some live channels on the device were being ripped directly from Dish's Sling TV service -- Sling's logo was still visible on certain feeds. Dish has pursued resellers aggressively, winning $1.25 million in damages from a vSeeBox seller in 2024 over 500 devices and $405,000 from another over 162 devices. None of this has meaningfully slowed adoption. The market has roots in earlier Chinese-made devices like TVPad that targeted Asian expat communities and reportedly sold 3 million units before being litigated out of existence. SuperBox and vSeeBox simply broadened the audience to mainstream America.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/streaming/873416/piracy-streaming-boxes
Unbelievable! (Score:5, Funny)
It's shocking that someone would take something that they didn't pay for. I'm going to write down the names of those devices and the services they funnel their clients to... I just want to make sure I don't accidentally buy one of these devices...
Re: (Score:2)
> It's shocking that someone would take something that they didn't pay for. I'm going to write down the names of those devices and the services they funnel their clients to... I just want to make sure I don't accidentally buy one of these devices...
Yes, we wouldn't want anyone to accidentally stumble across 8,000 channels of bootleg content from a box offered up at the local church festival.
Seriously? Charging money for streaming services is now a sign of the anti-Christ or what? With festivals like that, I'm guessing the pastors homemade moonshine puts a sparkle in the punch bowl.
Re:Unbelievable! (Score:4, Funny)
> With festivals like that, I'm guessing the pastors homemade moonshine puts a sparkle in the punch bowl.
Maybe the pastors got tired of being associated with a different crime... "Trafficking in Unauthorized Access Devices" is a lot nicer sounding than their usual crimes...
Re: (Score:1)
> Maybe the pastors got tired of being associated with a different crime... "Trafficking in Unauthorized Access Devices" is a lot nicer sounding than their usual crimes...
Or also being an ICE agent. Which has to be weird if/when a congregant is undocumented and needs help.
Church Member: "Forgive me father for I have sinned..."
ICE Pastor: "Sure. Two Hail Marys, then put on these handcuffs and let me pepper spray you, then ..."
[1]Who Is David Easterwood? Protesters Say Pastor Is ICE Official [newsweek.com]
> David Easterwood, who leads the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office in St. Paul, also apparently serves as a pastor at a church that was disrupted by protesters on Sunday.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/who-is-david-easterwood-protesters-say-pastor-ice-official-11385962
Southern Church Goers (Score:2)
Not recognizing each other at the liquor store and where these gadgets are sold?
Re: (Score:1)
the boxes are easier for the pastor to fiddle with than children they don't complain,
Re: (Score:2)
>> It's shocking that someone would take something that they didn't pay for. I'm going to write down the names of those devices and the services they funnel their clients to... I just want to make sure I don't accidentally buy one of these devices...
> Yes, we wouldn't want anyone to accidentally stumble across 8,000 channels of bootleg content from a box offered up at the local church festival.
> Seriously? Charging money for streaming services is now a sign of the anti-Christ or what? With festivals like that, I'm guessing the pastors homemade moonshine puts a sparkle in the punch bowl.
Finally! A church worth attending.
Re: (Score:3)
Also a note that many of the devices are [1]big targets for being members of botnets. [krebsonsecurity.com] So anyone going looking for one of these devices should be very careful.
[1] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/01/who-operates-the-badbox-2-0-botnet/
Stop being evil (Score:1)
Don't steal their bits because they need them to make cars.
Chinese Hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, people, just keep bringing that inexpensive, Chinese-manufactured hardware into your homes! There have never been any credible electronic threats or state-sponsored eavesdropping associated with such boxes...
Re: (Score:2)
Agree. There's plenty of fear-mongering about it, but there has never been anything _credible_. :)
Re: Chinese Hardware (Score:2)
There have several times when these devices have turned out to be part of a botnet.
Re: (Score:2)
"Chinese-manufactured hardware into your homes!"
The U.S. has tens of millions of Alexa devices (for example more than ~71 million Echo smart speakers sold in the U.S.), but the total including all Alexa-enabled gadgets (phones, TVs, thermostats, etc.) isn’t published officially.
On manufacturing: most physical Alexa-capable hardware (like Echo speakers and many third-party devices) are manufactured in China or assembled there.
The industrial revolution ran over our faces. (Score:5, Insightful)
Industry: "Watching content without paying is stealing. Bad consumes. Pay us."
Industry: "Taking all your data without paying is our God Given Right. Fuck you. In fact, you should pay us while we take your data."
Corporate culture isn't just sick. It's become zombified and is slowly eating the brains of the society that supports it.
Re:The industrial revolution ran over our faces. (Score:4, Interesting)
> Industry: "Watching content without paying is stealing. Bad consumers. Pay us."
I wish I could pay to watch home games, but someone pays the league even more not to let me watch them.
Worse, my tax dollars paid for the stadium they're playing in. It's like when we fund pharmaceutical research and then companies patent them and jack up the prices. These things all ought to be in the public domain because the public paid for them.
Re: (Score:2)
^^^^This!
It took me moving 2100+ miles away, for a completely different reason, before I could legally pay to stream my favorite sports teams. A full season cost of less than decent tickets to a game. Before I moved I watched pirated feeds. I’d pay, but they wouldn’t let me without having to also pay for 135+ other channels I had no interest in. Not going to do it. The local mlb team in my new city actually lets people stream the games for slightly less than the cost of two cheapest tickets a
Re: (Score:3)
>> Industry: "Watching content without paying is stealing. Bad consumers. Pay us."
> I wish I could pay to watch home games, but someone pays the league even more not to let me watch them.
> Worse, my tax dollars paid for the stadium they're playing in. It's like when we fund pharmaceutical research and then companies patent them and jack up the prices. These things all ought to be in the public domain because the public paid for them.
We've really perfected the "socialize the costs, privatize the profits" thing. It's utterly ridiculous how much tax money goes into propping up profit centers for folks and businesses that already have plenty and plan to make more on the tax dollars they're spending.
Reminds me of something (Score:1, Troll)
We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals..
+++The Mentor+++
January 8, 1986
[1]https://phrack.org/issues/7/3 [phrack.org]
[1] https://phrack.org/issues/7/3
Re: (Score:3)
> We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals.
To be fair to the entertainment industry, it does cost money to produce new content. So, it's not exactly the same thing as hacking ma bell to get free phone calls on their existing network with capacity that just goes unused when no one is paying.
Now, if you're talking about pirating old content that should've entered the public domain, had the length of copyright not been extended to the heat death of the universe, yeah, that I'll give you.
Purpose (Score:2)
I don't quite understand the purpose. Most smart TVs come with a free IPTV bundle. My LG came with LG channels, that has a few hundred free streaming channels to watch. Tubi does the same thing on any smart gizmo, you can plug into a TV, the cheapest of which is around $40.
Re: Purpose (Score:2)
These so-called âoedodgy boxesâ let you watch content that otherwise you'd have to pay for. For example, a full subscription to Sky TV including film and sports channels is close to $100 per month. Subscriptions for these boxes will run you about $100 per year.
The people running these services are essentially re-broadcasting paid-for content for a fraction of the price. The big companies are starting to notice too; I've seen a few scaremongering 'news' articles about them these past few months.
Re: (Score:3)
> The people running these services are essentially re-broadcasting paid-for content for a fraction of the price.
I seem to recall a story from awhile back about a guy who got busted for doing exactly that and unsuccessfully tried to argue that he was doing nothing wrong because he had legitimately paid subscriptions to the channels he was re-streaming (nobody ever reads the TOS).
So, you're basically stuck running these type of pirate services from countries that really don't care to enforce copyright laws, otherwise you might as well just call prison and make reservations. With the geographical limitations of where t
Re: Purpose (Score:5, Interesting)
You'd be surprised. A friend of mine has one and though it sometimes freezes for a few seconds the quality is just as good as what I would expect from Sky. I was tempted to get one myself but for a couple of football games it's not worth the hassle.
One other thing, the box was some sort of nvidia device (Toblerone shaped) and the UI is so much snappier than any STB or smart TV I've ever used. As ever, the pirates' user experience is better than the paying customers'.
Re: (Score:2)
> the UI is so much snappier than any STB or smart TV I've ever used
I suppose corporate devs are just concerned with checking off "deliverables" or whatever their managers or suits oblige (checkboxes of some quota or evaluation, several hops away from reality) and indulge in the ol' Runs Fine On My Computer while rogue devs hear directly from the actual dogfood eaters.
Re: (Score:3)
> The people running these services are essentially re-broadcasting paid-for content for a fraction of the price.
That's quite probably [1]not all they are doing. [krebsonsecurity.com] Remember, if it's too good/cheap to be true, then *you* are probably the product or, in this case, your bandwidth and IP address.
[1] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/01/the-kimwolf-botnet-is-stalking-your-local-network/
Re: Purpose (Score:2)
Yes thatâ(TM)s exactly the sort of nebulous fear mongering that I see masquerading as news articles. Out of curiosity, which lobby group do you work for?
Re: (Score:3)
> I don't quite understand the purpose. Most smart TVs come with a free IPTV bundle. My LG came with LG channels, that has a few hundred free streaming channels to watch. Tubi does the same thing on any smart gizmo, you can plug into a TV, the cheapest of which is around $40.
Because while those services do exist (typically using the FAST approach for older content with lower licensing costs), they do not always cover what some people want to view (I am guessing things like ESPN).
There is, and will continue to be, a disconnect between what consumers are willing to pay, and what the owners expect to receive in revenue, for the content being produced.
Re: (Score:2)
The Smart TV's don't come with "dodgy" piracy apps. The boxes are basically just preloaded with Kodi, and then a bunch of plugins for backends that are basically just abusing various system's CDN's.
Like facebook is a popular CDN to steal bandwidth from by pirates. I'm sure you've seen "watch (whatever) online" sites, if you go poke through their source code you can see what sites they are getting the data from.
Re: (Score:2)
Sports. Sports! Sports!!!
Content only has value when it is behind a paywall (Score:3, Interesting)
Once outside the paywall, it no longer can generate revenue.
Content is not like shelter, healthcare, or sustenance. people will do without if control is tightened to the point where no one can watch the content.
The fact that it is non-essential for supporting life means that there is a limit on how much revenue can be generated. At some point you reach a diminishing point of return on the curve where it is no longer profitable to go after the consumers pirating the content.
As the economy deteriorates over the next few years, more consumers are going to ask "Why am it paying do much for this", this is going to cause subscriber counts to drop. Expect enhanced enforcement from the producers and distributors, but at some point they'll just be wasting their money.
Cable TV is dying (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me see, do I want to pay for a service that shows me stuff I don't want to see filled with ads that I want to see even less, or do I want to not pay for a service that shows me what I want without ads? This isn't that difficult of a choice. It's no wonder cable TV is dying; the only price point anyone is willing to even consider it at is the one pirates offer.
I get cable TV bundled with my internet subscription (where I live there's no other choice besides satellite) and even then the only time I ever use it is if I'm out and about and bored out of my mind, as my ISP kindly offers a web frontend that I can log into and watch it on. That's an actual cool value add that I'll give them... but even then it's usually a better experience to just pop on my Jellyfin server and watch something I actually want to see without ads plastered over half the program.
Re: (Score:2)
Not just cable TV is dying, but broadcast television and radio too.
Why should I put up with high ad loads while I consume linear content. It used to be that ad loads were lower decades ago, but then almost everyone has no choice but broadcast television and radio. Now, with fewer eyeballs watching radio and TV, the ad loads had to go up because broadcast ratings count eyeballs.
Broadcast radio and TV operated by corporations with deep pockets are going to wilt away. Most manufacturers of high power radio and
Re: (Score:2)
> Not just cable TV is dying, but broadcast television and radio too.
Well, radio sucks because their target demographic is now "people who don't have access to stream music on a smartphone." Arguably though, this is only a slight downgrade from how ClearChannel previously ran things before streaming music became ubiquitous.
TV, though, has seen any content worth watching being locked behind the paywall of streaming. That's where the difference is really noticeable, because terrestrial broadcast networks have given up trying to chase eyeballs and are now going after subscrib
Re: (Score:1)
> That's where the difference is really noticeable, because terrestrial broadcast networks have given up trying to chase eyeballs and are now going after subscribers . So, over-the-air TV has become a dumping ground for everything nobody is willing to pay to watch.
And yet that stuff is still pretty watchable. In my area, there are two specialty channels I like, one for sci-fi (comet) and the other for westerns (grit) and both keep showing me either stuff I've never seen, or stuff I've seen and don't mind running in the background as I exercise or do work of some sort.
Re: (Score:2)
> "Let me see, do I want to pay for a service that shows me stuff I don't want to see filled with ads that I want to see even less"
You are not describing all cable TV that way. Millions use DVR's and TiVo and have it record and have ready hundreds of programs the user DOES want to see and CAN skip or zoom through commercials.
If you are watching "live" TV, you are doing it wrong. (And there is no way I would ever do that). The main issue with CATV is the cost of cable TV is absurd. For my ONE PERSON ho
'Theft' worked for AI. (Score:4, Insightful)
Prove me wrong.
Re: (Score:2)
its theft until its a corporation doing it. thats how messed up are copyright it.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
prisons are full of people who say they are innocent of wrong doing,
Re: (Score:2)
> ChatGPT says:
>> The statement made by the Slashdot commenter that "'Theft' worked for AI" is not accurate. While it is true that some AI models are trained on large amounts of data, this data is not obtained through theft. The data used to train AI models is typically collected with the consent of users or comes from publicly available sources.
>> The training data used for AI models is crucial for their performance and generalization capabilities. It is important that this data is collected ethically and legally to ensure the trustworthiness and fairness of the AI systems developed.
>> Therefore, it is incorrect to suggest that theft is a valid or acceptable method for obtaining the data needed to train AI models. Ethical considerations and adherence to data privacy regulations are essential in the development and deployment of AI technologies.
A good reminder that ChatGPT and its ilk (including their corporate owners) don't just steal. They also lie.
OMG. That's disgusting. Where? (Score:3)
There's clear price points that people will pay for their content. We all got pretty used to being able to get any movie we wanted from Netflix, and that set the bar. Paying that same $15 to 10 different vendors for the same level of service pretty much ensures that piracy will be rampant. Sorry that your business model sucks.
Re: (Score:1)
yep they do everything they can to drive people away then cry why did piracy come back strong. not just cost but making some pretty trash stuff.
Re: (Score:3)
> Paying that same $15 to 10 different vendors for the same level of service pretty much ensures that piracy will be rampant.
See, I'd argue that paying $15 would be a bit more tolerable if it was the same level of service that Netflix had in 2014. The problem is that we went from one service that had basically-everything, to a dozen services that have 1-2 shows we want to watch and 1,000 we don't. Now, *that* wouldn't be so bad if those services reflected the difference; 10 services at $5 a pop might still ultimately be more than Netflix was at its peak, but it'd at least be a bit more palpable because it's so cheap...but, to you
Defintely Not Everyone (Score:2)
Definitely not everyone is stealing TV. I'm opposed to piracy and I'm definitely not plugging one of these janky Android Trojan horses into my network.
But, the price gouging is totally out of control! Cable companies and streaming services alike. They are priced absurdly high. Even more so when one considers the low quality programming that they are pushing. Then they layer ads on top of services I'm supposed to pay for? Fuck them. Piracy may well be on the table in the near future.
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly!
Not to mention going from one remote that worked properly to multiple remotes that don't work as expected and new issues with every update and every gadget.
Where is the smart in smart TVs? To me they are the Trojan horses. I had to move them off the main network.
Piracy sounds simpler and way less intrusive
Re: (Score:2)
there own greed is why piracy came back strong.
Distracts from AI Stealing Everything Else (Score:3)
Here in the U.S., we presently have two sets of standards: Corporate theft is fine; personal theft is an dire emergency.
Whadda ya mean, greed is bad? (Score:1)
Corporate rent-seeking has *always* had potential (national) security implications. It seems bizarre that it's only this sort of thing that's bringing it to attention. Just by sheer dint of not wanting to be nickeled and dimed to death, countless Americans are happy to bring unvetted tech from dodgy sources into their homes. What could go wrong?
Funny thing (Score:3, Interesting)
We have this in South America for a looong time. I would estimate some 80% of households use these boxes.
It became so widespread that the major streaming platforms started to pressure the governments. Most of the devices were outlawed and recently there were huge cross-border crackdowns that took the pirat... ahem, alternative platforms down.
One very funny thing is that because it was a paid service, most people didn't even realized it was illegal. When the boxes started to get bricked, consumer protection organizations got flooded with millions of complaints. There are reports of people that even reported it to the police.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
the thing is you can do the same with a phone or anything with a web browser. so banning those devices do nothing.
Re: Funny thing (Score:2)
Sounds a lot like allofmp3.com
I would think (Score:2)
it suggests that the subscription costs are too high. If the pricing structure cuts out most people and they have to find another way to access the content, then lower your price.
One problem with the content market is they are hell bent on extracting the most money out of the market, they keep increasing costs and also moving content so a consumer has to access multiple subscriptions. All this puts pressure on consumers and they either have to dropout or get content another way.
did it to themselves (Score:3, Insightful)
rember when Netflix was the king piracy was at a all time low. then everyone got greedy pulling there content in a sad attempt to clone them. wile increasing prices all the time.
Those devices are an odd choice (Score:2)
Why pay for a pirate service? It's the equivalent of 'script kiddie' hacking.
You can find streams of pretty much anything and just download what you want to keep, and barring someone breaking into your home and taking the hardware, it can't be taken from you.
If it's on broadcast TV where you live, this is no different than grabbing it off the air with a DVR.
Re: Those devices are an odd choice (Score:2)
> Why pay for a pirate service? It's the equivalent of 'script kiddie' hacking.
Cost, obviously. Convenience, reliability, the fact that you don't need to faff around trying to find a link that actually works. These things aren't aimed at hax0rs, l33t or otherwise. They're easy enough to use that your granny could do it.
Thanks for the info! (Score:2)
I'll have to try this out.
Piracy is just advanced socialism (Score:2)
Time to move beyond "monetising" society and move to a post money society. We have the technology with AGI now. Imagine if "pirates" put in as much passion into producing free housing, education, healthcare and food, poverty is a capitalist invention. Even on Slashdot we could be posting freely and not need MongoDB in the corner of our site.
Re: (Score:2)
> Time to move beyond "monetising" society and move to a post money society.
Okay Gene Roddenberry...let's work this out...
> We have the technology with AGI now.
And mining the components that make AGI work, sucks...what's the motivation to do that? "Betterment of society"? Okay...that works for me...but I can't do this all by myself...can you encourage enough OTHER people to do it for purely altruistic reasons? How about trash removal, or logging, or any number of super dangerous jobs? How about overnight nurses? Our society runs on a whole lot of people doing very-unglamorous jobs, and unless the ENTIRE society is will
He who steals my TV program... (Score:2)
Steals trash.
Obligatory joke and not surprised nothing else has come up on today's Slashdot. Your better joke below:
(I wanted to put a down arrow here, but couldn't figure out a way to do it on ye olde Slashdot.)
Of course we are: there's no viable alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm in the US. The winter Olympics are about to start, and I'd like to watch every possible event, and I'd like to watch them in real time -- if possible. (It's not entirely possible: some of them overlap and I have other things to do, like sleep.)
Despite paying for a cable subscription, despite paying for a premium service, despite having two kinds of devices: I can't do that. I can't even come close. What I can do is watch -- mostly -- delayed, abbreviated, edited versions of events mostly featuring US athletes/teams layered with puff pieces because that's what NBC is serving up. Yes, there are some happy exceptions to this, and that's nice, but it's nowhere close to what I actually want.
So I plan to fire up the VPN and stream whatever I can. Some of the quality will suck and some of the streams will fail and so on, but it's still much better than what I'm actually paying for.
Similarly, in a few weeks spring training for MLB will start. I would like to buy a subscription that gets me every game involving my favorite team: pre-season, season, post-season: every game. I can't. When I went through the exercise of trying to figure this out in 2025, I determined that I'd have to pay for 5 -- FIVE! -- different services and even then, I might miss a game here and there because of obscure and poorly-articulated "blackout" rules that are in play when games are time-shifted to accommodate networks.
So, again, I plan to fire up the VPN and stream whatever I can.
With this in mind, I completely understand why people are buying dodgy devices from dodgy companies that supply dodgy services. It's much simpler, it's much cheaper, and -- as noted in the referenced article -- even if it only works for a few months, it's still more cost-effective than anything the cable/streaming companies are offering.
These cable/streaming companies have managed -- through completely inept management -- to turn a golden business opportunity that could make them a fortune into hot garbage...because they couldn't restrain their greed and their egos. They weren't content to just make a fortune, they wanted to make an obscene fortune. And so here we are.
Re: (Score:2)
Ummm.I am in the US I just paid $18.23, including tax, for peacock premium and it literally has live feeds of every event in real time. As well as replays of each event. I can also run multiple feeds simultaneously on different devices on same Wi-Fi network. No commercials. What you say used to be true, but hadn’t been the case since the last summer Olympics.
Friction matters (Score:2)
The thing I find most incredible about this is that people are willing to track down and spend hundreds of dollars on a dubious piece of hardware, jump through whatever hoops they have to jump through to set it up, and maintain functionality over time - just to avoid dealing with the hassle of piecing together a decent media package/
Some of this is a pricing problem. Some of this is customer greed. But you know what else it is? It's an obvious outcome of a system that keeps fragmenting and driving insane cu
You can have ... (Score:2)
... my rabbit ears when you pry them out of my cold, dead hands.
Re: (Score:1)
I hear you and like the sentiment but broadcast tv is about to be encrypted across the board. You'll still need to pay.
Welcome (Score:1)
to the real world that you seem to have lost to greed. You really only have yourselves to blame, Nobody else did this. You'll all fall, One domino at a time, Over time. THAT is how this works.
Farmers Markets? They're on Amazon and Walmart (Score:2)
I own the superbox. I don't watch much TV, so it doesn't see much use, but yes, it has nearly everything. More stations than I know what to do with, all the sports channels if you care about that stuff, video on demand (they're just downloaded torrents) so while most are good quality, some have the weird logos or closed caption forced in, but mostly it all just works.
I do like the live tv rewind feature too. Show started at 5 o'clock and it's 5:20? No worries, just start from the beginning. Not availab
It's _not_ stealing. (Score:2)
Let's not adopt the language of the dark side, shall we?
Now, if.... (Score:1)
now, if only there was something worth watching....
It's part of their business plan. (Score:2)
Streaming services optimize their profits by accounting for the amount of copyright infringement that is a result of their higher prices. Therefore, the fact that "everyone" is not paying for their content is an acceptable part of their business plan. If they have miscalculated then that's on them, not me.
OTA TV (Score:2)
Ahhhh yes, I'm "stealing" the freely available over-the-air digital TV signals available here in the Seattle area. Darn those pesky corporations producing pirate airwaves that anyone and everyone can freely tap into with their TV or a box like HDHomeRun! Absolutely horrible.
Just training our AI models (Score:2)
They got this completely wrong: People just need to stream all those channels to train their local AI models at home. And as we all know from the wealthiest corporations in the US, getting whatever copyrighted material you can get hold of for free is all good as long as you use it for training AI models.
Yep (Score:2)
The UHF app on our Apple TVs & iOS devices and the UHF Server in Docker to act as a PVR gives us everything for a few $ a month paid in crypto.
We haven't had cable since ~1999-2000. Downloading and the *arrs have kept us happy, but the better half wanted to check out some live sports. So IPTV it was.
"Stealing" what a joke (Score:1)
These media companies have for Decades Rammed Commercials down our throats so much that the public hates it, then they want to screw people AGAIN, by charging them "fees", then AGAIN, Charging them to WATCH it With Subscriptions. So when the public got tired it their BS, go behind their back and watch what you want, and they say "It's not FAIR!" is a God damn Joke. I'm paying nearly $300 a month for Cable/phone/internet for what? watching commercials for 30 minutes an hour, Bad Phone service, and High "Fees
not everyone (Score:1)
Some of us just stopped watching. :)
I did love Netflix when the value proposition made piracy not worth my time.
Today instead of having to pay for 4-5 streaming services, I slowly stopped cared about TV shows and movies. The "second screen" content made the shows horrible.
IDK for some reason I just don't care about it anymore. I do still pay for Tidal and YouTube Premium, but that is all I have left in streaming subscriptions and is more than I need for what little free time I have.
Re: (Score:2)
The entire point of Vox Media was to milk viewers for more money because Tim Stevens was very against additional monetization.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah.... something tells me that The Verge isn't going to get a lot of subscriptions to get past a paywall on an article about the growth of piracy.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not seeing a paywall on the site. uBlock Origin must be doing something.
Re: (Score:3)
> I do still pay for Tidal and YouTube Premium
And I've never seen anything on YouTube worth tossing money Google's way for. Don't get me wrong, some of the content creators do deserve to earn money for their efforts, but they're already doing so via Patreon, t-shirt/knick-knack sales, direct paid sponsorships, etc. Which ironically, you're not spared from when you do subscribe, so you're paying money and still sitting through the part of the video where the content creator does his spiel for NordVPN anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
Youtube + uBlock for me, that at least cuts the worst junk aside from some pop-up AI slop channels.
Re: (Score:3)
The SponsorBlock plugin does a great job at bypassing the NordVPN/Squarespace/Microcenter ads and "Buy my merch" plugs in the video.
Re: (Score:1)
You have all of the local TV channels on it. You don't need cable. I think it's still overpriced.
Re: (Score:2)
Same here.
I stopped watching pretty much anything after 2018 or so.
Just random shit on YouTube or TV when I'm in the car (because our cars all have TV in them, not sure why that didn't catch on in the West, but it's universal in Japan.)
Re: not everyone (Score:2)
Maybe because it's stupidly unsafe?
Re: (Score:2)
I still pay for my VPN.
Re:not everyone (Score:5, Insightful)
I am always very surprised when the topic of enshittification of entertainment industry comes up, and people cry out there's too many ads or the new movies aren't great. People should understand that advertisement and repetitive teenager contents are central to entertainment and won't go away. If you don't like ads or believe you're too old for the low quality contents, come to realisation it's time to move on.
Re: (Score:2)
> I am always very surprised when the topic of enshittification of entertainment industry comes up, and people cry out there's too many ads or the new movies aren't great. People should understand that advertisement and repetitive teenager contents are central to entertainment and won't go away. If you don't like ads or believe you're too old for the low quality contents, come to realisation it's time to move on.
I'm going to disregard the repeated flamebait references to age being the driver behind complaint about quality or ability to appreciate content. As it happens, I'm confident we're in a golden age of TV/movies right now. There is far, far more variety and quantity available. There's more to chose from and if a given viewer can't find more today that suits their tastes, they're not trying. Complaints about quality are bogus and always have been.
As for advertisements, that's much more complicated than y
Re: (Score:3)
I have YouTube premium from back when they had an excellent music service in GooglePlay.
I got rid of it, but then resubscribed so that my cats can watch their bird and squirrel videos uninterrupted.
Seriously.
Re: (Score:3)
> I have YouTube premium from back when they had an excellent music service in GooglePlay.
> I got rid of it, but then resubscribed so that my cats can watch their bird and squirrel videos uninterrupted.
> Seriously.
Install yt-dlp, take the time to download a couple dozen videos, and play them in a loop in VLC. Your cats will never twig to the repeats, especially if you can automatically shuffle the videos. Your wallet will thank you.
Or do bird and squirrel videos have embedded ads?