'Everyone is Stealing TV' (theverge.com) 186
A sprawling informal economy of rogue streaming devices has taken hold across the U.S., as consumers fed up with rising TV subscription costs turn to cheap Android-based boxes that promise free access to thousands of live channels, sports events, and on-demand movies for a one-time $200 to $400 purchase.
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.
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.
not everyone (Score:2, Insightful)
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:not everyone (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Youtube + uBlock for me, that at least cuts the worst junk aside from some pop-up AI slop channels.
Re:not everyone (Score:4, Informative)
The SponsorBlock plugin does a great job at bypassing the NordVPN/Squarespace/Microcenter ads and "Buy my merch" plugs in the video.
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Re: not everyone (Score:3)
Much of the impact of the ads is subliminal. You usually become aware of the company/product being advertised within the first few seconds. If you are manually skipping over, you are saving time, but are still being impacted by the ad.
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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:3, Insightful)
Maybe because it's stupidly unsafe?
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I still pay for my VPN.
Re:not everyone (Score:4, 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.
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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
Newspapers and magazines double-dip (Score:3)
When prices rise and subscribers are pressured to pay for still-more-expensive tiers of service to avoid advertisements, something has gone wrong. The provider is double-dipping. They're making their profit off the price you pay plus whatever the ad industry gives them. It's because they want more profit.
Printed newspapers and magazines have been double-dipping since before the Internet opened to the public. Is there a material difference?
Re:not everyone (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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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?
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I don't believe you, Mr Jennings.
If you're feline and you're smart enough to post on Slashdot, surely you're smart enough to spot a video loop.
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Some of us? Most of us. Why watch insipid, uncreative, cut and paste productions?
I've got thirteen channels of shit on the T.V. to choose from ~ Gilmore
Face facts, classism breeds corruption which produces incompetency and this is exactly what we are seeing, a complete lack of creativity and quality. Like corporate food, corporate culture is empty of value, a waste of time and worse, manipulative and misleading. People are paying to be programmed by classist and authoritarian propaganda, 1984 indeed. Welcom
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sorry, written by Waters not Gilmore, I know i know
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Re:not everyone (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Unbelievable! (Score:5, Funny)
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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:5, 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...
Southern Church Goers (Score:2)
Not recognizing each other at the liquor store and where these gadgets are sold?
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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:Unbelievable! (Score:5, Informative)
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Who else remembers 1channel, FlixNet and the others?
Ah... happy days. At one point almost everything that had ever been screened or broadcast was available to anyone with a Raspberry Pi and a copy of Kodi with a few choice plug-ins. I'd gladly have paid $50 a month to have access to all that stuff but now, with the destruction of that piracy vector, much of the content is no longer accessible and what's left is fragmented over a dozen different streaming services that all want to empty your wallet.
Hence I
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...
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Re: Chinese Hardware (Score:2)
There have several times when these devices have turned out to be part of a botnet.
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How about I name a 2.0 [cgu.edu]?
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"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.
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Hate to be the one to break it to you - that square in your pocket is a credible electronic threat with state-sponsored eavesdropping. By a much closer government, with a much greater ability to do you harm.
And it's more expensive.
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What are you going to do, buy American hardware? It's made in China anyway, and we know for a fact (thanks to Snowden) that the US installs spyware in it.
If you really care, get a Raspberry Pi and run Kodi on it. You can also replace the OS on many of the Chinese boxes with your own.
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:5, Interesting)
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.
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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:The industrial revolution ran over our faces. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Purpose (Score:2)
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.
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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'.
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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: Purpose (Score:4, Insightful)
That's quite probably 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.
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Remember, if it's too good/cheap to be true, then *you* are probably the product
Either that, or you are watching a national broadcaster.
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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.
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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.
Ah, that makes sense. My disconnect is that, while flipping through pay TV channels which I have access to them, I don't find any more programs to watch than when flipping through the free IPTV channels. The sports-heads I know just spring for the streaming package for whatever local team they want to watch.
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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.
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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)
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.
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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
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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
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>"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)
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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)
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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.
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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
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Distracts from AI Stealing Everything Else (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re: Funny thing (Score:2)
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:5, Insightful)
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)
Piracy is just advanced socialism (Score:2)
Re:Piracy is just advanced socialism (Score:5, Insightful)
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 willing to handle sewer cleanings if needed, there will need to be some sort of motivation...but if it isn't altruism and it isn't bartering, you're gonna have to come up with a motivation to do undesirable work, and/or deal with undesirable hours. If those systems go offline at 2AM...someone's getting "the call"...if there's no motivation for me to answer that call, I don't know how that call is going to be answered.
Imagine if "pirates" put in as much passion into producing free housing, education, healthcare and food,
...all of which require a whole lot more commitment, and finite resources...and the possibility of lawsuits for doing the thing you're proposing. Please let me know how your 'free restaurant', 'free apartment', or 'free hospital' idea would work, in a way that doesn't involve incentivization, compulsion, or externalizing of the costs.
poverty is a capitalist invention.
No, poverty is the default state of existence. Take away all of modern society, and we'll spend our days hunting and gathering for our next meal, hoping we don't get sick or injured, along with everyone else doing the same. Specialization means that one person can spend more time on one task, to the benefit of others, but then that person would have a deficit in other areas. Two specialists exchanging the results of their labor means both people benefit by receiving improved outcomes than if either person were to divide their time...but once you've introduced trade, you've introduced capitalism. Our current system has many, MANY faults (medical insurance, as a singular example, basically being the worst parts of socialism and capitalism without the best parts of either), but true socialism requires everyone to agree that the value of all goods and services are roughly-similar-enough that everyone's willing to participate equally and consistently, but once someone comes in and disrupts that, it requires some form of force to maintain the equilibrium. This is why socialism has huge problems scaling beyond small and/or voluntary communities...but if we take away every system and abstraction, some people will successfully hunt and gather on a particular day, some will not. Some will successfully reproduce on a particular day, some will not. Poverty isn't a capitalist invention, it is what happens if anyone does nothing.
Even on Slashdot we could be posting freely and not need MongoDB in the corner of our site.
Soylent News has no MongoDB ads, but you're here.
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)
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.
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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)
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 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:4, Funny)
Yep (Score:2)
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.
Just had this conversation .... (Score:2)
So⦠the next generation of BadBox? (Score:2)
Hello,
How soon we forget: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/... [eff.org]
If you take a look into some of the technical write-ups on that, you'll see it was involved with everything from ad-injection to click-fraud to DDoS to selling your internet connection as residential VPNs and proxies, etc. And simply wiping these devices and installing a clean Android image was often not enough, since their bootloaders had bootkits in them that eventually reloaded the malicious apps and malware on to them.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Piracy is a competitor (Score:2)
Capitalists whining again about how their beloved markets work.
Fuck 'em. I'd rather people spent their money on things that would actually enrich their lives , like having more free time and better healthcare than paying execs, old copyright holders and celebrities who play pretend for a living.
Piracy is a righteous opposition to greed and lazy business.
The model needs to change we need "pick and mix" content, not channels.
Something similar to Youtube, pay for the specific content you want, Let the produce
I am not (Score:2)
Stopped watching TV about 17 years ago. Still not missing anything. The half hour or so I see every year when I visit family is quite enough to confirm I made the right decision.
Re: I am not (Score:2)
The last thing I want to be alone with is my own thoughts.
Re: (Score:2)
Well. First, you should probably work on that and second, there is a whole wide Internet out there, books are a thing and games are too.
Re: I am not (Score:2)
I have been working on that for years. Most of the problem is that I am autistic and neurodivergent so for me that means I can't shut off my thoughts. A book won't do that and if I'm sitting by myself in a quiet room my thoughts get louder. A game is too stimulating before bed. TV is really the only thing that can turn my mind off and can be done with my wife.
I like to support the industry (Score:2)
I like to support the industry, but it does sting to pay $5 to rent old 90s movies.
I wonder what "everyone" means here (Score:2)
Unfortunately the original article is beyond a paywall, so I don't know if it's mentioned there, but I'd guess that "everyone" means "about 5% of the population".
TV subscription costs have been overpriced (Score:2)
TV? What is the TV of which you speak? (Score:2)
People still watch TV? I quit nearly 10 years ago. Broadcast TV is utterly useless.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Very similar for me.
I haven't even owned a TV for half my adult life. And when I do have one, I rarely use it. And when I do use it, it would almost never be for watching random broadcast TV.
Too many people allow TV to just "wash" over them, every night, night after night, for hours on end, for years at a time. It's literally damaging like that. Watching TV isn't damaging but THAT is. It's how adverts, jingles, reality TV, the latest "fad" etc. gets into your head.
For the last 10 years of so I've been