Five Men Convicted of Operating Massive, Illegal Streaming Service That Allegedly Had More Content Than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Prime Video Combined

The headline they want you to read: "zomg these master criminals were causing billions in damages!!!!1!1"

The headline everyone else reads: "lmao piracy run by a couple random schmucks has an infinitely better service AND content selection than any corporate streaming service"

Alternative headline: "study finds that people don't like subscriptions that tell them to eat shit"
piracy run by a couple random schmucks has an infinitely better service AND content selection than the top 4 corporate streaming services combined"
FTFY 😁

Maybe those services could take a hint and create a unified platform where each partner gets a cut depending on % of their content watched.

You mean, like cable?
- Like early Netflix before they all decided they would make their own shitty streaming services and didn't renew contracts.
- There's a very functional middle ground between all in one cable, and a hundred different services.
- More like how all the music streaming services work. All got pretty much the same content, just different quality and prices.
CEO: share!? profit? SHARE PROFIT!?! SOMEONE CALL SECURITY WE HAVE A COMMUNIST!!!
That was the original idea behind Hulu.
But Netflix had a much better UX and ate their lunch.
- That and Disney decided they wanted to break (sorry. Let me use the business terms. "Disrupt") the market by having a vertical integration of streaming platform and production company. The thing is, it did great for the in the short term, but may have harmed them long term. Meanwhile everyone else is now chasing the model that may actually be losing Disney money because short term greed is the only driver in our economy

Wow, it's really hard to imagine the deep societal harm done by these five people. And you do have to imagine it because it doesn't exist.

Entertainment to uplift the spirit? For free? Think of the children!
(Apparently not free at all, $10/month.)

The group used “sophisticated computer scripts” and software to scour piracy services

that's way too fancy talk for these programs LOL

Sophisticated computer scripts
if (request) { Connection.Stream(video); }

Mentally translating this as: Competition from the free market unfairly prosecuted by a tyrannical state that enforces the monopoly of “intellectual property” of corporations

This is insane. This does not warrant a 48 year sentence; some actual rapists and murderers get off for less time. The “justice” system is a joke and doesn’t prosecute criminals. It prosecutes those that threaten the system.

Sentencing hasn't happened yet; 48 years is the maximum, according to the article.
Whatever the sentence is will be ridiculous since it's just copyright infringement, but hopefully the sentencing goes to a small fraction of the maximum.
- Thanks for the clarification. Hope they get the greasiest lawyer they can find outta this.
To be fair, Netflix and the others all had to pay licensing fees and whatnot. I think governments should simply ban exclusivity deals so that competition can exist.

It's not exactly difficult to have more content than those services when they keep fucking around with exclusivity bullshit.

Right? This dude was probably just hosting all of the content that the platforms removed over the years lol
Yeah... when you pull up stats for Netflix library, you learn some things... Like how little content they actually had. Never cracked 7000 movies... And while that may seem like a lot to a lot of people out there. Those of us that remember blockbuster stores, you ignore like 90% of them cause they're dumb or silly movies that you'd never watch anyway (or stuff you've already watched). Then you can put actual numbers to it... If each of these are full bluray rips (which they're not as far as Netflix goes) they only take up 175TB... It's not a lot of movies at all.
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-netflix-movie-and-tv-show-catalog-changed-over-time-2020-2
It's pretty easy to see how an individual could collect more content than netflix easily. Now add money to the equation... I think it would be possible to collect double or triple netflix easily.

Lol I think most self hosted media centres over a year old have more content that all those services combined

IDK, I've been at it for a month and have accumulated around 3.6tb, I'm pretty sure Netflix alone has way more than 43.2tb in their entire library (>17000 titles globally)...
- Guess we'd need to qualify it with more in our personal libraries that we actually want to watch. Lol
- To be fair, most of Netflix is crap that no one watches.

Five Guys have better service that is free than largest paid service providers

Cheaper, not free.
Five Guys have better service that is free
It wasn't free — they were charging money for it:
Jetflicks, which charged $9.99 per month for the streaming service

Free my boys they did nothing wrong. Also, I thought the US doesn't go after you with copyright unless you profit from it.

Edit: my bad, they were charging for this. Yeah..

Jetflicks, which charged $9.99 per month for the streaming service, generated millions of dollars in subscription revenue and caused “substantial harm to television program copyright owners,” the Justice Department said Thursday.

Lmao must of us here do the same thing. It's not hard. I don't think I've written a script for this but it can't be too difficult.

The group used “sophisticated computer scripts” and software to scour piracy services (including the Pirate Bay and Torrentz) for illegal copies of TV episodes, which they then downloaded and hosted on Jetflicks’ servers, according to federal prosecutors.

The average human considers the Pythagorean theorem "sophistication". Let's not take our education for granted.
- Relevant xkcd

It's not that hard to compete with the ever shrinking Netflix library

Wow, that must have had like 12 shows.

Give me like $7,500 and I provide enough harddisks for 183,200 episodes. I'm not sure what to calculate for traffic, though.

And I mean it's a bit unfortunate that you have to commit money laundering and/or tax fraud alongside this "business model". It's just not that easy to say: Hey, I would like to pay taxes on this pile of money and I don't want to say where I got it from, it's definitely mine, though.

Were they using cryptocurrency? Maybe that's how they thought they could get away with it. The article doesn't say
- The article doesn't talk much at all about all the interesting technical details.
  The press release talks about trouble with payment providers... So I suppose they accepted credit card payment.
  Maybe the court documents are publicly available if anyone is willing to dig them up in order to find out... I don't think I'm that interested. If it's a good story, maybe someone will do a documentery or podcast episode at some point. Would probably do for a "true crime" show.

At one point, Jetflicks claimed to host more than 183,200 TV episodes.

Look what they took from you!

You should really be more specific. All of them have more content than netflix hulu vudu and prime video combined.

They wrote it in the article: jetflix It was even paid and people still used this instead of the legal services

I miss the old Netflix, where discs would come to my house.

Don't worry, there are still some services out there that do this!
3D Blu-ray Rental
DVDInbox
And Gamefly allows you to rent movies, too!
I've read that some people are going back to simpler tech stacks, and it feels like they're just leaving money on the table if that demographic continues to grow.
Who knows, though? Maybe somebody new will fill in that niche.
- I wasn't raised with cable so TV isn't my thing, but I was fortunate enough to live by a $1 theatre and watch all kind of movies in a theatre, I'm just gonna go back to that. Once I find a dollar theatre.