FBI Busts Massive Pirate Streaming Service With More Content Than Netflix (usatoday.com) 124
An anonymous reader quotes USA Today:
Two programmers in Las Vegas recently admitted to running two of the largest illegal television and movie streaming services in the country, according to federal officials... An FBI investigation led officials to Darryl Polo, 36, and Luis Villarino, 40, who have pleaded guilty to copyright infringement charges for operating iStreamItAll, a subscription-based streaming site, and Jetflix, a large illegal TV streaming service, federal officials said Friday.
With roughly 118,000 TV episodes and 11,000 movies, iStreamItAll provided members with more content than Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu and Vudu, according to prosecutors. Polo urged members of iStreamItAll via email to cancel licensed services in favor of pirated content, according to his plea agreement. He also admitted to earning $1 million from his piracy operations, officials said. He also admitted to downloading the content from torrent websites. "Specifically, Polo used sophisticated computer programming to scour global pirate sites for new illegal content; to download, process, and store these works; and then make the shows and movies available on servers in Canada," officials said.
With roughly 118,000 TV episodes and 11,000 movies, iStreamItAll provided members with more content than Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu and Vudu, according to prosecutors. Polo urged members of iStreamItAll via email to cancel licensed services in favor of pirated content, according to his plea agreement. He also admitted to earning $1 million from his piracy operations, officials said. He also admitted to downloading the content from torrent websites. "Specifically, Polo used sophisticated computer programming to scour global pirate sites for new illegal content; to download, process, and store these works; and then make the shows and movies available on servers in Canada," officials said.
Not the exit they were looking for I presume (Score:5, Funny)
I guess an IPO is now out of the question.
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TFA says they made $1 million.
With their skills and creativity, they could have made $1M over the same timeframe by just getting a legal tech job in Silicon Valley.
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Re:Not the exit they were looking for I presume (Score:5, Funny)
TFA says they made $1 million.
With their skills and creativity, they could have made $1M over the same timeframe by just getting a legal tech job in Silicon Valley.
And then spent $1 million on rent over the same time frame.
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TFA says they made $1 million.
With their skills and creativity, they could have made $1M over the same timeframe by just getting a legal tech job in Silicon Valley.
And then spent $1 million on rent over the same time frame.
Unless you suck it up and commute. Commute sucks but there are people out there sucking it up to minimize cost. Not a great strategy for the long term (specially if you want to plan to have a family), but it makes damned sense to do so for several years IIF one lands a very lucrative job in the valley.
It's all a matter of planning and priorities. Don't want a commute? Then pay up a shitload of money plus a kidney. Don't want to pay up a shitload of money and a kidney? Then suck it up with a murder commute
Crunchyroll pulled off the transition from piracy (Score:2)
Crunchyroll ... investment drew criticism from anime distributors and licensors Bandai Entertainment and Funimation as the site continued to allow users to upload illegal copies of licensed titles.
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Sensationalist headline. That's a pretty low bar.
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Sophisticated programming? (Score:1)
Damn, these guys sound real bad. String em up!
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Damn, these guys sound real bad. String em up!
"Spohisticated programming" is probably law-enforcement code for "Sonarr / Radarr with Jackett and some really good Indexers added". Can't make it sound too easy or it will encourage copycats.
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Go to any network streaming video service, ABC, CBS, NBC, Discovery, A&E, PBS, Netflix, Hulu... view a streaming video and click on developer tools or press F12 in any browser
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Programming a computer to automate common tasks? Heresy!
Computers should only be programmed by authorized corporations that wish to steal and resell our private information.
His defense: (Score:2)
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1. Get Content.
2. Pay for it. LEFT OUT THIS STEP.
3. Charge for it.
4. Deliver it.
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Even if the court would be at all charitable to such an argument, he'd have a hard time arguing why he made $1 million off of that information.
Beacause hookers and dealers don't accept information as payment.
The Spotify of video (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:The Spotify of video (Score:5, Interesting)
Some truths of the modern world, which might shock you:
- Physical content is dead. Most people don't WANT to buy or rent DVDs.
- Many houses nowadays don't have a working DVD player, and most houses never had a BD player
- Children under 10 don't even know how to operate disk based media
- Most houses no longer have a desktop computer. Many don't even have a computer at all (the boom you see in those "streaming" services, given how easy it is to torrent, is the fact that they consume media in their phones, and need it delivered to the walled garden most phones are)
- Disney $media (VHS, DVD, and now Disney+) are no longer your kids' babysitter. Youtube is. There are channels dedicated to children with literally BILLIONS of plays, ranging from well-produced goofy acting from russian kids, to an incredibly high viewcount of toy unboxing videos.
- Netflix is even putting the pirate DVD sellers out of business: here in Argentina pirate DVD sellers are a dying trend. Netflix fills that, even for lower-middle class and, shockingly enough, "upper" lower classes as well (they share passwords though).
- The same people as above actually now pay for Youtube Premium (the family plan costs about half of what a mcdonald's combo costs) because they are sick of seeing ads on their smart TVs and Chromecasts.
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There are literally a dozen places that I know of selling DVDs in my home town in the UK; they're not doing it as a hobby.
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So... someone notices things that contradicts your narrative, and your response is 'ok '.
Wow. Great response. By the inverse, I guess that means == paying attention to reality, and whatever you are == not paying attention?
What a trollish, inane reply.
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I'm sure you'll agree that an internet connection gets you anything you want--games, movies, music, porn--if you know how to use it.
I'm sure you'll agree that those that don't know how to use it literally a dying breed; dying of old age if nothing else.
Physical media has very small margins and shrinking every day.
Boomer.
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The issue with the narrative is that it extrapolates from data which is already out of date. Piracy has never been a huge part of the market - the tens of millions that watch a new movie don't want to learn how to use the Internet in a way that gives them access to eveything they want to see. While the legal online market was unified, they where happy. Now they need to juggle four subscriptions they're not. That doesn't mean they're going to learn how to use piracy tools and sites, it means they're going to
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Whatever, snowflake.
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There is some exaggeration in this post.
1. While most people don't want to buy or rent DVDs, physical media is not dead. People prefer not having to get up to pull a DVD out of a library and insert it in a player to see a movie now that they've acclimated to streaming video, but absent a guarantee that the streaming service to which one subscribes will ALWAYS host the products, a person who wants that video on-demand will continue to purchase physical media. I even (over time) ripped by DVD library in stand
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Redbox, a DVD rental kiosk company, just sold for $1.6 billion. I buy DVDs if I know I'll want to view the movie/show in 10 years. So, mostly classics. Of course, if it's a one-off rental, I'd rather stream it.
The market penetration of XBox One and Playstation would like to have a word with you about BD. And old consoles are chiming in on the DV
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2. Are you counting all the houses with gaming consoles?
3. my 3 year old will go to the DVD shelf, pick a movie he wants, take it to the player and put it in. Yes, we know you are dumber than a 3 year old.
4. As desktops fell, laptops increased. I note you said "desktop computer" as if you know that a PC is in most houses. You are deliberately lying, or were trying to exclude the infinitesimal edge case of houses with Chromebooks without a PC.
5. yes. Because You
Re: The Spotify of video (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at the fiasco of UFC 245. People having to go to 3 different channels to see everything. Content blocking so non-US customers can't even BUY the content, even those who have a monthly membership! I always pay for what I watch but I had no qualms about making other arrangements in this case.
One question: Why risk this? (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who was put through the wringer back in the early 1990's over some accusations I hosted pirated software on a hobby BBS that cost more to run each month than any users ever donated in funds? I guess I find it hard to fathom that anybody would actually try streaming copyrighted movies and TV shows as a commercial service, actually advertising it like it was a legitimate company, and think they could get away with it?
I mean, we're talking the FBI putting effort into coming after me over a total user-base of maybe 100 or so people, back in the day when the general public didn't even understand what a BBS was, versus running an illegal competitor to Netflix or Hulu with global reach and earnings in the $1 million range! You better believe they'd come for you.
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"earnings in the $1 million range"
Is that a serious question? Some people will kill for $50.
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Re: One question: Why risk this? (Score:1)
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Maybe this person is related to the one who was pilfering $80k out of the bank at which he worked and Instagramming pictures of him with all the money...
Re: One question: Why risk this? (Score:3)
to get a plea deal of 1 mil while keeping the othe (Score:5, Informative)
to get a plea deal of 1 mil while keeping the other 3, pretty much. once the numbers get big enough the game kinda changes.
remember that shutdown of a couple of rom sites a while ago by nintendo? they paid a bunch of cash to nintendo and shut down. the cash was estimated to be less than earnings from running the sites. they ran the sites for nearly 2 decades, all of it was for profit monetized with intrusive ads(also malware ads).
Whats strange in this story is that they ran the operation while staying _in_ USA and having the servers in Canada. why not run the servers from mexico, taiwan, hong kong or whatever? why risk staying in USA and not go into some place like vietnam or thailand to run it through proxies?
also in the bigger cases it's not that unheard of that .. well, that they make a plea deal thats got a cash back statement on it. the purpose is to make for headlines like paid damages of 50 million or whatever, while paying 1 mil. the studios(mpaa,riaa) view the headline as the thing they want, not the cash.
do I have any proof offhand for these numbers? not really no. so just treat this info as a rumor. it also used to that pirate sites actually got the most actual flak and damages for stealing bandwidth(servers at universities and such, calling card fraud and all that) not so much for the actual pirated content(the call card fraud etc the telecoms viewed directly as lost money, the stolen bandwidths usually viewed as an authority issue by university etc admins).
it's probably the flow of cash that the feds got them with too.
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also in the 90s the cops didn't really know shit about anything and had no idea whatsoever what was serious cybercrime and what wasn't serious cybercrime. I had my computers confiscated for 2.5 _years_ in the late 90s with no chargers raised in the end at all. I did some stupid stuff back then(basically what was scriptkiddie stuff with rootshell.org scripts and such and fxping warez and what have you) but they thought I did some other stupid stuff that I didn't actually do. was any of that really serious enough to bust me in middle of school day and confiscate most (not all!) computers including some floppies from the floor and shit? not really. but it's not like they had done any such cases before that.
also if you ever get busted by cops anywhere be very sure to read the transcript of the questioning _very_ _very_ carefully before signing it. cops are used to druggies and such and they will just put in a confession into the transcript even if you didn't actually confess to anything when speaking. mine had a confession to something technically impossible before I told them that nope I want this changed. . I mean the cops doing the questioning didn't even know what was possible, but put it in there anyway that I agreed to having done all of it. the usual druggie, or someone with social anxiety just from whatever, coming down just wants to get out of the situation of the interview/questioning.
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Re: to get a plea deal of 1 mil while keeping the (Score:1)
The People _want_ virtuous laws enforced with a soft touch by honest cops. Alas, the Owners want & get the iron boot.
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More content than Netflix? How hard can that be? (Score:5, Informative)
With the scattering of all exclusive content over +100 streaming services, getting more content than Netflix is something you achieve on your first day as a pirate.
somethg you achieve onyour first day as a piratate (Score:1)
Only if you're a slow learner.
Not pick nits but, when are real piratate takes the plunder, owners no longer have the loot. Not the case here. Here, we just have someone selling tickets to the show but not sharing profit. Sharing the show isn't the crime here, not sharing the profit is.
Only one million profit in 10 years collecting from Joe6pack [who is happy to pay comcast 200 a month for less service], no way. The other question one must ask is WTF would any business be stupid enough to store the result of
So it /was/ illegal the whole time... (Score:1)
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Yep... this resembles recent TV streaming site Aereo. Mainstream content, which they didn't license.
Re: So it /was/ illegal the whole time... (Score:1)
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The "small antenna" was fiction... while they tried to keep everything in-market they were really just a streaming site.
Re: So it /was/ illegal the whole time... (Score:5, Insightful)
There's something deeply wrong with the copyright model when it's illegal to rebroadcast anything that was ever broadcast.
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There's something deeply wrong with the copyright model when it's illegal to rebroadcast anything that was ever broadcast.
How so? Note I'm picking on the specific term here: rebroadcast. This implies playing something for the benefit of other. Are you saying that you think it would be okay to just record a cable TV channel and then replay it with a 10 second day (rebroadcast) while charging a few cents less and paying nothing to the people who broadcast the original piece?
How is that not the same as blatant copying, for profit of anything? Should I be able to make a 100% identical iPhone and sell it without legal repercussions
Re: So it /was/ illegal the whole time... (Score:1)
Google Nazis sure do love stomping shady small businessmen with the iron boot for the same class of shady activity from which Big Brother Google ostensibly earns the lucre it is unofficially paid by the gestapo.
Re:Why is this illegal? (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't understand copyright. The producers spend a lot of money making content, and that first copy comes with the right to say who gets a copy.
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You don't understand copyright. The producers spend a lot of money making content, and that first copy comes with the right to say who gets a copy.
That's true but the issue is making a copy without permission isn't the same thing as stealing.
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Legal fantasies are not going to cut it. Should be obvious to anybody with 2 brain-cells after the legal approach has failed consistently for a long time now. (No, there would not be more "piracy" if it was legal.) The problem is that the legal offers are really bad to non-existent. Since copying does basically costs nothing these days, people look for better offers. This is well-documented. Essentially, the copyright holders are doing it to themselves.
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Re: Why is this illegal? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's just ones and zeroes in a certain sequence. They probably edited or converted the video format, so it wasn't even the original ones and zeroes...
If I took the "just ones and zeroes in a certain sequence" that your bank calls "your account," you'd probably be pretty upset, even though I didn't physically take anything from you. I get the argument, and simple copying is certainly not as bad as theft of a physical product (loss of sale is much harder to prove than loss of physical property, and not every copy equates to a lost sale), but profiting from illegal distribution is difficult to defend. Without some form of copyright protection there would be no incentive for many content creators to do what they do.
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Without some form of copyright protection there would be no incentive for many content creators to do what they do.
Is that really what happens though? There has been plenty of content creation in places/times with no copyright at all or ineffective enforcement. You could certainly find some creators who would no longer do it, or perhaps create less. That isn't the same thing as establishing a net benefit or an entitlement.
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If I took the "just ones and zeroes in a certain sequence" that your bank calls "your account," you'd probably be pretty upset, even though I didn't physically take anything from you.
Why should I be upset just because you obtained a copy of my balance and account history? I mean, I might be upset with the bank for failing to keep the data private as required by our contract, since that data could potentially be useful to someone who does intend me harm (e.g. targeted advertising, identity fraud, blackmail), but simply possessing a copy of my records is not harmful in itself. If these were public records, which would be a much better analogy for published copyrighted works, then there wo
Re: Why is this illegal? (Score:2)
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I have no problem with your name. In fact, it is a valuable indicator that you probably have nothing worthwhile to contribute and I can ignore you right away, Saves time.
Re: Why is this illegal? (Score:2)
Re: We all laugh as well (Score:2)
YouTube video vs $100 million movie (Score:2)
If you want to watch content that costs approximately nothing, there are over five BILLION videos on YouTube to choose from.
If you want to watch a movie that costs $100 million to make, you pitch it in your $2. That's how it works.
Mostly I watch the free stuff. With 5 billion videos to choose from, I don't think I'll run out of things to wqtch any time soon. When I do want to be more entertained by a $100 million spectacle, I swipe my card and chip in my $1.50 at Redbox.
Re:YouTube video vs $100 million movie (Score:5, Interesting)
Only that I cannot actually "pitch in that $2". I would if I could. There are no legal offers for non-dubbed English language movies here. Dubbed, I will not watch, and, for example, quite a few TV series are not available legally at all, ever.
Re: YouTube video vs $100 million movie (Score:1)
Downmodded for stating the obvious. Winning!
Re:Why is this illegal? (Score:5, Insightful)
> They didn't steal the content from anyone
You seem to think laws exist to enforce common law. That's an absurdly antiquated perception.
Go read the DMCA and you'll come to the inescapable conclusion that the statutes exist solely to increase the profits of multinational corporations. Who purchased the statute in the first place (cf. Fritz Hollings).
Enjoy your life as a subject, rather than a citizen, or go do something about it.
Re: Why is this illegal? (Score:1)
Yay serfdom! Cybernetic totalitarianism FTW!
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So if you write a book and print it on paper to sell it and then I copy your book and sell it to make money and give you NO money, are you happy with that, because you still have your original book? I am just like a global bookshop where anyone can buy a copy of your book.
Funny thing, Copyright got introduced because large printers were doing exactly that and making a hetfy profit of it. It was never intended to restrict customers.
With roughly 118,000 TV episodes and 11,000 movies (Score:2)
"With roughly 118,000 TV episodes and 11,000 movies"
Seriously people, if you are going to run a pirate streaming service you can do better than this.
Did you even look into foreign content?
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Alphabet Agencies Need to Look Relevant (Score:3)
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Errr the FBI has gone after mass illegal production and copyright issues since before terrorists consumed your mind. They have different internal departments which deal with these issues, and those departments have pretty much existed for the best part of 50 years.
But by all means, OUTRAGE. NOISE. ANGER.
Re: Alphabet Agencies Need to Look Relevant (Score:1)
Hurrah for the iron boot!
Thou shalt not provide fixes for market failures. (Score:2, Insightful)
Providing free fixes for obvious holes in the market for the the shared community is FORBIDDEN. It shall be PUNISHED SEVERELY.
The market will instead BUNDLE, it will EXCLUDE, it will MANIPULATE market segments.
Because we have learned NOTHING from the era of the Robber Barons, or at least nothing that we aren't willing to forget in the name of stock prices.
The public interest does not exist. Insult anyone that insists that it should be respected. Mock them - and respect all seekers of rent - for all forms
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Look, those copyright cartel companies paid a LOT of money for those laws. Are you suggesting they shouldn't get their money's worth?
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ask to do the time in Canada! (Score:2)
ask to do the time in Canada!
FUD (Score:2)
FTA ''One of the platforms reportedly had more paying subscribers than Netflix, Hulu and other popular licensed streaming platforms.''
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
''In the third quarter of 2019, Netflix had over 158 million paying streaming subscribers worldwide as well as over 5.5 million free trial customers. Of these subscribers, 60.62 million were from the United States.''
So how do you only make 1 million dollars... or am I bad at math.
Admitting admitting (Score:2)
Re: Admitting admitting (Score:1)
In Soviet America, one has all the civil liberties one for which one can afford to litigate in federal kangaroo court for a couple decades.
Maybe Plex (Score:2)
I have seen several posts from users on the Plex reddit, implying they're basically selling access to their Plex library like some kind of Netflix - several of these posts. I don't know if it's genius or stupidity.
It seems like a very risky, foolish move to me but I do like money, so I sympathise with doing idiot stuff when money flows in.
Still, very dumb - dunno if that's what these 2 did, but what a crazy thing to do.
Wake up legit companies, this is what we want! (Score:2)
Hmmmm...
Just think about that for a second Hollywood execs and legit streaming companies, 2 guys organised and operated a collective, subscription based streaming service that gave people exactly what they wanted and people paid...they paid a shed load of cash for it! Alright, they did it without permission and yes they needed to be stopped as it was illegal but just 2 guys ran it. With all the thousands of resources, people and lawyers the top 5 streaming and production companies have at their disposal and
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Because Netflix has been losing titles (Score:3)
People do want a "one stop shop". They don't want to pay enough to make it a successful business, because all that accumulated storage and indexing and bandwidth to provide the uploads costs money. This is the fundamental flaw of Eric Swarz's attempts to simply copy JSTOR and "make information free". It wasn't his to copy, he had no resources to keep it organized, and it was the _organization_ and reliable access to very obscure, low volume content that make JSTOR valuable.
Netflix's problem is only partly the pirates, it's the flood of other "streaming services" who've flooded the market and made a one-stop-shop impossible.
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As a pirate since the data of trading games on copied audio tape, I agree fully. Netflix, along with other legal services like Spotify, iTunes and Steam, really hurt piracy. We lost a lot of users to the lure of convenience. Most people don't pirate just to save money - they do it for the sake of convenience, because it's easier to grab a torrent than to order a box set that will take a week to arrive and spend years sitting on the shelf after you've watched it.
With the increasing fragmentation of legal pro
How stupid? (Score:2)
MPAA has the US government as its own copyright police. It's not a question of IF but WHEN you'll get busted.
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Exactly, the US government is not exactly known for competence. Unless you are as blatantly obvious as this guy you don't have much to worry about.
Re: How stupid? (Score:1)
Three cheers for the iron boot of monopoly capitalism! Hup hup hurrah!
Why? (Score:2)
That's like the first rule of the 1997 edition of the Internet Pirates Handbook; don't pay someone for your warez because that defeats the entire purpose. Your internet connection doesn't count...but paying for streaming piracy? Did a millennial write the new handbook?
"Like, OMG you guise! You pay but you don't pay. It's so cool."
More content than Netflix? (Score:2)
My 2000's blu-ray collection had more good content than Netflix.
Balkanization (Score:2)
The public does not want to be confused with 30,000 different streaming services, and wants to get all of their content from one place.
Right now, there is a vacuum for that and somebody else will come along, build and build a new pirate site. They will learn from their predecessors mistake and make sure it's done where American law cannot touch it.
Of course, the companies can band together and do this themselves and legit, but we all know that will not happen.