Football and Other Premium TV Being Pirated At 'Industrial Scale' (bbc.com) 132
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A lack of action by big tech firms is enabling the "industrial scale theft" of premium video services, especially live sport, a new report says. The research by Enders Analysis accuses Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft of "ambivalence and inertia" over a problem it says costs broadcasters revenue and puts users at an increased risk of cyber-crime. Gareth Sutcliffe and Ollie Meir, who authored the research, described the Amazon Fire Stick -- which they argue is the device many people use to access illegal streams -- as "a piracy enabler." [...] The device plugs into TVs and gives the viewer thousands of options to watch programs from legitimate services including the BBC iPlayer and Netflix. They are also being used to access illegal streams, particularly of live sport.
In November last year, a Liverpool man who sold Fire Stick devices he reconfigured to allow people to illegally stream Premier League football matches was jailed. After uploading the unauthorized services on the Amazon product, he advertised them on Facebook. Another man from Liverpool was given a two-year suspended sentence last year after modifying fire sticks and selling them on Facebook and WhatsApp. According to data for the first quarter of this year, provided to Enders by Sky, 59% of people in UK who said they had watched pirated material in the last year while using a physical device said they had used a Amazon fire product. The Enders report says the fire stick enables "billions of dollars in piracy" overall. [...]
The researchers also pointed to the role played by the "continued depreciation" of Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems, particularly those from Google and Microsoft. This technology enables high quality streaming of premium content to devices. Two of the big players are Microsoft's PlayReady and Google's Widevine. The authors argue the architecture of the DRM is largely unchanged, and due to a lack of maintenance by the big tech companies, PlayReady and Widevine "are now compromised across various security levels." Mr Sutcliffe and Mr Meir said this has had "a seismic impact across the industry, and ultimately given piracy the upper hand by enabling theft of the highest quality content." They added: "Over twenty years since launch, the DRM solutions provided by Google and Microsoft are in steep decline. A complete overhaul of the technology architecture, licensing, and support model is needed. Lack of engagement with content owners indicates this a low priority."
In November last year, a Liverpool man who sold Fire Stick devices he reconfigured to allow people to illegally stream Premier League football matches was jailed. After uploading the unauthorized services on the Amazon product, he advertised them on Facebook. Another man from Liverpool was given a two-year suspended sentence last year after modifying fire sticks and selling them on Facebook and WhatsApp. According to data for the first quarter of this year, provided to Enders by Sky, 59% of people in UK who said they had watched pirated material in the last year while using a physical device said they had used a Amazon fire product. The Enders report says the fire stick enables "billions of dollars in piracy" overall. [...]
The researchers also pointed to the role played by the "continued depreciation" of Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems, particularly those from Google and Microsoft. This technology enables high quality streaming of premium content to devices. Two of the big players are Microsoft's PlayReady and Google's Widevine. The authors argue the architecture of the DRM is largely unchanged, and due to a lack of maintenance by the big tech companies, PlayReady and Widevine "are now compromised across various security levels." Mr Sutcliffe and Mr Meir said this has had "a seismic impact across the industry, and ultimately given piracy the upper hand by enabling theft of the highest quality content." They added: "Over twenty years since launch, the DRM solutions provided by Google and Microsoft are in steep decline. A complete overhaul of the technology architecture, licensing, and support model is needed. Lack of engagement with content owners indicates this a low priority."
The problem isn't DRM. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't DRM, the problem is overpriced content and treating the customers like manure.
Also don't assume that customers will pay if they can't get pirated content. Most won't, so the monetary loss is fictional.
Re:The problem isn't DRM. (Score:5, Interesting)
that's not the problem, that's the business plan
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that's not the problem, that's the business plan
:why-not-both:
Re:The problem isn't DRM. (Score:5, Insightful)
Correct. Big Media wants us to pay them hundreds per month and they still serve us ads. Pure greed.
It's also not thefth, at most a copyright violation.
Re:The problem isn't DRM. (Score:5, Informative)
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I find most "premium" high price sport to be quite boring. It's the more niche stuff that hasn't become dominated by money yet where the interesting action is. Sumo, women's football, even Formula E.
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"the games in which I'm interested"
There is your problem. I assume you are an adult, And you care about a pseudo event like sports? Why?
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I already don't watch American football because I don't have cable, don't care for the nearly incessant advertisements, and it's quicker and easier to just read the summaries of the games in which I'm interested after the fact. I'm not really missing anything. Add DRM all you want, fellas; I don't care.
The problem is, with American football if you remove the ads, that's 80% of the content gone right there. The whole reason it's a game of 4 x 15 min quarters that takes 3 hours to play is to make room for ads.
I don't mind a bit of Basketball, but I'm not paying £19 a month to stream games with ads, doubly so as the team I follow is based on the west coast so games are played at 3AM UK time so I won't be watching live anyway.
The DRM doesn't deter the pirates one bit. It just punishes your legitim
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They tried to rise the subscription costs, but this had the unintended effect that some people stopped it and didn't go to pirated content, especially because they also added advertising.
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Sky TV are absolute bastards in that regard. Whenever they re-bid and won the rights to show Premiership games, they put up the cost of all their packages and not just the Sports package to cover the cost of their winning bid.
Re: The problem isn't DRM. (Score:3)
The problem isnâ(TM)t a lack of maintenance of the DRM, itâ(TM)s that theyâ(TM)re finally discovering that DRM that works is fundamentally not possible.
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Exactly, this is just typical classist and corporate propaganda from the BBC. Big Media is always sending the same messages.
This almost reads like an ad (Score:2)
This almost reads like an ad for amazon fire sticks.
I had no idea they could be so useful.
Hot damn, I gotta get me one of those!
Re: The problem isn't DRM. (Score:2)
Re:The problem isn't DRM. (Score:5, Informative)
* Yeah, yeah. There's some ultra-rare, one-of-a-kind film you want to see but can't find on a streaming service.
That's not entirely correct.
Here's a real life example. Almost all of my top 50 favorite movies and TV shows are spread across no less than 8 (eight) streaming services. 41 of them have no option of pay-per-view, forcing me to pay subscriptions to watch them. 21 of them are not available in my country through any legal option due to geofencing, exclusivity rights, other bullshit (to me, as a customer) reasons.
Worth mentioning none of those are actually ultra-rare, as a matter of fact they are all well-known movies and TV shows. Some of them could be considered "cult classics" in their genre.
Just a few examples, no point in getting the whole list: Jericho, Serenity, Firefly, Dogma. I can't watch any of them legally.
Re: The problem isn't DRM. (Score:3)
This. My wife wanted to watch a rather obscure B-movie. I tried to find a way to buy it, either download or even a physical copy. For me, in my country (Switzerland), this was not possible. As always, piracy was fast and easy.
If companies want people to buy their stuff, they have to make it easy to hand them money.
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F1TV isn't available in my country. I still subscribe to it and pay for it using a VPN.
So you openly admit you violate copyright protections by concealing yourself with a VPN. When F1TV discovers you and cancels your account, who will you virtue signal to then? You are no different legally than the "pirates" who PAY for IPTV other than in your own mind.
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VPNs don't "violate copyright protections". It's like thinking that aircraft violate copyright if I use them to travel to another country to buy a book not available in my own. VPNs do allow you to violate contracts with suppliers ... but that's not the same thing.
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And that's the reason sane countries have outlawed it. It's nothing but shitting on the customer.
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1. I never said I pirate those movies or TV series. What I said is that many of them are not available to me in any legal way. No more, no less.
2. Um, yeah... you pirate as well. Rationalizing what you do is not going to make it legal. You lie about your location in order to gain access to otherwise-unavailable services.
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He's saying he would not pay the offered price, but was willing to pay a lesser price. And some businesses do sell the same products for different prices (Airlines). There was (for a time) a coca-cola distributor that was importing foreign bottled products (cheap prices) to resell in the US (premium prices).
This becomes an ever larger problem as shipping prices trend to zero (like digital purchases). It becomes harder justify multiple prices for the same good.
What normal businesses try to do is differenti
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We're just following our leaders. Since they don't respect the laws (that they wrote) why the fuck should I respect them?
Re: The problem isn't DRM. (Score:2)
I'm in the slot where I now just don't watch and go for other entertainment sources. Sport result summaries often end up on free to view.
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You know I have a premium cable package and most popular streaming apps.
About half the time we don't even use that shit and just airplay a pirate website off our ipads, like we don't even bother to check if we have a legal way to watch the content.
I wish you could watch us download an entire season of "the boys" without feeling a bit of empathy for jeff bezos and his lost profits. Hardened criminal psychopaths we are.
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You and all your yes men replying are full of shit. You pirate because you are cheap and so you convince yourself the content providers do not deserve the money. Spare me the Robin Hood cosplay
Won't anyone think of the cable companies?
Re: The problem isn't DRM. (Score:2)
I donâ(TM)t have to convince myself, itâ(TM)s objectively true that most of the links in the chain between the creative people (and athletes) and my eyeballs add little value for big cost. whether that justifies piracy is another matter, but capitalism is definitely not working for fansâ(TM) benefit here.
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Oh jesus I've worked for content providers off an on my whole career.
so you convince yourself the content providers do not deserve the money
Lmao no. The content providers convinced me of this.
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Ethically, I won't give money to Rupert Murdoch.
Murdoch hasn't owned Sky for some time. It's owned by Comcast.
Re: The problem isn't DRM. (Score:2)
Foxtel and Kayo aren't owned by Murdoch anymore, they are owned by a mob called DAZN now.
"Good" (Score:2)
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Yeah, I'm not sure I feel it's good, but I certainly don't care.
Also football: the FA can go fuck themselves with a roughened stick at far as I care.
Re: "Good" (Score:2)
I would put Serie A and LaLiga in the same boat. Both leagues can get stuffed as far as I am concerned.
They're plenty motivated (Score:5, Insightful)
Every single sports fan would purchase normal legal streaming if it wasn't such an unholy pain in the ass or wildly overpriced.
I'm a very simple example. I want to watch the NFL Vikings game in america. I'm not in the 'home zone' because I'm not a damned pleb that can't leave their home town. It isn't on free broadcast tv. Spending over $600 for approximately 9 games that I'll end up watching? Naw...I can find better things to do with my money.
You give me a simple option for $20 to watch the single game I want to watch? Sure. I'll probably do that every single time.
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I'm more of a baseball fan. Last year, my legit options to watch were a crazy-over priced streaming service with deceptive advertising or the even crazier over-priced DirecTV. It's possible I may have watched some less official streams for free.
This year, it's available for $20/month and goes month to month. So I'm paying and watching the official streams.
It's that simple.
And by the way, it's not the streaming devices enabling the yo ho ho. By the time they see a stream it has already been stripped of it's
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And by the way, it's not the streaming devices enabling the yo ho ho. By the time they see a stream it has already been stripped of it's DRM and looks just like any other stream.
No, that's the point (to them). The hardware is too open. They want devices that will only play DRM'd content signed by the special services. Just like a cable TV receiver is generally worthless to a normal person without a cable TV subscription.
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I said 20 dollars a MONTH.
Perhaps you meant to reply to the person I replied to.
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Baseball players work a little harder than you may think. Each team plays a bit over 6 games a week, so even with some doubleheaders that's some play on most days of the week.
Not a bad deal for $20/month if you're a fan.
Re: They're plenty motivated (Score:2)
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Hmm, they have multiple players at each position they rotate in and out. The same pitcher doesn't play all week, for instance. He may play a game or two one series, then sit for the next three games, then play another game or two of the next series.
So their overall list of starters is longer then say the NFL, where typically you have 1st string, 2nd string, etc. 1st string will always start/finish the game if their health allows it.
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The starting pitchers rotate, but the rest of the lineup tends to play almost every game baring injuries.
Of course, even with a 5 or 6 man starting rotation, they tend to blow their elbow out and require surgery somewhere in their mid 20s. Many players have to retire in their early 30s.
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Yeah, I don't mind the $20/month. It's a good deal.
Re: They're plenty motivated (Score:3)
Re: They're plenty motivated (Score:3)
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Where I am... it's broadcast on Fox9 OTA for free.
Re:They're plenty motivated (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. I've been paying MLB like $130 a year to get (most) of the baseball games every year and it feels fine. It only works because the team I mostly follow is out of market where I live, so never blacked out for that reason.
It loses value slowly as they try to double dip by selling those games I've already paid for to other networks and services exclusively -- Apple TV here, Roku there, a Fox or ESPN exclusive national game. It's infurating to pay for all the games and not get all the games.
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Protip: If you join MLBPAA (players alumni association), you can get a 50% discount. Not the first year, though.
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Literal pro tip, impressed.
NBA Situation (Score:2)
Hate to say it, but if they can stay centralized, MLB might be onto something. Cite below, NBA 2025-6 regular season nationally televised games carried by:
Sunday: NBC, ESPN
Mondays: Peacock
Tuesdays: NBC
Wednesday: ESPN
Thursday: Amazon
Friday: Amazon, ESPN
Saturday: ABC, Amazon
Not sure about regional networks, but that'll probably mean adding Season's Pass through the NBA. Getting absurd.
--
https://www.si.com/nba/new-tv-... [si.com]
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"Getting absurd"? That my friend is already full blown absurd. I actually didnt realize it was this bad.
They only do it because they can get away with it. You folks need to stop giving them money.
I even get frustrated by the outlandish sums sports fan will spend on sports. While I have no interest in televised sports I've loved going to the local pro baseball team's games since I was a kid. The tickets for the big pro league team in their big pro team stadium are priced so expensively I havent been in over
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Re: They're plenty motivated (Score:2)
Exactly! I like F1 racing. I pay US$45/year for their subscrption and can watch all the practices and races live (or after). And the streaming is wonderful. I can even change narration language, watch onboard cameras and race telemetry. I've been gladly renewing it for the last 4 years.
Re:They're plenty motivated (Score:5, Informative)
The NFL is the perfect example of why people pirate. For those that don't know, NFL games are generally broadcast in their home market IF the game is sold out. If not, the game was not broadcast locally. There are a few games (4-5 of the 16) per week that are broadcast nationally. Now if you don't live local to your team, then you could only watch your team maybe a few times a year relying on national broadcast.
Then came NFL Sunday Ticket (if you had satellite TV). For one price, you could get all games** (IF it was not broadcast locally, etc.) However you could not get games for one team if you wanted to pay less. NFL Sunday Ticket started in the era of analog satellite so it was somewhat understandable back then that they could not limit games to the ones a specific customer wanted. These days, everything is digital over the Interwebs; yet NFL Sunday Ticket has yet to offer a package for one team. Compounding that is the price increases every year.
And that's for the average residential customer. Commercial customers like bars had a different price structure often charging per screen. While some bars that had dozens of TVs would like all of the games, most smaller bars would really like the local team only..
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Forget live... (Score:1)
...there are enough good sports games over the past 50 years that have been videoed that a fan could spend the rest of their life watching and not finish.
Once every Celtic's and Laker's game from the 1980s and 90s is available on a torrent, nobody is ever going to have to watch live basketball again.
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I think you might have misunderstood why people watch sports. And I say this as someone who really watches very very little sports.
Re: Forget live... (Score:2)
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Yes, I dispute your assertion. There are definitely some turbonerds of the sport variety for whom the game itself is far and away the primary thing. But for a lot of people, a lot of it is being involved in a shared activity. Even if you're watching a game alone, there is some feeling of camaraderie with the other fans out there, and the story of the team, this year, finally they'll win the championship/league/whatever.
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I, for one, have every basketball and football (and yes, hand-egg too) game I ever intend to watch saved on this 5.25 inch floppy disk.
Why, yes, it is still sealed mint-in-envelope. Why do you ask?
Just put 'em on broadcast TV like in the old days (Score:1)
Sure, it wasn't every game but in the USA at least you had a few pro sporting events every week on free over-the-air TV.
Want people to watch your games without piracy? With dozens of channels in most major markets, you can air hundreds of games a day.
My eyes are waiting for your advertisers. Except when I mute during the commericials and walk away to get food or answer nature's call. So um nevermind that bit about my eyes waiting for your advertisers, they aren't. But my wallet is definately not waitin
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Sure, it wasn't every game but in the USA at least you had a few pro sporting events every week on free over-the-air TV.
Football is still very popular in America, and for the most part games are still broadcast.
People should take a closer look at not just free streaming services, but what still lives OTA. There's a lot more than most assume.
https://www.antennaweb.org/ [antennaweb.org] https://www.watchnextgentv.com... [watchnextgentv.com] https://www.titantv.com/ [titantv.com]
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Sure, it wasn't every game but in the USA at least you had a few pro sporting events every week on free over-the-air TV.
They still do but it is only a handful of games. During the NFL season there are 16 games in a week. You might get 5 of the 16 during a week that are national broadcasts and it might not be your team especially you don't live local to the team.
Want people to watch your games without piracy? With dozens of channels in most major markets, you can air hundreds of games a day.
You are assuming that they broadcast your team in those markets. If your team is across the country from where you live, it is highly unlikely that game will be broadcast unless your team is playing against the local team.
Look an easy target! (Score:2)
Maybe (Score:3)
Because your online streaming prices are insane, the quality isn't good, and the various restrictions in order to promote overpriced in-person tickets or cable packages are stupid. Which, of course, all of that is because every single person related to the major sports is either overpaid or underpaid - no one is paid appropriately. NFL players cannot earn less than $800k/year. Head coaches earn multiple millions per year minimum. Specific coaches, like a passing coach, earns less than the people they are coaching - which is ridiculous.
The league and team owners significantly overvalue their own entertainment value while also significantly overspending on things or people that don't matter.
They're making profits on the teams (Score:2)
So they're not overvaluing anything or paying employees too much.
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Just because there are still enough morons in the world left to pay for such overinflated pricing on everything and, thus, make a profit, does not mean everything is not overvalued or people overpaid. Both things are capable of being true. Hence, the pirating at 'industrial scale'. If going to the game in person was cheaper more people would go, instead of watching. If watching the game at home or on the go, legally, was cheaper and easier (and came in decent quality) to access, pirating wouldn't be as high
Value is what people are prepared to pay (Score:2)
Enough are prepared to pay the extortionate prices for an inferior product, so they aren't overvaluing it, at least in the short term. However what may happen is that people start to realise that it's not actually worth it to them...
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Enough are prepared to pay the extortionate prices for an inferior product, so they aren't overvaluing it, at least in the short term.
Yes. They are. Not overvalued enough to turn *everyone* away. But overvalued enough that...
However what may happen is that people start to realise that it's not actually worth it to them...
That this is true, hence the article we are commenting about.
That's telling em! (Score:2)
Easy Solution (Score:3)
Sounds like they should raise prices yet again.
Google Chrome (Score:1)
They must be going bankrupt (Score:3)
All that lost revenue! There's probably a year-over-year decline in revenue and profits. Right? ...Right?
Paid choices are expensive, complex and limited (Score:2, Informative)
If I'm a football fan wanting to watch as many of my team's games as possible, I have to buy subscriptions for:
Sky TV £35/month
Sky Sports £22/month
TNT Sports Monthly Pass £31/month
Amazon Prime £9/month
£97/month, and that lets me see maybe 25/30 games a year from the team that I follow. But I get to watch a load of other crap that's bundled in too ...
Is pirating actually needed (Score:2)
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Re: Is pirating actually needed (Score:2)
Which "Premium TV" service ?? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no such thing as commercial premium service. A premium service would let me watch the movies I want and customize the welcome screen to start with .. Netflix and alike are no premium services.
The only premium service I know is Plex server in combination with torrents. It offers best experience, free.
The Odd Hack for Anti-Piracy. (Score:1)
(Fellow Couch Potato) "Dammit these greedy streaming prices are too much. Time to steal this shit."
* Flips HDTV over to 'rabbit ears' mode *
(Me Potato) "Hey uh, the game is on. You DO remember these things still work, right?"
Boomer Tech > Felony Charge
(Not saying it works every time for every game obviously, but there's more on broadcast TV than people assume. Tax dollars at work. Fucking use it.)
Re: The Odd Hack for Anti-Piracy. (Score:2)
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Another Wing of Enshitification... (Score:2)
Piracy isn't the problem. Piracy is the response.
The problem is corporate theft of public matters and material.
In what rational world are major sporting events a locked down massively expensive to even view scarcity?
A world where people make this strategy profitable (Score:2)
The rights owners and the teams are making money. Enough people are spending their hard earned money to ensure they are getting stupidly richer...
Random Number Generators (Score:1)
I hate team sports with all my passion and would never watch them in the first place. Team sports are just one big random number generators with reduced entropy where the output is always one of 4 options:
- Team A wins.
- Team B wins.
- It's a draw.
- A natural disaster strikes and the game gets called off.
It's not worth my attention and time to watch any of this crap.
Not enough natural disasters for my taste (Score:2)
Lightning bolt hitting a random player. Earthquake. Volcano. That would make for some real entertainment...
Have the police do some policing (Score:2)
At industrial scale, there are industrial money streams. This is not hard for the police to handle, they just de-prioritize almost everything to handle fallout from mass immigration and disastrous mental healthcare decisions.
They should tell politicians to tell the police that this is important enough to dedicate a tiny bit of manpower to, rather than saddling the tech industry with policing tasks. Sometimes the tech industry are the only ones in a good position to do the policing, this is not one of those
Reasonable prices and convenient access is a must (Score:3)
Are PlayReady and Widevine actually cracked? (Score:2)
Don't these services just re-encode the HDMI streams. Unlike what these bozos say, widevine does gets patched. Why suffer outages when you can just use the semi-analog hole?
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HDMI is at the video/audio output port, with HDCP encryption applied. Widevine and Playready operate at the compressed stream layer (typically H.264, with AV1 gaining in usage on compatible devices). The DRM systems are specified at several levels of protection. At more recent levels intended for higher value (like 4K) content, these require TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) capability within a device.
While the highest levels of content protection do require various hardware content protection paths (TEE or equivalent and more), many content distributors do not actually specify the highest levels, because a lot of devices can't support it (and the content distributors want the largest potential audience possible).
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Thank you chatgpt.
Stop charging so much... (Score:3)
If the subscription providers stopped charging a fortune for the sport, there would be less reason to pirate it. The fact that the greedy bastards in charge of the sports leagues are increasingly giving different games to different providers doesn't help.
Enshittification imminent: You'll do without (Score:2)
whether you like it or not.
Streaming will eventually become unaffordable for most people if the prices keep going up. Additionally, the streaming services are degrading the quality of their product by inserting ads, and forcing consumers to pay for multiple streaming services.
Piracy will become rampant, and Congress will attempt to introduce forms of Internet censorship to try to control it. If passed, these censorship controls will be challenged in the courts and will probably be upheld (Due to the conserv
Americans survived truly dire TV for 50 years (Score:2)
Are you old enough to remember just how bad TV quality was? Yet it was still enough to keep people glued to their screens. So no, no chance of them being forced off as we might hope.
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Cable TV-style bundling is the problem. (Score:2)
I'd be happy to pay a couple bucks to watch one game. I won't pay $20 or more for a single game. I won't pay $50-100 to buy cable/streaming package for a month to watch one game. There's so much crap on all the bundled channels that I refuse to pay for an ongoing subscription. I don't need more ways to waste my time.
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