Clampdown on TV 'Dodgy Boxes'

It would not be surprising if it happened. I ran website categorisation surveys on millions of websites and the Chinese/Hong Kong websites had a lot (thousands in some gTLDs) of video sites. There were also websites that were apparently aimed at users in the US/EU as well.

I tend to be extremely cynical about claims from MUSO and similar about billions of website visits because detecting and categorising such websites is an extremely complex thing to do (they typically don't use English) and some of these websites only last for a year or less. This is because they were often using discounted domain names for the website. The registration fee for a new domain name was typically below $5 (closer to $1). The renewal fee was about $30. So when it came time to renew, the domain name was dropped and a new one registered. Chinese websites need a government licemce. So what some of these sites did was to register domain names via non-Chinese registrars and host the websites outside of China. It is a very competitive market.

Time to take it to a new thread and keep this one on topic

No. There are approximately 197 million gTLD websites. They are hosted all over the world. Not all of them have actively developed websites. The first part is to distinguish developed websites from undeveloped websites. Then there is the fact that all websites do not use English. It requires a lot of planning, development and programming before it even gets to the categorisation stage. I don't think that MUSO has the people or resources for this kind of work.

French is easier than Chinese. Chinese webbsites typically use Chinese characters and one character can be a word and combining two characters can generate a new word or phrase. Some don't translate directly into English. Having a few people sitting in front of screens categorising usage is typically used by academic efforts (generally using a sample of websites rather than the full set) which are aimed at distinguishing "parked" websites from active websites. It doesn't scale. It has to be done with a search engine approach.

It has to be scalable and highly automated and repeatable. The expertise is generally limited to people who have worked in Search as it is effectively building a search engine index. Video and streaming sites are only a very small part of the Web. The hard part is removing all other types of websites in order to analyse them. And many of these websites will change domain names (effectvely "disappearing") because there are millions of new domain names registered each month and millions more deleted. It is much easier to proapgandise by press release because using actual statistics and technological arguments can confuse journalists.Claims of billions of website visits unsupported by hard data is much more impressive and makes for better headlines.

Lots of people in using dodgy boxes shocker!

All very hand-wavy, full of buzz word bingo, and impressive to people who haven't a clue about the Web. A 750K website database. Wow! The problem with that is that if their detection and take down rate is as efficient as they make out, then that number would be significantly lower.

Then there is the natural attrition of these websites and their domain names. The first renewal rate on domain names in some TLDs is lower than 20%. That means that about 80% of domain names registered today will not renew next year when they are up for renewal. There is still the problem with "measuring" access to these sites. That is not explained.How are these "visits" measured?

Then there are these rather unfortunate quotes from the report (page 26)

"The data presented in this report is the number of visits to such registration websites. However, this does not provide a measurement of the number of IPTV users or subscriptions, because not all of these visits will result in a new subscription."

"23. The accesses originated by ‘Mail’ and ‘Display Ads’ have been aggregated in this study, since the figures are very small.
24 IPTV piracy occurring through other means is not captured in this study"

"However, this does not provide a measurement of the number of IPTV users or subscriptions, because not all of these visits will result in a new subscription. There are cases where people will visit these sites toexamine the offering but choose not to sign up. Therefore, more than the actual piracy level, the reader should look at the trend over time and the differences between countries."

Did you actually read the report?

Built on MUSO’s Discover datasets, the industry’s most trusted measure of global piracy consumption

Surely that's not true.

The industry’s most trusted measure of global piracy consumption are the lads here on boards.ie

…tis all over i guess!

I think most people who buy subs know it could stop working at any time, and that they won't get any refund.

Thing is, many have subs for years now, and saved an absolute fortune compared to handing sky extortionate money.

There was a case a few years ago where some non-Irish individual went to a Garda station to complain that he had been sold bad drugs. He was arrested, apparently. The problem for Sky and others is that that piracy on its services has been going on for decades. Most dodgybox users are probably aware of the risks of using such a service. The subscription fees are probably below the financial pain threshold of many subscribers so losing access is not a big thing and there is always an alternative supplier .The cost of replacement is still probably much less than the annual subscription to Sky and that is a big problem for Sky. For year, it has had a near monopoly position in Pay TV. The rise of dodgybox operations has changed that.