Clampdown on TV 'Dodgy Boxes'

Eh?

Tbh, he has triggered you, and you can't handle it. It's a discussion forum. I wouldn't take things too seriously.

hahaha, no worries, again, couldnt give a bollcoks, the whole thing is bloody mess, and wont be resolved, its gonna be very interesting to see how much pressure the whole broadcasting sector can take before it starts to buckle, its clearly doing fine just now, but there could be serious issues in the 30's if rights holders dont get a handle on it, which i just dont see happening

where have i prevented you from posting anything, especially an interesting story that you did?

hahaha, some people are fcuking mental on the internets!

again, thank you for your post, again, it is a very interesting story, but again, what a fcuking mess the whole sector is

I could call you mental too but anyway life is too short for arguing with strangers on the internet.

I agree it's going to be interesting how it all goes especially for sky, astra satellite's at 28.2 are EOL of 28-29 and are not being replaced. The huge fragmentation of sports rights is causing people to move to IPTV. You need 2 or 3 different subs to watch some sports.

The move to full time streaming for TV is going to a huge advantage to the bookies as "live" will be even further behind giving them and advantage for in running betting.

Some people seem to be triggered when there is talk about anything negative about IPTV.

If there is a media article about actions to clampdown the reaction is often something like "why aren't they writing articles about more important things like the housing crisis or immigration"

It's as if people are so invested in lauding the alleged robin hoods that run these services and hating on evil Sky that they cannot tolerate any negative narrative about illegal streaming.

They are like the sports club fanboy who cannot tolerate anything negative being said about their team.

And what's ironic in all of this is it's not Sky that are the evil ones, it's the sports teams and organizations that the fanboys can't get enough of that are the root of the problem.

They are the ones who fragment the rights, limit the number of games being shown and demand the highest price from the bidders.

I'm a dodgy box user and love it, but I'd be not one bit surprised if a major clampdown came in the form of a data center raid or something else that has been brewing for months that we never get wind of.

And if it's gone, it's gone and I'll have to wait for the next iteration of illegal streaming comes ubiquitous or buy official streams in the meantime.

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/18zURxyR5p/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Slightly off topic, but still relevant.

Broadly speaking, most of what I'm looking for on Stremio or Syncler is now back available via RD. However I also use syncler as an alternative to Stremio, and recently lots of stuff that would normally play on syncler just wouldn't play, series like Pawn Stars, Mr In-between (excellent series if anyone wants something to binge on) for example just wouldn't play cus RD.

I just got a TorBox account ($3 a month) and all these are now playing again. So if you're after an alternative to RD, or even just an accompaniment to RD, you can't go wrong with TB.

Ah don't tell me that straight after me paying for it lol😬😬

Tried both the series I posted about above earlier, albeit for a few seconds on each and seemed fine.

I suppose people get triggered when non technical people talk about it been shutting down. The likes of the argh me maties has been going strong for near 25 years and that's still going no where. Sky can do what they like but its not going anywhere. The whole streaming service of Sky, netflix, disney +, paramount, apple tv etc, needs major reform as no one is going to spend over 200 to 300 euro a month on them to watch what they want.

Multiple different ways.

Data center raids as someone mentioned earlier.

The busting of a criminal organization (please don't ask me to prove that criminal enterprises are involved in illegal streaming, you know I can't but only a fool would believe that they are not involved)

Legal means. Remember myp2p.eu ? Got shutdown due to a change in Spanish copyright law.

Advance tech identifying which subscriptions end up on illegal streams, kill the subscription and you kill the illegal stream.

I'm not saying any of this will happen today or tomorrow or even in the next year. But I'll not be surprised if my illegal stream goes down and I read subsequently that a multi nation, multi agency, months long operation put a major illegal streaming service out of business.

I'm not fool enough to think that the current iteration of piracy is invincible, unlike some others here.

You are wrong about card sharing. Card sharing was only ever a temporary solution between various countermeasures that would stop it working. Unlike you or any of the Irish media, I am quite familiar with it.

Sky knew about the vulnerability of its systems to card sharing since 1989. The company that developed the VideoCrypt system even patented some possible countermeasures in the early 1990s. The problem, for Sky, was that the connection between the card and the decoder was unencrypted with the decrypted key being sent back to the decoder from the card. That key could, with some other data and synchronisation, be used in other decoders.

There was an algorithm to ensure that a card was legitimate but it did not work properly. The problem was that stopping that iteration of card sharing would have required an upgrade for all decoders in the field.

The analogue VideoCrypt system was replaced by Sky's digital system which had taken measures to harden the link between the card and the decoder. The company had also introduced a feature where a card was "married" to a decoder. There were also patents published to allow cards and subscriptions to be grouped so that a complete reissue of cards would not be necessary where subscriptions were being used for card sharing.

The problem for system providers is that once access to the decrypted key can be achieved, it can be used. The problem with many digital TV systems was that their Conditional Access Module system could be emulated in software and the specification for the CAM interface was published. There was a rather misguided effort to standardise CAMs in the 1990s and that basically left systems vulnerable to the least secure Conditional Access system where services were showing the same movies, sport or series. Sky and its provider opted to keep its proprietary CAM rather than use the industry standard CAM. That helped for a while but Technology evolves too.

Card sharing predated the pirate smartcards. What limited the effect of card sharing initially was that most people did not have Internet access and thus it was radio or phone based. Internet access for most people did not happen until the mid to late 1990s and as such it was not a major problem for broadcasters.

Piracy evolves. The official Sky cards were completely reverse-engineered and the algorithms and keys were used in pirate smartcards. That was a total compromise of Sky's VideoCrypt system. Eventually, Sky managed to deal with that. It was also planning to switch to digital and drop the analogue VideoCrypt system. In the absence of a pirate smartard solution, card sharing became an interim solution because the external conditions had changed since the early 1990s with most people having Internet access even if it wasn't always-on broadband. Card sharing is a very low bandwidth solution suited to low bandwidth connections.

As broadband Internet access became widespread, card sharing was once again overtaken as a solution and this time it was a much more dangerous one for the broadcasters. Broadband meant that the actual programming could be streamed. The costs of servers and bandwidth had also fallen to a level that made this business model commercially viable. These streaming services use "legitimate" subscriptions to gain access to the programming and then resell it. The broadcasters are effectively locked into a game of whack-a-mole in trying to identify the subscriptions being used by these services and neutralising them. The problem is that they often have to gain access to the streaming services and there are many of those. Some use programming and subscriptions from other copyright regions. That makes it more difficult for enforcement because multiple jurisdictions are involved. That is the major problem at the moment. The Internet has largely removed borders for data but the broadcaster's rights model is based on borders that no longer exist.