

Ask HN: How does illegal movie streaming services survive? - desushil

Just quick googling &quot;watch movie&#x2F;series xyz online&quot; will avail many websites on the first page of Google results that streams movies&#x2F;tv-series for free, smoothly.<p>With the DMCA and other laws in act, how does this kind of websites still continue to survive? Not only about the DMCA but I am assuming many (almost all) countries will take this as a serious offence on illegally streaming 3rd party contents online without appropriate permission from the content creators. And these online services are not just some small website but websites with millions of hits everyday. Comparing these to mediafire or thepiratebay these are smaller, but these are not just storing illegal contents but also directly streaming them causing millions of dollars in loss for the content creators such as hollywood&#x2F;bollywood.<p>Albeit these service operators might use some kind of method to hide themselves, their servers, domains, contents are always visible to everyone and should be easy to take them. Google doesn&#x27;t remove them from their search results, they get advertising network operating on their website. And they keep operating as just another &quot;paid service&quot; (but with a crappy UI).<p>How do they survive? What prevents original content creators to stop them?
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eecks
There's two types of sites:

1) Portals/search engines which just link to the content. These claim they are
not doing anything illegal because they are not hosting anything illegal.

2) Video sites that host the illegal content. These sites do take down the
illegal content when they find it or receive a takedown request. The illegal
content is uploaded in so many places that it doesn't matter if a few are
taken down. The sites in 1) point to about 20 sites for every TV episode/movie

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tyingq
>>How do they survive? Churn and burn. So long as the cost to bring the site
up on a new domain is lower than whatever the profit is (ads?), the DMCA is
just playing "whack a mole" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whac-A-
Mole#Colloquial_usage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whac-A-
Mole#Colloquial_usage))

