Pirate Sites Using Twitch to Stream TV Shows Under Investigation in Hollywood *TorrentFreak

House > Anti-piracy > DMCA >

Pirate streaming sites offer many options for finding movies, TV shows, and live TV streams. But for some, though, cheaper is apparently better. Streaming portals offering channels from Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros. and HBO are using Twitch’s servers to save money, but it looks like Hollywood has already launched an investigation and is on the trail.

In today’s click-and-play world, almost anyone can start their own pirate site.

Servers ready to accept self-installing scripts are available in minutes, and for those who don’t have time to source movies and TV shows, providers ready to sell access to vast libraries in a similar delay do not miss.

At the other end of the market, cutting costs to maximize meager advertising revenue seems to be more important than a brilliant user experience.

Court filing targets streaming sites

In a DMCA subpoena request filed in a California court this week, the MPA (on behalf of anti-piracy group Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment) pointed to piracy issues faced by companies such as Paramount, Sony , Universal, Disney, Warner, Amazon and Netflix. .

Seeking court-ordered cooperation from Cloudflare, MPA/ACE requested information on a number of pirate streaming sites, including the personal details of their operators. As part of the normal investigative process, this is nothing new for ACE. However, a few details catch the eye as being somewhat out of the ordinary.

Two of the domains listed in the app are TVConnexion.com and TeleBunker.com. When combined, the sites offer dozens of live TV channels from companies including Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros. and HBO – a perfect recipe for appearing on the ACE radar.

ACE informed the court that the sites offered infringing copies of the movies Suicide Squad and Salt, as well as the TV shows Gold Rush and Deadliest Catch. Court documents show that the named sites do not host any video content, as they both rely on third-party hosting sites to deliver content.

Discount Hackers Love Free Streams

The stream URLs listed in the court documents no longer work, but when they did, they were linked to video streaming live from Twitch’s servers.

Further investigation suggests that the sites named by ACE rely on what appears to be a dedicated pool of Twitch user accounts set up for the purpose of streaming or re-transmitting live TV channels.

The names of the Twitch user accounts involved aren’t particularly important for the purposes of this article, but it’s likely MPA/ACE’s 100-person investigative team has them all listed now with plenty of evidence. supporting.

And since this is Twitch, the evidence isn’t hard to come by.

Unlike many pirate servers, Twitch loves logging

While pirate streaming servers certainly have the ability to log who is doing what and when, precision logging is extremely unlikely to be high on the priority list. But, as the image below shows, Twitch loves to record information, and sites like StreamsCharts are more than happy to present it gracefully.

The image above shows statistics for just one of the many accounts used to stream TV shows on the sites listed in the ACE/MPA subpoena. With this one alone racking up nearly 46,000 hours of watch time in just 30 days, the overall consumption should be quite high.

Why ACE/MPA didn’t pursue these Twitch accounts rather than the webpages embedding their streams is unknown, but it’s clear the studios believe the portals are related. Indeed, evidence of this abounds.

In addition to channel sources and analytics accounts, advertising affiliates are shared across multiple domains. Maybe a bit too early to tell, but there’s probably more useful information available in the public domain than the bogus details Cloudflare probably has on hand.

Other sites in the same DMCA subpoena

Ver-television.online is listed as an infringer of the films Suicide Squad and Changeling. It is quite a popular site with around four million visits per month according to SimilarWeb statistics.

The subpoena request requests information from Cloudflare about the domain operator. The site itself appears to be located on the Replit developer platform and offers access to a wide range of live TV channels.

Three similar domains – Cablegratis.online, Cablegratishd.online and Cablegratistv.online – enjoy around 1.5 million visits per month and are also mentioned in the subpoena. They are joined by the exceptionally comprehensive streaming portal Televisiongratisennivo.com.

An additional domain is mentioned in the subpoena as the primary source for the Teleullenvivo.com streaming site, but it raises some suspicion, so we won’t reproduce it here.

The ACE/MPA assignment to Cloudflare can be found here (pdf)