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The article buries the important part further down: These boxes are often used as botnet nodes and join residential proxy networks. The TV feature is a trojan horse to get it into your house. The high price makes it feel legitimate.

More from Krebs: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/11/is-your-android-tv-strea...

Going back I dumped all the streaming platforms as most of their new programming was not at all interesting. Turns out I was watching reruns of shows I downloaded years ago that were still sitting on my server. So I made my own cable channel by dumping every downloaded TV show into a single playlist then turn shuffle on. I have a low power PC hooked to my TV running Debian. The power is low enough that I just turn the TV off and leave the PC running.

Since I mostly put the TV on to have background noise this solution works perfectly. It's really nice to turn the TV on and see random x-files, mst3k, max headroom, cowboy bebop, futurama, and so on 24/7. And most of it is in SD or ripped from TV/VHS which doesn't bother me at all, in fact, it adds charm and character via those artifacts of the past.

I too got tired of paying so much for TV so I canceled and just stopped watching it.

I find the attitude that one is entitled to entertainment media fascinating.

People like to say that it’s not stealing because there is no physical product the producer is being deprived of, which is factually true, but even so why are you entitled to it at no cost?

NFL games aren’t water or food.

https://archive.ph/t9pIW (heh)

You can live just fine without tv. Better, in fact. Read books -- they are a lot more interesting.

  "There are no 6K TVs available for sale to consumers"

This seems to be incorrect. What about the Samsung TQ65QN900FTXXC, which is claimed to have a resolution of 7680 x 4320 (8K)?

Well, they unbundled stuff into streaming, then went around and made exclusive deals and forced us back into the same monthly amounts, if not more

Consumers are reacting

Maybe also an alternative if you want to participate in the boycotts until the CEOs stop cozying up to the US admin (emperor)

It is estimated that all these pirate streams combined bring in more revenue than Netflix & other established media companies[1]. Margins are of course pretty incredible as capex and opex is effectively zero since the content is "free". Such a great business that it's attracted organized crime.

But on a technical level how can a federated "shadow Netflix" operate out in the open and pull in that kind of revenue without ringing all kinds of alarm bells. They need infrastructure and obviously storing/streaming copyrighted content is against the policy of virtually every cloud provider. I also doubt these guys are bootstrapping & setting up their own datacenters. I would love a speculative analysis on how all of this works that goes in the weeds.

[1] https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/iptv-market...

Can't the cable company just include steganography with the subscriber ID encoded into the video stream, so that when NFL appears on one of these streaming boxes, they can just kill that subscriber's service and thus the pirate streams also?

Weird! This went from the home page to completely gone from the list in the time it took me to read a few paragraphs of the article...

TV and movies, but no longer music?

Because the Spotify business model, so far, does not play silly games releasing, then removing content.

It is very frustrating to pay money to streaming services and they remove content you're watching or they have partial content

They have a better example in Spotify, or will causation go the other way?

This doesn't seem sustainable.

Even now living in the states, I cannot comprehend how someone can end up paying hundreds of dollars a month for tv streaming. Can someone enlighten me?

Paywalled.