It's not theft. It's copying or copyright infringement.

If it was theft, the owners wouldn't have it anymore.

The words matter because they change your moral intuition about it.

The Verge needs to stop making articles like this.

Fucking idiots want to ruin a good thing

.... Or they're trying to?

It would be nice if I could know how to use these services without some "box" or "app"

LibreElec installed on a raspberry pi 4 with a real debrid sub will get you pretty much the same thing for less money.

you wouldn't download a television

I wouldn't mind learning all this magic, seems interesting

Way ahead of you here. Stopped watching TV entirely in the early 1990s.

As always piracy is a symptom not the problem. People pirate when a) they don't have enough money or b) the experience for paying customers is significantly worse than for pirates, or c) the price of services far exceeds their perceived value. Piracy was down for a while because Netflix and Hulu were relatively cheap (or free), ad free, and the economy was doing OK so most people had a little disposable income.

Now that we're in a recession that's starting to look like it might turn into a depression and Netflix and Hulu (and others) have cranked the prices of their services up and stuffed them full of ads, yeah I'm not in the least surprised to see piracy surging. Every time you turn around there's another email from some service letting you know they're raising prices another couple bucks a month, and a bunch of people cancel their subscriptions and start sailing the high seas.

"You wouldn't steal a handbag. You wouldn't steal a car. You wouldn't steal a baby. You wouldn't shoot a policeman. And then steal his helmet. You wouldn't go to the toilet in his helmet. And then send it to the policeman's grieving widow. And then steal it again! Downloading films is stealing. If you do it, you will face the consequences."

News sites telling on everyone again. Snitches.

DON'T COPY THAT FLOPPY!

Everyone is stealing The Verge.

What's old is new again. Descramblers are back

Oh well that's ironic

After signing him up as a reseller, Jason’s SuperBox contact also recruited him for a unique side gig: Whenever Jason finds a SuperBox advertised for less than the company’s suggested retail price, he buys it and sells it back to the company for a premium. He says that the SuperBox maker then checks the device’s MAC address against a list of past sales and remotely deactivates all boxes it sold to the reseller who openly advertised the unauthorized discount.

Offending sellers are then asked to pay a fine, Jason says. Consumers who happened to buy a box for the wrong price find it locked, with an onscreen warning telling them to contact their service provider. vSeeBox engages in similar practices, Mike says: “They can essentially shut off the boxes.”

I feel like outside of a handful of "TV Programs", the younger generation wouldn't even notice if "TV" as we know it disappeared tomorrow. Me personally whenever I visit family, "TV" is on and I'm repulsed by the level of marketing on it. Even if there's a baseball or football game on, they've made damn sure that every single frame of the game includes at least one sponsor logo.
I know I wouldn't care. I might even celebrate.

I know someone that uses TVpass.org and thinks that it's not stealing because it's a .org and "they only give those org websites out to good people" It made me smile.

Having not used one of these (and being extremely leery of putting one on my network), does using a pi-hole with a custom blocklist for these things help? I’ve considered getting one and isolating it in its own subnet, but I only know enough to be dangerous.

Why is TV so expensive in USA? People just taking on so many subs?

I found a website called yarrlist.net to watch movies and tv shows, and I thought it was great! but someone told me I was putting myself at risk by using it. Basically they said I shouldn't use my bank/credit card while having those tabs open. I'm not very tech savvy so I don't understand the risk.

Yargggggg the subscription and AI slop trash

Do you want to contribute to a botnet? Because those rogue streaming boxes are how you contribute to a botnet.

Unpaywalled: https://archive.ph/20260205014706/https://www.theverge.com/streaming/873416/piracy-streaming-boxes