Everyone is stealing TV
"Fed up with increasing subscription prices, viewers embrace rogue streaming boxes." The question is: what's on them?
[Janko Roettgers at The Verge]
Maybe this goes without saying, but I don’t think these devices should be trusted.
“It’s called the SuperBox, and it’s being demoed by Jason, who also has homemade banana bread, okra, and canned goods for sale. “People are sick and tired of giving Dish Network $200 a month for trash service,” Jason says. His pitch to rural would-be cord-cutters: Buy a SuperBox for $300 to $400 instead, and you’ll never have to shell out money for cable or streaming subscriptions again.”
From a user perspective, I see the appeal: I certainly have subscription fatigue. Beyond that, geoblocks are intensely irritating to me; I’d give anything to be able to watch the UK’s Channel 4 News, or Doctor Who spinoff The War Between the Land and the Sea, which are both unavailable to me unless I want to dive into VPNs and breaking terms of service. A box that gives me what I want to watch, no questions asked, seems too good to be true.
It’s not fully clear who is manufacturing these devices, what’s on them, or who runs the services that allow people to access all this television without paying for it. We already know that some streaming boxes have been fronts for residential botnets that have been used for illicit activities that run the gamut from avoiding scraper detection to real organized crime. If I wanted to run malware inside the networks of thousands of homes and businesses, this wouldn’t be a bad way to go about it.
Which is a shame, because the allure is real. I’d pay for all that unavailable television. Just, please, let me.
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