'Everyone is Stealing TV'
14 183A sprawling informal economy of rogue streaming devices has taken hold across the U.S., as consumers fed up with rising TV subscription costs turn to cheap Android-based boxes that promise free access to thousands of live channels, sports events, and on-demand movies for a one-time $200 to $400 purchase.
The two dominant players -- SuperBox and vSeeBox -- are manufactured by opaque Chinese companies and distributed through hundreds of American resellers at farmers markets, church festivals and Facebook groups, according to a report by The Verge. The hardware is generic and legal, but both devices guide users toward pirate streaming apps not available on any official app store.
vSeeBox directs users to a service called "Heat"; SuperBox points to "Blue TV." One user estimated access to between 6,000 and 8,000 channels, including premium sports networks and hundreds of local affiliates. A 2025 Dish Network lawsuit against a SuperBox reseller alleged that some live channels on the device were being ripped directly from Dish's Sling TV service -- Sling's logo was still visible on certain feeds. Dish has pursued resellers aggressively, winning $1.25 million in damages from a vSeeBox seller in 2024 over 500 devices and $405,000 from another over 162 devices. None of this has meaningfully slowed adoption. The market has roots in earlier Chinese-made devices like TVPad that targeted Asian expat communities and reportedly sold 3 million units before being litigated out of existence. SuperBox and vSeeBox simply broadened the audience to mainstream America.
14 comments
Re:not everyone (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @02:38PM (#65969086)
I do still pay for Tidal and YouTube Premium
And I've never seen anything on YouTube worth tossing money Google's way for. Don't get me wrong, some of the content creators do deserve to earn money for their efforts, but they're already doing so via Patreon, t-shirt/knick-knack sales, direct paid sponsorships, etc. Which ironically, you're not spared from when you do subscribe, so you're paying money and still sitting through the part of the video where the content creator does his spiel for NordVPN anyway.
Re:not everyone (Score: 5, Funny)
by wirefarm ( 18470 ) on <jimNO@SPAMmmdc.net> on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @04:27PM (#65969304)
I have YouTube premium from back when they had an excellent music service in GooglePlay.
I got rid of it, but then resubscribed so that my cats can watch their bird and squirrel videos uninterrupted.
Seriously.
Unbelievable! (Score: 5, Funny)
by GoTeam ( 5042081 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @02:15PM (#65969040)
It's shocking that someone would take something that they didn't pay for. I'm going to write down the names of those devices and the services they funnel their clients to... I just want to make sure I don't accidentally buy one of these devices...
Re:Unbelievable! (Score: 5, Funny)
by GoTeam ( 5042081 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @03:07PM (#65969140)
With festivals like that, I'm guessing the pastors homemade moonshine puts a sparkle in the punch bowl.
Maybe the pastors got tired of being associated with a different crime... "Trafficking in Unauthorized Access Devices" is a lot nicer sounding than their usual crimes...
Re:Unbelievable! (Score: 5, Informative)
by Himmy32 ( 650060 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @04:15PM (#65969282)
Also a note that many of the devices are big targets for being members of botnets. [krebsonsecurity.com] So anyone going looking for one of these devices should be very careful.
Chinese Hardware (Score: 5, Insightful)
by plstubblefield ( 999355 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @02:17PM (#65969044)
Yes, people, just keep bringing that inexpensive, Chinese-manufactured hardware into your homes! There have never been any credible electronic threats or state-sponsored eavesdropping associated with such boxes...
The industrial revolution ran over our faces. (Score: 5, Insightful)
by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @02:19PM (#65969052)
Industry: "Watching content without paying is stealing. Bad consumes. Pay us."
Industry: "Taking all your data without paying is our God Given Right. Fuck you. In fact, you should pay us while we take your data."
Corporate culture isn't just sick. It's become zombified and is slowly eating the brains of the society that supports it.
Re:The industrial revolution ran over our faces. (Score: 5, Interesting)
by ObliviousGnat ( 6346278 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @04:02PM (#65969248)
I wish I could pay to watch home games, but someone pays the league even more not to let me watch them.
Worse, my tax dollars paid for the stadium they're playing in. It's like when we fund pharmaceutical research and then companies patent them and jack up the prices. These things all ought to be in the public domain because the public paid for them.
Re: Purpose (Score: 5, Interesting)
by newcastlejon ( 1483695 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @03:51PM (#65969214)
You'd be surprised. A friend of mine has one and though it sometimes freezes for a few seconds the quality is just as good as what I would expect from Sky. I was tempted to get one myself but for a couple of football games it's not worth the hassle.
One other thing, the box was some sort of nvidia device (Toblerone shaped) and the UI is so much snappier than any STB or smart TV I've ever used. As ever, the pirates' user experience is better than the paying customers'.
Cable TV is dying (Score: 5, Insightful)
by twocows ( 1216842 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @02:28PM (#65969072)
Let me see, do I want to pay for a service that shows me stuff I don't want to see filled with ads that I want to see even less, or do I want to not pay for a service that shows me what I want without ads? This isn't that difficult of a choice. It's no wonder cable TV is dying; the only price point anyone is willing to even consider it at is the one pirates offer.
I get cable TV bundled with my internet subscription (where I live there's no other choice besides satellite) and even then the only time I ever use it is if I'm out and about and bored out of my mind, as my ISP kindly offers a web frontend that I can log into and watch it on. That's an actual cool value add that I'll give them... but even then it's usually a better experience to just pop on my Jellyfin server and watch something I actually want to see without ads plastered over half the program.
Distracts from AI Stealing Everything Else (Score: 5, Insightful)
by BrendaEM ( 871664 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @03:02PM (#65969132)
Here in the U.S., we presently have two sets of standards: Corporate theft is fine; personal theft is an dire emergency.
did it to themselves (Score: 5, Insightful)
by luther349 ( 645380 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @03:27PM (#65969168)
rember when Netflix was the king piracy was at a all time low. then everyone got greedy pulling there content in a sad attempt to clone them. wile increasing prices all the time.
Re:Piracy is just advanced socialism (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Voyager529 ( 1363959 ) on <voyager529@ y a h o o .com> on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @05:16PM (#65969390)
Time to move beyond "monetising" society and move to a post money society.
Okay Gene Roddenberry...let's work this out...
We have the technology with AGI now.
And mining the components that make AGI work, sucks...what's the motivation to do that? "Betterment of society"? Okay...that works for me...but I can't do this all by myself...can you encourage enough OTHER people to do it for purely altruistic reasons? How about trash removal, or logging, or any number of super dangerous jobs? How about overnight nurses? Our society runs on a whole lot of people doing very-unglamorous jobs, and unless the ENTIRE society is willing to handle sewer cleanings if needed, there will need to be some sort of motivation...but if it isn't altruism and it isn't bartering, you're gonna have to come up with a motivation to do undesirable work, and/or deal with undesirable hours. If those systems go offline at 2AM...someone's getting "the call"...if there's no motivation for me to answer that call, I don't know how that call is going to be answered.
Imagine if "pirates" put in as much passion into producing free housing, education, healthcare and food,
...all of which require a whole lot more commitment, and finite resources...and the possibility of lawsuits for doing the thing you're proposing. Please let me know how your 'free restaurant', 'free apartment', or 'free hospital' idea would work, in a way that doesn't involve incentivization, compulsion, or externalizing of the costs.
poverty is a capitalist invention.
No, poverty is the default state of existence. Take away all of modern society, and we'll spend our days hunting and gathering for our next meal, hoping we don't get sick or injured, along with everyone else doing the same. Specialization means that one person can spend more time on one task, to the benefit of others, but then that person would have a deficit in other areas. Two specialists exchanging the results of their labor means both people benefit by receiving improved outcomes than if either person were to divide their time...but once you've introduced trade, you've introduced capitalism. Our current system has many, MANY faults (medical insurance, as a singular example, basically being the worst parts of socialism and capitalism without the best parts of either), but true socialism requires everyone to agree that the value of all goods and services are roughly-similar-enough that everyone's willing to participate equally and consistently, but once someone comes in and disrupts that, it requires some form of force to maintain the equilibrium. This is why socialism has huge problems scaling beyond small and/or voluntary communities...but if we take away every system and abstraction, some people will successfully hunt and gather on a particular day, some will not. Some will successfully reproduce on a particular day, some will not. Poverty isn't a capitalist invention, it is what happens if anyone does nothing.
Even on Slashdot we could be posting freely and not need MongoDB in the corner of our site.
Soylent News has no MongoDB ads, but you're here.
Of course we are: there's no viable alternative (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Arrogant-Bastard ( 141720 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @03:56PM (#65969232)
I'm in the US. The winter Olympics are about to start, and I'd like to watch every possible event, and I'd like to watch them in real time -- if possible. (It's not entirely possible: some of them overlap and I have other things to do, like sleep.)
Despite paying for a cable subscription, despite paying for a premium service, despite having two kinds of devices: I can't do that. I can't even come close. What I can do is watch -- mostly -- delayed, abbreviated, edited versions of events mostly featuring US athletes/teams layered with puff pieces because that's what NBC is serving up. Yes, there are some happy exceptions to this, and that's nice, but it's nowhere close to what I actually want.
So I plan to fire up the VPN and stream whatever I can. Some of the quality will suck and some of the streams will fail and so on, but it's still much better than what I'm actually paying for.
Similarly, in a few weeks spring training for MLB will start. I would like to buy a subscription that gets me every game involving my favorite team: pre-season, season, post-season: every game. I can't. When I went through the exercise of trying to figure this out in 2025, I determined that I'd have to pay for 5 -- FIVE! -- different services and even then, I might miss a game here and there because of obscure and poorly-articulated "blackout" rules that are in play when games are time-shifted to accommodate networks.
So, again, I plan to fire up the VPN and stream whatever I can.
With this in mind, I completely understand why people are buying dodgy devices from dodgy companies that supply dodgy services. It's much simpler, it's much cheaper, and -- as noted in the referenced article -- even if it only works for a few months, it's still more cost-effective than anything the cable/streaming companies are offering.
These cable/streaming companies have managed -- through completely inept management -- to turn a golden business opportunity that could make them a fortune into hot garbage...because they couldn't restrain their greed and their egos. They weren't content to just make a fortune, they wanted to make an obscene fortune. And so here we are.