Pirate streaming services (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by open_door@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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This is kind of a weird question, I understand, but why does every pirate streaming service seem exactly the same? Let me explain: I was looking through the r/Piracy megathread (via rentry.co) for alternatives to Soap2day, now that it's gone down, and I noticed most websites had almost identical interfaces, and seemingly identical search results. Does anyone know what's up with that...? It creeped me out a little, I won't lie. Sort of uncanny valley.

I also wanted to ask, what is the deal with Soap2day? I know soap2day.to is down. I've seen two websites thus far with the same name but different top-level domains, with totally different layouts and title blurbs. Are those like... legit? I don't know, I suppose it would be difficult to give me a virus via a streaming service (it's not like I go around clicking on ads) but, again, it's confusing and a little eerie.

EDIT: To be clear, I'm not looking for recommendations. I am also not looking for alternatives to anything, I can sort myself out. I'm asking, out of curiosity, if anyone knows why these websites look so similar, and what's going on with soap2day clones.

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[-] pelikan@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 year ago

Piracy movie streaming websites rely on CDN servers to exist. This are servers where films are hosted and from where films are streamed. This is very big infrastructure investment (by far bigger than is required to run popular torrent tracker) which is not possible for random pirate enthusiast with web develolment skills. This means that most of those sites are run by pirate enterprises (it's known fact that most of those CDNs are sponsored by illegal gambling operators that's why many of pirate streaming cinema is spammed with casino advertising). So most of similiar looking streaming sites are whitelabels: this means they have same owners, common CDN, same backend and only differ with domains, frontend skins and also they could have a bit different films in database. Such sites are created to get most of free traffic from search engines (so if positions of one site would drop, other site from same owners could raise and compensate this drop).

[-] open_door@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago

Ah, thank you! That makes a lot of sense. I'm broadly familiar with CDNs, so I figured they must all be using the same database, but I never made the step from that to "the sites themselves might have the same owners".