The rise and fall of a Halifax man's illegal TV streaming empire

[nobodyspecial]

  https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/nova-scotia-man-illegal-streaming-empire-1.7112573?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=topic%2Fcanada

[nobodyspecial]

If someone want to copy and paste the text go ahead I couldn't do it from my phone
Thx

[The Noof]

IPTVSOLUTIONS was a reseller of that service.I knew there was trouble a couple of years back.Now I see why...

[hotplay]

U.K. market has been using there name for recognition and sales of there re branded servers. Several other big ones had the same take down then within months the same brand from another source. It just opens the window for someone else. lol like chasing tails.

[The Noof]

I think the fact that the service was over-represented comes into play.Flying under the radar is next to impossible when you're cautious,but completely impossible when you're not

[Justdroppedin]

The rise and fall of a Halifax man's illegal TV streaming empire

Founder of now-defunct Beast TV ordered to pay millions to powerful entertainment giants





It was intended as words of wisdom, but it oozed cockiness, as Activeits plotted his path to fortune on an internet forum popular with spammers.

The boast was right there in the title of the thread: "How i made 1k a day or more."

Typing under the fictitious name, he detailed his involvement with "a thing called IPTV" and how he'd built an unauthorized online television streaming service, one that illegally rebroadcast channels to subscribers at cheap rates.

"There is a TON of money to be made in IPTV and i'm just getting started!" Activeits wrote on March 14, 2018, later dismissing concerns he would get sued or sent to jail. "Everything i do, i do carefully."

These weren't the embellishments of a blowhard. Activeits was making a ton of money, and he would make a ton more. But he was wrong in one crucial respect. He wasn't careful enough.

Last fall, Activeits, also known as Tyler White — who lives on Old Sambro Road on the outskirts of Halifax — was ordered to pay $7.1 million in penalties to some of the largest entertainment companies in the world for his role in a streaming service called Beast TV.



Tyler White, the founder of Beast TV, is shown in an undated photograph.(Tyler White/Facebook)


The case offers a window into the inner workings of operations that break copyright laws but which many law-abiding Canadians quietly use — pirate services offering thousands of channels for a fraction of the price of legitimate cable or streaming packages.

"We view it as a critical threat to not just our platforms, but to the creative sector as a whole," said Aaron Wais, the head of global litigation for the Motion Picture Association, a group that includes Disney, Netflix and Warner Bros.

"It impacts us as right-holders. It impacts creators across the industry. It causes hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and thousands of lost jobs."

There are many legitimate IPTV (internet-protocol television) services that offer TV streaming over the internet, including those run by major Canadian broadcasters like Bell Media and Rogers.

But over the years, the internet has been littered with illegal IPTV operators, some of them peddling huge packages of live sports, television and movie channels for as little as $20 a month. Only the big ones catch the attention of the major studios, and Beast TV was one of them.



There are two dimensions to illegal IPTV, according to experts and court records. The first involves operators who run what amount to "server farms." They subscribe to television services, and deploy dozens of receivers tuned to specific channels, retransmitting them immediately to the internet.

The second dimension involves operators who purchase those streams, and set up their own websites and subscription services, selling channel packages for cut-rate prices.

In many cases, those in illegal IPTV do a bit of both, pooling unauthorized streams between themselves for a fee so each can create subscription services that advertise hundreds or thousands of channels.

The Beast case also shows how powerful entertainment companies have turned to an extraordinary legal measure in Canadian civil courts, gaining judicial orders allowing them to enter the homes of perpetrators and even seize equipment.



Inside the Beast TV case

When lawyers and private investigators arrived at White's two-storey country house on the morning of Nov. 24, 2020, and simultaneously to the Brantford, Ont., home of a business partner, Colin Wright, they came armed with an order signed by a Federal Court judge.

Each was instructed to turn over control of Beast TV infrastructure to lawyers, provide log-in credentials for the registrar accounts of domains and subdomains, tell them the location of servers, and release detailed financial information. Not only that, the duo were forbidden for 48 hours from telling anyone, aside from their lawyers, what was happening.

White's response was defiant: "Never heard of it," he said of Beast TV when confronted at his home, according to court records. "I don't even have a computer in my house," he said, admitting moments later he owned a laptop.

He may have been caught off guard. But the knock at his door should have hardly been a surprise. In 2019, he and Wright had been implicated in another busted illegal IPTV operation called Vader Streams.

Computer forensic experts deployed by the studios were never able to seize control of Beast IPTV because White and Wright refused to immediately share log-in and registrar information, and White told an associate linked to Beast to shut down two domains, according to court records.
Over the course of the next month, according the court documents, other players in the Beast operation began migrating subscribers to other streamers before terminating Beast itself.
It was intended as words of wisdom, but it oozed cockiness, as Activeits plotted his path to fortune on an internet forum popular with spammers.

The boast was right there in the title of the thread: "How i made 1k a day or more."
Typing under the fictitious name, he detailed his involvement with "a thing called IPTV" and how he'd built an unauthorized online television streaming service, one that illegally rebroadcast channels to subscribers at cheap rates.
"There is a TON of money to be made in IPTV and i'm just getting started!" Activeits wrote on March 14, 2018, later dismissing concerns he would get sued or sent to jail. "Everything i do, i do carefully."
These weren't the embellishments of a blowhard. Activeits was making a ton of money, and he would make a ton more. But he was wrong in one crucial respect. He wasn't careful enough.
Last fall, Activeits, also known as Tyler White — who lives on Old Sambro Road on the outskirts of Halifax — was ordered to pay $7.1 million in penalties to some of the largest entertainment companies in the world for his role in a streaming service called Beast TV.