Five men have been convicted for running Jetflicks, a low-cost streaming service that offered more TV shows than Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime combined. The service was too good to be legal, as it scraped popular television shows and award-winning movies from pirate sites and bundled them into a streaming service.
Jetflicks operated as a subscription-based streamer that allowed users to watch and download copyrighted TV shows and movies without permission from the copyright owners. The group ripped off thousands of copyrighted television episodes, generating a mass of content larger than the combined catalogs of Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, and Amazon Prime. For a $10 monthly subscription fee, users could watch shows on multiple devices and platforms within days of new episodes appearing on legitimate services and channels.
The five men, Kristopher Dallmann, Douglas Courson, Felipe Garcia, Jared Jaurequi, and Peter Huber, obtained content from pirate sites such as SickRage, Sick Beard, SABnzbd, and TheTVDB and offered it up in one place to subscribers. At one point, Jetflicks claimed to have more than 37,000 paid users and 183,200 episodes of television. Authorities estimated the monetary harm to program owners to be in the millions.
Like a legitimate business, Jetflicks eventually ran into problems, such as subscribers sharing logins and passwords. Officials also said the group tried to disguise the site as an entertainment service for aircraft flyers after it faced inbound demands to remove unlicensed content. When complaints from copyright holders and problems with payment service providers threatened to topple the illicit multimillion-dollar enterprise, the defendants tried to disguise Jetflicks as an aviation entertainment company.
Read more: fortune.com