Why have so many official US channel streams had their encryptions broken and been rebroadcasted online, but so few UK channels?

by shitboots

Sorry if the wording isn't clear; there are several sites/services that offer US channel official streams, with IP restrictions to the US and Canada, and adjustable video quality. If you open a logger, you see that the .m3u8 file is hosted at the official source. There seem to be no such sites for UK channels, with only rehosted/recorded streams available. Do the UK channels use different encryption? If so why haven't US channels adopted those practices?

ESPN, ABC, Fox, NBC, TNT, Bein Sport etc. have all been broken in this way, so I don't think its just a bug with one service.

I wanna know why US channels are so bad at protecting their streams lol

j2225

They are using services like PlayStation Vue they broadcast various US channels via various platform`s like android tv its just a matter of capturing that footage and rebroadcasting . In The UK its far harder most of the streams are coming via Virgin Media cardsharing, soon to be coming to an end

I believe int the UK there is only only three streaming portals Now TV,Sky Go and Tvplayer the later not great quality and not particularity reliable in my experience.

In the US services like Direct TV Now,Hulu Tv,Youtube TV Directv,Comcast Xfinity,Dish and Spectrum all offer online streaming portals hence the amount of sources available Etc

iptvfan

Many, many reasons. Lots of options for US channel sources - Sling is broken, Vue is broken, many of the channels have streams on their website and those are usually broken, each big league has an out-of-market streaming service and every single one of those are broken, I can go on forever here. Just a billion options for sources. This is not the case for UK channels.

UK stuff is all trapped behind aggressive DRM that no one wants to spend the time to break correctly. US customers expect a much more open service - if I have pay TV, you better let me watch on whatever device I want. UK customers are accustomed to having to a low limit on the number of devices per account, 30 day deregistration wait times, etc.

If the US channels were to go the UK 'aggressive drm, fuck you' route, the cable companies would lose everyone to Sling/DTVNow/PSVue/etc. People want to watch content on all of their devices.

Here are some more thoughts on the complexities of UK TV: https://old.reddit.com/r/IPTV/comments/8izsms/50fps_uk_sports_providers/dywyeu4/

Why do you even want UK channels, though? Most everything they air is on US TV too. The real issue here is that the only thing on UK TV that anyone cares about is footy, PL footy to be precise, and that is on US TV too without the dumb 'closed period'.