The fight against pirated IPTV does not only concern those who want to watch football matches for free; legal IPTV lists have become the target of rights holders, taking advantage of the lack of knowledge that both legislators and users have of these Internet video services.
Yes, there are legal IPTV lists, which provide access to channels broadcast for free; in most cases, these are public channels such as RTVE or regional channels, but there are also private channels that decide to broadcast openly on the Internet.
However, in recent months, another type of IPTV list has become very popular, and in this case, the legal issue is a bit grayer and more controversial. We are talking about the FAST Channels IPTV Listswhich is free to access and publicly available.
FAST stands for “Free Ad Supported Streaming Television”, a streaming television financed by advertisements. In other words, these are free streaming services, accessible without having to pay a monthly fee and that earn income through advertising; whether integrated into the website or in the broadcasts themselves. One of the most popular FAST services is Pluto TV, but there are more and more alternatives; for example, Samsung and LG televisions, among other brands, come with FAST services pre-installed so that their users can access the content without having to pay for a subscription to Netflix or another service.
These services have gained popularity thanks to unofficial IPTV lists, which compile the channels they broadcast so that the user You can view them using an application on your mobile or on your Android TV device, for example. However, users who rely on these lists now realize that they have stopped working.
Pluto TV is one of the most popular FAST services
Free Android
The creator of these lists, developer Matt Huisman, confirmed to TorrentFreak that the production company Warner Bros, through the anti-piracy organisation Markscan, managed to eliminate IPTV lists that I shared on the Internet; he did so via a DMCA request sent directly to Cloudflare, the company responsible for the servers that hosted the files, instead of Github, the service Huisman used to distribute the lists.
It’s not every day that we see a “hacker” use their real name and defend what they do like Matt Huisman did. That’s because There is some debate over whether what he did constitutes “hacking.”or simply help users use legal services.
Huisman has always defended that the only thing his IPTV lists do is collect already existing and public linksthat direct to services broadcast on the Internet; In other words, it only facilitates the use of these services, since it is not necessary to go to each page separately and it is possible to watch the channels with the application that we prefer. But this explanation has not been very appreciated by the owners of the services, who prefer that users access their pages, possibly to generate traffic and obtain information to generate personalized advertising.
It’s obvious that this is a more complicated situation than it seems when looking at the petition used by the Markscan organization to remove the IPTV listings. The company claims that the listings violate Warner Bros. copyrighted content, but has been unable to explain exactly what that is. The petition makes no mention of no movies or series supposed to be “pirated”and only puts the Warner Bros. website address as “proof” of copyright infringement.
With such a basic request, it is very likely that Huisman will be able to recover the IPTV lists if he files a claim. However, this may open the door to a lengthy legal process through which Huisman “will not be disturbed” in his words. Therefore, IPTV lists are not coming back, at least not like now; Huisman has already hinted that he is working on another method for users to generate their own IPTV lists, but for now, he first needs to figure out how.
