A shrug of the shoulders, accompanied by “a couple of hundred”, used to be considered a reasonable ballpark estimate of the number of meaningful pirate sites operating at any one time. It could’ve been treble that, of course, nobody is omnipresent.
Best estimates today range from “thousands” to “tens of thousands” but that’s to a background of massive site blocking measures with perhaps 60/80,000 domains blocked to date and no end in sight. Whatever the true figure, even those with the resources to monitor at such scale find a shifting, disappearing, morphing, reappearing, constantly rebranding body of sites, that simply won’t stay counted for long, at least with any accuracy.
ACE Domain Seizures
Since 2017, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment has taken hundreds of sites offline and seized even more domains, easily in excess of a thousand, most likely over 1,500, give or take. Since ACE doesn’t maintain a public list, WHOIS and DNS records, redirects, and other methods provide reasonable levels of information.
Complications still exist, including when pirate site owners voluntarily redirect their domains to the MPA in what appears to be an act of surrender.
Allowing for a broad margin of error, and without filtering for subdomains and unforced redirects, since January 1, 2024, around 600 domains have started showing the familiar ACE seizure banner for the first time. For those with an official arrangement, visitors to those domains will be counted and logged as part of the MPA’s intelligence gathering program.
Whether the same can be said of the many IPTV domains officially commandeered over the past few days is up for debate.
ACE/MPA Takes Control of IPTV Domains
After being registered on May 25, 2022, xnetultimate.com was transferred to brand protection company MarkMonitor around May 10, 2024. The domain was subsequently transferred to the MPA on May 17 and all visitors are now redirected to the ACE anti-piracy portal.
This ‘XNET Ultimate’ domain was used to sell IPTV subscriptions and operated with the slogan “Why Have Cable TV When You Can Have XNET Ultimate?”
Other domains sharing the same fate include xnetiptv.com (first registered in August 2016 and taken over by the MPA May 20th), xnetott.com (May 25, 2022 / May 20, 2024), and xnet4k.com (May 25, 2022 / May 20, 2024). As far as we can determine, in one way or another, the domains were linked to the portal below.
Registered May 3, 2023, clearott.com was transferred to MarkMonitor’s DNS on May 3, 2024, before being transferred to the MPA on May 20, 2024. Zoomott.com and zoom-4k.com were registered on March 31 and August 14, 2019, respectively; yesterday, May 20, 2024, both were in the hands of the MPA.
Other likely connected domains in the same batch include superheroiptv.com, superherott.com, mystreams.club, itecultimate.com and itec4kultra.com. All currently display the ACE seizure banner before redirecting via official URLs to the ACE portal.
Aside from a couple of outliers on the top row of the image above, an unusual aspect here is that most of the remainder have zero traffic. Whether more domains will be transferred in due course is unclear, but there are dozens more just like them. Some appear to have been used for a short time before falling out of use, others are registered but not used.
Behind everything appears to be an IPTV reselling enterprise, but more time is needed before drawing any firm conclusions either way. In the meantime, many more domains connected to the above could find themselves in trouble at any moment, but with an infinite supply of replacements, losing a domain or having one blocked isn’t the problem it once was.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
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