As Internet streaming of live content has gained on traditional cable TV viewership, we have also seen significant growth of free live streaming services which illegally provide free access to copyrighted content over the Internet. Some of these services draw millions of viewers each month. Moreover, this viewership has continued to increase, despite the consistent coupling of this free content with deceptive advertisements and user-hostile tracking. In this paper, we explore the ecosystem of free illegal live streaming services by collecting and examining the behavior of a large corpus of illegal sports streaming websites. We explore and quantify evidence of user tracking via third-party HTTP requests, cookies, and fingerprinting techniques on more than @math unique video streams provided by @math unique illegal live streaming domains. We compare the behavior of illegal live streaming services with legitimate services and find that the illegal services go to much greater lengths to track users than most legitimate services, and use more obscure tracking services. Similarly, we find that moderated sites that aggregate links to illegal live streaming content fail to moderate out sites that go to significant lengths to track users. In addition, we perform several case studies which highlight deceptive behavior and modern techniques used by some domains to avoid detection, monetize traffic, or otherwise exploit their viewers. Overall, we find that despite recent improvements in mechanisms for detecting malicious browser extensions, ad-blocking, and browser warnings, users of free illegal live streaming services are still exposed to deceptive ads, malicious browser extensions, scams, and extensive tracking. We conclude with insights into the ecosystem and recommendations for addressing the challenges highlighted by this study.
Illegal Live Media Streaming. @cite_17 studies the ecosystem of free live streaming websites with an analysis of over 5600 live-streaming domains discovered from live-streaming domains through aggregator websites. This study does not focus on user tracking, and instead highlights other aspects of their behavior such as trademark infringements, malware distribution, and anti-ad-block techniques, and uses these intuitions to build a classifier of these sites. Though this study is over two years old, it notably does not include Reddit as one of their aggregators, despite our finding that Reddit is now one of the most popular aggregators (see ).
@cite_17
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Recent years have seen extensive growth of services enabling free broadcasts of live streams on the Web. Free live streaming (FLIS) services attract millions of viewers and make heavy use of deceptive advertisements. Despite the immense popularity of these services, little is known about the parties that facilitate it and maintain webpages to index links for free viewership. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the FLIS ecosystem by mapping all parties involved in the anonymous broadcast of live streams, discovering their modus operandi, and quantifying the consequences for common Internet users who utilize these services. We develop an infrastructure that enables us to perform more than 850,000 visits by identifying 5,685 free live streaming domains, and analyze more than 1 Terabyte of traffic to map the parties that constitute the FLIS ecosystem. On the one hand, our analysis reveals that users of FLIS websites are generally exposed to deceptive advertisements, malware, malicious browser extensions, and fraudulent scams. On the other hand, we find that FLIS parties are often reported for copyright violations and host their infrastructure predomi- nantly in Europe and Belize. At the same time, we encounter substandard advertisement set-ups by the FLIS parties, along with potential trademark infringements through the abuse of domain names and logos of popular TV channels. Given the magnitude of the discovered abuse, we engineer features that characterize FLIS pages and build a classifier to identify FLIS pages with high accuracy and low false positives, in an effort to help human analysts identify malicious services and, whenever appropriate, initiate content-takedown requests. Over the past few years, the popularity of Social Live Streaming Services (SLSSs) like Periscope, Ustream, or YouNow, has been on the rise. The services offer their users the opportunity to interact with the viewers in real time while broadcasting themselves. With this kind of human-computer interaction legal dangers are a possibility. We performed an empirical investigation on law infringements on YouNow, Periscope, and Ustream. To this end, a content analysis of live-streams was applied. We developed a codebook based on literature regarding the usage of social media and on the conducted observations of streams. Based upon the most restrictive law (German law), researchers defined categories on potential law infringements while using SLSSs which were the following: copyright violations regarding music, video and picture, violation of personality rights with an additional focus on data protection and insults, committed road traffic acts, the violations of the sports broadcasting rights, as well as violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. In a time span of four weeks we observed 7,621 streams from SLSSs in Japan, Germany, and the U.S. We further examined if there are differences regarding law infringements between age groups, genders, motivations, contents, countries, and platforms. Over recent years, a major shift has occurred in piracy of paid-for content services toward illegal redistribution of live content in real-time over the Internet. This paper will provide insight into pirate content platforms, covering the various architectures and protocols used, from peer-to-peer protocols adapted for live streaming to more traditional Web streaming protocols. More specifically, it will focus on the methods generally employed to set up and scale ad-based illegal services using some of the above-mentioned protocols with streaming media platforms, while securing streaming servers, enabling these sites to remain hidden. A thorough analysis of the used architectures and protocols makes it possible to measure the actual audience viewing illegal streams, typically leveraging peer-to-peer networks data. This enables content service providers to assess the piracy threat level of any content, while illustrating the need for a business intelligence tool that provides relevant information on viewers' behavior. The introduction of mobile apps such as Meerkat, Periscope, and Facebook Live has sparked enthusiasm for live-streaming video. This study explores the legal and ethical implications of mobile live-streaming video apps through a review of public-policy considerations and the computing literature as well as analyses of a mix of quantitative and qualitative user data. We identify lines of research inquiry for five policy challenges and two areas of the literature in which the impact of these apps is so far unaddressed. The detailed data gathered from these inquiries will significantly contribute to the design and development of tools, signals or affordances to address the concerns that our study identifies. We hope our work will help shape the fields of ubiquitous computing and collaborative and social computing, jurisprudence, public policy and applied ethics in the future.