These “Piracy-as-a-Service” providers offer ready-made video players that other sites can embed. This allows new pirate sites to launch live sports coverage without hosting any streams themselves.
Streamed was one of these providers. The platform focused on live sports and was used as the backbone by many other sites. However, its homepage now suggests that this has come to an abrupt end.
“We are no longer operating Streamed. Thank you for the support over the years,” the message reads.
The operators don’t explain why they decided to pull the plug.
Pointing to Rivals
The notice isn’t limited to streamed.pk. The strmd.link domain redirects to the closure page and streamed.st shows the same message.
Instead of simply going dark, the operators offer some advice to former users. They list five alternative sports streaming sites, each with a short description of its niche. This includes ppv.st, pitsport.st and thedaddy.pk. The latter has “lots of ads” according to the recommendation.
The shutdown of Streamed is significant as it affects dozens of sites at once. It was also seen as a notorious piracy threat by the Motion Picture Association.
The MPA previously mentioned Mapple as one of the sites that relied on Streamed. At the time of writing, some of its sports streams return a 404 error.
A Growing Threat
Earlier this month, the MPA listed Streamed in its annual overview of notorious piracy markets, which it sent to the U.S. Trade Representative. The movie industry group described it as a “Piracy-as-a-Service” provider that keeps growing.
Citing Similarweb data, the MPA said that around 30 pirate sites used Streamed in July, with a combined 463 million visits. A year earlier, it counted 29 sites with 134 million visits.
According to the MPA, a significant number of the sites relying on Streamed are so-called “hydra sites,” one-stop piracy portals such as HydraHD, Rivestream, StreamEX and Mapple. Cineby is listed as an example too, although it has since shut down.
“None of the sites Streamed services host live content themselves; all traffic flows through Streamed as the PaaS, which relies entirely on its own infrastructure,” the MPA writes.
The MPA’s data covers the sites that used the Streamed embed. The streamed.pk domain itself also received 19.76 million visits in September according to Similarweb, 56% more than the month before. Nearly half of these visits came from the United States, followed by Canada and the UK.
But Why?
Streamed’s farewell message doesn’t mention any enforcement action. There is also no seizure banner and neither the MPA nor the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) thave said anything so far.
That doesn’t rule out any external involvement, however. In its submission, the MPA took credit for the shutdowns of Cineby and AnimeFLV. These sites didn’t mention an anti-piracy action when they went down, and no group claimed it at the time.
That said, since the closure message openly promotes other pirate streaming sites, it seems unlikely that the shutdown was part of a settlement or another agreement with Hollywood.
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We reached out to the MPA and ACE for a comment on the shutdown, but they did not respond before publication.
