She arrives. She sits down. She turns off the computer of the guy next to her. She takes out a disposable wipe.
She cleans the keyboard, the screen, the mouse, and the keyboard again. She puts on her headphones. She finds the power button.
She turns off the computer of the guy next to her again.
A man built an illegal streaming service bigger than Netflix and ran it from a house in Las Vegas for ten years.
> Kristopher Dallmann ran it out of his house in Las Vegas from 2007 to 2017.
> 183,285 TV episodes. More content than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Amazon Prime combined.
> 37,000 paying subscribers at $9.99 a month.
> The whole catalog was built by automated bots scraping the biggest piracy sites the moment new episodes dropped.
> Subscribers often got new episodes the day after they aired on television.
> When copyright complaints started piling up, Dallmann tried to rebrand the whole operation as an aviation entertainment company. As if it was just for in-flight TV on private jets.
> One of his own programmers left mid operation and built a competing illegal streaming service called iStreamItAll. Same model. Twice the price.
> The DOJ called it the largest internet piracy case ever to go to trial.
> Netflix spent roughly $6 BILLION on content in 2017. Hulu and Amazon Prime spent BILLIONS more.
> One guy in Vegas was beating all of them on library size from his house.
> The streaming wars were just starting. Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, Paramount+ were still years away from launching.
> Studios were about to spend the next decade burning hundreds of billions trying to out-content each other.
A guy with bots and torrents had already won that war in 2017. He just couldn't keep it.