Vitalii Rybachenko

Vitalii Rybachenko

Full Stack Developer

Wind of change in piracy, yet again

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Thoughts
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In short - a little more than a month ago our so-called cyber-police shut downed one of the biggest service providing the largest catalog of
movies - FS.to. By the way, I developed a bot for Telegram for it - of course, it doesn't work right now. This service was providing illegal
content, which is bad, but the main thing is that we don't have anything legal in Ukraine with the same database of films. We have only
Megogo, divan.tv and oll.tv, which are really poor - I couldn't find even Big Bang Theory episodes on any of them.

A few days later, another big service called EX.ua decided that they don't want to take a part in this comedy and gave up before police
took an action - they just shared an info that they will close in a week.

It is really disgusting. Don't take me wrong, piracy is not good. But we don't have anything legal to watch on, with big database and features
on top of it and stable connection in prime time. Really. Do you know such service in Ukraine? Or which can be easily used in Ukraine.

I had searched for a replacement, tried few different resources, and right now I'm using kino.pub, which has big database of different movies
and premium subscription, which supposed to provide only movies with better video quality, but, in my case, somewhy I just can't watch anything
without having premium subscription :) Anyway, it is not a big deal (costs about $3), better than nothing.

I'm really disappointed that in 2016/17 we still don't have anything like Netflix - an application, which you can install on your devices,
including Apple/Android TV, and watch movies, track episodes etc. Well, actually we have Netflix in Ukraine, and Amazon Prime also
launched a few days ago here, but their database of allowed movies for Ukraine region is really poor, sadly.

Right now the only choice for me is opening movie on iPhone and send it to TV via AirPlay. It works, but:

  • You can't use your iPhone while you are watching
  • It consumes more battery of iPhone
  • Pausing a movie can cause AirPlay to disconnect for saving energy

As EX.ua administration said in their 'shutdown' message:

The darkest night is before dawn.

I hope movie content managers someday will finally agree on something and we would have something like Netflix here, in Ukraine. Or, maybe,
Netflix will act and grow their database, who knows.