The rise and fall of a Halifax man's illegal TV streaming empire

It was intended as words of wisdom, but it oozed cockiness, as Activeits plotted his path to fortune on an internet forum popular with spammers.

The boast was right there in the title of the thread: "How i made 1k a day or more."

Typing under the fictitious name, he detailed his involvement with "a thing called IPTV" and how he'd built an unauthorized online television streaming service, one that illegally rebroadcast channels to subscribers at cheap rates.

"There is a TON of money to be made in IPTV and i'm just getting started!" Activeits wrote on March 14, 2018, later dismissing concerns he would get sued or sent to jail. "Everything i do, i do carefully." 

These weren't the embellishments of a blowhard. Activeits was making a ton of money, and he would make a ton more. But he was wrong in one crucial respect. He wasn't careful enough.

Last fall, Activeits, also known as Tyler White — who lives on Old Sambro Road on the outskirts of Halifax — was ordered to pay $7.1 million in penalties to some of the largest entertainment companies in the world for his role in a streaming service called Beast TV.

The case offers a window into the inner workings of operations that break copyright laws but which many law-abiding Canadians quietly use — pirate services offering thousands of channels for a fraction of the price of legitimate cable or streaming packages.

"We view it as a critical threat to not just our platforms, but to the creative sector as a whole," said Aaron Wais, the head of global litigation for the Motion Picture Association, a group that includes Disney, Netflix and Warner Bros.

"It impacts us as right-holders. It impacts creators across the industry. It causes hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and thousands of lost jobs."

There are many legitimate IPTV (internet-protocol television) services that offer TV streaming over the internet, including those run by major Canadian broadcasters like Bell Media and Rogers.

But over the years, the internet has been littered with illegal IPTV operators, some of them peddling huge packages of live sports, television and movie channels for as little as $20 a month. Only the big ones catch the attention of the major studios, and Beast TV was one of them.

There are two dimensions to illegal IPTV, according to experts and court records. The first involves operators who run what amount to "server farms." They subscribe to television services, and deploy dozens of receivers tuned to specific channels, retransmitting them immediately to the internet.

The second dimension involves operators who purchase those streams, and set up their own websites and subscription services, selling channel packages for cut-rate prices.

In many cases, those in illegal IPTV do a bit of both, pooling unauthorized streams between themselves for a fee so each can create subscription services that advertise hundreds or thousands of channels.