Everyone is stealing TV | The Verge

Walk the rows of the farmers market in a small, nondescript Texas town about an hour away from Austin, and you might stumble across something unexpected: In between booths selling fresh, local pickles and pies, there’s a table piled high with generic-looking streaming boxes, promising free access to NFL games, UFC fights, and any cable TV network you can think of.

It’s called the SuperBox, and it’s being demoed by Jason, who also has homemade banana bread, okra, and canned goods for sale. “People are sick and tired of giving Dish Network $200 a month for trash service,” Jason says. His pitch to rural would-be cord-cutters: Buy a SuperBox for $300 to $400 instead, and you’ll never have to shell out money for cable or streaming subscriptions again.

I met Jason through one of the many Facebook groups used as support forums for rogue streaming devices like the SuperBox. To allow him and other users and sellers of these devices to speak freely, we’re only identifying them by their first names or pseudonyms.

SuperBox and its main competitor, vSeeBox, are gaining in popularity as consumers get fed up with what TV has become: Pay TV bundles are incredibly expensive, streaming services are costlier every year, and you need to sign up for multiple services just to catch your favorite sports team every time they play. The hardware itself is generic and legal, but you won’t find these devices at mainstream stores like Walmart and Best Buy because everyone knows the point is accessing illegal streaming services that offer every single channel, show, and movie you can think of. But there are hundreds of resellers like Jason all across the United States who aren’t bothered by the legal technicalities of these devices. They’re all part of a massive, informal economy that connects hard-to-pin-down Chinese device makers and rogue streaming service operators with American consumers looking to take cord-cutting to the next level.

This economy paints a full picture of America, and characters abound. There’s a retired former cop in upstate New York selling the vSeeBox at the fall festival of his local church. A Christian conservative from Utah who pitches rogue streaming boxes as a way of “defunding the swamp and refunding the kingdom.” An Idaho-based smart home vendor sells vSeeBoxes alongside security cameras and automated window shades. Midwestern church ladies in Illinois and Indian uncles in New Jersey all know someone who can hook you up: real estate agents, MMA fighters, wedding DJs, and special ed teachers among the sellers who all form what amounts to a modern-day bootlegging scheme, car trunks full of streaming boxes just waiting for your call.

These folks are a permanent thorn in the side of cable companies and streaming services, who have been filing lawsuits against resellers of these devices for years, only to see others take their place practically overnight.

Jason, for his part, doesn’t beat around the bush about where he stands in this conflict. “I hope it puts DirecTV and Dish out of business,” he tells me.

Jason isn’t alone in his disdain for big TV providers. “My DirecTV bill was just too high,” says

Eva, a social worker and grandmother from California. Eva bought her first vSeeBox two years ago when she realized she was paying nearly $300 a month for TV, including premium channels. Now, she’s watching those channels for free, saving thousands of dollars. “It turned out to be a no-brainer,” Eva says.

Natalie, a California-based software consultant, paid about $120 a month for cable. Then, TV transitioned to streaming, and everything became a subscription. All those subscriptions add up — especially if you’re a sports fan. “You need 30 subscriptions just to watch every game,” she complains. “It’s gotten out of control. It’s not sustainable,” she says.

Natalie bought her first SuperBox five years ago. At the time, she was occasionally splurging on pay-per-view fights, which would cost her anywhere from $70 to $100 a pop. SuperBox’s $200 price tag seemed like a steal. “You’re getting the deal of the century,” she says.

James, a gas station repairman from Alabama, estimates that he used to pay around $125 for streaming subscriptions every month. “The general public is being nickeled and dimed into the poor house,” he says.

James says that he was hesitant about forking over a lot of money upfront for a device that could turn out to be a scam. “I was nervous, but I figured: If it lasts four months, it pays for itself,” he tells me. James has occasionally encountered some glitches with his vSeeBox, but not enough to make him regret his purchase. “I’m actually in the process of canceling all the streaming services,” he says.

It’s stories like these, spread among friends, neighbors, and Facebook acquaintances, that have helped devices like SuperBox and vSeeBox gain a foothold across America. Natalie got her first SuperBox from a friend, and has since bought two or three more for family members. James got introduced to these devices through a friend as well, as did Eva. And while James quickly became a professional seller, Eva has simply been spreading the word — and buying additional boxes for her extended family — out of conviction.

“I’ve been on a crusade to try to convert everyone,” she says.

For years, tech-savvy TV fans have found ways to watch live sports events and other TV programs in shady ways, either by paying for bootleg streaming services or watching free on sketchy websites plastered with porn ads. The most dedicated pirates use media center apps like Kodi with rogue add-ons on their PCs or Mac Minis, but piracy has gotten more and more accessible over time. The Play Store on Android TVs is full of browsers optimized for those shady streaming sites. Amazon won’t ever admit it, but the popularity of Fire TV Sticks is in part due to how easy it is to root them and sideload piracy apps.

SuperBox and vSeeBox have simply turned all of this into easy-to-sell products, with a thin layer of legal deniability. vSeeBox guides users to a pirate streaming service called “Heat”; SuperBox’s service is “Blue TV.” You won’t find apps for either service on Google Play or any other app store; users who have tried report that it’s impossible to run them on any other third-party device, suggesting that they were custom-built by or on behalf of the makers of SuperBox and vSeeBox.

The boxes don’t ship with the apps preinstalled — but they make it really easy to do so. vSeeBox, for instance, ships with an Android TV launcher that has a row of recommended apps, displaying download links to install apps for the Heat streaming service with one click. New SuperBox owners won’t have trouble accessing the apps, either. “Once you open your packaging, there are instructions,” Jason says. “Follow them to a T.”

Once downloaded, these apps mimic the look and feel of traditional TV and streaming services. vSeeBox’s Heat, for instance, has a dedicated “Heat Live” app that resembles Sling TV, Fubo, or any other live TV subscription service, complete with a program guide and the ability to flip through channels with your remote control. SuperBox’s Blue TV app does the same thing, while a separate “Blue Playback” app even offers some time-shifting functionality, similar to Hulu’s live TV service. Natalie estimates that she can access between 6,000 and 8,000 channels on her SuperBox, including premium sports networks and movie channels, and hundreds of local Fox, ABC, and CBS affiliates from across the United States.

How exactly these apps are able to offer all those channels is one of the streaming boxes’ many mysteries. “All the SuperBox channels are streaming out of China,” Jason suggests, in what seems like a bit of folk wisdom. In a 2025 lawsuit against a SuperBox reseller, Dish Network alleged that at least some of the live TV channels available on the device are being ripped directly from Dish’s own Sling TV service. “An MLB channel transmitted on the service [showed] Sling’s distinguishing logo in the bottom right corner,” the lawsuit claims. The operators of those live TV services use dedicated software to crack Sling’s DRM, and then retransmit the unprotected video feeds on their services, according to the lawsuit.

Heat and Blue TV also each have dedicated apps for Netflix-style on-demand viewing, and the services often aren’t shy about the source of their programming. Heat’s “VOD Ultra” app helpfully lists movies and TV shows categorized by provider, including HBO Max, Disney Plus, Starz, and Hulu. Some of this content may be ripped directly from legitimate services, similar to the way rogue service operators gain access to live TV feeds. Another possibility was highlighted in a 2019 indictment of pirate streaming service operators: To offer their paying customers a Netflix-like experience even for movies that were still in theaters, the defendants allegedly went old-school and downloaded videos from newsgroups and torrent sites with the help of automated scripts.

Most vSeeBox and SuperBox users don’t seem to care where exactly the content is coming from, as long as they can access the titles they’re looking for.

“I haven’t found anything missing yet,” James says. “I’ve actually been able to watch shows from streaming services I didn’t have before.”

The companies behind SuperBox and vSeeBox launched in 2019 and 2020, respectively, which was perfect timing: With everyone cooped up inside during the covid-19 pandemic, streaming boomed, and people like Natalie burned through the massive libraries of their boxes in no time. “We watched it all,” she jokes.

However, rogue streaming boxes have been around for much longer than either company. A handful of Chinese manufacturers first began churning out these devices over a decade ago with a much narrower audience in mind: Devices like TVPad, Moon Box, and CrownTV all specifically targeted Asian expats by providing free access to TV networks from their home countries for a one-time $200-to-$300 purchase price.

TVPad boasted on its now-defunct website that consumers would have access to “over 100+ popular Chinese channels, more than 40 Korean channels, 20+ Japanese channels,” and more. It was a huge hit among expats: The company behind TVPad is said to have sold 3 million units worldwide, according to a legal filing.

TVPad sold the device through its own website, but also started to use a network of local resellers. TVPads would pop up in malls and mom-and-pop stores in Asian neighborhoods across the United States, where they were openly sold next to snacks and groceries. In the spring of 2014, a Los Angeles-based reseller even rented a billboard atop a medical plaza in the city’s Koreatown neighborhood, advertising the device as capable of playing South Korean TV networks without monthly fees.

It didn’t take long for overseas rights holders to take notice. China’s state broadcaster CCTV teamed up with Dish to sue the maker of TVPad in 2015, eventually putting the company behind it out of business.

Others quickly filled the void, and the makers of these devices increasingly embraced an interesting design choice: While the original TVPad looked more or less like an Apple TV clone, manufacturers started to add front-facing LED displays with clocks and channel numbers — the kinds of things you’d expect to see on a satellite TV receiver.

That’s no accident, according to researchers from Australia’s RMIT University, who wrote in a 2019 paper about TVPad and similar devices that their “design and user experience evoke longer histories of diasporic satellite television.” Expat communities had long tapped into programming from their home countries one way or another, be it through official satellite subscription services or black-market receivers capable of descrambling those stations for free. Going down the pirate route seemed a lot less risky when the rights holders were half a world away.

Chinese device makers learned their lessons from that first wave of expat streaming boxes: They realized that the market for rogue streamers was much bigger than just the diaspora, and they stopped openly talking about piracy, leaving the riskier parts of their business to their American resellers. Some also kept the clock, with SuperBox still looking more like a satellite TV receiver than an Apple TV.

Holdover digital clocks aside, SuperBox and vSeeBox aren’t shy about hyping their products. The companies sell Android-based streaming devices with a variety of different specs and price points, and both take creative freedom with their marketing. The vSeeBox V6 Plus is being advertised as an 8K HDR Android TV box; its chipset does not actually support 8K playback. SuperBox’s latest S7 Max device promises 6K video — a resolution used almost exclusively for professional video production. There are no 6K TVs available for sale to consumers, as SuperBox’s own website points out.

All of this doesn’t exactly instill confidence in the security of these devices. “You don’t know if there is any kind of malware built into the box,” says Mike, an IT worker from Pennsylvania who uses a vSeeBox.. It’s a reasonable concern: In the past, cybercriminals have exploited insecure streaming boxes to commit ad fraud and other crimes. In a recent lawsuit, Google estimated that one such botnet consisted of 10 million streaming boxes and other personal devices, though the lawsuit did not mention vSeeBox or SuperBox as affected.

A recent report also suggested that SuperBox devices were connecting to Grass, a residential proxy network that lets end users monetize unused internet bandwidth. Grass founder Andrej Radonjic tells me that there’s no connection between the device and his service. “SuperBox is not a user, customer, or affiliate of Grass, and Grass does not permit third-party installations of its software in consumer devices,” Radonjic says. “Grass has not encountered its software being used by any specific smart TV box or streaming device.”

With hard-to-pin-down companies operating from overseas through an army of small-time resellers, these devices arguably represent much higher security risks than anything made by Apple or Google. Mike admits that he has concerns, but they haven’t stopped him from using his box.

If you try to buy a SuperBox or vSeeBox by searching for them online, you’ll find countless websites, all looking like official company stores, but run by individual resellers. The same is true for the seller-run subreddits and Facebook groups that double as customer support. Getting honest feedback from them can be challenging.

Jason had his doubts before he became a streaming box reseller. Sending an unknown company in China a few thousand dollars for a wholesale order of streaming devices seemed risky. “I was so skeptical [of] ordering from SuperBox,” he admits. What ultimately convinced him were weeks of back-and-forth with a gentleman from Hong Kong, who walked him through the sales process and told him that the company has fewer than 500 resellers in the United States.

SuperBox and vSeeBox rely on such direct relationships to recruit resellers, with company representatives often using personal Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram accounts for outreach. In many cases, these accounts feature likenesses of young, attractive women, with profile pictures ripped from fashion websites and Instagram model profiles.

After signing him up as a reseller, Jason’s SuperBox contact also recruited him for a unique side gig: Whenever Jason finds a SuperBox advertised for less than the company’s suggested retail price, he buys it and sells it back to the company for a premium. He says that the SuperBox maker then checks the device’s MAC address against a list of past sales and remotely deactivates all boxes it sold to the reseller who openly advertised the unauthorized discount.

Offending sellers are then asked to pay a fine, Jason says. Consumers who happened to buy a box for the wrong price find it locked, with an onscreen warning telling them to contact their service provider. vSeeBox engages in similar practices, Mike says: “They can essentially shut off the boxes.”

To alleviate the concerns of would-be buyers fearful of getting scammed, device makers maintain online verification tools. Each reseller gets a certificate with a unique code. Enter that code into a web form, and the company will tell you if the reseller in question is in good standing.

As a result, many resellers have stopped advertising device prices online altogether, only adding to the mysteries of rogue streaming boxes. Neither company responded to multiple interview requests for this story, and both are obtuse about their owners and executive leadership.

Resellers and users are more than willing to fill those gaps with wild rumors. One Facebook post claims that SuperBox was developed by a Comcast engineer who wasn’t willing to share the fruits of his labor with his employer. “They tried to buy this person’s product and silence,” the post ominously states. AT&T supposedly also tried to buy the device, but “SuperBox said no.”

Jason had heard a different story from a friend. SuperBox was engineered by a group of veterans from California, he tells me, and “Spectrum Internet” secretly owns 20 percent of their company. I wasn’t able to confirm the claim about the veterans. Spectrum Internet, however, is not a company, but the brand name for internet and pay TV services sold by telco giant Charter — a company that generated more than $55 billion with its cable TV and broadband business in 2024, and seemingly would have very little to gain from dabbling in pirate streaming hardware on the side. Charter declined to comment.

It’s clear to pretty much everyone that SuperBox and vSeeBox don’t have the licensing agreements required to stream thousands of TV channels, live sports events, and on-demand movies. “Obviously, it is definitely piracy,” Mike says.

“I’m sure it’s not super legal,” Natalie says. However, with these kinds of devices regularly popping up on major e-commerce sites, she didn’t bother researching the legal intricacies. “I don’t care,” she says.

Resellers have been sued, and are often made to pay hefty fines. Dish Network sued a California-based SuperBox seller last summer, alleging copyright infringement. The case is ongoing. Dish also won a case against a vSeeBox reseller in 2024, forcing defendants to cough up $1.25 million in damages for the sale of 500 rogue streaming devices. A year ago, another vSeeBox seller was ordered to pay $405,000 in damages for the sale of 162 devices.

But none of that feels relevant to the people using these services. “As far as I’m aware, watching streaming is not illegal,” James tells me. “Hosting it is.”

This also seems like a bit of load-bearing folk wisdom: Copyright owners have very famously sued people for accessing copyrighted content in the past, and there’s nothing stopping them from trying again if they want to. Even mentioning this idea to copyright law professors provokes thoughtful responses about legal tactics and business strategy considerations. “Copyright holders are likely to look for chokepoints where they can maximize the impact of legal pressure, but where those are is not always predictable,” says Blake Reid, an internet and copyright law professor at Colorado Law School. “Historically we’ve seen actions up and down the Internet stack, against device manufacturers, service providers, and even users. The legal actions copyright holders take are not always obvious or intuitive and often contradict social norms and folk wisdom in online communities.”

Jack Lerner, a law professor who heads UC Irvine’s Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinic, says that going after individual users would be challenging. “It’s not entirely clear that consumers would be committing copyright infringement just by accessing pirated content through these boxes,” Lerner says. “In the analog world, merely consuming pirated material is not illegal. For example, it’s not against the law to read a book that was copied by someone else and given to you.”

But there are other, perhaps worse punishments Hollywood could mete out to streaming pirates. “Rightsholders regularly pressure ISPs to cut off infringing content and terminate subscriber accounts,” Lerner says. “If they haven’t already done so, it would not surprise me if ISPs were to start terminating the accounts of people who use these devices.”

The challenging intellectual complexity of the situation can’t compete with the combination of convenience and defiance that runs through this community. “Illegal or not: [If] it plays, I’m watching it,” James says. “What are they gonna do? Come and arrest me?”

As Netflix and other services continue to increase their prices, some streaming box users are done with paying for TV once and for all. If SuperBox or vSeeBox got sued out of existence, they would likely just move on to the next device. For people like Jason, there’s little pay TV or streaming service operators can do to win him back. “They can try, but good luck,” he tells me.

James agrees. “Why would I pay for something I get for free?”

The throughline in all of my conversations with SuperBox and vSeeBox users was that TV has gotten both too complicated and too expensive. But quite a few of them continue to pay for some services.

Natalie, for instance, has a Peacock subscription. “It’s super cheap,” she tells me. She also cycles in and out of Hulu’s live TV service, which she appreciates for its cloud DVR. Eva doesn’t think she’ll ever go back to paying almost $300 a month for pay TV, but estimates that she pays around $60 to $70 a month for services like Netflix and Disney Plus. “That’s still reasonable to me,” she says.

And Mike is still paying for YouTube TV after realizing that his vSeeBox couldn’t fully replace it. “The paid services are worth it, to a certain extent, for me,” he says.

However, even people like Mike only have so much patience for being pawns in the streaming wars. When ABC and other Disney-owned channels went dark on YouTube TV last fall, he seriously considered pulling the plug and moving all his viewing to his rogue streaming box. Many more people could find themselves tempted to do the same, especially if streaming services keep raising their prices and media companies continue to make consumers suffer during licensing fee fights.

“This box is not that hard to figure out,” Mike tells me. “Anybody can do it.”