Quite liked the irony in this article 
I agree. This is funny.
Maybe itās just me, but where do people get the right to pirate something if the legitimate stream goes offline? It hardly āsavedā the fight.
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Where does the rights holder have the right to charge and not provide an adequate, working and simple platform?
I find a lot of Sky Sports Box Office stuff fairly confusing and over complicated to set up and use (even having to have specialist hardware such as a Now TV stick to watch) with having to fight restrictions management to watch, the key is providing a good platform where itās EASIER TO PAY than pirate, Spotify is a good and positive example of this.
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In law? They are the rights holder.
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Canāt remember the last time I paid for any content to be fair other then when I purchased Disney+ for a year, that runs out in a month and then Iām back to a streaming box.
They have that right by virtue of being the rights holder. Thereās no law that says how easy they have to make it for you to access their materials.
Now, clear commercial pressures strongly encourage them to make they content easy to pay for and access, because that way they earn more money for it. But thatās a very different thing.
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Surely they owe refunds to people that paid but couldnāt access it? If you pay for a service in advance that is then not provided, surely there is a claim there? It is the US so if it is as bad/ as widespread as the article infers then they will in due course be facing a class action if they donāt offer some compensation?
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This isnāt āironicā.
Itās like saying thank god a load of unlicensed taxi touts came out onto the street when people couldnāt find black cabs.
You do realise that a lot of illegal streaming ultimately leads back to organised crime, which uses it to fund human trafficking and terrorism, donāt you?
Possibly. Depends on the terms of service. Not really impacted by the existence/non-existance of illegal streams though.
They do love a good class action over there. It seems they have something going on all the time 
I may be misunderstanding here, but if the original video is 16:9, and the image is scaled to 21:9, then surely youāre either stretching the image horizontally or cropping the top and bottom of the picture?
The rights holder holds the rights irrespective to whether they have entered into a contract to allow you to view it. You definitely do not have a right to illegally take the law into your own hands to fulfil a disputed contract with them.
If they are in breach of that contract, you are entitled to restitution - usually in the form of a refund or credit for a future event. You could pursue legal action for the breach, but I doubt it would get far if they offer a fair refund.
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The original images are 21:9 I think. If Iāve understood correctly the the problem is the hard coding of the letterboxing, which means it will appear letterboxed and distorted on a 21:9 display.
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The amusing thing is that the rightsholder will find it difficult to claim they suffered a loss if it didnāt actually air properly.
Alright, so itās hard to say with 100% certainty because theyāre not the precise same frame, but - the from the examples give, the 21:9 picture appears to be cropped at the top and bottom.
ETA: have looked it up at CoCoās original aspect ratio looks to be 2.35:1, which suggests that it is should indeed be show to more or less fill a 21:9 screen anyway, so please disregard my nitpicking on that point.
I will absolutely concede that the windowboxed Disney+ presentation looks f****** awful and reminds me of the pain that was trying to watch non-anamorphic DVDs.
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In case you missed the edit I made to my previous reply while you were posting, Iāve withdrawn all my objections as Disney+ have indeed quite clearly screwed the pooch here.
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I recall they had to upload The Simpsons in its original format after about a month, they tinkered with it and it meant that in plenty of episodes the gag wasnāt on screen as it was chopped out of oblivion by them messing with the ratios
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Yes; they put the whole lot up in 16:9, and the cropping meant that sight gags involving the top and bottom of the screen were butchered - the example which did the rounds showing how bad this was was the Duff brewery and the tanks of different types of beer, with the 16:9 cropped version losing the fact they were all filled from the same pipe.
The only affected seasons 1-19, though, as from season 20 onwards the Simpsons was 16:9 native.
Having seen the screenshots of the windowboxing above, however, I dread to think how theyāve fixed the Simpsons!
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Distributing illegal streams is a breach of copyright law, as opposed to an infringement of rights. Itās a crime basically, not a civil dispute so thereās no need for anyone to demonstrate loss.
Not that whether it actually aired or not is relevant to a demonstration of loss anyway.