I worked in this space on the CDN non-pirate side and it's basically the same thing but everyone (including the major ones you know) distribute all of their content like that over various cdns and they're all essentially pitted cost/error-rate/latency wise against one another to the bottom. If you're interested in some of the tools used that essentially re-compiles, allows you to interject interstitial ads based... - Source: Hacker News / 2 months ago

The pirate scene for sport event streaming is accessible through: * Ad-ridden, dubious websites with a streaming widget, which have a terrible user experience and are a single point-of-failure (servers get taken down routinely) * Acestream (https://acestream.org/), which is a proprietary streaming protocol on top of BitTorrent, available only via a closed-source, unaudited server. Very shady, but works somewhat... - Source: Hacker News / 12 months ago

Go to https://acestream.org/. If doesn't load, most probably your ISP is blocking it, then use Tor browser. Source: about 1 year ago

Acestream Uses the BitTorrent protocol to stream video, which is pretty neat. Not sure how effective that can be wholesale, as it’s speed and therefore quality would depend on having a big enough concurrent network. It’s been around a while though. Source: over 2 years ago