AMAZON’S latest Fire Stick model is making life harder for TV pirates looking to illegally stream telly.
The newest Fire TV Stick came out just a few weeks ago – ahead of Amazon‘s global crackdown on piracy.
In late October, Amazon began blocking so-called “dodgy” apps that allowed Fire Stick owners to watch premium telly illegally.
Amazon had already been blocking these apps through its own Appstore, but users were still “side-loading” them onto their Fire Stick devices.
The retail giant blocked this in a major update, and also prevented it from working on the new Fire TV Stick 4K Select model, which has much stricter “side-loading” rules.
And it turns out that the new model doesn’t currently allow VPNs to run either, as revealed by Cordbusters.
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A VPN – or Virtual Private Network – is a type of app favoured by TV pirates.
They’re a handy privacy tool that lots of security experts recommend.
That’s because a VPN will encrypt your online activity, scrambling it so that it can’t be spied on.
This is very useful if you’re connecting to public Wi-Fi, at a coffee shop.
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But it’s this encryption – and the ability to make you appear like you’re logging on from somewhere else – that makes VPN apps popular among ‘dodgy’ Fire Stick users.
Previous Fire Stick models ran on software based on Google‘s Android system.
But the new Fire TV Stick 4K Select uses a different software called Vega OS
And Vega OS currently doesn’t offer support for VPNs.
It was previously expected that VPN support would be added in late October, but it appears to have been delayed to later this month.
So even if Fire Stick users were able to find a way to use illegal streaming apps on the new model today, they still wouldn’t be able to access VPNs.
It’s unclear why VPN functionality isn’t currently supported on the new Fire Stick.
In any case, it will be extremely difficult for TV pirates to use dodgy apps on the new Fire Stick at all.
Rules around side-loading – installing apps from outside of the official Appstore – are much stricter on the new model.
You need to have an official developer account so you can use side-loading specifically for testing out apps.
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The fact that millions of Brits are turning to piracy isn’t a surprise.
Telly subscriptions are now wildly expensive, and it’s increasingly hard to justify having them all.
I mean a top-tier Netflix subscription will cost you £17.99 a month, while Disney+ comes in at £14.99 a month.
And the offering seems to be getting worse: Amazon now shows ads on your Prime Video movies and shows unless you pay extra (on top of your Prime membership) to remove them.
That’s an extra £2.99 on top of the regular £8.99 fee.
Netflix, meanwhile, just hiked prices in the US – and experts told The Sun that a UK rise is likely to follow.
And if you pay for Sky – and extra services like Sky Sports – then your costs will simply balloon.
So what are you to do?
Well one of the best strategies to cut your TV bills is to try something called “service cycling”.
That’s where you only have one TV service active at a time, and then rotate through a list.
So one month you pay for Netflix and watch all of its top telly.
Then scrap it and move on to Disney+ the next month, before binning that and going to Amazon for the third month.
Do this with three or four services then start the whole process over again.
It means you’ll get three or four months in each year to watch all of each app’s content.
So you won’t miss any top shows, but you’ll avoid paying for all of the apps every single month for an entire year.
It brings enormous savings and you won’t miss out on any great telly either.
Plus it’s totally legal, so you don’t have to worry about that.
And if an illegal streaming app is detected, Amazon will likely shut it down as part of its global crackdown.
On older Fire Sticks, the crackdown means that piracy apps simply won’t load if you try to launch them.
And because the ban is at device-level, even using a VPN wouldn’t get around the system.
Amazon says its crackdown is an “ongoing effort”, and its new rules will significantly limit piracy on Fire Sticks in the future.
“Piracy is illegal, and we’ve always worked to block it from our Appstore,” an Amazon spokesperson told The Sun.
“Through an expanded program led by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), a global coalition fighting digital piracy, we’ll now block apps identified as providing access to pirated content, including those downloaded from outside our Appstore.
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“This builds on our ongoing efforts to support creators and protect customers, as piracy can also expose users to malware, viruses, and fraud.”
It come as TV giants introduced several price hikes this year, including Netflix, Disney+, and Apple TV.
