Therefore, professional pirates rely on HDCP stripper devices to set up their piracy ecosystem operations. Not only can they feed the pirated  content to origin servers for distribution of live streaming, but there is next to no loss in quality compared to the legitimate service. 

The latter kind of attack was more common when smart cards were used in set-top boxes as the receiver security component of one-way broadcast conditional access systems, and it also required advanced analysis equipment and knowledge.

The most successful approach pirates use is to run deeply discounted online services with linear portfolios, often with hundreds of channels. By aggregating content into multichannel streams with professional-quality EPGs, pirates can deliver a user experience that’s comparable to legal services — and steal their advertising and subscription revenue in the process.