With more than half a billion site visits in just three months, pirate streaming site FMovies is seen as a major threat by Hollywood.
The pirate site rivals legal streaming platforms such as Disney+ in web traffic and has become the poster child for rejuvenated site blocking proposals in the U.S. Congress.
Pressure Mounts
To illustrate the brazenness of the site, lawmakers in Congress got a demo of the site from MPA’s Senior Executive Vice President, Karyn Temple, late last year. This showed how easy it is to stream the latest movies and TV shows in one of the best secured buildings in the country.
The operators of FMovies, who allegedly reside in Vietnam, are not oblivious to the controversy. They know that the MPA and ACE are on their heels but have managed to continue their operations despite legal and diplomatic pressure.
From the outside, little appeared to change. The site has switched to a new domain name occasionally, possibly to fight back against search engine demotions and pirate site blockades, but the constant stream of fresh pirated content kept going; at least until last week.
FMovies Goes Stale
Without any type of explanation, FMovies hasn’t updated with new content for over a week.
For example, the latest “House of the Dragon” release on the site is episode one, which came out on June 17th. The Boys, meanwhile, is ‘stuck’ at the fourth episode, which dates back to June 20th.
The most recent episodes appear to have been added to the pirate streaming site little over a week ago. That also applies to movies, as recent releases such as Netflix’s “A Family Affair” are not listed.
This release delay is very unusual. Typically, pirated TV episodes and movies appear on FMovies within hours of their official release. The site’s users need this type of instant access, or else they switch to one of the many alternatives or clones.
Needless to say, the site’s users are not happy. Aside from the lack of new releases, the site functions normally and, over in the comment sections, people are starting to wonder what’s going on.
Something’s Up
To find out more, TorrentFreak attempted to contact the site’s operators, but it appears that the regular contact channel is down at the time of writing.
The lack of new content might simply be the result of a ‘simple’ technical problem. However, the fact that it has persisted for more than a week is highly unusual, especially without any official updates from the team.
For context, it’s worth noting that the FMovies team was previously linked to other pirate sites including BflixHD, SflixTV, and Losmoviesz. These sites don’t have any trouble on the supply side, it seems.
Given that all major anti-piracy groups have FMovies in their sights, we can’t rule out an enforcement effort or intervention. If that’s the case, it was only partially successful, so far, as the ‘stale’ site itself remains operational for the moment.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Source : Pirate Streaming Giant FMovies Hasn’t Updated in a Week
