It's Free for a Reason: Exploring the Ecosystem of Free Live Streaming Services

Recent years have seen extensive growth of services enabling free broadcasts of live streams on the Web. Free live streaming (FLIS) services attract millions of viewers and make heavy use of deceptive advertisements. Despite the immense popularity of these services, little is known about the parties that facilitate it and maintain webpages to index links for free viewership. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the FLIS ecosystem by mapping all parties involved in the anonymous broadcast of live streams, discovering their modus operandi, and quantifying the consequences for common Internet users who utilize these services. We develop an infrastructure that enables us to perform more than 850,000 visits by identifying 5,685 free live streaming domains, and analyze more than 1 Terabyte of traffic to map the parties that constitute the FLIS ecosystem. On the one hand, our analysis reveals that users of FLIS websites are generally exposed to deceptive advertisements, malware, malicious browser extensions, and fraudulent scams. On the other hand, we find that FLIS parties are often reported for copyright violations and host their infrastructure predominantly in Europe and Belize. At the same time, we encounter substandard advertisement set-ups by the FLIS parties, along with potential trademark infringements through the abuse of domain names and logos of popular TV channels. Given the magnitude of the discovered abuse, we engineer features that characterize FLIS pages and build a classifier to identify FLIS pages with high accuracy and low false positives, in an effort to help human analysts identify malicious services and, whenever appropriate, initiate content-takedown requests. Permission to freely reproduce all or part of this paper for noncommercial purposes is granted provided that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Reproduction for commercial purposes is strictly prohibited without the prior written consent of the Internet Society, the first-named author (for reproduction of an entire paper only), and the author's employer if the paper was prepared within the scope of employment.