PIRACY CHALLENGER Virgin Media has been caught running, er, piracy-enabling software in one of its physical stores.
Virgin Media has long taken a hard-line on piracy, and last year started sending out letters warning customers suspected of piracy to cease their wicked ways and adopt acceptable services like Netflix and Spotify instead.
It looks like Virgin Media will have to send a letter to, er, itself after an eagle-eyed Reddit user spotted piracy software running in one of the ISP’s bricks-and-mortar stores in Ireland.
The now-deleted Reddit post, spotted by TorrentFreak, sees a screen promoting Virgin’s ‘Full House’ package displaying a notification from Terrarium TV announcing the arrival of films The Star and The Stray (above).
For those innocents unaware of Terranium TV, it’s an Android-based service that enables users to stream and download free films and TV shows. It claims to push users in the way of “official” content streams, but the majority of its content breaks copyright laws.
This is a bad look for Virgin Media, which not only claims to crack down on customers obtaining ‘pirated’ content but also flogs its own premium TV subscriptions.
In a statement given to TorrentFreak, Virgin Media has shunted the blame onto a contractor, and says the issue has “no connection whatsoever with Virgin Media”. Er.
“Virgin Media takes copyright very seriously and does not condone illegal streaming.
“Our new Tallaght Store is due to officially open later this month and currently does not currently have Virgin Media network connectivity.
“Over the weekend, an advertising screen display in this Store was being set up by a contractor.
“The contractor took it on themselves to use their own 4G device to set up the screen, ahead of the store being connected to our fibre services this week.
“At some stage, an unwanted pop-up appeared on the screen from an illegal streaming site. To be clear, this did not come in through our network.
“Other than as outlined above, this occurrence has no connection whatsoever with Virgin Media.
“This is an entirely isolated matter and we are thoroughly investigating how it happened.”
Source;-.theinquirer.
