123movies was a Vietnamese website. It was a movie streaming website. It is considered the world’s “most popular illegal website”. It was operating from Vietnam.
Introduction
In 1994, Seung Min Cho (赤板 杉), was born in Da Nang. During his first year of life, his mother died from complications caused by cerebral malaria. He and his two elder sisters were left at an orphanage. He studied in an ordinary local high school and lived alone in a room. He learned to read and write in prison camps, through reading comics. He worked hard to support his family. In his first year of high school, he made a living through selling smuggled goods. In 1998, his life changed. He visited the Vietnamese embassy in Russia to fill out an entry form and apply for an annual visa. The embassy officials quickly granted him an interview. He was accepted as a Vietnamese student in that year. But due to visa problems, he remained in Russia until 2001.
A brief history of 123Movies
Movie streaming website 123movies was founded in 2005. According to other sources, 123movies was founded as early as 2000. It was most successful on Sunday, when it was broadcasting 5,000 illegal pirated movies and television shows. 123movies attracted the attention of the authorities. Although it was only operating as a movie streaming website, the company made quite a lot of money. Its servers were registered in Singapore and the servers themselves were located in the Cayman Islands, a British tax haven. It sold advertisements in their software, including one that targeted female users. It was accused of violating United States law by illegally selling and distributing films and distributing in many other countries.
123Movies comes to America
This is the story of how 123Movies entered the United States. They would steal movies from American streaming sites. They would cover up the U.S. registration of their IP addresses. They would upload the pirated movies onto their servers. They would show the movies in an illegal Chinese streaming site to hide the fact that they were in the United States. They were like a pirate ship, just hiding and sinking at the same time. Who’s on the Ship? It was a conglomerate of groups with the same motivation. It was composed of a “foreign movie rental company”, a “video movie companies”, a “video game company” and a “film production company”. All of these companies were based in Vietnam. All these groups consisted of co-founders, financiers and employees.
123Movies goes down
And these were the first days. You could still watch movies but only few movies were available. Some genres were unavailable. 123Movies came back again a few months later, in 2013. That time they promised to go offline at midnight and come back at 3am to give more movies. It did not happen, again. 123Movies went down again on the second day. This was a bad day for the good people. But finally the site came back online. 123Movies went down again in 2014. The music streaming service But the app itself remained online until 2016. In 2016 it disappeared and was replaced by a new app named 123bpm. And later the company changed its name to be a music streaming service. The new app had some big names as partners. They are even delivering a ton of content. It was a Spotify-like service.
Conclusion
On the other hand, on the Internet, you can find there are certain people that will say that it will never happen. There will be thousands of top film piracy websites in the world. That it won’t happen. They are the ones that would say that. However, the point here is that a number of incidents of illegal sites being blocked by government authorities have happened already. Today, it is happening in a bigger scale. The websites are blocked by various government authorities from a wide range of geographic areas around the world. This fact should give a reason to the film companies to look into securing a legal method of getting their content online. You can see full detail of 123movies on Pak24tv.