> Also I don't buy your premise that illegal video streaming only make money on ads. I'm under the impression they also sell access to a lot of viewer's machines to companies that want to crawl the web and appear to come from lots of residential ISP nodes.

How would they do this from your web browser? If we're talking about TV apps, many piracy ones are FOSS while legal companies turn your TV into a residential proxy.

It's a highly competitive space: https://fmhy.net/video#stream-aggregators