HeheStreams

HeheStreams started as a proof of concept I posted on Reddit after BallStreams—a beloved NBA streaming site that I used myself to watch NBA games—vanished overnight. This is back in 2016 when you’d be lucky to find a 480p stream. Eventually I made an example about how to use official streams, but nobody picked up the reigns so I kept working on it. It started as an example, then a free site with the intention of not doing anything after the season ended.

Well.

Eventually I slapped a paywall on it, thinking it was ludicrous that anyone would pay for such a thing. And guess what? People paid for such a thing.

The infrastructure was a bit different; it wasn’t your prototypical streaming site. I wasn’t capturing broadcasts and rehosting them—no, that’d be too much work. Instead, users connected to the leagues’ own streams—their infrastructure—something they call “CDN leeching” these days. The streams were as reliable as the official ones because they were the official ones, at a cost of me playing cat and mouse 24/7. The main draw was bypassing geoblocking that you couldn’t otherwise buy your way out of legally.

I made the site for me so I could watch sports. I just had some other people watching with me.

While operating the site, I said no to a lot of things. UFC/MMA/boxing I turned down because their business models revolve around PPV. NCAA sports I refused outright—NIL didn’t exist, and I wasn’t going to profit off children. Feature parity mattered. If I couldn’t make it as good as the other sports’ implementations, I didn’t add it. And, I mean, I have morals—still do—just… skewed.

In July 2021, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment came knocking. Civil settlement. Site goes dark. Then the U.S. Government decided they weren’t done. I was sentenced to three years in federal prison. That story has its own site.