The Motion Picture Association (MPA) has officially claimed credit for the high-profile closures of several massive pirate streaming platforms, including the dominant movie site Cineby and the Spanish-language anime giant AnimeFLV, in its latest global anti-piracy submission to the United States government.
The disclosures were made public as part of the Hollywood trade group’s annual overview of notorious foreign piracy markets, which is submitted to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR). In the comprehensive filing, the MPA looks back at major enforcement victories achieved over the past year while outlining the persistent and evolving threats still facing the global entertainment industry.
For months, the sudden disappearance of platforms like Cineby and AnimeFLV had been shrouded in mystery. Cineby, which pulled in an astonishing 160 million visits last July alone, stood as one of the most heavily trafficked unauthorized streaming websites on the entire internet before its operators announced a surprise shutdown in August. The site was gradually taken offline in stages over a period of more than a week, with its final domains going dark by early September.
Initially, the platform’s administrators offered no explicit explanation for their decision to pull the plug. In a later farewell statement, however, they pointed to structural instability, noting that their two primary video-sourcing providers—identified as the "Sflix group" and the "1Movies group"—had suffered catastrophic outages about three months prior, leaving Cineby unable to ever fully recover. Because no prominent anti-piracy organization stepped forward to claim responsibility at the time, industry observers were left wondering whether internal pressures or technical failures caused the collapse.
That narrative has now changed with the MPA’s latest U.S. Trade Representative submission. In the document, the Hollywood coalition highlights the demise of Cineby, alongside its associated embedding service Videasy, as a direct result of coordinated international pressure.
According to the MPA, the closure of Cineby.app and Videasy.net followed targeted actions spearheaded by the MPA and its sister organization, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE). The filing notes that the takedown was the result of an "extensive investigation and multi-region enforcement effort." Following these private enforcement measures, the primary cineby.at domain has been rendered entirely nonfunctional, and Videasy has ceased operations. A related service, Vidking, is still technically accessible, but the MPA points out that it currently operates with no connected source servers.
Although the MPA’s filing does not explicitly name a specific court or police force involved in the Cineby takedown, it indicates that private anti-piracy enforcement played a central role. However, the document draws a clear link to a separate, massive international criminal crackdown in Vietnam. The MPA credits Vietnamese law enforcement with dismantling the HiAnime piracy network—a sprawling illicit operation that the MPA states also encompassed the Sflix and MyFlixer platforms, alongside backend video hosts Megacloud and Vidcloud. Seven suspected operators of that Vietnamese ring were formally charged in July. This law enforcement action directly aligns with Cineby’s earlier statements regarding the collapse of the Sflix group, implying that Cineby’s infrastructure heavily relied on the dismantled Vietnamese syndicate.
Despite the demise of the original Cineby platform, the MPA’s report cautions that the brand has not vanished entirely. Unaffiliated copycats have predictably emerged to capture residual traffic, with the MPA specifically citing cineby.vg in its official filing as an ongoing concern.
Cineby is not the only unexplained shutdown that the MPA is now officially counting as a major victory. The Hollywood group’s submission also addresses the sudden disappearance of AnimeFLV, a massive Spanish-language anime portal that previously commanded more than a billion annual visits.
Back in June, industry reports noted that AnimeFLV had abruptly stopped serving video content. At the time, the site’s operators maintained absolute silence, and no enforcement organization claimed responsibility. Today, the core AnimeFLV domain fails to load any media, instead returning an HTTP 502 server error. Like its movie-streaming counterparts, the vacuum left by the original site has quickly been filled by various copycat domains attempting to leverage the established brand name.
In its filing, the MPA emphasizes that the shutdown of the AnimeFLV family of sites represents a significant strategic success for rights holders, directly resulting from coordinated actions taken by the MPA and ACE.
Even as the MPA celebrates these high-profile victories, the broader scope of its submission underscores a sobering reality: the global piracy ecosystem continues to adapt, fragment, and expand much like a hydra. The trade group highlights dozens of ongoing threats, providing a detailed breakdown of how unauthorized distribution networks have shifted their operational models.
While platforms like Myflixerz, Sflix, and HiAnime occupied top priority slots in previous reports, this year’s filing designates Kisskh as a primary linking and streaming target. Specializing in a mix of Asian dramas and Western Hollywood content, Kisskh drew more than 70 million visits on a single domain in August alone, with the vast majority of its audience originating from India. Meanwhile, older platforms like Cuevana have shifted to the group’s regular monitoring list.
A central focus of the MPA’s ongoing concern is the proliferation of "hydra sites," a category of pirate portals that depend heavily on third-party Piracy-as-a-Service (PaaS) infrastructure to host and deliver video content. This includes live sports PaaS networks such as Streamed, which supplies video streams to a vast network of derivative sites. According to the MPA’s data, roughly 30 individual websites utilizing the Streamed PaaS network accumulated a staggering 463 million visits in July, marking a dramatic surge from 134 million visits during the same period a year prior.
New hydra-style threats highlighted in the latest report include portals such as 1Shows, 1Flex, CineHD, VidBox, and StreamEX. On the infrastructure side, while prominent PaaS providers like Videasy and MegaCloud have been neutralized, new entities have quickly stepped in to fill the void. The MPA notes that a service named VidFast is currently utilized by at least 158 distinct pirate websites, which collectively generate approximately 629 million monthly visits.
In the realm of direct-download cyberlockers and video hosting services, messaging and communication platforms have taken center stage. Telegram now occupies the top priority slot in this category, surpassing traditional hosting platforms. The MPA expresses acute frustration over Telegram’s handling of copyright infringement notices, noting that the platform’s response times vary wildly from swift action to weeks of complete inaction, making it an immediate concern for content creators.
The hosting provider landscape is also shifting. The MPA’s filing provides fresh investigative details regarding Netulu, a hosting entity that was incorporated in Delaware in April. According to the trade group, around the time of its incorporation, numerous pirate websites previously hosted by Private Layer were abruptly transferred to Netulu. U.S.-based investigators are reportedly actively following leads related to this corporate migration.
Pirate applications distributed through mobile marketplaces continue to pose a massive distribution challenge. The notorious mobile app MovieBox is prominently featured in the MPA’s filing once again, with the group citing more than 243 million downloads originating from a single distributor, the Palm Store. Industry observations indicate that the actual download counter has since surged past 300 million.
The USTR will spend the coming months reviewing the MPA’s extensive submission alongside commentary and data provided by other industry stakeholders. The federal agency’s official annual list of notorious markets is expected to be published early next year.
Leave a Reply