At the end of June 2020, a series of major pirate movie websites in Vietnam such as phimmoi, dongphim, HDonline, Phimbathu… were unexpectedly blocked in Vietnam through technical measures from ISPs. According to information from regulatory authorities, these websites are on the list of 83 sites “showing signs of copyright infringement on television program content.”
Since that time, users in Vietnam have been unable to access the aforementioned sites. Although the owners of these websites have continuously tried to evade authorities by changing their domains, the traffic to some of these movie streaming websites has still significantly decreased.
Most recently, several other pirate movie websites in Vietnam have also had their domains blocked, including Vkool – a relatively ‘familiar’ pirate movie website to many internet users in Vietnam.
A series of pirate movie websites such as phimmoi, phimbathu, and most recently Vkool have all had their domains blocked by ISPs at the request of regulatory authorities (screenshot).
Specifically, when accessing this site’s domain, users only receive a message in English stating “This site cannot be found.” However, when using VPN tools to access the internet, users can still enter the site and watch movies normally. According to reports, users of Viettel, FPT, and VNPT networks have been unable to access the domain of the Vkool site since July 19.
According to Tran Tuan Hung, an IT expert in Hanoi, traffic to Vkool is not actually large compared to some other pirate movie websites like phimmoi or phimbathu. Statistics from Similarweb show that Vkool has an average monthly traffic of about 1.09 million visits. In some peak months, traffic can reach around 1.3 million visits.
However, this is also an established pirate movie website in Vietnam that has been around for nearly a decade. Specifically, the domain of this site has been registered since 2008. At that time, Vkool mainly operated as a general entertainment website. However, since 2012, when a series of pirate movie websites began to flourish in Vietnam, Vkool also started to upload unlicensed movies to the site.
Similar to most other pirate movie websites, Vkool often uses servers from Google, Facebook, or Openload to host and stream unlicensed movies. This website also places advertisements such as banners and inserts TVC ads in each movie to illegally profit from unlicensed content.
The content on Vkool is mostly pirate movies. Many films recently released in theaters are also uploaded to the site in ‘cam’ versions (screenshot).
According to many technology experts, due to their easy construction and immense profit potential, pirate movie websites are becoming direct competitors to domestic OTT platforms. Meanwhile, a significant portion of Vietnamese people still do not have the habit of paying to watch movies or listen to music online, inadvertently aiding pirate movie websites to thrive. From the perspective of regulatory authorities, dealing with these pirate movie websites also faces many difficulties, as the owners of these sites continuously change to new domains after the old ones are blocked.