HeheStreams allowed users to watch sports live and on-demand from any device, at any time. It started as a joke in February 2016 and ended with a civil settlement in July 2021. In October 2021, the U.S. Government charged me in connection with it—and for my piss-poor handling of disclosing bugs to a sports league.

I'll primarily focus on the website here.

Why'd you do it?

It started as a proof of concept. My beloved BallStreams—a website for watching NBA games—pulled the rug on me and fellow fans, and NBA fans like myself were left SOL. I posted the proof of concept on Reddit, hoping someone else would pick up the slack. Nobody did.

It soon started taking up a lot of my time. I felt an obligation to fix the site when grown men told me my shitty basketball streaming website wasn't working for them.
Eventually, I slapped a paywall on it, thinking it was ludicrous that anyone would pay for such a thing.

Oops.

It was weird to reach product-market fit. While it was, indeed, a subscription website, the motivation for starting and maintaining it wasn't financial. I was employed as a respectable software engineer for the entirety of the website's existence. It was a mix of passion project and an escape—a home I built for myself.

What was the main attraction of using your site?

Many Americans are subject to blackouts: geographical restrictions that disallow users from watching their local team(s), or nationally televised broadcasts. This effectively forces them to buy a cable package to see their local teams.

Allowing users to bypass those blackouts was the primary driver. To this day I don't believe my users were more attracted to the price.

I took a lot of pride in being honest and forthcoming and establishing trust with my users. This is hard to scale to millions of users. I didn't have that problem though.

Why the name?

It was meant to be a joke.

How much did you make?

Less than my $3M restitution.

No, really, how much did you make?

Above.

How many customers did you have?

More than one, and they were from all walks of life. Did you know that professional athletes have the same issues as people who work at Discount Tire?

This includes LeBron and Tom Brady.

How many people officially worked with you?

It was just me. I had some people make the cute graphics on the homepage and paid $60 for a stinger on the Roku app.

Speaking of Roku—BrightScript is a clinically awful programming language, and I wish it on nobody.

How did the site work?

TorrentFreak has the most accurate representation of how it worked, so I'll defer to them for the lite technical details. However, it involved me reverse-engineering DRM authentications and private APIs to provide the streams directly from the source. I didn't have a single server encoding anything.

Broad strokes of the stack: It was an uninspired Rails-based monolith with server-side rendering, and one feature that used React. There were 227 tables, running the typical PostgreSQL/Redis setup.

Along the way, I pulled out some of the internals and open-sourced them. One of them exists today as the most popular open-source package of its kind for managing scheduled event sequences: Caffeinate. I used it to handle lifecycle emails to my customers: welcome, getting started, you-haven't-watched-anything-yet, etc.

I used Grape for managing the API endpoints. I can't remember why I did this. I do enjoy using Grape, though.

Many of the programming patterns I used are discussed in my upcoming Ruby on Rails book Caboose on the Loose.

Can you talk more about how the website worked?

I can, but I won't.

How many apps did you support?

If it had a networking stack and a display, it was probably supported: Apple TV, Android, FireOS, Chromecast, fourth-generation game consoles and newer, Roku (BrightScript is an awful language), smart TVs, smart fridges, Teslas, and the usual web platforms.

Wow, this was a lot of work. Were you employed during this time?

Shoutout to my colleagues watching me burn myself out at UseSixty, AdQuick, and AngelList. Many of my fellow developers knew about HeheStreams, and one happened to be a subscriber prior to my employment.

Do you have any fun stories?

Someone once asked for the manager, claiming that I didn't have the "capacity to work with people who had mental illnesses." That was a wild, wild email.

It was always weird to see who was using the site. I had a lot of internal tracking for abuse, which included associating IP addresses to users. I could see which groups of users (see above mentions of athletes) were at which hotels in different cities. Absolutely batshit to see in practice, all things considered.

I was once bringing a TV back from Best Buy in an Uber because it wouldn't fit in my car. On the way back, the driver asked if I watched sports. I chuckled and said, "Sometimes." He asked how I watched them, and I said I had to deal with shitty streams on the internet (see: mine). He suggested my website. I had him send me his referral link and gave him a little "congrats you won a free subscription for life."

(I guess that means I should say I had more than three users.)

How do you feel about the state of streaming these days?

Intentionally leaving this blank, while saying as much as I can by not omitting it entirely.

Do you currently do any other shady shit?

I eat a lot of ice cream, which probably isn't healthy for me. So, no.

How many commits did you make to the repo?

Round up to 6,900. I'm a child.

Any other cool parts?

I eventually built a CDN with 100Gbps throughput for fun, using Ceph and Nginx. I plugged it in for a day just to watch it come to life. Lots of interesting problems there.

Scaling illegally (and elegantly)

I didn't make an effort to hide my tracks. Cloudflare was merely convenient way to hide the origin IP. My server was located in The Netherlands because I thought it mattered when I propped up my MVP. I only received a handful of DMCAs and those were in the early years.

Product–market fit (by accident)

It's weird to see product-market fit with your janky side-project of a piracy website. I mean, I'd hardly consider it janky—people asked if it was legal occasionally, and I'd have to break it to them that, no, no sports league is going to license their content to a website called HeheStreams.

What ultimately did you learn from it?

Well, HeheStreams wasn't supposed to work. It was a joke that outgrew its punchline—a proof of concept that turned into a case study in scale, ethics, and curiosity. The site is gone, but the business and product lessons keep refactoring themselves.

Anything else?

I had a civil settlement reached in July 2021 with rightsholders. This resulted in me shutting down the website. It was three months later that I got tagged by the feds.