The Android app known as “Evil King Media” (EKM) has declared that all development ceases, and the project enters an unsupported state immediately. The app was basically a central hub for pirate IPTV streaming access through which users could easily browse and access on-demand content, TV channels, music, cartoons, live sport streams, and more.
There was no cost for accessing the service, so the operator wasn’t making money directly from this illegal operation. This made the app popular in the pirating community, as there is always a big audience for free stuff.
The first clouds accumulated above the service late last month when an anti-piracy agency working on behalf of broadcaster Sky filed a DMCA complaint on Github. This resulted in the removal of the “Evil King Media” APK from the popular software hosting platform, but that wasn’t the end.
Those interested in sourcing EKM could still do it via the project’s official website, but this only lasted for a very brief period. In a couple of days following the Github removal, the EKM operator made it clear that the app will not be updated anymore and even urged everyone to uninstall it.
This pattern of action would be consistent with a possible direct nuisance from Sky to the EKM developer, leaving him/her no margin to play around. Indeed, TorrentFreak reports that Sky sent a complaint on Google regarding the “EvilKingMedia.com” domain. Google has delisted 96.6% of the reported subdomains from its Search results, so EKM’s official web portals were getting buried anyway.
Considering the recent declarations from the operator, we can now predict two possible outcomes for EKM. One would be to see it pop up elsewhere under a different name, and the other would be never to see it online again.
At the time of writing this, the “evilkingmedia.com” website remains online with all piracy guiding content still available, but the download links aren’t working as expected (we didn’t try them all, though). As for the state of its functionality, we wouldn’t know about it, as we won’t test pirating software, but from what users report by commenting on the blog posts, it looks like most of the streaming links aren’t working anymore.
So, could it be that the site’s admin account was taken over by hackers? That’s always a possibility since there are mixed messages on the site. At this point, we can’t draw safe conclusions about what’s really going on.