To all the AZ'ers who posted here - thank you for your support, defense, and kind words.
To Dakaratestar - your handle, avatar, and writings have been burned into my memory.
When people do things to potentially hurt Accu-Stats, I take it VERY personally and I have a long memory.
Some streamers understandably ask for donations. As of now, we do not.
We feel that your purchasing of our products are "donation" enough.
It is tremendously expensive, monetarily, psychologically and motivationally for great billiard streams to be brought to you. It is NOT as easy as people like TAR, Bigtruck, AZ Billiards, Lenny, MI_Billiards, and BigDog (and even us) make it seem. Things that hurt even one of us - hurt ALL of us - including you the viewer.
But this thread does pose a need to explain a little about how the PPV system really works.
1. When a customer purchases a Pay-Per-View event he is buying the right to watch that event for a certain amount of time.
2. The PPV system is set up to allow only ONE viewer to be logged onto that stream at one time. So if I give you my username and password and you log in as me, I get kicked off. It's just that simple. Even those that feel the need to be sneaky and pass around the URL of the stream (as I saw done last week with the TAR stream), the result would be the same. One user accesses the stream, the other gets kicked off.
3. Could I employ stronger security measures, sure, but as of now the customers that I've met, especially the AZ'ers, have all been honest and aboveboard. But WOULD I change the system if I found abuse, yes, in a heartbeat.
4. Am I nieve enough to believe that customers do not ever "share" their usernames and passwords? NO, because I would do it myself (maybe).
What if I paid for the whole week and had to go out, go to dinner, work, show this "great stream" to a friend, whatever. Would I give my username and password to my son, to a friend? Why not, I paid for it! Legal? Sure - I paid for it. Ethical? Sure - I paid for it.
So in conclusion, what is the harm in sharing?
As long as the "sharer" understands that it could just might happen that if he gives the keys away - somebody might just change the locks on him.
Thanks again to all of you for your support and loyalty and the nice words said in this thread. It is comforting to know that all of you are "Watching the Skies".
Long windedly submitted,
Jim