LAS VEGAS (AP/FOX5/CNN) — Two Las Vegas computer programmers have pleaded guilty in federal court in Virginia to charges stemming from illegal video streaming operations.
Federal prosecutors say 36-year-old Darryl Julius Polo, aka "djppimp," pleaded guilty Thursday to copyright infringement and money laundering charges while 40-year-old Luis Angel Villarino pleaded guilty Friday to conspiracy to commit copyright infringement.
The Justice Department said the Jetflicks and iSttreamItAll (ISIA) streaming operations involved subscription services that pirated entertainment and deprived copyright holders of millions of dollars.
According to a Justice Department statement, Polo admitted that one of the sites had about nearly 120,000 television episodes and nearly 11,000 movies and got the content from pirate sites through searches conducted around the clock.
"In fact, according to the plea agreement, ISIA had more content than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Amazon Prime, and Polo sent out emails to potential subscribers highlighting ISIA’s huge catalog of works and urging them to cancel those licensed services and subscribe to ISIA instead," the release said.
Jetflicks was operated out of Las Vegas and was subscription based.
Both iStreamItAll and Jetflicks had tens of thousands of paid subscribers and were designed to work on many different devices and platforms, "including myriad varieties of computer operating systems, smartphones, tablets, smart televisions, video game consoles, digital media players, set-top boxes and web browsers," the DOJ said, citing the two plea agreements.
Additional defendants in the case resulting from an FBI investigation are scheduled to go to trial in February.
Polo and Villarino are expected to be sentenced in March. Polo told FOX5 he did not want to talk until the other defendants in the case go to trial.