30 november 2016
FMovies
There are only a few websites that choose to infringe on copyrights on a massive scale and give them away for free, and pay attention to their front-end UI. MovieTV was one of them, but it is neither free nor open to signups any more. Only if you were a paying customer has your account information been retained.
The person behind MovieTV is on the lookout for movies and TV series available in the very highest quality (1080p) on torrents and Usenet, and hosts them illegaly on their server. The website makes money by charging users a monthly fee, and no fees have to be distributed to anyone other than this person. I bet this person invests all the money earned from MovieTV into index funds and individual stocks to protect it from inflation, so that in case the film industry and Uncle Sam come knocking, they can settle (and hopefully keep a portion of th earnings).
It's the principle of asking for forgiveness instead of asking for permission (because the latter is almost never given to prevent competition even at the cost of consumer satisfaction (the consumer will not like what they don't see). Look at Netflix. They had to fund their own TV series like House of Cards to save money by undercutting cable channels).
FMovies is one of the few alternatives left. It is quite noisy without ad blockers, but with them it is completely ad-free. It probably offers more than any other content provider, and it does that for free (donations are welcome, though, I think). They even have a companion website called 9Anime that offers a variety of anime in 1080p for free.
It's getting so popular, that Google has been forced to mark it as a phishing website (at least temporarily) to disincentivise people from seeking them out. I cannot fathom how they haven't been shut down yet (their domain name has not been revoked yet), but I bet they make a lot of money on mobile (which, for the most part, don't have ad-blockers (yet)).