The rise and fall of a Halifax man's illegal TV streaming empire

March 19, 2024

Founder of now-defunct Beast TV ordered to pay millions to powerful entertainment giants.

It was intended as words of wisdom, but it oozed cockiness, as Activeits plotted his path to fortune on an internet forum popular with spammers.

The boast was right there in the title of the thread: "How i made 1k a day or more."

Typing under the fictitious name, he detailed his involvement with "a thing called IPTV" and how he'd built an unauthorized online television streaming service, one that illegally rebroadcast channels to subscribers at cheap rates.

"There is a TON of money to be made in IPTV and i'm just getting started!" Activeits wrote on March 14, 2018, later dismissing concerns he would get sued or sent to jail. "Everything i do, i do carefully." 

These weren't the embellishments of a blowhard. Activeits was making a ton of money, and he would make a ton more. But he was wrong in one crucial respect. He wasn't careful enough.

Last fall, Activeits, also known as Tyler White — who lives on Old Sambro Road on the outskirts of Halifax — was ordered to pay $7.1 million in penalties to some of the largest entertainment companies in the world for his role in a streaming service called Beast TV.

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