Playing with friends TV boxes, they seem to have installed multiple apps which offer live-streamed worldwide TV (including commercial and premium channels, not just free to air). They also have apps that give access to seemingly massive video on demand libraries, streaming a wide range of TV and films. Most content seems to have multiple sources available as well.

It seems to be free to install the apps, free to use and I can't see any advertising. How are they making money?

If they're not making money, how the heck do they afford to host the service?

I can see it being relatively easy to make & host an Android app that lets you pick from a database of streams/playlists, but someone, somewhere has to be hosting the media content. The live-streaming alone would (I assume) require a vast amount of tuners or capture cards to get the content, an amount of processing to re-encode it all, some level of CDN or proxies to support large numbers of simultaneous viewers and a large amount of bandwidth as well. The video on demand doesn't have the capture problem, but it swaps it for massive storage requirements.

The ongoing costs must be massive. Even self-hosted, you're burning large amounts of electric and bandwidth, and no doubt ongoing engineering time.

I'm very naive, but I don't understand the motivation or the finances that cause these apps to exist in the first place. I (and others on HN) have certainly been guilty of building silly things and keeping them running only for the heck of it, but the ongoing costs make me think it must be something bigger than a few people doing it "for the lols".

Can someone please tell me what I'm missing?