Piracy is a nuisance, no doubt about it. And it remains a hassle — searching for torrents, putting them on download, and mindless waiting. In Ethiopia, though, you can cut to the chase and just get pirated content from the mall instead.
According to a recent report by Torrent Freak, a few kiosks have begun popping up across a mall chain in Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia, which let anyone download a movie of their choice straight to a USB drive.
Maintained by a company called Escape Computing, these ‘Swift Media’ kiosks are designed to look like bright yellow ATMs, positioned at various branches of the All Mart chain, a source told Torrent Freak.
“Basically you go to this very big store and you approach the machine and you plug in a USB drive. The screen will turn on and it will let you browse through a massive archive of pirated movies.”
All you have to do is walk up to the kiosk and plug in a USB drive. The service offers various packages for approximately $1, $2, and $4, allowing you to pick a certain number of movies for each price point.
And it’s not just old movies, the source indicates that some of the movies he saw available had just released in cinemas that very day. “Apparently the maintenance guy torrents all day and stores the data on his drive, the drive shown by the SwiftMedia monitor. This would not have been a big deal as this is Ethiopia and the allegedly democratic government has bigger issues,” he told TF.