Xôi Lạc TV — When Technical Talent Sells Its Soul for Money, and the Bitter Ending After 10 Years

OK so this post starts from a piece of news that pretty much everyone already knows. On March 5, 2026, Xôi Lạc TV was taken down. 38 suspects were arrested, 30 of whom were charged with copyright infringement, organizing gambling, gambling, and distributing obscene materials. Total assets seized and frozen exceeded 300 billion VND, with operations scaling up to nearly 1,000 billion VND. Nearly 20 well-known commentators with nicknames like “Người Dơi,” “Batman,” and “Người Rơm” were all arrested.

When I read this news, I felt something strange. Not happy, not sad. Just… regret. Genuine regret.

The Moment That Made Me Stop

In the arrest footage, when the police entered Xôi Lạc TV’s meeting room, the camera panned across a whiteboard on the wall. I suddenly froze for a moment.

Written clearly on the board by hand: “4 main pillars of the product.”

I’m just a junior fresh out of school — I read what was on that board and didn’t fully understand everything. Things like crash, null pointer, state management, async, lifecycle, trim space, display logic. All terms I’d heard in school, seen during my internship, but hadn’t deeply grasped yet.

But I knew one thing. That board wasn’t the scribbles of some kids running an illegal football stream. The way they wrote on that board — systematic, analytical, asking questions then digging deeper layer by layer — it looked exactly like the sprint reviews I saw during my internship. That level of work was beyond what I’d reached.

Honestly, looking at that board, I felt both admiration and pain. Admiration because clearly this technical team was no joke. Pain because it was all inside the meeting room of a criminal operation.

Xôi Lạc TV Was Not Just an Ordinary Football Streaming Site

Look at what the investigators seized: 20 laptops, 35 high-spec desktop computers, 3 tablets, 64 smartphones, 4 professional livestream equipment sets. The organization was divided into separate teams — scriptwriting, commentary, content aggregation, finance, logistics. Staff were all bachelor’s or master’s degree holders. Recruitment was independent — each team only knew its own tasks.

Sound familiar? This wasn’t some kids restreaming football from their dorm room. This was the structure of a real tech company, with access controls, internal information security using a cell structure, and professional operational processes.

According to VnExpress, the group operated under the cover of media companies, software firms, and even labor export businesses. Domains were registered through GoDaddy, servers hosted in the US. They frequently changed servers and operating locations. It took the A05 cybercrime unit a long time of surveillance to identify the ringleaders.

And the best part? They even built their own app to bypass blocking systems from Vietnamese ISPs. Built their own app. Not something just anyone can pull off.

Colonel Nguyễn Huy Lục assessed the system’s personnel as “highly capable and proficient in information technology.” All young staff, all with bachelor’s or master’s degrees. Recruitment was independent — individuals didn’t know each other, each team only knew its own tasks.

Sound familiar? This is microservice architecture applied to… a human organization.

Let’s Do the Math — How Much Would Legal Football Livestreaming Cost?

This is the part I really wanted to dig into. As a homelab enthusiast, I always wonder: if a normal, legitimate business wanted to build a streaming platform at the same scale, how much would it cost?

Bandwidth — The Most Expensive Part

I’ll use conservative numbers: 500,000 concurrent viewers for a hot Premier League match. Streaming at 1080p with a bitrate of 4–8 Mbps (according to YouTube Live encoder settings, 1080p falls in the 4.5–9 Mbps range; I’ll use 8 Mbps as a high-end figure for sports streaming).

Data transmitted per hour: 500,000 × 8 Mbps × 3,600 seconds = 1.8 petabytes. CDN costs vary by volume — according to AWS CloudFront pricing, first-tier US/Europe is $0.085/GB, scaling down to $0.02/GB at the petabyte level. Using an average of $0.05/GB, that comes to roughly $90,000 per hour. In Vietnamese dong, that’s about 2.2 billion VND. A 2-hour match costs about 4.4 billion VND in bandwidth alone.

According to Viewcast, with 1 million concurrent viewers, the total cost (CDN + transcoding + origin + infrastructure) reaches $200,000/hour, roughly 5 billion VND. And live streaming has much lower cache advantage compared to video on demand, since each segment only lives briefly before being replaced. Costs scale almost linearly with the number of viewers.

Infrastructure — No Joke

To run a streaming system at this scale, you need:

Estimated total fixed infrastructure: roughly $70,000 to $563,000 per month. Not including actual bandwidth costs.

Technical Staff

You’d need at minimum 2–3 DevOps/SRE engineers for 24/7 operations, 1–2 Video Engineers for the encoding pipeline, 2–3 Backend Engineers, 1–2 Frontend Engineers, 1 Security Engineer, and 1 Network Engineer. Around 10–12 engineers total. In Vietnam, with this level of expertise, staffing alone would cost 500 million to 1 billion VND per month.

And the Most Important Thing — Licensing

This is exactly what Xôi Lạc TV completely skipped. Broadcasting rights for the Premier League, La Liga, Champions League — each tournament costs millions to tens of millions of USD per season. FPT Telecom alone pays a fixed fee of 26 million USD per year for exclusive Premier League broadcasting rights in Vietnam — a total of 110 million USD (approximately 2,900 billion VND) for 5.5 seasons.

And Xôi Lạc TV? They captured OTT or satellite signals and restreamed them. Licensing cost: zero. That’s why profits reached hundreds of billions of VND. When you skip the biggest cost, obviously the margins are sky-high.

A Homelab Perspective: Could You Build This Yourself?

As someone who runs a homelab, I can’t help but be curious. How far could homelab-grade hardware actually take you?

A homelab with a 3-node Proxmox cluster, each node with 32GB RAM, a Xeon E-2288G, ZFS mirror with 4TB storage, and a 1Gbps uplink, could stably handle about 100 to 150 concurrent viewers at 720p. In theory, 200 viewers is possible, but at that point your 1Gbps uplink is 100% saturated — no headroom left for TCP overhead or anything else.

For the stack, you’d use Nginx-RTMP (14k stars on GitHub) or SRS (28.6k stars, supporting RTMP/WebRTC/HLS/SRT) to receive and distribute streams, FFmpeg for real-time transcoding, output HLS/DASH for adaptive bitrate, Caddy or Nginx as a reverse proxy in front, and Tailscale or WireGuard if you want to connect multiple nodes.

All open-source and free. The real bottleneck is bandwidth. 200 viewers × 5 Mbps = exactly 1 Gbps. Done. That’s your entire uplink.

To scale up to enterprise level, you’d have to use CDN, deploy multi-region, use Anycast networking to route users to the nearest server. And at that point, it’s no longer a homelab. It’s real enterprise infrastructure costing tens to hundreds of thousands of USD per month.

I’ll be honest — the gap between homelab and enterprise is enormous. But who knows, maybe if I keep learning and pushing forward, someday…

“Your world is like a blank page
Each day you try, you paint a picture”
(Vietnamese poetry quote from the original)

They also had a blank page. They also painted. But their picture was ultimately torn apart by their own hands.

Technical & Cost References:

• AWS CloudFront Pricing — first-tier US/Europe $0.085/GB, decreasing with volume
• AWS Shield Advanced Pricing — $3,000/month + data transfer
• Viewcast: The $200,000 Hour — cost analysis of livestreaming for 1M viewers
• Meta Engineering: Scaling Live Streaming — how Meta handles large-scale live streaming
• YouTube Live Encoder Settings — recommended bitrates for each quality level
• Nginx-RTMP Module — 14k stars, NGINX-based streaming server
• SRS (Simple Realtime Server) — 28.6k stars, supports RTMP/WebRTC/HLS/SRT/DASH
• FFmpeg — open-source transcoding
• FPT Telecom pays 26 million USD/year for Premier League broadcasting rights