Originally Posted by
Emporium
The M3U lists we had were definitely nice to have (and were around for a while). But like sat mentioned, they are dynamic and they change every few hours. These links are not "free" in the sense that you may think. The intention was for the streams to be used strictly by their client apps. They have all their own advertising in the client apps, and that is how they generate their revenue (nothing is free in this world). Using the direct links, bypasses all the advertisement (and all their revenue stream), since they do not inject advertising directly into the m3u8/hls stream.
Yes, Pluto has an API, which you can easily pull the channels and epg (for now). For those that are handy, they can easily create a script to do it, and there are even some docker containers which can handle it already (even some basic php pages exist). But like sat mentioned, having the list is only one part of the equation. Regularly injecting this "dynamic" link into the panel, is a completely different challenge.
If you do a little "googling" you can easily find at least 2 other sources for these dynamically generated lists. How long they will be around for (considering their location is now more front and center after this takedown), is anyone's guess.
The 2 or 3 pluto streams I personally watch, have not changed in a while. And since they are just 24/7 style channels, I don't really care about the epg for them anyhow. I just appended it to my own m3u list and it's on a private pastebin m3u file and I just use that link to watch them. 1 of those channels also seems to be the same stream running on the "redbox tv" category anyhow :)
When/if they are back, they are back I guess. In the meantime there are options anyhow :)
Thanks