“I remember thinking that they were a hero,” she said. “That was my first bootleg moment.”

A few years later, her parents moved the family to Parlin, N.J., and Ms. Beshara graduated from Sayreville War Memorial High School as valedictorian. She enrolled in New York University and, in 2003, graduated with a degree in political science. Her future looked bright: She dreamed about a career as a diplomat, or as an important political figure, perhaps.

But after college, she returned home and drifted. She worked as a bartender and then as a receptionist in a dentist’s office, a job that one of her mother’s friends arranged as a favor. “I was figuring out what I wanted to do with myself,” she said.

One night, while driving, she was pulled over. The police officer found marijuana in her car, and she was charged with possession and later put on probation for a year. The ordeal sent her into depression. “I felt like I was a step behind everyone,” Ms. Beshara said.

The Internet became her escape.

Ms. Beshara spent hours bingeing on shows like the science-fiction drama “Battlestar Galactica” and eventually frequented chat rooms where people uploaded shows and movies. Eventually, she started doing the same.

During this period, she met Matthew Smith, then 21 and living in North Carolina. The two decided to build a different kind of streaming site, one with high-quality files and with chat forums interlaced with the content. Ms. Beshara would manage and moderate the forums; Mr. Smith would handle the technical back end. NinjaVideo went up on February 2008. Within the first couple of weeks, there were a few thousand videos on the site, largely from volunteers. “It started to blow up very, very quickly,” Ms. Beshara said.

Josh Evans, one of NinjaVideo’s administrators, hired in December 2009, said that working on the site was one of the “funnest times of my life.” He lived outside Seattle and remembers traveling to New York and Greece to meet Ms. Beshara and the other NinjaVideo administrators; the gang even exchanged gifts around Christmas.

“We were all a bit intoxicated with each other,” Ms. Beshara said.

By day, Ms. Beshara went through the motions of her job. After work, she made a beeline for her computer, where she sometimes stayed until dawn. She logged into NinjaVideo and Skype, where she and the other moderators coordinated the shows going online that evening. They waited for their network of uploaders, who used special software to tape shows directly from television and upload them to a cyberlocker, or hosting site. From there, shows and movies would be posted on NinjaVideo.