Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?
416 points by jesuscript on Jan 5, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 621 comments
Given all the streaming services, cable and sling alternatives being roughly the same price, and just general prices of games/dlcs, Spotify/YouTube premium (the full page ads and frequency of them on YouTube is at a new level without premium).

I just feel like if we’re at peak monetization, I might as well go back to my old teenage ways.




I'm not going to speak about my personal practices, but I find the current landscape of streaming services unusable and unsustainable from a customer perspective. I share a Netflix and Prime account with my parents, and support for that is soon going to end. I don't feel like either of those services provide enough value to me to consider paying for them entirely by myself. The content is mediocre at best, finding anything good to watch is like going through a haystack, and once you find something remotely interesting you feel so exhausted that you'd rather turn off the tv and go to bed.

Don't even get me started on "there's this movie I heard about and I want to watch, but I need a subscription to this obscure random service and then also pay a rental fee on top to even get to watch it". It's just absurd.


My household has one streaming service at a time. We have lists (shared reminder lists in iOS) that we make for whenever a friend mentions a good movie - it goes on the Apple TV list, or Disney plus list, etc. then once enough films build up (can take 2-6 months sometimes) we purchase a subscription and watch all those shows for one month.


Considering how frecuently movies (and third party shows) disappear from one platform to appear in other that seems hellish.

It's easier to pirate stuff.


It's the fragmentation and lack of ease of use that does it. If I had a NAS and Jellyfin setup, I'd have a catalog of basically everything available to stream; I wouldn't have to look a dozen different places to see if anyone has it available; I'd not have to worry about the streaming rights switching to another service in the middle of a show I'm watching; I'd not have to search through a bunch of different services to find where exactly I purchased it; I wouldn't have to learn a bunch of different inconsistent crappy, buggy interfaces; previous purchases wouldn't mysteriously disappear.

Throw all that on top of not being forced to watch the same ad for Rings of Power the thousandth time in a row, a much broader library of content, a better library of subtitles, and no performance issues.

I'm happy to pay for things that deliver usable experiences. Concretely, I'd gladly pay $200/month for a good streaming service that avoids the pitfalls mentioned. But I'm not going to pay money to subject myself to abusive practices and terrible experiences.


My experience is that the learning curve for piracy has increased quite a bit. IIUC you need some private tracker to reliably source things, something that takes time and connections most people don't have.

Despite being strongly motivated to find and watch things that are inexplicably unavailable to me (especially new foreign cinema) I usually just wait, and then sign up for a trial of whatever service has it a year or more after I read the review.


> My experience is that the learning curve for piracy has increased quite a bit. IIUC you need some private tracker to reliably source things, something that takes time and connections most people don't have.

Only if you want rare and older stuff (and even then, only sometimes). Anything mainstream, a public tracker is more than enough.


Are content owner letters/lawsuits still a thing? Piracy was cool(tm) when I was a broke high school student, but now that I have assets worth being sued over (and now that if my ISP cut me off I couldn't just move to a different apartment at a moment's notice) I'll just pay for the Bluray or for a month of Hulu or whatever, it's far simpler.

I have a significant legitimate media library (>1TB), I have the Plex/Kodi infrastructure to stream it to my TV, but going one step further and mixing in piracy is a step I'm not willing to take.


Depends on your country. In Germany: Extremely. Probably a few seconds of uploading (of a movie or porn, don’t think they care much for other things) will get you a letter (edit: C&D + damages, courts see it as commercial distribution, so the letter blackmails you to pay 300-500 € instead). Or you can use a VPN.

As I said in another post, I like to pay when given the option and I don’t have to jump through tons of hoops.


Interesting. Here in Chile we can do almost everything with our Intenert connection.

I dont know now that we signed the TPP11 how things are going to change.


It's very Germany-specific, the whole "commercial distribution" bullshit is what enables the cottage industry of blackmail lawyers


you just need to pay a few dollars for a foreign seedbox that is expressly designed for this purpose

you can then just set the seedbox as a source in kodi, I can even add torrents while sitting on my couch on my phone with the mobile interface

I have shared accounts to a variety of streaming services that I pay for but I largely prefer using kodi as it's a much more pleasant experience


If you are in a lenient country you'll be fine with a public tracker, and it's easy to deploy sonarr and some torrent client to download things automatically.


I haven't torrented in forever. I usually just google "Watch XXXX online free" or check a few sites that I frequent that allow you to stream them.

It's (almost) as easy as looking something up on youtube.

Why would "normal" people muck about with torrent software? I think it's mostly the groups doing (and monetizing) the re-uploads that bother with torrents


I do the same thing as the parent commenter, I pay for service, but will move from one service to another based on content and what I've watched.

Funny that the proliferation of streaming services has just decreased the duration of my subscription to any one of them.


I said in another comment I pay for some services too, but if my online experience have taught me anything is that I can't trust them to be around, or be good forever.

I used House of the Dragon as an example, I watched it on HBO max but I also downloaded it and shared it online. One of my favorite shows (Future Man) is now on D+ but I am not going to delete it from my collection.

It all comes to: "I don't trust others with the data I care for"


It depends on the movie. Friends might drop from Netflix, but there’s a lot of content being made that’s wholly owned by the streaming service itself that will stick around forever. Especially with Disney.


HBO is removing many: https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/westworld-hbo-max-the-never...

Apparently to make them available on other ad supported networks: https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/23513277/westworld-hbo-...


Besides what other have said it's a matter of time netflix starts to delete cancelled series because they are a waste.


HBO is proving that to not necessarily be the case.


This in a few sentences summarizes everything that sucks about the current streaming landscape


It does, and it feels quite high effort to maintain. I'd rather simply disengage and find something else to do. The plus side of all this BS is it might force me back toward more interesting and worthwhile pasttimes than just bingewatching TV shows and films. From that point of view, I suppose, long may the suck multiplication continue.


I'd love a website I could enter my account info for these streaming sites and turn each one on, one month at a time, with a click of a button. This would attract the ire of streaming companies though.


This would be a fun idea. Especially if this was combined with your watchlist. The website could decide you have most stuff on your wishlist for service X, automatically cancel/subscribe, and send you an e-mail with a summary of what you can watch in the upcoming month.


This is what Plex has branched into, kinda, although there's no automatic subscription management since no service wants to give up control of cancellations and whatnot.


Realistically it’s already very easy to do this. Sure it’s not one click, but it takes all of 30 seconds.


The DoNotPay app does that. You can make a card for a specific account or trial and share account access through it too.


this sounds economical but also a major chore


Not at all. I do the same thing, and the key is to cancel the subscription immediately upon signing up. You keep the one month you've already paid for, and don't need to worry about recurring cost.


But that's literally (literally 'literally', not an annoying turn of phrase) a monthly 'chore' to sign up for (and cancel) the next one.


I recently forgot to cancel a one month free trial for a HTC Vive marketplace (yes, even they got some bullshit monthly sub going), and they locked me into a year long commitment.

I’ve turned very sour to these monthly renewals and accounts I can’t keep track of anymore.


To use a deeply HN metaphor, it's kind of like pulling in a 3rd party library into your source code. No matter how convenient it is at the moment, you have to account for the cost of the ongoing maintenance over time; sometimes you look at that and decide just to never pull the library in the first place.

Similarly, if I'm on the fence about some service, this is the tie breaker for me; the risk of forgetting to cancel it. Even though I do scan my bank account around once a month, I do naturally pay more attention to the bigger transactions and can easily skim past a $8.99 for a few months before noticing I accidentally left something on.

(Fortunately, where I am, it's just an annoyance. Affording individual subscriptions to all the things I may conceivably at some point want to use would be a noticeable kick in the pants, what with the proliferation of them, but accidentally leaving on one service is just an annoyance.)


I’m now using virtual disposable card for any subscription to a service I'm not sure to use more than one month. If I forget it that means I don't use it and the subscription will end itself.

If I somehow still need it after the first month, I usually get a email reminder or a message about payment processing failure and I can fix that with a non-disposable card.


what do you use for the disposable card?


It highly depends on your country, some banks offer that as a service (most do in France where I live) in EU a lot of online banks do too (Revolut, Lydia, N26, etc) I don't know in the US, I think privacy.com does but I have no recommendation.


I have a capital one credit card that allows unlimited virt cards that basically can only be used at one online merchant. I use this card exclusively for subscriptions, then pay it off every month.


I’ve used Privacy.com in the US. works great!


FYI you can usual cancel immediately after signing up and it'll keep working until the next bill is due


Doesn't have to be monthly - sometimes I have months at a time with no subscription running at all. Once one "fills up" or there is a specific show I want to watch _now_, I activate that service and immediately cancel it. I guess it is more of a chore than just leaving them all subscribed and having access whenever - but the savings are easily worth it to me.


Binging a few shows and then not watching anything for months is probably a healthier lifestyle, but I imagine most people with streaming subscriptions are too accustomed to watching something every day/week/certainly month for that - guilty myself, exhibit above: I just assumed 'sign up and cancel in any month you want to watch something' would mean every month!


I do the same thing. The only inconvenience is it adds an extra step when you want to watch something after your subscription runs out (resume the subscription and cancel). Google play and the app store make this super easy.


I hear, it’s doable and it works but very few people do it because it takes patience and care. Most of these services use dark patterns to lure users into not doing that. If a larger percentage of users did it streaming services would quickly change policies.


someone is making a rails app right now to enable this as a SAAS. Now you have two problems ..


Still sounds stressful and like a chore. I would feel "forced" to burn through as much of the backlog as possible during that month, even if I don't feel like watching something from it right now.


Related to what olex said, if you're "saving" over $100/month because you don't have 8 other subscriptions running, you can tell yourself quite reasonably you're already saving a lot of money and you don't need to squeeze the value out of a monthly subscription that's less than one fast food meal's worth of money.

The whole point is to enjoy the service; if you feel stressed because you feel forced to binge everything to get your "value", well, cancel that service too. It is apparently not bringing you that value. That will help you get over it pretty quickly.


May be. To me it's easily worth the hundreds of Euros in savings from not having running subscriptions to more than one service at a time. Oftentimes I have no running streaming subscriptions at all. I guess I watch a lot less than many people do.


Just automate the watching process too, and get ChatGPT to summarise the content. Even better if you can let it watch with you, give it feedback, and tune it over time so it can make a value call on shows and save you the effort - "yeah I watched that, so you don't have to, you'll hate it". (/s, but I imagine it won't be in a year or two or with a skilled coder).


I use virtual cards generated on privacy.com for streaming services. You can set the limit based on how many months you want to pay for, and not worry about forgetting to cancel.


Because I view them via an AppleTV, I subscribe to Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu, and AppleTV at various different times all through my iTunes account. It's easy to turn them on and off all through one account interface. The Account Settings page lists both Active and Expired accounts for all the services, along with next billing or expiration dates. It's just a few clicks.


Seems like it could be an opportunity for a website with all the news shows and movies on each platform. You check off the ones that seem interesting. It tells you what service to subscribe to after you hit a threshold. Not sure if any of the services have affiliate programs for revenue.


Justwatch provides a lot of that and I bet you could automate the rest


Auto-expiring temporary credit card numbers can help automate cancellations after N months, but figuring what shows are on what services and signing up for them as needed is still a major chore.


The problem with that is that legally, the contract to pay a provider, and the instruction to your credit-card company to pay a recurring amount, are two separate things. Some companies will send threatening letters, dept collectors etc after you if you just cancel the CC instruction.

It's different on the apple store, where Apple forced providers to agree that a subscription could be unilaterally cancelled via the store. Ideally we would pass a law so that credit cancellation also cancels a contract as long as the minimum period is over. Not holding my breath though.


> Some companies will send threatening letters, dept collectors etc after you if you just cancel the CC instruction.

What companies do this in practice. I think I’ve “ghosted” 300 companies and never had a single even send a threatening letter, much less do anything. Usually I get an email of “error processing your card, please fix or we turn off.”

I can’t imagine it is ever economical to pursue in courts over an $11.99/month contract.

The exception is gyms that do seem to go to ends of the earth to collect.


Zipcar tried to do it to me once. But it may depend on your jurisdiction as well.

I had a colleague who used to get monthly calls from a cable co. He was divorced from his wife, who had set up the cable contract, so they wouldn't let him cancel it but were still convinced that he was liable for the money because it was supplying his house.


This would be annoying for people whose credit card just happened to expire and who then have to deal with not having the service for a period, re-signing up, losing loyalty bonuses, etc.


Credit card expiry can have integrations where the merchant automatically gets the updated value


Do you have more details? I found that in my case the credit card provider has ways to continue paying for the subscription through the magic of recurring charges that is very difficult to stop (survives credit card cancelation/number changes).


Right, getting a new card number has nothing to do with the fact that it is the same account. The numbers point to the same account.


It seems the credit card providers would have an anti-incentive to provide this kind of consumer friendly functionality. Maybe Apple's card does? Any first-hand accounts?


Capital One's Eno service allows you to generate temporary credit card numbers with a custom expiration date.


The Playpilot app helps to get an overview over where (on what streaming services) a movie or show is available.


We use JustWatch[0]. It's good for keeping a "want to watch" list and also tells you which of your services has which films at any one time.

[0] https://www.justwatch.com/


I wish I had the discipline to manage things that way.


This implies there is something about """you""" that is inherently lacking rather than the habits currently in your brain and "more discipline" often means """if only I would castigate myself more"""


Market opportunity!

A meta streaming service that dispatches you towars the service that has the show you want to watch. Of course it needs to work in colaboration with the actual streaming services and diatribute revenue proportional to services' use. It would create much more real-time competition.


Are there any products or tools for managing this kind of thing?

I generally want my lists of books/films/music playlists whatever that I've seen, reviewed or marked as "to watch" to be managed seperately from any one particular vendor, and owned by me.

There seems to be some movement towards this with e.g. smart TVs that will search all your apps for shows, and sites that will tell you where a specific film or show is available, but I've not seen anything either super geeky, or super easy to use.


Without telling you to pirate: What you're describing is Sonarr / Radarr with Plex / Jellyfin.

The former lets you put in a list of shows / movies you want it to download, and it'll check against public and private trackers periodically until it finds what you're after. The media you want doesn't even have to be released - an IMDB or TVDB link is enough.

The latter makes it easy to stream anywhere, download ahead of flights, and tracks watched status. Plex especially is fantastically easy for family to use.

Setup is "easy" in that it's an afternoon or less for the kind of people browsing HN, and using it is actually easy for anyone else you care to share the service with. Combined, it checks all your requirements of pulling in reviews from you and others, watched status tracking, and owned by you.


I don't know if this is what you're asking specifically, but I use justwatch.com to see where I can watch stuff. Sometimes (it happened to me last night) one of those weird internet channels has what you're looking for...


Trakt.tv lets you bookmark, rate, and keep track of the sites and movies you watch. They also have an API which is used by other apps, such as kodi.


That looks like exactly what I was thinking of, the fact that they use the verb 'scrobble' to describe this tracking suggests they're on the same wavelength as me, so thanks for the tip.


The JustWatch app can sort-of do this. It aggregates the library index of all the streaming services so you can see what movies are where.


https://www.justwatch.com/ automates this.. great service


When clever people start creating their own personal systems to deal with it, movie streaming has a serious problem. What about the rest of us who aren't so clever?


it's too much work for entertainment, that's the whole problem. We as users, shouldn't be doing anything clever to get our content. I have 5 streaming services, and sometimes I hope from one to another, searching for a movie to find out that no one of them have it. Then going to google and find out that the movie is hosted on a different streaming service. No fun.


I have a Prime account, but I'll soon be cancelling it I feel. The same products can had on eBay for less money with no shipping charges added.

Prime video is quite unique, but I'm very much past them putting pre-roll ads on the content I want to watch. It's universally an advert for their own craptastic, homegrown version of an existing well-defined format. If I was interested in watching Law & Order I can start from Season 1, not from their knockoff version of it.

Amazon Music would be another great service I'd be willing to pay for, but all the available clients are so buggy it's an impediment to me using it.


I dropped Prime for the first time in many years just last month. 2-day shipping is pretty much standard now at Target and Walmart, there was nothing terribly compelling on Prime Video, and I never even used any other services. Why again have I been shoveling ~$12/month in perpetuity to Amazon?


Prime shipping for me is now a week or two! It's not uncommon to wait 12 days for an order that's Prime from the Amazon warehouse to arrive at my house, and I don't exactly live in a super rural area. It's ludicrous IMHO to pay for prime now when we barely use prime video and super saver shipping wouldn't take much longer than prime.


Whoa, that's unbelievably long if you're a Prime subscriber. I pretty much assumed 2-day shipping was standard for every single Prime member in the US. Do you live elsewhere? And how urban is your area if I may ask (approx. population)?


Yes, I live in Eastern Idaho, area population about 200,000 people.


> The same products can had on eBay for less money with no shipping charges added.

eBay sellers also tend to ship promptly, which used to be one of the main reasons to use Amazon/Prime. The latter's shipping speeds have increased by orders of magnitude in some parts of the country over the last couple years. It's not uncommon these days for a Prime order to sit in limbo for 3-4 days before being shipped, while the same order to the same city shipped instantly in 2018.


Prime delivery was a once a week thing in a remote town in Utah several years ago. On the other hand, my parents live in a rural area in the midwest and frequently get packages next day or two day. I'm guessing the difference is down to distribution centers.


Interestingly, I haven't had Prime since maybe 2016, and my experience was that Amazon is only capable of two day shipping, but if you don't pay for it, the item just sits on the shelf for three days, then ships.


> If I was interested in watching Law & Order I can start from Season 1, not from their knockoff version of it.

Actually you cannot. Only Law & Order SVU is available on streaming. The original series and the other spinoffs only have the most recent season available online.


Actually, you CAN. It's all over bittorrent, therefore it is available online. Which brings us back to the title question, how many of you are open to piracy again?


yeah, I canceled Prime a few years ago. I reasoned that if I needed the product fast then it would be faster to physically go to target or walmart. And if I didn't need it fast, then the default shipping would be fine.

Their add-on services all felt lackluster too. Most of the prime video content is not well-rated.


It doesn't matter as much to me now but when I was traveling a lot some determinism in the shipping time was worth a lot to me. And even now, there's a category of things that I don't need right now but I want soonish and probably won't get to the store for a day or two anyway.

It's still a decent value to me overall--especially throwing in video.


What do they charge in the US? It costs me 3 EUR / month here in NL which is worth it. Amazon regularly either undercut or price-match other stores and for 36 EUR a year I get enough entertainment from Prime alone.

Netflix is 15 EUR / month and I honestly just keep it for the kids + my wife..


In the US Prime Video is $9/month, full Prime is $15/month. I think it's half price for students.


Student discount is now time limited iirc!


I just cancelled Prime for the same reason.


If you can wait, most Amazon products are on Aliexpress for much less, sometimes 50% less, up to 90% for electronic components.


I return a lot of products bought from Amazon. How is the return policy and cost with Aliexpress?


It sucks.

In my case I got a dysfunctional cell phone LCD assembly and seller said I could either ship it back (would cost like half the cost I bought it for) or they would refund me 40% of what I paid. The system to contact the seller has technical measures to prevent you from conversing in Chinese even though that is obviously what the seller is most comfortable with.

I think it's fine if you're either buying nonelectronics or buying in bulk but I will not use it for purchasing electronics again.


When do you return Amazon stuff? I have returned online clothes purchases from other stores but I'm pretty sure I've never returned anything I bought from Amazon. Basically because I buy "things" from it, and I end up doing so much research before buying that I'm always happy with the purchase.


I buy and research multiple products in parallel. You can’t beat my system. Jeff Bezos hates me.


Jeff Bezos loves you, because he makes money each way. It's the third party sellers who are footing the bills.

You make think that you're sticking it to the man, but you're actually screwing the little guys.


Never tried it; I don't think it works too well. Amazon is probably better in that case.


Far be it from me to shill for Amazon, but I find that I can't go without 2-day shipping.

Ebay is fine I guess, but I'd lose my mind if I had to wait a week for something. That makes the $140/yr worth it to me.


Prime is still useful outside of the US. EBay shipping feels in that case can be exorbitant.


You can turn off the previews in account settings. Still annoying though.


What did people think was going to happen with subscription services? That you get everything you wanted in just one? This was inevitable, I am not quite sure why people were so excited about Netflix. It just meant that we own even less of what we consume. When you brought a disc (or even a digital version of it), you can kind of claim ownership. With subscription services? You can't even morally argue that you own it.


You are missing an important thing.

Netflix allowed a huge library of DVDs to be rented. You could have 3-4 DVDs on rotation for a rather cheap price.

This happened when Blockbuster would charge you $5 per movie, and Netflix would charge $10.99 for unlimited DVDs, but you could only have 3 DVDs checked out.

That's why Netflix was huge and killed Video Store rentals.


BTW, this is still the case. https://dvd.netflix.com/

Netflix has never dropped their DVD service even though they wanted to many times. There are still places in the US where broadband is unavailable.

Also, due to first sale they don't have same license restrictions as they would on streaming. Once they buy the disc they can rent it as many times they want for as long as they want.

I've considered re-adding the DVD rental, I've been using Netflix since they included the coupons in DVD player purchases, because they have the films that aren't available on Netflix streaming and it would be cheaper than adding the myriad streaming service subscriptions.


I re-upped their DVD service for a while early in the pandemic. It's still worthwhile if you want to watch a lot of movies even if their back catalog availability has deteriorated quite of bit. It makes me shake my head a bit that so many people consider suggesting that the idea of just watching some things on physical media (whether Netflix disc by mail, library, or just buying a movie) makes you a weirdo. (Or for that matter, renting streaming a la carte.)


There were a couple of movies I just can’t get without pirating. Already had Netflix and Prime, but to watch Chunking Express I would have needed to subscribe to HBO Max just for this one movie. There was no option to buy/rent it one time on YouTube/Amazon. This was true for at least 4-5 movies I wanted to see (yep, I’m that snob that doesn’t watch the latest and greatest).

And then I’d have to remember to cancel HBO Max.


HBO max makes me mad. A bunch of good old movies had their rights purchased so if I want to watch the Thin Man, a movie from the 30s, I need to get HBO max. No thank you.


Or you can rent it a la carte. (Or very possibly borrow it from your local library whether they have it or can get it from inter-library loan.)


Or instantly access it via the internet for free because everyone who made it is long since dead.


Funny, I'm not from the US, all I get from https://dvd.netflix.com/ is a 404 page not found error.

Maybe that's the perfect use case for subscription-based VPNs, renting DVDs from an American IP address... Hope it fits through the IP tunnel.


Actually, though the page literally has the string "404" in the title, it returns an HTTP 200 and redirects via Javascript.

  $ curl -I https://dvd.netflix.com/
  ...
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK


They probably don't have DVD rental at all in your country. Netflix in the US/CA and Lovefilm in the UK were the only DVD/Bluray mailing service that I'm aware of. Once they were able to offer streaming internationally, setting up mailorder service probably wasn't even considered.


I use the disc service instead of streaming. Its cheaper and the selection has a ton of stuff I want to basically rent but not buy. I also purchase a ton of movies on disc too. It is good for those 'hmm not sure if bargain bin is ok on the price to buy'. Friend of mine uses redbox pretty much exclusively too in the same way. We both have access to decent internet as well.

Downside, there is starting to become a decent number of shows/movies that are exclusive streaming. Second downside is it can be decently slow to get anything. I average about 4 discs per month on a 1 disc out at a time level. It used to be 6-8 per month. But they slowed it down.

I stopped messing with streaming because of the churn of is it on this one or that one. I just gave up and bought whatever boxset I needed. Then found I was not watching the streaming services at all.


You know what’s even cheaper than renting DVDs?

But also, I get your stance. I prefer legal routes over gray/black markets.


In the UK second hand DVDs are very cheap on eBay. A classic film might cost $2.50. Action trash is buy one get one free for $2. Both prices include postage.


Right! Streaming services weren’t feasible back then. We lacked the bandwidth, no apps existed (because internet connectivity outside of a desktop/laptop computer was in its infancy), and not that many people connect a computer to their TV.

People were excited about streaming services because we all got sick of dropping $20+ to buy a shitty movie or album, and there were always availability issues at video rental stores.

Ownership over movies and TV shows isn’t particularly important. I don’t have data to support this, but it seems true that people watch the (probably overwhelming) majority of movies only one time. Why own what I don’t want or need? And if I really enjoy the flick, I can still buy a disc.

Music seems more important to own since owning is the only way to guarantee availability.


Is that why Netflix killed video stores? I don't know anyone who used it when it had DVD rentals (I don't even know if we had that option in Canada).

Myself and most people I know stopped renting videos when we could stream stuff easily.


I think you might be an outlier. Netflix DVD rental was huge in the US—can't speak for Canada though. Everyone I know had it.


Yeah, it was big although it worked better for film than TV. I wish it were still bigger. The fact that so many people seem to think that just renting a physical disk is something weird means that they're really not investing in restocking older films any longer.


I'm sure it depended on your social circle/age group.

My age group, mid 20s during Netflix creation, everyone I knew have a Netflix DVD subscription. We were raised with VHS rentals, so DVD rentals were the natural next step when DVD players got cheap.


Same. It was a chore to churn through the discs and watch whole seasons of shows like the X-files, but by god we did it.


Spotify largely works as all-in-one sevice for (mainstream) music, I don't know why it would have been unreasonable to think that same could have happened to movies/series.


The licensing/royalty mechanisms for music have long been much more centralized.

I also strongly suspect that, if you look at the numbers, all you can eat for video would come with a price tag that very few consumers would pay--especially if you throw in live TV.


> "there's this movie I heard about and I want to watch,"

This is why I don't subscribe to any of the streaming services, they all utterly fail at having the movies I want to watch when I want to watch them. These services are mostly for people who want to watch something and don't particularly care what it is. TV as background noise. I expunged that sloppy style of TV watching from my life and I'm never going back to it. The only time I watch something is when I want to watch that thing specifically before I even sat down. And the odds of the streaming services I might have subscribed to having that thing is basically zero.


Adding to this is the complex web of region-limited content. Is using a VPN to watch something on Netflix more or less legal than torrenting? What if I want to watch it with subtitles that aren't available in my current region, but are in another? The other day I ended up pirating a program that I only later realized I had streaming access to via one of my streaming subscriptions, because the title was different in different regions... ugh.

Unlike in my teenage years I'm happy to support artists with my money (and do!), but it's often a puzzle to figure out what content is on what service and in what region at what price.


I didn't realize subtitles were different based on region.


Add to that the fact that there's this disquieting connection between the IP ownership and the video tech.

Couple services with plenty of good content managed to put together teams to build their mobile / web apps that can barely code their ways out of a paper bag (in the non-trivial space of high-capacity video streaming, nonetheless). It's enough to make me yell "Just give me the damn file and I'll play it myself."


Video tech for streaming is more or less off the shelf from cloud providers (disclaimer: I work for one).

As far as I know, the only two companies that have their own video streaming expertise of any note are Netflix and Disney (after the BAMTech acquisition).

Any other company with sufficient funding can outsource it.


So why does Paramount+ feel like it was put together by attention-deficit badgers relative to YouTube? Just age of software and years spent on polish?

Because there's basic fit-and-finish crap in that player that drives me positively bananas (things like "Doesn't remember your close-captioning setting" and "Doesn't let you change the setting when ads are playing"). And that's disregarding the 1 out of 50 times it fails to do the Chromecast-dance and leaves the Chromecast or the mobile device in a wacky state requiring software restarts (to their credit: that's down from approximately 1 in 10, so I've seen improvement there).


I agree. But those are mostly standard UX issues not underlying video streaming issues.

But ChromeCast overall I’ve found to be crappy technology.


> Chromecast... crappy technology.

Absolutely 100% agree. Like Bluetooth and USB, it's built to work with a whole pile of stuff out in the real world that the devs didn't have access to for testing / didn't exist yet when it was standardized, so it's got some grabasstical corner cases.

... problem is, it's also got like 36 million users, so it's incumbent upon anything that claims to be a "streaming service" to account for those quirks to work in 36 million living rooms (in the same sense that it's not Bluetooth's "fault" when the new car or headphones on the market don't pair with already-existing popular brands of mobile phone).

If we had one streaming app to rule them all, it could consolidate the quirks fixes and we'd be all good. The fact that market competition means everyone has to solve for those quirks individually and is disincentivized to share solutions is a PITA for end users.


Yet I don’t have that problem with AirPlay even with my $40 Roku sticks.


I'm not privy to the details of how AirPlay is configured, but knowing Apple, they probably built the streaming part of the protocol atop their own proprietary software tech stack (because that's how they usually solve these issues) and anyone who doesn't pay-to-play (with the corresponding cost burden of confirming interoperability with the infrastructure Apple built) is left out in the cold. Evidence I have for this is that you can control an AirPlay device from anything running Apple software (including a Windows machine running iTunes)... But not Android. Quick Googling confirms that the on-the-wire AirPlay protocol is undocumented.

That's Apple's style and it probably works better for an application like this (there are a lot of problems for which dictatorship is the solution in the technical space... I wish we had a streaming service dictator to solve the Chromecast problem from the other direction).


I have just been thinking of how to explain why the audio landscape (podcasts and music) are so wildly different in this sense.

While not perfect, you have a way less unreasonable user experience especially in terms of DRM and hostile in software and APIs, and the fragmentation and balkanization is not even close to at the same level.

Most people who pay seem content with what they do and complement with free and open (mostly legal save for much on the YouTube). Public warez is spotty outside of that and the toplists. Private trackers are extremely exclusive, insular and inaccessible except for the very dedicated.

What's the dominating factor here? IP ownership and legal differences? Market dynamics? Opex costs? Industry corporate cultural differences? Or is it just circumstance that Spotify and Apple Music have been able and willing enough to make it happen while what.cd left a legacy where insular elitism became the norm and video pirates have always been more Tallyho?


I suspect it's because podcasting historically originated from radio, esp free public and internet radio communities, whereas the film ones originated from major corporations and not like public access TV. The closer thing to that is probably YouTube in it's earlier days


I think you hit the nail on the head with "The content is mediocre at best". This applies to all of the services with one exception for me where I see higher quality content, that's personal preference though so I don't want to get into a debate about one service vs. another. I'm sure others have that one service too.

What I will say is there are certain genres or types of content where I just feel like watching that type of content and any of the services will meet that need. Rarely is there a "killer show" that I will pay for a service that hosts it anymore. If I want to watch documentaries about murderers they all have some version of that, or cop shows or home shows or ... you get the idea.

Maybe this is age showing and just the nature of how Hollywood constantly regurgitates characters, shows or "franchises" where I feel like I've seen things already when they are brand new.


> I need a subscription to this obscure random service and then also pay a rental fee on top to even get to watch it

That's not true. There are a number of services/products you can simply purchase or rent content without an additional subscription fee.


> It's just absurd.

It is.

What's needed is some kind of aggregator; a firm that will sublicence content from the major providers, and sell it to consumers. I'm not going to set up a Netflix account to watch one show.

Of course, the big content providers won't sublicence; they'll have to be forced to. But I would watch more of their content if I could pay for just what I want to watch, without subscribing to a mess of bundles containing mainly dross content.


I pay for Netflix and Prime Video.

I pirate stuff when it's somewhere else or when it's not available anywhere (surprisingly that's 50% of cases, but maybe that's just my country). So the spread availability is one of the problems, but not having a chance to watch something legally is another.

The same problem is with videogames. Some of them can't be bought anymore (excluding used physical copies on CD/DVD, but that's not something I prefer).

Pirating movies is even legal in my coutry - it's legal to download a movie that's already shared - I just can't share it. So at least they can't jail me for this sporadic crime.

Do I feel bad? Partially. I'd prefer to pay, I love paying for stuff that's even free (donations), but I don't want to feel like I'm an animal that predators want to lacerate.


> “We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem,” he said. “If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.” -- Gabe Newell

There have been many times where I've found DRM encumbered products inferior: trying to stream anime on Crunchyroll during primetime only to experience slowdowns; trying to screenshot something for a wallpaper only to get it blacked out; trying to download offline shows with subtitles, only to find subtitles didn't get downloaded with the video. Compound that with The Streaming Wars, I can't help but feel like a lot of people will turn to piracy out of necessity. It isn't enough that there are like 10 subscriptions to get all of the content you might want. It's also that each provider reinvents the wheel and each version is slightly jagged in different ways and doesn't work like a wheel. It's like 10 inferior clones of a wheel. Piracy, much to the chagrin of all of these services, usually fixes this: an H.265 .mkv file usually "just works" without problems in your favorite media player.

It's just a mess right now.


I bought NFS Unbound when it came out. It was rendered unplayable on Linux repeatedly whenever EA updated their new launcher app even though the game otherwise ran fine on Linux.

Piracy is our last refuge from companies delivering awful user experiences and shitting on our rights as consumers.


Fucking. Preach.

Just so you know you can fix EA games on the Steam Deck by logging into EA with your steam account and linking it. All the EA launcher games will work again.

Go to EAs help page. https://help.ea.com/en/contact-us/ Click login, and choose the Steam option. Link your steam with your ea account. Then try launching your game again. You’ll get the gray screen but give it time and it will go away.


Ebooks are the worst offenders IMO. Most stores I’ve seen don’t even tell me the format or DRM, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be an open format


I've started buying from ebooks.com exclusively, because they tell me it's DRM-free EPUB and PDF.

I end up paying a big premium in practice over Kindle DRM and discounted paperbacks, but I'm doing my part to convince publishers to offer DRM-free.


Speaking of buying DRM-free books, let me mention again The Humble Bundle. Not many books in there, but for a good cause: https://www.humblebundle.com/


I bought a DRM-free Schneier's "Applied Cryptography" from a Humble Bundle, and got a virtual pile of other interesting books at the same time.


Schneier's last book, Data and Goliath IIRC, was also available as an audiobook, so I bought it, listened...until it ended abruptly at 1/3 of the full length.

How could he do this to readers, old fart!?


_Some_ of their books are DRM-free.

“But please note that eBooks.com uses Adobe DRM to protect most ebook files, so the device, or the software running on the device must be compatible with Adobe DRM. If you'd prefer to obtain your books without DRM, you can browse our DRM-free section.”

https://support.ebooks.com/hc/en-gb/articles/214119286-Guide...


Yes, unfortunately this is the case (I work for ebooks.com). Most publishers require us to use DRM and Adobe DRM really sucks, but there isn't other options out there and we don't have the resources to make something better.

We focus quite a bit of effort on educating publishers about moving to DRM-Free as it makes everyone's lives easier and from what we've seen increases publisher sales numbers.

https://about.ebooks.com/should-we-sell-your-ebooks-without-...

https://about.ebooks.com/sales-jumped-54-when-this-publisher...


Is this a regional thing to buy without DRM? I just checked some books from my reading list and many have DRM. Just some examples if you could double check: Double Star Project Hail Marry Children of Time A Memory Called Empire This is How You Lose the Time War

While I know/assume that it will be easy to remove the DRM, I do not want to install Adobe Digital Editions to download the books.


For the most part, whether a book has DRM is a per-publisher decision, not per-storefront. e.g. TOR books are DRM-free everywhere (including Apple).

That said, ebooks.com is great! Clean interface, easy to download old purchases, etc. It's my go-to for O'Reilly content.


Worst part for me is that even libraries, who want to promote openness and reading, are perfectly comfortable with delivering books using Adobe's horrible DRM delivery solution.


Libraries have to play in the rules the publishers give them or else they get cut off from the supply of ebooks. They already have to pay more for the ebooks that expire after a certain number of loans.


Yeah, it's a major misconception to state that they're happy about it. Talk to librarians after hours and they will rant. (And most of us have personal DRM stripped libraries).


At least Adobe DRM is trivially easy to break. Right click in the Adobe software and it has a "open document storage location" option. Then drop that DRM loaded PDF into Calibre and you get a free and clear PDF in your library. At that point I go back to the library and hit the return button.


Why not get a DRM-free epub off the net in the first place?


In some cases these are not available. For instance, archive.org has many books that don't seem to be available anywhere else.


I like using the Kobo store, because it sells some of its books DRM-free. When it does use DRM, it lists the book as being DRMed, and Kobo DRM is easy to remove anyway.


Are you aware of Calibre?


Even license holders benefit from using the pirated versions of games:

> Denuvo DRM Outage Leads to Major Games Being Unplayable

[0] https://gamerant.com/denuvo-drm-outage-major-games-unplayabl...

> The cracked version of Resident Evil Village runs better, testing confirms

[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/resident-evil-village-drm-denuvo-stu...

> Shadow of the Tomb Raider Reportedly Runs Better Now That Denuvo Has Been Removed

[2] https://gamerant.com/shadow-of-the-tomb-raider-reportedly-ru...


Denuvo is awful. Anno 1800 uses it, I can't tell you the number of times I've had to fiddle with my computer because it doesn't want to connect to it's server and says I can't play the game.

If the pirated version wasn't so buggy I'd use that, even though I've paid for the game.


That RE:Village one was wild - those stutters looked frustrating


The pirating user experience is incredible right now. Gone are the days of hunting around different torrent trackers and sketchy websites for what you want. You can set up a server with the *arrs and download anything with the click of a button, and then have it automatically added to something like Plex or Jellyfin to watch. And then you hold on to the media to rewatch it whenever you like, forever.


*arrs?


Readarr, Sonarr, Prowlarr (and others)

Modern versions of CouchPotato or SabNZB if you were familiar with those


Overseerr is worth a mention — it’s really, really good. Waaay better than Ombi.


> There have been many times where I've found DRM encumbered products inferior: trying to stream anime on Crunchyroll during primetime only to experience slowdowns; trying to screenshot something for a wallpaper only to get it blacked out; trying to download offline shows with subtitles, only to find subtitles didn't get downloaded with the video. Compound that with The Streaming Wars, I can't help but feel like a lot of people will turn to piracy out of necessity.

Piracy is not necessarily better. Languages are very few (english essentially), subtitles may not exist at all, quality is variable, and speed can be a problem as well, since it depends on how popular a movie is.

Most importantly, malware push from pirate websites is a very serious problem. I warn non-power users not to download from pirate websites.


It's common for them to not include more than original and/or English audio, but most competent groups will generally include all available subtitles at least.


Besides the websites displaying less than friendly ads, what malware can even be found in downloading a video format? Sure, it could be an executable renamed to some video format, or something like that, but without a serious vulnerability in your video player which was very cleverly hacked for very low reward, what can even happen?


In the video file itself none, but before being able to click to download whatever (either torrent download or streaming), there's lot of misdirection. From a certain tablet for example, I wasn't able to start a video playback _at all_ from a certain website, because ads kept popping up. In some cases, it's not obvious where to click even for experienced users.


Sure, but nothing will “infect” your computer even if you click all the fake download/play buttons.


Fake buttons definitely can initiate the download of an executable file pretending it's a movie; there's nothing unusual (tech-wise) with it. Once in while, I do experience them.

There are countermeasures in place by some browsers/versions (that is, blocking of downloads with executable extensions), but non-savvy users can be tricked - the concept of file extension/type is not so clear to them, and it also assumes that the user is giving the right attention.


GabeN hit the nail on the head. If you make paying for a service/content impossible or hard, people who want it will find other ways to get it. Regional DRM/content licensing is one annoying culprit.. Consumers want something instant, and if you instantly tell them "this is not available in your region," they're obviously not going to go out of their way to figure out where, whom, and how to pay for it.


> trying to screenshot something for a wallpaper only to get it blacked out

I found this out when I was going to send a screenshot of a funny scene to a friend. Ok, I guess they don't want free advertising.


It is worth considering that Gabe Newell quote in light of how Steam built its original install base: By strong-arming owners of retail copies of Half-Life (notably including players of CounterStrike, a player-created mod) and requiring them to install Steam and create an account to update Half-Life / play it online.

At the time this was as well-received as any other strong-arming.


The incentives are misaligned.

Netflix, Amazon, Disney et al, aren't interested in showing me what I want to watch for a purchase price, they are after my attention, and to divert me to their most profitable revenue stream (Netflix in house creations etc).

My attention is not for sale, I'll buy content if it is sold in a manner that is attractive to me in a consumer friendly model, Louis CK selling his standup specials on his own website come to mind, otherwise I won't bother.

The problem is there's no end game for these companies, if you agree to buy something, they'll stop selling it and sell you a subscription instead. If you buy the subscription, they'll chuck ads in front of the subscribed service, and then periodically cut off access to certain content in an effort to maximize their own profit. There's no way to manage you're own library, you're subject to whatever the shareholders think they can keep squeezing out of you. On top of that, even if I yield to them completely, I still have to run their DRM blobs on my computing devices for the priviledge.

It's "amoral" to pirate in my worldview, but these companies are equally amoral. I still want to participate in the collective modern culture of tv, movies, etc, so somethings got to give.


> The problem is there's no end game for these companies

It's our whole economic system. Everything is set up for the expectation of endless growth. Every company is expected to increase their revenue and share price and employee compensation.

This is a bit of a problem for global tech companies because when you already have a big chunk of the world's population as your customers then growing your numbers becomes difficult. The only way to get more cash then is to extract more cash from your existing users.

Even (or especially) if you're already making vast sums of cash, the expectation is that you'll produce increasing amounts of it year on year. As a result you almost have to give your users a worse experience each year.

No one seems terribly keen on the actual effects of this, but individual decision makers' performance is generally measured on how well they impel users to give up more cash.

I don't see how this situation improves without some rethinking of our whole economic system.


They also have a tendency to edit, remove episodes, etc. And it does not even need to be for political correctness either. It could be licensing rights to music in shows. They will sometimes edit a show to remove the music or remove the episode altogether. (This happened with Scrubs.)

They will remove content that involves people talking about suicide. They will remove content that is offensive. They have even gone back and edited previous episodes and content. This has happened in Stranger Things (actual edits with no notice) and Arrested Development (a redesign of the fourth season that is far worse than the original version of it). (I could not watch the fifth season. It was way too terrible.)


Peep Show, 30 Rock, Community. Modern classics, editing out "offensive" material, that was actually making a point about how offensive it is.


What's edited out of peep show?

The swastika post-it?

How would you even edit that out? If I recall correctly it puts the whole character of Sophie in a different, much more naive, light. It's one of the first times we actually get anything longer than a small transactional interaction from her and it deconstructs some of the character that has been built up from Mark's (imagined, infatuated) head.

I might be misremembering the early series though, it's been a while since I've watched it.

This is a bit of a tangent but the scene as a whole also shows one of the key differentiations between UK and US tv is that UK tv doesn't have the apparently uncontrollable need to make the central couple seem desirable (and restrict them to "oh so human" flaws which aren't really flaws). This is also very obviously evident to anyone who has seen The Office then tries to watch The Office (US) where the Tim and Lucy characters are warped into star-crossed lovers who are destined to end up together. The US programme can't help but have an every-man character for the audience to root for rather than a more pathetic self-sabotaging character who kneecaps their own career progression for the sake of pursuing a romance that hasn't actually progressed further than the confines of his head.


Jeremy’s blackface taboo sex with Nancy.


This happens in physical media release as well, mostly i've seen music replaced with cheaper licensed music, I think the most recent physical releases of 'Community' still contain the episode that includes the 'Advanced Dungeons and Dragons' episode, that has been removed from netflix due to the use of Blackface (One character arrives at the game in blackface (actually jet black with a white wig) because his character is a Drow (dark elf), other characters call him out for being racist but he explains his character's backstory)


> mostly i've seen music replaced with cheaper licensed music

Which completely changes the vibe of some shows. Daria needs the 90s music, I'm sorry.


This famously happened to Daria. I'm not sure if a version with the original soundtrack even exists anymore.


And Clone High.


Do you know where I could read more about this (specifically suicide/offensive stuff). A cursory search only showed a scene being cut from 13 Reasons Why, but I would be very interested in learning more.


IMO Disney plus as a product is conceived as 'a library of disney properties' not as a general streaming service that might license movies from other studios. Anything that is licensed externally for disney+ is an exception. Netflix, originally conceived and operated as a blockbuster in the cloud is certainly going through a transition to more in-house product.

Other services are going the same way. Netflix being a first mover was able to license a lot of content for what must have been more favorable rates, now that it's much easier for a studio to spin up their OWN streaming service (there are vendors out there that will sell you, essentially, a streaming service in a box) they are experimenting with increasing their rates for licensing and simultaneously running their own service.

This is all region dependent of course. Often you'll see stuff available only on the studio's streaming service in north america, but licensed to more general streaming services overseas.

We'll see how this shakes out. Perhaps someone like paramount determines that their in-house streaming service just isn't profitable and move back to a licensed model.


> they are after my attention, and to divert me to their most profitable revenue stream (Netflix in house creations etc).

They don't even really want your attention. In house creations aren't the most profitable because they make money, they are the most profitable because they cost the least. As long as you keep paying your subscription they are happy. The content is intended to keep you just happy enough to stay subscribed (or upgrade your plan) as well as to attract new subscribers.

Basically their income is subscriptions, their costs are largely video licensing (or creation). Serving content is probably a minor additional cost.


> It's "amoral" to pirate in my worldview, but these companies are equally amoral.

Amoral or immoral? Companies (being legal entities) are amoral; and I am fine with being amoral in return; but many would complain that it's immoral :-)


Of course your attention is for sale. Even now, you are posting to a site whose entire purpose for existing is to advertise YC funded companies.


You are correct, obviously.

> I still want to participate in the collective modern culture ... so somethings got to give.

Same comment applies to this forum. I want to participate in discussions on HN, and therefore I am subject to the occasional job ad from YC companies. It's not perfect, but it's a bit facetious to compare that to the attention grabbing of Youtube/Amazon, etc who will intentionally curtail my efforts to find content I want, in lieu of something they want to promote.


It is very much a dark pattern that “continue watching” isn’t in the first row on the streaming services and “my list” isn’t the second row.

I agree.


That's too cynical. If it were an ad platform, you wouldn't be allowed to criticize those companies, or YC, or members from YC. But you can!

It also doesn't ask for a lot of attention. You don't get notifications, infinite scrolling, custom content for your preferences, and click bait is limited, per the enforced guidelines. There's a bit of FOMO since articles only stay at the top for a while, but there's ways to get around that (RSS, which I use).

HN is a place to discuss interesting ideas first, and YC startups second. The hard work from dang deserves more praise than that!


Thanks for reminding me of Louis CK website. One of the few places I'm happy to pay for content.


They should be charged with attention piracy


It’s funny, I’m more sympathetic than ever to pirates, given how frequently creative works are disappeared or moved these days - pulled from streaming for political/social norms reasons (1984 style), “purchased” items removed from libraries for licensing reasons or because a platform outright closes, and then the garden variety shuffling of content between platforms in what seems like a hypermodern version of IP musical chairs (“who has 30 rock this week”).

But at the same time I engage in piracy less than ever before. For me it seems like the hard part used to be obtaining the content — “why can’t I buy or rent the new Sopranos online” — but now the hard part is choosing something worth my time in the oceans of available titles.

This past week I watched a Norwegian miniseries about people stuck in an airport at Christmas (Netflix). Prior week I watched videos from a London Clojure conference (YouTube premium). Prior to that I rewatched an old Jim Jarmusch movie (Criterion). A couple months ago I was on a Hulu binge (The Bear, Only Murderers) before cancelling. I bought a comedy special from Louis CK’s own website. I only used a couple months of a free year of Apple TV, to watch Ted Lasso.

My default is to watch old Anthony Bourdain, either streaming (back when I had Hulu, or when I had HBO Now for Curb Your Enthusiasm) or buy a copy on Apple’s store.

But just as often I look around and give up. Most nights there’s nothing I want to watch. If I can, I make myself read a book or do some coding or maybe a podcast. I subscribe to streaming platforms then cancel. It’s so easy to sign up and then leave.

My point is, if I can find something I want watch it’s only a few clicks to watch it legally for a decent price (helps that I am not in my 20s, income wise). But it’s hard to find anything I want to watch. Piracy is almost a non sequitir these days, most of the time. But sure, if you find something you love, make sure to torrent a copy, because it will disappear eventually for one reason or another.


I was astounded when HBO said they would remove Westworld from their streaming catalog.

WTF. Why even subscribe in the first place. Absolutely ridiculous.


The wife went to bed early last night, so I figured I'd finally finish off S4 of Westworld. "Oh, no you won't.", said whoever owns HBO this week. I've had that HBO streaming sub since it came out. I guess it's time to turn it off until the next season of $WHATEVER_SHOW and raise the sails for some Westworld episodes.

I'm seriously astounded that someone thought this was a good idea.


Same. Completely blows my mind, and furthers the case for pirates even if just from the digital hoarder/archivist view.


Hey we still have it in torrents catalog :)


I pirate everything. Haven't subscribed to a service like Spotify, Netflix, etc. in many years. I can listen to my music in CD-quality and bring it anywhere. Same with any movie, TV show, etc. And I know that no one is selling what I find interesting as analytics data.

At the same time, I want to support creators, and I'll donate/use services like Bandcamp to directly support folks I appreciate. I have a $100/mo "donation" fund.

Has nothing to do with the price as I'm more than happy to support creators. Just not through centralized platform that doesn't respect my freedom.


I channeled the money I was spending on YouTubeTV into a seedbox that has 0 personal information about me, paid for with Monero (XMR). Much better bang for the buck and completely removes all the potential adverse legal effects that you could have by torrenting on your home / work connection.

I was happily paying a netflix and spotify sub for over a decade, but once we started getting greedy with Paramount+, AppleTV+, Discovery+, Peacock, etc. I decided it was high time to sail the seven seas again, which I hadn't done since college.

I keep waiting for all the netflix-likes to fail and people go back to just selling their content to netflix, but I don't think it's going to happen. I might be yaaar matey for the rest of my life.


How do you access the seedbox anonymously? Unless you use Tor (which doesn't seem practical for movies), they surely see where your connections come from, don't they?


You can buy seedboxes and VPNs with cash-purchased bitcoin.


Right. But if you only buy a seedbox and connect to it from your home IP, then it does not matter that you paid with bitcoins, right?

If you connect to it through a VPN, then that's a second level of indirection, but still you must trust the VPN. Because even if you paid with bitcoins, the VPN knows your home IP and it knows that you connect to a seedbox.


A VPN service would have no way of knowing the box you are connecting to is a seed box. Particularly if you connect over a different IP than you seed from.

Piracy is a local tort at worst, and not a crime. Certainly not something that can compel mandatory IP disclosure from multiple foreign entities at the same time for a US copyright claimant targeting an individual.

Even then if access to said seedbox is shared with multiple people they would need to prove who actually executed the choice to seed which files. Now you need a court order to get the FBI to travel to another country to use a hotplug device to seize the entire machine with memory in tact and do forensics.

If you do not do any logging then only recent files could be claimed if at all.

That much work to prosecute someone over their two most recently downloaded movies at worst? Never going to happen, and it never has.

There are exactly 0 cases of foreign seedboxes being seized over copyright claims.

I am not a lawyer and do not currently operate any seedboxes so take this as you choose.


Interesting points indeed. Connecting through a VPN may be enough for the this case. I guess I mostly wanted to make it clear that it's not "perfectly anonymous" just because one paid with bitcoins. And of course that if you connect directly to the seedbox, then you trust 100% this seedbox to be legit.


I've been using a seedbox for years

I think the risk of not using a vpn to access it is pretty much zero as these seedboxes are deliberately designed to essentially eliminate this issue (i.e., business in one country, hardware is another, likely minimal logs)

I've never heard of anyone getting in trouble using a seedbox - likely because there's enough much lower hanging fruit to prosecute


If you DO NOT use a VPN, you 100% trust the seedbox. You trust that they "are deliberately designed to essentially eliminate this issue". That's fine for me, but it's important to know that it's about trust.

If you use a VPN, then you do distribute that trust between the VPN and the seedbox, which makes it much better already.


Do you move the files from your seedbox to your home to watch or do you have Plex or something like it on your seedbox and just stream to your home?


The challenge with this is actually supporting creators for complex works that are published by these companies.

Take a TV show for example - hundreds of people work on these things. There's no real way to support the show when you pirate something. TV shows don't have patreons or kickstarters.

Piracy is quite attractive because of how hostile the copyright holders are to end users. Sticking it to the megacorps that treat us with such disdain, even in these small ways, feels great. But this leaves a difficult question of how to actually support the people who are making the thing.

As far as I can tell, if you are serious about this, the closest thing to directly supporting a complex creative endeavor like a TV show is to "purchase" it from Amazon. Of course, you realize you "own" nothing, and Amazon still takes its cut, but at least it's a "sale" for the specific work in some spreadsheet.


I think this is where NFT could actually be useful. Buy a video, and you have a license for it. The money goes to the people who made it. Maybe you resell that license sometime, whatever.

The point is that you can get the actual video file from ~wherever~ and you're legally fine because you own the license.

Now the streaming platforms compete for being the best video delivery service for the array of things you own a license for.

Movies Anywhere is the closest thing to this I have seen. It only works for movies though, and it's a centralized service.


> TV shows don't have patreons or kickstarters.

I wonder why not. If you're already doing payroll for the production of a TV show, it should be trivial to express each payout as a percentage (this particular gaffer gets 0.56%, etc).

It would then be easy to encode that in software somewhere (smart contract?) such that when payments come in, they get split up and disbursed accordingly.

If you coupled the addresses of these contracts with the content itself (as metadata on the file or in a lookup table somewhere, keyed by CTPH) consumers could then be choosy about whether they're supporting content which transparently supports all of its creators vs content that just lets a middleman soak up the profits.


By the time this could be set up, making digital content by recording real-world action will be niche. It will be mostly computer generated.


I honestly don’t feel bad at all. I am fairly sure the actual creators barely get any compensations from plus 1 subscriber, so in effect one only hurts these streaming sites, which really should finally get the message sent by that.


Aye matey. Only thing I pay for is Bandcamp since it goes direct to the creator and steam games because the experience is amazing esp since I game exclusively on Linux.


How do you view that content? Plex, Roku, TVs, and related are definitely spying on what you watch, even if it's locally hosted.


Jellyfin would be my recommendation if you are concerned about this. It's like Plex but open-source.


Do those devices have cell network access?


Hook a small PC to each TV and run Kodi.


A few weeks ago I rented the Alien: Covenant movie on youtube because I didn't even know it existed. About 2 minutes in I noticed it was playing at 480p. I paid the extra dollar for HD rental. Lo and behold, if you want to watch rented youtube movies in HD (which you paid for) you can't do it in chrome browser on mac but hilariously safari did let me watch it in HD on the same computer... Those 15 minutes of debugging added about 3 cuts to the 10000 caused by silly restrictions that exist.


I suspect it's because of DRM.

Funnily enough Firefox can apparently use Google Widevine on MacOS: https://www.drm.cloud/platform-compatibility/

I am puzzled at these ridiculous restrictions but I am happy with their effect: a million papercuts driving viewers away.

https://www.defectivebydesign.org/


Netflix is the same. You can only watch HD netflix on the netflix app or on edge.


Thanks for this, I was wondering why my show had massive artifacting even after I changed settings which supposedly should have made the picture quality better. I'll have to try another browser.


No, but we are at the point where we are going to start cancelling subscriptions. There is more content than we will ever watch. First of the chopping block is Netflix, there just isn't enough really good content to justify it anymore. What we are considering is subscribing for maybe 1-2 months a year, bundle the things we want to see on it then.

From our perspective the two most valuable subscriptions are AppleTV+ and Disney Plus. Apple are making by far the best "prestige" TV, and that seems to be their strategy. Quality over quantity, much like their other product ranges.

My wife and I watch slightly less on Disney, but the value it brings us as a family (8yo + 4yo) is enormous. If we could only have one subscription it would be that one.

Amazon Prime Video is just a value add on a subscription we have anyway, although we increasingly shop less on Amazon, without the free shipping we probably would cancel the video subscription.


I agree with everything you wrote. We keep Disney+ because their family content is untouchable by anyone else. HBO/Apple we trade off every couple of months depending on what's new and what we are most interested in.

Netflix I subscribe to for about 1 month per year to binge the latest of whatever I'm watching (this year: Stranger Things, The Crown) and then cancel. Anything else (Hulu, etc) is a 1 month and churn kind of situation.

Netflix especially seems to be in a content death spiral of sorts. They cancel their original content so aggressively and often in such unsatisfying ways for the audience that I've decided I don't want to watch anything on Netflix until after it is an established success with multiple seasons produced. I wish they would put more wood behind fewer arrows. Or maybe just make a move toward miniseries so at least the audience can have a satisfying beginning, middle, and end to something they've invested time in watching. I would so much rather have 5-8 episodes that form a cohesive story, than a Season 1 that sets up a world and then never gets to go anywhere because some algorithm decided the show wasn't successful enough to continue.


I agree that the cancelations are terrible. In the short term, the viewers get pissed and cancel, in the long term, you get a catalog of incomplete works.

I have great respect for HBO: The Leftovers is a great show but wasn't doing well. They threw the director a bone and gave him an extra season, the 3rd and final, to wrap things up. And what a memorable season it was! So glad they did it!

On the other hand, they canceled Westworld, but that's been dragging on its feet for too long. So that's on the directors.


Apple TV was my first attempt at trying a streaming service outright (instead of a bundled service like Amazon video or using a friend's parent's account they signed into once on my TV)

The experience is awful. They have a similar experience as Amazon video where they pretend to have a lot of content and when you find something you want to watch they throw up a pay gate. If you have to do research online ahead of time to figure out which shows are on the service you can spend that same time finding it elsewhere.

There's also plenty of annoying quirks with the UI like assumptions that you only watch a show on your account and never anywhere else so navigating to seasons is a pain.

The original shows are pretty good (they seem to have a weird Disney+ aversion to any nudity but violence is fine) but it was an easy choice to cancel before any free trial periods ended.


> What we are considering is subscribing for maybe 1-2 months a year, bundle the things we want to see on it then.

Do you see them stopping that ability at some point, and requiring a yearly subscription? I remember the cable companies wouldn't let you start and stop premium channels each month. You'd have to sign up for at least a year.


If they did, at the current rate of content we would then just cancel.

Maybe a pay per series could work, but then that's them admitting that they don't make enough good content to justify a subscription.


> without the free shipping we probably would cancel the video subscription.

Amazon has never made sense to me. Living in Toronto the regular free shipping usually arrives in 1-2 days anyways. Is this wildly different in other cities? My partner pays for prime and I usually just order on my account anyways since there is little difference. Even if there is I rarely need something urgently.


Prime is free shipping _both ways._ Non-prime returns cost money. [1]

That makes buying much more risk-free. I haven't paid for return shipping on an Amazon purchase for years.

I don't know that I return enough to compensate for the ~$120 annual cost (I guess it's going up to $140?), but it does get me faster (and more to the point, deterministic) shipping as well, _and_ the other benefits like Prime Video.

Overall I find it still makes sense. But you do you.

BTW, your partner can probably share the Prime shipping benefit with you, if they aren't already sharing it with someone else, and if you live together. My wife can buy things on Prime with our one subscription.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html%3FnodeI...


Hmm, I've definitely returned defective items before and never been charged shipping. I wonder if that has changed or if it doesn't apply to defective items. (The help page for amazon.ca for "Defective Item?" fails)


I've bought items that weren't defective, but that turned out to not work as well as was advertised, and that's also free.

I don't know the full policy, but it makes sense they would cover the returns of an item that items that are DOA.


I have more disposable income than in my teenage years, so when it comes to convinience/money tradeoffs I'll natually choose differently than my teenage self.

Where the streaming services are getting in trouble is if they are less convinient than piracy. Steam's success is largly built on being more convinient than pirating games, and similarly early Netflix was more convinient than pirating movies. Netflix and Amazon Prime still are on the "more convinient than piracy" side for me, the plethora of other streaming services not so much.

And then there's the question whether watchin Youtube with adblocker and SponsorBlock is equivalent to piracy. It is damn convienient.


Rentals and a la cart are pretty much always more convenient these days. At my adult income level, $3 for a movie that's not on the services I'm subscribed to hits a reasonable spot in terms of convenience vs price. Anyone who ignores the a la cart option to justify "piracy is just convenience" isn't being honest with themselves.


For some people I know, myself included, that would be ~$84USD/mo., if all taken a la cart. This whole thread has me semi-considering the flag, as an alternative to starting umpteen more subscriptions.


You don’t have to to it all a la cart. Subscribe to one or two, and then supplement with a la cart.


I disagree that we're at peak monetization (see what the price of a premium cable package used to be)

Since you mention Spotify I'm super happy with it. It's basically everything I ever wanted consistently. Can recommend new music better than any person I know, and I can feed it any song that I and somebody else like as a radio station and get a pretty decent list of songs we both don't mind. Granted I don't listen to music as many hours as I did when I was young, but that's just me changing I think.

I feel like video games are actually often underpriced if you wait for a steam sale. I think child me would be blown away by the fact I can buy a game 10x better than mario 3 for 1/10th the price of Mario 3 ($50). I'm talking Baba is You, or Hollow Knight is 7.49 right now, or Slay The Spire is 8.49 right now. When I grew up I had "Gauntlet" which had some traits/bugs that made it nearly unwinnable without a guide, even by old standards.

In TV I think there's more of an argument to be had, and if you had only said TV I think this would be an interesting discussion, but if you think it's everything I think the more likely explanation is it's a you thing (maybe just not as easy to please anymore and upset at the media for not giving you that same magical feeling).


I’ve been a Spotify premium customer for years. For music discovery, they’re incredible. But I really hate two things about Spotify:

1. Sometimes music I have in playlists disappears, for licensing reasons. I understand the reasoning but it makes me irrationally angry

2. There’s still no way to remove playlists from the home screen. No, spotify, I still don’t want to listen to your Dad Jokes podcast. I feel like some bozo product manager has had a bonus package attached to podcast listens and he’s doing what he can to get more podcast listens, instead of making me (the customer) happy.

I’m considering going back to a bespoke mp3 collection again. Something about it feels better. It feels like mine.


> No, spotify, I still don’t want to listen to your Dad Jokes podcast. I feel like some bozo product manager has had a bonus package attached to podcast listens and he’s doing what he can to get more podcast listens, instead of making me (the customer) happy.

Two things I have an issue with when it comes to Spotify and podcasts:

1. Podcasts are _still_ open and distributed via RSS. They're probably the last medium to truly exist in this way in a mainstream fashion. With a company like Spotify "embrace, extend, extinguish", then putting podcasts behind a walled garden is a real risk. (Remember when Chrome was the cool and hip browser instead of an ad space?)

2. The annoying, pushy UX (you're making my music listening experience worse)

Given 2., it's hard for me to imagine that 1. isn't a wet dream of some myopic, OKR-obsessed product person at Spotify.


Nr 2 is just bizzare. I pay premium to not get ads and as a thank you I am constantly bombarded with other ads, ehum…sorry…suggestions, for bad podcasts. Wtf.

Otherwise Spotify is one of things I am happy to pay subscription for. Sure it sucks a bit when some good songs go away, but it’s rare and there are thousands of other songs that I like and never have time to listen to anyway, it all just works, has great suggestions and is super convenient otherwise, outweighing the few negatives.

Hoarding mp3s and syncing to devices just in case one out of thousand favorites go away simply isn’t worth the time anymore. For nostalgia reasons my old teenage mp3 collection is enough and can double as providing local music needs in case of a zombie apocalypse.


Absolutely agree RE podcasts. These are ads, which I pay not to see.


I’ve been making playlist for years, and I’ve noticed Spotify mangle songs on some of the older ones. Like one of my earliest playlist now contains a few tracks of super obscure jazz from the 40s that I’m pretty sure I never added. What they replaced I’ll never know.


That's never happened to me, but I'd hate if it did!

Could this be an error from the producer? Or, dumb question, did it start playing related songs after?


On 2, what really grinds my gears is that some of that content is tied to the country of your funding payment method, including podcasts in a language you don't speak about local politics on the other side of the world.


There's an option that allows to keep showing unavailable tracks. They appear greyed out and are not playable, but at least you know they're there.


Not too relevant to the topic, but I can’t be the only person who seems to be inside a “music bubble”, and constantly get recommended the same deal of songs? Though I also have “liked music” be pretty buggy, it used to be the case that “download offline” added the songs to my liked list as well, so I got plenty of songs I didn’t like that much added that I only recently managed to clear out.. maybe I should wipe clean my profile?


It can’t just be a me thing because when piracy showed up, it became a everyone thing. For it to return, it would return for all of us at the same time. The monetized ecosystems will metastasize to a point where everyone will go ‘the fuck? I think not’.


It will be interesting to see how sports (NFL, especially) shakes out. Sports was always the biggest cost of a cable subscription.

Amazon bought Thursday night NFL rights for $1 billion a year, just to get credibility. That's $12.50 for every active Prime Video user.


I see no moral problem with file sharing. Personally it's rarely worth the hassle, though I occasionally convert a youtube video to and mp3 for niche songs I can't find on spotify. I'd say it depends on how you value your time and how difficult it is to find what you want.

"Piracy" is the legitimate competitor of streaming services. It seems like we have had a period where streaming offered a better product, but having a credible threat of competition is important to keep the streaming offerings competitive and relevant.


Well interestingly enough, it really is developers that can make a great piracy user experience. Why don’t we?


There are a bunch of open-source projects out there that automate away the hassle of piracy. Just look at radarr, sonarr, etc. Combined with media servers like Plex, you can grab any content you want to watch with one click.


I find a lot of piracy to have better UX than the legitimate ways, although maybe not for the average user who doesn't know how to set up things. But I find Plex superior to all of the legitimate streaming services and their apps.

Biggest exception is probably gaming and specifically Steam. It's been a while since the last time I've pirated a game and even then it was probably like a retro ROM.


It's an arms race. If you make piracy too convenient, the IP lawyers and lawmakers start working against you.


It already exists, its called Plex + Plexshare.


It's probably easier and faster to explain and setup someone for torrent than to signup for netflix


This is far from true.


Jackett would like word with you.


It depends. Games and music - no, I'm glad to pay for Spotify subscription, and I'm happy to buy a game every once in a while. Movies and TV shows - yes, if I cannot find them in Netflix. Sometimes I want to watch something, and it's not available in Netflix in my region, or not on Netflix at all. What choices do I have?


GamePass for me was the end of game piracy in any way. (plus competition between Steam and Epic lowering prices and making many more games accessible at cheap prices).

At this point for music there is so much free music available online that makes no sense to pirate anything. But I assume this depends on your music tastes.

For Movies and TV piracy is king especially if you live in a country where many less popular movies don't make it to the movie theaters and some streaming networks (e.g. hulu, disney+ etc) are not available.


I usually choose not to watch.And not because of morals, but because the life is sad when so much effort goes into consuming content.


I usually just use yt-dlp for most things I want, how is one command a sad amount of effort? A ton of older cartoons I want to watch just sit on archive.org.


Then I will miss a big pile of content. Netflix is very limited in some regions.


You will miss a big pile of content anyway because even if you are in full consumption mode with full access to everything, no one has the time to see/read/listen/play even a fraction of what is published every given day. Given our rate of media production, the backlog of potential worthwile stuff you will miss out on is ever growing.


Pretty much the same, although I'll not get spotify, I can still buy albums DRM free and know my streaming provider won't then remove them.

Games, always, although I only have a console now, but PS Plus I found to be a very good service, I rarely buy full price titles unless it's something exceptional, otherwise I just wait for something on sale.

I have netflix, and that was good for a while, But now with all the streaming options with exclusives, I can't be bothered to juggle my subscriptions. I tried apple TV for a bit as I got a free offer, but they had about 2 shows I wanted to watch and despite the subscription, it's still seemed to be pushing me to "buy" things (I think being allowed to use the term "Buy" from any of these services is downright fraud if they can remove it anytime they want)

plus the one I seem to consistently want is HBO Max which isn't even available outside the US


Not to watch them?


> I just feel like if we’re at peak monetization.

We're really not. If anything there's more content (for lack of a better word) available for token amounts of money than there ever has been. I don't know how old you are but back in the distant past of the 90s you had two choices if you wanted to watch a film, you could go to a shop and buy a copy, probably for more money than you'd pay for a monthly Netflix subscription now, or you could go to the video rental store and rent it for a few pounds. If you were really lucky someone you know might own a copy and would lend it to you.

Games would cost £40+ new, or you could pick up the really big older ones for £10 or so. If you happened to want a game no one else did you were out of luck. Compare that to something like Steam now, or Game Pass where for ~$15/month you can have hundreds of games to choose from.

Maybe you don't like the model of monthly subscriptions. Guess what, for almost any film you can still buy a copy, either physically on disk, or digitally and be able to watch it right now. Don't like the level of ads on YouTube (which is honestly still better than what you'd see on any TV channel)? You can pay to turn them off.

This whole thing just reeks of entitlement. You don't have a god given right to watch and play anything you choose, whenever you choose, without paying anything for that. That's not how the world works. I'm not aware that ever having been how the world works. So sure, go pirate the things you want, but don't try to justify it as anything other than "I'd rather not pay".


Well, here’s the thing. That is how the world works. You do get shit delivered to you within a day or two. You do get to watch whatever you want, either for free, or for a price. We do get to do those entitled things simply because we were deadly serious about being entitled fucks.

So, with that said. I do want prices to a) drop b) services to consolidate and if they don’t, I will get all my shit for free. And so will others.

And we’ll have a better world because of it. The same way we have everything else at our fingertips.

See, if we want to talk about reality and how the world works, then the truth is everything is built on leverage. If users opt for free, well then that’s a whole lot of leverage. No huffing and puffing will solve that, now will it? That’s reality.

If we couldn’t get it for free, then we’d have no leverage, they would. Then they can charge anything, and no huffing and puffing would solve it.

Calling them greedy, or calling us entitled, is just huffing and puffing. That’s how the world works.

The consumer and business are never in a discussion (there’s nothing to discuss). It is always a barter based on leverage. “Why don’t you pay this price, you are being entitled”, is not something the business can say to me, and likewise, “Why don’t you lower the price, you are being greedy”, is not something I can say to the business.


Loved the analogy, thanks!


Intellectual property is an artificial, legal notion with a specific stated Constitutional purpose. It's not God-given either. It is also supposed to be limited, but currently it's 100+ years which is effectively unlimited since it's beyond a normal human lifetime.

The current situation overly incentivizes creation of intellectual property, particularly entertainment. Did we really need 50+ cable channels with shows 24/7? Did we need endless talk shows in the 90's and reality shows in the 00's? Do we need remakes upon remakes upon remakes of franchises of stuff?

If copyright returned to sane durations instead of the corporate-legacy-creating ones in effect currently, or even didn't exist at all, much of the resources that go into entertainment might go into better, less wasteful uses, or might go into developing actual novel entertainment.

> This whole thing just reeks of entitlement.

DRM schemes also reveal that entitlement goes both ways. External companies don't have a god given right to tell me I cannot watch X on my screen or download X.

Subjecting my personal property to surveillance to enforce a parallel to this old world is too far.


> You don't have a god given right to watch and play anything you choose, whenever you choose, without paying anything for that.

Why not? Some sense of morals towards HBO or etc? Life is too short for me to receive a worse experience just because it might hurt Casey Bloys' massive paycheck. If they want me to pay for it they need to offer it at a reasonable quality. Because I CAN watch anything anytime I want without paying. And they don't have a God given right to demand otherwise. They have a police-enforced right to demand otherwise, but good luck doing anything about it when I'm behind a VPN.


Owning a physical copy of a movie hasn't gotten any cheaper since the 90s. A Top Gun Maverick blu-ray is $25. Netflix streaming has gone up in price significantly from debut and has a worse content library, due to "the streaming wars." Streaming access is not fair to compare to ownership --it's closer to rental, but without any of the supply-side cost of making and distributing physical media, so value to consumers should be better, based on that. The subscription services aim to lock in some or all of your entertainment budget to maximize per capita revenue month to month. If you want access to the full gamut you need to pay 5+ different ways and end up spending more than what's reasonable for a month full of viewing content (with next to no distribution cost.) IMO, it's only a good deal then if you're spending absurd an amount of time streaming, and there probably isn't enough good content to keep you busy. Quantity and variety of niche shows/films available has gone up over the years, but you can definitely argue quality has gone down apart from format fidelity and CGI quality.

Games haven't really gone down in price either, and now since so many of the games themselves are "live service" things, many of them expire after a few years when they turn the servers off. $25 cosmetic "virtual goods" are often sold in game, representing an absurd markup on the time of artists. You get manipulated/harassed to spend (maybe more like burn) money in them, often after having spent $40-70 to get in the front door.

Monetization is awful, and that shouldn't be too surprising. Businesses endeavor to extract what the market can bear most profitably, and to have a bigger piece of that pie, not so much to give the benefit of progress to the people paying.


>Games haven't really gone down in price either

They have though. Games used to be so much more expensive back in the day.

I actually ran across this nugget recently: https://twitter.com/Mailia/status/1608496022589952003

You had to shell out $70 for a copy of Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey '98. That's $130 when adjusted for inflation. And disc-based games weren't as cheap as you'd expect either. I think I saw an ad for Crash Bandicoot and the inflation-adjusted price of the game was like $74.

These days you might need to pay for $70 if you want a triple-A title on release date. If you don't mind waiting a bit or just go non-blockbuster titles, you can find a lot of games for quite a lot less.


and once you adjust for cancer (microtransactions, skins, grind2win, slightly lower code quality, thought police, platforms like steam, no control over versioning, no ability to make your own server) you get the same value as they were back in the 90s.


No, triple A games these days are $90+.


God of War Ragnarök – $70 (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B61YDF5V/)

Horizon Forbidden West – $55 (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09FBCRKC9/)

Bayonetta 3 – $53 (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072MK1CLN/)

Need for Speed Unbound – $44 (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BHF4XXK5/)

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II - $70 (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B3H227Z5/)

Hogwarts Legacy – $70 (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09W4HF94W/)

Elden Ring – $53 (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09743F8P6/)

You're gonna have to show me the $90+ triple-A game.


And some of these were on discount during Steam Winter sales. Elden Ring was avialble for 40 euros or so!


I should've said CAD, my bad.


> content (for lack of a better word)

Content is the perfect word, insipid material to fill our bottomless pit of boredom

> which is honestly still better than what you'd see on any TV channel

The last time we had less ads on youtube than on TV they were still releasing new episodes of starget sg1, I'm too lazy to check when that was but I didn't even finish high school back then


Well, you also don't have a god-given right to get paid for something you made, if there are a million copies of it out there free for the taking.


I just reduce consumption, because 1.) that's better for you anyway 2.) most media is drivel and always has been 3.) can't be arsed to do illegal shit for such a petty reward


Yeah, everyone should at least recognize and think about the possibility that they don't need to consume all the time. It fuels a lot of bad things in the world. Same with game console scalping. As long as people can be counted on to consume like this, that will be used to abuse them.


I have Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and Prime TV. I will search through all of those before resorting to the high seas. If I didn't have a family though, I would cancel all of those services because it takes me less overall effort to download from torrents.

It's amazing how ridiculously easy it is to pirate these days. I didn't know jack shit about anything other than a handful of torrent sites and qBittorrent until recently. Yet it took me only 15-30 minutes to set up a full media-server stack for the whole thing.

Here's my full stack:

- ProtonVPN at $120 for 2.5 years of service, approx $4/mo

- qBittorrent: torrent download client. Free

- Jellyfin Server (PC) + Jellyfin Roku Channel (Roku device): similar to Plex media server, it's like a Netflix-style UI for your local content. Free

- Sonarr: searches for TV shows and can automatically download them into qBittorrent. Free

- Radarr: searches for movies and can automatically download them into qBittorrent. Free

- Jackett: search indexer so you can search all your favorite torrent sites through one service. Integrates into Sonarr and Radarr. Free

EDIT: Oh I use Spotify for music since that one is reliable and all the music I want is there. Plus they have offline download options.


As I'm a complete 0 at IT, would you mind explaining how one gets started with this? I have VPN, I've torrented before.

How does Jellyfin work and what do I need? Does it sit locally on a laptop/PC (so takes up space) and if it uses the same WiFi as my TV I can play it? That's the bit I really don't understand...


I'm only using it in the most basic form (streaming to my roku from my PC), so hopefully someone with more experience with it can chime in here, but I'll do my best.

I saw the software mentioned on reddit a while back, and then I just Googled each product to learn more or download/install it. They are all pretty straight-forward click and launch products with minimal configuration for which you can find guides by a quick search.

Honestly if you already have the content downloaded or don't want to tinker with other software too much, you only need Jellyfin to serve that content. Jellyfin server runs as a service on the device housing your content. This server has a URL that you will provide to whatever device is connecting to it. For me, my home PC is my server. In its most basic form, yes, it uses the same WiFi as your TV. Most home WiFi routers allow communicating with other devices on the WiFi (typically referred to as your "local network") easily.

Serving Jellyfin outside of your local network (e.g. if you wanted to share with extended family across the internet) requires configuring your router for it and that can be a bit more tricky (and poses security risks), but there's a bunch of guides out there that help you do this safely without compromising your local network's security.

When you install Jellyfin, you're presented with a screen asking you to create an admin login. You can then create additional user logins in the software (which launches its UI in your default browser), so you can use it when connecting to it on your network. The way you "consume" it on your TV is through the Jellyfin client software. They have software available for the popular OSes like Windows and macOS as well as phone software for Android and iOS, but also Roku, Android TV, FireTV, etc. Lots of options on how you consume it. My Roku was able to automatically detected it running on my network, so all I had to do was input login info.


Really appreciate it! I'll have to look into it in a bit more detail. I'm a little tired of having to plug my laptop in via HDMI every time I want to play a movie I can't find on netflix.

The only problem is, I don't have a PC and I really don't want to mix my mac I use for work with torrented movies. So I would have to look into getting a cheap windows machine :)


The only 3 platforms that receive my money are Bandcamp, Itch.io and Steam.

The first two are pristine from an ethical standpoint.

I'm torn on Steam because it's not run as a typical USA corporation with all the anti consumer BS. The DRM they themselves provide is more of a suggestion instead of a real challenge. It can be broken with off the shelf tools or just stepping and dumping in x64dbg. However they did their fair share of damage in eroding what it means to own digital goods.

I also bought https://everycircuit.com/ because halfway through reversing the license checks I started feeling bad for the developers :(

I unapologetically pirate everything else.


I approve of Steam's commitment to Linux and they have a great track record. I also will never pirate an exectuable file.


> halfway through reversing the license checks I started feeling bad for the developers

What do you mean by this? Is there a story I'm missing?


Not much story. The wasm binary crahsed wabt (lol) so after getting frustrated with the state of the chromium tooling for wasm, I switched to messing with the android build.

That one was super easy to deal with because it had symbols. Judging by the license routines, they initally intended it to be a subscription service, only to give it an actually fair price down the road ($15). Seeing the username of the dev in the build metadata also made me feel a bit bad for him.


I am growing really frustrated with the legal options. Buying DVDs / Blurays is not an option. Delivering the media takes days, the DVD menus are a real pain to deal with, binge watching is a chore due to constantly having to change disks. Old TV series often cost a small fortune when the DVD box set for one season costs almost 50€ and there are 9 seasons. Streaming was fine for a few years, but it's beginning to erode really fast. I'm definitely not going to pay for a bazillion subsciptions. If it's not an in-house production, you can never rely on a specific show or movie being available just because it was yesterday. And the quality of in-house productions is constantly going down. But should you happen to actually like that new Netflix (or whatever) show, the chance that they'll leave you hanging after 2 seasons before any story arc came to conclusion is really high. So yeah, I'm growing increasingly frustrated and piracy is beginning to look really attractive again.


The documentary series I spent 10 years working finally landed 6 weeks ago on NBC Peacock. Guess how I saw the final cut? That's right. I pirated it. I pirated my own show.


Again? I never stopped. I try to find ways to fund creators directly whenever I can but I'm not going to encourage:

- the balkanization of content that we've seeing

- investment in DRM

- the strengthening of artificial-scarcity-based business models which I think harm innovation more than they help


I pirated a lot when I was younger and couldn't afford it. It's a headache I don't need anymore - worrying about VPNs or seedboxes, torrent sites moving to different domains or being shut down, maintaining ratios, letters from your ISP...

Nowadays entertainment is quite accessible through subscriptions and I just wait for decent sales on the games I want to play.


Usenet is the answer :)

Also, media piracy is much more convenient these days thanks to the excellent media server options (Plex/Emby/Jellyfin) and the *arr suite of apps.

You simply add movies and shows to your library and have them “magically” appear in your media server app on release - like a personal streaming service.


Usenet is definitely the answer. Old school but it works and its inaccessibility relative to torrents keeps it out of "easy-ish target" territory for IP enforcers.


Found this comment when I did a ctrl-F to see who was breaking the first rule of Usenet LOL


What’s the hot one now days? I used to sub to Giganews.


The Usenet subreddit is a good reference. They have an excellent wiki as well - e.g., https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki/providerdeals/


This. I just got back into it a couple weeks ago.


You don't need seebox / ratios, trackers don't know how much you really uploaded, as a matter of fact it's your client that send that information, so you can send anything you want.


This is terrible advice. Any tracker worth participating on is monitoring ratio cheating like a hawk.


I think trackers eventually can find out that bad actors and bad them out. If you claimed to have sent 100 kb but nobody reported to have received them then you are flagged.


In 2008, sure. Any worthwhile monkeying of seeding statistics in a largely compliant user base will obviously stick out like a sore thumb.


That’s one of the reasons I kind of gave up on, but it is 2023. I wonder how streamlined piracy has gotten.


Chill.institute (manual) and showrss.info (scheduled TV) + put.io + cronjob running `rclone move` into your Plex media directory is one I've seen that seemed pretty neat.

Entire process is probably faster than finding which service the thing you want to watch is streaming on.


Popcorn time was quite slick when I tried it maybe in 2015 or so.


https://wiki.servarr.com/


Incredibly streamlined. plexshare subreddit.


while I agree that despite fragmentation, it is more accessible, this can be a US-centric view. Even if you're aware of the service that can provide a series, you might need a VPN to subscribe and use.


I don’t see why I should ever have stopped pirating. Advertisements are exploitation. They waste time and distract, as well as deceive. On top of that, companies track your usage, data & location, then go on to sell your info to anyone.

You never truly ‘have’ most paid media either, it can just be deleted out from under you, which I find extremely rude and contrary to ideas of ownership and archival.

I never stopped pirating and never will. Most things I want aren’t available to stream, and I’m not waiting years for some bastard streaming company to ingest the media so I can pay for the privilege of watching it in my Plato-cave.


I had an account for an unnamed streaming service and I really valued contributing to the production of the content with my small contribution. Then I moved from one country to another. After the move I have a credit card issued by a bank in the country I moved to and said streaming service will not accept it as payment. I can't find a way to actually pay them money. It seems the only way to get access is through some bundles with ISPs which sadly do not fit my situation. I find this extraordinarily stupid and I'm not even sure I would call it greedy. It's just counterproductive. I want to give them money, they just seem to have come to the conclusion that money is not fungible, the source matters.


I have a similar problem with BattleBots. I want to pay for it, but they don't want to sell it to me online I believe because they sold the exclusive rights to a cable channel in Canada.

So it's not just that they don't accept credit cards from certain places, they won't sell to you depending of where you are too.


I’ve been fortunate and really can’t bring myself to take things without paying for them. Being a movie and sports fan I pay for (deep breath) Netflix, HBO, Peacock, Disney/Hulu/ESPN, Sunday Ticket, Fubo, Paramount+, Prime, and AppleTV/Music.

I don’t mind the money, except Sunday Ticket which is insanely expensive for something that blacks out the biggest games each week.

What I mind is the complete unusability of having different UIs for each of them, and the lack of any unified schedule/guide. It is bizarre that the only way to find a live football game is to try each of the services that it might be on until found.

I don’t begrudge content creators and distributors their money. I just find it insane that the content choosing user experience is so much worse than 30 years ago.

If someone came out with a 100% pirated live+streaming solution with a unified catalog and schedule, I’d happily use it while still paying for the legit services whose various baroque UXes I wouldn’t miss at all.


I don't think I would ever resort to piracy, as a middle aged guy with a family, the reward is not worth the risk to me plus I am lucky enough to be able to afford to watch what I want if I really want it. With that said the quality of options available on streaming services has really gone down. I am subscribed to Netflix, Prime, Disney+, Apple, Hulu and HBO Max; and there is nothing to watch.

I am likely going to cancel Apple, HBO Max, Hulu and Netflix shortly. My kids like Disney+ although personally I am concerned with the channels attempts to front and center homosexuality targeted at kids. This is a personal issue I am not seeking to change anyone's opinion or mind or lead a boycott against Disney. Its just something that I don't like for my kids. So depending on if the amount of animated LGBTQ content increases on the channel I will likely cancel that as well.


> I am concerned with the channels attempts to front and center homosexuality targeted at kids

This is the first I've heard this complaint. Could you share some examples of this type of content and why it's concerning to you? I don't have Disney+ or kids.


There have been several times, generally during pride month where gay focused shows have been the top items displayed on my kids accounts when they login. Adult accounts are fine. They are animated and kid friendly shows so they encourage children to click on them. Really don't want my kids watching an animated show telling them how to come out.

Another is a large number of recent Disney movies feature LGBTQ main characters such as Strange World. This is fine I am not telling a company what to make but I generally try to limit my kids exposure to homosexuality and the main character in an animated movie being gay makes that difficult and leads to me having to tell my kids they can't watch something while being vague on the reason.

I'm not anti gay, I'm pro gay marriage and pro adults doing whatever they want. I just want to limit my kids exposure to it while they are young. Just a personal choice.


You have the right to parent your kids any way you want, but I want to gently say that if you have a gay kid, this isn't going to make a difference. I knew I was gay (or at least same sex attracted) when I was 5 or 6. And one reason I knew this is that 80+% of movies I watched ended in male + female romances and I didn't get why I didn't like that, so I started searching online. Which is to say if you have a gay kid and are clearly 'don't want to talk about gay things', your kids might end up going to other adults which is not good.

If you do want to avoid all the Pride stuff/gay characters (I mean I'm gay and I agree it's annoying and wish they'd cool it in kid's media) can you VPN or set your location to somewhere that censors the content? China or the Middle East, etc. Usually that's why it's such a small part in Disney productions; they cut it for other countries.


I 100% agree with you, I think that the vast majority of people are gay because they are born that way. I wish gay people nothing but happiness. I think that sexual confusion can arise though when kids are exposed to new ideas / concepts and I just want to delay that exposure as much as I can until they are older (at least middle school). Its just a personal parenting choice; I could be wrong and am ok with that. If my kid ends up gay then he's gay, I love him the same.


I'm not sure what you mean by 'sexual confusion' unless you mean the gay version of me trying desperately to make myself like men? Or something like my sister who thought she was bi for a while because I was the only decent role model she had and I was gay. The reason I mention how young I was is because having romance shoved in my face constantly made me aware by the time I was a kindergartner that something was 'wrong' with me. Now, you do say 'he' and male kids get more of an opt out there, but as a girl child? It wasn't great. Also, what do you fear about the sexual confusion? Do you think your child will be hurt/taken advantage of?

I guess to me the defining line is how are you treating straight romances? Because tbh my thought is that children's media in general goes way too hard into romance and I agree with you that in general prepubescent childhood shouldn't be the time for that - I get major ick from all the het stuff we push on kids and I don't think the answer is 'push our (queer) stuff onto them too!' Like why does The Lion King need a romance? (Also do you worry about things like that turning them into furries?) Basically, are you consistent or do you single out homosexuality?

(Also thank you for engaging; it's hard to have conversations about this that don't devolve into name calling. There are pretty legitimate reasons to not want a kid to turn out gay if there is a nurture component: It severely limits their partners and/or opens them up to abuse from culture around them. It's obvious why a parent wouldn't want that for their child.)


I think your personal experience actually captures my concern: "Or something like my sister who thought she was bi for a while because I was the only decent role model she had and I was gay"

Kids are very malleable at a young age and they build themselves based on the rolemodels and influences they are exposed to. I take this into consideration when deciding what they can watch. As to your question on do I apply the same concerns to depictions of straight romances, to a point but very much not to the same degree. I am biased in that I would prefer my kids be straight, generally for selfish reasons such as wanting my kids to have kids of their own but also for general reasons such as its just an easier life for a straight kid than a gay one. I am not advocating for gay kids to have harder lives, its just unfortunately the facts on the ground. I don't let my kids watch anything that is openly sexual though, gay or straight. I know the furries question is a throw away but it does raise a point. I think a lot of sexual fetishes (not including homosexuality here) are due to exposure to them via media. No one wakes up and thinks I'm a sexual [insert animal of your choice]. They are exposed to it via media and it sparks a flame [the nurture component]. I try to limit my kids exposure to media that I think could influence them in ways I prefer they not be influenced.


That's a very fair approach.

One thing I will also note is - and I do mean this in a gentle way - that placing pressure on your child to have children of his own might not just backfire if he's gay. Half of my family is conservative (the other half is progressive) and very Catholic, and my cousin who is infertile has had a terrible time of it. Or if your straight son's wife is infertile. Or if your child ends up disabled and unable to commit to parenting. That may be something you want to work on in the coming decades, partially because if you are a part of conservative leaning communities (like if you're religious) you need to be there for your child if they can't meet those expectations for whatever reason.


What you say is a fair caution. I have not openly told my kid that I expect them to have kids, its just an internal hope. The only thing I really pressure them on currently is trying their best at school and whatever sports they choose to play (the what is up to them except I make them take boxing). If they try their best and still don't do well then its on me for not sitting down with them to explain things they were having an issue with or it just is what it is, no blame. As far as conservative leanings, I'm not religious and prior to reaching my current age was actually fairly liberal (but not the crazy kind). I think getting older and having kids has tempered that and given me more of a conservative political bent but hopefully not the crazy kind :)


I know I'm not going to change your mind, but this viewpoint just seems so strange and morbidly fascinating. What exactly does "exposure to homosexuality" even mean? These shows and movies aren't depicting gay sex. They aren't trying to convince straight kids that they are gay. They aren't even advocating politics. What specific content do you object to? My kid is Disney movie aged, and we've watched em all--it's exhausting. But, I've never seen anything even remotely objectionable. "Gays exist" is about as far as any of them go. Is that really what's objectionable?


While I cannot speak for OP, I have noticed that some people seem to view non-straight orientations as inherently sexual. To those people any reference to having a same sex spouse (or that you date members of the same sex, etc.) is equivalent to mentioning that you engage in BDSM. I do think most people would be weirded about about a kids show having characters that mention they are into BDSM would be weird and inappropriate.

Of course mentioning that you are not straight is no more inherently sexual than mentioning that you have an opposite sex spouse, or that you like people of the opposite sex romantically.

Honestly, I think a large part of the issue is use of the phrase "homosexual" in many places where "homoromatic" would be better (and people equating the word "gay" with homosexual, rather than homoromantic). In plenty of circumstances discussing who you find hot or who you are sleeping with would be inappropriate, while mentioning who you are dating, or married to would not be inappropriate.

For example, I probably should not know who my boss is sleeping with, but it would not be weird to know who they are married to, if not married, to know their long term dating partner. The fact that most people sleep with those they date, and that their romantic orientation tends to align with sexual orientation is not really relevant.


I agree with this to a point but I think a lot of this has to do with the overt sexualization of pro gay demonstrations. Pride parades contain a lot of heightened sexuality. One of the drivers of my point of view (which for me is relatively new) and my aversion to letting my kids watch gay shows was I accidentally drove passed a pride parade with my young kid a while ago and he saw several men walking with their rear ends sexually exposed. Sex vs romantic intentions is often associated with homosexuality but its not only the fault of the people wishing to limit exposure of their kids to it, its also the fault of those advocating for it. I am 100% for adults doing whatever they want sexually in the privacy of their homes, I just disagree with pulling bystanders into it. This is different that romantic displays, if a couple of gay dudes want to walk down the street dressed in a tshirt and jeans holding hands, more power to them.


I do agree that far too many people treat public pride events as kink events, which is really f'ed up.

The most important rule about kink is not to involve unwilling participants. This even includes things like dont go around wearing your gimp mask in public. At a kink convention, sure, i guess that sort of think might be acceptable.

Unfortunately, pride events are in an awkward spot where many have long been associated with queer kink communities, and when organizers or reasonable members of the community try to reign this crap in, they get a lot of pushback from people who don't want to lose the event where they can be kinky in public.

Many pride events would really benefit from either becoming a properly family friend event, possibly with a a contained 18+ area for the kink stuff, or become a fully 18+ event, and setting up so as to minimize exposure to the general public. Sadly not all of them are doing so...


Honestly, I agree with you. (And I'm a lesbian). In my opinion, if we want to be accepted members of the community, we need to hold ourselves to the same standards as any other community members. It's also, unfortunately, a bad cycle: The boring gays like me start staying home and being quiet but then there's nobody around to say 'uh, maybe there should be a public and private distinction in acceptable behavior and attire'.

If we expect people to trust us with their kids, we need to be trustworthy around kids.


Each of us is an inexperienced parent; we can all only do what we think is right. What I think is right may differ from you, and that's completely ok. My main objection to this really started when I saw the short "Out" listed prominently on my kids Disney+ account. Its an animated kid friendly short detailing how to come out to your family. While I don't think that watching a show like this will turn someone gay I do think it can potentially lead to confusion in a kid. My take is that while people are generally born gay, that peoples minds can be changed or confusion introduced, in much the same way that exposure to pornography can induce / awaken sexual fetishes (I am not calling being gay a fetish). I am very open to the fact that I could be completely wrong and I am ok with that. My kids know about gay people and I am always careful to tell them that people are free to live their lives and be happy how they want. In the long run I don't think not allowing my kids to watch a few shows is going to have detrimental affects and just do the best that I can.


> My main objection to this really started when I saw the short "Out" listed prominently on my kids Disney+ account. Its an animated kid friendly short detailing how to come out to your family.

I hate shit like this. It's just pandering to progressive parents who will sit and watch that with their kids. No kid under 9 or 10 is concerned with coming out (or at least they're a very tiny population), and in middle school liking childish things (like twee Disney shorts) is cringe as hell, so they're not watching it. It's all about parents being able to give themselves backpats, which is stupid. Or Disney employees who want to pack themselves on the back for being progressive enough.

Like just from an audience standpoint, it doesn't make sense?


"Or Disney employees who want to pack themselves on the back for being progressive enough"

I think this is the main driver of much of the fault in current society. Not Disney employees but people on the extreme of both political spectrums who are relatively few in number but very loud. They take over the conversation and speak so loudly that everyone else is afraid of objecting for fear of being cancelled or made fun of. Social media has made the issue 100x worse. The majority center who for the most part just want everyone to get along have lost power. Everyone wants to tell everyone else how to live and force their opinions on the public. I just want everyone to be able to live happy quiet lives. This is not a comment hearkening for the return to the "good ol days" as I know that being gay or black was a hundred times harder a few decades ago. Today its no longer ok to be not racist, we have to be radically anti-racist. Its not ok to be pro gay people having equal rights, we have to be be for openly advocating for transexuality in schools. Its all exhausting.


Both filter bubbles suck. Being a mid-30 something lesbian is great. I either get to hang out in spaces that yell at me for being a degenerate or ones that yell at me because there are aspects of gender theory I think are bunk.

On the left, it's not just that you have to be anti-racist, you have to be anti-racist in the right way. On the right, you can't just be anti-taxation; you have to be all in on Trump and ranting about illegals and drag queens. They both have really offputting authoritarian strands, and a large portion of them get angry if you leave the bubble.

It's tempting to lay all the blame on social media's feet, but I spent a couple of years immersing myself in legal theory for work and I think we're letting Congress and our politicians off too lightly. They're all playing to it and lending it legitimacy because it's easier than actually helping their constituents, in the same way it's easier to focus all their energy on getting elected instead of governing.


Do you also object to content aimed at children that discusses hetero relationships? That could potentially lead to confusion in children who are not heterosexual.


No, I am biased though as I would prefer my kids be heterosexual. I am biased for many reasons, I want grandkids, straight kids & people generally have an easier life (not saying it's a good thing) and it's just what I'm used to. If my kid is gay though then he's gay, I love him the same. I don't let them watch anything overtly sexual though, gay or straight.


I don't want to pay for DRM content.

Piracy is a better alternative. Far less hassle and better quality.

There is some very nice software out there so you can basically have your own private Netflix. Risk is minimal when setup correctly.

People say piracy is stealing. It isn't. It's the natural order of things. People support things with money that they want to see. People see plays, concerts, and movies in theaters all the time. Not letting people share a recording is ridiculous, as is the concept of eternal royalties.

Look at how much art we have that takes from prior art to turn it into something new. Piracy helps that goal. We wouldn't have people like Eminem if he hadn't pirated tapes. Piracy hurts no one, and studies show pirates spend the most on content.

A decade or so from now, no one will be talking about piracy because it will simply be the natural way of sharing, at least in free countries.


Agreed. An argument is that themovie producers won't continue producing movies. Which is false because more money is made in royalties, merchandise, and advertisements on streaming.

Piracy is stealing something measurable, property. If something is not unique or measurable, then what would the value be? So legally, I wouldn't consider it piracy by definition.


I pay for my basically all of my games and music, proving Gabe Newell's old quote about piracy being the result of lack of convenience in the legal method of acquiring things (paraphrasing). Steam is convenient and I still have all access to all the games I bought 10+ years ago. And as for music, I stream it like most people, and also buy vinyl records for albums I particularly like which gives me something tangible and sends the artist some actual money in the process.

Movies and TV shows though, I basically pirate all of it. When it was mostly all on Netflix there was a convenient legal offering to watch a lot of content, but these days I have no idea where anything I want to watch is streaming. And even then, stuff moves around because contracts expire, new deals are formed, etc. And it's even worse if you're outside of the US (Canada in my case). You look up where to watch something and all the results tell you one thing, you go check, and it's not there because there's different distribution in Canada. I don't want to subscribe to 10 services when I'm probably not gonna use most of them in a month, and I'm not spending hours managing which services I'm subscribed to every month because it's a waste of time and it's not like I plan what I'm going to watch that far in advance anyway. Some things are only streamable on some network's website where they expect you to login with your account through a cable provider. So yeah, screw that - I flick my VPN on, load a torrent into my client, refresh my Plex and I'm watching in a few minutes. And half the time it's better quality cause it's a Bluray rip instead of running through an ugly compression algorithm.

I still do what I can to support shows I enjoy so they get some of my actual money -- buying merch or physical copies of the show/movie. But even if I buy a physical copy I still usually end up just watching it through my Plex server cause it's more convenient than grabbing a disc from my shelf and loading it into the disc drive that my current PC doesn't even have.


As I've gotten older, I think my morals have gotten more defined. I no longer think that piracy is acceptable. Someone spends time and money to produce something, and I think they get the right to sell it however they like.

My choice, of course, is to pay for the content, or just not to consume it. I don't believe I have an inherent right to consume any content I want for free. The counter argument is usually that a copy of creative content doesn't take anything away from the author, but I don't really buy into that one.


That’s interesting, because as I’ve gotten older, I don’t think piracy is good or bad (or in general, my taste for amorality is much more refined), just a strategic counter attack on an opposing force that is just as fluid in its tactics.

We approached a middle ground of pricing and accessibility, but it only lasted so long. The other side over monetized, so the consumer has to counter attack and stop paying.

It’s a wild bargaining scheme, we are in a digital bazaar. Never give up a tool in your tool shed.


I don't think that someone else acting immorally gives me the license to also act against my morals, but that's just me.

If I think that Amazon is being unfair about how they make Rings of Power available, that's totally fine, I just don't consume it.


Interesting, as I've grown older, I have had to actively try and keep my morals defined.

Constantly seeing people behave badly and get rewarded for it has increasingly led to me to believe that obeying the rules is a fools game.


On the other hand, not consuming the content vs pirating it doesn't change the outcome for the creator - if anything, piracy is slightly better as it still keeps the content relevant in the collective mindshare so that others who don't pirate (either due to moral or technical reasons) might buy said content.


This is incredibly true. Wow.


I'm curious whether you use an ad blocker. The same reasoning could apply: the website has posted a price (some of your time, attention, and compute resources), and the choice is whether to pay the price or not engage in the transaction.


I do use an ad blocker, but more as an 'early warning system'. I generally use it less as a way to get around ads, and more as a way to understand how many there are, and avoid those sites.


Regarding your last paragraph, could you expand a bit on why you believe that copying creative content does indeed remove something from the author?

I guess the usual argument is that a copy of something cannot, by definition be theft. The author still has the object in question.

Sometimes people counter by saying that a potential sale has been lost, but you can’t steal something that you didn’t have in the first place (the sale). The assumption that someone would have otherwise paid always seems to me a bit of a stretch.

I guess you have thought about this more than i have so I’m curious as to what you’ve come up with.


Sure! These are my opinions of course.

If I spend a lot of time, effort, or money creating something, I may have plans to try to make money on it. If many people copy it for free, they may not be stealing as physical object from me, but they are removing my ability to generate revenue from them based off of my time, effort, or money.

And of course, taking it to the extreme, people simply will stop creating works. Or, some folks may not be able to afford to create works.

I'm well aware that most here won't agree with me, but I think it's on the creator to be able to determine what they want to do with their creations, and that it's not ok for me to arbitrarily tell them that their work is completely worthless, except I really really want to utilize it.


I think, from an emotional perspective re works i create, i feel the same.

The bit i feel unsure about is if it really removes my ability to generate revenue. To make that claim I’d have to be sure the people that have copied would have otherwise paid. I’m not at all confident that i could assert that.


I agree, I'm not sure that you could prove it.

I think there's also some intersection between cost and ease to pirate as well. Having not really pirated anything for many years, I was shocked when a friend showed me how easy it was with their Plex setup to just grab whatever TV show they wanted. The only anecdotal evidence that I have is that another friend who was with me saw the Plex setup, and within a week had cancelled several subscriptions and switched to Plex.


> And of course, taking it to the extreme, people simply will stop creating works. Or, some folks may not be able to afford to create works.

Being broke has never prevented artists from making great art. In fact, historically and today, the majority of artists have never been fairly compensated for their work, even with insane copyright laws. I do believe that artists should be correctly compensated for their work if they wish it, like any other work, but copyright laws (even if introduced as a way to protect artists) have been transformed into something that doesn't protect the artists, but the copyright holders (which are most of the time record labels and big companies).

Here is the point of view from musical artists:

You have two major scenarios: - you are a musician which does not produce original music. Then you make your money with gig playing mostly (weddings, venues, orchestras, ...). Copyright law is not siding with these musicians, and these musicians don't care about piracy. - you are a composer which produces original music. Here again, copyright law doesn't help, artists are trapped to distribute their music through either record labels or popular streaming services which don't care about their artists (spotify will pay artists 0.004$ per stream).

Often, musicians will be doing both (composing and playing at gigs). But most of the money to be made is in gigs, and maybe a fan base that will buy your CDs and come to your concerts. Distributing your music on popular streaming services is just a way to grow your own fan base, not to make money. So piracy can even help here by making the music even more accessible.

What I want to say is that from the point of view of musicians, copyright law doesn't help. Sometimes it even works against you: if you are a classical musician and putting some public domain music (that you played yourself) on youtube, you will be inevitably copystriked by some random record label that doesn't give a shit about you and there is nothing you can do. Copyright law also prevents musicians to rearrange popular music, to make transformative art unless you pay some fees. You can't play music from somebody even if the author has been dead for 50 years. And these fees won't probably go to the other musician you are arranging from, but to the copyright holder (which will be a record label or big company).


I wish the UX of streaming services wasn't so horrible. That is what makes me most want to go back to a Kodi box.

I want a personal collection of movies, imagine a bookshelf of my favorites.

But all the streaming services are like having a messy Blockbuster Video in my living room, which I don't want.


Alternative viewpoint: Their (movie, song, game and book content producers) problem is not piracy, it's being ignored.

Right now there is much more competition for eyeballs than there ever was in the past (social networks, video shorts, etc). People only have so many hours in the day for entertainment, and these alternative eyeball-grabbers are can only gain eyeballs at the expense of traditional eyeball-grabbers.

For example ...

I've got Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+, and the last time I saw a movie on TV was in 2021, the last series I watched to completion was The Boys (and Umbrella Academy).

I'm literally paying for tons of stuff I am not going to see; is it reasonable to think that I am going to go out of my way to search for, then download something?


Nowadays it's fairly automated


I mostly play smaller or indie games, which have less aggressive monetization.

If I were to go and play the latest AAA like Assassin's Creed or whatever, I would definitely pirate it, but the game doesn't call to me anyway. Not only due to pricing and additional monetization, but mainly to remove the invasive DRM these kinds of titles use.

YouTube Premium I do the janky family sharing thing that makes the price tolerable, but it pays creators better so that's good.

Spotify, I'm on the verge of just going and pirating all the songs I want, because their UI is optimized for entirely the opposite way I listen to music (this could be a rant by itself).

Movies, I never stopped pirating. Just figuring out where I can find a movie in the quality and language I want requires being up to date on the existence, platform support, and terms of like 10 services. And yes, justwatch exists but A) I only watch like one movie a month, but most movies can't be rented, and are only available in a subscription which is a hassle to sign up and cancel every month, not to mention the expense. Versus pirating, where I can use 1 piece of software that will aggregate all the movies and series in the world and provide with an unified access.


The Spotify rant:

Here's how I listen to music: entire specific albums, in tracklist order, maybe queue up a couple albums. I always know what I want to listen before even thinking of opening a music player. Maybe the odd playlist if it's say, a game soundtrack that doesn't have a single album release.

Here's how Spotify fucks it up:

Home page shows a couple recent albums, which might or not be what I want to listen to. Despite the set of music I listen to being mostly fixed, it is not small, so it doesn't fit in the single row of big album art buttons.

It also shows recommendations, which as I described, have 0 value to me, and in fact, are of negative value when they take space of features that would have positive value.

The side bar has a couple options, but most of the space is dedicated to playlists ("create playlist", the button I never clicked, as well as "liked songs" and a list of arbitrary playlists). As I don't use playlists most of the time, the ones that do show up are a random smattering of previous listens.

I then click the "Your Library" tab. First of all, I was walking through the app while writing this, and a full modal to some random ass merch ad showed up. (related to the silly Wrapped thingy) I am a paying user, why am I seeing ads?

Anyways, the first page in Your Library is always Playlists, which, as previously estabilished, are useless to me. So another click to go to the Albums tab.

The albums tab is pretty alright, maybe not very information dense, and no categorization options, but it works.

Now, let me set up my listening. I go to album A, click play. It starts playing album A, brilliant. Then I go to album B, which I would like to play after album A, so I click "add to queue", which for some reason is hidden behind a "..." menu even though there more than half a screen of empty space in the row of buttons where it lies.

Did you spot what I did wrong? Playing an album plays the first song in the album, and puts the rest in the "up next" part of the queue, but queueing an album queues all its songs in the "queue" part of the queue. "up next" goes after "queue", so this means I will hear song A1, then B1, B2, [...], then A2, A3, [...]

But wait, There's more! Last time I used Spotify, I did not finish listening to the queued songs! Blimey me, there were still some songs from album C in there! So actually, my listening order is A1, C7, C8, B1, B2, [...], A2, A3, [...]. No, bad user, you did the incantation wrong!

So my usual workflow for using this blasted application is:

Open the app.

Click the tiny "queue" icon that has no indication about if there are things there or not.

Click "Clear queue"

Click "Your Library"

Click "Albums"

Select the album I want.

Click the "..."

Click "Add to queue"

Go back to the album list

Click the other album

Click the "..."

Click "Add to queue"

Rinse and repeat.

---

I don't even particularly mind having the feature of storing the queue for the future, it has been useful a couple times, but the fact that everything is hidden behind a million pages of useless bullshit is infuriating.

Compare it, for example, to the Elisa player on KDE, which is pretty simplistic, it gets it right! Straight to the music, the playlist ("queue" in Spotify terminology) is visible so I can immediately see and clear it if I want, playing an album doesn't put its song in the limbo queue...

Even the good old Windows Media Player has a fantastic library UI that goes straight to the point!


I've heard that playing an album costs more in royalties than a playlist, since a playlist is more like radio which has lower royalty payments. So it's probably not a coincidence that the UI is heavily optimized for radio style playlists.


Open to it? I practice it when I find it the appropriate response to the market.

I will usually pirate video under one or more of the following conditions:

- I already own or owned a copy of the film at some point in my life

- The film or show isn't available for streaming or even purchase

- The streaming quality is vastly inferior to the format I can pirate

- The film or show can be streamed but with no option besides "free with ads"

- I have good reason to believe that those responsible for making the film won't receive a red cent

I've been finding myself pirating more often recently because I find the quality of streaming video to often be intolerable. It may be alright for brand spanking new shows, but I like to watch a lot of older content, and the quality of the video often totally blows. I'm talking a crapton of compression, and what I suspect to be upscaled standard def rather than actual HD or 4k.

What blows my mind is that a ~250mb mkv file I torrented in under 30 seconds usually blows streaming quality out of the water. I get that torrents are on a much smaller scale, but come on, it's peer to peer file delivery that it almost immediately ready to watch with no buffering or ads or massive disk space needed.


>"free with ads"

I am learning to despise Amazon for this crap. As someone who still finds massive value in AMZ, they have poisoned the well and I feel that it is just a matter of time before I flush this company out of my life.


Yeah I feel the same way. Though I've yet to be truly scammed by their regular storefront as others have claimed, their catalogue is becoming increasingly useless to me. Way too much crap from Alibaba being sold on there under fake sounding brand names (OFTEN IN UPPERCASE FOR SOME REASON) and with thousands of reviews that don't sound legit. At this rate of decay, I don't see how Amazon isn't destined for some kind of correction.

Same goes for YouTube, despite being a very different kind of service. Their search is now virtually useless, everyone is using codewords to get around their draconian content policies, the number of ads that appear on the YouTube smart TV app is completely absurd, their web interface is full of bugs, old content is now difficult if not impossible to surface in many cases, and the overall kind of content now is repetitive and PG rated in all categories. Though I doubt that YouTube ever made a profit (or at least a sustained one), it just seems like the status quo is neither a good one nor one that can be sustained even by The Google.

All of these companies seem in trouble long-term, really. The one thing Amazon really has going for it is AWS. Yeah, The Google has their own cloud stuff, but let's face it, enough people have learned their lesson that anyone in their right mind wouldn't be hosting a new web service through them.


I'm doing a bit of both.

I think it's fair that artists are rewarded for their work, so I pay for one global service per type of content : Netflix for movies and TV shows, Youtube Premium for music.

However, I abhor the game of 'selling rights to certain platforms for certain duration only in certain countries', and I don't want to have to handle half a dozen subscription just because someone in the marketing team somewhere decided that this movie was going to be exclusive to this platform.

So my go to is, if I want to watch something, I first try to find it on my legal paid platform, and if I can't find it there, I'll pirate it.

Works pretty well so far.


This is my philosophy as well. I think it's a balanced approach. You are supporting the industry but also yourself. Even with this approach, I torrent much less now because there is so much high quality content that I can pay for.


There's just more content that I want to watch than I have time, or attention, to watch. I only subscribe to Netflix and Disney+; and Disney+ is because I have young children. (I also subscribe to YouTube music, but I consider that a different form of entertainment. And I subscribe to Amazon, but that's for free shipping.)

Most of the time, if I want to watch something that's not part of one of these existing subscriptions, I can rent it for a small fee. I only rent 2-4 times a year. If I think the kids will want to re-watch it, I buy the Bluray. I only buy a few a year.

So, would I go back to piracy? Well... I have to really want to watch it, it has to be missing from my streaming and rental services, and I have to "not care enough to rewatch" to not buy the Bluray. The last thing I pirated, I reminded myself that I've watched it enough to justify buying it outright.

IMO: What we need is copyright reform along with piracy. Copyright should only be protected if an asset is available online instantly at a fair price. Otherwise, if the asset isn't available at a fair price, piracy should be 100% legal.


I am. Fuck playing unfinished, unoptimized games for only 69.99 and paying for a dozen streaming services to watch shows.

Why exactly did music piracy go downhill? Because you can just pay 10 bucks (or a fiver if you're a student) per month and have pretty much everything available at high quality.


Let me share my perspective on piracy as a citizen of Russian Federation who don't think about relocation.

I was a youtube/Spotify/last.fm/[smth other I don't remember] subscriber before 2022.

Actually it was kind of pride in younger population in Russia for games: "I pay for all games I like".

My son, my friends has hundreds of games bought on Steam.

That was a big step actually.

How sanctions worked?

For me: - youtube/youtube music - I was a subscriber, so it was for me: "No advertisments, ability to support channels, ability to listen youtube videos on locked phone". Now: no advertisements for all Russia - which is great. Not able to listen on locked phone - irritating. Support channels (I'm a WH40K fan) - thru direct donations

- spotify - I still think that last.fm was the best

- netflix, amazon, etc - sorry, I have no options, except eztv, kickass, piratebay, etc. Nothing new

My POV: Piracy is not a problem. Piracy is a solution. When everything else failed.


I get the financial thing

but it's a bit stupid to cut off a country from shows. This is lost soft power, and gives more space for Putin's shows.

Russia no longer being able to watch shows demonstrates what 'content' is now about : 'content' that consumers pay for. They're no longer about meaning, meant to be provocative, influential, spark a discussion, or anything. They are meant to be sold, not actually viewed.


The stupidest thing was that a lot of youtube channels in Russia were not monetized by views, they relied on subscriptions.

WH40K channels particularly: they don't have large audience, it's a hobby not for everybody but board-games fans usually earn more than average.

So "sanc you" hit the most on those absolutely apolitical guys.

They were apolitical before, they're apolitical even more now.

What was changed: - every significant channel is still alive - youtube lost their fraction of paymenents - now everything goes without them - channel owners .. I suppose they lost a bit of income. Now they rely on online donations more than it was previously

I don't understand what was the idea behind all that.

>> Russia no longer being able to watch shows demonstrates what 'content' is now about : 'content' that consumers pay for. I suppose that you did not understood: I'm able to watch *everything* now and it's the same as before. Nothing changed for me.

The real problem today is to find something interesting. Something that worth it's time to see. It's not a lot in 2022 - 5 fingers enough to count


For journal articles, absolutely. For software, never. For movies and tv shows, I'd prefer not to but some content is simply unavailable now except maybe on ebay in the form of used discs. As far as there being too many streaming services, life is short and I don't want to spend too much of it watching content so it's easy to do without if some individual show is the only thing a particular service has on it that I'm interested in.


The only real issues that have "encouraged considerations of piracy" for me are the drive toward subscription for things that don't involve recurring costs to service me, and the generally abysmal quality of everything in the absence of a free trial/sample.

Beyond that, piracy must be among the top 3 motivations for companies to senselessly subscription-ify everything, so engaging in it is at least participating in incentivizing that behavior.


Music is a non-issue with services competing on features rather than exclusive content.

I pirate games that cost more than ~$20 and don't provide a demo. If I enjoy the game then I'll usually buy it after an hour or two, especially indie games.

I'm done with movie/TV streaming services. Their business model and user experience is garbage while piracy provides a significantly better ease of use, overall UX and content quality. I'll reconsider paying for these services when they start competing on features and pricing rather than content exclusivity that varies by geographical region.

I'll buy e-books as long as the price is "reasonable", don't expect me to pay more for an e-book than a physical copy.


I've done this, pirate a game just to find out if it's any good. I don't do full playthroughs. If the game is good, I'll buy it. 99% of the time it just gets deleted after an hour.


I’m kind of with you on this with the games. Going down the whole “ethical” piracy is a moral conundrum, so let me not go there.

However, pirating a game to try it out as a demo before buying seems very legitimate. I have truly spent 30-60 bucks on one game to realize I won’t play it more than a few hours.

Technically, this loophole can be fixed on Steam if they have a 15 day return policy no questions asked. That seems very reasonable, but they don’t. Their early-access stuff is a huge money sink. Game pass is a step in the right direction, but their library is limited.


I already gave up and installed Plex along with the *arr apps on my home server.

I still pay for Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube premium etc. but I find myself many of the times I want to watch something, I just use my home server rather than even checking if they exist on Netflix or Prime video.

Can’t give up YouTube premium, but probably will stop having Netflix as soon as they block password sharing.


I want to be back to piracy. Not specifically for money, but for quality subtitles :

I want translations that are close to the original content, not an adaptation that nearly destroys its meaning.

Until a decade ago, Japanese right owners were hardly interested in broadcasting content in my area. Fansub teams would provide subs for content as long as it wasn't licensed. (it was in order to make it available, but most of them didn't want to compete with companies who would actually develop the content). This resulted in a range of subs, each with a different trades-off between pure translations and adaptation. If you got a subtitle from a team that offered a close translation, you had much more meaning, but you had to understand a bit of what was going on.

We also had the opportunity to make the shows a bit of our own by discussing about its meaning and by reflecting on it, in order to write the subtitles. The we could compare subtitles and what each team understood.

Now most commercial services destroy that meaning. They take the show away : you're just a consumer/viewer without a say (don't forget to purchase a shirt to make the show your own) They adapt it with a lot of approximations, and remove the quirks and rudeness to make it ok for the most viewers. (yes, shonen characters are rude, you can ride a mamachari and it's not just a bicycle on which you're an angry cyclist, -kun / -chan / -dono have a meaning, ...)

I no longer enjoy to watch anime with commercial services, that's just bland. They just want to do a western show with a Japanese show. And since I used to be in a fansub team with the 'as long as it wasn't licensed' clause, I and don't approve of piracy, so I just no longer watch this content as much as I could. (now US shows like South Parks feel more mature)

I find it a shame that governments went all over the place to find dichotomies to break down public services on behalf of free competition (operating train isn't maintaining rails, selling power isn't maintaining lines and power plants,...), but that you can't just purchase a license for movie and its subtitles separately.


For movies I’m ditching the streaming subscriptions and back to digital rentals.

Most of the old movies are available for $2.99 from Amazon Prime Video.

A couple clicks from the smart tv is worth a few bucks to me compared to finding the torrent then finding a way to get it in the TV.

Watching classic films is more fulfilling than the latest steaming fad.

If you try to consume quality over quantity the monetization isn’t too bad IMHO.


I think piracy is born from overcoming economic inaccessibility, and sometimes convenience. In the case of a hypothetical teenager I once knew as well as myself, it was the desire to learn professional tools but they were faced with economic inaccessibility. Subscription services has made that cheaper, but with the volume of subscriptions required one might think we should go back. That hypothetical adult now though doesn't feel they need to do that because the open source ecosystem is amazing with a little technical nohow, but they wouldn't have learned that nohow without pirating professional tools early on.


The day Disney+ launched, I bought a Usenet subscription. I've since cancelled Netflix, because they kept removing shows as I was watching them, then kept increasing the price, and finally added advertisements. I've stuck with Ad-free Hulu, because my kids watch a lot of shows on it, and it's been working very well. I tried Paramount+, but it doesn't work if you have a Pi-Hole, it just refuses to play anything unless you allow ads, no matter what level you pay for. Not for me.

Piracy isn't perfect, but it never shows me ads, never removes shows, and doesn't try to recommend anything to me.


I've tested recently a very "refined" ipTV service that for the price of a single "mainstream" subscription "aggregates" all the newest content of all services + TV + Non Subscription services Movies, they provide simple to use apps for all Smart TV platforms, OS and phones, great user experience, 1 single account and app for everything. Clearly all this is illegal but in a way, removes the direct legal risk of downloading stuff yourself, I got the feeling these type of offers will start to grow a lot soon, sadly we know this type of services will never be legal.


Refined like „elegant“?


I mean, alternative services I tested required to download and install some very fishy feeling apps or browser plugins, the whole experience to setup was not user friendly, not the case here, very nice and functional app directly from the official app stores. Also very smooth payment options from crypto to regular bank debits (Non US / EU locations).


Give a hint as to what it is please.


I don't typically condone piracy because I think it's important to compensate writers/actors/artists, but I do feel angry about the state of things. Physical media is looking relatively good in many cases. Discs are a hassle but at least then you know what you have after a glance at the shelf; there have been several times I bought something a la cart on Amazon / Apple / Vudu and only later realized it was actually available on a streaming service I was subbed to. Even if I'm willing to pay up (and we usually keep 2-3 subs at a time), the UX of checking each platform to see if something is available is absurd.

There's also the issue of content just randomly disappearing off streaming services for no good reason. Even big-budget, big-name shows like Westworld have now fallen prey to this. Big parts of our culture can just get thrown in the bin if some MBA decides it's what's needed to squeeze a few more pennies out of their bottom line? To me, that is unacceptable. The cultural preservation angle is the best thing about piracy IMO.

Even with all the madness, some content doesn't seem available anywhere for any price. I recently tried to track down The Abyss (1989), a scifi classic by James Cameron. It's currently not on any digital platform and the physical discs appear to be out of print. The only way to watch this movie seems to be piracy or buying a second-hand disc on eBay.


Physical media second-hand market is surprisingly good nowadays. Use reputable sellers and buy discs rated "good" or below with caution.


+1 to this. A whole load of movies that Disney and Netflix want to get behind a subscription are $2 at Goodwill or another thrift store. A DVD drive and Handbrake will place the movie on your computer for you.


Not speaking personally, of course, and I do not like the word piracy, but.

The tech is on the side of those who wish to share. The idea of sharing is 100% identical to the entire point of libraries.

I have no problem with shaming and otherwise encouraging people into paying things that they should pay for if they can.

I have a huge enormous problem with directing law-enforcement and other restrictive and punishing actions to individuals for consuming things they want to consume, when the marginal cost to do so is zero.


I went from full piracy as a teen to paying for everything as an adult. However, recent price hikes, password crackdowns, removed content, and fragmentation have changed my mind. It’s now easier just to rent a seedbox in another country and setup Plex, so I do that.

Funnily enough, it costs me what a couple of streaming services used to cost <$30/mo. But I don’t have these annoying restrictions.

It’s not about the money. It’s about wanting to preserve access, easily, to my favorite shows that I love to rewatch.


Never stopped, never will. Radarr and sonarr already give me superior UI/UX than the godawful streaming service UIs, plus I never have to worry about a favorite song or show or movie suddenly going poof out of existence.

Plus, y'know, free.


For me it is a convenience factor. Even when I have subscriptions with what I want to watch, I eventually found myself often just downloading it because it is easier than thinking about what service a show will be found on.

Spotify has this down since it is rare that they don't have the music I want. I happily pay for and use this subscription.

Games are also easy to find since on PC it is a quick Google that gives a direct link to the correct store. It is still annoying when things aren't on Steam but the friction of finding the game to play is minimized by using Playnite to collate all the different services after I buy the game.

Movies and TV are just a mess that is driving people to pirate. The media companies got greedy and prevented Netflix from becoming the one stop shop for all media. Watching on the TV means that even figuring out which service to use sucks and it is a terrible user experience.

Another complaint is live sports, I would happily subscribe to Dazn if they had every sports league on it. But since they don't have some sports I want to watch then the subscription just isn't worth it. Similarly, blackouts on the sport specific services make them a non-starter.


I don't agree with money being the issue. While I think copyright is far too long, most of the stuff people complain about would be well within coverage even at the original 14 years. I don't think it's wrong for creators (including companies) to set prices as they wish.

What does bother me though and I do think is genuinely against the core public bargain of copyright is when material simply isn't available at all, or when copyright holders attempt to extract rights beyond copyright via layering DRM and such on top. The whole reason the public grants copyright is to encourage the creation and availability of quality IP. If IP isn't available at all in a given market for a reasonable period of time, IMO it should lose copyright protection. I'd support a separate "credit right", whereby for a long period of time after expiration of copyright anyone making derivative works would need to reasonably prominently credit the original with links, but copyright should never be about keeping things away from the public, that's literally the polar opposite of the point. I should be able to go buy a DRM-free FLAC or the like of music or DRM-free MKV of movies I'm interested and then use them on all of my devices, and be able to do that for any content made anywhere in the world (at least within Berne convention type countries, which is most of them). With books, original music and so on, the protection was the law and that was that. That's what it was all built around. Copyright holders should not be able to have it both ways, to get legal protection and then add tons of stuff beyond legal protection (and lobby to disgustingly and retroactively extend copyright as they frequently did).

So if I go to get something and it's "not available in your region" or exclusively via DRM'd streaming then yes, I'm open to copyright infringement. Even more so and without hesitation if it's just not published at all anymore. Copyright should never, EVER be about REMOVING IP from the public sphere. But if a game is on GOG and they want $60 or $90? Or hell if someone wanted to charge $500 for the Ultra Hyper DigiGigi Polkadot Edition? Then I'll respect that. If it seems worth it I'll get it, if it doesn't I won't, but "monetization" isn't wrong for luxury goods. There is lots of choice, including doing stuff ourselves more easily than ever. What I do think is absolutely wrong is not putting things up for honest direct sale.


For new music (as in recorded and released recently), no. Most of the music I buy is made by artists who probably tour in a van. So, every little sale matters to these folks. And, I'm happy to support them! In regards to some hit record from the 60's that already went 10x platinum (or whatever), I'll grab the free version in a heartbeat.

For movies / tv series, I don't want to bother. I really don't. But, the streaming landscape is just out of control (for lack of a better phrase). Even with just a few services, the signal to noise ratio is heavily noise. Who knew there were so many Christmas movies?! I just want to watch Elf. Oh, it's on the other streaming service? That's weird, it was on here last year!

I just want to buy some of this stuff digitally, so I can watch it without having to Google what service it's on. Or, after Googling it's location, come to find it's been removed recently (looking at you, Netflix). But, a lot of the newer shows are streaming only. Which, leaves one option if you want it on a hard drive.


I just dont understand how media companies cant figure out that its QUALITY over Quantity. I dont want bullshit C list actors coming up with sharknado 3. Ok, maybe I do want that to some degree, but not all the time and everywhere. We get it, its cheap and easy to make. cool. no one wants to watch it and especially no one wants to pay AND watch ads to watch it.


I've been trying to stream/rent Dead Poet's Society in English in Germany for over a month now. It's nowhere to be found. It's like I don't even have a choice here. But I also don't particularly enjoy hunting for pirated content while trying to ensure that it's not full of unconsumable garbage.


It is still cost-benefit thing for me.

When I was young, I did it a lot with Microsoft Office, Photoshop, Movies, MP3, and etc. Because I didn't have money.

I don't pirate anymore because I make money.

In this day of age, piracy has increased risk with malware that mines bitcoin or locks your disk for ransom, so the risk is much higher and effectively lowers the benefit.


> In this day of age, piracy has increased risk with malware that mines bitcoin or locks your disk for ransom, so the risk is much higher and effectively lowers the benefit.

I don't think that's true at all, rather the opposite in fact. Piracy feels much safer now than it was 20 years ago.


Limewire and Kazaa weren't safe?


There was definitely a lot more junk (mislabeled or fake content, viruses, keyloggers, ...) shared on those networks. Even the Kazaa client itself was riddled with dubious adware. Also legit content was of much poorer quality overall.

Today even public trackers are pretty clean. Cryptominers are trivially caught by Windows Defender. Effective ransomware campaigns are targeted at entities that can pay millions, not random individuals.


They were relatively safe.

In 2000, bad actors couldn't do much with your computer. They could get your computer infected with virus for fun, but that was about it.


For me it is not about monetization anymore, it is about convenience. I would gladly pay netflix or any other provider to have access to movies I want to actually watch. Right now it is more about what netflix wants me to watch. So I usually pay netflix for month or two when I there is something I want to watch and cancel subscription shortly after. I think rent/buy model is more sustainable here then pure streaming services.

For games I rarely pirate something, steam/gog/xbox are just too convenient for me. Unless it is something on the platform I don't have, but I still want to play it in an emulator.

Music is sort of middle ground. I am ok with content selection major stream providers have now. So basically the only thing I care about is to platform to not mess with me with some bullshit features. I switched from spotify, because I got tired of how their android and mac apps work.


I don't see the need for priracy (yet).

To pay for all streaming services I only need to work 1 hour. This is to pay for Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, Videoland, Disney+, HBO Max and Sky

As for videogames, there's currently a sale on Steam and PSN. That's when I usually buy games. It's very easy to save money but you gotta be patient.


For PSN, I keep a list of games I want to buy as bookmarks to psprices.com.

That lets me periodically check what's on sale, and also see how good the current price is, and what the price trend is.


For the PC gaming market, gg.deals can sync with your Steam wishlist and let you know where to get the best deal.

It's actually possible to get Steam games for a better price outside of Steam from official retailers like Voidu or Green Man Gaming that get their Steam keys directly from the publishers.


100%, and I have hulu, netflix, hbo max etc. I pay for YouTube premium because the amount of savings I've made from it is 10 fold higher than the cost.

It's software that has switched from pay one time per version to subscription only that causes me to feel this way too. And let's not forget what TurboTax has done to the US.


How do you save on YouTube Premium? Is it accounting for the money value of time that you save on ads, replacing another music service, or the value of listening to the videos in background?


I have learned everything from changing brakes, engine work, generators, pond building, house repair, etc. without YouTube I would have spent thousands on various things so the investment in premium is a drop in the bucket. And those who have ads get some money from me being a premium user.


Actually, I kinda like the current way.

I can listen whatever I want via Spotify. If I like the album that much, I can buy it via iTunes or their store, however finding lossless versions are hard.

If I really love the album, I'll buy its vinyl.

If I don't plan to buy the vinyl, and can't find the lossless version or a decent priced CD, I buy the album online and find the lossless version elsewhere.

I'm a former orchestra player. I know how tedious and draining producing music is. It's unethical to just download it and let it be. Before, it was impossible to get decent music without being gouged, so I had to download some of the albums, but it's no more now. Buying prices are accessible, storage is ample, and syncing is easy.

There's no need to screw musicians over it.

I'm not a big movie buff anyway, so if I can stream it legally, I'm fine.


> If I like the album that much, I can buy it via iTunes or their store, however finding lossless versions are hard.

Try Bandcamp.


Ah, yes. I also buy a lot from there.


Games: I rarely use it as demo if I’m not sure about a game. Helped me avoid CP77 ;)

Music: I gave up on my RIAA&Co protest and nowadays just buy the albums, usually on bandcamp. Not using streaming services.

TV: Depends a lot on availability. Sometimes things are not available in English with English subs (I’m in Germany), sometimes not available at all. Don’t have much patience for either issue. Otherwise, I always have Prime and often Netflix.

Movies: I don’t watch movies.

About Amazon Prime, they are finally raising the prices in Germany, from 70€/year to 90€ a year. But besides the streaming being decent, the shipping is a nice bonus (and here Amazon has the best prices quite often, especially if shipping is free), and there’s also Twitch Prime, canceling Prime would mean I’d subscribe to one more channel, which would be almost 50€ a year anyway…


My entertainment consumption has basically moved to reading progression fantasy and litrpg on Royal Road and Kindle Unlimited. It more or less replaced everything, tv, movies, youtube, podcasts, I'd rather just read even if it's not exactly the best writing in the world.


You are my hero. <3


I have never stopped pirating since I got internet. My TV provider gives me Netflix, I have HBO Max through a sweet deal, amazon because of the delivery and Disney because a friend share the account, yet I still download all the shows I want, for example, I downloaded House of the Dragon week after week while I watched it on HBO Max, I think the only episode I watched pirated was the leaked one.

Why? Because I automated this process along time ago and also because I know sooner or later I am going to stop paying for that and this way I am prepared for it, because I don't have Apple or Rakuten, or many others. Because I have my own library of stuff (paid, and pirated) that goes back decades and I can access it from anywhere in the world.


For listening music piracy isn't worth it. The streaming solutions of Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music ... are pretty good.

With a family plan it comes down to less than 3 dollars a month.

For video, the story is completely different. I would have to subscribe to 3 to 5 subscriptions and the experience varies. Netflix sucks immensely [0]. I pay for netflix and prime, but have to run my own Plex Server. When you run your own Plex Server, you also run Sonarr and Radarr. Now you don't care anymore, just add the movie, 10 minutes later i can watch it.

Setting it up maybe a little a hassle, but when it runs ... its god like.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33451725


Never stopped it in the first place. Never got into streaming. Never had a single subscription.

Every time I see someone struggle with streaming services (content not available, DRM, shitty artificial limitations, shitty players, shady business practices, things you "bought" disappearing because licensing changed), I get reminded that piracy is just so much better. Find a torrent, download it, done. After you've downloaded it, you have it forever, it's not going anywhere.

On the OP question, of course I do still watch YouTube, and of course I don't pay for it. I run uBO + SponsorBlock + some userscripts for a barely bearable experience. To be honest, the modern web is literally unusable without an ad blocker anyway.


We haven't had cable TV here in almost 20 years. But we've had some type of high-speed internet and on a business account...which never has data caps of course.

Back then, much of our TV viewing was with the old Netflix DVD-through-the-mail thing, and then various torrent sites. When more and more streaming services started popping up, I torrented less and less to being zero. But now with the shake-up with some of the streaming services (like HBO Max), you just can't get some of the shows anymore...or else you have to buy entire seasons from Amazon or wherever. I haven't resorted to it yet, but I can see how pirating will take a new upswing as the streaming services keep damaging themselves.


Havent left the seven seas since ive discovered it a decade ago. At this point the inconvenience of finding things doesnt even feel burdensome for myself and for the few i provide things. Not even in a private tracker, just a few semi private ones


Aye, aye!


Some of the problems I think I’m seeing around streaming right now is that every media conglomerate is trying to extract the most they can from consumers. Media companies are debasing cable packages and streaming cable-like packages (Sling, etc.) where their channels and on-demand content is aging and lowering in quality and availability. They increasingly seem like platforms to advertise the Plus versions of services where valued content and new original content is moving rapidly to paid streaming, e.g. Discovery+, Paramount+, HBO+, Disney+, etc.

While this extraction reality sucks but I feel like there’s a game to play here that’s still better than piracy though.


Aside from a brief (ten film) dip into piracy just so I could see how this BitTorrent thing worked about fifteen or so back, I never really pirated anything.

Now, though, I feel like I am getting gouged from one side, nickel and dimed from another. I am especially considering it for music -- chasing down out of print stuff has begun to annoy me. If they can't keep it in print, then I think they should give up copyright. I'd be willing to support legislation to that extent. We'd have to close a lot of loopholes as to what "in print" meant, mind you.

Plus, sharing my extensive music collection, which contains some rarities, might not be the worst thing.


I never stopped pirating, I watch movies once a week at most.

All my friends rely on streaming services, every few weeks we have a movie night, 50% of the time we can't find the movie we plan on watching even though they have 4 or 5 services, and when we find the movie we have another 50% chance of it not being available in OV.

Even when it works flawlessly, and even if you pay for the "Uber+ 8k topmaxi over resolution" option you have the same bitrate as when you were buying a DVD for 3 euros in 2005

Also, 90% of the created content is absolute garbage, sometimes we boot netflix just to scroll for literally 20 minutes in quest for something to watch before giving up


All my friends rely on streaming services, every few weeks we have a movie night, 50% of the time we can't find the movie we plan on watching even though they have 4 or 5 services, and when we find the movie we have another 50% chance of it not being available in OV.

That can literally be an SNL bit. So funny.


Where I am, there are frequent power cuts or Internet is down because of a storm. We do have a generator so we can keep on living. I hate the fact tho that I'm not able to pay for content I paid for : movies, fitness classes, music etc.

So looking to build a media server full of content, via legal means or piracy!

Another motivation is while I'm ok paying now, what about in 20 or 30 years time? Maybe there will be a time where I want to discard my credit card, but still want to be able to enjoy movies. I would have paid then thousands of dollars to streaming services. A media server with my favorite content sounds like a better bet.


For TV and Movies I'm very open to piracy because I often find that when I want to watch something it is, for some reason, only available on some obscure streaming service I don't have. Sometimes it is on Prime or Paramount Plus, but only if I pay extra.

Fuck that noise.

For games though, I have no problem with the state of things. For a while Epic exclusives were annoying, but I just refrained from buying those games until they were on Steam or GoG or something and Epic seems to have become much less aggressive about it now anyway.

Steam: still more convenient than piracy.

TV/Movie streaming: rapidly becoming less convenient than piracy.


Piracy has driven and given political cover to all all sorts of abusive technology.

This was entirely predictable, I and others pleaded decades ago that exactly this would happen, but people just wanted free stuff. And here we are.

Yes, the big media companies are often unlikeable. But US piracy gives up any high ground, and helps grease the push of further anti-consumer conventions and legislation. "Lawmakers, don't let big media do this latest anti-consumer thing (while we are taking their paid product for free)!" doesn't have a lot of credibility.


It's not the questionable popularity of piracy driving anti-freedom technology and legislation. If it were, the push for such things would have dried up as streaming became extremely popular. Rather, executives intrinsically want the top-down centralized control they enjoy in their businesses to extend to individuals' computers. The law has created an exclusive right for them, and so they're going to do everything possible to make that right as broadly enforced as possible, decentralization and progression of society be damned.

The entertainment industry has yet to create a watch-at-home offering that matches the experience of piracy. Starting with the "FBI" Warning, unskippable advertising, DVD menu screen loop, the connectivity and locked-down device requirements of streaming, fragmented bespoke UIs, memory-holing content, and trustees of "purchased" digital content straight up pulling exit scams. These are all anti-patterns that revolve around taking a customer's purchase/attention for granted and feeling entitled to abuse it.

It's up to the industry to create sane offerings first. I would be quite interested in a paid service that was accessible with libre software, that dropped plain unencrypted files on my hard drive alongside my existing library, viewable with Kodi/mpd/mpv like my existing library, with the option to redownload as long as the company stayed around. But without something like that existing? Why would I suffer the world of streaming, with the constant whinging about some service dropping some show, some device type being deprecated, heavy proprietary clients burning my CPUs for fun, forced software updates causing the setup to fail when I just want to relax (or with music, want to put it on and be productive at other stuff) - especially knowing that some of my money would be going to support the ongoing attempts to continue destroying personal computing? No thank you!


I gave up on trying to access movies and series legally anymore. There was even a website where you search for a movie and it will show you on which service/subscription its available and for which price. Last straw for me was amazon prime that forced me to buy an older movie which was in a very bad quality and ONLY in one language and NO subtitles. Few google searches away Ive found a pirated stream with full HD quality and in language of choice AND subtitles. Screw all of this. Fuck all of you, who works on this shit at making your customers life miserable.


I propose that where possible we avoid the term "piracy" and instead use the term "commons".


Please don't conflate consensual with nonconsensual.


Honestly, I can't consume all the new media that's being created by all these services, so it's a waste to subscribe to more than one or two... I'd gladly pay $3-$4 to watch a movie once (even if it's just me watching), but when you see prices like $20 and $30 it means I need to turn it into a have friends over party to justify the expense. There's still a huge mismatch between the value consumers see and what Hollywood sees in movies - and as long as that gap persists it creates incentive for piracy.


I mean we live in a completely insane world:

Companies logic:

- subscribe to 10 different streaming services to watch all the tv and movies that you enjoy;

- you like music? They don’t care they will shove podcasts down your throat just because it’s cheaper for them to produce;

- ebooks? Let’s make customers pay the exact same for digital products as hard cover physical books just because it makes totally sense;

- games? Let’s put ridiculous drm that acts more like spyware, also let’s charge for 10 years old+ games the same or more than new games.

Yeah punish consumers and reward pirates, that’s their logic.

Definitely an insane world.


I used to download TV shows via IRC, Usenet, or other means back in the 90s because nobody would take my money. I did the same when Star Trek Discovery Season 4 came out from piratebay.

For episode 2 onwards I could buy the season of Discovery through apple tv, which I did. I assume S5 will be on Paramount Plus which is now available in my country, so I subscribe to that if I want to watch it.

As far as I'm concerned if I can't buy it, it's fair game, if I can pay for it then I will, or I won't watch it.


After some technical know how and upfront time investment, piracy is genuinely easier and presents a better UX than the legal route.

With the suite of production-quality piracy automation software out there, as well as BYO media front ends like Plex et al, those who are so inclined are a long long long way past the ‘manually rifling through Usenet or Demonoid’ of yesteryear. One can simply visit a polished web UI of a piece of software running on their home network, and that they want every season of Letterkenny in 4K and it’ll be available to them within the hour.

Those who consume media this way don’t need to keep track of which steaming service has the rights to which property at the current point in time. Nor do they need to deal with inconsistent and increasingly Byzantine UXs of steaming service apps. They can instead enjoy a consistent interface on all of their devices with a single play queue, with even the ability to build playlists and collections of media that would otherwise be across streaming services.

I am significantly visually impaired and as such find it difficult to sit back on the couch and bounce between different apps and interfaces on my Apple TV. Were I inclined to consume media by way of piracy, I imagine that I’d find the experience to all in all be much more accessible than doing things the Right Way. All completely hypothetical of course.

The one thing that paying for and using streaming services has over the modern privacy approach, for one that has the prerequisite technical knowhow and ethics to pirate in the first place, is discovery / recommendation engines. The current suite of piracy apps make attempts to recommend new media to you, but obviously they can’t hold a candle to the millions of hours and petabytes of Big Data that powers…say…Netflix’s recommendation engine.

I genuinely believe that there’s a notable portion of pirates that would stop doing it if it were easier to consume content legally. This is why you see music piracy sinking deeper and deeper into the shadows. Comparing music consumption with movie or even TV show consumption has its limits, but were there a legal way to consume such content with a Spotify level of coverage, I think that it’d be quite compelling to these people. Of course, piracy is much less of a problem than it once was, so who knows if media companies even care anymore.


Piracy is a service problem.

If I want to watch a particular movie, and it’s not on Netlix or the iTunes Store in my country, I’ll pirate it, as I don’t feel like signing up for yet another service.


Pirate movie streaming sites are better now than in the old days. The recommended content is more relevant. There are no agenda driven promotions. The related content is related to the content, not some politicized algorithm trained on other people's tastes. There's no geotargetting garbage. I've never seen, "Content not available in your country" on a piracy site. And since when did I own an entire country?

Whatever gets the most clicks generally makes it to the home page. You can also search or browse by actor, genre and other data they've imported from IMDB.

No need to sign up or sign in. Just start watching the movies you want for free. Unless you feel obligated to pay, I'm not sure why you wouldn't?

Pop-unders if you even see them on your system are still a lesser evil than ads mid stream in DRM content or dark patterns pressuring you to install some horribly bloated app. Just click and they are gone.

You can usually download the video directly over and watch it later from these streaming sites. Opening a video file in the video player of your choice and watching it whenever you like, however you like. It is almost like you own the computer and can do whatever you please with the data contained within. Imagine that.


This got really really complex these days. I subscribes to HBO Max but sometimes the connections to their server are so bad, the catalog page don’t even load, in case like these I will have no choice but to find some pirated sources and load them to my device. Netflix / YouTube doesn’t have these kinds of problems though.

I would say the dollars are for the smooth experiences, you have to make it worth the dollar; otherwise I have no choice but piracy.


Just one movie shows how the situation is nuts:

Baahubali is a very long movie that was split into two parts. It is not a normal "movie 1 + sequel", it is basically a 5 hour long movie split in two for easier production.

Netflix originally had both parts, it is where I watched it. I went to show the movie to my wife and found out now only second half is there. The first half is on HBO, that doesn't have second half.

So to watch one movie you need two subscriptions!


I bought one of the parts on amazon and got a version that had either desynced audio or subtitles. It seemed like a speed mismatch as it got worse as the movie went on. I don't speak Tamil, but I can still tell who should be speaking and it became very hard to follow. There was no way to adjust the sync or track speed like in mpv.

Message received, I won't buy again.


Again? With how fragmented the availability of TV Shows is, sometimes there was no other option except for sailing with my boat over the 7 seas.

If you are in the US, you pretty much have access to every streaming service, but outside of the US, some people like me struggle to access shows from Hulu for instance, and sometimes the only viable option is to wait until a TV Channel buys the rights of the shows one desires to watch.

I haven't got time for that!


I'm not there yet, but the fragmentation of movie and tv services is a killer.

I want to watch the latest of <series I enjoy>, which service is it on? Prime? Netflix? Great. Disney? OK, that has a lot of content we enjoy too.

But there's also Stan, Binge (or NowTV in the UK) ... and wtf? Apple tv? Not really there yet IMHO though the dinosaur thing was good. AMC or Paramount? Now you're just taking the piss. One or two services is fine, but what seems to be happening is the old-school distributors are trying to get in on the game (NowTV/Binge etc) and the production networks are trying to regain access to streaming bucks by pulling a few 'anchor' shows off the other services and putting them on their otherwise execrable offering.

I don't know what the answer is. But I do know I'm already using a VPN to log into the same services in different countries to try and watch stuff, and taking a lot of 'free trials' that I then cancel when I've watched the thing I want.

Piracy has got to be easier! And when it is, it thrives. When paying is easier (Spotify/Deezer/Whatever) then that wins.


In the early days of video streaming services, I thought Netflix would become something like Spotify, where I could eventually watch everything.

Spotify, Apple Music, Google Music and all the other offers basically have the same repertoire, minus some specials. You will mostly be happy with choosing a single one. That is what I also would to like have for movies and series. Why is it different with visual media?


YouTube Premium has been an amazing alternative to piracy IMO. A lot of music I listen to (covers, Marcus Veltri) don't even make it to MP3s and such, so just ad free is good enough. The recommendation engine is spot on, it's how I discovered Japanese city pop.

YouTube Music has everything that Spotify has, but better algorithm imo. Instead of radio/playlist stuff, I can just pick a song and it will autogenerate based on the mood of that song. So if you pick a song that's good to sing to, you get other songs to sing along to. Play something from a soundtrack, and it pulls similar soundtrack songs.

I think this is the way to beat piracy; offer something more than just the song, video, all that. Steam achievements and "skip intro" isn't enough though.

There are things that I've been to pirate though - all the Sims expansions, all the crap that goes on Netflix for 5 months then gets removed, things unique to one platform that doesn't have anything else (e.g. certain HBO stuff), things with lots of seasons but incomplete sets of them.


I never 'left' piracy. Part because third world issues, part because I couldn't get much sense of that: never went into any streaming service. At home we "still" consume cable TV (4 families with 5 tvs, via coax cable, 118 channels and a fee of around USD$6/month). I admit I pirate music though half of my catalog is stuff I downloaded from Jamendo.


I'd like all of the subscription providers to provide an API so that I can have a unified front-end, in order to improve discoverability & just save my sanity.

I preferred the old days, with just a single cable/sat set-top box. Might not have been able to stream on-demand, but at least I only had to look in 1 place to record (series link etc) or work out what was available.


Agreed, there are services like Just Watch, but an official API from each streaming service would be nice.

https://www.justwatch.com/us


I don't think it's ethical for our economic system to incentivize all these high-budget productions, so I like to "vote with my dollar," for what that's worth. Is it really good for humanity if billions of dollars are spent a year on Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs 3: The Golden Spork or Top Gun: Maverick's Last Stand: The TV Show?

Various streaming apps are simply very difficult to use for me. Plus other issues: Netflix's 4K is inconsistent and has banding and artifacts that it shouldn't, for one example. There's a long, long list of dark patterns and whatnot which turn me off. You can't even screenshot in mainstream apps!

But with all these IPs being taken down and lost forever (esp. HBO), piracy and seeding feels like I'm contributing to the maintenance of a library. If we're going to spend billions of humanity's resources on these things, they should at least continue to be accessible somewhere.

The pros and cons list ends up pretty imbalanced!


The one that blows my mind are the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) pay-per-views. You have to be subscribed to one service that charges monthly, ESPN+ I believe, for the 'privilege' of buying a PPV at ~$80. Not only is it quite expensive IMO, but it is a complete pain in the rear compared to the alternative of googling a couple of stream links.


Hah. Yeah pirate that shit lol. It’s almost as if these people think we’re not tech savvy.


I've never abandoned it. Why pay for that crap if you can pay put.io?


Morally, I won't go back to pirating - I stopped that around 2006. But I understand why people are so frustrated by the current landscape. It's a terrible mess that is incredibly consumer hostile, and these companies deserve to get slapped around by the "free market" (which includes being exposed to the high seas) a bit.


My process:

  1) I find a TV-show or movie I want to see
  2) I go to justwatch.com to see if any streaming services or digital stores carry it in my area
  3a) If 2 is true, I navigate there and watch it
  3b) If 2 is false, I open sonarr/radar, insert the show/movie there and wait.
For the ones I know I want to see 5-10+ years in the future, I try to find a Blu-ray on sale at one point and buy that.

Steam/GoG pretty much shut down any budding game piracy needs I had. It's just so easy and the sales are so common I've got more games in my collection than I have time to fully complete.

Same for music Spotify and Apple Music cover a good 99.99% of my music needs. There are a few rare albums or artist who go against the grain that are missing, but I can live without those.

Books I could pirate, but the Kindle is too simple to bother - or I can just grab the book from the local library.

If paying is easier than piracy, I'll always pick paying.


As I get older I feel that I care less about watching shows and movies, I would rather watch something interesting on YT, read a book, or just do some other hobby.

Music is handled by Spotify and I'm happy with that, Games through Steam which I also like just fine.

I have a netflix subscription, but I rarely use it now and I don't think my parents do either.


I don't pirate, purely because of the risk of malware. If there was no risk of malware, I would definitely pirate a lot more. Personally, the risk of getting all my accounts/PC hacked isn't worth saving the $X per month to me, and just the inconvenience of trudging through dozens of torrents/trackers/etc.


So you could benefit from security by compartmentalization and start pirating, it seems. You may be interested in Qubes OS: https://qubes-os.org. Can't recommend it enough.


Lotta good tips here for those wanting to pirate again lol. Thank you.


> YouTube premium

I tried YT Premium.

I found it to be unwatchable. Too bad. I was enjoying the show (Impulse).

I have no trouble paying for services I like, but find the landscape to be chaotic, and am not into paying for one marquee show.

Also, I am finding the streaming apps to be absolute bug farms. It's bad. Real bad. I'm constantly having to restart them.


I pay for music (Spotify) because it’s easiest to share with family members and I honestly don’t even listen to much anymore.

We’ve been trimming down our streaming services to just what we need for our kid at this point, and I’ve been beefing up my media server setup to support us friends and family.

I use streams for all sporting events because that whole landscape is stupid and it’s nearly impossible to simple pay per view stream the games/teams I want to watch. I would gladly pay per stream to watch any sporting event, it’s just not simple/possible, and I don’t want a package because other than nfl, I only watch other sports sporadically/during championships.

I don’t care about any live news or anything else so cable tv is useless to me. Also every time I’m in a hotel with my son and he sees commercials on tv you can see his brain warping so I avoid all ad content at all costs.


Here in CZ, where pirating has long tradition, mainly because it's legal to download movies and copyrighted files for own use. Or at least it's in gray area now because of push from EU but still nobody is willing to prosecute it. (Uploading/uploaders are prosecuted normally, since it's illegal to upload)

Many people is buying games from Steam, because it's convenient. Not gonna mention we have same prices like US or even bigger, because it's in EUR, yet we have 4x smaller median salaries. And still we buy games from Steam.

Netflix was popular here too, but recently (me included) everybody is switching back to fileshares and torrents. It's unbearable to pay for multiple streaming services and that's just foreign movies, if you want our local movies, there are different streaming services for it.

Thanks but no thanks.


1. If anything, just do one streaming service at a time. Pay for a month, watch a few shows, and then dip.

2. Get an Ad Blocker

3. Buy games on sale.

In summary, piracy probably only makes sense in a handful of contexts. Like I’d be open to pirating the Weird Al Movie, but mostly because there’s an ad for it where he is literally advocating this.


Like many others here, I never stopped. It's not about money, but availability and overall experience.

An experience that has stuck in my mind: as a poor Eastern European who pirated everything as a student, after emigrating to the West, earning "western money" and getting a visa card and all that, I thought: "now I'll buy legally, cool, I'll be an upstanding citizen".

However, when I wanted to buy from itunes or whatever it was (10+ years ago), I was told "The content is not available in your location". Um, yes, it is available, for free, even: if you don't want my money, your loss!

Since then, I have had enough similar experiences that my default is the seven seas.

I have bought games on steam and gog, that was ok. Ebooks, however, are, even in 2023, mostly a drm-filled usability nightmare.


Again? I've never stopped pirating in last almost 30 years. Just moved from BBS and direct sharing/exchange through DC++/Napster via DDL filehostings like Napster/Mega/etc. to torrent in the end, but stil ocassionaly use DDL (Mega/Uptobox). I remember paying around 2008 maybe for Rapidshare for few months to avoid download limits and then maybe in 2018-2019 I paid for hacked Netflix account for like 5USD for year which seemed reasonable price, but anyway end up pirating everything instead watching Netflix, which I used entirely to show my kids Peppa pig and nothing else, the app experience and content was worse than my pirating experience (I can search via search plugins within qbit and I check new releases at YTS/xREL/Pahe/RlsBB).


I wouldn't put Games / Software in the same category as media. I wouldn't pirate software (can you even still pirate games with everything being online / server-side?), but I do "pirate" Spotify / Youtube (with ad-blockers). I still pay subscriptions for Netflix / Hulu / Disney+ / Amazon Prime but already cancelled HBO and Paramount+ and will consider cancelling more.

I do occasionally "pirate" old foreign content that just can't be bought anywhere but it's too much of a hassle (Docker with VPN kill-switch, finding a "legit" torrent tracker, etc.); might consider using it for mainstream content as well if the streaming services keep diluting available media or keep bumping up prices to an unreasonable level.


Internet pirates, once thought defeated, Have made a comeback, and now they're heated. No longer just about music and movies, They've found new ways to share and reuse.

They hide in the shadows of the dark web, Stealing passwords and login info, it's a fad, web. But it's not just about the money, you see, It's about the thrill of breaking the rules, can't you agree?

Streaming services are the new target, Subscription fees, they want to circumvent it. But the entertainment industry won't let them win, They'll fight back with all their kin.

So beware, internet pirates, the law is hot on your trail, Streaming services are here to stay, no need to wail. Better to pay for what you watch and listen, Than to risk it all and end up in prison.


Let's compare:

The law and order way:

- Pay $$$ for a dozen of separate services, still have a lot of content not available to you

- Be forced into using crappy apps which may or may not be available on your favorite platform

- You could pay for years, but you never own anything - the moment you stop paying, you are left with nothing at all

- Be prepared for your favorite series be yanked from the service in the middle of your watching it because some lawyers didn't agree

- Be shown long idiotic un-skippable ads 4-5 times per hour

- Be unable to share your content with family, at least legally, and often be limited in number of devices allowed to access content

- The content is available only when you are online and with good internet connection

- If the content you're interested in is old or foreign or both - sucks to be you

- Maybe you'll get subtitles. Maybe not. Roll the dice.

- If the company decides the content is "not agreeable with modern sensibilities", they'd just remove it and you have no way to access it anymore

- If you don't know which service owns a particular piece of content, maybe there's a third-party service that knows that. Maybe not. Certainly nobody among content owners cares.

The Arrgh and Jolly Roger way:

- Pay nothing

- No ads ever

- Get access to the content that is convertable to any format known to man and will play on any device

- All the content can be made available offline and ported to any device that can play a video or talk standard media player protocol

- Infinite shareablity to any devices in your household

- You get it once, you have it forever and can store it for as long as you like, for zero cost

- You can get practically any content, no matter how old and what the twitter mob thinks about it

- You can get it translated and with subtitles in many languages, in formats supported by devices from mobile phone to smart TV

- There are many specialized search engines allowing to find any piece of content that exists, and usually it takes minutes, not hours

So, am I open to piracy? Hmm... Tough question.


Early on, I had zero compunction about piracy. It took going into business, and having a competitor insult me in a very public fashion, because I had used pirated Windows on a customer's machine - that he had previously dealt with. I was mortified.

Piracy is theft. Full stop.

When you pirate, you are stealing from someone else. Big bad corporation, or small mom-and-pop shop...

They worked to create those bits. If we're not paying, we're stealing.

The reasons why don't matter.

After getting called on it, I never did it again. If I can't afford the solution I want, I work to find something that I can afford.

As an aside - I would rather pay for a product, rather than get a free version of something and BE the product.


It's been said before, but piracy is not theft.

The media which is pirated is a copy of the original, a new entity separate from the original. The original media is still intact and in place (not stolen).

The argument that not paying money for pirated media is stealing also doesn't hold water. Revenue was never generated from pirated media, which you could technically qualify as unrealized revenue, but it doesn't not qualify as stealing, since the intellectual property owner's possessions haven't been touched.

These are all semantics, but semantics matter. Courts- semantic powerhouses- prosecute on copyright violations, not theft.


I used to pirate things. I still do, but I used to too.

The golden age of easy access media was 20 years ago. Its also today, too.

I like streaming services. Streaming services are great when you're into movies, and you want to watch 2000 of them.

R.I.P. Mitch Hedburg

I feel it's back to where things were with cable TV. Subscribe to 5 services and get access to the 6 series you want to watch. Or buy a "package deal" and upgrade access to services that add nothing of value. Either way, I have no time to watch all the content I want before it expires. And once expired I have the option to pay for it again while abiding by TOS to keep the now doubly paid for access open. I have yet to encounter a .MKV with such issues.


-- Audio --

I used to buy CDs back before and especially during the rise of Napster. It made discovering new bands and music so much easier than randomly finding something new on the radio.

Then they started suing customers, and I stopped, just stopped paying for media. I've got MP3s of the CDs I had, and there's YouTube for anything I care to listen to that's not in that.

-- Video --

The whole extractive "Intellectual Property" industry can go pound sand as far as I'm concerned. The only reason I have Netflix is inertia.

-- Games --

I have bought a few games through Steam, and I'm currently a big fan of Stardew Valley, previously it was Factorio

-- Software --

Open source as far as I can go, but Windows 10 as WikidPad doesn't work on Linux due to breakages in wx_python


It's too bad that Apple's Season Pass was such a failure. If it would have been successful it's possible it could have attracted almost universal participation by all the majors given its price point, and competitors with a similar model would have sprung up.

$20 or $30 just for a single season of a TV show seemed outrageous. Why pay $20 for a single season of a TV show when you can pay $10/month for unlimited?

Now most people are paying > $50/month for TV subscriptions and still don't get everything they want. So in a year that's $600. That'd buy you 20-30 season passes. How many people watch more than 20-30 shows for their $600?


I use exactly two approaches. First is I buy movies (and sometimes TV shows) on iTunes. Second, I do pirate. But for me, I only pirate when the movie I'm looking for is not available. The moment I can buy it on iTunes, I do, and ditch the pirated copy that I have. So for me it is entirely about availability. And before anyone says that if I subscribed to a half dozen steaming services I'd have that availability, I'll say that most, if not all the movies that I have pirated are very obscure things that I have never seen on any service--Baby of Macon, Meet the Feebles, Underground, and (surprisingly) most recently Spider.


> First is I buy movies (and sometimes TV shows) on iTunes.

This approach is starting to make a lot more sense to me: I suspect we may have reached the point where, based on my own consumption (i.e., anecdata), this could be cheaper than maintaining subscriptions to multiple different services.


I switched to purchasing one of the first among my peers, for any type of service. But I will pirate stuff which is artificially restricted for me by the location and won't feel any remorse. Regional locks should have died decade ago. As for the service fragmentation - I've picked two of each - Netflix+Prime Video, Steam+GOG, Spotify+YT, so far I simply don't have more free time to watch or play anything more. My wait lists are rather long even on these few services :) . If other companies try to create artificial scarcity by pulling content to their new silos, well, it's their loss. They won't get my money that way.


I got fed up with streaming years ago and have just been curating a small collection of physical media instead. Despite that, I still pirate digital copies because it's simply easier for actually viewing than ripping my own copies.


I think there's a better place to discuss this than here and I also see little reason to discuss this.

All I'm gonna say is that I believe it's silly to pay for subscription services and pay for spotify/youtube or endure their ads.


Streaming services subscription model is wired. I refuse to pay for something that I can barely use 2-4 hours per month (considering 4 streaming services).

Most absurd is situation, when I need to use software for business, but natively it has build in spyware and my data analyzing for AI (yes, Adobe, its you) and also there is no option to use it offline for more than one week, so piracy is only way how to have working software that I actually pay for. It absolutely ridiculous consisering that I pay for this software over 7 years.

There are no professional alternatives yet. Monopoly of Adobe with their agressive dictate needs to be broken.


I decided a while ago that I don't really need to watch TV or play video games, that it's a distraction from more fulfilling activities.

So I got rid of the lot and now spend my free time composing music and reverse engineering software that I find interesting.

I regard this as time much better spent than passively consuming media or getting lost inside virtual worlds adversely designed to be addictive.

And there's no need to even consider piracy, as I don't require these products. Though I'd pay for these items if I did desire them, just like I'll pay to watch something in the cinema now and again.


I never wanted to subscribe to multiple streaming services. Netflix was a great solution but having more than one is a deal breaker for me. Password sharing with friends with other services alleviates that but the industry is trending against that practice.

This alone is a dealbreaker for me. Pricing is ridiculous for third world countries.

The competition and drying up of licenses has also diminished a lot of netflix's value. If you think of a random movie, chances are you wont find it there and said chances are steadily diminishing every year.

I think these trends make piracy more and more palatable each day.


Piracy takes too much work. I have limited time outside of work,study and self-care stuff, for that netflix and prime are more than adequate.

LOTR and Peripheral on prime were top-notch, just watched cowboy bebop (sad they are not making more) on netflix. I simply am never in a situation where I can't find watchable content. There is nothing I can pirate where the quality improvement is worth finding a torrent/magnet, waiting for it to download (and hope it has subs, I like subs) transfer it to TV or connect my laptop or run a plesk server or something like that.


How many of you are open to the piracy of your work product, by people who work for your company's competitors? Or by someone else on your team pirating your code and claiming it as their own?

I oppose piracy because I recognize that I am not entitled to things produced by others, even if there is literally no cost to reproduce them. (Unless the author him/herself supports said piracy!) The fact that I make enough money to afford these things (when/where they are available), as I suspect many of you do, makes the idea of piracy, frankly, ridiculous.

Such entitlement!


It might just be that I haven't really been pirating the last 5+ years, but it seems harder to find things now. TPB isn't a great source anymore. I'd join a private one and seed my fair share (I have a seedbox), but I don't really know what the good ones with good collections are. I'd go back to piracy for certain things like Portlandia, which I pay $7 a month for with AMC+. There's no other programming I care about with AMC+, but I can't find a good source for all the seasons of Portlandia.


I find it immoral to give money to (c)opywrong companies who support Intellectual Slavery.

Their products are also strictly inferior to simply downloading movie files.

I'm older now so am not pirating myself like I used to, but I fight each and every day to try and get momentum going for a Constitutional Amendment in the USA to abolish (c)opywrong and patents laws once and for all: https://breckyunits.com/the-intellectual-freedom-amendment.h...


To each their own, but I am not. I feel obliged to pay for the work of others that I consume where I can. Whether or not the creators of the content are getting paid a fair share is certainly up for debate. I understand that spotify rates are exceedingly poor for the artists. But it isn't my place to negotiate for them.

And when it comes to movies and TV that aren't available on a streaming platform, I'll just rent it on Apple TV. I think it's like $4 for a movie rental. A much better deal than going to the theater.


Or neither streaming subscriptions nor piracy. I’ve gotten to the point that I don’t need or want to be entertained enough to justify either the financial or ethical cost.

> at peak monetization

That and peak attention saturation.


Around the time that Metallica started suing their biggest fans rather than trying to work with emerging distribution models, I just gave up on the music industry entirely. The Sony rootkit added injury to insult, and I was done. The whole fiasco left such a bad taste in my mouth, I felt physical revulsion if I even thought about buying a CD, and I didn't feel like pirating anything either. Commercial music had its Bill Cosby moment, basically, and I wanted nothing to do with it. I had a big collection of MP3s but they lost their appeal. They were all tainted, the whole industry was dirty. I felt dirty listening to any of it, no matter how I acquired it.

I still went to concerts on occasion, but the smaller the better. And the only time I'd buy new CDs was in the lobby after the show. My cash went directly into the artist's hand, that was the only way I could see supporting the art form. If I listened to anything casually, it was radio, and I got so annoyed with top-40 and robo-rock stations that I installed a better antenna on my roof so I could pick up the little high-school LPFM station a few towns over, where real deejays still existed.

(They are still excellent, by the way. A fresh batch of optimism every semester, passion for the music, pride in the technical aspects of the broadcast. I've learned to accept REM being referred to as "oldies".)

After over a decade of this, Spotify finally made sense. It seemed like things had settled down enough, the industry had made it easy to go legit. I paid my money, got my music, I knew at least some tiny fraction of that was theoretically going to the artists (though the more I learn about this, the more disgusted I become), life was good. I could enjoy music again.

Then Spotify had its Joe Rogan moment, and I went back to feeling dirty about everything.

There's a parallel story about movies and TV, though I was never much into either. Never signed up for Netflix even in its golden era, but I can see plain as day that that era is dead and buried.

Will I pirate again? Likely not; it's simply easier to do without. I have a big shelf of dead-tree books that I've been meaning to read, and I'm finally starting to get through them. They're DRM-free, low-power, and the display contrast ratio is second-to-none.


Piracy seems like an easy way to get something for nothing but it becomes a time sink and you get crappy video long term. You end up filling your life with digital clutter.

It's so much easier to buy/rent the video and get it over with. There are so many and better ways to use your time than to waste it filling up a hard drive with videos you will never see.

I knew of a guy that spent his free time gathering videos. He had hard drives full of them. He spent so much time on it that he rarely watched any of them. All wasted time.


I am open to piracy when there is like 10 different streaming services offering exclusive movies. Sure, I can afford having one or two subscriptions but I can't have 10 different subscriptions.

Piracy have also become incredibly easy for everyone, popcorn time, fmovies & webtorrent have made it extremely user friendly, almost to the point that the user is unaware of the fact that they are pirating a movie.

I do have one rule though, if there is a book or movie etc I REALLY enjoy, then I buy it just to support the creator.


Yeah I started seriously considering piracy once again a few months ago. Partly because I've started worrying that we will see some major failure in AWS/Azure/GCP at some point in the near future leading to cascading failures, taking a long time to recover from. So, sudden failure of service is one thing. Another is that it is sometimes hard to find a show or movie you are looking for in any of the streaming services I subscribe to. Third, I want more freedom, piracy gives some back.


Regarding youtube and ads, I feel like they've issued an ultimatum. Either you pay us or you effectively can't use the service.

It's entirely within their rights, it's their business. Personally I question that tactic since I'd think it drives people away. The size of youtube is worth a lot.

I'm sure it's working temporarily at least and some staff are getting massive bonuses for driving up revenue. But does youtube's long term goals and staff member 5 year goals go hand in hand?


I use uBlock Origin and I never see YouTube ads.


Yes, but you can't use that on a smart TV, Chromecast (although SmartTubeNext works for newer chromecast) or YouTube app for mobile.


I'm paying for YoutubeTV / YT Premium / Netflix / Prime / D+. We're getting AppleTV as part of some free bundle but can't remember why.

Despite all that. The thing I watch the most is content loaded on to my Plex server. It's just easier than dealing with trying to track down shows at all the places.

IMO what stopped music piracy was having all the content under one easy to access service. It's a lesson that TV / Movies studios haven't figured out yet.


I'll stand out here, because I work for a major sports streaming service. So let me be heard about live streaming at least:

1) Content needs to get paid for, if you're watching an illegally restreamed match then you're not rewarding people like me for the hard work we've done to get that game to you. It's not just faceless corporations, we're people and it's really hard to make a profit in the streaming world, so every viewer counts.

2) We don't decide how much the rights cost and on top of that we spend millions getting it to our subscribers (e.g. cloud providers, CDNs, developers). We've got to pay our bills, again, no streaming service is scalping right now. Delivering Tbps of streams is hard!

3) Many live sports re-streaming services really are run by organised crime gangs. I have involvement in some revenue protection work, there's not just hacking, there's also money laundering, we've even encountered links to people trafficking in the same organisations. I'm sure you think it's an exaggeration, but it's real and it's not just some guy in his basement doing this stuff.

4) The companies that invest in technology for this stuff often invest in things like AV1, FFMPEG, Exoplayer, stuff that's available to the wider open-source community. We, as organisations, contribute back to the world in other less obvious ways. Hurting us hurts the community as well.

5) Lastly, I presume that most people here get paid for their work, or at least would like to be paid for what they do in the future. Put yourself in my shoes: how would you feel to have your work ripped off? Oh, and then someone else profits from it? Hmm, not cool. That app you work on? That website you support? Maybe you hate your employer enough that you don't care if they get ripped off, but most of the people I work with love their work, so consider that as well.

I am sure people will argue against all my points, but they stand none the less.

What I will say, unofficially, I sympathise with people who cannot watch our content because it's not available in their market and I also have some sympathy for those who are too poor to pay. But I'd assert that 99% of the people who pirate our content are not too poor and have ways of watching legally, they just choose to go to the dark side.


Your points are what they are, but I have to say that I find major sports to be the about the least empathetic target you could have chosen. Even college sports in the US are awash in money and we somehow end up using public money to build stadiums for teams of deca-millionaires owned by billionaires.

I get that there are plenty of working stiffs who put it all together, but I think they'd be better off asking the bosses for more of a share than admonishing the anonymous masses who just want to watch a game once in awhile.


Except all that money is part of the leagues themselves, I', confident we'd happily pay less for the rights.

Ultimately as a platform we're trying to charge as little as possible to capture the largest audience, there's no exclusivity we're driving.

Personally, I'd love if it leagues allowed multiple platforms to carry the same right in the same country, so we could compete entirely based on customer service and service quality. But they love to drive up the bidding war because it gets them more money.

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

I'm not aiming to attack anyone for doing it, more asking people to understand that there are consequences to piracy more than they expect.


It's not about bad people not willing to pay, it's about your employer or their partners trying to milk consumer with different platforms and artificial restrictions. When you push too far, people will try alternatives ways (potentially illegal) or stop watching.

Sure, you will always find some people who will never pay. Focusing your business on this audience doesn't sound smart.

Just design something convenient and most people will be happy to pay. Basically, I wouldn't blame people for the current streaming landscape.


Research says that 30% of pirate consumers are "pay never" and couldn't be convinced to watch legitimate streams. I recall when we did a boxing match and made it available free, you could sign up for a free trial and then cancel, yet our anti-piracy measures showed huge numbers of pirate streams watched by a large number of people. So, even without restrictions, only asking people to follow a simple sign-up process, we still had piracy.

Also as I've said in another reply, the cost and market restrictions aren't a consequence of the streaming platforms decisions, they're what the rights owners/leagues decided is their business model.

I don't want to attack anyone, just remind people that piracy isn't just innocent fun.


I love how when you want to watch something specific, you proceed to search all 5 services I subscribe to and none of them have it.. what am I supposed to do if not pirate..


I use Soulseek. It’s actually a better discovery layer if you find someone with the same tastes. I find Netflix flashy and diluted. So much content but most isn’t quality.


Yes, I pirate everything now. As always, it comes down to usability. If you make the paid version way more difficult than torrenting, my decision is very easy.


I really don't understand this perspective. Media is both incredibly accessible and cheap.

If you want to steal, stop looking for justification. The choice is wholly yours.


I'm really tired of all the streaming services and their various flaws. I've been tired of cable TV for decades now.

But I'm not about to jump to piracy.

I've started looking at setting up a personal Jellyfin server in my home network and buying DVDs and CDs again, and loading their contents into Jellyfin. That way I legally own all these things, they can't be taken away, and I have full control over my streaming experience.


honestly I never stopped pirating video content (either series or movies), but as I rarely watch anything (like an handful of movies each year), any kind of subscription is a pretty bad deal and I never tried buying movies anyway.

I (nearly) stopped with video games, since I've gotten way more used to buying games (mostly on Steam) and there's enough added value in buying game vs piracy that I'm willing to pay.


I used to subscribe to Netflix, Disney+ and Prime Video. The other day I wanted to watch Harry Potter (so not some obscure movie) and couldn't watch it anywhere in my country.

I bought a Plex lifetime pass the day after and cancelled all my subscriptions, except for Apple Music and Crunchyroll (for animes) who both fit their role for now. I can't justify paying +30€ per month for not being able to watch what I want.


I’ll always pay for Spotify or something like it because the UX is 1000x better than pirating everything and trying to sync up my collection to the cloud across devices. Not gonna bother with that. The ease of discovering new music and sharing it with friends is also unparalleled.

For movies, I usually just pay $4 to rent it from iTunes on my Apple TV. If it’s something I love and want to keep forever I might pirate it.


Nah, too much work.

I subscribe to Netflix and Amazon Prime maybe once a year for a month each. That's more than enough time to watch everything worth watching.


I have generally been against piracy. My one carve out has been live sporting events like NFL games. Due to the local games being chosen by networks, it's difficult to get specific games. Maybe I could get direct TV but it seems excessively expensive.

For everything else, like music, movies, tv shows, etc., I hope people at least try to see if a local library system near you has access to the material.


Never stopped, but I'm from the library and archives side of things and value copies completely under my control for long term preservation.


I read today something I am not sure I believe, that Adobe opts you in by default for all of your photoshop art to be samples for their ML products. (It was a reddit post so I would need to see something more official before I really give this more thought)

If that were true it would definitely get me thinking about whether I want to keep using that product at all, let alone whether I am paying for it.


To be entirely honest I was never against pirating, I just found it to be more convenient to use streaming services in the early days. Now with the proliferation of services and the balkanization of content, sharing logins with friends is the only reasonable way to get access to a decent spread of stuff.

If these password sharing crackdowns get going in earnest, its back to torrents for me.


I’m seriously considering piracy because streaming services don’t offer subtitles in my mothertoungue. I come from a non-english speaking country and I live in a foreign country. Some movie offerings provide my mother tongue, but others don’t, and this is super annoying :’( I really wish content providers would just add on all subtitle languages :(


I don't pirate things anymore. I subscribe to Spotify Premium for music. For movies/shows I subscribe to Netflix/Disney+ when there's something I want to watch and after a couple of weeks/months I unsubscribe when I'm done. If you can't afford 12$ or whatever it is for a Netflix subscription, I think you have other problems.


I'm open to owning the media I buy.

How else do you expect to fight against the greed that exists on the other end...? By buying their products?


I’m far less inclined than I used to be. I’ve reached the equilibrium of not being interested in what I can’t afford or don’t need. I have two streaming services and I don’t need any commercial software at the moment, and I limit my software exploration to what’s freely available. I’m kinda over the whole piracy, information-wants-to-be-free thing.


I think the golden age of piracy ended when it became impractical for individuals to collect digital media. The streaming services deliver a convenience to consume anything, anywhere which is cost prohibitative for laypersons to replicate by other means.

So no - while I'm not opposed ethically, my family would be very frustrated with such a transition.


> when it became impractical for individuals to collect digital media.

When was this? I have a 300mbs internet connection, cheap access to seedboxes and newsgroups, and I can buy a 15TB hard drive at Walmart.


I'm willing to pay a lot to have all the content I care about in one place. I do that with Steam, for example. I'm lucky that I don't have to pay a lot for all the music I care about in Spotify. For movies and shows, unless the industry can figure out how to be more convenient than Plex, I'll be sticking with Plex.


Nope not open to piracy. I'm not going to pirate a movie just because I can't afford the streaming service.


What if there is no alternative? Imagine you're already paying for 3-4 streaming services but none of them have the content available, would you result to piracy then or just give up to watch it?

What if they had the provided content, but not dubbed/subtitled/cc'ed in the language you need?


I'm not the person you replied to, but have the same stance. I'd just not consume that content.

I don't deserve to have everything, even if I want it. At the end of the day, it's just a piece of media.


Regarding music, we are in a golden age, in which nearly every song I want is available from either an affordable Amazon music subscription or Spotify. I fear some day it will become segmented, and that you will need multiple services to get all the bands you want. Maybe I should be preparing with MP3s backups.


I have Prime as an Amazon subscriber and beyond that I tend to cycle through film subscriptions every few months. Just closed off Disney+ and now back in Netflix, had Mubi last summer, and prior to that Netflix.

This seems to be a sensible approach, provided you're not frothing at the mouth for new film releases.


I’m not playing the "which service is this show or movie on" game. The alternatives are still a better user experience than buying legit. I have one place where I go for everything and there are no ads anywhere, I'll pay for content but I’m not going to compromise on experience.


For me,

Netflix is heavily subsidized via my TMobile bill.

Amazon Prime Video is bundled with Amazon Prime. I would have that anyway.

AppleTV+ is bundled with Apple One

Paramount+ is bundled with Walmart+ which is free with the Amex Platinum

I am grandfathered in with free HBO Max because I have internet with AT&T.

The only thing I pay full price for is the Disney/Hulu/ESPN+ bundle.


I'm open to piracy whenever product I need is either unavailable (like some old or lesser known works, or works issues in limited pressings) or isn't served properly (like 3 decade old games on Steam, which I own anyway but can't even use and have to pirate from archive.org)


I don't really mind paying. What I mind is geo-limiting content.

And yeah, when Netflix starts enforcing these multiple accounts; my wife and myself often work in different locations (different countries) so if they start enforcing that, it's definitely a cancel as we are not abusing anything.


Related discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34146126

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34172506


What's the scene like for music piracy nowadays? It seems like it was mostly gone. I've looked in a few different places and finding music released in the last 10 years is somewhat difficult. Do you just have to know where to look or is music piracy just dead/dying?


I buy cds and dvds and rip them still. Archive.org is mostly where I find new things to watch online.

I'm really not interested in modern media anymore. It will take my whole life to get through what was produced in 10 years or so that I was interested before I had children.


No, I'm just cutting out my consumption. I have a simple philosophy - if I don't want to pay for it I'm cool with not having it. I have prime, will probably be getting rid of that soon, at which point I'll only have Youtube Music/Premium.


I do it all the time but I pay for all the services too. Everything about the quality of streaming is worse, but it’s convenient for the rest of the family and occasionally me. I’d gladly buy full quality DRM free stuff directly if anyone would make it available.


DRM problems are very different depending on the medium.

I do buy many games, mainstream and not, and actually play them. In the big picture, DRM is not as not as bad as depicted; the vast majority of games rely only on Steam DRM, which isn't problematic.

Vocal game DRM opponents actually refer to a small section of the games landscape (AAA with Denuvo, mostly), so it's really something players love to hate.

I definitely had DRM problems a couple of times I can remember of. Definitely gave me problems, but it was a small percentage of the games I've played. If there's a problem, I don't disagree with getting a refund and pirate it.

Books are another story. In that case, I think that DRM is evil without exception, because it's important for me to use my own tools on books, which DRM prevents. Differently from games though, there are multiple distribution channels for books, and one may find more expensive non-DRM'ed versions.

(movies a different matter as well, which has been discussed quite extensively)


> Vocal game DRM opponents actually refer to a small section of the games landscape (AAA with Denuvo, mostly), so it's really something players love to hate.

It's not even that so much as "what the fuck is wrong with these companies?"

For example, I got the cracked version of Spore back when it was released because the official disk's DRM installed something that bricked Windows. Had to wipe it and start over.

From what I've heard this was an outlier (Spore's DRM being worse than most), but invasive DRM on PC games like that has always been about as bad as it can get. I've never heard of anything remotely like that from book/tv/movie DRM.


I wish there was less subscription model for movies. I like gog & steam, where I can precisely buy something. This gives incentive for the company to produce good content. Where subscription model does not incentivize company to create a good product.


Pricing doesn't make me think about piracy.

But when streaming services own rights to stuff and refuse to make it available, it definitely makes me value real physical ownership again. DVD/Bluray, etc.

It's concerning that the power to just remove works is available.


As far as games and music are concerned, my needs are fulfilled by Steam and Spotify. I have basically just stopped consuming TV-style content because I just don't care enough about it to pay the price or pirate.


I don't know what all these companies were thinking when they started splitting up content into different services like this. Piracy only really arises when there's a service problem, and right now that's the case.


Tried to get some high quality flac music, found a site to buy, made an account, added to cart. Oh we can't sell to you because you are from this or that country. Yea, well I want the song so I go pirate it instead.


all in again, i left alternative methods for getting my media years ago. but now im fed up with the poor user experience of the multiple services with synthetic border blockades, so i have set up a signal group shared for a group of friends, it has a bot and you can ask him for a movie or series and the bots download it from private trackers with a VPN and it shares an streaming url in the same group or privately with subtitles and everything. all the people share the cost of the infrastructure, which is like 50 USD /month. also it has a nice unexpected social aspect.


What I do for music is that I switch continuously between platforms and take up on the 3month promo offers.

It's a bit of a chore, but I really don't feel like paying for a streming service I only use when driving the car.


Never have been and doubt I ever will be. I wish this was as easy to prosecute as any other kind of theft. What the streaming services do or don't do isn't going to have any effects on my ethics.


I like buying physical discs and then bringing the media I'm bored of watching to a friend swap. I get rid of movies/music I won't watch again soon, and I get movies/music I want to try!


I just got back into Usenet.


There is so so much content out there that I'm content just to watch the little bit that's available via Netflix, Amazon Prime, and YouTube. I don't watch multiple hours per day though.


Streaming is really convenient.

I really don’t want to manage files more than I already do.


Paid streaming services are intentionally bad/broken on Linux.

Open source, free alternatives aren't just not broken on Linux (and every other possible platform); they're actually very good.


I think a lot of people's first reaction was "what do you mean, again?"

Personally I was always open to it, no matter all great services along the lines of Netflix and Spotify etc.


What do people use these days? I just had a check and I cannot really find anything anymore. Nothing but the most popular stuff. Which I actually can get legally easily usually.


Piracy is illegal.

Before I proceed, I have to say that in my personal opinion piracy makes sense when it comes to media, as in music, movies, shows. I feel like application piracy is a different thing. Mainly because with an application you use it a lot, while media, you own a CD, you can listen to it, but it won't be daily for years (like Windows for example). I'm also against book piracy, with the exception of university books because it's predatory.

If I did pirate stuff it would for the exact same reasons why I would have had a pirate FTP server in the 90s.

In the 90s it was because you had to pay multiple fees (or had to buy multiple CDs etc) to get access to media. If you lacked the money, you had no access. As a poor college student, it made sense to use piracy bridged that gap financially.

In the mid 2000s you basically had to use Netflix and Pandora/Spotify/Internet Radio, I have to pay a few fees, and have access, or watch small advertisements and get it for free. At that point piracy would be doing more work to get the same result.

Nowadays you have multiple services, they each have tiny niches which is exactly how Cable TV works in the States, and why piracy made sense in the 90s to begin with. If you like 4 TV shows, there are probably in 4 different streaming apps you need to use. All with their own fees. To make things worse services like Hulu, and others are still going to have advertisements. Essentially you are paying the services to watch a show, and they make money a second time by forcing advertisements down your throat.

That's BS. Maybe I just don't like spending money.

There is another problem about ownership. Anything in the cloud, you don't own, even if you paid for it. $4.99 to get this movie online annoys me. I have no control of it. I can't resell it. Sometimes it's hard to even tell what you own. I rather have it in my hard drive, then I can do what I want to it.

Ultimately though, piracy is about greed and money, both for the pirate and the services that get affected. In the 90s it was about freedom of access. That's not as much an issue case anymore.


Piracy always seems kinda stupid to me. If you don't want to put in the effort to get some content legit, just don't consume it. If you do want to consume some content, then put in the effort to do it legitimately.

Like if Spotify is too much of a bother, just don't listen to it. Go to Bandcamp or 7Digital or whatever and buy whatever you're into. "Oh, but they don't have this one album I want," is crap. If you really wanted it you'd jump through the hoops. Wanting it badly enough that you can't settle for anything else but not so bad that you don't want to put in the effort is just you making excuses.


I think the best user experience has been the same for about 15 years or so. Automatic downloads from private trackers onto a local network server that’s connected to TVs around the house and devices outside the house.

The front end has changed from xbmc to kodi to plex, but it’s been the same recipe.

It’s easier to see what’s available. New shows and movies are presented to me based on my real interests rather than what Netflix is promoting, etc.

Interestingly, this isn’t always from pirating as content may come from ripped purchased dvds or even sideloaded from subscribed services (eg, subscribe to hbo, download content from tracker).

I feel like the product is known, but it’s hard to get a business model working that’s legal. Kind of like a Napster moment. I thought Netflix would be Spotify, but that didn’t workout.

Tl:dr; never stopped pirating as non-pirated hasn’t been as good for almost 20 years.


Uninterested in piracy. I’m sure there is plenty of great content not covered by my current streaming subscriptions but I am fine not to experience those at all.


As long as Hollywood keeps producing stuff that is barely watchable I'm all for piracy. This is largely not stuff I want to vote for with my wallet.


"again" ¦-D


Just torrented Unreal Tournament '99. Indended to buy it, but Epic apparently wants to erase all traces of their old games from the web ...


I never stopped.

Private torrent sites FTW

I also stream twitch with streamlink (stream scraper that pipes to vlc, blocks ads) and watch YouTube with NewPipe on my shield TV.


Software (games included) and music: never

TV Shows and Movies: Yes, if they are not on the platforms I'm subscribed to (currently Netflix and Disney)


I've found it to be easier to 'pay the piper' than deal with warez pups and risk potential criminal and civil penalties.


Totally pro. Because nowadays you don't own any of your digital media. Piracy is the only way to "own" any digital media


It's interesting to watch all of the moralizing and rationalization in here. I would expect this crowd of (mostly) very smart adults to just accept that piracy benefits them, hurts the content producer, doesn't hurt anyone they know, and has a very low probability of negative consequences.

The tendency to compress an uncontroversial description of costs and benefits as they affect multiple parties into a unique point on a moral continuum to be observed by all parties is age appropriate for a teenager.


We are right back to the 90's and early 2000's with cable. Replace the word "channel" with "platform."


Sir, it never went away. The new geenration of kids continued it, not all of them can afford these multiple streaming services.


I can neither confirm or deny intents and means planned to plant seeds or swarm in this direction.


I'm on the caribbean, call me Jack Sparrow


You are assuming I was ever not open to piracy.


I'm generally against but I had to for the FIFA world cup as I couldn't figure out a way to legally pay for it.


What? I would just delete the cookie and refresh to restart the 1 hour timer of free viewing.


Was it live? On which website?


I would watch live on Fox Sports


Ah ok. Not available in my country unfortunately.


I pay $0.60 per month, per connection for an iptv/vod service that has everything....so, I'm all in on piracy.


I pay for more or less all the streaming services. Still I end up pirating. Why! It’s just too damn cumbersome otherwise


I pay for indie films/music/games.

I pirate AAA/Giant corporation films/music

Digital piracy is not the same as theft, nothing was lost.


I've cancelled everything but YouTube Premium and Apple TV and share for everything else I'm interested in.


Yar har fiddely-dee Being a pirate is alright with me Do what you want, cause a pirate is free You are a pirate!


I just stopped consumption of TV and streaming formats.

Music that im interested in gets bought (eg. Bandcamp) or yt-dl'ed.


Never stopped pirating.

I've used friends logins for a few streaming services, but I prefer to just torrent the content.


I pirate games in two situations 1. As a demo. If I think they're worth the money, I buy them (like Elden Ring and DOOM Eternal recently). 2. As a way of archiving my favorite games. For example, I “own” the original Prince of Persia collection in Steam, but I also downloaded the games and have them stored, in case for whatever reason Steam one day decides to terminate my account.


I don’t see any justification for (1) given steam has a 2hour refund window.


Paying for various services (spotify, netflix, prime, nebula) but not opposed to supplementing things


VPN + BitTorrent client + ThePirateBay has pretty much any current or recent movie or TV series.


It is more sensible to pay mullvad 5 USD a month than pay all these companies. Never again.


I just don't watch any streaming content. Simple. A bit boring maybe. But simple.


Piracy groups compete for clout. That seems to be just as good of a motivator of quality.


Netflix broke everything by producing own content, essentially ending their neutrality.


On that note. Remember how cinemas were blocked from engaging in any way with content production. That seemed smart.


I never wasn't open to it!?


Hmm. It helps that as an old guy, I can afford multiple streaming services, but, quite frankly, were it not for my wife, I would have none at this point. Beyond that, with few exceptions, there are few memorable items that make me reconsider ( or even bother to think of pirating it ).

To me it is just like gaming and it serves as a good example. Steam made it so easy, accessible and hassle-free that I accepted their online 'DRM' despite initially being staunchly against it. I have no reason to pirate. Just about ANY game I can think of is there. This is what the content owners need to create. They don't want to cuz they don't want to share, but to that I say, tough noodles.

I don't really want to go back to the old days, but oddly I clearly could if things got sufficiently annoying. The last time I wanted something that was locked behind another paywall was new Dexter. I ended up just skipping it ( I am not gonna subscribe to another subscription within Hulu ). I don't need it. I don't need any of it and this brings me to my main point.

It is a luxury item. It is entertainment. It is hardly a necessity.


I'm done with music streaming but I still have Netflix, Disney and Amazon Prime


you guys ever been against ? "Oh let's be the good guy I serve a higher purpose by giving even more money to one of the most succesfull industry in the history while it produces decreasing quality of movies"


I have never not been open to Piracy, so I cannot contribute to this thread.


I don't even know how - what's the best torrent sites nowadays?


Completely open to piracy.


It surprises me that anybody that knew how to do it would ever stop.


Can't be open to it "again" if you never stopped...


lets just say, sea shantys are becoming more popular by the minute


Arrrr, I never stopped.


I never stopped being.


I think free-trial periods are mostly good enough.


I'm not the target audience -- I consider most commercial content to be pollution, and piracy as free marketing for/perpetuation of such pollution -- so of course I don't subscribe to any of it, or have any interest in pirating it. My time and attention is too valuable to be spent on motivated addictive mass drivel.

Though I might have a way above average disgust reaction to popular culture, the relevance/tldr is that some reaction to high prices and uncertain availability and other friction of subscriptions will be to consume less, rather than pirate. I wonder what the proportions are, and how they've changed over time?


Why pay when you can take for free, is the idea?


More like, don’t pay until they curtail their segmentation of content across myriad of services, each adding n number of dollars and mental overhead of automatically renewing subscriptions bundled with certain must-pay-on-delivery for certain content that’s not available any other way.

We see their model, we need to stop the growth of it.


if you don't find value don't consume or purchase it and it will stop growing. it grows because people pay. piracy is a strange rationalization


Piracy got us the accessible model we have today. It was a positive force. If it didn’t exist, don’t be shocked if these publishers would have sold you a Blu-ray with a digital code that expires for the digital version.


It is not a zero sum game.

A better phrase would be: "Why pay when you can copy for no cost".


I think the idea is that it’s problematic to pay for many different streaming services to get the content. Spotify got it right for music - one subscription, everything i want is there. Movies etc, not even close.

How is one to fight back? The traditional way worked for music. I’m happy to pay but I’m not going to be taken advantage of.


if you don't like it don't consume, no? seems simple to me. seems like a strange rationalization


I think that’s fine if en mass that was happening.

What causes corporations to sit up and take note is that when things are presented as a paid option with reasonable terms, people pay. However unreasonable terms (as we see with multiple streaming services, with adverts or minimal good content unless you pay again) increase piracy, not underconsumption.

What motivation would people have, when they feel they are being ripped off, and are presented with an alternative with no demonstrable downsides, to not consume?

People would happily pay but it’s impossible to do so in a reasonable or indeed fair way.


What do you mean "again?"

Never been closed to it.


Discover a book at your public library:)


Nice try cops


Nice try DMCA


Again??? Was there a pause?


“Again”?


Again? Always was.


I never stopped.


yup, qbittorrent search tab never fails me


again? Who said I was ever against it lol


again?


For years I've been saying the era of every company thinking they can get $20 per month from everyone has to come to an end in some form. There's a real limit to how many $20/month payments people can or are willing to make. At some point budgetary limits come into play. There's also payment exhaustion (where you start feeling like you are bleeding money every month and ask yourself "Is it really worth it?".

This isn't true just for streaming services. Software is another good example. MS Office, CAD and EDA tools, online tools/SaaS, email, etc.

My simple example is what used to be called the Adobe Creative Suite. We used to buy full suites for everyone who needed it in the company and update them with every release. That worked well until CS6, the last time we sent money to Adobe. The subscription-only approach put an end to that. While we still use CS6 (we own a bunch of licenses), this has caused us to look into alternatives. One remarkable example of this is GIMP. It's a fantastic tool. It has as much, if not more, depth as Photoshop. It does everything we need to do and more (Python scripting is incredibly useful). And so, by pushing subscriptions, Adobe pretty much lost a loyal customer forever.

The business equation is, at the core, simple. You have inputs and outputs. If you want to remain viable and grow you have to increase one and decrease the other. Subscriptions force you to bleed money every month just to be able to keep working. In many cases you don't have the option to take a break. Imagine 2020, 2021 pandemic timeline when, for lots of companies, the music stopped (the inputs).

There are companies like JetBrains who get it. If you take a break you are entitled to use the product without updates (I think it reverts to the last full years' version. That's acceptable. If I remember correctly, with products like Office 360 and Fusion 360, you stop paying and you are done until you send more money. That simply isn't acceptable. I think of files and projects I have dating back to early 1980's AutoCAD and other tools.

Another example is Altium Designer. Altium has been trying really hard to shove people into a cloud-based paradigm. They spent a tremendous amount of time and money adding a whole cloud layer to their product. The strategy was to try to sell the company. AutoDesk almost bought them. The problem, in my opinion, was that they devoted so much time and effort to the cloud paradigm that they caused serious damage to the product. Every time they touched it they introduced ten new bugs. It got to the point where you almost could not trust the product. We certainly got there. After over twenty years of supporting this company with multiple licenses and annual maintenance payments, we decided to pull the plug. Last year we begun a transition to KiCAD and could not be happier. We are also happy to support the effort financially by sending a portion of what was our annual maintenance fees to the KiCAD foundation. This is very similar to what happened with Photoshop and GIMP.

That said, I do understand companies liking the subscription model. You get to shift into a consistent revenue stream and can focus on upgrading software over time. I get it. The issues is that I just don't think this is the best model for the customer. If you are going to constantly demand money there need to be non-trivial benefits to someone spending that money. Objectively speaking, there are no major benefits between Excel 2016 and whatever you get with an Office 360 subscription. Sure, a few things here and there and some collaboration benefits. Guess what, the world ran just fine before all of that.


... again?


never stopped


Nah I'm pretty content with Netflix + Prime + Disney + YouTube premium. Still save a ton over traditional cable prices and still pretty convenient.

Also game prices are fine IMO, I don't buy the overpriced AAA stuff (that still has microtransactions SMH), indie games are pretty reasonably priced IMO.


[flagged]