> Even among pirates, file-sharing is no longer as relevant as it once was. Most pirate sites today are streaming-based and BitTorrent lost pretty much all of its ‘market share’ there too.
It seems like having a NAS full of music and movies is starting to become “Grandpa Technology.” To people who have become utterly reliant on streaming, I’d ask: what happens when the pirate stream is taken down, or the (legit) Netflix removes it from their library, or your Internet goes down, or any other event that causes a denial of access? To me, “files on disk” is still the simplest and most reliable way to collect/consume media. The apocalypse could come, and as long as I have a power source, I’ll have access to my 80’s New Wave Hits playlist.
It seems so weird to voluntarily replace that with something as fragile and inter-dependent as streaming, but maybe I’m just an old man set in his ways.
Just guessing here. What happens then is probably that people barely even notice it or not at all.
People are getting trained by shitty UIs to not always find what they want but instead to choose from something that was thrown in their faces. There's little difference between "this content is not available in service XPTO anymore" and "I can't find this content, maybe it's on X, Y or Z service but I can't be arsed to hunt it down - let's watch this other generic Netflix thing that seems to be on the top 10".
I guess it depends whether you want to watch a specific thing or just find something to watch. There will always be some new pirate site that has something available.
Spotify works in offline mode for 30 days. So it will stop working 30 days after the apocalypse but it's a downside I'm willing to accept to have almost any music available in my pocket up until then.
When the apocalypse hits you you need to already have an offline Spotify library on all devices you would like to continue using. Offline Spotify won't help you much if you don't have any media saved for offline use at that point.
People sell access to Plex libraries now. Why have a NAS when a few dudes have a preexisting library of thousands of movies and shows that you can access for $20/month.
> This marks the end of a period of declining dominance that started two decades ago when BitTorrent reportedly accounted for a third of all web traffic.
Weird thing to claim because bittorrent traffic is not web traffic at all.
> Most pirate sites today are streaming-based and BitTorrent lost pretty much all of its ‘market share’ there too.
I don't really agree. Rarbg was a huge loss though. But I don't know anyone that uses pirate streaming sites. And they're so prone to takedowns.
> Weird thing to claim because bittorrent traffic is not web traffic at all.
I suspect the opening paragraph (“lede”) may have been written by a sub-editor (or the web publication equivalent). The rest of the article - including the headline – correctly refers to Internet or upstream traffic.
I also don't see the point? Why pirate if you are still streaming? It's all the same downsides of streaming plus some more with no upsides aside from possibly being a bit cheaper. I understand why people pay for streaming, I understand why people pirate files to have something "tangible", I don't understand why people pay for pirate streaming.
People are not looking for preserverance, they are looking for consumption. Today most of the "content" is created for consumption rather than as creative and artistic endavours. This is why there are recipies for content making like Netflix recipie despite they have some creative movies and series here and there most of their movies and shows follows a strict recipie.
As I said, I get that. What I don't get is people paying for a shitty shady streaming service that's broken and insignificantly cheaper than e.g. Netflix.
I wonder if this is related to the shift in media consumption habits more than anything.
Empirically from my experiences, I’ve shifted from watching “official” content (e.g., TV shows, movies, etc) to watching a lot more YouTube content. I still watch traditional content, but I also watch a boatload more YouTube than I did 5 or even 10 years ago. There’s just so much out there on YouTube you can pretty much always watch something for a certain topic.
Since there’s no need to pirate YouTube content, there’s less need/desire to use BitTorrent in the first place.
> I wonder if this is related to the shift in media consumption habits more than anything.
In the past I was active torrents user but now I just lost interest in movies and music, I'm tired of it. I already saw and heard almost everything, nothing "new" will impress me.
It seems like having a NAS full of music and movies is starting to become “Grandpa Technology.” To people who have become utterly reliant on streaming, I’d ask: what happens when the pirate stream is taken down, or the (legit) Netflix removes it from their library, or your Internet goes down, or any other event that causes a denial of access? To me, “files on disk” is still the simplest and most reliable way to collect/consume media. The apocalypse could come, and as long as I have a power source, I’ll have access to my 80’s New Wave Hits playlist.
It seems so weird to voluntarily replace that with something as fragile and inter-dependent as streaming, but maybe I’m just an old man set in his ways.