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Piracy offers:

1. Unrestricted access to an absolutely huge library of movies, music and TV shows, nearly unlimited. Certainly not limited by opaque "licensing deals" between various companies.

2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release.

3. No arbitrary device/OS limitations.

4. Can watch/listen/download from any location on earth with sufficient bandwidth.

I didn't even mention that it's free or that there are no ads, because that's pretty much the least important attribute to me. If any company came out with a service that offered those four points, I'd probably be willing to pay a lot for it. How much? Who knows, we don't know how much this is worth because nobody is even trying to offer it.

Piracy also offers:

0. Ability to watch offline!

1. Ability to fix subtitle issues with minimal tweeks like change size or moving location.

1.2 Ability to get subtitles if they aren't offered (or offered in your language)

2. Ability to normalize audio.

3. Ability to buffer videos when on a poor connection.

4. Ability to create collections, organize, and track your movie as you wish

5. Arbitrary number of user accounts

6. Multicast streams to watch the same show across different devices regardless of if someone has an account or not (see JellyFin's SyncPlay)

7. No big organization tracking you and selling your data to the highest bidder

There's more, but honestly pirating is just a better experience. I can't tell you how many times Netflix has fucked up the subtitles so they are covering half my screen. There's tons of little issues like that that are just random and the only option is to just not watch Netflix (or pick your streaming service) that day.

Besides that, for the price of a yearly subscription you can build a NAS that can do all this for you and you get to keep the movies. Instead of having a monthly fee you can progressively add more drives and this can also be used for all your other things. Pictures, home videos, games (you can make a Steam cache), your local AI models, or whatever else you want. With $1k you can build a pretty good system, though that's 3 years of 4k Netflix, so not the cheap route in the short term.

This is a case study in why competitive markets are important in general.

Copyright is a government-granted monopoly but the monopoly is hard to enforce. It works because most people actually want to support the creators, not because DRM is effective or anything like that.

So you have the uncommon situation in which a monopoly (the copyright holder) is operating in parallel to a competitive black market for content distribution (pirates). And then the competitive market -- even though it has to operate underground and makes hardly any profit -- provides the better experience.

Lesson for anyone who thinks market consolidation doesn't lead to consumer harm.

I really want to support the creators! But by paying for movie tickets or streaming services, very little of the money I pay goes to the creators. It mostly goes to the executives and financiers, or the megastar actors that I don't really care about.

Piracy gives zero money to the creators.

It also gives zero money to scum-sucking studios and labels and worthless bureaucrats that only give the author a 2% cut.

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The black market is only more competitive because it doesn’t bear the costs of actually creating the content.

None of them are paying the cost to create the content for movies and TV, except for their own original shows. I also have no problem paying a company to watch their original content…that’s completely fair. I also have no problem paying toward the “cost of creating content” as you say.

I have a problem with how media is carved up to make sure you have to use multiple services and maximize profit. I have a problem with the ads they want to force me to watch…and charge me to watch them. I have a problem with their ever increasing prices for worse and worse catalogs. I have a problem with, despite paying for the right to watch it, they still decide how and when I can watch.

None of those things are the “cost” of creating content.

What do you do instead to make sure the creators are fairly compensated?

I like to watch old movies and don't think dead creators need compensation. Their descendants are entitled (maybe!) to inherit their wealth, but not to earn an aeternal rent doing nothing.

Apart from visiting the creator and physically handing them a wad of cash, you can't. There is no way at all for you as a consumer to ensure the creators are fairly paid. Simply put, the people you're paying for access to the content take most of the money and the creators get next to none.

Why do you think it's better for studios and labels to be allowed to extort artists this way?

The artist isn't getting fair pay in any situation, so why would you want to make things worse for everyone by continuing to encourage this rent-seeking behavior?

Alfred Hitchcock's movies aren't missing from Netflix because Netflix couldn't afford to pay for their production.

Creating the content is a sunk cost.

That said, the evidence on content creation and financial incentive is quite blurry - there's some relationship but there are also lots of people who create lots of things without tremendous financial incentive. And the genesis of copyright wasn't to protect authors, but publishers who had significant costs for producing first editions compared to those who might just copy a first edition.

The non-black market produces an intentionally inferior product so they can maximize their rent-seeking behaviors.

You shouldn't need to spend anything like $1k to get yourself going with a simple Jellyfin server running on a $50 TinyMiniMicro and a 4 tb external HDD. $150? 8 months to match Netflix. Substantially less to replace two services.

Subtitles are often a very dumb failure point, especially when English subtitles aren't available in half the world for basically no reason.

Similarly annoying is when original language subtitles aren’t available in your region for some reason, even when the audio track of the same language is. Really puts a damper on using foreign media for immersive language learning purposes.

One of the streaming services (I forget if it was Netflix or Amazon) had the original German audio track for Deutschland 83, as well as German subtitles, but the German subtitles were machine-translated from the English subtitles. Maddening!

Max has an anime and we stopped watching because even though English subtitles and English dubbed audio was available the original Japanese audio was always strangely delayed by days or weeks and the only way to tell it had been added was to check manually.

Lazarus?

Yes. We figured it was a mistake and watched a single dubbed episode and it was terrible. IIRC when I googled it I found out it was an intentional decision and of course people were talking about just pirating the original.

Edit: It has been some months, but I also vaguely recall the episodes getting the Japanese audio out of order, which is why we thought it was just a mistake for that episode until we 'caught up' to the newest episodes.

I have another problem, which is that my wife is Japanese and I’m American, and if we watch a French movie then I want the English subs and she wants the Japanese subs. Making that work with streaming services is very painful.

Anecdotally, for a long time dual French and German subtitles was the standard in Swiss cinemas when movie was shown in original language. So your usecase is not that unusual !

Same in Belgium, top line was Dutch, bottom line was French

I had never thought of this before. What is the solution? Can any video software show two subtitles at once?

VLC, mpv, and SMPlayer all support dual subtitles, with varying amounts of fiddling.

https://old.reddit.com/r/VLC/comments/hnle2o/dual_subtitles/

https://superuser.com/questions/1255487/how-to-get-vlc-to-di...

I developed a tool (https://github.com/smacke/ffsubsync) which can sync subtitles against each other (or even against an audio track), and this can be used in conjunction with other tools such as https://pypi.org/project/srt/ to combine multiple subtitle streams into a single stream. I've used this strategy to good effect to get both English and Chinese subtitles up at once.

For Netflix and YouTube I actually use a language learning chrome extension called Migaku, that has this feature - but if there don’t exist subs, can also sometimes pull it off with a chrome extension for dual subs - forget what it is called but I can download SRT files and load them up alongside a stream. Both are not reliable and require significant fiddling.

And don't miss the situations where the subtitles are baked into the stream: HBO Max is very fond of just not letting you remove subtitles at all for at least a few non-english series.

Until recently, 3. (poor connection) has been a huge issue for me and streaming services. When there is a download/watch later, I sigh with relief.

7. is only sort-of an issue, IMHO. Anything that is pirated is usually fairly benign content and I don't care if someone knows how many times I've watched Idiocracy. I just wish I could know how many times I've watched it too.

I would add: Piracy offers the ability to remember content that isn't popular enough to remain in streaming services. I just searched "Big Trouble in Little China" and Google Play wants me to pay $3.79 to rent it or the full original price to purchase it. Tell me, does the original cast get any of that or is it just adding pocket change to Google's coffers?

> I don't care if someone knows how many times I've watched Idiocracy.

I come from Germany, from East Germany. And some people there wanted to know if you had seen certain films and how often. And ‘Idiocracy’ would have been very high up on their list.

Not all films were banned right from the start (‘The Legend of Paul and Paula’ [1]), but right from the beginning the Stasi found it very interesting who had watched the film.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Paul_and_Paula

This. Privacy does not matter until it does.

Thanks for your example, qrios

What if I have recently watched The Lives of Others?

(Which everyone in the US should.)

‘The Lives of Others’ is an outstanding film. However, it is a reappraisal of East German history and was made seven years after the collapse (the director grew up in West Germany and Western Europe).

US-America has looked at the subject of surveillance of its own population and its own (possible) collapse many times and often in a timely manner.

"The Conversation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation

"Enemy of the State": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)

"The Siege": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siege

"In the Heat of the Night": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Heat_of_the_Night_(film...

"Eagle Eye": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Eye

If you ask publicly, ‘What if I've seen XYZ?’ then it's actually already too late.

The collapse being the collapse of the DDR? The Lives of Others must have been made way further beyond that than 7 years. Closer to 20, I'd figure.

TLOO came out in 2006, 16 years after the DDR collapsed.

I wondered if GP was thinking of another movie so I asked ChatGPT, which told me: "The German film you’re thinking of is "Good Bye, Lenin!" — released in 2003, exactly seven years after the formal end of the DDR in 1990." (My emphasis.)

So much for GPT-5.

That's hilarious. Imagine going back two years and showing someone GPT-5? They might think the Pause AI movement had won. It makes you ponder an alternate timeline where the OpenAI brain trust wasn't dismantled

Which version did you use, though? GPT-5, GPT-5-Thinking, GPT-5 Pro, GPT-5-Mini, GPT-5 with Thinking (reasoning effort=high) or one of the other 18 options? Did you tell it to think harder? Maybe you are just holding it wrong?

A perfectly grammatical and plausible sentence. Those words all seem quite likely to occur in that sequence. Another LLM success.

GPT-5 fell into a coma and missed a few critical years.

Linguistically it's an ok association. If you look at it unconsciously, you can find it plausible too, add 7 but in reverse.

Right, I missed a whole decade. (For me 1989, the Mauerfall is the official end of GDR)

Trivia about that movie: The spying devices used were authentic and from the era depicted.

Interesting. There isn't one sentence in that article (English) which describes the political controversy of that movie. A single sentence mentions the film almost being banned for its 'political overtones'.

The English article is incomplete. The banner is there. I guess I could try to complete it but it’s highly my work would be struck out by an angry editor feeling territorial for a reason or another so maybe not.

The French article is a bit better - I don’t understand German sadly.

The controversy stems from the protagonists values. They put their love for each other and their search for fulfilment above other commitments which was seen as dangerously non communist. The film was cleared by the head of East Germany but the censors still imposed a tragic ending.

> I just wish I could know how many times I've watched it too.

I exported all my private data from Netflix and it had very detailed information on exactly when I (or anyone else in the household) watched what.

Sadly it only went back a few years. Either they do not keep older data or they pretend not to. My Spotify data seemed to be complete for all years I have used it, listing the exact time and location, what device etc, I listened to any track there ever.

>isn't popular enough No that's because it's good enough to get rented regularly. Why sign a streaming deal if your IP prints money?

> Tell me, does the original cast get any of that or is it just adding pocket change to Google's coffers?

Google will have negotiated with the “owner” (in this case I think Disney) for a wholesale price and then adds its retail markup (eg 20%). Disney pay the industry standard SAG/DGA union negotiated residual agreements to cast, writers and directors

I find myself wishing for a lower-overhead approach to this. 20% already gets the price from $14.99 to $12.49. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the cast gets less than 50% and lawyers get more than 40% of that. If true, that's less than $6.25 to the folks that actually made the movie and $8.75 (or more) of pure, unadulterated overhead. Finally, clicking on "where to watch" shows prices within $0.20 of each other. It's not ... not price-fixing, but it kinda is.

Also, "wholesale" is such a strange way to look at this. There is no way the digital asset is sent to them more than once. It's some kind of strange fiction for me to imagine, "here are X downloads of movie Y at a discounted rate. If you want more, you need to come back and purchase another X downloads." It's as if a download itself is a consumable that Disney provides.

Also the trust that your favorite music will still be available to you if the streaming service goes bankrupt or cancels its content licensing deal or decides to jack up prices unaffordably or makes its player incompatible with your OS or introduces a service-ending software bug.

GOG used to have a small selection of DRM-free movies that you could buy to download and that would then make all those things possible to do in a way that would be legal or at least able to do locally in a way that would have a zero risk of being discovered even if it violated some EULA. Announcement from 2014:

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree...

Sadly http://www.gog.com/movies now redirects to http://www.gog.com/games and the movies link that used to be on the front page is gone. Based on a comment in that announcement thread it looks like the movies were silently removed already back in 2023. I only noticed it now. They never seemed to really add any new movies and the existing ones were mostly game-related documentaries.

> With $1k you can build a pretty good system

1. The hardware you buy for these activities, has still residual value after 1, 2, 3 year. Unlike the streaming service you pay for.

2. Its cheap to upgrade / expand over time (if its not a all in one solution)

3. It opens a door to not just store movies/music/images, but as emulator, streaming service, or game streaming to one or multiple.

4. The content will not arbitrarily vanish.

5. Your bookmarks / last viewed / ... will not arbitrarily vanish. Do not get me started on this and how annoying it can be when a services removes content!

6. It serves not only as a device for "linux isos" or other gray zones but also as a legit backup of your own personal data.

7. Saves you from needing "cloud" storage or other cloud services.

8. Can be enhanced with programs that offer image conversion, pdf conversion etc, all private!

9. Run your own chat server for the family, no US/EU "we want to know what you are saying" issues.

10. Can act like your own VPN, to route data from your phone or other devices outside your home.

11. Provides service if you are in area's with horrible internet connection with its ability to "cache isos" at night slowly.

12. Your control over the media means you can stream 4k to your PC. Netflix kuch kuch ... No, its not 4k.

13. You can gain the FULL bitrate of the media. You do not get a washed down version of the supposed media based upon how busy a streaming service their servers are or other limitations.

14. It can be used for so many other activities like programming.

15. Did i mention home automatization?

And so much more ... People are probably doing things with NAS setups that i can not even think about.

Your not investing into a machine for "illegal" stuff, your investing into a machine that frees you as the end user from all those cloud, streaming, and other services their lackluster service. And then provides all the added benefits on top, that a 24/7 running PC can provide.

Lets also not forget the future where LLM's are a thing. Having your own open source LLM that runs at home, can be a major benefit.

But ... it does require more knowledge, especially as you step up beyond simple storage. So that is the real downside, not the money, the time and knowledge buildup.

> The hardware you buy for these activities, has still residual value after 1, 2, 3 year. Unlike the streaming service you pay for.

With mine I am cracking on 14 years with some of it. It still 'just works'. I ripped all of my stuff so I can manage it as I have too much of it. The home streaming has been quite nice. I would upgrade just for '4k'. Not sure if I want it or not. One major roadblock has been finding a decent wake from power off not just s3 and works with an IR remote. 14 years ago media center was a thing so most manufactures put CIR into everything. Then suddenly they didnt. If I could get past that one roadblock I would update it all.

You completely forgot to mention home automation :) Home Assistant FTW

Making all this work is not difficult with docker once you get past the steep learning curve

1.3 Ability to make your own subtitles so your Klingon grandma can watch the movie

1.4 Ability to edit the video so your 10 year old can watch Top Secret! without gross anal sex jokes

I think my favorite thing of not even piracy, just ripping my DVDs, is the ability to watch a random episode of a show. There's some shows like The Simpsons that I don't want to watch in production order any more, nor do I want to manually select. Now I just tap some buttons in Kodi and it randomly picks a recently unwatched episode.

Or more generally: the ability to use a video player of your choice, which can have whatever features and interface that you want.

Funnily enough, ability to watch offline is something the Netflix app for Windows (yes from their app store) lets you do. It is my favorite reason to install Windows apps instead of just using the browser, really handy for a trip when you have a real screen to watch movies from.

Offline watching is a thing with streaming services, too.

Also, there is no reason for a paid streaming service not to implement 1 (but not 1.2), 2, 3 and 4. It's not like these features will affect their bottom line. They just don't see value in implementing and supporting them.

  > these features will affect their bottom line. They just don't see value

The issue is that most of this "what has value" is just as made up as anything else. Most people don't even know what they want. They get features and then they know they want it, but often not before. So it is affecting their bottom line, but the problem is group think.

Sorry, I meant that "implementing them wouldn't affect their bottom line in a negative way". I agree with you that they are useful features.

That's what separates these bullet points from the others: Others will never be implemented because they won't help them make more money.

most streaming services i use do not allow offline watching on a computer, only mobile

What do you mean by audio normalization? Aren't you talking about compression?

It's not the same thing. Normalization is scanning to see what the highest volume scale you can use without introducing clipping, then multiplying every sample by that scale.

Compression is very different. The volume scale isn't constant, and the original sound is distorted significantly. I often use a compressor to listen to video game streams because they tend to have the game audio be way too quiet. Having the compressor on causes the game audio to become louder with some minor distortion, but distorts the streamer's voice significantly.

I know about this. This is why I asked

Some movies have portions that are really quiet and others that are quiet loud. Depending on your taste you may prefer to not have the experience of turning up the audio so you can hear a quiet conversation, then having your ears blown out by a loud explosion or whatever. Director's tastes be damned, I'm trying to relax over here!

In audio processing, the more precise term for it is compression (dynamically adjust gain). Normalization usually means that the gain is adjusted so that the highest volume meets a certain level. (Like what YouTube does)

Compression is an entirely different thing.

Compression isn't just gain adjustment - it's a specific type of audio processing that increases perceived "gain" (loudness) of the entire source audio by "compressing" the levels of loud frequencies & increasing the levels of quiet frequencies.

Normalization increases gain of all frequencies at any given point-in-time while reducing gain of all frequencies at other points in time. It doesn't reduce dynamic range.

I think you're describing a multi-band compressor. "Normal" compressors do indeed do gain adjustment. They usually do this without regard for the frequencies present. Only the amplitude matters for normal compressors.

Not specifically talking about multiband.

Normal compressors do effectively do gain adjustment - it's not really the same as a typical amp since their core function only reduces gain, then makeup is applied to the entirety to compensate - but yes the result is effectively gain adjustment.

As for doing it "without regard for the frequencies present", if you compress a mix with a base guitar & high vocals, the impact of the compression on the base will be different than on the higher notes. This is aside from (/in addition to?) attack & release applied on a per-track basis & more just about the natural effect of dynamics within frequency ranges.

Are you referring to psychoacoustic effects? Something like perceived loudness is only determined by waveform amplitude, but also affected by frequencies present? Or maybe the vocal and bass parts have transients at different times causing the other to be attenuated when it was already relatively quiet?

Other than that I'm not sure what else you could mean. Maybe we've been using different compressors. I've used a small handful of hardware and software compressors and haven't found them to sensitive to spectral content when used "normally". Meaning no extra filters or side chain configuration.

> Normalization increases gain of all frequencies at any given point-in-time while reducing gain of all frequencies at other points in time.

When you do that then the difference between the loudest and the quietest part of the audio gets reduced. That's dynamic range reduction.

True. But.

While normalization is usually one-way, if you're doing DSP normalization & have a record of the level offsets you've applied, it's reversible. This is never the case for compression - you can't increase dynamic range of a compressed file (short of AI-generating something that never was)

Sorry but you really misunderstand what normalization and compression means. "quiet frequencies" :D

I assure you I don't.

I'm not sure what the scare quotes are about but if you point out what I'm misrepresenting I can try to explain it a little better.

You don't need to explain, I know the subject.

Compression acts on the amplitude of the entire audio signal, not "quiet frequencies". You can start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression

Normalization as it normally is used is offline process where you up the gain of the whole audio so that the loudest noise is 0dB.

But compression is ambiguous because that could also refer to compressing the video stream to reduce the size of the movie.

> compression is ambiguous

I think the unambiguous term for this is "Dynamic Range Compression"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression

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I stopped pirating in college when I got a job and was making enough money to pay for movies I wanted to watch. But I miss almost every single one of the points listed so much so that I have begun purchasing dvd or Blu-ray copies of movies and shows I would otherwise stream, and ripping the content for my own use. It is an absurd amount of work, but the end result is a better experience than streaming in almost every way.

If I could legally download movies and shows (paying full price for them) I absolutely would.

Mind elaborating?

"Look, doing something illegal offers a lot of benefits for me! I must be a genius"

You’re not considering that many of these points are in no way illegal to provide as a streaming service.

I didn't say it. but the comment we are replying to says "piracy offers:", so direct your complaint to that guy.

I agree with you. How about launch a better service instead of pointing out how breaking the law is beneficial to the breaker. Duh it always is, I wonder why??

2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release.

Arguably higher. For example, fans of Star Wars have scanned the original 1977 theatrical release with very high quality film scanners and created a 4K release complete with film grain and the original scenes intact which is not available through approved channels.

There’s also a number of movies where the best quality publicly available is a pirated rip of an HDTV broadcast from a Malaysian TV network or something similarly odd because the rights holders never released a BD and the official DVD release was a transfer from a crappy VHS or similar.

In cases of TV shows, fans have gone to the lengths of producing the best quality release possible by patching together video, audio, and subtitles from myriad sources, sometimes even splicing individual cuts when their quality varies between sources. It’s so much more effort than you’d see from any official restorations.

Yeah, IIRC NHK broadcast some movies, like 2001, in 8K scans that are hard to find even on the high seas.

And there are one or two movies that have leaked in DCP 4K, which look absolutely stunning if you have the hardware to play them.

The criterion collection being the one noteable exception, and they have their own standalone streaming service that is pretty good:

https://www.criterionchannel.com/browse

Ironically, signing-up to Criterion isn't available in Australia:

--------

Request Access

Sorry. This is currently unavailable in your region. Type in your email below and tell the producers you want it in your country!

Try a VPN, I think it was easily circumvented

> In cases of TV shows

Can you give me some examples of those guerilla remaster ? I know of the various Star Wars projects (Harmy and the likes) and the remaster from "La Classe Américaine", but I don't know any others.

A French movie that bungle together several excerpt from classic Warner movie to tell its own humorous story. A cult classic for French millennials. The director later on went on to make The Artist to universal acclaim.

A couple I can remember off the top of my head, since I can't check my server right now. Scrubs with original music, since they didn't have the license for the original songs for streaming (or the DVDs, I can't remember). Daria with the original music for the same reason. I can't think of any fan visual remasters of tv shows though.

Right now it's usually CINEPHiLES remuxes, that pick absolute best sources available, and sometimes splice the video to get each shot the best possible treatment from the available bitstreams

Many other groups do this; look for the HYBRID tag.

It's really infuriating how many TV series are only (legally) available as horribly over-compressed and interlaced DVDs outside of streaming platforms.

The Star Wars project is a bit of an outlier in terms of the insane work and dedication that's gone into it.

However, in the quality-focused corners of online film piracy, it's still pretty routine for people to combine the best features of every retail release available to produce something that's better than what you can get even by just going out and buying a Blu Ray. For example, maybe the best picture quality available anywhere is from a Blu Ray that was released to the German market, but a US Blu Ray release has an extra commentary track, while the best audio track is actually from an old Laserdisc release (crazy but it's happened before).

In the live action world it's pretty rare for a video track or an audio track to be spliced together from multiple sources, though it does happen. But in the anime world it's pretty common and they'll do stuff to fix picture quality issues or localize Japanese text to English on signs or whatever (and they can do it slick enough that you wouldn't even notice).

The most bizarre part of all of this, though, is that people put in all this work only for the communities themselves to be small and fiercely private, meaning it could be hard for most people to actually access the end results (though the popular stuff tends to trickle out). The best place on the Internet to download movies bar none (better than all the major streaming platforms put together) is an invite only site with under 40k members that's extremely difficult to join these days.

What's the name of the Star Wars project? You know, so I can avoid those darn pirates more effectively.

The one they were talking about (based on scans of original film prints) is called 4K77/4K80/4K83 for the three films.

I believe the first project of this type for Star Wars was Harmy's Despecialized Edition but I think these days most people prefer the 4K77 versions, although it varies by film and by person.

Thanks!

People just don't realize just how garbage even 4k streams are from all the services. It's not in their interest to give you real bluray quality.

Yes! Someone came after me on here because I said there really is no 4k streaming.

The marketing of a resolution really won out. People will fight you if you suggest a high bitrate 1080p encode can look better than a low bitrate 4k.

I’m going to develop 8k streaming - it’s just the normal low bitrate shit, but if you pause it sends a full quality 8k frame.

Nobody will figure it out!

When your source material shows fast sweeping motions you'd certainly get away with that.

I don't know, 4k HEVC at 15,000mbps looks plenty good to me.

And that is good for you, giving you the benefit of the doubt that you meant 15mbps, but I know I can personally tell the difference between 15mbps and 50mbps. Seeing more detailed film grain and seeing less artifacts in fast moving scenes are two of the most noticeable.

Commercial 4k Blu-ray’s are twice that all the way up to 4x or sometimes more. And I’d say even on the best mastered disks there’s still obvious encoding artifacts.

...what service offers 15Gbps stream?

Sorry my unit was wrong 15Mbps is pretty common for the highest nitrate streams

None. No matter how much you pay, the best you'll ever get from streaming services is a bit-starved encode with fake film grain in a bullshit codec that'll look worse than 720p DVD rips you'd find on Zamunda yet still require more power to decode...

That's a bit of an edge case, powered by the absolute, lovely turbo-nerdery of a few dedicated souls. They are called 4K77 / 4K80 versions for people looking for them.

Wow. I thought it was impossible to watch the original release of star wars. I need to hunt this down.

"4k77" should get you to the right places

4k80 was finally released last year as well. Some notes on why it took so long: https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k80/

Yup. Team Negative One are doing some very important work in terms of film preservation/digital archeology.

Legend thank you

There's also a DVD release of the theatrical versions. Usually goes for $50-75 for OG trilogy.

DVDs are 480i, the parent comment described far higher quality than DVD.

DVDs support progressive scan and most movies were encoded in 480p; the player then just sent half the picture on one field and the other half on the other field.

Your point still stand though, these modern 4k editions are far higher quality.

The DVD releases of the original theatrical versions of Star Wars were encoded in 480i non-anamorphic, drawn from analog video masters intended for Laserdisc, which employed an early version of DNR that created a bunch of ugly temporal ghosting artifacts. Blown up onto a modern display it looks really bad.

I watched the PAL edition and I don't remember those artifacts, but it was a million years ago so my memory could be wrong xD

The PAL release was an NTSC>PAL conversion, so throw upscaling artifacts onto the pile as well. e: Actually thinking back on it, it may not even have been PAL at all, but 480i/60hz Region 2/4.

There's a good chance you watched it on a CRT given that even on a flat panel LCD fom the late 2000s the low vertical resolution was quite noticeable (effectively ~272p, not counting deinterlacing artifacts from it being sourced from a video master). It looked somewhat acceptable in that context but aged very quickly once CRTs started becoming obsolete.

Yes, there was the official DVD release that included the original versions as a bonus. But the quality can not compare to 4K77.

They release better products than trillion dollar corporations.

There are piracy groups out there who are known to source frames from multiple different blu-rays in order to create the best version of a work.

Imagine caring so much about something you compare different releases frame by frame in order to select the best ones so that you can splice them all together to form the highest quality ultimate version of a work.

Meanwhile corporations are perfectly happy shitting out some butchered streaming slop with compression artifacts in 90% black frames.

Eh Stremio's episode chooser leaves a bit to be desired, when jumping back into the middle of a show.

It’s great but do you know of any others?

Harmy's Despecialized Edition(s).

all of Star Trek Voyager

Care to expand? I assume the result is still 480p or have they actually done more than that?

All of the 90s Star Trek series were filmed on 35mm, but all of the post-production work (editing, SFX, etc) were done on tape, at 480p. There's no 35mm copy of the final result to scan and color-grade for a "normal" HD remaster. For the TNG remaster, what they actually did was re-do all of the post-production from the original 35mm negatives. VFX were re-composed, some were re-done in CG. They finished the TNG remaster just as streaming services were ramping up and Blu-Ray disk sales declining, and sales were disappointing given the amount of work that had to go into them.

Paramount will never remaster DS9 or VOY because they don't expect to make the money back, because neither was as popular as TNG. And it's worse for DS9 and VOY because they extensively used CGI effects for things like ship battles, which were originally rendered at 480p. If the original assets could be found, they could be re-rendered, but in many cases, they would have to be fully re-created.

Fans have created AI upscales which are generally better than watching the horrible 480p releases that were on Netflix and are now on Paramount+. But they are also sometimes uncannily smooth and unpleasant.

Is there a name that these upscaled releases fall under to easily find them?

Star Trek in particular (I was watching voyager yesterday) the quality is always pretty depressing when shown on a larger TV. Been recently thinking about trying to find the best quality I can find but it is always a lot of trial and error. But if there is a common name and tag I could look for that would be great.

Just "<series name>", "upscale", and "complete" or "S0<n>", will work, I believe.

While that's the best option, there's always AI upscaling and frame gen. These of course won't be as good as native resolution and can sometimes make more errors, but they can make a big difference on low resolutions when you got a big screen.

To be blunt, upscaling is pretty shit and doesn't belong in a discussion about quality. The quality-obsessed piracy world we're talking about here would shudder at the comparison.

While that’s the best option to eat chocolate, there’s always eating shit. If you put it in the right form it might even resemble chocolate.

Don't forget censorship-free

I swore off streaming services when they started pulling episodes of comedy shows and editing out scenes because they were worried someone might be offended

The DnD episode from Community (S2E14) can't be seen on any streaming services because one Asian character wears black makeup while cosplaying as a drow.

The list of Sunny's removed episodes from Hulu is insane to me:

- Season 4 Episode 3: America's Next Top Paddy's Billboard Model Contest

- Season 6 Episode 9: Dee Reynolds: Shaping America's Youth

- Season 8 Episode 2: The Gang Recycles Their Trash

- Season 9 Episode 9: The Gang Makes Lethal Weapon 6

- Season 14 Episode 3: Dee Day

They're all in my home server, though :)

One of the best episodes in my opinion, and an excellent introduction to DnD for people who don't know what they are getting into.

That's a problem that predates streaming.

There's at least one ALF ('86-90)episode that you can only get the uncensored version via piracy.

(Episode in question is Try to Remember. ALF originally got an electric shock. It quickly got censored in reruns to have ALF slip and hit his head because the network worried kids would get shocked emulating ALF.)

For me, it was when a movie wasn't the way I remembered it. Then I found a pirated copy.

Turned out the 'official' release was heavily edited, with tone, characters, and even some plot had been completely reshaped. I've found this to be increasingly prevalent, and not just in a "made for TV" or "adapted for Flying" type modifications.

Fair to be upset. Just noting that has been happening for about the whole history of televised comedy:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smothers_Brothers_Comedy...

That part really aggravated me. I already pay a hefty premium for Disney/Hulu so the fact that I do not get full experience, because someone thought an episode I pay for with subs is offensive really irks me. I am slowly getting to the point of pulling the plug and each time I see an ad for hulu on disney, I am getting a tiny little bit closer to pissing off wife and making kid cry in one go.

Nature is healing ! https://nofilmschool.com/disney-butt-in-splash

They also often time have versions of old movies and shows that have been modified due to silly things like license agreements on music expiring! I have felt gaslighted when I rewatch and old movie and some scene isn’t how I remember.

Or sometimes the licensor just doesn’t feel like paying for it. Netflix famously removed the iconic version of “Fly Me to the Moon” from the ending credits of their copy of Neon Genesis Evangelion and even more weirdly stripped the vocals from the similarly iconic ending credits theme of Naoki Urusawa’s Monster, both because they didn’t want to shell out the cash for the rights.

The TV series Scrubs was hit really hard by this — The soundtrack and sound-design in that show really drove home the emotion in the episodes, and when replaced, it really doesn't hit the same mark.

I was so surprised and bummed when I discovered this was a thing. My wife and I started watching the original Beverly Hills 90210—a sort of ridiculous snapshot of American pop culture in the early 1990s—on some streaming service, and after a few episodes I noticed the music was just...super wrong.

Reading online, I learned that a lot of the original music had been licensed only for the original run of the show, so even when it went to DVD in the early 2000s they had to remove a whole bunch of the original music. It's terrible on two fronts: one, the show is an awesome snapshot of 90s music, with tons of great stuff featured both as background music and in extended live performances, but they cut whole scenes and entire episodes that had too much of it, and two, whoever managed the process of picking replacement music clearly did not care at all, and used awful generic music that sounds like it came from a file called "BeachRiff.aiff" on a $29.95 CD library of royalty-free 60 second stock music samples.

I admit to finding a source of video files patched together from various sources with the original soundtracks intact, and it's simply MUCH more enjoyable. It seems, though, that some episodes of live performances are lost to time—or at least lost to the corporate owners who'd rather sit on the tapes in a warehouse somewhere than make them available.

You can no longer get Rocky&Bullwinkle episodes with the original music. The replacement music is so awful it is unwatchable.

what's really pointless is how they released the beavis and butthead episodes without the music videos. even the replays on mtv or mtv2 back in the 2000s couldn't play the music videos.

Back in the 90s, people just had no concept of today's media offerings. Content was edited specifically to work with the only home media they new of at the time, and that was interlaced TV at frame rates of 29.97 or 25. There was no concept for progressive displays. The only home video format that was in wide use was VHS, and TV shows just didn't find their way there. That was something for theatrical releases. TV shows were much more concerned about trying to make it to syndication. When it came time to licensing, that's all the producers had on their radar.

What's the point? This was much less a malicious thing than it is made out to be. Once the licensing ran out, that's it. They can't just YOLO their way through it, or they'd have been sued. It's possible they tried to negotiate new terms for the music, but terms couldn't be agreed. When it came time to release on DVD, the person involved for the music might not have been available or interested in doing it again. At that point, the music would never feel right when replaced. The last point being these producers would be doing this on the cheap, so your <$30 CD library wouldn't have been far off, except the music libraries would have been much more expensive than that. Decent royalty free music has only been a thing within the past 10-15 years.

Edit: one more thing about the music, it is a large expense for the production. the studios are usually willing to pay for it to air, because they know how much ad sales they have and build it into part of the per episode expense. negotiating for DVD release with no known amount of money to earn makes it difficult to negotiate a license for "real" music

Everybody knows all of this, and nobody thinks the companies doing it are doing it "maliciously." The point is that it is stupid, harmful and unnecessary, not a consumer complaint.

Of course these people did not want to sell a broken product; they sold a lot fewer copies because they were forced to by goofy laws and their financial circumstances.

I hate that kind of destruction of what I think should ultimately be considered property of humanity. When you create something, you're free to destroy or ruin it. Once you share it with somebody else, you should need their consent to destroy it.

The social responsibility for ensuring that things could be shared falls on libraries. You might check a few libraries for old copies of vintage media.

My sore spot is the original Rust In Peace album. It was rerecorded and the rerecording is horrible. Any copy of the original is treasure to me.

> The social responsibility for ensuring that things could be shared falls on libraries.

That's a fair point!

That's the thing: I don't feel like the studios really own something once it is released. It almost becomes the property of the viewers. Things like changing Star Wars is horrifying to most. It's almost as if the public should have to vote on any changes (e.g. I'd probably be willing to vote to remove some flubs, like a mic dangling in frame).

When the Bobs sold Back to the Future they put a clause in the contract that the movies could not be remade or altered in any way without their approval. They nixed the 3D versions that Universal was planned when 3D TVs were in vogue.

This feels like a terribly entitled way to view someone else’s work.

This feels like an entitlement to disappoint people. If you plan to ruin the experience, don't waste my time on it.

Ugh, the music licensing issue is horrible. I sold a movie to Netflix many years ago and they "couldn't afford" the awesome soundtrack so they switched it out with garbage which makes a so-so movie into a total turd.

> They also often time have versions of old movies and shows that have been modified due to silly things like license agreements on music expiring! I have felt gaslighted when I rewatch and old movie and some scene isn’t how I remember.

1990s Beavis and Butthead episodes seem completely bizarre/pointless without the music.

When Mike Judge started releasing new episodes back in 2012-ish, it's noticeable how he mostly avoided music clips and focused on satirizing reality shows that were on the same network (MTV.) I assume this was to avoid licensing nightmares.

the DVD/streaming releases of Daria suffer from this. i used to have old TV rips of the show with the original contemporary MTV soundtrack but i'm not sure what happened to them. the stock music just doesn't carry the weight of the times.

I was literally complaining to my partner about this exact thing last night -- we ended up torrenting a collection of what look to be old VHS rips and really enjoyed them.

Mission Hill as well. If you want the original one, with tracks by Moby, Looper, the Toasters, and more, the only option is a fan made restoration project

If you want 4k, that fan restoration project is also the only way to get it

google “The Daria Restoration Project”

especially when Advanced DnD is like the best Community episode

This was what made me cancel Netflix 10 years ago.

They decided to remove stuff that cost them nothing to have in their library like Gone with the Wind. I'd never watch it but it was clear then they had decided they would be gatekeepers of what people can and cant watch.

> cost them nothing to have in their library

I cancelled Netflix too, but it's not true that it cost them nothing to have it in their library. Everyone in the movie still needs to get paid and simply having the show in the library costs them money.

If people stopped getting offended by literally anything. We wouldn’t have to deal with this bs.

Centralized services are low-stakes levers of power that encourage people to form outrage movements to pull them.

I hate the censorship. But when some groups are willing to kill if you don’t censor then I can’t blame others for not wanting to be martyrs and put their lives on the line for it

What groups are you talking about

Publish a cartoon about the prophet Mohamed and some of the groups will make themselves known to you.

What does that very specific example have to do with broad censorship as a phenomenon in media? Like how often do you think TV networks and streaming services are removing depictions of Mohammed in the stuff they make or license?

Did you really not know the answer or were you asking just to force the answer?

I can't think of any answer that makes sense in this context (widespread tv show editing).

Not TV show editing, rather a satire magazine, but a now-deleted reply mentioned that Charlie Hebdo was pressured to censor and would not. They had staff members murdered because they would not censor.

That is a thing that happened.

But if it's what socalgal2 was talking about, then their comment was a non-sequitur. They saw the word censorship and rambled something almost entirely unrelated to the topic at hand.

That's why it's worth asking what they're talking about.

They were responding to a comment about piracy not self-centering extant works. I could see where the comment does sequitur, just barely. Perhaps he is pushing an agenda, perhaps he was making conversation. I can see far further OT comments all up and down this post.

My issue is less with taking a tangent but the way the comment is framed as if it's a justification for what services are doing. Maybe one south park episode can be half-justified that way, and basically nothing else.

I see what you're saying now. I'm not familiar with the South Park episode but I think I understand you.

There was also South Park's episodes 200 and 201 where they got a slew of death threats for depicting Mohammad. Funnily enough, Mohammad's depiction was the least offensive of all the other religious figures they showed in that episode, which was basically the point of the episodes more or less.

The funniest part of it all is that the network decided to not only remove the episode after the initial airing, it even censored Kyle's speech at the end of 201[1] about fighting back against intimidation. The censorship was done in such a way that it looked like South Park was satirizing the censorship itself too [2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TMHIYDHMSE [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imj_pHXzJbc

I genuinely don’t know what socalgal2 is referring to. If everybody instantly understood cryptic posts we wouldn’t call them cryptic

Not directly related to streaming services, but this happened: https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2025/08/13/noisy-le-s...

I can definitely see how streaming services would adapt to bigots.

That seems like a bad reason to swear off streaming services. Do you not shop at stores because they don’t carry offensive clothing?

If a tshirt rental store was renting me my favourite tshirt (not available to buy) for two decades then decided it wasn't available any more because other people don't like the shirt design, I would be pissed and not want to support the tshirt rental industry any more.

That’s a bad analogy. It works against your point. It seems entirely, entirely reasonable to avoid a clothing store that refuses to stock hip styles simply because they’re “offensive”. For an example using the cliche, many people find a naked ankle to be completely acceptable.

Yours is wrong. Yours would work if you liked all the clothes there but then one day they stopped selling Kanye West’s Nazi shirt that you liked because people found it offensive. And then you stopped shopping there because of that.

The analogy requires you giving up what you want because they stopped carrying something others find offensive. Not that they don’t sell what you like all up. In which case it makes perfect sense not to shop there.

That's a really awkward analogy. A better one would be: Would you buy an album with all the curse words bleeped out? A lot of people would, but others would prefer the uncensored version.

That’s a worse analogy. The other guy doesn’t want to use a service because they don’t offer content he wants because people are offended by it. There’s a bunch of clothes not sold at most retailers because it is offensive but you can buy them online directly from the manufacturer.

The analogy you gave would be better if they edited the content to be semantically equivalent but they aren’t. The content just isn’t available.

Now maybe the argument is that you’re paying for the service. In which case it would be like Costco where you have a membership and they definitely don’t carry offensive material.

This can happen with piracy too. For example, I'm aware of at least one case where the highest quality option for a specific show edited out the gay scenes.

Sure, someone can upload a new edited version. But the unedited one doesn't get removed. That's not really censorship.

If you don't notice the removal and therefore don't have a reason to look elsewhere, it has the same effect

But that's unrelated to why tech. People advertising one version instead of another does not have a technical solution. The only thing tech can provide is the ability to keep copying the old version, regardless of what the original creator/distributor thinks.

You don't understand, it's terrible to censor movies but absolutely vital to make sure people can't make movies I disagree with.

edit: It's funny, I wouldn't be happy about a version of the old HBO series Rome reedited with anything gay taken out, but I'd be absolutely excited to watch a version of Queer As Folk with all the gay stuff edited out.

What was that specific show?

What gets to me is exclusivity deals. Wanna watch this? Subscribe to that. Wanna watch that? Well itnisnt available on this so you'd have to subscibe to that. New streaming service launches with promotional exclusivity of something you like? Gotta get on that too. And don't get me started on sports!

Streaming was OK when it was fighting cable, because it was cheaper and on-demand. With the constant greed, we're back to paying more than we used to pay for cable, it doesn't make sense anymore.

It's a shame https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_P.... was never applied to streaming services.

In addition to inconvenience and cost, this is a problem because the technical implementation of most services is poor. For example, Comcast's streaming service as of a few years ago went VERY out of its way to block Linux.

> 2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release.

I paid for Disney+ to watch Andor at 4K, only to find out that you can't - Disney+ prohibits anything over 1K on computers whether you use the app or a browser. Went back to piracy very quickly after that. More fragmented experience is annoying, not even being able to get the highest quality as a paying customer is insane.

I went down a similar rabbit hole when I bought my OLED monitor, finding that you can neither stream UHD nor play UHD Blu-Ray (it was possible on a few generations of Intel chips before SGX was deprecated because it was not in fact secure; 10th-gen was the latest)

Well, okay then -- chump don't want the money, chump don't get the money

Amusingly if your have MakeMKV and patched firmware, you can rip them without even blinking.

The firmware flashing story for the drives is even funnier because some of the really common LG bluray drives that get used for ripping UHD blurays doesn't support reading UHD discs "on the box", but if you flash the firmware from a different drive it reads them without skipping a beat.

The 4K standard didn't bring any new disc formats to my knowledge. It just started using the higher layer count formats that were already available but the firmware on the cheaper drives wont read them.

Netflix and to some level spotify drowned piracy for a time. But then a lot of companies tried to rap the same "winings" splitting the ecosystem and trashing the user experience.

- ¿could we watch x movie? - let me see. no, it in this other service beside the 3 we are paying.

At some point I'm willing to just pay a few dollars for a movie. But even then you cant get them all in one place! And they like to charge a premium for some. Im not paying a premium for anything I've already seen a while back.

The particular service that has the movie may not last or they may lose access to the movie. With a streaming service you aren't "buying" much.

> Im not paying a premium for anything I've already seen a while back.

devil's advocate. what's the point of a producer expending money to have a premium version made? it takes money to go back and rescan film to higher resolution, and the rest of the work flow involved to create that new final version.

sure, it's easy to not have sympathy for hollywood producer types, but to meet modern standards for legacy content takes time/effort/money. of course they are going to want to get a bit of that back.

But this is the insane bit - there is clearly a market for this. People do want to watch old stuff in new formats, and they're prepared to pay a reasonable amount for it. There is a perfectly reasonable business model in here.

How sure of that perfectly reasonable model are you? Are you willing to find a movie that you think this would be a solid bet, contact the content owner with the money to finance the necessary steps to get the content streaming platform ready? Would you put your money where your mouth is on this?

Edit to add more food for thought. Let's take a non-premium feature film as an example. Let's assume that the title you've chosen has a decent copy of the 35mm film available. To have it scanned at 4K is going to be the first expense. You then have to decide if you're going to clean any of it up with and post production. Color correction will be necessary as well. Something else to consider is do you have any the clips with text on them have and are textless clips available. How much will it cost to get a textless version. You will need to see what audio is available. Hoepfully something other than mag. Do you have just the final mix? Is it stereo/mono? Does it need to be remastered to deal with expired music rights? Do you have elements to do a new mix? Do you have any subtitles available for it? Captioning? Those cost to have made too. Do you have rights for the international versions, and is that content available? Does your streaming platform really want the dubbed audio available? Subtitles for that too please.

Well this is how the "unofficial" streaming services make money, basically.

They don't have the production costs, obviously, so there are some numbers to crunch there. And I don't have answers to any of your questions, because I am not in the industry. I suspect these are a whole bunch of trade-offs, as in most technical questions, and there is a version of these trade-offs that are economically viable.

But people are willing to pay to view stuff, and willing to take risks to view stuff. There is a market there, there's money there. We know this because there are people making money on this.

I am in the industry, and I'm giving you a simplified formula which answers why more titles are not available. You just don't want to accept the reality of it from the content owner's perspective and only see if from the "I deserve to see anything I want anytime I want" perspective.

Yeah, fair point.

I counter that I can go and see anything I want, if I'm prepared to accept a bit of risk and some morally dubious justifications.

The reality that the content owners face is that there are people making money off their work because they're not giving the paying customer what they want, and those other people are. That's a viable business that they're not profiting from. That's the reality. I'm not sure why it's not visible from the content owner's perspective.

I don't care about that. By premium I just mean a popular movie. Sometimes all the Clint Eastwood films are free for example, but one or two big titles are $9.

Give me $2 or $3 movies with a huge catalog and I'll watch several.

> I don't care about that.

That's precisely my point.

Even for these $2-$3 dollar non-premium movies to be digitized and made available for streaming costs money. Let's just say at a minimum $50k (which is on the low end), 50,000/3 = 16,667 people willing to rent/buy that movie for that $3. Is that a guarantee? No, especially when it is not "premium". Out of curiosity, how many movies do you rent/buy through Apple/Amazon type rentals? There are many times where the math of renting from a platform is much cheaper than going to the movie to see it. It is still hard for me to do it since I'm already paying Apple/Amazon a monthly fee. That's for the "premium" content, so it would be hard to convince me that 16k people would be willing to spend for non-premium at all.

I lived in a country where Netflix never bothered to open up (until very recently) so piracy never went away for the 100 million people living there.

In the beginning, Netflix was great. Then they became a media company and suddenly EVERYTHING they push on you is THEIR stuff. Gone are the days where you could remember a cool movie and pull it up on Netflix like Fandango or Corvette Summer. I remember going back and watching several seasons of the original Miami Vice back when nobody knew who Michael Mann was.

Not its exactly as you say, you want to watch something but its not on any of the streaming services you're already paying for. I've started to just think of a movie I want to watch, go out to Pirate Bay, download it and then stream it. When I'm done? Delete it.

Its good to know I'm not the only one who has gone back to downloading movies.

My understanding is that this isn't Netflix's fault. They were king when they were the first major streaming service, and studios and networks were happy to get extra income from hosting their content on Netflix. But Netflix knew that any success it has would be mimicked by those same studios and networks, and that they would pull their own content to their own services as soon as they have them up and running, and so Netflix started making its own content in preparation for that day. And that bet paid off.

As the saying at Netflix used to go back in the day: we need to become HBO before HBO becomes Netflix

If the production quality of Netflix was close to HBO it would be nice. HBO has some absolute classics: The Wire, The Sopranos, GoT, White Lotus, The Last of Us, Alaskan Killer Bigfoot. Almost all bangers.

I'd argue Netflix productions started out almost as great as HBO, but quickly took a dive when they started pushing quantity over quality. Now finding a quality Netflix production is about once a year. Maybe that's the same rate as it use to be?

I agree that the quality went down, but I think it might be part of their strategy.

I think when they first started, they tried the HBO strategy of putting big money into big shows that try to win over broad audiences. But over time shifted to focusing on low budget shows that appeal to specific, smaller audiences. Which makes sense, if your goal isn't to have 70% of the total market as paying users but rather 90% of the market as paying users.

The problem is the bean counters running Netflix didn't want to pay the cast and crew their due, so their shows ended before the cast and crew could unionize, specifically so they couldn't unionize, leaving Netflix with no HBO-grade shows. Pennywise, pound foolish.

This is the way. As the studios decided they could make more money by becoming a streamer than they'd ever make with licensing deals with Netflix, they quit making those deals. As the deals would expire, Netflix would start removing them.

I always thought Netflix probably could have made licensing deals on their CDN. Lots of early streamers had issues (still have) with their CDN. Then again, the studios would probably want a clean break because they are so good about every thing they do (yes, that's sarcasm).

Netflix also often only buys the first seasons of an existing show. And of course they love to cancel shows they produce themselves which for me has significantly lowered my loyalty over the years.

[dead]

Let's not forget:

No advertising.

I think, particularly now after having the luxury of ad blockers for so long, that many of us are extremely triggered by advertisements and see them more nakedly as the awful propaganda they are.

Disrupting a cinematic experience with garbage propaganda ruins it. It's an insult to the creators, and none of us should tolerate it.

I'm glad streaming services adopted a better model, but then they reverted back as they increased prices because the money is too good and people put up with it.

Don’t forget that piracy allows for front ends that actually want to make the user happy and have good UX.

I use Plex and it shows what I’m currently watching first. So continuing to a new episode is easy. If I sub to 50 episodes they just show up on my first line. Hulu makes me scroll down a few rows to continue watching.

It also shows cast and crew and other movies with the same.

Plex’s recent changes have been garbage and it’s still better than the experience on a lot of streaming sites.

Prime Video keeps starting the wrong episode when I click on "Continue Watching". That's infuriating in particular because that often makes me watch advertising 2-3 times: When starting, when clicking into the middle of the episode to confirm I indeed have watched it already and then again when switching to the correct episode.

It blows my mind what slow momentum Amazon has for a company with such vast resources. Kindle, for example, lacks so many features to enhance the reading experience. Jailbreaking my kindle and installing KOReader was a game changer.

No one is offering that service because it would be completely illegal.

You can't just offer all the content ever created without the rights holders to that content agreeing.

(I expect many will say those rights holders deserve zero compensation because they are large greedy corporations. Conveniently ignoring that piracy also means the creators of the content also get zero compensation for their work.)

> No one is offering that service because it would be completely illegal.

It would be technically possible to decentralize distribution while still paying rights holders for each download. Laws could be rewritten to accommodate, encourage or even require this.

My biggest gripe with streaming services is that you literally can't legally own the content you paid for. You can only "license" it. Amazon, Google, Apple, whoever can revoke your access at any time and there's nothing you can do about it. There are plenty of examples of this already happening. The rights holders are protected, but the consumer is fucked. It's untenable, in my opinion.

You also get many other features:

1. Automatically downloads subtitles, can pick between multiple available voice versions

2. Calendar with notifications when new series are available

3. Integration with various services like Trakt.tv, Letterboxd, etc

4. Automatic collection and organization of content

5. Metada, IMBD ratings and other movie details

6. Foreign content, Anime series (oh and of course let's not forget 4k porn...)

Point 6 grow a lot, with the recent UK chances requiring people to hand over their Identity to see xxx rated content. Privacy was a issue before but its getting worse and worse.

Point 7 ... see the recent EU law about chat services needing to provide access to users chats. Also links to UK recent laws etc ...

The more the governments and companies go crazy for your data / privacy, the more a personalized solution becomes a need. All the other benefits that such a platform offers, become icing on the cake.

Piracy also offers audio description, allowing blind people to enjoy described media, for shows movies that don't have them on streaming services, like Doctor Who. An audio description site offers audio description for the original and revival series. Streaming offers none of that. They also do third-party audio description cause studios can't be bothered.

It also offers video games that can be emulated, and with OCR nd AI image descriptions, can be played by blind people. It also offers EBooks in many different formats which can b loaded onto accessible apps or Braille displays and read, without needing apps which may or may not be accessible, but which will always need connection to a phone or computer. And you can read all this offline.

So when I find companies, like Big Finish and Graphic Audio, which offer their stuff in downloadable, DRM-free formats, I pay them good for their stuff, because they respect me.

For flights, I don't even try to "download" videos on the apps I do pay for anymore. I've been burned too many times by blurry downloads or videos refusing to play. I just find a copy elsewhere and use VLC.

I'm sure somebody else has mentioned this, but if you're willing to buy physical media, it's not difficult to rip even 4K HDR blu-rays yourself and stream from a self hosted platform like Jellyfin.

I'm able to find most of what I want to watch on physical media in either HD or 4K, with the exception of more obscure anime. Some TV shows can be expensive to pick up and more laborious to rip, though.

Older TV shows are often also only available on DVD which is much lower quality than what streaming services (and thus pirates) have for them.

And a player that doesn’t suck. How many times have I hit rewind only to go back 30 min instead of 10 sec because the service lost track of where I was.

Pressing rewind is akin to Russian roulette, to the point where I’ve mostly given up, lest I risk ruining the mood while trying to scrub back to where I was.

Amazing how what was table stakes in the 90s seems like unattainable tech these days.

Also doesn’t track user and send a bunch of telemetry

Except for our ip address, timestamp and torrent metadata

https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com

All of which could be solved via a VPN of Seedbox.

The point being, my movements around the homepage aren't tracked and used for pushing more ads. My microphone isn't being recorded for AI training or recommendations algorithms. The intricate ways I use the platform isn't being sold to some third party data company. I just open the film, and it works..

Your IP address being logged in a bittorrent swarm is far less concerning to me than the 100 page privacy policy which explains how they will take rectal scans and sell them to cancer research agencies or something.

Fair point about it being less invasive than adtech sites, but my comment was just addressing the claim that piracy doesn't “track users and send a bunch of telemetry”. Torrent-trackers broadcast ip-addresses, timestamps, and torrent metadata; even if you consider it minor or mitigated by VPNs/seedboxes.

I was going to say.. does not seem to show much. That said, fun idea and very privacy inspiring.

Privacy is undervalued.

Your characteristics are you. Businesses already having that data allows them, specifically, to market their junk in a way they have an advantage over other businesses.

It's imbalanced: it screws the economy, and can be used to influence you -- to show you information which encourages conformance/lowers diversity. Freedom of choice is diluted by unknown leaking of your personal characteristics.

That has like a 50% precision rate for me. Around half of the reported torrents is stuff I've never seen.

So don't use torrents. Usenet is still alive for this stuff. Though you need a indexer and Usenet subscription so it's a wash for privacy.

It really bothers me that they don't really (reliably) release new Blu-rays anymore.

NOT THAT I WOULD EVER ENDORSE BREAKING DRM BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE A CRIME, but if I had a Blu-ray I could fairly easily break the DRM of the movie with MakeMKV or something and watch it anywhere I want without pirating it.

It's too bad it's illegal to do that, it sure would be nice to be able to have all these features without piracy.

It also offers:

- Watch movie before deciding if it's worth paying, or if it was propaganda for a particular ideology.

- Watch original movie. Companies like Disney often change content to match a trending ideology.

- Avoid subscription services.

I think the key thing it misses though (usually) is that you usually have to go grab things. I'm not willing to go download something in order to view it. Not even spending a few minutes time grabbing a whole season of a series and then storing it somewhere, even if viewing it takes many hours.

Spotify's convenience killed the mp3, and Netflix is hyper convenient compared to most piracy. No one (to a rounding error, but let's say no one) is _really_ interested in file organizing, bitrates, buffering, whether a show disappears in 5 years etc. Everyone (again, to a rounding error) just wants to watch that latest season of that latest show and then forget it.

What's now making old-school piracy return is that while Netflix is convenient, having 7 streaming services is really _inconvenient_. Not to mention expensive. But the inconvenience is horrible.

I wish just 1-3 of the large streaming services would cooperate on some standard which lets me see and manage all my content in one place. Then devices could natively support browsing that "rss for streaming" instead of having N different services. Once a few do, the pressure on others to join the standard would increase.

It's been super easy to stream pirated content for more than a decade (Popcorn Time) at this point, especially of late with the billions of pirate streaming sites that all pull from 20 different sources.

It's funny in a sad way how much better the UX of a lot of the piracy sites are, too.

It's still hit & miss. You still get shit content interspersed with the good there. There isn't perfect curation so you can have a missing episode, a version that doesn't allow removing the spanish audio track, a duplicate of a movie or whatever. I'm not sure if that's solved yet (i.e. that you can somehow subscribe to pirated and well curated content) but at least last time I checked it sucked.

Curation tends to be better with private sites and their trackers than with public trackers.

It's a point of member pride to assemble complete seasons with consistent quality, sizing, subtitles, and audio, etc.

Yes but pirate site 1 does that for shows A, B, and C while pirate site 2 does it for show B, C, and D now you have rivaling versions of B and C etc, and worst case one of them did a poor job. If you just choose one source you have decent curation but not all the content. If you choose both you get duplication. I don't get how it solves the fundamental problem of getting everything curated with good content and no duplication? Perhaps this is a solved problem - but I just haven't tried recently.

I guess the best answer to that is it requires a touch of "smart customer" insight, they kind that people develop food shopping, buying hardware, etc.

Scene files are named to rules that name the content, the source, the video and audio encoding, and the release group.

  SeriesName S03E12 EpisodeName 1080p AMZN WEB-DL DDP5 1 H264-NTb
  SeriesName S03E12 EpisodeName 1080p HEVC x265-MeGusta

That'll be a larger file and an "as viewed" copy.

The second is probably derived from the first, re-encoded using HEVC H265 to create a smaller file. The audio stream may also be transformed to be smaller in size, perhaps fewer channels. The compression may have introduced jagged chunky artifacts in fast moving scenes, or moire patterns in panning shots across chain link mesh basketball court fences.

So, it's a "solved problem" in the sense of it's not hard to learn to read the labels and understand different brand strategies.

Again, good private trackers that have been about for a good while now typically have complete seasons in a fully consistent form as a single multi episode torrent- all the same source (eg: BluRay release, or DVD, or from digital channel, or upscaled reconstruct, etc) all by the same release group.

Good private trackers also tend to have request forums, anything sought and not held can be requested and admins or users with multiple accounts tend to fill requests and often like the challenge of a hard to source rarity.

From the end user PoV they can also join multiple private trackers and use tools (-arr suite, etc) that can search across multiple trackers and present sorted and grouped results with easy selection of some or many for download.

My personal solution is I've pretty much always "curated as I go", making notes or filing stuff as I consume it - books, film, TV, papers, things built or designed.. anything I circle back on may or may not be worth chasing up a better version, I'd have to have liked it and want to share it or experience it again in better form- I'm happy buying digital media that I can own if it's available for things I enjoy, for things not available over the counter I can search for the best version available ATM by polling trackers .. failing that by joining forums and asking about.

RSS doesn't support such aggregation?

You just fetch all your rss'es from N sources and the client can show a merged one.

Also the content doesn't disappear on vacation, it has subtitles for all languages and audio track is actually high quality.

Physical media offers the first three, but not option four.

I, too, would pay per show/movie to download and save DRM-free videos to my own drives.

So how come you can't (legally) watch Blue-Rays using a Linux computer, or when viewing it on an ancient CRT using an HDMI-to-analog converter?

A lot of effort has gone into making physical media work only with pre-approved devices.

And driving the price up for the consumer for the anti-consumer tech licencing fees.

A lot of effort has been wasted, thanks to MakeMKV+libredrive making ripping easy.

It fails on all of them if it's not available to purchase, and none of them are of relevance if I want it right now vs having to wait 1-7 days to get hold of that physical copy and there's an easier alternative where I can have it right now.

The elder might remember a time where you could drive to a place and rent physical copies of a movie.

But of course, these places dried out a long time ago.

In NZ we have aliceinvideoland.co.nz which overnights you x DVDs. They have a pretty extensive library and a lot of lesser known and local content.

I used them for a few years, they are great and I'm happy to see they're still around.

They still exist and now are free.

They’re called “public libraries”.

Physical media has arbitrary device limitations.

and arent' there retro-active device blocklists on bluray? I seem to recall sth of the sort. Sure, they can be circumvented, but then why bother buying in the first place if you're gonna be the bad guy anyhow?

Yes and yes. I got mildly upset when I learned this, because it is oddly surprising amount of work to get it to work ( and some models do better than others, apparently ).

On the other hand, dvd is dirt cheap now and you get a very respectable collection that is not reliant on the internet.

i pirate stuff even after i've paid for the streaming service that offers it. i just want to watch things on plex - it's already installed wherever i want to watch, and it stores and syncs my watch history. unlike if i watch a show on amazon, and then it leaves amazon for netflix, and nextflix starts telling me it's "unwatched".

With regards to point 2, in some cases piracy offers better versions than have ever been commercially released. Look at the mission hill restoration project, the Ed Edd and Eddy restoration project, or the various "despecialized" Star wars cuts

#4 is huge. I happily paid for all the streaming services, then I moved out of the US, and most stopped working even on VPN. Most things I’ve just stopped watching, but it’s annoying where I’m trying to pay and still can’t access.

Cost was/is a non-factor.

> I didn't even mention that it's free or that there are no ads, because that's pretty much the least important attribute to me.

In 2001, Joel Spolsky wrote:

Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like “Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music” and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it’s interesting because it’s peer to peer, completely missing the point that it’s interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...

And in 2003, Apple started "selling" songs for 99 cents. They were incredibly successful, demonstrating that people weren't "pirating" songs to save a buck, but pirating songs to escape the deeply enshittified DRM shenanigans the industry employed, like installing rooting your PC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

There is a very large market of people who want no fuss, no muss access to movies, shows, and music. I personally think that many people who "pirate" shows do not want adware of any type, especially if it surveils them, and also do not want to stream certain shows and deal with issues like region locking, the shows vanishing when the streaming service retires them, and so forth. But that is a small quibble.

History agrees with you that "piracy" is not about the price, it's actually about the shitty experience that the music, TV, and film industries impose.

I found that people around me pick movies a lot less of what they want to watch and more of just what is available right now on Netflix. Maybe having an unlimited library also means you have to be lot more picky of what you watch and developing your taste a lot more.

Nn. Also you can code up your Own Video Player interface, if you like to.

Ever get frustrated because you can't determine if you're selecting a button or if the button is always outlined/large ish, fix it yourself!

And your personal data won’t be sold off!

A Netflix presentation to invite advertisers actually boasted how well they could target you for adds.

For me it's being able to fully browse movies and tv shows, along with their universal rating and not some vague "You'll like it" nonsense.

I think thats the issue most people missed with Piracy the first time around - it wasnt even the cost (free) - its that the experience itself was just so much easier.

I have several streaming services and its always a struggle to find out which one the show I want is on. And then maybe I don't subscribe because its something random.

Streaming took off originally because the experience was just smoother and easier than torrenting

hey, maybe you’d never heard of https://ororo[.]tv this is exactly what you describe, at lease for movies + shows…

just in case - not an ad, not affiliated with them anyhow, just use it for years with all my friends and family.

there are subtitles is 20+ languages, direct download links, no ads, and new episodes come out pretty fast (usually <24 hours from official release).

I recently bought music from the iTunes Store, because it was easy and DRM free. I can do what I want with the music after I buy it, and don’t have to worry about what happens if Apple shuts down the store. I’m not aware of a single video platform that can say the same thing. This is the core of the issue for me. In 25 years, I want to know that I can still watch my favorite movies and TV shows. Outside of buying DVDs and ripping them, there is no way to do that without venturing into piracy. I actually bought an external DVD drive recently (while I still can) so I can still rip music and DVDs when discs are the best/easiest way to get some content.

While piracy has a huge library, when it comes to stuff that’s not popular for the long-term with the mainstream, if a person doesn’t grab it while they can, it can be very difficult to get. Of course, these same things aren’t available at all on streaming services, so…

If I could buy DRM free movies and TV shows, from a single source, with a quality library of every show and movie, I’d be down. That doesn’t exist.

> Who knows, we don't know how much this is worth because nobody is even trying to offer it.

Note that this was the original concept of Netflix's streaming service. The service got steadily dismantled as copyright holders demanded higher fees.

Which means that we do have a good idea how much it's worth; it should lie between the range of what Netflix was able to sell successfully and what they weren't.

This might fall under 3/4 but to me the biggest issue is being able to watch without having to turn my vpn off! I had already accepted the rest

Why would you need a connection at all to play local content that would need a VPN? Are you using one of those players that "streams" the torrent? That always seemed like a novel idea once bandwidth was available for that, and I guess plenty of seeders. It could also be the stereotype I've built in my head that the people that torrent lean towards hoarders adding to their local inventory.

I think the point was that streaming services freak out if you connect from a disapproved IP address.

The saddest part is that there's clearly demand for a service that just works across devices, countries, and catalogs

This is kinda what netflix was for many peak for a brief moment in time. It wasn't perfect, but it was pretty great, it had most of what you wanted to see. Then EVERY studio wanted their own meh streaming system, and fragmented the system again.

And don't forget, not "remastered" with content changed and/or removed.

Subtitles is a big one for me. I can stream something in Japan, that I have seen other places has english subs, but due to licensing I cannot see them.

I know I could vpn around this, but why should I pay even more just for subtitles?

In the end I'm paying for Netflix, Disney and Amazon. My son uses those as he is bilingual, I just pirate what I want to watch personally.

It’s frustrating when languages are locked behind regional restrictions or selective availability, and it borders on being an accessibility issue. That said, things have improved compared to the past, at least when it comes to consuming foreign media from outside its home country. In my case, that means accessing Japanese content while outside Japan.

In most cases, I suspect the limitation isn’t the fault of the streaming services but rather the content owners. On Netflix, for example, expecting English subtitles for anime in Japan is about as hopeless as expecting Japanese subtitles for U.S.-made films while in the United States.

To Netflix’s credit, their original shows are often subtitled and dubbed in a wide range of languages, which has significantly increased the availability of non-English content worldwide.

The same trend can be seen with music, at least for Japanese music. Until around ten years ago, almost nothing was available abroad. While some regional restrictions remain on certain tracks, the vast majority are now accessible outside Japan.

You're correct (in the things I have checked) when viewing Japanese content outside Japan. But inside? No, it's never licenced (or available, I'm not sure).

I live in Japan, so we'll fuck me otherwise, right? xD

Well, my point is that what you’re experiencing with anime and other content from Japan when accessed within Japan is actually quite normal. It’s the same reason I can hardly ever find content here in the U.S., especially from major movie studios, that includes Japanese subtitles or dubs.

I’m sorry you have to deal with that limitation. I can relate, since I also want to enjoy media in Japanese. Fortunately, having lived here long enough, I can at least comprehend it without subtitles.

Am I happy about it? No, but unfortunately, that’s the reality for now.

This one is particularly janky!!!!!

Watch anime on Netflix at home with English subs. Fly to japan. Open Netflix, now you cannot watch with English subs.

The workaround is to pre emptively download the show, then put your device on airplane mode so Netflix cannot phone home, then watch the show with the English subs as snapshotted at home.

From a cursory search, there are browser extensions to display your own subtitles on sites like netflix. At least for firefox.

Also in any language. I am so tired of reading a list of audio/subtitles languages available, only to find out that they don’t work after purchase. Am all platforms. Good lord. Just tired of that bs

Apple is the most egregious of them all. The times I wanted to watch a foreign language film only to discover the subtitles are not available in English!

Same. I am just tired of buying a movie and then torrenting it 5 min later. Once even bought twice on two different platforms. Still broken languages. It is not that hard. WTF.

Plex is phenomenal software

Jellyfin is shockingly good now also

Jellyfin + Infuse is so easy a baby can use it

Plex is garbage spyware. You cannot use the client/server offline, go ahead and reatrict your Plex server to lan only and try to log in from a client.

Jellyfin is an excellent solution right now. I'd say the desktop and mobile app is early Netflix quality now. Completely open source, and has click to run binaries for almost any OS.

I’d add an additional point to this list: Piracy offers control over the particular edit of the film you’re after.

I find it so infuriating when streaming services only offer the extended edit of the Lord of the Rings films - these scenes were edited out for a reason! I pretty much only want to watch the the cinematic edits.

Same for Bladerunner. There’s so many different edits and the streaming services rarely declare which edit they offer, let alone offering options to choose your preferred edit.

Use the right browser (not built/funded by ad tech companies) and all Ads can be blocked in 2025.

Those companies own half the internet and they make sure the right browser is always slower and shittier than theirs

Where does one safely pirate these days to avoid authorities

Maybe I'm just lucky with where I've lived, but I've literally never had problems pirating without obfuscating my traffic in any way whatsoever. I've been torrenting since I was a kid, too, and I torrent literally everything you can possibly torrent from software to music.

Do people really get hounded for piracy in other countries?

But you can check out fmhy.net, it's a great resource (unaffiliated, it's just a genuinely great resource for piracy :p)

https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/wiki/megathread/movies_and_t...

I use torrent with private trackers for over 20 years now, no VPN. Never had an issue.

pay for a vpn, get an open-source client like qbittorrent, and go to sites like yts.mx and 1337x.to.

I'm not going to name any names but depending on your budget and jurisdiction you can probably figure out a setup where you either torrent, possibly through a reputable VPN, from an invite based tracker, or you pay to play with one or two Usenet accounts.

If you are willing to spend a bit of money you can get what's called a seedbox in a suitable jurisdiction and do rather innocous seeming tunneling between your home network and there.

Torrenting is a bit messy, usually it's not 'one tracker fits all', instead you'd likely want one for movies and one for music or something like that. Perhaps Limewire is a good fit for your needs, or perhaps you're more of a power user willing to endure weeks or months of research and interviews with tracker admins.

Usenet is a bit more involved, and you pay for access and bandwidth. The network traffic doesn't look as suspicious as torrenting, however, and if something turns up in a search it's yours, you don't have to beg for people to seed and so on.

With a bit of effort and technical savvy you can automate a lot of piracy these days, with tools like Sonarr and Radarr tracking releases and automatically pushing them into your self-hosted streaming service.

Usenet? Is the alt.binaries hierarchy really still around? how active is it?

if you have good indexer you have access to almost anything.

If you pick decent indexers and buy enough traffic it's absurdly good. Especially if you're into less than mainstream material or tend to try many things out before you settle on a binge, because if it's in the search result it's almost sure to be on your disk within minutes and you don't need to keep a cache for days or weeks because of hit'n'run rules.

Politically I prefer torrenting, due to the social character and openness and so on, but Usenet has none of the fuss beyond a bit of setup and configuration.

- Not having to watch ads after you've already paid for a subscription

I pay £22 per month to rent a seedbox and I would happily pay more.

Piracy also offers the ability to use the software of your choice.

You get to use mpv instead of the streaming company's obnoxiously shitty video player.

You get to use Linux without some asshat in a suit taking issue with the fact he doesn't fully own your computer and deciding he'll only stream you 720p video as punishment.

I had a Plex server for years. It just got to the point where it wasn’t worth the time or effort to find a high quality rip. If I can’t find what I want on streaming service I just buy it or rent it on iTunes.

For movies, if you buy it from one of the major movies studios that participate in Movies Anywhere, it is automatically added to your library in Amazon Prime, whatever Google is using these days, Vudu etc.

But to your other points.

2. If you can find a high quality rip

3. All the streaming services work on iOS, Android, Roku, AppleTV, Windows and Macs and whatever Google device that Google decide not to abandon this week

4. I had a Plex server and 1000Mbps u/d and it still wasn’t as reliable when I was on a plane, outside the country etc

4. Plex lets you cache stuff locally for a plane or when you’re traveling. That’s usually what I do when I’m going somewhere. I did try streaming from my house to a hotel in India a decade ago… it technically worked, but I had to set the resolution so low that it wasn’t fun to watch. I assume that’s better now, but I just cache stuff before I leave now.

[flagged]

Supply and demand might argue that if there was real demand for something like this that people were actually willing to pay a lot of money for, then the market would be all too happy to provide.

I think the inconvenient truth here is that when anyone has got close to doing such a thing the price has been high enough that it turns out nobody actually turns up to pay for it, not at least outside a small niche.

You have to have real options or people can’t make informed decisions.

I have a background in city planning, and in the US, you’ll constantly hear about how trying to make cities more friendly to pedestrians, bicycles, or public transit is a waste because no one uses it. But the truth is, most people will end up using the system you design. If you build a system just for cars, people will use cars. If you build a city around public transportation, people will happily use it. If you build a walkable city, people will walk.

Great analogy. I'm visiting a particularly car-centric city atm, and from the car driver's perspective, "nobody uses the bike lanes, I never see them, so why build them, it constrains traffic". Well ya, there's so much car traffic because it's car-first, and nobody wants to be around tons of cars, not even people in cars. It's like arguing that you never see cyclists on the freeway, therefore nobody likes biking and we should discourage it.

> If you build a walkable city, people will walk.

No, they won't. If you build a walkable city and then make it impossible to do anything else, then people will walk.

It's a subtle difference, but it's there.

I live in a "walkable city". By walkable, I mean the old parts of the city that predated the automobile (and weren't destroyed in the name of modernization) are walkable. New parts of the city are completely unwalkable. If you came here, you would notice that massive numbers of people walk in the old parts of the city. Even the people who drive into the old parts of the city tend to walk once they are there. In the new parts of the city, virtually all of the pedestrians you see are on their way to or from a bus stop.

That said, there is more to a walkable city than a bunch of sidewalks. It also has to offer what people want and what they want must be easy to access. Something similar can be said about piracy. It wasn't streaming services that stymied piracy, it was cheap and easy access to legal sources of music and video. Even then, cheap was likely a secondary factor (as long as the price was reasonable).

> By walkable, I mean the old parts of the city that predated the automobile (and weren't destroyed in the name of modernization) are walkable.

OK. Here's my question: is it possible and feasible to NOT walk?

Because when the answer is "yes", people tend to not walk.

It is both possible and feasible to drive in the old parts of the city. It is a North American city, so old is not that old. It just predates the automobile. Yet virtually all of the roads are plenty wide for two lane traffic, on street parking and sidewalks. What differs most significantly is land use patterns. More stuff (homes, businesses, schools, parks, etc.) are within walking distance. One could argue that parking is problematic, but that is true of the core of every city I've been in. Even the modern car-centric ones. It should also be noted that plenty of people drive in the old parts of the city, it's just that people have an opportunity not to and plenty of people choose not to.

I knew plenty of people in London who chose to walk 30+ mins. This is over other available options like ebike, bus, underground and taxi - simply because it is pleasant.

Absolutely not true. If anything, the opposite is true - people will walk unless/until you make the city unwalkable.

Still good!

it's a welcome change from "if you build a driveable city and then make it impossible to do anything else, then people will drive".

Streaming services were great back when they were separate from content producers and IP holders.

Once every media company became a streaming company and started using anticompetitive licensing practices in an attempt to drive viewership to their own platforms, the market fractured too much for it to be profitable.

Something smells “prisoner’s dilemma” about it: the best move for any individual streaming service is to have exclusive content (and the best-positioned players to do that are the studios), but when everyone does that, it decreases the overall profit available in the market more than it increases their slice of the pie.

> more than it increases their slice of the pie.

That's the part that might not be true, unfortunately. If each individual content producer sees more return on their own streaming service than they did sharing revenue from one of the independent services, then that's better for them, even if the total pie got smaller. If that wasn't the case, you'd think we'd see some of them shut their services down and go back to independent services once their income drops.

Sacrificing a wide audience to extract more from the most dedicated portion of the fanbase isn't an entirely new concept, and it financially makes sense short-term (until you start losing some of those dedicated fans over time and don't have the mindshare outside your bubble to attract new ones).

I think we will see this eventually.

Once Netflix isn't the only one that doesn't share their monthly subscriber numbers anymore, we'll know that they're beginning to at least question why they own everything instead of license their content out

They just have to out-survive the competition, selling theme park tickets and merch. Oh, and putting hit movies in theaters.

The streaming service itself doesn’t need to be profitable.

Copyright is inherently monopolistic and violates basic rules of free market like supply and demand.

You can't talk about those rules when a single publisher corporation commands exclusivity deals and dictates pricing essentially forever.

Supply and demand rules go out the window when the product is infinitely replicable.

Digital video is a big enough amount of data that replication at scale takes up a significant amount of netural resources and energy. That is true both for storage and transmission/streaming.

Supply and demand means that corporations attempt to maximise their revenue. If the cost of providing a good service eats into their profits, they will provide a bad service.

This idea that "markets will provide" is eccentric, and obviously empirically wrong.

Markets are there to extract value and reinforce power imbalances. Consumer happiness is reliably at cross purposes with that.

IMHO not really, supply here is the limiting factor since the constrain is in licensing the work. The goal of the right holders is not to maximize access to the work or those stated by OP, but to maximize profit for the company, which when at odds with those other goals still prevails.

e.g. someone calculated/believes that having a big catalog from Disney at X/month is more worth more for Disney than sublicensing to Netflix at Y/month.

>> having a big catalog from Disney at X/month is more worth more for Disney than sublicensing to Netflix at Y/month.

But sometimes that leads to really stupid things. At one time all Star Trek TV shows were on Paramount while all the movies were only on Max. I believe they're all owned by Paramount, but apparently the shoes are the big draw (the new series "Picard" was exclusively on Paramount) and they could get more profit by putting the movies elsewhere and collecting a bit more than if it were all on their service. GAK!

I really wish we had laws that producers of content cannot also be distributors. That just creates perverse incentives to use content to lock people into their distribution platform.

If they had to be separate, that gives content producers the ability to cross license and those licenses to be better deals. We’d actually have competition in distribution companies as distribution providers would then be competing on price, quality, convenience, and other things that matter, not locking content away.

> I really wish we had laws that producers of content cannot also be distributors.

We have laws like that for beer and cars, and they're disasters in both cases.

Why would we want to implement an incredibly stupid idea a third time?

I think you're going to have to back that up with a bit more than "it's stupid"

Here's a much more relevant precedent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....

Yes I considered the same but decided to keep the point simple.

And I still can’t help but think that if there really was a large market of people willing to pay a premium for a more permissive access model then we might already see trends in this direction. My hunch is the most folk don’t really care and price remains the dominant factor.

The essential point of the article was that it’s higher prices that’s pushing people towards piracy (either through price rises or fragmented subscriptions). It wasn’t that it is the restrictive streaming model that is pushing people towards piracy.

I’m fact it was precisely this restrictive streaming model that was the one to finally beat piracy. At low prices, that’s already been proven and it’s higher prices that is brining piracy back.

Unpopular opinion here but I wonder how much of the justification for piracy in this thread, broadly around what is perceived to be unfair business practices (“if only the terms were fairer and I would pay”), would actually stand up if the terms were actually fairer but the prices higher.

Or how much is really just the simple rational economic idea that piracy is better value for money.

I personally buy physical media (BluRays and/or DVDs). But I often feel too lazy to deal with the content ripping, so I just download it.

I like Youtube Premium and I'm gladly paying for it, although I'm considering switching to an alternative YouTube client because the official YT App is crap. But then the creators will lose income from my subscription.

Sigh. I wish content providers just gave us API to get the content in exchange for payment.

Nah; copyright is a monopoly on specific media/titles. It breaks all of the “market willing to provide” mechanics because there is no free market for Star Wars, it’s Disney or FOAD.

Pray they do not alter it further.

Bingo. When distributors get exclusive rights to media, there is no competition anymore. You either do whatever the publisher wants, pirate, or go without.

The aggravating part about this: that was not the intention of the copyright clause. "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

Authors and inventors. Authors and inventors.

Not companies. Not entities, or even individuals, who purchased the "rights" and now "own" works. That has nothing to do with the intent here, which was to encourage actual authors and inventors to make more stuff. Walt Disney has been gone for more than half a century; he's not going to be able to come up with another Mickey Mouse.

"Intellectual property" is an oxymoron. Pray, tell me, which part of my brain does Disney own? Do they own the part that knows what Mickey Mouse looks like?

And it has only gotten worse since then. A copyright for a decade or two is completely reasonable, but "life of author, plus 70 years" benefits only large companies. Someone is violating your rights? Good luck suing them if you are an indie creator! Want to create a parody, which is totally legal? Sorry, you can't upload it anywhere - all the hosting companies decided to apply Copyright 2.0 instead!

No, because the owners of content libraries make more money with silos.

They won’t license content to third parties. So market forces can’t work.

>I didn't even mention that it's free or that there are no ads

It's free in the same way shoplifting is free, until you get caught. You are very much in violation of copyright laws if you pirate.

Shops aren't there yet, but ISPs are. Where can I pirate the internets?

If buying things at the store was as painful as watching stuff on streaming services, and shoplifting was as low risk as torrenting, and my stealing an item didn't make that item disappear from the store, I'd probably do it there too.

Only consequences, physically speaking the two are not the same at all.

Copying of anything digital is not actual theft, nor will it ever be.

"You wouldn't download a car!"

Wait, I absolutely would download a car if I could... or food... or clothing... I'd download the shit out of physical goods if the technology existed. Who wouldn't? You could solve scarcity. If we had Star Trek Replicators, we'd be living in a literal utopia.

Thanks to 3D printing this is starting to become reality and not just science fiction.

The “download” catchphrase is a joke, it was originally “You wouldn’t steal a car”, which I’d argue is true for most people.

Stealing a car deprives the owner of their product. Privacy does not. They still have access and ownership of it. But now, you do too.

> it was originally “You wouldn’t steal a car”, which I’d argue is true for most people.

Sure, but it's only true if you stretch the definition of what's occuring. If we stretched it in the other way, in that "stealing" a car in fact left the perfectly fine original right where you found it, the vast majority wouldnt think twice.

So long as you’ve paid for it before… maybe not. In many jurisdictions you are entitled to a backup. The fact that you have to pirate it… might be a gray area.

Do you sneak into concerts or hop turnstiles too?

Those actually take the resources away (space at the venue for example). In piracy that's not the case.

no true scotsman

wordsmithing on theft is the only defense thieves have

How dare you steal these hn comments by copying them over to your PC using your browser? Thief!

Of course it's theft. The owner of that content didn't intend to give it to you for free, they expected to get paid for their work.

I could copy A New Hope once for every atom in the universe, and no money is lost and the original continues to exist.

Theft is moving stuff. You can't move software or digital assets, you can only copy them.

If I committed a burglary and instead of taking your TV I go to Walmart and buy a copy, then that's not burglary. You certainly wouldn't report me to the police.

Then how come a month ago you were talking about preventing zero-days from stealing files: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44578850 ?

I can name at least one country in the European Union in which torrenting copyright content for personal use is legal, people still do very much use spotify and netflix.

Gabe Newell got it right from the very start, piracy is a service problem.

It's not comparable, because copying a bread with a bread copying machine should be completely fine.

I don't think analogy is comparable either though. With a bread copying machine, the baker of the original piece is not involved in creating the new piece of bread (other than the recipe), so it is more acceptable (though maybe not completely, if you consider that the recipe is also being copied) that the baker is not compensated for the new piece of bread produced by the copying machine.

With digital media, the creator is expecting people to pay to view the content. By making a copy and viewing it for free, imo, you are stealing the content.

Thank god they overturned Butter Krust v. Jesus Christ!

And I thought religion of pirates is pastafarianism.

Depends on where you live.

Copyright infringement is generally a civil offence in Australia.

Whereas theft of physical goods is generally not.

Penalties for copyright infringement differ between countries as well.

To really sum it all up in one place, check out the absurdity of the official guide on where to watch the Pokemon cartoon: https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...

And that doesn't even actually list the movies, which are even more fragmented.

And I thought the problem was (just) limited to fragmentation of complete IPs between services. I'd love for someone in the know to explain how you get to this stage.

It it some kind of hedging strategy by The Pokémon Company to account for the number of different streaming services (thereby actually making the problem worse)? Was there some kind of timed exclusivity deal that's forced them to put different things in different places? Did one of the streaming services come along at a later time to try to undercut the earlier ones but the earlier licencing deals haven't expired? Anything else?

Another possibility is that every streaming service wants "Pokémon" and parents don't care which season.

So each service buys a single season to tick that box.

And it doesn't even reflect availability outside the US it seems as my Netflix catalog does't have some of the seasons that list says it should.

Well, "Gotta Subscribe 'Em All!"

Wow. It's like an advertisement for torrent sites... I had no idea it was that bad out there...

Holy mother of God, that’s insanity. How could someone come up with that and get it approved is beyond human understanding.

I wonder if they will eventually go the LEGO route and host their shows on youtube while also letting streaming services have them.

I have seen this before, but I never realized that was an official product! Thought that started as a joke by a disgruntled fan.

For reference:

Season 1: Amazon Prime Video (also, Netflix)

Season 2: Amazon Prime Video Channels

3-5: Prime Video

6-13: Prime Video Channels (with 10-13 also available on the Roku Channel)

14-19: Prime Video (with 17-19 also on Netflix)

20-22: Prime Video Channels (and Hulu, and the Roku Channel)

23-25: Prime Video (and Netflix)

So, they're all on Amazon in some sense. I was aware that there was some kind of concept of Prime Video Channels, but when I tried to find an explanation on Amazon's website, I failed.

Following up, "Prime Video Channels" seem to be an Amazon offering in which you have your subscription to a separate video service (the "Channel") billed through Amazon, for "convenience". (And you can also watch their stuff on Amazon's website.) So Pokemon has licensed about half of their series to Amazon, and they reserve the remaining half for people who subscribe to the Pokemon Channel.

Thanks for sharing OP, that is just ridiculous, makes cable looks like a sane option.

With cable you didn’t get this fragmentation cause you also didn’t get many options.

Watch at 8am or at 6pm, whatever episode airs that day, probably a rerun or a skipped.

Different cable providers each had their own bundles and individual paid channels, so you kinda got a choice, with a lot of fragmentation.

>More fragmented Prime Video has it all which doesn't sound fragmented to me. It seems Prime Video is for old seasons and other services are fine for watching the current iteration of the show.

The problem with Pokémon isn’t that it’s fragmented across streaming services, it’s the anime itself where by Advanced you’re getting enough of the same formulaic bullshit it can drive even a kid crazy. I was that kid.

Except for some slight deviations, such as the beginning of Best Wishes (Black & White), you can put on a sequence of any 10 episodes from any season and it doesn’t matter what streaming service it’s on. By the end of the episode, Team Rocket is blasting off again.

> of the same formulaic bullshit

Sounds like every single mainline game until SV/PLA which tried the open world a bit. People still like it.

What's the problem with that exactly? Legacy catalogs having some incomplete coverage? That the Pokemon Company can't make a good list if pressed? These are all not new or streaming Problems

The gist is here, that the complete first four season are on YouTube for free and the 5th is being added as we speak? (200+ episodes)

https://www.youtube.com/@OfficialPoke%CC%81monTV/playlists

There was nether the expectation with streaming that third party content doesn't rotate.

If you want a bit more persistent access you can buy them on Apple TV (Season 1-5 and 10-25)

Oh Boy, Pokemon is really not the example I would bring up here, when the aim is completeness on official channels:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_episodes_removed_...

It’s pretty obvious that no one wants to subscribe and look for some content on 5 different platforms.

While the pirate goes to his or her favourite torrent site and downloads it all, with the added bonus of having offline, permanent access.

with a sample size of one, there is no obvious problem.

presumably any given household wants to watch more than just pokemon, though and this is where things become unstuck. suddenly, to satisfy the demand for the range of things people in the household want to watch they are forced to make subscriptions to multiple services, perhaps sometimes for one-offs.

scale this up, and you have a population forced to make multiple subscriptions to multiple streaming providers to satisfy their demand for content.

or people just choose a couple of them and that's that. either way it seems that there is a symbiotic relationship between the content authors and the streaming companies.

but wait, read the page carefully, multiple seasons of the same thing spread across different streamers forcing consumers to subscribe to multiple streamers .... and now we are into Phoebus cartel territory.

That's not how streaming worked, ever. You had to deal with what Netflix had to offer and that was it. These were the happy monopoly days. It was simply the lack of choice and nobody felt left out at watercooler talks.

The paradox now, is that if you're FOMO inclined you feel the need to subscribe to multiple ones at all times to satify all needs in a household. You don't have to. You can keep baseline Disney if you really have to, but everything else can be easily rotated or just cought up on for a month or three on the usual discounted offers. The social pressure was not some invention of the streaming companies.

Also pirating has a hardware and energy cost, that's not trivial and mostly subsidized by parents. On a ROI basis of adults with disposable income "buying" (aka personal licenses, ideally shareable with some other accounts what some might call a family) 4-5 movies for like 5 dollars on platforms like Apple TV each a month is actually cheaper than pirating. Streaming is not everything. And don`t kid yourself that your DVD or Bluray collection is worth something or usable in 20+ years. That's a niche hobby. Go visit a flea market. People are that lazy when it comes to couch and home entertainment stuff.

Now you are delving into small intricacies and "gotchas" which are just meaningless.

The problem is simple. People don't want to switch between 10 different streaming services, pay 10x a month, swap every second month, unsubscribe from X and re-subscribe to Y after going through a torturous process of unsubscribing. Different sites with different DRM, some might block Firefox, some might not work on an older MiniPC, some might not work or exist on the built in apps on my TV.

We as consumers shouldn't have to go through all these hoops just to watch stuff. Originally, I would buy a DVD (or even rent it) and then plop the DVD in the DVD player and it would work. It would work 10 years from now (assuming no disc-rot). It would work on my PC's DVD player, it would work on my TV. It wouldn't tell me my OS is out of date or that my internet connection is unstable. I could then go give you the DVD and you could watch it. It was simple.

For the sake of your argument, even if piracy was 100x harder and 10x more expensive than Subscriptions services (which its not), watching the entire series of Pokemon is still a pain and is still stupid and deserves to be called out for it.

> On a ROI basis of adults with disposable income "buying" (aka personal licenses, ideally shareable with some other accounts what some might call a family) 4-5 movies for like 5 dollars on platforms like Apple TV each a month is actually cheaper than pirating.

Yes, and I still pirate. It's more expensive, but the user experience is substantially better. It has always been a supply issue,

You think pirating videos will raise your electric bill by $25 / month?

Storage isn't free. running a 50 Watt anything 24/7 costs like 10 Dollars a month in Europe already if you don't want to be an anti-social leacher or want the convenience of an netflix-like media server.

I never understood (even in homelab circles) why people insist on running these toys 24/7. Just turn it off for the night, or use one of these timer sockets.

Your comment is a bizarre tangle of different concerns, of which none make even a tiny amount of sense.

- If you download without uploading much, what does that have to do with the costs of piracy?

- If you upload as well as download, how will that increase the amount you pay for 50 watts of electricity?

- In what possible sense is storage not free? You already have the storage. Putting things on it is free, unless you get to the point where you need to buy additional storage. You don't need to retain the things you pirate any more than you need to retain the things you stream.

-- Even if you decide to do that, storage is an utterly trivial cost.

- Stipulating that 50 watts a month costs $10, your network stack draws less than 25 watts. Given that storage will never add up to any amount you'd notice, it will take less than one month before piracy blows rental out of the water on costs, after which its lead will increase forever.

They're saying if you keep things on to seed it'll use more electricity.

But yes you can fit a torrenting machine into 25 watts. Or fit a reasonable amount of uploading into the time your computer is already on.

And yes storage is somewhere between free and $30.

5W with a Mac mini, 50W with a typical PC tower

read the page carefully

"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" -- Gabe Newell [1]

And I think he was largely correct, although the term _service_ seems like it now has to do a lot of heavy lifting as it now encompasses:

- Availability by Company

- Availability by Global Region

- Stream Quality

- Advert Policy (why does the lowest tier need to be ad supported? What am I paying for aside from being upsold?)

- Quality and availability of captions, audio description and any other media accessibility options

[1] https://www.escapistmagazine.com/valves-gabe-newell-says-pir...

Absolutely right!

A week ago I downloaded a couple of movies and shows from Netflix for my 6yo daughter, to watch on a 3hr flight. Worked nicely!

Today we made the return flight. She opens Netflix, and ⅔ of the films have now "expired" with no notice and she can't watch the one she wanted.

For the next flight I'll remember to pirate!

I remember a few years ago when our niece came to visit. One evening, we started watching a movie on Netflix together.

We only made it halfway before bedtime, but since she was coming back in two weeks, we decided to save the rest for her next visit.

Two weeks later, she returned, bouncing with excitement to finally see how the story ended. We opened Netflix, ready to hit play - and lo and behold… the movie had vanished from the catalog.

Be a cool uncle, be a pirate.

> She opens Netflix, and ⅔ of the films have now "expired"

I have given up saving Netflix titles in advance of travel because this has happened to me too many times. What is bizarre is you can only "download" them a certain number of times, despite being expired. So I now cannot download some shows ever again.

Nobody loses money if I cache a Netflix show to my device. The limitation is bizarre.

> Nobody loses money if I cache a Netflix show to my device. The limitation is bizarre.

It wouldn't surprise me if some executive has an irrational fear of millions of people passing ipads around their family and friends with a downloads of movies/series as a way to avoid paying subscriptions.

That's the problem with DRM in everything. Once the levers of power are there, it takes one overeager bean counter or paranoid executive to use them to squeeze out more revenue or exercise additional control. In the era of physical media none of this was possible - I could lend my DVDs to as many people as I want without approval from Reed Hastings.

I've lost access to YouTube premium features just because my phone was not the United States for a couple of weeks.

As soon as I was back on a US ip, features just came right back.

Last I checked, background play with VLC just works regardless of where you are physically located at the time.

I tried to download something from Netflix recently. The download wouldn’t process. It got stuck partway. Not an issue, I’ll just delete it and redownload.

Nope. There’s a limit to the number of downloads on some content. I wasted mine trying to get the download to even work.

Getting 'em started early. You arr a great dad!

> service problem and not a pricing problem

Indeed. Recently we purchased season 1 of a reasonably popular U.S. produced show via Apple TV. When played, it is available only in dubbed French in our region (Canada.) None of the info available beforehand said anything about this. Guess where I obtained the subsequent seasons? I will pay for content but not if you lie, or make me jump through ridiculous hoops.

That reminds me of some passengers I sat on a flight next to once.. they tried to watch something on their iPad, but because we were about to depart from a country foreign to theirs, it got region-blocked...

Not that I pitied them, they were obnoxiously late and boarded with 5 bags (the stiff rectangular bags boutique stores have) of shopping...

In a weird quirk that must be a bug, you can watch the first season of the Good Place in French in the USA but not in Canada.

Why make it complicated? Service means the user experience. If the user needs to do anything other than click pay click play, you done goofed, simple as that.

> "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem"

Maybe so, but if media companies invested in fixing the service problems, the pricing problems would remain, and those keep people away just as effectively, so they're not going to do it.

People don't want to pay what the media companies want to charge, at any level of service.

This is absolutely not true.

I pay an ungodly combined amount of money to various streaming services, but must still occasionally resort to TPB. Which "just works", unlike said streaming services.

Within reason, it's not a money problem (within reason; media conglomerates would love for me to sell my kidney in order to watch their premium shows, but that's not going to happen).I would rather just pay for the problem to go away, but Netflix, Disney et al just disagree.

Not necessarily true, as the success of streaming shows. The problem comes when the unbounded greed of the billionaires in charge leads them to inflate prices beyond their customers' ability and willingness to pay.

Streaming was cheaper than what existed before, and still is. Inflation-adjusted, movies and TV were insanely expensive back then, yet people willingly paid. And the movies were better. Who's greedy, companies wanting to offer nonessential entertainment for a price, or people who want it for free?

Nobody I ever talk to cancel Netflix because it’s too expensive. They cancel it because it runs out of content they care about. Including me. I’m not keeping a sub for that one week a year I find something I enjoy.

It’s absolutely a service problem.

It's both. I canceled when they increased their pricing again (a few months ago), because there's no way I'll pay more when neither the service nor the catalog gets better. I would have kept my subscription if they hadn't increased the price, regardless of any changes to the catalog.

What you described is the same as cancelling because it’s too expensive, you’re just describing the value side of the equation.

Yeah, it's too expensive because the _service_ is too poor. If the service was good, it would be a fair price.

… if it was offered for the same price as the current service.

That's one way of framing it (pro provider). A pro consumer way of framing it is that it's a service problem.

Since I'm a consumer, not a provider, I side with consumers.

Streaming sucks today -- I should know, I'm subscribed to most platforms.

Really voting with your wallet there.

Anyway I’m not taking platforms side just stating that “I don’t get enough value” and “it is too expensive” are the same thing.

> Really voting with your wallet there.

Sadly, you're right. But it's a Catch-22 here, if I pirated everything people would accuse me of being part of the problem, etc.

I enjoy the moral high ground of paying for everything yet still supporting piracy (with caveats, and not for everything): it makes my position unassailable.

And I disagree with your last statement, as I said it's a framing issue and framing matters. I'm pro consumer, and therefore, it's not the same thing .

Most people do not want it for free. It's just that they are fed up with streaming platforms fragmentation and anticonsumer practices.

Yes but price has also become a huge part of it netflix raised prices like 5 times in 1 year lol

Love how this same quote was used in celebration of streaming back in Netflix’s early days as the solution, and now to show the new industry found on those very same ideas as the problem.

I cancelled prime when they told me they were putting adverts on

Went to resubscribe, no option given for no adverts, no money from me.

This is what did it for me too. Why would I pay for a crappy UX and ads? But all these companies need numbers to keep going up, so they keep tightening the screws.

It still exists. I'm currently paying for the ad free add on and often cancel and resubscribe to it before I'm about to watch anything.

Annoyingly though, even with that, it'll still show you skipable ads about other shows they have once before you start something in a session.

When I click "subscribe" on my TV it gives me three options, all with adverts

Maybe I could subscribe and take a risk that I could then buy something again, but it tells me they don't want people paying money, they want people watching adverts.

As such the rare amazon exclusives (mainly clarkson's farm) I will get elsewhere.

Compared to say Paramount, which I once again subscribed to through apple-tv a couple of months ago. I watch new Star Trek and South Park episodes, then unsubscribe, suits me fine, far cheaper than how I used to watch Star Trek in the 1990s.

Likewise I'll subscribe to Apple when for all mankind and morning show come back.

If they want me permamently subscribed, they should go back to making 26 episodes a year.

Gabe Newell, founder of the largest video game DRM company. Find a way for anyone to download video games for free without risking malware or compromising online play, and see how many people still pay $60 for a new game on Steam.

That's a big if.

More importantly, Gabe is fundamentally right. I'm subscribed to most available streaming services in my country, and when I still cannot find what I want due to obscure reasons (e.g. region locked, or Disney decided to not make it available anywhere for who knows which reason), you can be pretty sure I'll be sailing the seas of the corsair.

It is a service problem.

It's almost like the corporate culture of being a bunch of greedy control freaks will push customers away when they have an alternative.

Ehh, while I agree its 70% about having a way more user-friendly experience, theres still 30% which is that the content needs to justify the price. And HBO and Netflix have missed that mark in my opinion.

I cancelled HBO after their price increase a year or two ago after being pretty happy with their service for a long time (though also the service quality had gotten worse). Too many people share my netflix for me to cancel it.

It's honestly wild that in 2025, you can still find better accessibility and quality control in a well-seeded torrent than on half the major platforms

Service problems are usually pricing problems. Advert policy is because people refuse to pay more so to make more money they put in ads. Fragmentation by content/region is also because each service is trying to spend as little as possible on content. If you want to watch unlock video content youd have to pay $100+ a month and people refuse to do that.

That quote is literally in the article you didn't read.

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I actually think pirating encourages a healthier approach to watching TV/movies. I've fully made the switch to pirating instead of subscribing to any streaming services, and it's led to me thinking more critically about what I want to spend time downloading and watching rather than just flipping mindlessly through endless amounts of readily available garbage on a streaming service.

I do still have Kanopy though, which is great for me but obviously depends on your library.

For me, I only seek out media I plan to actually watch. Rather than flipping through what is available and choosing from there. Currently it is stargate sg1/atlantis what I am watching.

Also, a lot of movies/series are only available dubbed here. (I really effing hate "Sie" in dubbed media. So much so, that it's one of the major reasons I go for subbed in english, at most)

When i first used netflix at my friends house, I immediately used the search bar and looked for Jurassic Park... what kind of movie service doesn't have JP, i thought. It must be around 10 years ago, and I never used it once afterwards.

Not always. Now I just flip mindlessly through endless amounts of readily available garbage on my jellyfin server instead.

Then don’t be a hoarder and only get what you want to watch

I have my watchlist hooked up to *arr so it pulls that stuff automatically. Once I watched it and it’s not something I want to show to others, I delete it.

> Then don’t be a hoarder

Of course. Why didn't I think of that?

> led to me thinking more critically about what I want to spend time downloading and watching rather than just flipping mindlessly through endless amounts of readily available garbage

For me it's a bit different. I have the *arr stack fully automated (with 22Tb of storage for now maaaaybe it's overkill), for friends and family too.

And the experience is nice because it makes content "crowd sourced". If something is on the server it means someone else purposefully added it, so you can still browse, but it's curated based on your friend/family circle.

But also the automation part can be a bit "mindlessly click download on everything even stuff I probably won't watch", but disk space constraints force you to delete it if nobody's watching.

Radarr and Sonarr are my two favourite pieces of software ever. Together with Plex I get an experience FAR superior to any streaming service. For the record I would be happy to pay for such a service, but they're so greedy they'll never offer such a unified service. Instead they keep making the direct to Netflix content worse. Removing content without any notice. Making the app UX worse, including removing useful reviews from the platform, and making content auto play when browsing. The best example of this clusterfuck is the Pokemon where to watch guide: https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...

Why not purchase the discs and copy them yourself? At least artists can get paid that way.

Most shows don't get a dvd release anymore.

And then sometimes you have to deal with a bunch of bullshit changes because of music licensing or something.

Or current streaming doesn't have the license for the original music or soundtracks. Thus it really is a different product.

I prefer physical media. However, it can sometimes be a chore to start the movie! Each disc is different. Some discs use non-standard methods to access the home menu. Some require that you at least skip past all the previews at the beginning. The worst discs require several minutes of fiddling in addition to finding and inserting the disc before you can watch it. Compare this with double-clicking an mkv and having it just...start.

I haven’t bought a lot of DVDs lately, but the ones I have all were from used DVD stores. I think the artists were paid once.

Ehh sounds like an automation issue. Buy another hard-drive and just have everything new auto download.

In a related vein, Ebooks. I have a Kobo e-reader that is fantastic.

I just ran into a situation where I really wanted to buy two e-books. Unfortunately, both are on Amazon. Amazon doesn't let you just download them to your computer anymore, you need to transfer them to a Kindle. A kindle I do not have.

I tried to find any possible workaround, but they've totally locked it down. So, I didn't buy either book. I really struggle to see how this is helpful to anyone. Does Amazon serious make enough profit off of each Kindle to be worth it like this? Ugh.

My current strategy is account hopping and ad blocking. I pay for Amazon Prime but I'm happy to pay less and have Firefox clean out the ads. I've cancelled my Netflix subscription for the third time. I'm soon going to re-enable Apple TV; probably for 1 or 2 months. And apparently HBO Max and Disney+ are now finally entering the German market. I will never pay for all of those at the same time. The more this market fragments, the smaller the pie gets for all of them.

What baffles me in this market is that there is all this unmonetized content that remains exclusively locked up in archives that is still very watchable earning almost next to nothing. The notion of cross licensing content between these networks seems controversial.

Take Game of Thrones for example. Exclusive to HBO. Some people in Germany may or may not have pirated that back in the day. Because HBO was not available in that market and there was no way to watch that legally even though world+dog was talking about that. Now it's old news of course. But Germany is probably full of people that might have payed for watching that when it wasn't old news yet. There are decades worth of high value series that you can buy (in some cases) but not stream. And I bet sales aren't all that great. Judging from the lack of marketing.

In the same way the BBC is sitting on decades of quality content. Same for most public broadcasters. Very hard to get your hands on any of it. Why are there no multi billion deals with Amazon, Netflix, Apple TV, etc. being closed about that content. Netflix is back filling their catalog with cheap Korean action movies and other filler crap instead. And they are cutting the budgets of the exclusive content that made them big.

Another example is that movie studios have been publishing 3D blockbuster movies for about 15 years now. These are almost all very expensive movies that only ran for a short time in cinemas. 3D only kicked off with the first Avatar movie. None of the big streamers offer any 3D content whatsoever. What's wrong with content publishers that they are allowing a good investment to go to waste like that? It's not a technical problem. TV makers have been trying to flog 3D tvs for ages. But without any content (not counting obsolete things like blue ray) there never was a reason to buy those.

One minor issue I've noticed with streaming is the quality. I went to watch A Bridge on the River Kwai the other day. I could borrow it from my library on Kanopy for free, but the audio was only in stereo. The $4 iTunes rental supported Dolby Atmos, which took advantage of my speaker system, and the video quality was comparably better. I ended up paying despite the library having it because iTunes offered a better experience that was easy to access.

iTunes movie rentals seem to almost always win out when it comes to streaming specifically. I don't know why I would want to watch something on Prime Video at a lower quality and sit through ads. I've also encountered a number of services such as Peacock that absolutely refused to run on my Linux laptop even though I was a paying customer.

Further, the iTunes versions of movies often come with special features (e.g. The making of the Lord of the Rings). They also earned a lot of goodwill from me when they upgraded a number of my HD movies to 4k for free.

I do maintain a Jellyfin server with movies and shows I have legally purchased because I didn't like how the digital version of my James Bond movies had the final movie on a different streaming app. It's really hard to beat that setup if you know how to configure it. My Jellyfin server contains an episode of community from the DVD I own that was removed from streaming services, and that's where it really shines. I also have higher quality versions of Star Wars than the VHS copies I own.

Nonetheless, I think iTunes proves what an effective model is in a similar vain as Steam is to gaming. Shame that unlike Steam's relationship with Linux, iTunes is much more tied to Apple. At least the Apple TV is genuinely a good streaming box.

i wish we could go back to a pre-streaming version of netflix.

the near-infinite library and lack of algorithmic nudging resulted in an era where i had healthy view habits. reasonable levels of screentime and VERY diverse content.

i add so many movies to my queue with the best intentions of watching them someday, but always put them off because something about staring at that endless scroll of options makes me crave something light and simple.

the disk-in-the-mail era was "remember that three-hour subtitled classic film you always said you should watch but haven't? well, today's the day you're watching it." and i always ended up being glad i did.

the streaming era is "ugh, i don't have the mental bandwidth to watch that three hour thing that's been on my queue forever. lets just rewatch some background content to zone out" and i always lament wasting hours of my life in front of the screen.

I was wondering recently whether someone could conceivably start a disk-in-the-mail Netflix again, now that streaming sucks so much and every publisher seems to want their own streaming service. My understanding (possibly wrong, I'm not an expert) is that it's perfectly legal to lend out physical media without any special permission from the publisher under the first-sale doctrine, so it seems like the only way to build a library that has content from many different publishers.

(of course, this could only work as long as publishers keep producing physical media)

Library. I order DVDs to my local library all the time. Maybe your library system is terrible, but if it isn't you certainly can do this. There are hundreds a big wide release films with, effectively, are only available on DVD from a library (legally).

Bonus when I go I can still get that browsing the aisle experience like in an old video store (but in this case I am lucky, my local library has a large DVD / Blu-ray collection to browse)

Scarecrow Video does this in Seattle. Their library is amazing.

https://scarecrowvideo.org/rent-by-mail

We have these guys in NZ, they're amazing. + overnight delivery. https://www.aliceinvideoland.co.nz/

and the wonderful https://arovideo.co.nz

The pirates version of blockbuster is still alive and well at your local library.

Slim pickin's, but, yeah.

For a few years Mubi solved this. They only had 30 movies at a time. Every day the oldest movie left and a new one was added. All well curated and movies you'd remember. No empty calories. Because of the timing it had the same effect as you described. While Mubi is still one of my favorite platforms it now has a regular catalog.

I relate to this. Also, I am not the best person in the world, but recently this hit the point where I decided because of these very same thoughts + nudging from my much better partner to donate to NPR, to cancel Netflix and move that money to NPR. Now no more Netflix, which is sort of a relief in ways, and I have to be more intentional about what I download / consume.

There are still services. Here is one:

https://www.dvdinbox.com/

Haven't used them, but I am planning on setting up a dvd player,

If they were willing to sell movies and tv shows WITHOUT DRM, I’d happily buy what I want and put on my Jellyfin server. I don’t pirate music because I can buy what I want on Bandcamp (and even mainstream music on apple and Amazon without drm).

But since I can’t (and you can’t even find physical media for a lot of things), I feel like I am left with no options.

I am not even trying to get stuff that is recent, as I prefer to wait, especially for tv shows, to finish its run before I decide if it is worth investing my time in.

I mostly go to the library every week and pick up movies and tv shows on Blu-ray and rip them so I can watch them on my schedule. I often delete them afterwards if I feel like they don’t have replay value.

I think Jellyfin also provides a much better interface than any of the streaming apps, and I like to be able to know if I am going to watch them on my theatrical version or some extended version.

> If they were willing to sell movies and tv shows WITHOUT DRM, I’d happily buy what I want

So much this. I take the simple moral position that I won't pirate things I can reasonably buy. That includes almost all music, and almost no movies, TV shows, comedy specials, etc. I still largely avoid pirating things and seek out alternatives instead, but I don't feel bad about it when I do because it's an industry that doesn't consider me a potential customer anyway.

It's no longer as convenient with dozens of streaming services; the streaming bitrate is also subpar, and audio is compressed to the point it feels flat. If you want to be mindful about what you are watching, it will be really hard with Netflix, Prime, and Disney compared to your own media server. When I had a streaming subscription, I was constantly shocked by what was popular in Poland and what people were watching. It took me some time to accept that I am not their target audience.

> When I had a streaming subscription, I was constantly shocked by what was popular in Poland and what people were watching. It took me some time to accept that I am not their target audience.

Now I'm genuinely curious

The quality of shows is also subpar. And there aren’t many shows on Netflix at a given time: Probably 80 things to watch, all categories included (with 70% of overlap in content).

I feel like we've had at least two lost decades of good content. It's probably somewhere, I just haven't found it yet.

In my humble opinion, some "good content":

Netflix:

* Dark

* Fisk

* Adolescence

* Ripley

* The Queen's Gambit

* Ozark

* Baby Reindeer

* Easy

Apple TV:

* Black Bird

* The Studio

* Severance

* Shrinking

* Ted Lasso

HBO:

* The Wire

* Oz

* True Detective (S1 at least)

* The Sopranos

* Big Love

* Rome

* In Treatment

* Succession

* Deadwood

* Insecure

Misc:

* Colin From Accounts

* Black Sails

* Mad Men

* Breaking Bad

* Better Call Saul

I don't know, there's plenty. It just absolutely gets washed out with a lot of chaff.

Off topic: Black Sails is amazing, I've watched it through a couple of times, and every now and then I lament that I'm not watching it again yet...

On topic: Black Sails is about actual piracy.

P.S. Fisk - you're a fellow Aussie I take it?

I guess I wasn't thinking "series", but "films".

I know I have a lot of series to catch up on (although from the above, I found Severance disappointing, oh well).

In India, people classify movies as “mass” or “class”. Netflix and Prime are doing a lot more “mass” and for good reasons.

Hey everyone,

The last 6 months I’ve been building what I believe is one of the best high-quality streaming platforms out there.

My inspiration was exactly the reasons listed here in the comments.

I’d love to get your honest feedback on the design, features, and overall user experience.

https://bingebeast.com

Thanks! GIzmo

I know this is pedantic but it is so annoying: downloading shows is not piracy. It is totally nuts to conflate unauthorized copying and sharing with the violent act of going on somebody’s boat and killing/threatening them until you loot their stuff.

Calling it piracy was funny during the early Internet when it was all pirate and ninja memes. But really letting them conflate this very minor crime with violence was a big propaganda loss.

Agreed. I do my part to avoid using the word at least since seeing it on gnu's words-to-avoid page several years ago.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Piracy

I don't usually get too many weird looks with "unauthorized copying".

Oh, that’s funny. Actually I feel a bit Stallman-y when I point this out.

You are a couple of centuries late: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#%22Pira...

Fair enough, but if you torrent a show - which I assume most people pirating something do - you also share something, unless you explicitly turn off seeding.

No one is conflating piracy with raid boats, killing people and physically stealing items.

Ignoring the nuance is just ignorance and pedantic.

As a matter of fact, most people likely don't even associate piracy with pirates or boats. It's almost universally used to describe obtaining digital content for free.

I think this is the more nuances understanding of the conversation. Using a word associated with violence and theft to describe something like copyright infringement is just over-the-top and ridiculous.

Sometimes words have multiple meanings, and that’s ok.

As a participant in English, I’m pushing back against a pair of definitions that, I think, conflate two very different concepts in a way that is damaging to the conversation.

Some words are overload with more than one meaning. That’s like, a thing in many languages.

You're not being pedantic, you're being wrong.

Black markets are usually the result of failed markets, and i think its no different here. Copyright is a monopoly so there is no competition. Sure different streaming services compete with each other, but they essentially sell different products. It'd be like if only one resturant was allowed to sell hamburgers. There might be other resturants but they arent really in direct competition.

The streaming services are relying on enforcement to preserve their business model.

This only works as long as there's no other nations with significant digital infrastructure that can be used for VPN egress points who don't care a whole lot about US copyright enforcement (or copyright enforcement in general).

Our government just pissed off a lot of other governments. Enforcement is good within the US, but not outside, even nations which the US has a lot of control over.

This mirrors my experience as well. I used to pirate everything, it was relatively inconvenient to get the exact thing you wanted on physical media. Then streaming, Steam, and app stores came about. I pivoted 100%, it was sooo much more convenient than trying to find legitimate and quality copies of content and managing a set up to do so.

Then the streaming side started to fragment a bit, but I just grabbed all of the subscriptions (HBO, Hulu, YouTube, Netflix, etc). It was getting a bit iffy on value, but at least it was still convenient. Now it's just ridiculously _in_convenient. Search around to see which service might have the thing you're actually trying to watch and use this device with this app to get a decent quality version of the content delivered, all while hoping it doesn't force automatic quality "for your benefit". With Steam it's a bit less severe, but it did reach the "and the games you want are split across 5 services in exclusivity" and "DRM is getting to be an extreme pain on some of these" stages.

I'll choose your comment to agree. I was a pirate in the 90s and early 00s, even though it took forever - it was "free"! Several years ago I was guilty of calling people out by saying that the real reason they pirated things is because they simply didn't want to pay. Fast forward to now and I can afford several services but it is just getting out of hand. My less tech-savvy family will hear about a show or movie and I have to google where the hell it is even available, and are we already subscribed to that service. Then I had a friend setup the whole AAR suite, and it has been a breath of fresh air. I'm not sure what the answer is but I am just about done having money extracted from me every month...

I've always chosen piracy for the privacy. I don't need a bunch of services building a profile on my viewing habits and tastes, then sharing that data with other businesses and governments. If I want a recommendation, I'll ask a friend, not an algorithm.

I'm fine with recommendation algorithms if it was truly anonymous. The problem is that when you're paying for these streaming services, they have your identity, and most likely also sell your watching preference and habit data to data brokers.

This to me is the biggest feature I’d love to see in paid services. It skeeves me out to know that everything I watch or listen to is recorded.

That and owning the media.

It's creepy when you're influenced in ways that are insightful, because they know you deeply from your behavior. It's unfair to you.

Privacy is undervalued.

A couple of months ago I was sitting at my desk when the kids were asleep and was going to put some show on the second monitor while I was doing some boring admin. I open a Netflix tab on the same machine, same browser, same LAN, no VPN as I've been using for years, from the IP where likely 95% of our household Netflix traffic is requested.

I'm met with:

> Your device isn't part of the Netflix household for this account

> Not <my email here>? Create an account to enjoy your own Netflix today.

> Create an account

> Did we get it wrong? Watch temporarily until you're back on your Netflix household Wi- Fi, or sign out.

> Watch temporarily

> Sign out

Neither of the options actually worked to escape the bug(/feature?) either.

So that's when I cancelled my subscription after 8 years.

For me worse than the can't pay is the lack of options. In the VHS time I had more good movie options than in the current streaming services. I remember when I bing watched Kurozawa or Mario Monicelli's movies. Now it's very hard to find non American cinema. The tech is there, but the System fail us.

Even many American movies are no shows on most streaming platforms. Sometimes I'm like: "Let's take the top 30 movies that critics loved the most in US in year X".

As soon as it's earlier than 2005 you're gonna find less than half available across most streaming platforms, unless for renting/buying.

"Gold Diggers of 1933", "Stella Dallas", "Marty", "The Snake Pit", "Casablanca", ... I could go on.

Yep. I swear I liked the old Netflix with DVDs better. I could rent pretty much any movie I wanted.

Even after the DVDs, Netflix had a much bigger catalog before everyone else decided they needed to copy Netflix and launch their own service, then IP rights got restricted and redistributed.

Streaming was great when I only needed to subscribe to a single service to watch most everything I wanted. It's not so great when I need to subscribe to 5+ services and still not have everything I want to watch.

Yeah, monopolies are bad but the way IP is distributed right now across so many different services just ends up being worse for consumers.

Netflix found that while it was a nice advertising tool to boast about the broadness of its catalogue, most customers rarely ordered the more niche stuff so it wasn't particularly profitable.

> most customers rarely ordered the more niche stuff

I'm sure that's true, but the flip side is that the niche stuff is what pulls in the hardcore film buffs. And guess who those of us who aren't big film buffs turn to when picking films and services? The hardcore film buffs we know.

They may not generate a ton of revenue if you look only at "how many people request obscure movie X", but having those movies pulls in the people who will, in turn, influence others.

Want the DVD-by-mail business still available until 2-3 years ago? It seems that faded silently away and there wasn't even a whimper when it died.

That’s what happens when you have a big library. The usage is going to be some 80:20 rule. A small slice drives the numbers. Yet it is nice to be able to consume some long tail content. Without the DVD catalog, access to the long tail has disappeared from mainstream providers.

That may be true. But for those in "the long tail" Netflix could have been the only game in town.

Amazon was that way for me. I went to record (music) stores to buy my music in the 1990's. I started buying music from Amazon in 1996 because they had the stuff I couldn't find in the record stores.

We don’t have that problem with books for the most part, why do we have it with TV shows and movies?

Criterion Channel and Kanopy are very good (not perfect) for international films.

Have you checked out Criterion or Mubi. Lots of excellent foreign movies. Criterion seems to have about two dozen Kurozawa movies.

MUBI is a good option for the more high cinema stuff, one of the few subscriptions I'd feel sad canceling.

Same. We rotate through services but Mubi and Criterion are fixed. I do sometimes miss when Mubi would only have movies for 30 days. It helped me to actually watch the movies I wanted to watch. I'd guess that at least half the movies that from the last ten years that sometimes pop into my head were from Mubi. I've probably watched entire series on Netflix I don't remember anything of.

Coming from a country where piracy was the norm, I was very happy when Spotify and Netflix finally arrived. I even went through the trouble of accessing them via VPN just so I could pay for them.

Unfortunately, that excitement didn't last long. Shows started disappearing from Netflix, so we signed up for another service, then another, and so on. Prices kept going up, and I eventually realized I was paying a lot of money for very little in return.

At the start of the year, I cancelled everything. With the help of a few scripts, I've essentially replaced Netflix and the rest, without any downsides and at virtually no cost. I now have 4K streaming, instant playback, no device limits, offline viewing, and access to what's essentially the world’s entire media library.

The moment a company offers all that at a fair price (I’d even pay $50+ per month), I’ll gladly switch back.

I assume you are using torrent based services?

I was always wondering about how this approach could provide "instant playback". This is the one feature that keeps me ensnared to the big streaming services TBH. It's hard to get into the matter if one does not have much time to scoop information from the web.

If your internet isn't delivered in literal buckets then the movie will download before you're done peeing. At 100MB/s you can download 30GB in five minutes, which is almost full Blu-Ray rip.

Never left bittorrent.

I really wanted to embrace streaming services, prime really killed me recently, with introducing ads into a membership that I already pay for! and 90% of movies on prime I have to pay an extra 20 bucks to view ...why am i paying for membership?

Ads for a paying member? That is just... evil?

They only show ads for other shows on their own service (at least in my region), and they're skippable, but I'm not defending it, it's still bad and serves no purpose for the customer.

What bothers me more with Prime is that when I finish watching the latest episode of something, as there is no next episode, it starts playing something entirely different I have no interest in watching, which then ends up on my "Continue watching" list.

Don't they have ads on pay TV too? "Free plus ads" is not the norm. In some countries you pay tax for national TV and you still get ads. Sports matches are only available on paid services and they stick as much advertising in them as they possibly can.

It's like nobody has ever watched cable TV.

Fun fact: cable TV also started out ad-free. The sell was you'd pay a monthly subscription and got just the content you wanted to watch. Then came the ads. Enshittification as a phenomenon didn't start in Silicon Valley.

> Never left bittorrent.

Yeah, I got into low level private trackers before netflix got really big and here in germany it always had a rather lackluster library anyway. The enshitification began faster than I was willing to move. In the end i'm still just pirating everything except games and music. Games because steam is more convenient on linux than dealing with cracks, wine installers and all that stuff. Not that i'm unable just that it's literally worth the convenience to pay for it and music because spotify was better than the pirated music i had available. I'm thinking about changing that and taking the RED pill, if you catch my drift.

For music, you can only pirate to fill the gaps in Apple Music / Deezer / Tidal / Spotify / whatever.

Inb4 get a better taste in music but i've yet to find a gap in spotify that matters to me. I can think of exactly two songs that are unavailable.

Burial (the one from London) has few collab track missing from music streaming apps. Some are on YT but quality is meh.

The streaming landscape is now terrible and no different than the incumbent CATV providers that it sought to replace. In 2011, streaming services were the hotness because CATV subscriptions were expensive. In 2011, people were subscribing to 1-2 or 2-3 services because they were all less than $10USD/month. That was still 10x cheaper than the alternative.

However, 15 years later, those numbers exceed or are the same as CATV costs combined with all the streaming/smart device headaches.

All we did was change the pipe. The providers didn't change except for consolidation and erosion of policy, both of which lead to worse outcomes for consumers.

All streaming services should have a pay per minute system as an alternative to the fixed monthly subscription.

That way, I'd happily use any service to watch whatever cause it would be convenient, instead of piracy.

And it would be a reason for them to really improve their recommendation systems.

What these companies would "sell" would be DRM crusty shit that wouldn't work on my devices. And the 'Authorization servers' would be decommissioned at some unstated future date. Hell, even Microsoft couldn't manage to maintain these DRM servers.

If MS cant, why would I expect any company to properly maintain them?

https://community.spiceworks.com/t/how-to-play-content-prote...

So, unless these are MP4's or MKV's with correct subtitling and appropriate audio, I'm not going to pay a cent here.

Lets go back to old good CD/DVD era.

Yes but then it must be in the form of a subscription (e.g. 300 mins/month), because recurring revenue is critical for the valuation of most companies.

> pay per minute system

And/or pay-per-episode, pay-per-season or pay-per-show. So I don't have to start thinking ahead too much about the _length_ of something and can just enjoy the thing itself based on some pre-determined price.

Isn't this just renting, which is already offered by Amazon, Apple, Google ...

Sort of, but:

- the price to rent is comically overpriced, to the point it makes no sense to rent, especially at HD or UHD.

- you still require an online connection.

- the quality is shit unless your playing it on the holy Privacy Violator 9000.

- they give you an absurdly small amount of time to view the movie or show. 2 days? Really? Family video did a week!

Pay per episode could be an ok granularity. Anything above that I'm not ok, there is too much garbage

Perhaps pay-per-episode with a discounted price for an entire series (and an option to buy the remainders taking that into account). It seems fair to be able to dip your toe into a series and try a few episodes before committing. On the other hand, that seems just a bit too consumer-friendly...

Would be fine with that. I want a demo before committing, essentially

Isn't this precisely what Amazon already does?

For the subset of Amazon-available content that isn't counted as Prime Video I think yes, but not for the rest of it. Apple TV+ possibly too, though they also have what feels like their own confusing model that shows some things as being available with the caveat that it's actually available through either a) a proxy with a subscription to a third party or b) a one-time purchase from them. I'd hate to be in the meetings where the details of these licensing agreements get hashed out.

Some Disney series are already 20mins about the show and 10mins credits/something else. Don’t give them new ideas to reduce the actual content…

I was thinking along the lines of how much I actually watch, if I only watched 10 minutes of your show, I only pay for 10 minutes, not the entire thing.

You're also saving on bandwidth.

Paradoxically, I'd still want to pay per minute of viewing time, if I'm watching the show on 2x the speed.

Maybe the incentives would be better, but i also dont really want to keep track of budgeting when watching TV. I'm here to relax. I dont want to stress about how much i watched this month and if im going to blow my entertainment budget.

That would incentivize services to make their shows longer. Maybe they play them back at 95% speed, maybe they add their own intro or credits to the end. maybe if they make their own shows like Netfliz does, they stretch them out.

Idea for a service.

The service effectively rebroadcasts all the streaming services to provide exactly what you suggest. It’s still paying the streaming services, and users pay it.

Better not set it up in the US .

This is like cable with extra steps ;)

I think we are already seeing some packaged stream services and we will probably see more. It’s a lot of overhead to maintain a separate service to do the exact same thing (with only a different library and branding).

I think the NHL uses the streaming backend developed by MLB Advanced Media (they adapted it in 2015, not sure if still the case).

https://www.sportsnet.ca/hockey/nhl/a-closer-look-at-nhls-pa...

Na, not like cable. It’s all on demand so you can watch what you want when you want. You don’t pay a cent for stuff you don’t watch.

You can pay by minute, or episode, or season or whatever.

Like Netflix but with the catalog of every streaming service in existence, better per-use pricing, no ads.

Movie shows will optimize for that by making half of the episode filler.

Sling TV now has a "day pass" option for $5. (A weekend for $10.) https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/sling-tv-off...

A bundle of streaming services. That you can surf and choose one from and just watch. And a TV guide that tells you what's running where.

Gee...sounds a lot like Cable TV.

Sarcasm aside, the one problem folks had with Cable was the inability to upgrade without getting locked into another 2 year contract. Streaming solves that one problem while enshittifying all the other good things.

I thought the main complaint was "I'm paying for channels I don't watch!" while not realizing the channels they were watching were actually what they were paying for, and the rest of the stuff was just lumped in for nearly free to make the lineups look bigger and more appealing.

For some reason I always saw it in reverse, that I had to pay to subsidise a set of channels I'm _not_ interested in for the one I am.

Chances are that's not what was happening unless you were watching the channels nobody else watches.

I haven't looked into cable pricing for a while but i remember a few of the contract disputes that caused some big channels to drop off big cable providers in the 2010s. The price-per-customer those channels were asking the cable companies were significant chunks of what a package would cost the customer (eg upwards for $1).

Meanwhile some of the less common ones were a few cents per customer.

That means that unless you weren't watching any of the $1+ ones, you were mostly actually "paying for what you're watching".

I assure you that there are many people who do not need nor want ESPN and knew damn well they were directly paying it.

And those people were having part of their package subsidized by the people who were watching ESPN but not the other channels.

> Gee...sounds a lot like Cable TV.

Honestly, Cable companies could make a comeback by using their relationships with producers to actually be a "one stop shop" streaming services. There's definitely a pain point to having to be subscribed to so many different services just to cover the gamut of shows and movies

> .. the one problem folks had with Cable was the i...

and hardware rental fees

ads on top of your service

bundling a bunch of channels you didnt ask for and increase price

outages

the list goes on

For movies at least it's usually no problem to find them for "rent", i.e. 48h for an absurd amount of money.

I think they know how many dead / inactive subscriptions they have.

That would only suit a portion of their user base and completely ream people who use Netflix to entertain/occupy their kids, who use TV shows to fall asleep, etc. Not to mention throwing away valuable subscriber dollars from idle users like me who maintain a subscription but rarely watch anything (mostly because there's nothing good on the entire platform).

It is annoying, I would much rather pay for the content I am consuming since I want to support content being made.

But with prices going up and there now being so many services, I find it hard to justify more than a couple.

I pay for Apple TV+ and Disney+ with zero hesitation since I get a large amount of content from both of those that I actually enjoy. I added Hulu to Disney plus because why not.

Outside of that I just can't bring myself to subscribe to Netflix, whatever HBO is calling themselves now, paramount, etc etc anymore. It added up too quickly and there are alternative solutions.

It isn't even necessarily about the cost anymore; I have spent way too much on the hardware for my media server and I am nowhere near any concept of breaking even. But I no longer need to think about where something may be accessible just to be disappointed that I can't stream it.

Recently, I also switched to Jellyfin. I still have access to Netflix and Disney through family plan. The service problem was the quality issue. I have the Ultra plan's while Netflix keep pushing SD (due to Widevine certificates). Simply cannot stand watching 480p on WQHD+ screen. For the content I have legitimate access, but cannot get good service, I don't consider it pirating.

Some of us never left piracy. It's just a better experience, and has been for a long time. Seems like most people would pay for a good service, but one doesn't exist.

Also offers original programming without weird edits made later. Disney and Netflix seem to have done this quite a bit removing scenes and sometimes entire episodes .

Oh, I have a question to all of the people who pirate but live in a country where that’s illegal and punished (with huge fines, I assume). I’m very interested in listening to some stories of how it’s technically done (vpn, a seedbox, or you just keep things simple and don’t care). E.g. I’ve been trying sophisticated backlists of IPs, but I have no idea whether they work. But even more I am interested in a legal aspect, meaning how serious these copyright claims are. Do you know anyone personally, who was punished for downloading a TV show? Which country? Personally, I know many folks who do, but none who was fined.

I don't even know what the law says in my own country, instead I use a country where is it not illegal to download (but is to upload) and has excellent global connectivity and got a VPS there. I installed Transmission, disabled uploads, and a few other tools and now I just click the magnet link on a torrent site and the media shows up in my download folder after a few minutes or sometimes hours. For anything a bit popular I get 300Mbps downloads on average.

The country in question is left as an exercise for the reader.

Argentina. Have been using BitTorrent directly from my home connection for close to 20 years now without issue, no VPN or anything. Never heard of anyone getting a fine, a warning, or anything like that. Never ran into transfer cap issues either; despite my ISP having a stated monthly cap of 250 GB down (although that was years ago; it may have changed), I handily exceed it every month, and some months I've passed 1 TiB without getting throttled at all. The record according to pfSense is 2.2 TiB in a single month.

With torrents you'll want a VPN. Usenet is generally safe just thanks to TLS unless you're uploading content. For that I'd use a VPN. But unlike torrent, Usenet isn't P2P so I can just download at my full internet bandwidth and don't need to hope there are enough seeders out there maintaining it or that I maintain some magic upload / download ratio.

What about torrents and Tor? Moral aspects aside. (Personally, I’d not do it, out of respect for the network.) Just curious about it theoretically, how this technology and its ‘moderation’ (let’s call it that) works.

About 10 years ago Netflix became available in the country where I was living back then. I was very excited about it, I was on their email list for years, waiting for the announcement. As I got the email that they are available, after work literally the first thing I did was to grab my credit card, and subscribe.

I found 4-6 movies I wanted to watch, but when I saw that they had Godfather 1 and 3 without 2, I had a good laugh. Then I watched all the Archer episodes they had, and tried to find something interesting for 2 more days before I cancelled my (still trial) account.

Though I stopped watching movies some years ago, until than I used to watch them on the same old pre-netflix way.

Of course I have heard that they have spent many billions on content since then, I'm sure they have some interesting stuff... but that came way too late for me.

Maybe I'm getting old, lol

If a movie has a Netflix label in it, it is a sure signal of a bad movie with a boring script made based on data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accolades_received_by_...

The Academy Awards? Who the heck cares for those?

The only thing they say is "the powers that be in Hollywood chose to highlight your product", but surely the information content regarding quality is as close to zero as it is possible to get.

This includes movies "streamed or distributed" by Netflix. Like the parent mentioned, Netflix has streamed the Godfather.

If you click through the movies on that list, you will find that almost none of them were actually produced by Netflix.

Movies produced by Netflix are highly likely to be as described, with a small handful of exceptions.

Some of those are other networks shows that just happen to be distributed by Netflix. For example, Wallace & Gromit. This is not a useful set of data to draw conclusions from. Which is precisely the problem that Netflix has.

In all of that time there are two best directors and two best supporting actress wins of the major Oscar categories. That is not much considering how much money they have dumped into movies. Netflix has always been quantity over quality.

Yes, very damming considering their spend to not ever have won a best picture/actor/actress/screenplay.

I mean when your company has enough money to essentially bankroll the creation of a greater-than-average number of productions and simply pay the individuals involved in the production of these films whatever it takes to get them on board, isn't it sort of inevitable that you end up featuring in the list of awards a greater-than-average number of times?

We should coin a new term: "Straight to Netflix"

That has been my experience as well. When I see that logo it's a bad omen on how the film is going to be.

I don't know why you're being downvoted because you're absolutely right. I'd say for me Netflix movies have less than a 5% hit rate. They're an excellent place to start if you desire a suitably (and needlessly) racially and sexually diverse cast, the most bland cinematography and grading possible, and scripts explicitly designed for viewers who are paying more attention to their phones than the show[1].

[1] https://comicbook.com/movies/news/netflix-reportedly-has-biz...

Based on data (and Twitter) part is true of any studio since a decade, in any case Netflix has produced or co-produced a good bunch of movies.

Also, some excellent documentaries.

While obviously this isn't realistic, I wonder if it were possible to start a streaming service on pirated media.

The infra is there already, just charge 5 bucks for high quality streaming. I'd gladly pay for that!

I’ve heard people repeating these apparently random words: stremio, torrentio, real-debrid. Never tried googling them myself

There are a few for $15-$20/month. Dig through torrentfreak news and you will find some services which are supposedly shutdown but they aren't.

I pay for Apple TV and I’d still pirate so I don’t have to sit through their shit “look at our new tv show” crap ad at the beginning.

Thank God for VLC, the greatest app ever created!

https://www.videolan.org/vlc/

I spent last few days chasing down a Bravo/peacock show from outside the US trying to watch legally, only to find it on watchseries and realize how good the experience has gotten. It's not even released on torrents or nzb. Watchseries UI is kind of peak now. Nuts. Does anyone know how Watchseries manage to stay up?

It's been taken down plenty of times. They just host a mirror somewhere else under a new TLD.

By take down I mean have entire org steamrolled which we've seen with other crackdowns. Watchseries hydra never seems to fully die.

I still have streaming services, mostly because my family uses them. I’m slowly getting back into the self hosted ways. But it’s also pushing me to just stop watching altogether. I’m finding better ways to spend my time than in front of a tv. Or rather, I guess I’m spending it more behind a computer screen. Haha

As with most things, I think we leaned in too hard to streaming services.

Part of the appeal of streaming services back then was being able to cherry pick what you wanted so you only paid for what you actually wanted to watched.

Because of how fragmented all the shows are, people sign up for multiple streaming services just to watch the shows the want to watch, and then wish for everything to be bundled together...again. Also, each streaming service charges a hefty premium compared to what you're actually getting, so it's not as worth the money.

The appeal back then was being able to get all the shows you wanted on a single platform. Netflix had all of Disney, WB, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc. at one point, including strong original content. Going all in on $10/month for all the TV I wanted to watch was a good deal. Paying $15/month times 5 for a worse experience... not so much.

I don't remember any cable tv packages that were $10/month except for maybe getting the local tv channels because you couldn't get good reception with an antennae.

Cable TV packages were $20-$30/month (base packages) for 200 channels, of which 10 of them you really cared about, then you had to add on another $10-$40 depending on what it was to get what you wanted. So, to finally get the 10-15 channels you actually care about you had to pay $50-$75/month for 900 channels.

Like, if all you wanted was Disney, you couldn't just get Disney channel(s), you had to pay for 250+ other channels too. Now you can just sign up for Disney+ streaming.

https://archive.ph/Q9lvm

I like the principled archive link, despite The Guardian having no paywalls.

The guardian does have a semi-paywall in that you can either share your personal data with them or pay. Which in my opinion is a breach of the GDPR but apparently the UK ICO has said it’s fine. Yet another toothless/useless organisation

Maybe not something to ask here, but how does pirating work now in 2025? Last time I did it regularly wash during my teens (18 years ago). Is it still torrent? Pirate bay? I've probably lost my "sense" to distinguish fishing/virus/garbage from real torrent, so if things have changed and moved to new places it feels like a hassle (why I still use streaming, really)

I would say either private torrent trackers or usenet. Later I never tried.

I never had a problem with "garbage" on private trackers, and if they are "nuked" fairly quickly.

Both torrent and usenet can be automated. (Sonarr, radarr etc.) If you want to watch a specific series, new episodes will be automatically downloaded, added to the torrent client, maybe moved and renamed and you get a ping your discord server / telegram / whatever.

There are a couple different streaming services that I subscribe to for different reasons but it gets harder to keep doing it.

CBC Gem - free public broadcaster, but I want to remove ads

Shudder - $50/year, cheap as chips

Netflix - cheapest way to watch WWE pay-per-views live

Crave - got a year for 50% off on a Black Friday deal. I don't know if I'll renew

TSN - only during hockey and football season

AppleTV - wouldn't subscribe separately, but they throw it in with my Apple One family plan

Honestly my Jellyfin server sees more action than any of them. The biggest reason to pay for streaming is live events, which I believe is why Netflix is pushing to get more into them. And I've been increasingly annoyed at how many things I want to watch are simply not available at all, or not available without subscribing to yet another service in the hopes they might have it. I'm planning a Sergio Leone spaghetti western binge. The only place I found what I wanted was usenet.

This is something that started a few years ago already

One of the major selling points of streaming was convince outweighed the cost. But cost keeps going up.

As tech companies that once prioritized “growth at all costs” try to become more and more profitable I expect you’ll see this in other spaces as well (it’s already happened to AirBNB, on demand services not far behind, nor is Amazon. And off on the horizon are AI-services)

I recently heard from a friend who is a Netflix subscriber that they felt they had to torrent a new Netflix show, because the Netflix app on their TV dongle just randomly stopped working for a few days. Sounds like a convenience issue to me.

I saw an Instagram post that showed how much it would cost for an American to be able to watch every NFL game this season. It was something like $1100/month.

We need to shorten copyright just so that the classics stay available online.

50 years from first publication. No more.

I agree no more. If I had to pick a perfect number I’d probably go to 25 or 30

I think we have it backwards by attaching it to the life/death of the creator (or the works’ creation). People should be alive to experience the works they consumed in new and open ways. Creation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It builds on the collective works. There’s no point in a work becoming public domain if no one is alive from the time when it first had an impact on culture. Seniors should be freely able to listen to access the culture of their youth and experience it in new modified ways without restriction.

15 years or less from the date of first public consumption.

My most annoying experience has been some providers blocking VPNs. I pay for an account, I log in with my account, I use a vpn with ip in the country I made the account with and use my account, and still I am blocked. I don't want to stop my vpn just for the sake of streaming, I would rather pirate the content.

A second one is subtitles. Somehow the streaming services decides which subtitles I need and which I don't.

It is funny how we went from pirating content being normalised, then being frown upon, and now getting normalised again.

> Spotify

> “enshittification” of streaming

I've been a happy paying Spotify user since 2010 or so. I'm still mostly happy with what I get out of it... they did try to shove podcasts down people's throats, but backed off pretty quickly. One thing that recently infuriated me though, was something they call "smart shuffle". Like, you press shuffle on your playlist, it starts shuffling. You press it again, it should turn off the shuffle, and just keep playing in order, right? Not according to Spotify's amazing designer team. With Spotify it's a tri-state switch. If you press it again, it activates a "smart shuffle" which has nothing to do with shuffling, instead it adds extra suggestions to your playlist.

There is a way to turn this "feature" off on mobile, and they've been promising a way to turn it off on desktop for many months now. As a paying user, being treated like an idiot this way definitely makes me resentful and is the most enshittified thing I've seen Spotify do.

I have been paying Spotify for 5 or 6 years now, and while I love how much amazing music it has helped me to discover, the UI is absolutely atrocious. The way it puts together artists, albums, individual songs and playlists in the same list, or the way it mixes your personal selection with their algorithmic recommendations, is extremely confusing to me. I am seriously considering going back to the high seas.

It’s not necessarily driving me to piracy, rather disengagement because the aggressive and deceptive practices have become abusive. For example, I pay for Disney+/Hulu and tried to watch Fargo (the series) and finally gave up after being constantly interrupted with the same exact unksippable ads every 10 minutes. With YouTube Premium, it seems like every streamer just switched to “sponsored content” to get around the no-ad experience. It’s very disappointing and just causes me to lose interest.

Is there an exhaustive list of methods people use in 2025?

Stremio, classic torrents?

What’s the current state of PopcorTime / successors?

Look up free media heck yeah.

In the uk many people use illegal streams purely to watch 3pm premiership football matches - they are restricted from broadcast in the uk

Tip: Watch Cartoons Online (search it)

Great place to stream cartoons and anime for free, no account. It feels like they have almost everything, as I found anime as far back as the 1970s on there.

When I discovered Food Wars was split between two streaming platforms, I hoisted the sails.

Piracy is when your digital assets disappear from providers' locations available to use.

piratebay/rutracker + apple tv 4k box + Infuse 8 app (which has icloud syncing of video timestamps) + a macbook/laptop with filesharing turned on = way better than buying 4 different stream services

I started buying Blu-ray discs and ripping them to my computer, where I run Plex. Why? I had a long-time subscription to HBO Max, but a few years ago, I went to watch Westworld, and it was gone from HBO. I ended up buying a season on Apple for the price of a monthly subscription to HBO. I cancelled my HBO subscription. I realized that second-hand Blu-ray discs of shows were selling for dirt cheap. I spent $40 to buy the rest of the seasons of Westworld on Blu-ray.

Clearly, new shows aren't getting Blu-ray releases, so this won't work for you if you care about new shows. My wife and I are so over the dystopian view from modern science fiction that we started focusing on shows from the late 1900s (80s/90s) to get more of a positive outlook from our entertainment. We are now going through Stargate SG-1.

Sucks that the Blu-ray experience is dreadful for 4K content. You've gotta find specific Blu-ray drives with specific firmware versions to do rips, or watch on a PlayStation or similar locked-down console. There isn't even a non-pirate way to watch on a laptop or desktop anymore since Intel SGX is dead.

If you want a fast and easy way to rip 4k Blu-ray buy a drive ready for it. People sell prepatched drives to rip with. They don’t mark them up much. I grabbed a couple and after two yeas I still haven’t worn through the first one yet.

> I went to watch Westworld, and it was gone from HBO.

Wait, isn't that their own IP? I get shows not running on 3rd party streaming services due to IP rights and stuff, but how/why would they be in a position to not stream their own IP?! That's like going to Netflix and not being able to see Stranger Things. It's insane!

Insane is the understatement of the year. I appreciate their idiocy though. It pushed me to make the switch to ripping discs so I have my own drm free offline library of content now.

From the geniuses who thought throwing away the HBO name in favor of "Max" was a way to unlock brand value

Are you over 40?

I ask because I'm over 40 and I've had enough of this too.

Also check out cafedvd.com.

Same. I'm 45 and lately I've been thinking about picking up a Blu-ray player. Not a drive to rip discs—a player to hook up to my TV. It's definitely an elder millennial thing, but I just want to own a physical copy of the movie and not have to worry about where it's streaming or whether the one I "bought" on iTunes has been quietly swapped for another version.

The sad thing is, I don't think Blu-ray is long for this world. But I at least want plastic copies of the classic movies I know I'll go back to.

There are quite a few devices these days that’ll allow you to capture streams by stripping HDCP so you can at least record it instead of having the service put it in “the vault,” to appease some bozo in a suit.

I have been trying to put my data hoarding data days behind me, but like the article, I’m being pushed back that direction. Doubly so since I use Linux and they restrict quality to 1080p. The only thing preventing me from it right now is a lack of a computer/server with ECC support (so I can run ZFS). Though encrypting a bunch of data and archiving it into Amazon Glacier seems more and more reasonable as time goes on.

Last night I rented the movie Sinners off of Google play and was beyond incredibly annoyed that the playback was 720p the entire time in chrome and Firefox, on both Linux and windows. I honestly feel like I got ripped off, and I got that 10 dollar Google gift card for free.

I think that we cannot separate it from amount of free cash people have. Inflation, layoffs, etc. People simply want to limit their spending on less important things.

It just has to be cheap enough and you have to have enough free time to pay for media. Not something you can do when your utilities and taxes are 100% up from 3 years ago and you’re constantly boarded with layoff news.

I was trying to watch The Big Short the other night, after checking 7 streaming websites I came to my senses and downloaded the 4k rip off the pirate bay

I was trying to put on a show for background noise this morning. Just two nights ago I was able to sign in with my cable provider and watch it. Now it's telling me there's a network (as in the channel the network is on) authorization error, customer support can't tell me why it doesn't work and they are not authorized to issue me a credit.

So I pirated that too.

And what the fuck is up with Netflix? Why do I have to install a browser extension to hide the games? I don't want games I want to watch The Big Short.

They are innovating where no innovation is necessary. And in the process they are making everything more shitty. Why change the UI every couple of months. It's fine, it's a UI for a media catalog, it's not rocket science. Why not work with other companies to collaborate and create a unified way to search catalogs but no that would be good for the consumer. Greed is an ugly thing.

Fantastic movie by the way. Worth rewatching a couple of times

I wonder if a business model where you buy movies for $x would work. You pay for each movie you want to watch, you get to download and keep the movie forever. A certain cut of the movie goes to the production studios. No ads, no device limits, no monthly subscription costs and you get access to the movie forever.

Some never left. I don't feel the need to torrent anymore because free libraries are consistently available for nearly all entertainment. Given the world is falling apart, maybe I should download some things to enjoy when things hit the fan.

Now more than ever before, for me, it’s exclusively because of UX and not price.

The most recent example: every Star Trek (TNG, Voyager, etc) on Netflix simply doesn’t work on my Chromecast.

After a minute the video goes all screwy, split 1/3 across the screen and loses half its colour. But this doesn’t happen with Plex.

A useful distinction is that upload is piracy and download is not.

True pirates maintain > 1.0 ratio

Neither is piracy, it is just unauthorized copying and sharing.

> unauthorized copying and sharing

Which is known in English as "piracy".

No piracy is theft done on sea.

3. The unauthorized duplication of goods protected by intellectual property law.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/piracy

The average European household now spends close to €700 (£600) a year on three or more VOD subscriptions. Why not buy a Blu-ray a week, instead?

This is true but also because most streaming services tech is doodoo butter.

For example, i wanted to watch the new south park season. I get paramount plus. It doesnt work on smart tv app. Ok fine shouldnt be using that anyways, hook up laptop. Still doesnt work. Use a different adapter and still doesn’t work. Airplay from phone, that works but i dont want to give up phone and website has major jank.

5s google search later and i am streaming on the 7 seas from smart tv browser.

To be fair, netflix is almost always solid. The rest are glitchy, slow, janky piles of dung.

Sadly, a lot of good torrent websites have gone down in past years. Especially after the coof, the internet has not recovered from it and torrents were one of those things. Sure, there are still options, but it's slim pickings compared to pre-2020 era.

I rarely watch something off Netflix. And when I watch something I love watching in highest quality (4K HDR if available). If they'd let me pay-as-I-watch I'd be happy to do so, but I don't want to pay every month for a service I rarely use, and sometimes never for a few months.

Another reason is availability. Apple TV+, for some reason, isn't available in my country. I've heard great thing about Severance which is available only there. I can't legally watch it even if I were to pay it. I'd have to pirate it if I want to watch it.

My pet peeve is when streaming services only allow me to watch something in the language of the country I live in. I'm sorry, but why? Why would I want to watch a 1988 movie with horrible German dub?

The only paid service I use is iTunes Movies/TV shows, because I buy them for $5 each. I have over 100 movies that I have "paid" for, knowing full well that they could be stripped from me in the future. But it's too damn convenient and works really well.

I remember when netflix had the dvd by mail option and you could get basically anything that way. It was amazing. Even the local blockbuster had way more available than today's streaming services. I watched way more then. Now I watch almost nothing and only have a single streaming service because the family wants one...and doesn't watch much on it. We are loosing access because of the thing that promised us instant access to everything.

I wouldn't have minded the newly inserted ads in Netflix or Prime Video. But they just throw the ads in during mid-sentence. Are they putting ads in using a random number generator? What happened to the accepted practice of putting in ads where they natural break occurs? It really throws out the flow of the moment. Major irritation. You know, how TV and Cable typically have done it.

This is true for me. I am using a offline music player, it is much much better, much faster and I can have a lot of underground bands on it.

Let's say I haul out my CD's I never got rid of over the past 30 years and my DVD's from the 2000's. I can still legally rip them, right?

If I took those ripped copies and wanted to stream them, what would be the best platform to do that?

Jellyfin if you want free, open source, and don't need special clients (like for LG TVs, Xbox, etc). Emby paid if you need the clients.

Skip Plex entirely. Their users are their product. They've partnered with media companies and push partner services over users media library. They like to claim that Plex Media Server doesn't send any information back to them, and its technically true; its the Plex clients that are sending the data back.