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.
"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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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 seriously make enough profit off of each Kindle to be worth it like this? Ugh.
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.
My main issue is that they're now slowly testing the waters to see if they can make you watch ads while still paying for the subscription, and at that point, might as well take advantage of Romania's lack of law enforcement and hit the torrent websites.
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.
Yeah, because you pay for the thing and you still can't watch it!
Last year they brought Andor to Hulu and every time I played it on my brand new LG TV, the video would be completely green while I could hear the audio underneath. It only happened to Andor because apparently they had some super special DRM, which ostensibly would restrict people who weren't authorized from viewing it, but had the effect of also preventing authorized people from viewing as well. So in the end, they can't even satisfy willing customers who have their wallets open. Of course they're going to turn to piracy.
Of course, the rights holders got my money and as far as they're concerned, their DRM move was great for the bottom line.
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.
Thank God for VLC, the greatest app ever created!
I pay for a pirate streaming site. It's nice, it has everything, it works, nothing ever gets memory-holed, I don't ever have to sign up for a different service to watch something because it got swapped in the middle of my binge, what I can watch doesn't depend on where they guess I am, I can access over a VPN, they have a support staff that actually listens to me and implements features users ask for, and I can download things to watch later drm-free. This isn't a money problem, as evidenced by the fact that I pay to steal. It's a product problem. I pay for this because their product is better and I want it to continue to exist.
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.
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.
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?
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.
We need to shorten copyright just so that the classics stay available online.
50 years from first publication. No more.
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
Luckily search engines like Yandex.com provide the easiest way to find unusual streaming sites. Using AdBlock saves us from the pop-ups and weird ads. If Netflix goes back to $9 per month with every show in existence, I will reconsider them. Until then, these streaming sites will continue to exist and thrive.
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.
Screw streaming. I bought a smart TV a few years back. Services discontinued within 3 years. No external commercial streaming boxes work because of HDCP issues. Back to piracy until the TV gives up. Streamers and smart TV people, you had your chance and you blew it. I'm not paying through the nose any more.
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.
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.
Thanks! GIzmo
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
Pay a bunch of money to Disney+ to watch any popular release and get terrible streaming quality and functionality. It makes complete sense to me why consumers would toss their hands up and find better and more accessible options.
One friend, who is a film enthusiast, told me that he doesn't understand why there aren't more titles on the streaming services vs. the scale of albums on Spotify. He often download old and new movies via Torrent.
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.
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.
A useful distinction is that upload is piracy and download is not.
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.
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 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.
Having multiple streaming accounts just to watch a couple of shows I like is such an unnecessary hassle. It's much more easier just to pirate.
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.
Is there an exhaustive list of methods people use in 2025?
Stremio, classic torrents?
What’s the current state of PopcorTime / successors?
I am absolutely astounded by the pirate streaming sites for a bunch of reasons.
First, I'm amazed that they exist at all. I don't understand how they do it for both legal and monetary reasons. Serving thousands of gigabytes of video daily cannot be cheap! And their domains continue to stay active despite what I'm sure is legal barrage from rights holders.
Second, the UX of these sites is better than any commercial service, hands down (as long as you use an ad blocking browser or VPN). The GUIs are super clean and provide all the features you'd want: Sortable lists, the ability to search how you like, clickable links for actor, director, year, etc. to get a list of just those shows, links to Trailers on YouTube, constantly updated new releases carousel and more. And again, this is content that's streamed straight to your browser - no torrenting or external downloading, etc. Just tap and watch.
Third, as mentioned in the article, the pirate sites have a catalog of every video and TV show/series you can imagine. Just about anything that's ever been on physical media or streamed, it's there. Every time I read about how such and such show or movie is unavailable on any streaming platform because of licensing disputes or other reasons, I go check my preferred pirate streaming video site and it's always there.
Bonus: There are live streaming sites as well dedicated to sports. Everything from BBC Olympics coverage to subscription only Soccer/Baseball/NFL etc.
Bonus 2: If you're impatient or too broke to see a newly released movie in theaters, decent quality cam recordings always appear within a day or so, and are replaced when the original is published.
Seriously, if any company were to provide the same level of service, they could charge tons of cash for it and have millions of subscribers. They're that good.
Again though, how do these sites exist!? Where is the data stored? How is the bandwidth paid for? Who is updating the sites daily with new content? So many questions.
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.
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 for I, ... quit Netflix and Prime (and deleted AirBNB and UBER) because they are US companies, and second ... all of what ryandrake said https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44906021
Throwing my two cents in, the problem with all of this, is that we're dealing with artificially created scarcity, for content that can be easily duplicated. Artificial scarcity is a terrible thing to exist, and if got rid of it as a whole in society, we might end up with less high production content, but at least we would own all digital content that would be created. Services where consumers are paying for or perhaps even have sway over the creation of content, not the distribution, i.e. like patreon, are much more in line with nature of digital things.
I'm just training LLMs with datasets retrieved over multiple peer-to-peer protocols.
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.
All of these streaming services have started cracking down on family and friend account sharing to game their stock price. Turns out kicking off the broke college students doesn’t lead to them signing up for ~$80/mo. smattering of streaming services.
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.
What’s really amazing is the contrast with music.
Music has figured it out. I subscribe to one of the major services. In exchange for my money, I get access to music. For my purposes, I get access to effectively all music from that one service. When I want music, I open that app and play it. End of story. If I don’t like that service for some reason, I can pick a different one.
Obviously, the logistics for long-form video are not exactly the same. But still, surely this is possible.
So, with all the detailed breakdowns about the failures of platform services in this htread, and the (well justified) applause for pirating, do any of you feel like sharing your favorite/most ample pirate content services for shows and movies.
I'll start: Piratebay. Oldie but still good for most of the limited tv show and movie watching I do. I get the feeling there's a lot more out there though.
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 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.
About 7 years ago I was desperately trying to find a particular band's only two albums. I looked everywhere I could think of to legally buy these two albums. For the life of me, I couldn't find a place to do this. Eventually, my hat an eye-patch came out. It's almost like companies don't want the money.
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 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.
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.
When content owners get too bossy their fans rebel, but keep in mind that pirates are also the largest buyers of licensed content. The pirates contribute monetarily but also serve as a warning that the pendulum has swung too far. When things get too tight piracy serves as a pressure release and a signal to loosen up.
In the end, people will use what is easiest to use.
The entertainment industries are going to need to come up with a solution fast.
If they can't find a way to make it so that you can sign up once and get all the content you need, they are screwed.
I cancelled Netflix years ago when they started blocking VPNs, limiting me to their extremely limited Australian library.
"" What's the point of robbery when nothing is worth taking?
== Stuart Leslie GoddardStreaming services surprised that customers left them like they left cable TV for them once they turned into cable TV.
It makes sense. All of the streaming services have exclusive rights to certain shows in addition to their own shows, so you have to subscribe to every service out there to see everything, whereas you used to just need 1 cable subscription for it all.
Piracy is when your digital assets disappear from providers' locations available to use.
Torrent or unlock + a putlocker site and whstever you use to share from your device to a screen.
No commercials, bigger selection, no geo locked content, high quality, and you're not paying out the ass for 3+ subscriptions for just a curated selection/UI.
theres no point of pirating new games, movies and music, the aren't as good as the older ones
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.
The only service I pay for is Criterion, which has done a great job at keeping vintage films alive, stuff I can't find on torrents, streaming services or even youtube.
Buying the Zatoichi box set has been one of my proudest purchases.
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.
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.
It’s because streaming services have brought us back to cable, which they had promised to free us from. So it’s as expensive as cable but worse because you have to deal with all these different vendors now.
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?
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 used to subscribe to every major streaming service, about 8 of them all up. As the prices increase and their libraries dwindle in size, they've been dropping one by one. Currently it sits at 4.
Plus my usenet subscription.
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 .
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.
My decision on this matter was made when MGM kept running the "ok, who wants SG-1 exclusivity this year?" Gauntlet.
I have to wonder if Amazon bought them just to stop playing the game. (I doubt it)
When billion dollar companies, which are praised and supported by governments, download pirated material and do not pay, why should ordinary people restrain themselves and pay? I cannot see how one can make moral arguments against piracy now. It makes no sense to pay if others are not paying and not punished for it. People also have a right to train their real neural network for free without paying.
I think a lot of the services competed themselves into a pricing corner with low subscription costs.
Now the audience is used to that pricing and doesn't like pricing relative to the price of the content.
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?
Like the acquisition of Turner Classics Movies that was the basis for the Criterion Collection.
Transmission is peer-to-peer, being the ping to distributions hosting positivities.
In the uk many people use illegal streams purely to watch 3pm premiership football matches - they are restricted from broadcast in the uk
Gabe Newell is still right. Piracy is a service problem.
I tried to watch some series on Prime the other day and they shoved 3 advertisements in one episode, then wanted to charge by extra to remove them.
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.
I canceled my AppleTV subscription because every show I wanted to watch required me to "buy" it. But I already paid for the subscription!!
I just want to give one more example. I wanted to watch “Just Beyond” (2021 Disney), but it’s impossible to find anywhere. So what am I supposed to do?
if buying aint owning then pirating aint stealing
It's nice to see some good news now and then.
All streaming services should just interoperate, Give me access to everything, and just charge based on title to who ever has it.
I’ve just given up and read books instead.
How hard does hardware based DRMs like HDCP, TPMs, etc. make pirating movies nowadays
Instead of making their shows exclusive they should make them time exclusive (1 year?) then sell a license
I recently started buying physical media and sticking it all on JellyFin. It’s been great!
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 pay for Netflix and Prime. I pirate their content for the better viewing experience.
Comments are full of people saying it’s a service thing and not a price thing.
I feel like that’s a bit disingenuous. You can rent anything on Prime for a couple £ (I focus on rent as the “buy” has the deletion problem) in multiple video qualities.
I am not disagreeing with the service issues, but a large part of the problem is people not willing to pay what studios deem as market value.
Case in point - early streamers had less fragmentation and still had the same service problem, but they could consolidate at low price due to vc subsidy. And piracy went down.
Let’s not forget Netflix and Spotify were not profitable for ages.
So my money would be on price actually being the cardinal problem.
I suppose you can't really complain when big tech pirates your IP to be used with AI.
Oh, this one's spicy! Looks like the industry goons are back out with their swords.
Netflix has gone to almost complete shit over the past few years. One of the things that really stood out as a strange choice for them considering their long term status as the "tech" innovator coming for media has been segmenting plans on resolution. I don't understand why they don't want to always put their best foot forward especially considering I assume bandwidth is always getting cheaper? And we seem upper bounded by 4k for the foreseeable future.
I feel like Disney+ really cemented the decline here. I enjoyed watching Reservation Dogs, which I think I had pirated originally because it was one of those smaller shows with awkward distribution rights. I genuinely wanted to just go and buy the second and third seasons up front when they were airing. It's fine if it's unreasonably priced and it takes a day or two for the episodes to be available, I needed to absolve my guilt for pirating it. So I tried iTunes, which has basically everything if you bring cash, right? Used to, anyway. Not anymore. The only way to watch this show is if you subscribe to Disney+. I don't know why they make this hard, and I don't care either. Episodes were available immediately on TPB. I felt bad, but Disney made me do it. To be fair, Netflix does the same thing, but they don't have their fingers in so many places.
The modern piracy experience is exactly what everyone hoped and was promised that streaming would be.
My husband is a non-tech person. I set up radarr and jellyfin, and now he has a website he can go to request any piece of media ever created, and then it magically pops up in the jellyfin app in like half an hour. He can watch it anywhere, at any time, for any amount and number of times. And there are no ads from the service we already pay for. Quality is better, streaming is flawless since it's on the local network. No one is monitoring his views and using it to profile him.
This is everything we all wanted streaming to be, before capitalism (inevitably) ruined it.
And honestly the fact that it's free is irrelevant. Most of us would happily pay for a service that operates this way. But such a business cannot possibly exist under capitalism so we must pirate.
But really, think about the experience of your favorite streaming platform. On radarr, you plug in a search term and you get a flat list of items matching your query and nothing else. The thing you wanted is always in the top three results. When you look at the library, you get a flat alphabetical list of everything available to you at that exact moment. No animated garbage, no endless multi-dimensional scrolling, no dickless executive trying to force you to watch whatever reality slop they're pushing that week.
Simple, respectful, and it shuts the hell up and gets out of your way. You can have anything that humanity has ever produced. There is simply no way for any business to compete. Capitalism just does not know how to make such a thing work.
Oh well, it's not like movie studios and record labels were giving that money to the artists anyway. I'd rather take $30 from Sony than give 15 cents to an artist and $29.85 to Sony.
One thing that is becoming off-putting is not just the entshitification, but the price creep I've been feeling. I've been on Spotify for over 8 years now, and deliberately paying the cost in my resident country (while I could very well get a subscription in another, which is a lot of my peers actually do). But just today morning, I got the notification, that the price will increase by another 10% which is after a 10% increase only last year (or was it this year, I forget).
I get the inflation and all that, but honestly, I don't want to fund a business that is either squandering money or not growing, by paying more to it. And I have to admit, it is not getting any better either. The AI generated/ drone music slop is probably an industry issue, but the recommendation algorithm hasn't been able to work out that it isn't my taste.
is buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing :)
Honestly, this feels like déjà vu. We went from Napster to Spotify, from torrents to Netflix, and now the cycle is reversing. Gabe Newell was right back in 2011: it's always been a service problem, not a pricing one. Weird how the tech just keeps getting better, but the experience keeps getting worse.
If there were an expensive but good service that aggregated the major networks - sorry, I mean, streaming services - then I'd pay for it. But managing 3-4 subscriptions is dumb.
Also the Linux experience for every streaming service typically sucks because of DRM, capping resolution to 720p.
Is it? NFLX is at an all-time high right now.
Its like if I want to watch Alien, all four of those older movies they want me to have two subscriptions?
And then most of streaming services actually stream stuff, so if my internet is bad im gonna sit there annoyed. I have a small samsung projector and its literally freezing all the time (something to do with wifi and qos, i have other things in my life more interesting that sysadmining a router).
Then up until last year, i could not even watch Dr. House legally.
And then the content changes over time. I remember seeing a scene, that i no longer see. Like wtf?
Its 98% (made up number) that its the service fault.
Currently I only pay for streaming services that allow me to make local copies, either as part of the service or by ripping the network stream. Preferably a one-time payment.
I'm not interested in feeding someone else's lust for behaviour profiling and 'analytics', mainly, but I also don't want to be shut down entirely because there's a main power or coverage issue.
Though I'm considering making an exception for https://www.cultpix.com/, because I'd like to support their rather niche business.
Personally I could trivially afford to pay triple for all the media I consume but I still mostly pirate it.
In Switzerland the media companies just make it so hard, and piracy is so easy. And I'm just not willing to jump through hoops for this shit.
If it's a small independent filmmaker I will make _some_ effort to try and pay for it but usually it's just not worth my time.
Gimme a website where I can hand over $10-$20 and easily watch a film on my TV and I'll happily pay. This was easy with 2000s tech. But the industry is too up it's own arse to deliver something this simple.
Why do people try to justify theft? That’s what I’m expecting to see in all the comments here. Like everyone is trying to somehow spin the whole situation into some story that makes their act of theft morally correct.
Don’t get me wrong. I pirate my self. But I’m honest about it. It’s theft. I steal because I’m a cheap ass thief. Why can’t you admit that about yourself?
If someone makes their product annoying and hard to access that’s really their free will and desire. Enshittification is not a crime. When you choose to pirate that work you’re doing something morally unethical.
Yet every pirate here tries to justify it. Just admit it.
My thing is that we are expected to pay in perpetuity for the privilege of accessing content. It's rent, and it is just tiresome.
Yes I understand that we have content available on far more devices than 30 years ago, when all we had was the TV in the living room. But should I have to pay in perpetuity to show my kids Moana?
Honestly it's much cheaper to just pay for a VPN and setup a homelab ... And the best of all : no damn ads!
Driving back???
That's quite an accomplishment that studios and distributors have achieved, after piracy was down for a few good years. But greed and the urge for enshittification won't be stopped.
Well, duh!
Back?
For our household, it's not even the cost or inconvenience of streaming services. It's that their constant A/B testing optimization seems to be leading them to actively shovel content we're less interested in at us, thus making it harder to find the little they have we are actually interested in. I'd be fine paying Netflix $20 a month to conveniently discover and watch the one or two things a month they have which I actually want to watch. But they seem convinced they must get me to watch more than a dozen things a month or I might cancel. So they use dark patterns to hide what things are and try to trick me into watching things I probably won't like very much. I guess that's why they replaced edited trailers with non-representative clips, choose misleading thumbnails and feature vague descriptions. Here are the sites I use to find which content is actually new, see an accurate description and watch a real edited trailer.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/browse/movies_at_home/
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/browse/tv_series_browse/
Note: Use the filters at the top to select the networks and streamers you have access to as well as your genre and rating prefs. They'll be stored in a cookie.
Using Netflix's own program guide, I keep watching less and less on Netflix because I can't easily get a sense of what anything is and value my time a lot more than $20/mo. And now I'm seriously thinking of canceling after being a sub since the discs-by-mail days because they're actively making it harder to identify IF I really will like something before watching it - and wasting my time is the one thing certain to make me cancel. I remember back when Netflix was running contests to optimize their recommendation algo to be as close to psychic as possible. I'd seriously pay more for a service that was that psychic about my preferences but also honest enough to occasionally say "Hey, sorry but this month we've got nothing you're really gonna like, so out of respect for your time, come back next month when we'll have two movies we're 91.5% sure you're gonna love."
Based on what Netflix is doing, I assume I have a significantly higher bar for content quality and fit to my prefs than most of their viewers, that I value my limited entertainment time more highly and I have much lower tolerance for content which isn't a fit. I'm not very price sensitive and I don't judge a streaming service's value on hours consumed but rather on the quality, suitability and convenience of finding the content I do watch. I'm also unusual in that if I'm watching media, I am 100% focused on it with no distractions and never have a second screen active - I guess that's one reason my quality bar is so high. This also makes me hate when they "stretch" content for longer running times, like padding three hours worth of tight story into eight hours of glacially slow script. I find myself increasingly 'self-editing' by skipping forward past scenes that should have been edited out. To me, just ONE really good thing which respects my time and that I didn't have to hunt for is worth far more than a dozen unknown things with a hit/miss ratio that averages to "meh".
The biggest issue yet is paying for stuff that pushes woke crap on you.
My decision had nothing at all to do with affordability, and everything to do with monopolistic capitalism. That said, most of my family media server’s content came from legit purchases, and most of the piracy came from those legit purchases being anchored to some idiotic DRM or unnecessary gatekeeping.
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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.