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.
godelski 12 hours ago [-]
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.
AnthonyMouse 5 hours ago [-]
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.
Dylan16807 11 hours ago [-]
Subtitles are often a very dumb failure point, especially when English subtitles aren't available in half the world for basically no reason.
cosmic_cheese 11 hours ago [-]
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.
umanwizard 11 hours ago [-]
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!
cgriswald 9 hours ago [-]
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.
zerocrates 9 hours ago [-]
Lazarus?
presentation 8 hours ago [-]
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.
PetitPrince 37 minutes ago [-]
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 !
wjholden 8 hours ago [-]
I had never thought of this before. What is the solution? Can any video software show two subtitles at once?
schiffern 8 hours ago [-]
VLC, mpv, and SMPlayer all support dual subtitles, with varying amounts of fiddling.
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.
presentation 2 hours ago [-]
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.
hibikir 9 hours ago [-]
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.
imoverclocked 11 hours ago [-]
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?
qrios 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
What if I have recently watched The Lives of Others?
(Which everyone in the US should.)
qrios 9 hours ago [-]
‘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.
If you ask publicly, ‘What if I've seen XYZ?’ then it's actually already too late.
zerocrates 9 hours ago [-]
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.
arrowsmith 9 hours ago [-]
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.
irthomasthomas 6 hours ago [-]
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?
nkrisc 1 hours ago [-]
A perfectly grammatical and plausible sentence. Those words all seem quite likely to occur in that sequence. Another LLM success.
boredhedgehog 4 hours ago [-]
GPT-5 fell into a coma and missed a few critical years.
GoblinSlayer 4 hours ago [-]
Linguistically it's an ok association. If you look at it unconsciously, you can find it plausible too, add 7 but in reverse.
qrios 8 hours ago [-]
Right, I missed a whole decade. (For me 1989, the Mauerfall is the official end of GDR)
irthomasthomas 7 hours ago [-]
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'.
StopDisinfo910 2 hours ago [-]
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.
3036e4 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
boppo1 49 minutes ago [-]
>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?
helsinkiandrew 10 hours ago [-]
> 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
imoverclocked 6 hours ago [-]
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.
benjiro 2 hours ago [-]
> 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 kuchkuch ... 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.
BrandoElFollito 1 hours ago [-]
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
goosedragons 1 hours ago [-]
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.
account42 3 hours ago [-]
Or more generally: the ability to use a video player of your choice, which can have whatever features and interface that you want.
selcuka 6 hours ago [-]
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.
godelski 3 hours ago [-]
> these features will affect their bottom line. They just don't see value
That's the problem. These are useful features. Look around you, people are... using them. I got a ton of upvotes for my comment. I'm not saying that to brag, I'm saying that because it is evidence that these things are in demand.
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.
efilife 11 hours ago [-]
What do you mean by audio normalization? Aren't you talking about compression?
Dwedit 9 hours ago [-]
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.
efilife 24 minutes ago [-]
I know about this. This is why I asked
komali2 10 hours ago [-]
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!
jack1243star 10 hours ago [-]
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)
lucideer 9 hours ago [-]
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.
recursive 8 hours ago [-]
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.
lucideer 8 hours ago [-]
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.
danadam 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
throwaway290 8 hours ago [-]
Sorry but you really misunderstand what normalization and compression means. "quiet frequencies" :D
lucideer 8 hours ago [-]
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.
thayne 9 hours ago [-]
But compression is ambiguous because that could also refer to compressing the video stream to reduce the size of the movie.
kbouck 8 hours ago [-]
> compression is ambiguous
I think the unambiguous term for this is "Dynamic Range Compression"
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.
kryptn 12 hours ago [-]
Mind elaborating?
throwaway290 8 hours ago [-]
"Look, doing something illegal offers a lot of benefits for me! I must be a genius"
BriggyDwiggs42 8 hours ago [-]
You’re not considering that many of these points are in no way illegal to provide as a streaming service.
chongli 15 hours ago [-]
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.
cosmic_cheese 13 hours ago [-]
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.
qingcharles 7 hours ago [-]
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.
PetitPrince 25 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
lyu07282 11 hours ago [-]
The criterion collection being the one noteable exception, and they have their own standalone streaming service that is pretty good:
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!
lyu07282 9 hours ago [-]
Try a VPN, I think it was easily circumvented
account42 2 hours ago [-]
It's really infuriating how many TV series are only (legally) available as horribly over-compressed and interlaced DVDs outside of streaming platforms.
dddgghhbbfblk 8 hours ago [-]
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.
dawnerd 11 hours ago [-]
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.
10 hours ago [-]
abbycurtis33 10 hours ago [-]
Yes! Someone came after me on here because I said there really is no 4k streaming.
bombcar 9 hours ago [-]
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!
gmueckl 8 hours ago [-]
When your source material shows fast sweeping motions you'd certainly get away with that.
kcb 10 hours ago [-]
I don't know, 4k HEVC at 15,000mbps looks plenty good to me.
buzer 8 hours ago [-]
...what service offers 15Gbps stream?
oguz-ismail 8 hours ago [-]
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...
10 hours ago [-]
lz400 13 hours ago [-]
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.
greazy 14 hours ago [-]
Wow. I thought it was impossible to watch the original release of star wars. I need to hunt this down.
Yup. Team Negative One are doing some very important work in terms of film preservation/digital archeology.
greazy 10 hours ago [-]
Legend thank you
nosioptar 14 hours ago [-]
There's also a DVD release of the theatrical versions. Usually goes for $50-75 for OG trilogy.
LeifCarrotson 14 hours ago [-]
DVDs are 480i, the parent comment described far higher quality than DVD.
pezezin 12 hours ago [-]
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.
scheeseman486 11 hours ago [-]
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.
pezezin 10 hours ago [-]
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
scheeseman486 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Dwedit 9 hours ago [-]
Yes, there was the official DVD release that included the original versions as a bonus. But the quality can not compare to 4K77.
Affric 12 hours ago [-]
It’s great but do you know of any others?
umbra07 11 hours ago [-]
Harmy's Despecialized Edition(s).
jaimex2 9 hours ago [-]
all of Star Trek Voyager
account42 2 hours ago [-]
Care to expand? I assume the result is still 480p or have they actually done more than that?
matheusmoreira 11 hours ago [-]
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.
fragmede 46 minutes ago [-]
Eh Stremio's episode chooser leaves a bit to be desired, when jumping back into the middle of a show.
13 hours ago [-]
godelski 12 hours ago [-]
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.
dddgghhbbfblk 8 hours ago [-]
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.
wiseowise 4 hours ago [-]
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.
hbn 15 hours ago [-]
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
maest 10 hours ago [-]
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.
BlobberSnobber 4 hours ago [-]
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 :)
thret 8 hours ago [-]
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.
nosioptar 14 hours ago [-]
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.)
ethersteeds 14 hours ago [-]
Fair to be upset. Just noting that has been happening for about the whole history of televised 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.
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.
cosmic_cheese 11 hours ago [-]
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.
josh-at-banxa 8 hours ago [-]
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.
macNchz 14 hours ago [-]
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.
WalterBright 13 hours ago [-]
You can no longer get Rocky&Bullwinkle episodes with the original music. The replacement music is so awful it is unwatchable.
jasonfarnon 7 hours ago [-]
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.
7 hours ago [-]
dylan604 13 hours ago [-]
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
exe34 13 hours ago [-]
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.
dotancohen 12 hours ago [-]
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.
exe34 4 hours ago [-]
> The social responsibility for ensuring that things could be shared falls on libraries.
That's a fair point!
qingcharles 7 hours ago [-]
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.
iamacyborg 4 hours ago [-]
This feels like a terribly entitled way to view someone else’s work.
exe34 1 hours ago [-]
This feels like an entitlement to disappoint people. If you plan to ruin the experience, don't waste my time on it.
qingcharles 7 hours ago [-]
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.
johnvanommen 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
GuinansEyebrows 14 hours ago [-]
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.
thedrexster 11 hours ago [-]
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.
paradox460 9 hours ago [-]
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
dml2135 12 hours ago [-]
google “The Daria Restoration Project”
jaimex2 9 hours ago [-]
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.
fragmede 47 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
wordofx 12 hours ago [-]
If people stopped getting offended by literally anything. We wouldn’t have to deal with this bs.
mindslight 9 hours ago [-]
Centralized services are low-stakes levers of power that encourage people to form outrage movements to pull them.
socalgal2 14 hours ago [-]
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
jrflowers 13 hours ago [-]
What groups are you talking about
more_corn 12 hours ago [-]
Publish a cartoon about the prophet Mohamed and some of the groups will make themselves known to you.
jrflowers 8 hours ago [-]
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?
12 hours ago [-]
throwawaylaptop 12 hours ago [-]
Did you really not know the answer or were you asking just to force the answer?
Dylan16807 11 hours ago [-]
I can't think of any answer that makes sense in this context (widespread tv show editing).
dotancohen 8 hours ago [-]
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.
Dylan16807 8 hours ago [-]
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.
sensanaty 4 hours ago [-]
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].
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.
Dylan16807 7 hours ago [-]
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.
dotancohen 3 hours ago [-]
I see what you're saying now. I'm not familiar with the South Park episode but I think I understand you.
jrflowers 8 hours ago [-]
I genuinely don’t know what socalgal2 is referring to. If everybody instantly understood cryptic posts we wouldn’t call them cryptic
I can definitely see how streaming services would adapt to bigots.
kenjackson 10 hours ago [-]
That seems like a bad reason to swear off streaming services. Do you not shop at stores because they don’t carry offensive clothing?
Sabinus 10 hours ago [-]
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.
DowsingSpoon 10 hours ago [-]
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.
kenjackson 9 hours ago [-]
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.
weberer 9 hours ago [-]
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.
kenjackson 9 hours ago [-]
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.
john01dav 11 hours ago [-]
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.
viraptor 10 hours ago [-]
Sure, someone can upload a new edited version. But the unedited one doesn't get removed. That's not really censorship.
john01dav 12 minutes ago [-]
If you don't notice the removal and therefore don't have a reason to look elsewhere, it has the same effect
efilife 11 hours ago [-]
What was that specific show?
pluc 14 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
wombat-man 11 minutes ago [-]
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.
zaptheimpaler 14 hours ago [-]
> 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.
anonymars 13 hours ago [-]
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
bombcar 8 hours ago [-]
Amusingly if your have MakeMKV and patched firmware, you can rip them without even blinking.
DHRicoF 15 hours ago [-]
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.
phkahler 14 hours ago [-]
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.
cmiles74 13 hours ago [-]
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.
dylan604 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
marcus_holmes 12 hours ago [-]
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.
dylan604 11 hours ago [-]
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.
marcus_holmes 10 hours ago [-]
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.
dylan604 8 hours ago [-]
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.
marcus_holmes 6 hours ago [-]
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.
phkahler 12 hours ago [-]
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.
dylan604 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
freddie_mercury 13 hours ago [-]
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.
birn559 12 hours ago [-]
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.
at-fates-hands 14 hours ago [-]
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.
ysavir 13 hours ago [-]
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.
cptnntsoobv 12 hours ago [-]
As the saying at Netflix used to go back in the day: we need to become HBO before HBO becomes Netflix
janalsncm 12 hours ago [-]
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.
aceazzameen 9 hours ago [-]
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?
ysavir 33 minutes ago [-]
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.
fragmede 49 minutes ago [-]
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.
dylan604 13 hours ago [-]
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).
14 hours ago [-]
kmeisthax 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
prepend 13 hours ago [-]
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.
1980phipsi 10 hours ago [-]
Plex’s recent changes have been garbage and it’s still better than the experience on a lot of streaming sites.
birn559 12 hours ago [-]
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.
GlitchRider47 9 hours ago [-]
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.
LMYahooTFY 9 hours ago [-]
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.
swat535 13 hours ago [-]
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...)
benjiro 2 hours ago [-]
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.
caconym_ 9 hours ago [-]
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.
account42 1 hours ago [-]
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.
tambourine_man 9 hours ago [-]
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.
tombert 11 hours ago [-]
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.
alkonaut 6 hours ago [-]
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.
sensanaty 4 hours ago [-]
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.
alkonaut 2 hours ago [-]
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.
defrost 2 hours ago [-]
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.
alkonaut 1 hours ago [-]
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.
defrost 26 minutes ago [-]
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.
The first is by a group -NTB that are known for 'direct copies' (by various indicated methods) of streaming sources; here it's episode 12, season 3 of SeriesName as a WEB-DL copy and sourced from AMZN, video encoded with H264 and DDP5.1 audio.
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.
GoblinSlayer 3 hours ago [-]
RSS doesn't support such aggregation?
alkonaut 2 hours ago [-]
You just fetch all your rss'es from N sources and the client can show a merged one.
matwood 2 hours ago [-]
#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.
jfghi 14 hours ago [-]
Also doesn’t track user and send a bunch of telemetry
vgb2k18 14 hours ago [-]
Except for our ip address, timestamp and torrent metadata
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.
vgb2k18 13 hours ago [-]
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.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 12 hours ago [-]
I was going to say.. does not seem to show much. That said, fun idea and very privacy inspiring.
ncr100 11 hours ago [-]
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.
fluoridation 8 hours ago [-]
That has like a 50% precision rate for me. Around half of the reported torrents is stuff I've never seen.
PenguinCoder 10 hours ago [-]
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.
a4isms 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
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.
izacus 13 hours ago [-]
Also the content doesn't disappear on vacation, it has subtitles for all languages and audio track is actually high quality.
galleywest200 15 hours ago [-]
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.
crote 14 hours ago [-]
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.
jonvk 2 hours ago [-]
And driving the price up for the consumer for the anti-consumer tech licencing fees.
account42 1 hours ago [-]
A lot of effort has been wasted, thanks to MakeMKV+libredrive making ripping easy.
noselasd 15 hours ago [-]
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.
MrGilbert 14 hours ago [-]
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.
wingworks 14 hours 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.
bombcar 8 hours ago [-]
They still exist and now are free.
They’re called “public libraries”.
yunwal 15 hours ago [-]
Physical media has arbitrary device limitations.
black_puppydog 15 hours ago [-]
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?
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 12 hours ago [-]
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.
paradox460 9 hours ago [-]
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
hereme888 8 hours ago [-]
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.
1212312523 10 hours ago [-]
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.
DrNosferatu 7 hours ago [-]
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.
ncr100 11 hours ago [-]
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!
timsh 5 hours ago [-]
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).
eleveriven 5 hours ago [-]
The saddest part is that there's clearly demand for a service that just works across devices, countries, and catalogs
notatoad 11 hours ago [-]
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".
al_borland 9 hours ago [-]
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.
MattDaEskimo 13 hours ago [-]
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.
Melatonic 13 hours ago [-]
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
getcrunk 14 hours ago [-]
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
dylan604 13 hours ago [-]
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.
sowbug 11 hours ago [-]
I think the point was that streaming services freak out if you connect from a disapproved IP address.
thaumasiotes 14 hours ago [-]
> 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.
CrouchEndTiger 6 hours ago [-]
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.
marak830 14 hours ago [-]
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.
unsignedint 11 hours ago [-]
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.
marak830 9 hours ago [-]
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
unsignedint 8 hours ago [-]
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.
djtango 12 hours ago [-]
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.
extraduder_ire 10 hours ago [-]
From a cursory search, there are browser extensions to display your own subtitles on sites like netflix. At least for firefox.
daseiner1 14 hours ago [-]
Plex is phenomenal software
trenchpilgrim 13 hours ago [-]
Jellyfin is shockingly good now also
bombcar 8 hours ago [-]
Jellyfin + Infuse is so easy a baby can use it
chasing0entropy 8 hours ago [-]
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.
wingworks 14 hours ago [-]
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.
joules77 9 hours ago [-]
Use the right browser (not built/funded by ad tech companies) and all Ads can be blocked in 2025.
oguz-ismail 8 hours ago [-]
Those companies own half the internet and they make sure the right browser is always slower and shittier than theirs
molszanski 14 hours ago [-]
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
eecc 6 hours ago [-]
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!
SilverElfin 9 hours ago [-]
Where does one safely pirate these days to avoid authorities
sensanaty 4 hours ago [-]
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)
I use torrent with private trackers for over 20 years now, no VPN. Never had an issue.
hereme888 8 hours ago [-]
pay for a vpn, get an open-source client like qbittorrent, and go to sites like yts.mx and 1337x.to.
cess11 8 hours ago [-]
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.
jasonfarnon 7 hours ago [-]
Usenet? Is the alt.binaries hierarchy really still around? how active is it?
cess11 2 hours ago [-]
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.
SSLy 5 hours ago [-]
if you have good indexer you have access to almost anything.
cadamsdotcom 12 hours ago [-]
And don't forget, not "remastered" with content changed and/or removed.
mathieuh 10 hours ago [-]
I pay £22 per month to rent a seedbox and I would happily pay more.
PKop 11 hours ago [-]
- Not having to watch ads after you've already paid for a subscription
matheusmoreira 11 hours ago [-]
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.
JustExAWS 10 hours ago [-]
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
al_borland 9 hours ago [-]
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.
Der_Einzige 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
wrasee 15 hours ago [-]
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.
l72 14 hours ago [-]
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.
brailsafe 14 hours ago [-]
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.
cyberax 14 hours ago [-]
> 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.
II2II 13 hours ago [-]
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).
cyberax 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
II2II 34 minutes ago [-]
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.
djtango 12 hours ago [-]
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.
marcus_holmes 11 hours ago [-]
Absolutely not true. If anything, the opposite is true - people will walk unless/until you make the city unwalkable.
toomuchtodo 13 hours ago [-]
Still good!
GuinansEyebrows 14 hours ago [-]
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".
hxtk 14 hours ago [-]
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.
jacobgkau 14 hours ago [-]
> 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).
baby_souffle 10 hours ago [-]
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
withinboredom 13 hours ago [-]
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.
izacus 13 hours ago [-]
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.
Levitz 14 hours ago [-]
Supply and demand rules go out the window when the product is infinitely replicable.
gmueckl 8 hours ago [-]
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.
TheOtherHobbes 12 hours ago [-]
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.
franciscop 15 hours ago [-]
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.
phkahler 14 hours ago [-]
>> 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!
l72 14 hours ago [-]
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.
thaumasiotes 14 hours ago [-]
> 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?
anonymars 13 hours ago [-]
I think you're going to have to back that up with a bit more than "it's stupid"
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.
wrasee 14 hours ago [-]
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.
cyberax 14 hours ago [-]
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.
sneak 14 hours ago [-]
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.
CivBase 14 hours ago [-]
Bingo. When distributors get exclusive rights to media, there is no competition anymore. You either do whatever the publisher wants, pirate, or go without.
area51org 14 hours ago [-]
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?
crote 13 hours ago [-]
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!
prepend 13 hours ago [-]
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.
8fingerlouie 15 hours ago [-]
>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.
hbn 15 hours ago [-]
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.
kaliqt 15 hours ago [-]
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.
ryandrake 15 hours ago [-]
"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.
jiggawatts 14 hours ago [-]
Thanks to 3D printing this is starting to become reality and not just science fiction.
cammikebrown 14 hours ago [-]
The “download” catchphrase is a joke, it was originally “You wouldn’t steal a car”, which I’d argue is true for most people.
PenguinCoder 10 hours ago [-]
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.
theshackleford 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
withinboredom 13 hours ago [-]
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.
robertoandred 14 hours ago [-]
Do you sneak into concerts or hop turnstiles too?
viraptor 10 hours ago [-]
Those actually take the resources away (space at the venue for example). In piracy that's not the case.
nh23423fefe 14 hours ago [-]
no true scotsman
wordsmithing on theft is the only defense thieves have
probotect0r 11 hours ago [-]
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.
const_cast 11 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
xyproto 15 hours ago [-]
It's not comparable, because copying a bread with a bread copying machine should be completely fine.
probotect0r 11 hours ago [-]
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.
ted_bunny 14 hours ago [-]
Thank god they overturned Butter Krust v. Jesus Christ!
firecall 13 hours ago [-]
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.
And that doesn't even actually list the movies, which are even more fragmented.
sunrunner 17 hours ago [-]
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?
LikesPwsh 8 hours ago [-]
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.
barbazoo 15 hours ago [-]
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.
kmac_ 15 hours ago [-]
Well, "Gotta Subscribe 'Em All!"
godzillabrennus 18 hours ago [-]
Wow. It's like an advertisement for torrent sites... I had no idea it was that bad out there...
aucisson_masque 15 hours ago [-]
Holy mother of God, that’s insanity. How could someone come up with that and get it approved is beyond human understanding.
devjab 17 hours ago [-]
I wonder if they will eventually go the LEGO route and host their shows on youtube while also letting streaming services have them.
0cf8612b2e1e 18 hours ago [-]
I have seen this before, but I never realized that was an official product! Thought that started as a joke by a disgruntled fan.
thaumasiotes 14 hours ago [-]
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.
thaumasiotes 7 hours ago [-]
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.
seatac76 18 hours ago [-]
Thanks for sharing OP, that is just ridiculous, makes cable looks like a sane option.
6thbit 16 hours ago [-]
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.
frollogaston 9 hours ago [-]
Different cable providers each had their own bundles and individual paid channels, so you kinda got a choice, with a lot of fragmentation.
charcircuit 14 hours ago [-]
>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.
SllX 15 hours ago [-]
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.
mystifyingpoi 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
mxfh 15 hours ago [-]
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)
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.
14 hours ago [-]
gjvc 15 hours ago [-]
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.
mxfh 14 hours ago [-]
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.
wiredpancake 14 hours ago [-]
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.
13 hours ago [-]
crote 13 hours ago [-]
> 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,
thaumasiotes 14 hours ago [-]
You think pirating videos will raise your electric bill by $25 / month?
mxfh 13 hours ago [-]
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.
mystifyingpoi 5 hours ago [-]
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.
thaumasiotes 12 hours ago [-]
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.
Dylan16807 11 hours ago [-]
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.
frollogaston 8 hours ago [-]
5W with a Mac mini, 50W with a typical PC tower
gjvc 9 hours ago [-]
read the page carefully
sotix 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
sunrunner 18 hours ago [-]
"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
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!
pi-rat 15 hours ago [-]
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.
teruakohatu 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
throwaway05241 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
baby_souffle 10 hours ago [-]
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.
snailmailman 15 hours ago [-]
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.
do_not_redeem 17 hours ago [-]
Getting 'em started early. You arr a great dad!
kashunstva 18 hours ago [-]
> 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.
netsharc 15 hours ago [-]
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...
interestica 14 hours ago [-]
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.
Ferret7446 17 hours ago [-]
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.
cchance 15 hours ago [-]
Yes but price has also become a huge part of it netflix raised prices like 5 times in 1 year lol
6thbit 16 hours ago [-]
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.
nlawalker 14 hours ago [-]
> "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.
the_af 8 hours ago [-]
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.
area51org 14 hours ago [-]
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.
frollogaston 8 hours ago [-]
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?
simianparrot 7 hours ago [-]
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.
the_af 8 hours ago [-]
Most people do not want it for free. It's just that they are fed up with streaming platforms fragmentation and anticonsumer practices.
ta1243 16 hours ago [-]
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.
WD-42 16 hours ago [-]
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.
cbeley 9 hours ago [-]
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.
frollogaston 8 hours ago [-]
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.
the_af 8 hours ago [-]
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.
hungmung 18 hours ago [-]
It's almost like the corporate culture of being a bunch of greedy control freaks will push customers away when they have an alternative.
eleveriven 5 hours ago [-]
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
JamesSwift 15 hours ago [-]
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.
HDThoreaun 16 hours ago [-]
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.
15 hours ago [-]
mvdtnz 17 hours ago [-]
That quote is literally in the article you didn't read.
lezojeda 13 hours ago [-]
[dead]
draw_down 18 hours ago [-]
[dead]
dilDDoS 16 hours ago [-]
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.
Akronymus 14 hours ago [-]
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)
justanotherjoe 4 hours ago [-]
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.
bhaney 15 hours ago [-]
Not always. Now I just flip mindlessly through endless amounts of readily available garbage on my jellyfin server instead.
artdigital 13 hours ago [-]
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.
bhaney 8 hours ago [-]
> Then don’t be a hoarder
Of course. Why didn't I think of that?
LelouBil 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Gareth321 4 hours ago [-]
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-...
galleywest200 15 hours ago [-]
Why not purchase the discs and copy them yourself? At least artists can get paid that way.
yunwal 15 hours ago [-]
Most shows don't get a dvd release anymore.
tstrimple 14 hours ago [-]
And then sometimes you have to deal with a bunch of bullshit changes because of music licensing or something.
PenguinCoder 10 hours ago [-]
Or current streaming doesn't have the license for the original music or soundtracks. Thus it really is a different product.
simpaticoder 10 hours ago [-]
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.
x62Bh7948f 13 hours ago [-]
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.
tick_tock_tick 14 hours ago [-]
Ehh sounds like an automation issue. Buy another hard-drive and just have everything new auto download.
parpfish 15 hours ago [-]
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.
bkettle 15 hours ago [-]
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)
piffey 15 hours ago [-]
Scarecrow Video does this in Seattle. Their library is amazing.
Haven't used them, but I am planning on setting up a dvd player,
ajmurmann 13 hours ago [-]
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.
shoelessone 15 hours ago [-]
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.
15 hours ago [-]
lackoftactics 16 hours ago [-]
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.
eastbound 15 hours ago [-]
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).
JKCalhoun 12 hours ago [-]
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.
disillusioned 7 hours ago [-]
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.
JKCalhoun 1 hours ago [-]
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).
madrasman 7 hours ago [-]
In India, people classify movies as “mass” or “class”. Netflix and Prime are doing a lot more “mass” and for good reasons.
l72 14 hours ago [-]
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.
jorams 59 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
bee_rider 15 hours ago [-]
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.
I don't usually get too many weird looks with "unauthorized copying".
bee_rider 14 hours ago [-]
Oh, that’s funny. Actually I feel a bit Stallman-y when I point this out.
TrackerFF 5 hours ago [-]
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.
wiredpancake 13 hours ago [-]
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.
bee_rider 12 hours ago [-]
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.
wrasee 15 hours ago [-]
Some words are overload with more than one meaning. That’s like, a thing in many languages.
IshKebab 15 hours ago [-]
You're not being pedantic, you're being wrong.
bawolff 16 hours ago [-]
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.
RajT88 15 hours ago [-]
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.
zamadatix 14 hours ago [-]
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.
owlninja 9 hours ago [-]
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...
WrongOnInternet 15 hours ago [-]
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.
lordofgibbons 14 hours ago [-]
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.
loughnane 14 hours ago [-]
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.
ncr100 11 hours ago [-]
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.
neves 18 hours ago [-]
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.
epolanski 18 hours ago [-]
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.
JKCalhoun 12 hours ago [-]
"Gold Diggers of 1933", "Stella Dallas", "Marty", "The Snake Pit", "Casablanca", ... I could go on.
whobre 18 hours ago [-]
Yep. I swear I liked the old Netflix with DVDs better. I could rent pretty much any movie I wanted.
thewebguyd 16 hours ago [-]
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.
rgblambda 18 hours ago [-]
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.
devilbunny 16 hours ago [-]
> 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.
ajmurmann 13 hours ago [-]
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.
0cf8612b2e1e 16 hours ago [-]
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.
JKCalhoun 12 hours ago [-]
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.
layer8 15 hours ago [-]
We don’t have that problem with books for the most part, why do we have it with TV shows and movies?
weeznerps 18 hours ago [-]
Criterion Channel and Kanopy are very good (not perfect) for international films.
ajmurmann 13 hours ago [-]
Have you checked out Criterion or Mubi. Lots of excellent foreign movies. Criterion seems to have about two dozen Kurozawa movies.
piva00 17 hours ago [-]
MUBI is a good option for the more high cinema stuff, one of the few subscriptions I'd feel sad canceling.
ajmurmann 13 hours ago [-]
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.
aggregator-ios 17 hours ago [-]
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.
oulu2006 10 hours ago [-]
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?
bagol 9 hours ago [-]
Ads for a paying member? That is just... evil?
croon 3 hours ago [-]
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.
bapak 9 hours ago [-]
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.
tootie 8 hours ago [-]
It's like nobody has ever watched cable TV.
fluoridation 8 hours ago [-]
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.
IlikeKitties 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
SSLy 5 hours ago [-]
For music, you can only pirate to fill the gaps in Apple Music / Deezer / Tidal / Spotify / whatever.
IlikeKitties 4 hours ago [-]
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.
SSLy 3 hours ago [-]
Burial (the one from London) has few collab track missing from music streaming apps. Some are on YT but quality is meh.
AbstractH24 1 hours ago [-]
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)
croon 4 hours ago [-]
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.
vhanda 18 hours ago [-]
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.
mystraline 16 hours ago [-]
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?
So, unless these are MP4's or MKV's with correct subtitling and appropriate audio, I'm not going to pay a cent here.
nicce 16 hours ago [-]
Lets go back to old good CD/DVD era.
sunrunner 18 hours ago [-]
> 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.
sosborn 14 hours ago [-]
Isn't this just renting, which is already offered by Amazon, Apple, Google ...
const_cast 11 hours ago [-]
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!
Fire-Dragon-DoL 18 hours ago [-]
Pay per episode could be an ok granularity. Anything above that I'm not ok, there is too much garbage
sunrunner 17 hours ago [-]
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...
Fire-Dragon-DoL 17 hours ago [-]
Would be fine with that. I want a demo before committing, essentially
themafia 16 hours ago [-]
Isn't this precisely what Amazon already does?
sunrunner 16 hours ago [-]
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.
nicce 16 hours ago [-]
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…
vhanda 15 hours ago [-]
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.
unglaublich 7 hours ago [-]
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.
bawolff 16 hours ago [-]
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.
RandomBacon 16 hours ago [-]
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.
testing22321 14 hours ago [-]
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 .
interestica 14 hours ago [-]
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).
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.
rkomorn 18 hours ago [-]
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.
sunrunner 18 hours ago [-]
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.
rkomorn 17 hours ago [-]
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".
nickthegreek 18 hours ago [-]
I assure you that there are many people who do not need nor want ESPN and knew damn well they were directly paying it.
rkomorn 17 hours ago [-]
And those people were having part of their package subsidized by the people who were watching ESPN but not the other channels.
thewebguyd 16 hours ago [-]
> 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
nickthegreek 18 hours ago [-]
> .. 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
barbazoo 15 hours ago [-]
For movies at least it's usually no problem to find them for "rent", i.e. 48h for an absurd amount of money.
duxup 18 hours ago [-]
I think they know how many dead / inactive subscriptions they have.
mvdtnz 17 hours ago [-]
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).
slybot 15 hours ago [-]
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.
not_your_vase 19 hours ago [-]
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
neves 18 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
_0ffh 15 hours ago [-]
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.
themafia 16 hours ago [-]
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.
dexterdog 8 hours ago [-]
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.
ZiiS 15 hours ago [-]
Yes, very damming considering their spend to not ever have won a best picture/actor/actress/screenplay.
sunrunner 18 hours ago [-]
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?
zo1 18 hours ago [-]
We should coin a new term: "Straight to Netflix"
LtWorf 16 hours ago [-]
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.
mvdtnz 17 hours ago [-]
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].
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.
NalNezumi 5 hours ago [-]
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)
Mashimo 3 hours ago [-]
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.
wltr 15 hours ago [-]
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.
fluoridation 4 hours ago [-]
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.
tstrimple 14 hours ago [-]
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.
wltr 8 hours ago [-]
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.
maxglute 16 hours ago [-]
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?
Yokolos 14 hours ago [-]
It's been taken down plenty of times. They just host a mirror somewhere else under a new TLD.
maxglute 12 hours ago [-]
By take down I mean have entire org steamrolled which we've seen with other crackdowns. Watchseries hydra never seems to fully die.
taraindara 16 hours ago [-]
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
hk1337 15 hours ago [-]
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.
Olreich 11 hours ago [-]
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 like the principled archive link, despite The Guardian having no paywalls.
CornishPasty 2 hours ago [-]
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
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.
DrNosferatu 6 hours ago [-]
Is there an exhaustive list of methods people use in 2025?
Stremio, classic torrents?
What’s the current state of PopcorTime / successors?
greazy 6 hours ago [-]
Look up free media heck yeah.
Animats 15 hours ago [-]
We need to shorten copyright just so that the classics stay available online.
50 years from first publication. No more.
loughnane 14 hours ago [-]
I agree no more. If I had to pick a perfect number I’d probably go to 25 or 30
interestica 14 hours ago [-]
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.
temporallobe 11 hours ago [-]
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.
ak217 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
pezezin 11 hours ago [-]
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.
YesBox 15 hours ago [-]
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.
UmGuys 4 hours ago [-]
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.
leumon 3 hours ago [-]
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?
dpacmittal 5 hours ago [-]
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.
szastamasta 6 hours ago [-]
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.
godzillabrennus 18 hours ago [-]
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.
zten 16 hours ago [-]
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.
johnebgd 8 hours ago [-]
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.
NitpickLawyer 15 hours ago [-]
> 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!
johnebgd 8 hours ago [-]
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.
anonymars 13 hours ago [-]
From the geniuses who thought throwing away the HBO name in favor of "Max" was a way to unlock brand value
themafia 16 hours ago [-]
Are you over 40?
I ask because I'm over 40 and I've had enough of this too.
Also check out cafedvd.com.
8 hours ago [-]
turnsout 16 hours ago [-]
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.
rubyn00bie 15 hours ago [-]
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.
Copernicron 13 hours ago [-]
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.
monster_truck 16 hours ago [-]
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.
barbazoo 15 hours ago [-]
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.
theoreticalmal 16 hours ago [-]
Fantastic movie by the way. Worth rewatching a couple of times
Waterluvian 14 hours ago [-]
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.
13 hours ago [-]
gethly 6 hours ago [-]
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.
delduca 5 hours ago [-]
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.
o0banky0o 17 hours ago [-]
A useful distinction is that upload is piracy and download is not.
AndyKelley 16 hours ago [-]
True pirates maintain > 1.0 ratio
bee_rider 15 hours ago [-]
Neither is piracy, it is just unauthorized copying and sharing.
IshKebab 15 hours ago [-]
> unauthorized copying and sharing
Which is known in English as "piracy".
Ekaros 6 hours ago [-]
No piracy is theft done on sea.
IshKebab 5 hours ago [-]
3. The unauthorized duplication of goods protected by intellectual property law.
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.
blindriver 8 hours ago [-]
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.
paczki 9 hours ago [-]
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.
can16358p 15 hours ago [-]
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.
Alex_L_Wood 15 hours ago [-]
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?
jmward01 13 hours ago [-]
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.
Yhippa 9 hours ago [-]
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?
depingus 8 hours ago [-]
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.
mayneack 9 hours ago [-]
Plex
18 hours ago [-]
stargrazer 14 hours ago [-]
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.
jbirer 19 hours ago [-]
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.
platevoltage 18 hours ago [-]
It's amazing how blurred the line is getting between streaming and cable TV.
sunrunner 18 hours ago [-]
It really doesn't seem like it has to be that complicated, yet somehow we've gone from channels with markedly anti-consumer fixed bundles to a massively fragmented ecosystem where it genuinely seems like the streaming services _don't_ actually want you to subscribe by the amount of the effort that goes into making things hard to watch or doing everything that could make the streaming experience worse (region availability, paid tier ads, lower bitrate stream quality, and so on).
squigz 18 hours ago [-]
It already came full circle some years ago when we started seeing new streaming services every year, and those companies pulling their content from other platforms to put on their own. Then you had to start thinking about what servces you need, whether you still want those services, etc. Just like cable!
Absurd.
platevoltage 17 hours ago [-]
True, although I guess this is sort of understandable. It's the "you're paying us, but here are some ads" that really gets me.
Either way, 5 bucks a month to Emby, a really easy to get membership to a large private torrent site, and a 16TB hard drive solves these problems for me, and will continue to.
dborzov 15 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the tips!
Could you explain how can one get about "getting a membership to a large private torrent site"?
Also, why Emby rather than, say, Jellyfin or Plex?
I was a Plex user, but gave up on it when it started to suck. This was years ago. Emby was the other option at the time and I'm a big fan of it. I've never tried jellyfin. If you want to, email me and I can get you an invite.
squigz 14 hours ago [-]
The private trackers tend to be a pain in the butt to remain active enough on to keep your account, as they tend to require a certain amount of upload:download ratio. This can be difficult to achieve since so many members have high-speed seedboxes.
Just use https://1337x.to/ or any other public tracker. You'll be able to find 99% of whatever you want.
rootsudo 18 hours ago [-]
Thats what they said about cable too, pay for it so no ads. Then the ads came.
nickthegreek 18 hours ago [-]
they are done testing the waters. its standard practice for the majority.
awaymazdacx5 9 hours ago [-]
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.
InfinityByTen 4 hours ago [-]
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.
panarchy 14 hours ago [-]
Streaming services surprised that customers left them like they left cable TV for them once they turned into cable TV.
jwrallie 9 hours ago [-]
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.
m463 8 hours ago [-]
What would you call that? self-un-advertising?
scheeseman486 13 hours ago [-]
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.
OhMeadhbh 8 hours ago [-]
"" What's the point of robbery when nothing is worth taking?
== Stuart Leslie Goddard
privatelypublic 14 hours ago [-]
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)
eleveriven 5 hours ago [-]
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.
WarOnPrivacy 8 hours ago [-]
I pay for Netflix and Prime. I pirate their content for the better viewing experience.
WalterBright 13 hours ago [-]
I canceled my AppleTV subscription because every show I wanted to watch required me to "buy" it. But I already paid for the subscription!!
codedokode 15 hours ago [-]
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.
imglorp 15 hours ago [-]
Plus the idea that if you pay someone to "purchase" and "own" (their terms!!) content, then it's yours forever. Unless, of course, they renegotiate something upstream and subsequently remove the content from your "library" or your device. Or perhaps they lock you out of those things altogether. This means it wasn't ownership, it was subscription.
So as they say, “if buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.”
Stealing is when you take something from him, and he no longer has the thing you took.
Piracy is when you see something for free that everyone else paid money for. You watching doesn't prevent anyone else from watching.
Piracy isn't stealing: piracy only deals in intangibles. Stealing is for finite goods.
There's a whole "how do we pay to make stuff if people can watch for free" problem around piracy, but it's fundamentally a different thing than stealing.
tzs 6 hours ago [-]
> Stealing is when you take something from him, and he no longer has the thing you took.
People commonly use "steal" to refer to someone making a copy of data they are not authorized to have. Even you have used it that way: "I know my credit card company allows me to set a password to prevent unauthorized access from someone who might have stolen this kind of data" [1].
I assume you mean "fare" evasion -- like riding a train or bus?
Yes, it fits. There are a finite number of seats on the train, and your gratis use of a seat (ostensibly) denies another paying customer. Even if there's excess capacity at the time of your ridership, the train operator is designing their capacity with buffer, so you're essentially stealing the capacity.
You could just as easily peg the theft to the incremental cost (electricity, gasoline, etc) it takes the train operator requires to move your incremental mass from A to B.
This is distinctly different from infinite, free copying & distribution.
defrost 8 hours ago [-]
Not a great analogy given fixed space on a bus or a train; in rush hours a fare evader occupies a seat that would otherwise be occupied by a a fare payer (presumably).
Media piracy is largely associated with either people that were never going to pay for a cinema seat or DVD, OR (and this is key) people that would likely pay for something were it available ...
RajT88 15 hours ago [-]
The film and music industries really shot themselves in the foot when they got a tax on recordable media introduced in Canada.
OK, CD-R's and flash memory cost a bunch more now. Streaming is legal, because customers already paid the record companies for their music they downloaded and put on that media.
At least, someone explained this was the current state of Canadian law ~10 years back when I first visited.
xethos 1 hours ago [-]
Must have been a good while ago, as we're currently at $0.29 CAD for blank CDs and... nothing else. Nothing on uSD cards, nothing for floppies, hard drives and SSDs are levy-free,and blank Blu-Ray discs have no extra charge
I'd actually rather this than the million dollar settlements for torrenting Germans and Americans have. We have "Notice and Notice", which basically means the ISP sends us a letter with very little legal heft to it.
We pay a tax on every piece of recordable media (don't think it's only SD cards or hard drives, it applies to phones, laptops, mp3 players, ebooks, even smartwatches). In exchange, sharing media for personal use is legal, and P2P is sharing media.
Doesn't stop corporations from trying to scare people off and complaining about piracy though of course.
crote 13 hours ago [-]
The Netherlands has the same tax, but they managed to ban the "sharing media" part.
First they outlawed uploading media (you could make a copy for your own use, but as you didn't hold the rights you weren't allowed to offer it to anyone else), then they outlawed the downloading as well (you can still make a copy for your own use, but you can't obtain it from someone who doesn't have the rights to offer it to you).
You aren't even allowed to download a copy of a piece of media you already legally own, so the only thing left is making a copy of a physical disk - which is of course made nearly impossible by copy protection.
The organisation behind it is now even claiming that you should pay the tax when a streaming service uses storage space on your device to temporarily make an offline copy...
chairmansteve 8 hours ago [-]
I guess we're going to have to go back to telling stories around a campfire....
codedokode 15 hours ago [-]
Tax on recordable media is unfair because honest people who don't pirate anything also have to pay. As with the case above, honest people get screwed the most.
subscribed 13 hours ago [-]
Wait a second, if I paid a tax allowing me to legally doenload/record..... what's dishonest in it?
It's basically a subscription.
8 hours ago [-]
Gud 15 hours ago [-]
Nothing dishonest with pirating. You wouldn’t download a car? Well I would.
wubrr 15 hours ago [-]
I can't believe people still fall for the 'piracy bad' propaganda in 2025
yalogin 13 hours ago [-]
This is a good point. Stealing is a crime only for end users and not for companies. Why should end users feel any shame violating the DMCA when the government itself says it’s ok for companies to not honor it
crote 13 hours ago [-]
You're not downloading a movie to watch, you are just "acquiring training material" and "reviewing" it to make sure you can use it to train a high-quality model.
codedokode 13 hours ago [-]
You just want to train a neural network in your head to be more knowledgeable about confronting evil empires, space flights and laser weapon, I think it is a "fair use". It's not like I planned to enjoy it.
wyre 10 hours ago [-]
This is/would be a fun point, but the illegality isn’t around watching the pirated media. When I torrent a copy of Terminator, the illegal act is acquiring the material, not my watching of it.
I’m not a lawyer so I’m sure there is more to this definition.
volkl48 9 hours ago [-]
Not a lawyer but the de facto law has always appeared to only care about uploading.
Torrenting gets you in trouble because uploading at least a little bit is inherent to how it (and some other P2P) is supposed to work, and that's enough for a case.
Cases against people just downloading have always appeared to be very rare/non-existent, at least from when I used to follow the news on this stuff more. I don't think I've ever seen a case of someone threatened for solely downloading off direct download services, for example.
frollogaston 9 hours ago [-]
If only pirating a CBS show somehow meant getting back at OpenAI.
stogot 9 hours ago [-]
Hold on. There are current lawsuits over this. The companies haven’t been exonerated yet
bsimpson 14 hours ago [-]
I was in film school in the 00s, when the media companies were in the news for trying to bankrupt the families of high schoolers to make a point that piracy is bad. This was the "you wouldn't download a car" era, when they tried to redefine "stealing" to include piracy.
The executives of these companies would come speak to our class in the evenings. I didn't even bother counting the number of times one of them would be making elated chitchat before/after class about how he had just been on some flight and watched some series on his iPod. On the one hand, everyone is just people. The people at the heads of film studios are also out of touch grandparents whose grandkids show them how to use modern tech over the holidays.
But it was pretty disgusting to see the people in charge of the companies that were trying to ruin people's lives over widespread behavior, themselves participating in that behavior, and with no sense of irony or remorse. It never occurred to them that the thing they were doing in their personal lives is the same thing they were vilifying in their professional ones.
wubrr 15 hours ago [-]
There were never any good moral arguments against digital 'piracy' to begin with.
nh23423fefe 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
wubrr 13 hours ago [-]
Your inability to provide a single example, which would immediately disprove my point, is the evidence.
nh23423fefe 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
prepend 13 hours ago [-]
I think things are moral unless proven immoral.
energy123 10 hours ago [-]
Morality is self-interest. Piracy isn't immoral because they aren't staked in the impacted industries. Eating meat isn't immoral because it's in their self-interest to keep doing it. What is immoral are things that would impact them, like if I stole their property, or if I take credit for their code at work, or if I ate their dog. Morality is easy to understand when you realize everyone is a hypocrite who uses their large brains to construct post hoc justifications, not unlike LLM confabulations. You can't argue against it because you'll get yet another confabulation conveniently aligned with self-interest. We don't even realize we're doing it. It's so baked into our neurology.
jancsika 10 hours ago [-]
> or if I ate their dog
Well, eating an unauthorized copy of their dog.
cindyllm 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
drewbeck 10 hours ago [-]
And your post isn’t a ham sandwich. An equally useful and interesting observation.
Der_Einzige 12 hours ago [-]
Copyright trolls are ontologically evil and a lot of spiritual warfare is waged to make sure they reincarnate as cockroaches.
frollogaston 9 hours ago [-]
Piracy did kill creativity in film just like people warned. Content is never going to be priced the way it used to be. The argument for respecting licenses when training AI is the same, if you make (or buy) something then you set the terms.
BriggyDwiggs42 8 hours ago [-]
Piracy isn’t all that important to prices. Most people won’t bother.
throwawayxcmz 9 hours ago [-]
What do you mean? is this about AI training on copyrighted material?
jayd16 13 hours ago [-]
Real question... Is it actually legally tested to torrent any media, and claim its for training purposes?
matheusmoreira 10 hours ago [-]
> I cannot see how one can make moral arguments against piracy now.
I cannot see how these arguments could ever have been made. Intellectual property is logically reducible to monopolistic ownership of numbers. It's such a schizophrenic distortion of reality. It should be abolished.
> It makes no sense to pay if others are not paying and not punished for it.
It's not just "others", it's trillion dollar corporations!
In the end I don't even blame them... There's no reason why technology should be held back because of intellectual property nonsense. I want them to train AIs on the entire body of works of the entire human race. And when they're finished doing that, I want their AIs to get leaked and pirated so I can run them locally on my computer.
wslh 8 hours ago [-]
I'm just training LLMs with datasets retrieved over multiple peer-to-peer protocols.
amlib 6 hours ago [-]
Your LLMs must be great at regurgitating full linux distro images :)
12 hours ago [-]
bjackman 5 hours ago [-]
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.
duxup 18 hours ago [-]
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.
tlogan 15 hours ago [-]
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?
15 hours ago [-]
herpdyderp 11 hours ago [-]
I recently started buying physical media and sticking it all on JellyFin. It’s been great!
ncr100 11 hours ago [-]
This works surprisingly well on Chromecast Android TVs too.
_0ffh 15 hours ago [-]
It's nice to see some good news now and then.
system2 15 hours ago [-]
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.
qmmmur 7 hours ago [-]
I’ve just given up and read books instead.
jdprgm 12 hours ago [-]
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.
dabber21 15 hours ago [-]
Instead of making their shows exclusive they should make them time exclusive (1 year?) then sell a license
ModernMech 18 hours ago [-]
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.
y-curious 18 hours ago [-]
Fwiw the LG operating system kind of sucks. I got an Apple TV and it's been infinitely better. Paramount Plus was wholly unusable on the TV
Marsymars 15 hours ago [-]
I haven't bothered checking, but I assume the hardware sucks too - I'd expect the Apple TV SOC to be like an order of magnitude faster than any smart TV.
crinkly 18 hours ago [-]
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.
djfobbz 14 hours ago [-]
Oh, this one's spicy! Looks like the industry goons are back out with their swords.
billy99k 15 hours ago [-]
I suppose you can't really complain when big tech pirates your IP to be used with AI.
wslh 14 hours ago [-]
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.
revlolz 14 hours ago [-]
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.
ratelimitsteve 15 hours ago [-]
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.
mkbkn 11 hours ago [-]
How do I find it?
lbrito 13 hours ago [-]
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.
buyucu 18 hours ago [-]
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.
tkz1312 15 hours ago [-]
is buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing :)
pmdr 16 hours ago [-]
Is it? NFLX is at an all-time high right now.
nullorempty 10 hours ago [-]
The biggest issue yet is paying for stuff that pushes woke crap on you.
kjkjadksj 18 hours ago [-]
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.
VanTheBrand 15 hours ago [-]
Except that so far results have shown that it does lead to a net increase in signups:
It’s also getting tiring of this massive fragmentation of streaming services as a whole combined with a weird game of rebundling various providers in either deals direct from the streaming platforms/their overlords, or rebundling all of these streaming services into “free” offers with other service providers and THEIR offerings.
Even my goddamn cable company does this now offering me one of the streaming services? with my Spectrum plan. I don’t even know which one(s).
Quite frankly, I’m tired of my Verizon plan trying to cram Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ and crap down my throat, I’m tired of Walmart trying to cram Paramount+ at me with Walmart+. However, the market of ‘average (dumb) people’ seems to love this concept as “little extras” that eventually cause scope creep to their bill over time (and we all lose as a result).
datadrivenangel 17 hours ago [-]
It's on AppleTV+ but only if you also have the entity formerly known as paramount+ or for 3.99 (14 to own).
There are services I already pay for that I'd likely save a handful of dollars on per month if I bundled them with my other services... but I can't bring myself to do it out of stubborn principle.
robotnikman 16 hours ago [-]
>I’m tired of my Verizon plan trying to cram Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ and crap down my throat
And of course when they do its never the ad-free versions.
HDThoreaun 15 hours ago [-]
I mean netflix saw a pretty big jump in subscribers when they started doing this so maybe it actually does work?
wat10000 10 hours ago [-]
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.
easwee 15 hours ago [-]
Driving back???
mulmen 11 hours ago [-]
Gabe Newell is still right. Piracy is a service problem.
jihadjihad 18 hours ago [-]
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?
It is easier to download from a torrent or illegally stream.
massysett 15 hours ago [-]
What a surprise, it’s easier to steal than to pay content creators. (I know, someone will now chime in and say it isn’t really stealing, etc etc.)
Actually I disagree though. Software and UX for torrenting is a pain. It’s easier to buy a $10 DVD.
alt227 15 hours ago [-]
> What a surprise, it’s easier to steal than to pay content creators.
They make it this way.
Buying a second hand DVD does not give any money to content creators, and I still get to watch the movie.
fluoridation 4 hours ago [-]
Devil's advocate: buying a second-hand DVD puts money back into a first-hand buyer, who may use it to buy first-hand again from the creator.
tick_tock_tick 14 hours ago [-]
> Actually I disagree though. Software and UX for torrenting is a pain. It’s easier to buy a $10 DVD.
You probably haven't checked back in in the last 5-10 year then. Honestly the UX is almost too good.
beoberha 15 hours ago [-]
Almost every digital movie provider has a rental option. Moana on Prime Video is 3.99 to rent.
frm88 43 minutes ago [-]
So, I would have to subscribe to amazon prime to rent the movie. Or another digital movie provider. Now we recalculate the price...
more_corn 12 hours ago [-]
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.
russellbeattie 14 hours ago [-]
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.
downrightmike 15 hours ago [-]
All streaming services should just interoperate, Give me access to everything, and just charge based on title to who ever has it.
DyslexicAtheist 15 hours ago [-]
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
DaSHacka 13 hours ago [-]
> i for I, ... quit Netflix and Prime (and deleted AirBNB and UBER) because they are US companies
I have some unfortunate news about this website you find yourself on, my fellow HN user.
DyslexicAtheist 1 minutes ago [-]
not paying here for anything, so totally cool with it
aussieguy1234 15 hours ago [-]
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.
seany 15 hours ago [-]
Back?
mrandish 13 hours ago [-]
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.
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".
nativeit 11 hours ago [-]
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.
18 hours ago [-]
cess11 7 hours ago [-]
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.
gdsdfe 13 hours ago [-]
Honestly it's much cheaper to just pay for a VPN and setup a homelab ... And the best of all : no damn ads!
rationalfaith 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
ontigola 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
ninetyninenine 11 hours ago [-]
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.
the_af 7 hours ago [-]
Piracy is not theft.
We already had this debate decades ago, and your side of the debate lost. It's not "theft" by any reasonable interpretation of the word.
It may not be legal, and it may be many other things, but it's not theft.
As to why "people justify it", what's the point of even asking when the article and many comments here explain the reasons? You may disagree with the reasons, but they exist and they are coherent.
matheusmoreira 10 hours ago [-]
"Piracy" is not theft, it is copyright infringement. Calling it theft is not "honesty", it's just factually wrong. There's nothing to debate on this matter.
> Like everyone is trying to somehow spin the whole situation into some story that makes their act of theft morally correct.
Nobody is "spinning" anything. We're telling you what we believe and why we believe it.
Actual moral justification involves the realization that all intellectual property is not only unnatural but also fundamentally unjust.
First, copyright is a perversion of reality. The natural state of ideas is actually the public domain. Ideas are infinitely copyable and trivially transmissible. Copyright seeks to completely invert that reality.
Copyright infringement is just reality reasserting itself. It happens every single day at massive scales without people even noticing or caring. It happens every time someone sends a funny picture to a friend. There is no such thing as stopping it, for it is natural, and natural processes shouldn't be stopped.
Second, copyright is fundamentally unjust. It is a functionally infinite state granted monopoly on numbers.
It's absurdity is merely tolerated because it promises well deserved rewards to creators, thereby incentivizing them.
The original social contract was "we're all going to pretend we can't trivially copy your works for a couple decades so that you can turn a profit and then the works will return to the public domain where it belongs".
So when was the last time a work you enjoyed entered the public domain? How many times has copyright duration been extended by now? It might as well be infinite. We're all going to be long dead before our culture returns to us.
They've all made their fortunes a thousand times over but they want to continue their rent seeking and unlike us they've got the trillions of dollars needed to lobby governments and get what they want.
Why fulfill our part of the contract when the copyright holders constantly demonstrate they're not willing to fulfill theirs? There's absolutely no reason to do that. Just stop pretending. It really is that simple.
> When you choose to pirate that work you’re doing something morally unethical.
Nonsense. Copyright infringement is civil disobedience of an unjust law and arguably a moral imperative.
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.
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.
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.
https://old.reddit.com/r/VLC/comments/hnle2o/dual_subtitles/
https://superuser.com/questions/1255487/how-to-get-vlc-to-di...
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 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
Thanks for your example, qrios
(Which everyone in the US should.)
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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
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.
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.
Making all this work is not difficult with docker once you get past the steep learning curve
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When you do that then the difference between the loudest and the quietest part of the audio gets reduced. That's dynamic range reduction.
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.
I think the unambiguous term for this is "Dynamic Range Compression"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression
If I could legally download movies and shows (paying full price for them) I absolutely would.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.criterionchannel.com/browse
--------
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!
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.
Nobody will figure it out!
Your point still stand though, these modern 4k editions are far higher quality.
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.
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.
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
- 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 :)
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.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smothers_Brothers_Comedy...
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.
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
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.
That's a fair point!
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.
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.
If you want 4k, that fan restoration project is also the only way to get it
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.
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.
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.
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 can definitely see how streaming services would adapt to bigots.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, okay then -- chump don't want the money, chump don't get the money
- ¿could we watch x movie? - let me see. no, it in this other service beside the 3 we are paying.
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.
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.
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 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.
Give me $2 or $3 movies with a huge catalog and I'll watch several.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 funny in a sad way how much better the UX of a lot of the piracy sites are, too.
It's a point of member pride to assemble complete seasons with consistent quality, sizing, subtitles, and audio, etc.
Scene files are named to rules that name the content, the source, the video and audio encoding, and the release group.
The first is by a group -NTB that are known for 'direct copies' (by various indicated methods) of streaming sources; here it's episode 12, season 3 of SeriesName as a WEB-DL copy and sourced from AMZN, video encoded with H264 and DDP5.1 audio.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.
Cost was/is a non-factor.
https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com
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.
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.
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, too, would pay per show/movie to download and save DRM-free videos to my own drives.
A lot of effort has gone into making physical media work only with pre-approved devices.
But of course, these places dried out a long time ago.
I used them for a few years, they are great and I'm happy to see they're still around.
They’re called “public libraries”.
On the other hand, dvd is dirt cheap now and you get a very respectable collection that is not reliant on the internet.
- 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.
A Netflix presentation to invite advertisers actually boasted how well they could target you for adds.
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!
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I live in Japan, so we'll fuck me otherwise, right? xD
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
OK. Here's my question: is it possible and feasible to NOT walk?
Because when the answer is "yes", people tend to not walk.
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.
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).
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
The streaming service itself doesn’t need to be profitable.
You can't talk about those rules when a single publisher corporation commands exclusivity deals and dictates pricing essentially forever.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
Here's a much more relevant precedent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....
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.
Or how much is really just the simple rational economic idea that piracy is better value for money.
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.
Pray they do not alter it further.
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?
They won’t license content to third parties. So market forces can’t work.
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.
Copying of anything digital is not actual theft, nor will it ever be.
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.
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.
wordsmithing on theft is the only defense thieves have
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.
Gabe Newell got it right from the very start, piracy is a service problem.
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.
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.
And that doesn't even actually list the movies, which are even more fragmented.
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?
So each service buys a single season to tick that box.
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.
Watch at 8am or at 6pm, whatever episode airs that day, probably a rerun or a skipped.
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.
Sounds like every single mainline game until SV/PLA which tried the open world a bit. People still like it.
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_...
While the pirate goes to his or her favourite torrent site and downloads it all, with the added bonus of having offline, permanent access.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, and I still pirate. It's more expensive, but the user experience is substantially better. It has always been a supply issue,
- 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.
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.
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.
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...
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nope. There’s a limit to the number of downloads on some content. I wasted mine trying to get the download to even work.
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.
Not that I pitied them, they were obnoxiously late and boarded with 5 bags (the stiff rectangular bags boutique stores have) of shopping...
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.
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.
It’s absolutely a service problem.
Went to resubscribe, no option given for no adverts, no money from me.
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.
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.
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.
I do still have Kanopy though, which is great for me but obviously depends on your library.
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)
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.
Of course. Why didn't I think of that?
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.
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.
(of course, this could only work as long as publishers keep producing physical media)
https://scarecrowvideo.org/rent-by-mail
https://www.dvdinbox.com/
Haven't used them, but I am planning on setting up a dvd player,
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.
I know I have a lot of series to catch up on (although from the above, I found Severance disappointing, oh well).
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.
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.
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.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Piracy
I don't usually get too many weird looks with "unauthorized copying".
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.
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.
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.
That and owning the media.
Privacy is undervalued.
As soon as it's earlier than 2005 you're gonna find less than half available across most streaming platforms, unless for renting/buying.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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!
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.
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 .
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...
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.
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 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".
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
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
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 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.
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.
[1] https://comicbook.com/movies/news/netflix-reportedly-has-biz...
Also, some excellent documentaries.
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.
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.
https://www.videolan.org/vlc/
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.
Stremio, classic torrents?
What’s the current state of PopcorTime / successors?
50 years from first publication. No more.
15 years or less from the date of first public consumption.
> “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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
I ask because I'm over 40 and I've had enough of this too.
Also check out cafedvd.com.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Which is known in English as "piracy".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/piracy
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.
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.
If I took those ripped copies and wanted to stream them, what would be the best platform to do that?
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.
Absurd.
Either way, 5 bucks a month to Emby, a really easy to get membership to a large private torrent site, and a 16TB hard drive solves these problems for me, and will continue to.
Just use https://1337x.to/ or any other public tracker. You'll be able to find 99% of whatever you want.
Transmission is peer-to-peer, being the ping to distributions hosting positivities.
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.
Plus my usenet subscription.
I have to wonder if Amazon bought them just to stop playing the game. (I doubt it)
So as they say, “if buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.”
https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2023-12-08...
Piracy is when you see something for free that everyone else paid money for. You watching doesn't prevent anyone else from watching.
Piracy isn't stealing: piracy only deals in intangibles. Stealing is for finite goods.
There's a whole "how do we pay to make stuff if people can watch for free" problem around piracy, but it's fundamentally a different thing than stealing.
People commonly use "steal" to refer to someone making a copy of data they are not authorized to have. Even you have used it that way: "I know my credit card company allows me to set a password to prevent unauthorized access from someone who might have stolen this kind of data" [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9001873
Yes, it fits. There are a finite number of seats on the train, and your gratis use of a seat (ostensibly) denies another paying customer. Even if there's excess capacity at the time of your ridership, the train operator is designing their capacity with buffer, so you're essentially stealing the capacity.
You could just as easily peg the theft to the incremental cost (electricity, gasoline, etc) it takes the train operator requires to move your incremental mass from A to B.
This is distinctly different from infinite, free copying & distribution.
Media piracy is largely associated with either people that were never going to pay for a cinema seat or DVD, OR (and this is key) people that would likely pay for something were it available ...
OK, CD-R's and flash memory cost a bunch more now. Streaming is legal, because customers already paid the record companies for their music they downloaded and put on that media.
At least, someone explained this was the current state of Canadian law ~10 years back when I first visited.
I'd actually rather this than the million dollar settlements for torrenting Germans and Americans have. We have "Notice and Notice", which basically means the ISP sends us a letter with very little legal heft to it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
We pay a tax on every piece of recordable media (don't think it's only SD cards or hard drives, it applies to phones, laptops, mp3 players, ebooks, even smartwatches). In exchange, sharing media for personal use is legal, and P2P is sharing media.
Doesn't stop corporations from trying to scare people off and complaining about piracy though of course.
First they outlawed uploading media (you could make a copy for your own use, but as you didn't hold the rights you weren't allowed to offer it to anyone else), then they outlawed the downloading as well (you can still make a copy for your own use, but you can't obtain it from someone who doesn't have the rights to offer it to you).
You aren't even allowed to download a copy of a piece of media you already legally own, so the only thing left is making a copy of a physical disk - which is of course made nearly impossible by copy protection.
The organisation behind it is now even claiming that you should pay the tax when a streaming service uses storage space on your device to temporarily make an offline copy...
It's basically a subscription.
I’m not a lawyer so I’m sure there is more to this definition.
Torrenting gets you in trouble because uploading at least a little bit is inherent to how it (and some other P2P) is supposed to work, and that's enough for a case.
Cases against people just downloading have always appeared to be very rare/non-existent, at least from when I used to follow the news on this stuff more. I don't think I've ever seen a case of someone threatened for solely downloading off direct download services, for example.
The executives of these companies would come speak to our class in the evenings. I didn't even bother counting the number of times one of them would be making elated chitchat before/after class about how he had just been on some flight and watched some series on his iPod. On the one hand, everyone is just people. The people at the heads of film studios are also out of touch grandparents whose grandkids show them how to use modern tech over the holidays.
But it was pretty disgusting to see the people in charge of the companies that were trying to ruin people's lives over widespread behavior, themselves participating in that behavior, and with no sense of irony or remorse. It never occurred to them that the thing they were doing in their personal lives is the same thing they were vilifying in their professional ones.
Well, eating an unauthorized copy of their dog.
I cannot see how these arguments could ever have been made. Intellectual property is logically reducible to monopolistic ownership of numbers. It's such a schizophrenic distortion of reality. It should be abolished.
> It makes no sense to pay if others are not paying and not punished for it.
It's not just "others", it's trillion dollar corporations!
In the end I don't even blame them... There's no reason why technology should be held back because of intellectual property nonsense. I want them to train AIs on the entire body of works of the entire human race. And when they're finished doing that, I want their AIs to get leaked and pirated so I can run them locally on my computer.
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.
Now the audience is used to that pricing and doesn't like pricing relative to the price of the content.
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.
Also the Linux experience for every streaming service typically sucks because of DRM, capping resolution to 720p.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/netflix-subscriber-boom-th...
Even my goddamn cable company does this now offering me one of the streaming services? with my Spectrum plan. I don’t even know which one(s).
Quite frankly, I’m tired of my Verizon plan trying to cram Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ and crap down my throat, I’m tired of Walmart trying to cram Paramount+ at me with Walmart+. However, the market of ‘average (dumb) people’ seems to love this concept as “little extras” that eventually cause scope creep to their bill over time (and we all lose as a result).
Poob. Poob has it for you. [0]
0 https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/poob-has-it-for-you
And of course when they do its never the ad-free versions.
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.
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?
https://www.amazon.com/Moana-Ron-Clements/dp/B01MAZGH7Z/ref=...
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/292095014239
Actually I disagree though. Software and UX for torrenting is a pain. It’s easier to buy a $10 DVD.
They make it this way.
Buying a second hand DVD does not give any money to content creators, and I still get to watch the movie.
You probably haven't checked back in in the last 5-10 year then. Honestly the UX is almost too good.
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.
I have some unfortunate news about this website you find yourself on, my fellow HN user.
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.
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".
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.
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.
We already had this debate decades ago, and your side of the debate lost. It's not "theft" by any reasonable interpretation of the word.
It may not be legal, and it may be many other things, but it's not theft.
As to why "people justify it", what's the point of even asking when the article and many comments here explain the reasons? You may disagree with the reasons, but they exist and they are coherent.
> Like everyone is trying to somehow spin the whole situation into some story that makes their act of theft morally correct.
Nobody is "spinning" anything. We're telling you what we believe and why we believe it.
Actual moral justification involves the realization that all intellectual property is not only unnatural but also fundamentally unjust.
First, copyright is a perversion of reality. The natural state of ideas is actually the public domain. Ideas are infinitely copyable and trivially transmissible. Copyright seeks to completely invert that reality.
Copyright infringement is just reality reasserting itself. It happens every single day at massive scales without people even noticing or caring. It happens every time someone sends a funny picture to a friend. There is no such thing as stopping it, for it is natural, and natural processes shouldn't be stopped.
Second, copyright is fundamentally unjust. It is a functionally infinite state granted monopoly on numbers.
It's absurdity is merely tolerated because it promises well deserved rewards to creators, thereby incentivizing them.
The original social contract was "we're all going to pretend we can't trivially copy your works for a couple decades so that you can turn a profit and then the works will return to the public domain where it belongs".
So when was the last time a work you enjoyed entered the public domain? How many times has copyright duration been extended by now? It might as well be infinite. We're all going to be long dead before our culture returns to us.
They've all made their fortunes a thousand times over but they want to continue their rent seeking and unlike us they've got the trillions of dollars needed to lobby governments and get what they want.
Why fulfill our part of the contract when the copyright holders constantly demonstrate they're not willing to fulfill theirs? There's absolutely no reason to do that. Just stop pretending. It really is that simple.
> When you choose to pirate that work you’re doing something morally unethical.
Nonsense. Copyright infringement is civil disobedience of an unjust law and arguably a moral imperative.