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5. Torrents are more convenient. I was happy to and still do pay for Netflix. But occasionally something comes along and I’m sure as hell not subscribing to 5

5. Torrents are more convenient. I was happy to and still do pay for Netflix. But occasionally something comes along and I’m sure as hell not subscribing to 5 extra streaming services. One or two? Maybe even three? But now you have Amazon, YouTube, Netflix, Apple TV along with the other regional streaming services if you want to get content legally. And there’s more services to come.

lucb1e 7y ago
> 5. Torrents are more convenient. Right but then you don't fall within the 90% that OP estimates would have bought the product. In OP's points, you either would buy it if you could (1, 2), or are planning to buy after limited evaluation (3). Item 4 is a bit of an odd one (though it applies to me: I only pay for Audible $10/month because you can still do .aa exports and turn them into mp3s and play anywhere, any time; otherwise I'd pirate the books or find a competitor), but your 5th is squarely a lost sale. The text below your point doesn't really match your point, that sounds more like can't afford or just doesn't want to pay. Leaving in the middle whether it's reasonable to have to go to five "stores" to get everything you want, you either can afford it and are the (proposed) 10% or it falls under item 2.
- the_af 7y ago
  I think "torrents are more convenient" is also about people who would have bought the product. Example: lots of people I know torrented Game of Thrones because paid services were actually worse. Things like HBO Go stuttered depending on internet connection -- and in one of the season premieres, the service was unavailable -- while torrents offered Full HD quality with no surprises. Another consideration is when you're paying for Netflix but it doesn't have all the seasons of a series yet. So people torrent the episodes even when they are already paying for a streaming service: torrents are more convenient. They get all the content when they want it, and with high quality too.
  - prepend 7y ago
    I torrented every season except the last when I used HBONow. The torrent experience was much better. Their app is bloated, shows ads, and is tough to navigate. Their app is worse than a folder where files show up and disappear when watched. That’s their competition and they failed.
- freeflight 7y ago
  Among other services, I'm subscribed to Prime, and really enjoy some shows on there like The Terror. But for whatever reason, the release schedule for new episodes on season 2 is all messed up in my Amazon region. Sometimes there will be 6 days between them, then 9 days, right now the last episode it offers is the fifth one, released there on September the 9th, that was 10 days ago. It ended with a massive cliffhanger, and I'm sitting over here looking for something to watch, but Amazon Germany simply doesn't want to deliver. So earlier I looked up the scene release, which was back on the 15th, and pirated that episode. The pirated version also has the added benefit of not throwing double the amount of subtitles (German and English) at me for any foreign language scene. One would think such localization subtitles should be easily disabled, yet Amazon Germany doesn't offer an option for it and still displays them even when English dub and subs are selected.
amelius 7y ago
Exactly. There's a problem here, though. If there was only a single distribution channel, that would be a monopoly with corresponding prices. So this means that there will never be a distribution channel which is satisfactory. Unless perhaps a non-profit organization runs it.
- laumars 7y ago
  The problem isn't so much having too many distribution services but rather that each service has a monopoly on specific content. If each service had access to the same content as every other service then market forces would not only satisfy the price argument but also the quality of the services itself (lets be honest, some of the pirating services run circles around the legitimate ones). Unfortunately though, the movie, TV and music industry have been allowed to operate monopolies - even push for extensions to copyright law and against reforms - for so long that I can't see it ever changing.
- BlackFly 7y ago
  My proposed solution to this: require frand licenses from copyright holders before they are allowed to bring copyright claims to court. Whatever license they want to give, they should be required to offer the same terms to whoever comes along, if they want public assistance in protecting their work. If they think they can keep it locked down on their own then they are free to offer discriminatory license arrangements. If they want help from society protecting their works, whatever is offered to Amazon ought to be available to Netflix, or anybody else, including you and me when we start our own alternative. Edit: to deal with rights holders that don't want anyone else to offer their content, they are free to make non-discriminatory royalty arrangements with extremely high royalties. However, they must pay those royalties to the government as a tax (again for access to the courts).
  - TylerE 7y ago
    I don't agree with this at all. Part of copyright is maintaining a degree of artistic control - for instance a band not allowing a certain political party to use their song at rallies.
cercatrova 7y ago
Unfortunately, any aggregator service suffers the tragedy of the commons. At first it's nice because one place has all of the content. As time goes by, each provider of content sees that they could make more money by removing their content from the aggregator and launching their own service. This is true if it occurs in a vacuum, but it inevitably doesn't; each content provider thinks similarly and creates their own service. Now the consumer does not want to pay for each service and will resort to the most convenient option, piracy. If you follow gaming news, you see this happen with regards to Steam and the Epic Games Store. Piracy is a nearly unbeatable service because it acts as the ultimate aggregator with unremovable content. (Yes, there are private tracker sites with their own selection of content, but the vast majority of people use public trackers.)
- phito 7y ago
  I don't see this problem with music streaming (although they have tried)
  - raxxorrax 7y ago
    Do they finally offer mainly DRM-free music? I think I saw at least some mp3 offers from Amazon, but haven't looked closer at music streaming for a long time, since other sources are numerous. For music it is one of my expectations. I have strange and sometimes old devices for playback. Not really interested in locked down content here.
    - gdfasfklshg4 7y ago
      Itunes for example is DRM free.
      - 333c 7y ago
        When you purchase a song from iTunes, it is DRM-free. When you download it through Apple Music, it is not.
      - raxxorrax 7y ago
NullPrefix 7y ago
>Amazon, YouTube, Netflix, Apple TV I think only YouTube works properly on Linux without the DRM EME botnet plugins.
- cabalamat 7y ago
  A lot of these (all of them??) are streaming services, which suffer when you have a slow internet connection.
fernandotakai 7y ago
i already pay for amazon, youtube, netflix and hulu. if some content i want to watch is not on any of those services, i will gladly download it -- not because i don't wanna pay for it, but because i'm already paying the studios (through these 4 services) more than enough.
giancarlostoro 7y ago
> 5. Torrents are more convenient. Don't forget Usenet automation like CouchPotato, now that is convenient ...or so I've heard. You can set it all up to automatically fetch files, and organize them in such a way for Kodi to consume them, and then Kodi gets art for all your shows and movies. There's articles online about it. Downside is Usenet costs a certain amount, course when you start piling on $14.99 for 4k from half a dozen online streaming services, $14.99 once and for all doesn't sound so bad. I don't condone piracy, but I may or may not have done that in my younger years. It was glorious.
- forgottenpass 7y ago
  I've heard that discoverability on usenet is a problem. Is it similar to private trackers and just harder to find an easy "in", or do people actually pay for access to those index sites?
  - enobrev 7y ago
    Having a couple free indexers and a decent paid one (or two) along with a couple good Usenet services tends to cover most needs. With a good downloader app, it's simply a matter of plugging in a couple API keys once and basically forgetting about them while letting your system do the searching and scouring for you. Or, so I've heard.
    - smnrchrds 7y ago
      Ca you give us some more specific details about what you have heard, like the name of these services? Why are they better than torrent?
      - giancarlostoro 7y ago
        With Usenet you get a direct line to the files, there's no seeding, and it's over SSL (you might have to specify a SSL server from your provider). The scripts to download take the binaries and take each part downloaded and put them together and extract all the files for you. I don't even think you need a VPN, but one does not hurt. Also like I said, you can automate the process with projects like SickBeard and CouchPotato. Specifically with SickBeard you can subscribe to shows, and it knows when new episodes come out, and it starts searching repeatedly. The other thing is you can define the quality you want to download, it will find the best thing closest to that quality and download it, say it's 480p but you want 1080p, but only 480 is available at the time. An hour later 1080p is published, but you already have 480 and maybe you're watching it, no way for it to know, so what the software does is, download the 1080p version, and don't delete it till it's done downloading. You'll know it's downloading cause you can setup all sorts of alerts and notifications. Then you have Kodi setup to auto parse those directories and fetch previews and descriptions. At one point I had a plugin for Kodi that takes all the content you have and makes "Channels" from the content, so you can feel like you're watching regular TV and browsing through channels. People love Kodi for the streaming plugins, but Kodi + Usenet was amazing. Nowadays I just pay for Netflix and Hulu, but like I said, at this rate it's tempting to think about Usenet again.
elliekelly 7y ago
Not to give Amazon any ideas but I would actually love a service like Audible for seasons of TV series: pay a monthly fee and get X “credits” that you can use to access a season of a show.
forgottenpass 7y ago
>5. Torrents are more convenient. I miss watching videos outside the service-branded players. I get that the floor is lower, but the ceiling is at the floor. None of them are special beyond making the DRM work, their UIs are at best rebranding of the good ideas they steal from the youtube player. Sometimes I just want the flexibility to watch their video with a feature I know a different player has. Or without uninterrupted access to high-throughput internet connectivity. Like, in the car, the wilderness, or anywhere that the home network is administrated by a normie.
oefrha 7y ago
In fact, I’ve “pirated” shows I already paid for because the owner doesn’t offer an offline option, or I don’t want to use the crappy players forced upon me. (HBO is a notable example.)
fnord77 7y ago
and DL'ing is only going to get more pervasive as the fragmentation of "exclusive" content gets worse with the explosion of services
pteraspidomorph 7y ago
Torrents aren't that convenient anymore. The vast majority of available data is on private trackers, and the procedures for joining said trackers are extremely byzantine, sometimes outright demeaning, and require vast quantities of time and effort. I'd argue that it's much more convenient to just pay Bezos, unless - as suggested - you're a teenager and don't have any money, or the rightsholders made it impossible for you to make the purchase (this has happened to me when trying to purchase music, of all things).
- yummypaint 7y ago
  The state of private trackers tells us about the amount of effort put into enforcement. Accessible trackers dont last long, so there is necessarily some hoop jumping to make it more profitable to go elsewhere and attack softer targets.
  - cabalamat 7y ago
    > Accessible trackers don't last long The Pirate Bay is still up, even if they do have to keep changing URLs; one can Google on "pirate bay proxy" to get a list of whatever the latest hostnames are, then go to those sites. This is a slight hassle, and the time it takes is not really significant compared to watching a 2-hour movie. I suspect it is less hassle than trying to buy a DRM-crippled movie and playing it on my Linux box.
    - pteraspidomorph 7y ago
      Even before the pirate bay became a vague concept often repurposed by people trying to sell dubious VPN services or mining cryptocoins with your browser they had already ceased to be a tracker. Those are just indices! They'll suggest some actual trackers on the magnet URLs in their listings but you can get comparable results using a DHT search engine. You can intersect here "trackers" that are "public": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BitTorrent_sites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BitTorrent_sites
  - Supermancho 7y ago
mikepurvis 7y ago
This one hit home for me recently as my partner and I were streaming Good Omens off of Prime. It was a laptop on wifi (10mbps connection), hooked up by HDMI to the TV, and the quality kept dropping down to 480p or worse. Every time it did it, I was like, man I should have just pre-downloaded this, and then it would be issue-free.
nurb 7y ago
6. You choose torrent for ethical reasons. To provide a culture access to everyone and not only those with enough money, to bypass censorship and virtual frontiers. But also to avoid financing distribution companies, that P2P made obsolete. Companies that finance themselves before the tiny subset of compliant artists working for them. The very same companies that make you thing that "sharing is wrong"... Seriously, put this out of context and feel the absurdity of it. Still though, financing culture still an open problem. For now the only ethical way seems to be the donate buttons and bitcoins.
arkh 7y ago
> 5. Torrents are more convenient. Some people enjoy "crazy good" less than 1Mb/s internet conexion: no way you're streaming anything. So yeah, torrent it is.
parliament32 7y ago
Not to mention the lack of a unified UI. I don't want to fire up 3-5 different apps, have to figure out which show is on which, manage 3-5 different watchlists, etc. It's all about convenience.
- megous 7y ago
  Thankfully one can just: mpv 'anyoldurl' and you have a unified UI for very many services: http://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html http://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html
duxup 7y ago
I don't even bother to torrent anymore .... I just don't view it. I love Star Trek, haven't seen any of the new series. I'm not singing up for a new streaming service for one thing, and there's so much media available I can always find something else... so I just don't watch.

lucb1e 7y ago

> 5. Torrents are more convenient. Right but then you don't fall within the 90% that OP estimates would have bought the product. In OP's points, you either would buy it if you could (1, 2), or are planning to buy after limited evaluation (3). Item 4 is a bit of an odd one (though it applies to me: I only pay for Audible $10/month because you can still do .aa exports and turn them into mp3s and play anywhere, any time; otherwise I'd pirate the books or find a competitor), but your 5th is squarely a lost sale. The text below your point doesn't really match your point, that sounds more like can't afford or just doesn't want to pay. Leaving in the middle whether it's reasonable to have to go to five "stores" to get everything you want, you either can afford it and are the (proposed) 10% or it falls under item 2.

the_af 7y ago
I think "torrents are more convenient" is also about people who would have bought the product. Example: lots of people I know torrented Game of Thrones because paid services were actually worse. Things like HBO Go stuttered depending on internet connection -- and in one of the season premieres, the service was unavailable -- while torrents offered Full HD quality with no surprises. Another consideration is when you're paying for Netflix but it doesn't have all the seasons of a series yet. So people torrent the episodes even when they are already paying for a streaming service: torrents are more convenient. They get all the content when they want it, and with high quality too.
- prepend 7y ago
  I torrented every season except the last when I used HBONow. The torrent experience was much better. Their app is bloated, shows ads, and is tough to navigate. Their app is worse than a folder where files show up and disappear when watched. That’s their competition and they failed.
freeflight 7y ago
Among other services, I'm subscribed to Prime, and really enjoy some shows on there like The Terror. But for whatever reason, the release schedule for new episodes on season 2 is all messed up in my Amazon region. Sometimes there will be 6 days between them, then 9 days, right now the last episode it offers is the fifth one, released there on September the 9th, that was 10 days ago. It ended with a massive cliffhanger, and I'm sitting over here looking for something to watch, but Amazon Germany simply doesn't want to deliver. So earlier I looked up the scene release, which was back on the 15th, and pirated that episode. The pirated version also has the added benefit of not throwing double the amount of subtitles (German and English) at me for any foreign language scene. One would think such localization subtitles should be easily disabled, yet Amazon Germany doesn't offer an option for it and still displays them even when English dub and subs are selected.

amelius 7y ago

Exactly. There's a problem here, though. If there was only a single distribution channel, that would be a monopoly with corresponding prices. So this means that there will never be a distribution channel which is satisfactory. Unless perhaps a non-profit organization runs it.

laumars 7y ago
The problem isn't so much having too many distribution services but rather that each service has a monopoly on specific content. If each service had access to the same content as every other service then market forces would not only satisfy the price argument but also the quality of the services itself (lets be honest, some of the pirating services run circles around the legitimate ones). Unfortunately though, the movie, TV and music industry have been allowed to operate monopolies - even push for extensions to copyright law and against reforms - for so long that I can't see it ever changing.
BlackFly 7y ago
My proposed solution to this: require frand licenses from copyright holders before they are allowed to bring copyright claims to court. Whatever license they want to give, they should be required to offer the same terms to whoever comes along, if they want public assistance in protecting their work. If they think they can keep it locked down on their own then they are free to offer discriminatory license arrangements. If they want help from society protecting their works, whatever is offered to Amazon ought to be available to Netflix, or anybody else, including you and me when we start our own alternative. Edit: to deal with rights holders that don't want anyone else to offer their content, they are free to make non-discriminatory royalty arrangements with extremely high royalties. However, they must pay those royalties to the government as a tax (again for access to the courts).
- TylerE 7y ago
  I don't agree with this at all. Part of copyright is maintaining a degree of artistic control - for instance a band not allowing a certain political party to use their song at rallies.

cercatrova 7y ago

Unfortunately, any aggregator service suffers the tragedy of the commons. At first it's nice because one place has all of the content. As time goes by, each provider of content sees that they could make more money by removing their content from the aggregator and launching their own service. This is true if it occurs in a vacuum, but it inevitably doesn't; each content provider thinks similarly and creates their own service. Now the consumer does not want to pay for each service and will resort to the most convenient option, piracy. If you follow gaming news, you see this happen with regards to Steam and the Epic Games Store. Piracy is a nearly unbeatable service because it acts as the ultimate aggregator with unremovable content. (Yes, there are private tracker sites with their own selection of content, but the vast majority of people use public trackers.)

phito 7y ago
I don't see this problem with music streaming (although they have tried)
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  Do they finally offer mainly DRM-free music? I think I saw at least some mp3 offers from Amazon, but haven't looked closer at music streaming for a long time, since other sources are numerous. For music it is one of my expectations. I have strange and sometimes old devices for playback. Not really interested in locked down content here.
  - gdfasfklshg4 7y ago
    Itunes for example is DRM free.
    - 333c 7y ago
      When you purchase a song from iTunes, it is DRM-free. When you download it through Apple Music, it is not.
    - raxxorrax 7y ago

NullPrefix 7y ago

>Amazon, YouTube, Netflix, Apple TV I think only YouTube works properly on Linux without the DRM EME botnet plugins.

cabalamat 7y ago
A lot of these (all of them??) are streaming services, which suffer when you have a slow internet connection.

fernandotakai 7y ago

i already pay for amazon, youtube, netflix and hulu. if some content i want to watch is not on any of those services, i will gladly download it -- not because i don't wanna pay for it, but because i'm already paying the studios (through these 4 services) more than enough.

giancarlostoro 7y ago

> 5. Torrents are more convenient. Don't forget Usenet automation like CouchPotato, now that is convenient ...or so I've heard. You can set it all up to automatically fetch files, and organize them in such a way for Kodi to consume them, and then Kodi gets art for all your shows and movies. There's articles online about it. Downside is Usenet costs a certain amount, course when you start piling on $14.99 for 4k from half a dozen online streaming services, $14.99 once and for all doesn't sound so bad. I don't condone piracy, but I may or may not have done that in my younger years. It was glorious.

forgottenpass 7y ago
I've heard that discoverability on usenet is a problem. Is it similar to private trackers and just harder to find an easy "in", or do people actually pay for access to those index sites?
- enobrev 7y ago
  Having a couple free indexers and a decent paid one (or two) along with a couple good Usenet services tends to cover most needs. With a good downloader app, it's simply a matter of plugging in a couple API keys once and basically forgetting about them while letting your system do the searching and scouring for you. Or, so I've heard.
  - smnrchrds 7y ago
    Ca you give us some more specific details about what you have heard, like the name of these services? Why are they better than torrent?
    - giancarlostoro 7y ago
      With Usenet you get a direct line to the files, there's no seeding, and it's over SSL (you might have to specify a SSL server from your provider). The scripts to download take the binaries and take each part downloaded and put them together and extract all the files for you. I don't even think you need a VPN, but one does not hurt. Also like I said, you can automate the process with projects like SickBeard and CouchPotato. Specifically with SickBeard you can subscribe to shows, and it knows when new episodes come out, and it starts searching repeatedly. The other thing is you can define the quality you want to download, it will find the best thing closest to that quality and download it, say it's 480p but you want 1080p, but only 480 is available at the time. An hour later 1080p is published, but you already have 480 and maybe you're watching it, no way for it to know, so what the software does is, download the 1080p version, and don't delete it till it's done downloading. You'll know it's downloading cause you can setup all sorts of alerts and notifications. Then you have Kodi setup to auto parse those directories and fetch previews and descriptions. At one point I had a plugin for Kodi that takes all the content you have and makes "Channels" from the content, so you can feel like you're watching regular TV and browsing through channels. People love Kodi for the streaming plugins, but Kodi + Usenet was amazing. Nowadays I just pay for Netflix and Hulu, but like I said, at this rate it's tempting to think about Usenet again.

elliekelly 7y ago

Not to give Amazon any ideas but I would actually love a service like Audible for seasons of TV series: pay a monthly fee and get X “credits” that you can use to access a season of a show.

forgottenpass 7y ago

>5. Torrents are more convenient. I miss watching videos outside the service-branded players. I get that the floor is lower, but the ceiling is at the floor. None of them are special beyond making the DRM work, their UIs are at best rebranding of the good ideas they steal from the youtube player. Sometimes I just want the flexibility to watch their video with a feature I know a different player has. Or without uninterrupted access to high-throughput internet connectivity. Like, in the car, the wilderness, or anywhere that the home network is administrated by a normie.

oefrha 7y ago

In fact, I’ve “pirated” shows I already paid for because the owner doesn’t offer an offline option, or I don’t want to use the crappy players forced upon me. (HBO is a notable example.)

fnord77 7y ago

and DL'ing is only going to get more pervasive as the fragmentation of "exclusive" content gets worse with the explosion of services

pteraspidomorph 7y ago

Torrents aren't that convenient anymore. The vast majority of available data is on private trackers, and the procedures for joining said trackers are extremely byzantine, sometimes outright demeaning, and require vast quantities of time and effort. I'd argue that it's much more convenient to just pay Bezos, unless - as suggested - you're a teenager and don't have any money, or the rightsholders made it impossible for you to make the purchase (this has happened to me when trying to purchase music, of all things).

yummypaint 7y ago
The state of private trackers tells us about the amount of effort put into enforcement. Accessible trackers dont last long, so there is necessarily some hoop jumping to make it more profitable to go elsewhere and attack softer targets.
- cabalamat 7y ago
  > Accessible trackers don't last long The Pirate Bay is still up, even if they do have to keep changing URLs; one can Google on "pirate bay proxy" to get a list of whatever the latest hostnames are, then go to those sites. This is a slight hassle, and the time it takes is not really significant compared to watching a 2-hour movie. I suspect it is less hassle than trying to buy a DRM-crippled movie and playing it on my Linux box.
  - pteraspidomorph 7y ago
    Even before the pirate bay became a vague concept often repurposed by people trying to sell dubious VPN services or mining cryptocoins with your browser they had already ceased to be a tracker. Those are just indices! They'll suggest some actual trackers on the magnet URLs in their listings but you can get comparable results using a DHT search engine. You can intersect here "trackers" that are "public": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BitTorrent_sites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BitTorrent_sites
- Supermancho 7y ago

mikepurvis 7y ago

This one hit home for me recently as my partner and I were streaming Good Omens off of Prime. It was a laptop on wifi (10mbps connection), hooked up by HDMI to the TV, and the quality kept dropping down to 480p or worse. Every time it did it, I was like, man I should have just pre-downloaded this, and then it would be issue-free.

nurb 7y ago

6. You choose torrent for ethical reasons. To provide a culture access to everyone and not only those with enough money, to bypass censorship and virtual frontiers. But also to avoid financing distribution companies, that P2P made obsolete. Companies that finance themselves before the tiny subset of compliant artists working for them. The very same companies that make you thing that "sharing is wrong"... Seriously, put this out of context and feel the absurdity of it. Still though, financing culture still an open problem. For now the only ethical way seems to be the donate buttons and bitcoins.

arkh 7y ago

> 5. Torrents are more convenient. Some people enjoy "crazy good" less than 1Mb/s internet conexion: no way you're streaming anything. So yeah, torrent it is.

parliament32 7y ago

Not to mention the lack of a unified UI. I don't want to fire up 3-5 different apps, have to figure out which show is on which, manage 3-5 different watchlists, etc. It's all about convenience.

megous 7y ago
Thankfully one can just: mpv 'anyoldurl' and you have a unified UI for very many services: http://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html http://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html

duxup 7y ago

I don't even bother to torrent anymore .... I just don't view it. I love Star Trek, haven't seen any of the new series. I'm not singing up for a new streaming service for one thing, and there's so much media available I can always find something else... so I just don't watch.