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No worries, I'll just use the torrent sharers. I bet those will give me a constant 4K quality on all my devices, no ridiculous DRM, get to keep them once I term

No worries, I'll just use the torrent sharers. I bet those will give me a constant 4K quality on all my devices, no ridiculous DRM, get to keep them once I terminate my "subscription", etc. Oh and it's free, not 10-15$ USD for each service.

option 7y ago
plus I don’t have to sign up on yet another service for just one film/show. I am 100% in for paying for the films/shows. Just give me a convenient cross-platform option to do so without any BS
- mrtksn 7y ago
  can't you just subscribe to all of them and use Apple TV or some Smart TV for the seamless experience?
  - nickthegreek 7y ago
    AppleTV doesnt have a deep integration into all of the streaming services available on the device. But they are at least trying to resolve the fragmentation issues.
    - LeoNatan25 7y ago
      For the streaming companies, fragmentation has become a feature. They have absolutely no interest in resolving it.
  - perennate 7y ago
    Yes, for $200/mo, and you cannot watch when you're on the go with just laptop and no Apple TV device, and when Amazon and Netflix go bankrupt you won't be able to go back and watch all that content. At least nowadays we can still get most content on DVD. It just feels like a waste with the physical media.
    - option 7y ago
      Surprisingly, even that won’t be enough! Like I commented above - try watching “Spirited Away” via that method .... and you can’t, unless you buy a disk! (and this isn’t the only example)
  - bscphil 7y ago
    No, I literally can't. I keep track of all the movies I'm interesting in watching in a list on IMDB. Checking right now (IMDB has this feature built in), it seems only about ~5% of them are on Amazon Prime. Assume I'm lucky enough that there's no overlap in the catalogues and subscribing to Netflix will get me another 5%, Disney+ another 5%, and let's say subscribing to the other services will get me 10% on top of that (they're smaller, but there are more of them ... this is just a guess). That means ... 75% of the movies I might want to watch any given night are simply not available through my streaming subscriptions. That's pretty bad, given how much money I'd be spending on all these. You might claim I could still do this legally, by renting the other films I want to watch at $3-4 a pop on the same apps (e.g. Amazon video). But no, that won't work either. IMDB tells me that less than half of the movies I want to watch are available to rent from Amazon at all, even if I could afford the thousands of dollars it would cost to rent them all. And since catalogue overlap for rentals is nearly 100%, I have little hope that I'll be able to find any significant portion of the remainder somewhere else. Even if e.g. Netflix somehow magically had every film I want to watch, it would still be a miserable experience, because since they don't like my browser / OS / hardware combination, I'm limited to 720p streams at 3000 kbps. That's noticeably bad compared to a Bluray. Not everyone's film interests can be satisfied with the top five Disney films from each of the last 10 years. What piracy means is the ability to watch anything you want near-instantly for free in the highest quality it was ever released in, if not higher (pirates not-infrequently correct mistakes made on commercially mastered Blurays). And even some popular stuff (like the original non-special-edition Star Wars trilogy) isn't available at all, you'd have to pirate it.
- khc 7y ago
  Don't Google/Apple all have pay per view for movies and shows? You don't have to have a subscription.
  - option 7y ago
    they don’t have everything (and I regulary buy things from them). Try watching “Spirited Away” there or upcoming “Mandolorian”. Also, what you can watch on Netflix depends on where you are.
  - LeoNatan25 7y ago
    Because of politics and DRM, Apple doesn't offer Disney movies in 4K, for example. I really don't give a rats behind about Hollywood politics. I would have purchased if I could get DRM free movies. Alas, this is not an option. So I go the "remux" way, where everything is free, quality is better than all streaming services and there is no DRM. It's up to Hollywood to make change.
    - friedman23 7y ago
      > I would have purchased if I could get DRM free movies. I have a feeling this isn't true. I'm sure if they released DRM free movies you would simply balk at the cost and then use that as justification for not purchasing it.
      - LeoNatan25 7y ago
        Your feeling is wrong. I used to collect optical media for many years, until I got rid of all my optical drives. At which point, my only choice was to torrent movies. Optical wasn't DRM free, but at least I could rip those, which is what I usually ended up doing for ease of use.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      You should be able to buy and watch 4K Movies on the Vudu app, tie your iTunes account to the Movies Anywhere apps and your movie purchases will transfer to your iTunes library (but not in 4K). You can also link your Amazon Prime and Google Play accounts.
megablast 7y ago
They are coming for them too. Don't think that they have forgotten about them.
- philth_ 7y ago
  They've been coming for torrentors for 15+ years. How's that fight going?
  - loeg 7y ago
    And somehow against all odds, the scene still seems to be hanging on despite tons of FBI arrests in the 2000's and zero profit motive.
- BubRoss 7y ago
  HBO has been monitoring torrents for a long time and sending letters to ISPs. VPNs and seed boxes get around this.
  - walrus01 7y ago
    Not everybody is in DMCA jurisdiction. Maximum liability in Canada is something like $5000, which makes it uneconomical for a copyright owner to actually send a lawyer to court to litigate against a person who wants to defend themselves.
    - BubRoss 7y ago
      I'm not sure what you are saying, no one implied everyone was in the reach of HBO. The parent was saying HBO was going to go after torrenters in the future, but they have been doing it for years.
      - walrus01 7y ago
        I guess what I'm saying is that inevitably in these sorts of discussions, about legal repercussions, the assumption is that the torrenters are physically located in the US 50 states.
dobleboble 7y ago
Convenience does not justify theft. You don't have an entitlement to consume specific content.
- shmerl 7y ago
  Same as pushing DRMed exclusives for rent doesn't help reducing it.
- zaksoup 7y ago
  I really think we need new language around digital content. I'm not a lawyer but it seems intuitive to say "the reason theft is bad is because you're taking something from somebody else that they, then, no longer have" or "you did not compensate somebody for services that, had they provided those services to somebody else, they would otherwise be compensated for." With digital content this is just not the case. The original file still exists. You not paying for a movie you download does not deprive the license-holder of an opportunity to offer that download to somebody else. Only the opportunity to sell it to you, one they wouldn't have had in the first place because of [your stance on draconian DRM, high prices for streaming, needing multiple different services instead of a single stop, etc]. What did they lose?
  - sjy 7y ago
    It’s a big assumption that you wouldn’t have purchased the product anyway. Sure, it’s often true, but there are clearly many people who dislike DRM and subscription fees who would nonetheless accept them if the alternative was to forego copyrighted entertainment altogether. The loss of the opportunity to sell to ‘you’ is not negligible.
    - kelnos 7y ago
      Not sure why you're being downvoted. It's certainly true that while there are many people who would not pay for the content at any price, there are also many people who would stop pirating and instead pay, if they got the right price, format, terms, etc.
kempbellt 7y ago
I may (or may not) have built my own Netflix competitor. It had more content than all of the major providers combined. Legal buffer: I will not say what the content was. It may have all been non-copyrighted cat videos ;) The service was available cross region. Stored videos in multiple resolutions for streamability in low-bandwidth situations. No DRM bs. It cost me under $400/month to run the whole service, and I could access it from any device, anywhere I had internet. I gave access to a few friends and family and they all chipped in to help cover expenses (it was never profitable). I ran it for a few months before I started to lose interest in maintaining it - it was mostly just a proof-of-concept, and fell back to Netflix/HBO/other subs for convenience. I applaud Netflix, HBO, etc for offering competitive solutions to monopolistic cable companies and other restrictive media outlets, but this will always remain a problem. Once you create a piece of art and put it out for the world to see, you cannot control how/when/where it will be shown. Stop trying... Just make it more convenient for people to pay to view it. Going after people for low-level copyright violation, like sharing a password, is childish.
- quineoa 7y ago
  I am curious to know about the infra / tech stack, if you're comfortable with sharing any information.
  - diminoten 7y ago
    He's (possibly) overselling his accomplishment here a little bit. You can achieve what he's describing using a combination of Plex, Sonarr, Jackett, and a private torrent site. You also need a torrent client that can work with Sonarr (Synology's torrent client works great in "watch this directory" mode). It's a truly self-running system. Other than the upgrades, you're able to select whatever shows you want to follow, and that's it. They automatically get downloaded, sorted into the right directory structure, picked up by Plex, and on-demand streaming around the world is yours, with all kinds of cool features like bandwidth optimization, offline show downloads, etc. More or less feature parity with Netflix, without any of the restrictions. Of course it's 100% illegal, though honestly I've never heard of a prosecuted case in the US.
Fakira 7y ago
They might be shooting themselves in foot here. Part of the reason why Microsoft is so big and why there is a PC n every home is because many of us could pirate Windows and Office in early days. That reduced barrier to entry and enabled poor folks in India and elsewhere use computers and be familiar with all other MS technologies.
- PretzelFisch 7y ago
  But then there is apple and ios where you can't really pirate the software effectively.
  - LeoNatan25 7y ago
    Eh. Most software can be pirated on iOS. Obtain an IPA (easy), resign it with Cydia Impactor and most apps will work no problem. There is now a "hack store" software that uses your Apple credentials to resign all the IPAs you give it and push them to your (non-jailbroken) phone.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      There is really no benefit to "pirating" most iOS apps. Almost all of the apps that I spend money on, I'm actually paying for a service.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
hyperbovine 7y ago
Ah yes, this comment. Whenever a story pops up here about a media company having the temerity to try and get people to pay for their product, I count the seconds until someone's inb4 with some pithy response invoking BitTorrent, the immorality of paywalls and DRM, and the supposed right that we all enjoy to freely consume content that costs billions of dollars to create. Love it. Came here expecting to find it, was not disappointed. In some sense, anyways.
- LeoNatan25 7y ago
  As are the comments from the people claiming "entitlement". ;-)
freeflight 7y ago
Careful with that, in some countries, anti-piracy outfits are monitoring torrent releases and sending out c&d letters in bulk to people who they catch downloading/uploading with a domestic IP. Particularly a problem in Germany, that's why it's best to use a torrent-friendly VPN in countries like that.
- wolco 7y ago
  What are good provider choices? Or even what countries are open and have enough connectivity?
  - LeoNatan25 7y ago
    I would recommend looking at seedboxes /servers where you run your torrent client/. You can then download the files from the server. 10-15 years ago, it was pretty cheap, so I can't imagine it hasn't gotten dirt cheap by now.
friedman23 7y ago
I don't understand the moral indignation. Getting angry at netflix et al. for trying to improve their bottom line is like getting angry at water being wet. If you want to pirate, fine, pirate. I just don't understand why people are so insistent on coming up with moral justifications for their actions. If it's moral or immoral fine, who cares? It's simply a sign of weak character when someone needs to come up with a justification for every little thing they do.
- nomel 7y ago
  > for trying to improve their bottom line Put in a more relatable phrasing, they're angry that they're not being compensated for the substantial expense they put into creating that content (e.g. $8M/episode for season 2). Not paying for something you value is a good way to reduce its quality.
tomdell 7y ago
You're a senior software engineer and yet somehow you can't pay for content?
- Matthias247 7y ago
  These things also suprise me, since my opinion is exactly the opposite: Content is so cheap nowadays, that it doesn't make any sense to look for illegal options anymore. If I pay 10$ for Netflix I get already more content than I can consume. And 10$ is not even that much for a non silicon valley non software engineering salary. I think even paying for multiple services shouldn't be an issue for people who actually have the time and interest in consuming the services. And to why I think things actually are getting cheaper: In germany you pay already mandatory 25€ for public broadcasting, which you might never watch. Pay TV back in the days was like 50€, and tons of people where willing to pay for it. You can get a lot of the new streaming services for that.
  - inapis 7y ago
    I am in the same boat. Content is so affordable and accessible these days that I don’t understand why people get pissed about it. Part of the reason, I feel, is that there’s so much abundance of content and stuff that choosing becomes impossible. We feel FOMO and slighted if there’s content which is not already included in the service we are paying for. As consumers we have come to expect everything under the sun to be accessible right here, right now, according to my expectations and preferably for free. That’s honestly irrational on our (consumers) part. Internet and forums just amplify this part.
    - LeoNatan25 7y ago
      I am not looking for free content. I am looking for content that is available conveniently, at a reasonable price, at high quality, available anywhere I want it to after purchase. I would gladly pay for Ten different 10-15$ DRM-filled streaming services, that only allow me to watch 4K if the sun is 5 degrees above the equator and require being online always, is not that, and thus, I refuse to pay.
techslave 7y ago
no worries, i just won’t illegally share my account.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
bestnameever 7y ago
I think thats the point? From what it sounds like, you are not paying for the services now but yet they are incurring costs every time you use it. This change is not going to force paying subscribers off their services.

option 7y ago

plus I don’t have to sign up on yet another service for just one film/show. I am 100% in for paying for the films/shows. Just give me a convenient cross-platform option to do so without any BS

mrtksn 7y ago
can't you just subscribe to all of them and use Apple TV or some Smart TV for the seamless experience?
- nickthegreek 7y ago
  AppleTV doesnt have a deep integration into all of the streaming services available on the device. But they are at least trying to resolve the fragmentation issues.
  - LeoNatan25 7y ago
    For the streaming companies, fragmentation has become a feature. They have absolutely no interest in resolving it.
- perennate 7y ago
  Yes, for $200/mo, and you cannot watch when you're on the go with just laptop and no Apple TV device, and when Amazon and Netflix go bankrupt you won't be able to go back and watch all that content. At least nowadays we can still get most content on DVD. It just feels like a waste with the physical media.
  - option 7y ago
    Surprisingly, even that won’t be enough! Like I commented above - try watching “Spirited Away” via that method .... and you can’t, unless you buy a disk! (and this isn’t the only example)
- bscphil 7y ago
  No, I literally can't. I keep track of all the movies I'm interesting in watching in a list on IMDB. Checking right now (IMDB has this feature built in), it seems only about ~5% of them are on Amazon Prime. Assume I'm lucky enough that there's no overlap in the catalogues and subscribing to Netflix will get me another 5%, Disney+ another 5%, and let's say subscribing to the other services will get me 10% on top of that (they're smaller, but there are more of them ... this is just a guess). That means ... 75% of the movies I might want to watch any given night are simply not available through my streaming subscriptions. That's pretty bad, given how much money I'd be spending on all these. You might claim I could still do this legally, by renting the other films I want to watch at $3-4 a pop on the same apps (e.g. Amazon video). But no, that won't work either. IMDB tells me that less than half of the movies I want to watch are available to rent from Amazon at all, even if I could afford the thousands of dollars it would cost to rent them all. And since catalogue overlap for rentals is nearly 100%, I have little hope that I'll be able to find any significant portion of the remainder somewhere else. Even if e.g. Netflix somehow magically had every film I want to watch, it would still be a miserable experience, because since they don't like my browser / OS / hardware combination, I'm limited to 720p streams at 3000 kbps. That's noticeably bad compared to a Bluray. Not everyone's film interests can be satisfied with the top five Disney films from each of the last 10 years. What piracy means is the ability to watch anything you want near-instantly for free in the highest quality it was ever released in, if not higher (pirates not-infrequently correct mistakes made on commercially mastered Blurays). And even some popular stuff (like the original non-special-edition Star Wars trilogy) isn't available at all, you'd have to pirate it.
khc 7y ago
Don't Google/Apple all have pay per view for movies and shows? You don't have to have a subscription.
- option 7y ago
  they don’t have everything (and I regulary buy things from them). Try watching “Spirited Away” there or upcoming “Mandolorian”. Also, what you can watch on Netflix depends on where you are.
- LeoNatan25 7y ago
  Because of politics and DRM, Apple doesn't offer Disney movies in 4K, for example. I really don't give a rats behind about Hollywood politics. I would have purchased if I could get DRM free movies. Alas, this is not an option. So I go the "remux" way, where everything is free, quality is better than all streaming services and there is no DRM. It's up to Hollywood to make change.
  - friedman23 7y ago
    > I would have purchased if I could get DRM free movies. I have a feeling this isn't true. I'm sure if they released DRM free movies you would simply balk at the cost and then use that as justification for not purchasing it.
    - LeoNatan25 7y ago
      Your feeling is wrong. I used to collect optical media for many years, until I got rid of all my optical drives. At which point, my only choice was to torrent movies. Optical wasn't DRM free, but at least I could rip those, which is what I usually ended up doing for ease of use.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    You should be able to buy and watch 4K Movies on the Vudu app, tie your iTunes account to the Movies Anywhere apps and your movie purchases will transfer to your iTunes library (but not in 4K). You can also link your Amazon Prime and Google Play accounts.

megablast 7y ago

They are coming for them too. Don't think that they have forgotten about them.

philth_ 7y ago
They've been coming for torrentors for 15+ years. How's that fight going?
- loeg 7y ago
  And somehow against all odds, the scene still seems to be hanging on despite tons of FBI arrests in the 2000's and zero profit motive.
BubRoss 7y ago
HBO has been monitoring torrents for a long time and sending letters to ISPs. VPNs and seed boxes get around this.
- walrus01 7y ago
  Not everybody is in DMCA jurisdiction. Maximum liability in Canada is something like $5000, which makes it uneconomical for a copyright owner to actually send a lawyer to court to litigate against a person who wants to defend themselves.
  - BubRoss 7y ago
    I'm not sure what you are saying, no one implied everyone was in the reach of HBO. The parent was saying HBO was going to go after torrenters in the future, but they have been doing it for years.
    - walrus01 7y ago
      I guess what I'm saying is that inevitably in these sorts of discussions, about legal repercussions, the assumption is that the torrenters are physically located in the US 50 states.

dobleboble 7y ago

Convenience does not justify theft. You don't have an entitlement to consume specific content.

shmerl 7y ago
Same as pushing DRMed exclusives for rent doesn't help reducing it.
zaksoup 7y ago
I really think we need new language around digital content. I'm not a lawyer but it seems intuitive to say "the reason theft is bad is because you're taking something from somebody else that they, then, no longer have" or "you did not compensate somebody for services that, had they provided those services to somebody else, they would otherwise be compensated for." With digital content this is just not the case. The original file still exists. You not paying for a movie you download does not deprive the license-holder of an opportunity to offer that download to somebody else. Only the opportunity to sell it to you, one they wouldn't have had in the first place because of [your stance on draconian DRM, high prices for streaming, needing multiple different services instead of a single stop, etc]. What did they lose?
- sjy 7y ago
  It’s a big assumption that you wouldn’t have purchased the product anyway. Sure, it’s often true, but there are clearly many people who dislike DRM and subscription fees who would nonetheless accept them if the alternative was to forego copyrighted entertainment altogether. The loss of the opportunity to sell to ‘you’ is not negligible.
  - kelnos 7y ago
    Not sure why you're being downvoted. It's certainly true that while there are many people who would not pay for the content at any price, there are also many people who would stop pirating and instead pay, if they got the right price, format, terms, etc.

kempbellt 7y ago

I may (or may not) have built my own Netflix competitor. It had more content than all of the major providers combined. Legal buffer: I will not say what the content was. It may have all been non-copyrighted cat videos ;) The service was available cross region. Stored videos in multiple resolutions for streamability in low-bandwidth situations. No DRM bs. It cost me under $400/month to run the whole service, and I could access it from any device, anywhere I had internet. I gave access to a few friends and family and they all chipped in to help cover expenses (it was never profitable). I ran it for a few months before I started to lose interest in maintaining it - it was mostly just a proof-of-concept, and fell back to Netflix/HBO/other subs for convenience. I applaud Netflix, HBO, etc for offering competitive solutions to monopolistic cable companies and other restrictive media outlets, but this will always remain a problem. Once you create a piece of art and put it out for the world to see, you cannot control how/when/where it will be shown. Stop trying... Just make it more convenient for people to pay to view it. Going after people for low-level copyright violation, like sharing a password, is childish.

quineoa 7y ago
I am curious to know about the infra / tech stack, if you're comfortable with sharing any information.
- diminoten 7y ago
  He's (possibly) overselling his accomplishment here a little bit. You can achieve what he's describing using a combination of Plex, Sonarr, Jackett, and a private torrent site. You also need a torrent client that can work with Sonarr (Synology's torrent client works great in "watch this directory" mode). It's a truly self-running system. Other than the upgrades, you're able to select whatever shows you want to follow, and that's it. They automatically get downloaded, sorted into the right directory structure, picked up by Plex, and on-demand streaming around the world is yours, with all kinds of cool features like bandwidth optimization, offline show downloads, etc. More or less feature parity with Netflix, without any of the restrictions. Of course it's 100% illegal, though honestly I've never heard of a prosecuted case in the US.

Fakira 7y ago

They might be shooting themselves in foot here. Part of the reason why Microsoft is so big and why there is a PC n every home is because many of us could pirate Windows and Office in early days. That reduced barrier to entry and enabled poor folks in India and elsewhere use computers and be familiar with all other MS technologies.

PretzelFisch 7y ago
But then there is apple and ios where you can't really pirate the software effectively.
- LeoNatan25 7y ago
  Eh. Most software can be pirated on iOS. Obtain an IPA (easy), resign it with Cydia Impactor and most apps will work no problem. There is now a "hack store" software that uses your Apple credentials to resign all the IPAs you give it and push them to your (non-jailbroken) phone.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    There is really no benefit to "pirating" most iOS apps. Almost all of the apps that I spend money on, I'm actually paying for a service.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

hyperbovine 7y ago

Ah yes, this comment. Whenever a story pops up here about a media company having the temerity to try and get people to pay for their product, I count the seconds until someone's inb4 with some pithy response invoking BitTorrent, the immorality of paywalls and DRM, and the supposed right that we all enjoy to freely consume content that costs billions of dollars to create. Love it. Came here expecting to find it, was not disappointed. In some sense, anyways.

LeoNatan25 7y ago
As are the comments from the people claiming "entitlement". ;-)

freeflight 7y ago

Careful with that, in some countries, anti-piracy outfits are monitoring torrent releases and sending out c&d letters in bulk to people who they catch downloading/uploading with a domestic IP. Particularly a problem in Germany, that's why it's best to use a torrent-friendly VPN in countries like that.

wolco 7y ago
What are good provider choices? Or even what countries are open and have enough connectivity?
- LeoNatan25 7y ago
  I would recommend looking at seedboxes /servers where you run your torrent client/. You can then download the files from the server. 10-15 years ago, it was pretty cheap, so I can't imagine it hasn't gotten dirt cheap by now.

friedman23 7y ago

I don't understand the moral indignation. Getting angry at netflix et al. for trying to improve their bottom line is like getting angry at water being wet. If you want to pirate, fine, pirate. I just don't understand why people are so insistent on coming up with moral justifications for their actions. If it's moral or immoral fine, who cares? It's simply a sign of weak character when someone needs to come up with a justification for every little thing they do.

nomel 7y ago
> for trying to improve their bottom line Put in a more relatable phrasing, they're angry that they're not being compensated for the substantial expense they put into creating that content (e.g. $8M/episode for season 2). Not paying for something you value is a good way to reduce its quality.

tomdell 7y ago

You're a senior software engineer and yet somehow you can't pay for content?

Matthias247 7y ago
These things also suprise me, since my opinion is exactly the opposite: Content is so cheap nowadays, that it doesn't make any sense to look for illegal options anymore. If I pay 10$ for Netflix I get already more content than I can consume. And 10$ is not even that much for a non silicon valley non software engineering salary. I think even paying for multiple services shouldn't be an issue for people who actually have the time and interest in consuming the services. And to why I think things actually are getting cheaper: In germany you pay already mandatory 25€ for public broadcasting, which you might never watch. Pay TV back in the days was like 50€, and tons of people where willing to pay for it. You can get a lot of the new streaming services for that.
- inapis 7y ago
  I am in the same boat. Content is so affordable and accessible these days that I don’t understand why people get pissed about it. Part of the reason, I feel, is that there’s so much abundance of content and stuff that choosing becomes impossible. We feel FOMO and slighted if there’s content which is not already included in the service we are paying for. As consumers we have come to expect everything under the sun to be accessible right here, right now, according to my expectations and preferably for free. That’s honestly irrational on our (consumers) part. Internet and forums just amplify this part.
  - LeoNatan25 7y ago
    I am not looking for free content. I am looking for content that is available conveniently, at a reasonable price, at high quality, available anywhere I want it to after purchase. I would gladly pay for Ten different 10-15$ DRM-filled streaming services, that only allow me to watch 4K if the sun is 5 degrees above the equator and require being online always, is not that, and thus, I refuse to pay.

techslave 7y ago

no worries, i just won’t illegally share my account.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

bestnameever 7y ago

I think thats the point? From what it sounds like, you are not paying for the services now but yet they are incurring costs every time you use it. This change is not going to force paying subscribers off their services.