5 ms·

Why would a bot ever log into HBO Max anyway? Everything is uploaded to torrent sites the day of release, and it's not bots doing the uploading.

jaredsohn 3y ago
Maybe check stolen accounts?
prepend 3y ago
They don’t want aggregator apps to log in without paying. Appletv will show me new shows on multiple platforms all on one screen. HBO doesn’t want people doing this without paying. It’s stupid and anti-user.
- TobyTheDog123 3y ago
  >HBO doesn’t want people doing this without paying. But why (from their perspective)? They don't make their money from metadata, they make it from content. Every piece of real monkey-making content is going to get a torrent regardless of if it's protected behind a captcha.
  - ajmurmann 3y ago
    The Netflix interface is so bad that I've been wondering if they made it bad on purpose. Over a decade ago when DVDs in red envelopes were the standard they had a table view of all their content and you could sort and filter it to your heart's desire. When they got rid of this, I used their API to build a CLI tool that just listed shows ordered by how much Netflix thought I'd like it. All of this was vastly superior to the current Netflix interface. However, I sometimes would decide that I had watched everything on Netflix and turn it off or even unsubscribe for a few months. Now it's really hard to find out if you have exhausted Netflix. It's easy to spend a lot of time just scrolling though the GUI hoping you'll find something and sometimes you do. Sometimes you find something where it's surprising that it didn't suggest it in the first place. I wonder if this is all by design because they try to increase quantity of engagement and not quality and value gained from the engagement. Edit: I have some sympathy for this. Engagement is much harder to measure than customer satisfaction. They are looking for the keys under the light because they cannot see anywhere else.
    - miyuru 3y ago
      I canceled netflix, because I am spending more time looking for a show a movies than actually watching it.
  - prepend 3y ago
    Because they make more money by charging Apple and others. Why be reasonable when you can be unreasonable and make more money.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      Is there a source that Apple pays Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) to get access to their catalog so WBD’s media shows up in searches in Apple’s TV app? It makes very little sense to me. Surely WBD wants people to easily find WBD content to watch, and easily be able to pay them to watch it. I know Netflix has been a holdout (the only one), and it is quite a stupid long term decision in my opinion, but I would not have thought Apple pays WBD, Paramount, Comcast, Disney, Starz, etc to be able to list their purchase-able media in Apple’s TV app.
- olyjohn 3y ago
  An aggregator won't just buy a $12/mo account and use a real login?
  - prepend 3y ago
    The aggregator uses lots of users existing accounts with their real logins. Using appletv again for an example, it wants to check prepend’s specific Hulu, Netflix, hbo, Disney, etc to see new episodes and whatnot related to my specific account. So it has a real login and, presumably, access to some api from the streamer. But a smaller company that didn’t pay for access could also just login as my accounts and scrape info.
2h 3y ago
torrent uploads dont just come from magic fairies. I write tools to download from sites like this, and it helps if you can automate the login process. its not strictly required, as in most cases you could just save cookies or similar locally, but weaker login systems are preferred.

jaredsohn 3y ago

Maybe check stolen accounts?

prepend 3y ago

They don’t want aggregator apps to log in without paying. Appletv will show me new shows on multiple platforms all on one screen. HBO doesn’t want people doing this without paying. It’s stupid and anti-user.

TobyTheDog123 3y ago
>HBO doesn’t want people doing this without paying. But why (from their perspective)? They don't make their money from metadata, they make it from content. Every piece of real monkey-making content is going to get a torrent regardless of if it's protected behind a captcha.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  The Netflix interface is so bad that I've been wondering if they made it bad on purpose. Over a decade ago when DVDs in red envelopes were the standard they had a table view of all their content and you could sort and filter it to your heart's desire. When they got rid of this, I used their API to build a CLI tool that just listed shows ordered by how much Netflix thought I'd like it. All of this was vastly superior to the current Netflix interface. However, I sometimes would decide that I had watched everything on Netflix and turn it off or even unsubscribe for a few months. Now it's really hard to find out if you have exhausted Netflix. It's easy to spend a lot of time just scrolling though the GUI hoping you'll find something and sometimes you do. Sometimes you find something where it's surprising that it didn't suggest it in the first place. I wonder if this is all by design because they try to increase quantity of engagement and not quality and value gained from the engagement. Edit: I have some sympathy for this. Engagement is much harder to measure than customer satisfaction. They are looking for the keys under the light because they cannot see anywhere else.
  - miyuru 3y ago
    I canceled netflix, because I am spending more time looking for a show a movies than actually watching it.
- prepend 3y ago
  Because they make more money by charging Apple and others. Why be reasonable when you can be unreasonable and make more money.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    Is there a source that Apple pays Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) to get access to their catalog so WBD’s media shows up in searches in Apple’s TV app? It makes very little sense to me. Surely WBD wants people to easily find WBD content to watch, and easily be able to pay them to watch it. I know Netflix has been a holdout (the only one), and it is quite a stupid long term decision in my opinion, but I would not have thought Apple pays WBD, Paramount, Comcast, Disney, Starz, etc to be able to list their purchase-able media in Apple’s TV app.
olyjohn 3y ago
An aggregator won't just buy a $12/mo account and use a real login?
- prepend 3y ago
  The aggregator uses lots of users existing accounts with their real logins. Using appletv again for an example, it wants to check prepend’s specific Hulu, Netflix, hbo, Disney, etc to see new episodes and whatnot related to my specific account. So it has a real login and, presumably, access to some api from the streamer. But a smaller company that didn’t pay for access could also just login as my accounts and scrape info.

2h 3y ago

torrent uploads dont just come from magic fairies. I write tools to download from sites like this, and it helps if you can automate the login process. its not strictly required, as in most cases you could just save cookies or similar locally, but weaker login systems are preferred.