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Piracy has, once again, become a better product than the one being sold. Ignoring the economics of paid vs free (or "stolen"), the experience with pirated medi

Piracy has, once again, become a better product than the one being sold. Ignoring the economics of paid vs free (or "stolen"), the experience with pirated media is flat out better than anything being offered by any of the companies selling products. Do you know what piracy doesn't give you? It lacks the torrential downpour of ads and other garbage that are relentlessly jammed in your face. I recently bought a new (cheap) TV that runs Google TV. On day 1 the interface is laggy and bogged down with piles of shit upon shit that I don't want. For example, I don't need a rotating billboard of ads on my homescreen when the hardware is barely powerful enough to keep things running. I'm sure it's going to be unusable in a couple years. I'm going to hack it and if I lose access to legitimate content, so be it. In Canada, we have SportsNet for NHL broadcasts. It's terrible. Pirate streams are better (video) quality. If it comes to it, I'll pay more than SportsNet costs if I can get and ESPN stream out of the US. Think about that for a second. I'm willing to pay more than what they're charging, but the current product is so bad I refuse to give them a dollar.

smaudet 3y ago
If we had actually supported legal torrents we could have paid for link access, legally owned the contents of the torrents, and never ever had to worry about the files disappearing. We would have just paid for some encryption key from a distributed DRM service and there would have been none of this licensing nonsense.
thrdbndndn 3y ago
In this particular space (sports streaming) I don't think piracy is any better, unfortunately. At least definitely not easier.
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  Piracy is frequently more difficult, yet better quality. Let's face it: using torrent search sites and dealing with a BT client isn't as easy for your grandmother as just using the built-in Netflix app on her TV.
  - thrdbndndn 3y ago
    I'm talking strictly about sport streaming. There is no "torrent search sites", just random hard-to-find websites with billions of ads (and they change frequently), or paid pirating services.
shiroiuma 3y ago
>I recently bought a new (cheap) TV that runs Google TV. On day 1 the interface is laggy and bogged down with piles of shit upon shit that I don't want. I got one of these too. It's fantastic: I love it! Well, compared to the competition anyway. The reason is simple: GoogleTV is Android, so you can install Android apps on it. Specifically, you can install SmartTubeNext, a FOSS YouTube viewer that blocks ads and includes SponsorBlock. You can also install Jellyfin to have streaming access to any media on your PC or other server.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
>Ignoring the economics of paid vs free (or "stolen"), That's a big thing to ignore. Of course every company wants to be able to serve all media for a low price (and for zero labor costs). If you need to pay for every license you own, for people to maintain your website, to maintain customer support, to translate media, for the servers to transmit media from etc. Then costs are going to add up immensely. Pirates don't have to worry about any of that. The only catch here is that pirates are enough of a minority that they still eat their cake. If it gets too rampant, everyone loses. Tragedy of the "commons" (despite this being the exact opposite of a commons).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
pndy 3y ago
> I'm sure it's going to be unusable in a couple years. I've bought a Philips tv some 11 years ago that come with some custom-tied linux distro and bunch of smart apps - the usual stuff: weather, yt, netflix, facebook, some games and of course none of these work nowadays. Luckily there were no ads anywhere in the UI - yet, because that was just about to happen in 2-3 years.

smaudet 3y ago

If we had actually supported legal torrents we could have paid for link access, legally owned the contents of the torrents, and never ever had to worry about the files disappearing. We would have just paid for some encryption key from a distributed DRM service and there would have been none of this licensing nonsense.

thrdbndndn 3y ago

In this particular space (sports streaming) I don't think piracy is any better, unfortunately. At least definitely not easier.

shiroiuma 3y ago
Piracy is frequently more difficult, yet better quality. Let's face it: using torrent search sites and dealing with a BT client isn't as easy for your grandmother as just using the built-in Netflix app on her TV.
- thrdbndndn 3y ago
  I'm talking strictly about sport streaming. There is no "torrent search sites", just random hard-to-find websites with billions of ads (and they change frequently), or paid pirating services.

shiroiuma 3y ago

>I recently bought a new (cheap) TV that runs Google TV. On day 1 the interface is laggy and bogged down with piles of shit upon shit that I don't want. I got one of these too. It's fantastic: I love it! Well, compared to the competition anyway. The reason is simple: GoogleTV is Android, so you can install Android apps on it. Specifically, you can install SmartTubeNext, a FOSS YouTube viewer that blocks ads and includes SponsorBlock. You can also install Jellyfin to have streaming access to any media on your PC or other server.

johnnyanmac 3y ago

>Ignoring the economics of paid vs free (or "stolen"), That's a big thing to ignore. Of course every company wants to be able to serve all media for a low price (and for zero labor costs). If you need to pay for every license you own, for people to maintain your website, to maintain customer support, to translate media, for the servers to transmit media from etc. Then costs are going to add up immensely. Pirates don't have to worry about any of that. The only catch here is that pirates are enough of a minority that they still eat their cake. If it gets too rampant, everyone loses. Tragedy of the "commons" (despite this being the exact opposite of a commons).

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

pndy 3y ago

> I'm sure it's going to be unusable in a couple years. I've bought a Philips tv some 11 years ago that come with some custom-tied linux distro and bunch of smart apps - the usual stuff: weather, yt, netflix, facebook, some games and of course none of these work nowadays. Luckily there were no ads anywhere in the UI - yet, because that was just about to happen in 2-3 years.