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Piracy offers: 1. Unrestricted access to an absolutely huge library of movies, music and TV shows, nearly unlimited. Certainly not limited by opaque "licensing

Piracy offers: 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.

galleywest200 1y 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.
- yunwal 1y ago
  Physical media has arbitrary device limitations.
  - black_puppydog 1y 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 1y 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.
- noselasd 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
      They still exist and now are free. They’re called “public libraries”.
- crote 1y 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 1y ago
    And driving the price up for the consumer for the anti-consumer tech licencing fees.
  - account42 1y ago
    A lot of effort has been wasted, thanks to MakeMKV+libredrive making ripping easy.
wrasee 1y 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.
- franciscop 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
8fingerlouie 1y 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.
- kaliqt 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
      Thanks to 3D printing this is starting to become reality and not just science fiction.
    - cammikebrown 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
DHRicoF 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
    - phkahler 1y 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 1y 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.
hbn 1y 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
- ethersteeds 1y ago
  Fair to be upset. Just noting that has been happening for about the whole history of televised comedy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smothers_Brothers_Comedy_Hour#Controversies_and_cancellation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smothers_Brothers_Comedy...
- l72 1y 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.
  - macNchz 1y 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.
chongli 1y 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.
- greazy 1y ago
  Wow. I thought it was impossible to watch the original release of star wars. I need to hunt this down.
  - nosioptar 1y ago
    There's also a DVD release of the theatrical versions. Usually goes for $50-75 for OG trilogy.
    - LeifCarrotson 1y ago
      DVDs are 480i, the parent comment described far higher quality than DVD.
      - pezezin 1y 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 1y 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.
thaumasiotes 1y 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.
jfghi 1y ago
Also doesn’t track user and send a bunch of telemetry
- vgb2k18 1y ago
  Except for our ip address, timestamp and torrent metadata https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com
  - wiredpancake 1y ago
    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 1y 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 1y ago
      I was going to say.. does not seem to show much. That said, fun idea and very privacy inspiring.
  - ncr100 1y 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.
marak830 1y 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.
- djtango 1y 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 1y ago
  From a cursory search, there are browser extensions to display your own subtitles on sites like netflix. At least for firefox.
- unsignedint 1y 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.
  - 1y ago
wingworks 1y 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.
molszanski 1y 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 1y 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!
  - molszanski 1y ago
    Same. I am just tired of buying a movie and then torrenting it 5 min later. Once even bought twice on two different platforms. Still broken languages. It is not that hard. WTF.
daseiner1 1y ago
Plex is phenomenal software
- trenchpilgrim 1y ago
  Jellyfin is shockingly good now also
  - bombcar 1y ago
    Jellyfin + Infuse is so easy a baby can use it
- chasing0entropy 1y 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.
pluc 1y 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.
- bradbeattie 1y ago
  It's a shame https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_P.... was never applied to streaming services.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- john01dav 1y ago
  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.
getcrunk 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
    I think the point was that streaming services freak out if you connect from a disapproved IP address.
zaptheimpaler 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
    Amusingly if your have MakeMKV and patched firmware, you can rip them without even blinking.
    - MindSpunk 1y ago
      The firmware flashing story for the drives is even funnier because some of the really common LG bluray drives that get used for ripping UHD blurays doesn't support reading UHD discs "on the box", but if you flash the firmware from a different drive it reads them without skipping a beat. The 4K standard didn't bring any new disc formats to my knowledge. It just started using the higher layer count formats that were already available but the firmware on the cheaper drives wont read them.
    - anonymars 1y ago
      Yep. As is often the case the DRM screws over the paying customers. At that point I certainly wasn't going to give them money for a disc they didn't want me to let me play
izacus 1y ago
Also the content doesn't disappear on vacation, it has subtitles for all languages and audio track is actually high quality.
prepend 1y 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.
- birn559 1y 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 1y 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.
    - birn559 1y ago
      They just don't care enough. User experience only needs to be "good enough", mostly determined by the question of users will tend to terminate the subscription without the feature or with the bug.
- 1980phipsi 1y ago
  Plex’s recent changes have been garbage and it’s still better than the experience on a lot of streaming sites.
swat535 1y 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 1y 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.
Melatonic 1y 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
MattDaEskimo 1y 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.
cadamsdotcom 1y ago
And don't forget, not "remastered" with content changed and/or removed.
godelski 1y 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.
- account42 1y ago
  Or more generally: the ability to use a video player of your choice, which can have whatever features and interface that you want.
- Galaxeblaffer 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - kryptn 1y ago
    Mind elaborating?
    - throwaway290 1y ago
      "Look, doing something illegal offers a lot of benefits for me! I must be a genius"
Der_Einzige 1y ago
[flagged]
tombert 1y 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.
matheusmoreira 1y 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.
PKop 1y ago
- Not having to watch ads after you've already paid for a subscription
ncr100 1y 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!
notatoad 1y 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".
1212312523 1y 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.
- bambax 1y ago
  Well that's also the point of building your own library. You get to choose to store only the things you like, and not store/delete things you don't like. Nothing gets pushed to you, you are in charge.
mathieuh 1y ago
I pay £22 per month to rent a seedbox and I would happily pay more.
joules77 1y ago
Use the right browser (not built/funded by ad tech companies) and all Ads can be blocked in 2025.
- oguz-ismail 1y ago
  Those companies own half the internet and they make sure the right browser is always slower and shittier than theirs
JustExAWS 1y 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 1y 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.
al_borland 1y 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.
tambourine_man 1y 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.
LMYahooTFY 1y 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.
caconym_ 1y 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 1y 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.
SilverElfin 1y ago
Where does one safely pirate these days to avoid authorities
- cess11 1y 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 1y ago
    Usenet? Is the alt.binaries hierarchy really still around? how active is it?
    - SSLy 1y ago
      if you have good indexer you have access to almost anything.
    - cess11 1y 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.
paradox460 1y 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 1y 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.
DrNosferatu 1y 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.
alkonaut 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
CrouchEndTiger 1y 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.
eleveriven 1y ago
The saddest part is that there's clearly demand for a service that just works across devices, countries, and catalogs
timsh 1y ago
hey, maybe you’d never heard of https://ororo[.]tv 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).
matwood 1y 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.
a4isms 1y 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. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architecture-astronauts-scare-you/ 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_rootkit_scandal 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.
wombat-man 1y 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.
devinprater 1y ago
Piracy also offers audio description, allowing blind people to enjoy described media, for shows movies that don't have them on streaming services, like Doctor Who. An audio description site offers audio description for the original and revival series. Streaming offers none of that. They also do third-party audio description cause studios can't be bothered. It also offers video games that can be emulated, and with OCR nd AI image descriptions, can be played by blind people. It also offers EBooks in many different formats which can b loaded onto accessible apps or Braille displays and read, without needing apps which may or may not be accessible, but which will always need connection to a phone or computer. And you can read all this offline. So when I find companies, like Big Finish and Graphic Audio, which offer their stuff in downloadable, DRM-free formats, I pay them good for their stuff, because they respect me.
jimbokun 1y ago
No one is offering that service because it would be completely illegal. You can't just offer all the content ever created without the rights holders to that content agreeing. (I expect many will say those rights holders deserve zero compensation because they are large greedy corporations. Conveniently ignoring that piracy also means the creators of the content also get zero compensation for their work.)
- pickleglitch 1y ago
  > No one is offering that service because it would be completely illegal. It would be technically possible to decentralize distribution while still paying rights holders for each download. Laws could be rewritten to accommodate, encourage or even require this. My biggest gripe with streaming services is that you literally can't legally own the content you paid for. You can only "license" it. Amazon, Google, Apple, whoever can revoke your access at any time and there's nothing you can do about it. There are plenty of examples of this already happening. The rights holders are protected, but the consumer is fucked. It's untenable, in my opinion.
McAlpine5892 1y ago
> I didn't even mention that it's free It depends. If you're fine browsing torrent sites, choosing a download, loading in into your client, waiting for it to download, then plugging your laptop into your TV. Sure it's free. If you're out to recreate a better streaming experience then it's certainly not free. Software licenses, server hardware, electricity costs, Usenet access, etc. Not to mention the time/effort to getting everything running so smoothly to the point that it is effortless to request and then watch. I mention this because for a certain crowd (myself and likely many people on HN) it's not about being free. It's about not having to fight crappy software. Or not paying for the privilege to have ads shoved down your throat and being tracked. Not needing to remember which app Mr. Robot is currently on or having it suddenly vanish due to some licensing expiration. The list goes on. Do I still pay for content instead of the tools to circumvent it? Sure! My city has a huge video rental store. It's super fun to go browse, find weird stuff, and help out a local business. The owner(s) are clearly huge movie nerds and seem to have spent a good amount of their earnings on some very cool movie props they put in the store. I love it.
Mabusto 1y ago
I have a Plex/Radarr/Sonarr setup on my home server. I've made a landing page so it's extra easy for my parents and friends to add media. It's been really wonderful, everyone knows everyone by one degree of separation (me) and are adding to the library like a sort of group project. You can just hop on and see a somewhat currated library in the sense that someone you'll probably run into IRL thought this was worth watching. So just to add to your point, you can't get this with a streaming service.

galleywest200 1y 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.

yunwal 1y ago
Physical media has arbitrary device limitations.
- black_puppydog 1y 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 1y 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.
noselasd 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
    They still exist and now are free. They’re called “public libraries”.
crote 1y 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 1y ago
  And driving the price up for the consumer for the anti-consumer tech licencing fees.
- account42 1y ago
  A lot of effort has been wasted, thanks to MakeMKV+libredrive making ripping easy.

wrasee 1y 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.

franciscop 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.

8fingerlouie 1y 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.

kaliqt 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
    Thanks to 3D printing this is starting to become reality and not just science fiction.
  - cammikebrown 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.

DHRicoF 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
  - phkahler 1y 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 1y 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.

hbn 1y 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

ethersteeds 1y ago
Fair to be upset. Just noting that has been happening for about the whole history of televised comedy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smothers_Brothers_Comedy_Hour#Controversies_and_cancellation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smothers_Brothers_Comedy...
l72 1y 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.
- macNchz 1y 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.

chongli 1y 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.

greazy 1y ago
Wow. I thought it was impossible to watch the original release of star wars. I need to hunt this down.
- nosioptar 1y ago
  There's also a DVD release of the theatrical versions. Usually goes for $50-75 for OG trilogy.
  - LeifCarrotson 1y ago
    DVDs are 480i, the parent comment described far higher quality than DVD.
    - pezezin 1y 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 1y 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.

thaumasiotes 1y 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.

jfghi 1y ago

Also doesn’t track user and send a bunch of telemetry

vgb2k18 1y ago
Except for our ip address, timestamp and torrent metadata https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com
- wiredpancake 1y ago
  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 1y 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 1y ago
    I was going to say.. does not seem to show much. That said, fun idea and very privacy inspiring.
- ncr100 1y 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.

marak830 1y 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.

djtango 1y 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 1y ago
From a cursory search, there are browser extensions to display your own subtitles on sites like netflix. At least for firefox.
unsignedint 1y 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.
- 1y ago

wingworks 1y 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.

molszanski 1y 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 1y 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!
- molszanski 1y ago
  Same. I am just tired of buying a movie and then torrenting it 5 min later. Once even bought twice on two different platforms. Still broken languages. It is not that hard. WTF.

daseiner1 1y ago

Plex is phenomenal software

trenchpilgrim 1y ago
Jellyfin is shockingly good now also
- bombcar 1y ago
  Jellyfin + Infuse is so easy a baby can use it
chasing0entropy 1y 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.

pluc 1y 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.

bradbeattie 1y ago
It's a shame https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_P.... was never applied to streaming services.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
john01dav 1y ago
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.

getcrunk 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
  I think the point was that streaming services freak out if you connect from a disapproved IP address.

zaptheimpaler 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
  Amusingly if your have MakeMKV and patched firmware, you can rip them without even blinking.
  - MindSpunk 1y ago
    The firmware flashing story for the drives is even funnier because some of the really common LG bluray drives that get used for ripping UHD blurays doesn't support reading UHD discs "on the box", but if you flash the firmware from a different drive it reads them without skipping a beat. The 4K standard didn't bring any new disc formats to my knowledge. It just started using the higher layer count formats that were already available but the firmware on the cheaper drives wont read them.
  - anonymars 1y ago
    Yep. As is often the case the DRM screws over the paying customers. At that point I certainly wasn't going to give them money for a disc they didn't want me to let me play

izacus 1y ago

Also the content doesn't disappear on vacation, it has subtitles for all languages and audio track is actually high quality.

prepend 1y 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.

birn559 1y 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 1y 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.
  - birn559 1y ago
    They just don't care enough. User experience only needs to be "good enough", mostly determined by the question of users will tend to terminate the subscription without the feature or with the bug.
1980phipsi 1y ago
Plex’s recent changes have been garbage and it’s still better than the experience on a lot of streaming sites.

swat535 1y 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 1y 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.

Melatonic 1y 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

MattDaEskimo 1y 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.

cadamsdotcom 1y ago

And don't forget, not "remastered" with content changed and/or removed.

godelski 1y 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.

account42 1y ago
Or more generally: the ability to use a video player of your choice, which can have whatever features and interface that you want.
Galaxeblaffer 1y ago
[flagged]
- kryptn 1y ago
  Mind elaborating?
  - throwaway290 1y ago
    "Look, doing something illegal offers a lot of benefits for me! I must be a genius"

Der_Einzige 1y ago

[flagged]

tombert 1y 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.

matheusmoreira 1y 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.

PKop 1y ago

- Not having to watch ads after you've already paid for a subscription

ncr100 1y 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!

notatoad 1y 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".

1212312523 1y 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.

bambax 1y ago
Well that's also the point of building your own library. You get to choose to store only the things you like, and not store/delete things you don't like. Nothing gets pushed to you, you are in charge.

mathieuh 1y ago

I pay £22 per month to rent a seedbox and I would happily pay more.

joules77 1y ago

Use the right browser (not built/funded by ad tech companies) and all Ads can be blocked in 2025.

oguz-ismail 1y ago
Those companies own half the internet and they make sure the right browser is always slower and shittier than theirs

JustExAWS 1y 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 1y 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.

al_borland 1y 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.

tambourine_man 1y 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.

LMYahooTFY 1y 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.

caconym_ 1y 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 1y 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.

SilverElfin 1y ago

Where does one safely pirate these days to avoid authorities

cess11 1y 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 1y ago
  Usenet? Is the alt.binaries hierarchy really still around? how active is it?
  - SSLy 1y ago
    if you have good indexer you have access to almost anything.
  - cess11 1y 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.

paradox460 1y 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 1y 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.

DrNosferatu 1y 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.

alkonaut 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.

CrouchEndTiger 1y 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.

eleveriven 1y ago

The saddest part is that there's clearly demand for a service that just works across devices, countries, and catalogs

timsh 1y ago

hey, maybe you’d never heard of https://ororo[.]tv 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).

matwood 1y 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.

a4isms 1y 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. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architecture-astronauts-scare-you/ 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_rootkit_scandal 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.

wombat-man 1y 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.

devinprater 1y ago

Piracy also offers audio description, allowing blind people to enjoy described media, for shows movies that don't have them on streaming services, like Doctor Who. An audio description site offers audio description for the original and revival series. Streaming offers none of that. They also do third-party audio description cause studios can't be bothered. It also offers video games that can be emulated, and with OCR nd AI image descriptions, can be played by blind people. It also offers EBooks in many different formats which can b loaded onto accessible apps or Braille displays and read, without needing apps which may or may not be accessible, but which will always need connection to a phone or computer. And you can read all this offline. So when I find companies, like Big Finish and Graphic Audio, which offer their stuff in downloadable, DRM-free formats, I pay them good for their stuff, because they respect me.

jimbokun 1y ago

No one is offering that service because it would be completely illegal. You can't just offer all the content ever created without the rights holders to that content agreeing. (I expect many will say those rights holders deserve zero compensation because they are large greedy corporations. Conveniently ignoring that piracy also means the creators of the content also get zero compensation for their work.)

pickleglitch 1y ago
> No one is offering that service because it would be completely illegal. It would be technically possible to decentralize distribution while still paying rights holders for each download. Laws could be rewritten to accommodate, encourage or even require this. My biggest gripe with streaming services is that you literally can't legally own the content you paid for. You can only "license" it. Amazon, Google, Apple, whoever can revoke your access at any time and there's nothing you can do about it. There are plenty of examples of this already happening. The rights holders are protected, but the consumer is fucked. It's untenable, in my opinion.

McAlpine5892 1y ago

> I didn't even mention that it's free It depends. If you're fine browsing torrent sites, choosing a download, loading in into your client, waiting for it to download, then plugging your laptop into your TV. Sure it's free. If you're out to recreate a better streaming experience then it's certainly not free. Software licenses, server hardware, electricity costs, Usenet access, etc. Not to mention the time/effort to getting everything running so smoothly to the point that it is effortless to request and then watch. I mention this because for a certain crowd (myself and likely many people on HN) it's not about being free. It's about not having to fight crappy software. Or not paying for the privilege to have ads shoved down your throat and being tracked. Not needing to remember which app Mr. Robot is currently on or having it suddenly vanish due to some licensing expiration. The list goes on. Do I still pay for content instead of the tools to circumvent it? Sure! My city has a huge video rental store. It's super fun to go browse, find weird stuff, and help out a local business. The owner(s) are clearly huge movie nerds and seem to have spent a good amount of their earnings on some very cool movie props they put in the store. I love it.

Mabusto 1y ago

I have a Plex/Radarr/Sonarr setup on my home server. I've made a landing page so it's extra easy for my parents and friends to add media. It's been really wonderful, everyone knows everyone by one degree of separation (me) and are adding to the library like a sort of group project. You can just hop on and see a somewhat currated library in the sense that someone you'll probably run into IRL thought this was worth watching. So just to add to your point, you can't get this with a streaming service.