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In my circle, piracy is making a comeback. We're tired of having to hunt down streaming services, and be extorted for hundreds of euro a month, just to see ads

In my circle, piracy is making a comeback. We're tired of having to hunt down streaming services, and be extorted for hundreds of euro a month, just to see ads for their own programs. Streaming was fun for a while, but as always these greedy execs are ruining it.

timmg 1y ago
> Streaming was fun for a while, but as always these greedy execs are ruining it. I've been doing a lot more digital purchasing. Like movies and TV shows. I know there is some risk to the services shutting down. But Disney's MoviesAnywhere mitigates that some. I typically buy stuff when it is on sale. Generally a digital movie is (way) cheaper than a single ticket at a theater. And I've kinda built a decent sized library where I usually can find something to watch. And, generall, my library is way better than Netflix at any given time. (Though I still have a couple(!) streaming subscriptions...)
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- gchamonlive 1y ago
  > digital purchasing That's an oxymoron if you can't have a local copy
giancarlostoro 1y ago
Just let me buy an MP4 legally for $5 and I will buy every movie.
- jll29 1y ago
  This is a good point. I paid many movies on iTunes, and there's no way to access that content anymore, certaily not from my Linux (main) machines. Also, people who "bought" 1984 on Amazon only to see it disappear from their Kindle will not have been amused. Nobody likes to have things they spend money on cluttered across 20+ services with changing subscription fees and licensing terms. It's a mess.
  - giancarlostoro 1y ago
    Check out Moviesanywhere lets you sync itunes movies to Google, and other providers including moviesanywhere itself. Its owned by the movie industry iirc so totally legit. Not sure if it will help but it sucks losing an entire movie library otherwise.
- ac29 1y ago
  Hell, I'd be happy to pay full price to have this option. All my devices run Linux and apparently there is no amount of money that will let me stream paid content above 480p.
  - fxtentacle 1y ago
    Maybe we'll soon see another round of "piracy as a paid service", just like Napster and the beginnings of Spotify.
    - deaux 1y ago
      That industry is still worth billions today. IPTV being the biggest one, then there's the debrid sites.
    - plastic_bag 1y ago
      That never went away. You still have tons of debrid services.
      - bacchusracine 1y ago
        Shhhhhhhh....
  - mixmastamyk 1y ago
    Netflix does 720p and kanopy too, maybe some at 1080p. Need to install widevine.
  - giancarlostoro 1y ago
    Hell, sell me BluRays that just contain an "unprotected" MP4 file in them, and I'll pay a little extra if I'm allowed to copy it as much as I want. I promise I wont share my files with anyone else, unless they're over my house to watch a movie together. I would go back to buying movies.
- tmtvl 1y ago
  I'd buy 720p MP4s for $20, though my tastes in passive visual entertainment are rather niche.
- titusjohnson 1y ago
  We need mandatory licensing. It worked for Radio, it can work for Streaming. There's no reason Netflix and Hulu couldn't both have ALL media available. Then they could actually compete on features and capabilities, not on media catalog.
benbristow 1y ago
Too many services nowadays. Was fine when it was just Netflix, had mostly everything, no ads, full quality. Nowadays Netflix price has gone up, additional plans for 4K/no-ads, anti-account sharing and less content as content now has gone to Amazon/Disney+/Hulu/Discovery+/Paramount+/Peacock/HBO etc. etc. Even if you subscribed to them all you'd still not have everything. Sailing the seas, you get everything for free or for a couple dollars a month for a more premium experience. Time for change.
- Barbing 1y ago
  Higher price, 1080p cap, no account sharing… that’s one thing. But the content issue is just so dumb (and I’m not blaming Netflix). I suppose next we will have a new streaming service for each film and show.
  - CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
    Let me pay $0.1 for each episode I watch, make everything available and route to the right entity that should be paid and then offer one cross-platform client that everyone pooled their efforts into. And since we're dreaming, make it a open collaboration with a FOSS client too. I'd predict most of the piracy would again disappear quickly as long as it's better, faster and has virtually everything people wanna watch. Basically replicate what Spotify did, but more open, so closer to what Grooveshark tried to do I guess.
    - benbristow 1y ago
      Grooveshark, that's a name I've not heard in a while... But even Spotify are putting the price up this year. I bet if something like that happened, it'd quickly soar to $0.2 an episode in the next year, then slowly creep up more and more.
      - CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
        > I bet if something like that happened, it'd quickly soar to $0.2 an episode in the next year, then slowly creep up more and more Yeah probably, until they find the point where more people leave because it's too expensive than they'll earn by raising prices, then they'll oscillate or find a new direction. Isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work?
TechSquidTV 1y ago
I pirated for many years until Netflix had everything when I was in high school. Roughly around the time I got a job I stopped pirating games and bought everything on Steam. There is still some annoyance with other launchers besides Steam but, I endure. Its been a long time now but probably around when South Park left Netflix, I started pirating again. Now I have a massive Plex server and home lab dedicated to piracy. AND I STILL PAY ~$20/m for Usenet lol.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
  > probably around when South Park left Netflix, I started pirating again Unrelated, but fun example as South Park is probably the only show on TV that also let people watch the entire show (-latest seasons it seems) for free online! https://www.southparkstudios.com/seasons/south-park https://www.southparkstudios.com/seasons/south-park Been like that (in many places) for many many years at this point too :)
  - crtasm 1y ago
    Depends where you are, I only see short clips on there.
  - justinclift 1y ago
    > let people watch the entire show Isn't that only for people in the US?
    - CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
      I lived in three different countries in my life, and neither of them have been the US, but all of them have apparently had free South Park episodes available to them :) I don't know if that website works/shows full episodes in the US, currently I'm in a EU country and everything except the last two seasons seems available.
- ssl-3 1y ago
  Why so much? Plex is a pretty light-weight system as long as transcoding is avoided or it has hardware transcoding available to use. And wrangling Usenet is a fairly simple affair on vaguely modern PC hardware, too. So all of that stuff runs in the background on the same desktop Linux box that I also use for everything else. Am I doing it wrong?
dmix 1y ago
I also started torrenting again after I got tired of the quality of streaming content. But I still use Youtube all the time.
wsatb 1y ago
Yep. Piracy getting popular is the market telling you something is seriously wrong. The system is currently broken with tens of services each coming in at $10+ per month (and seemingly increasing every quarter).
zingababba 1y ago
For me personally piracy made a comeback when everyone memory-holed "The Speech" episode from IT Crowd. I had even paid for it on a separate platform when Amazon removed it, only to find the platform I paid for it on removed it also. Say what you will about Graham Lineham, I still think it's one of the funniest IT crowd episodes, on par with "The Work Outing". I'd rather not have media I personally enjoy rug-pulled from me in this manner.
- Melonai 1y ago
  Yeah Graham Linehan was a great comedy writer (past tense because I don't think he's writing more, not that he is a horrible writer now), and even though IT Crowd had some really weird episodes towards the end, it's really interesting to see how much his views shifted (in my biased opinion, for the worse) after the show was done. For people not in the know, Linehan is nowadays a very outspoken voice against "transgenderism", specifically in regards to trans women, and is quite close to the J.K. Rowling sphere of influence. He seems to have given up a lot to end up where he's now. Now with IT Crowd, it's fascinating that there are the typical early 2000s trans jokes, what with the trans woman getting into a relationship with Douglas because he misheard her saying "I used to be a man", for "I used to be from Iran", after which Douglas and the trans woman get into a fist fight together. This is the episode "The Speech" that the parent is referring to. It's pulled from circulations over allegations of transphobia, but really this wasn't at all abnormal for the time, and there were lots of shows with jokes that, although maybe less physical, were far more cruel to trans women (trans men of course, never really coming up at all, but that's another story). I remember a tweet that called out Linehan for this episode at the time, and he apologized with genuine understanding, no cruelty behind it. That's not something I could ever imagine him doing now. It's a shame in my opinion, I think IT Crowd is one of the better comedy shows of it's time and I don't know if he'll be able to write it now as he used to, as with any deeply held political belief it does seep into the work itself, sometimes making it better, sometimes ruining it, though I will probably not watch anything Linehan will create in the future, sadly.
  - pixxel 1y ago
    [dead]
freefaler 1y ago
I'm waiting for TorrentCoin to pay/earn while you're watching/seeding to occur and then the pirating will become profitable and open the flood of dedicated for profit pirates from less regulated parts of the world. When this happens (it's sorta happening right now with Real Debrid & etc...) there will be a napster moment for movies and streaming.
wilg 1y ago
It's not extortion for them to charge money for you to watch TV shows, at historically low prices.
toasterlovin 1y ago
From the point of view of content owners, an moderate amount of piracy is ideal, since it implies that they’re extracting maximum value from everyone who isn’t pirating.
m463 1y ago
I focus a lot on 4k, bluray and dvds. Shuffling physical media is nice. Small used cd/dvd stores like rasputin are a delight. If life gets busy, you pause without racking up subscription fees. Also - there is something deliberate about choosing and watching a movie physically. You buy it deliberately, and later you play it more deliberately. When I had netflix, I could spend the time to watch a movie doomscrolling through not-that-great stuff to not watch.
hedora 1y ago
I’ll just add that bogus DMCA takedowns (for anticompetitive or censorship goals) are a real burden for many YouTube creators, making supporting their monopoly at least as morally dubious as piracy.
Dig1t 1y ago
Also I think the piracy experience has improved significantly. Jellyfin + Infuse makes the watching experience just as good, if not better than, the streaming apps. You get the same nice scrolling interface, trailers, automatic subtitles and it feels just as good as the Netflix app. Except it’s all the content you actually want, nothing you don’t, and there are no ads.
trymas 1y ago
Also some streaming services are not available at some countries or only sold as some bundles with only particular ISPs or cable providers in that country. Hence you cannot buy it legally even if you wished (to change your ISP).
pjmlp 1y ago
I rather keep myself to a single service, I don't suffer from FOMO, do not need to see everything. If ads get too much, then I just shut it off, books don't have ads, and the local library has enough audio books and DVDs to keep me busy on rainy weekends.
listenallyall 1y ago
I think the explanation is less about greed and more that ad-supported programming is almost always the only viable economic model. Cable worked brilliantly because everybody paid for a full range of channels, sure YOU only watched about 8 of them but other people had a totally different 8. Some channels survived many many years without earning any subscriber fees, just getting the distribution was enough and the ads paid the bills. Anyone thinking that paid streaming subscriptions could entirely replace ad-supported for the long-term, never really thought it all through in my opinion.
mrtksn 1y ago
We used to share passwords but as the streaming services begin the crackdown started cancelling the services and just use pirated movie watching sites. Funny enough, our TCL Smart TV has an UI that shows trending movies etc. and when you click on these it just does a web search with the relevant words to find pirate websites. The browser is also able to detect video streams and asks you if you want to just play the video in the video player. The overall experience is not too far away from the legal streaming platforms. Most new films are a trash anyway, so I don't think I feel moral dilemma either. In fact, if the streaming services go away this will be a net win for the movie industry.
ta1243 1y ago
In the 90s we clamoured for being able to subscribe to what we want rather than a single We broadly have that now. I subscribe to Youtube, Spotify, Netflix, Disney, Apple, Paramount, BBC. Only Apple and BBC force adverts on me, and Apple I'll be cancelling because of it. I keep BBC more out of moral reasons as I think it's a net good for the UK. The monthly cost is very reasonable to me, inflation wise its about the same as I paid for BBC and Sky in the 90s. Last night we wanted to watch the 2012 Les Mis film, £3.50 to rent it from Apple. In the 90s, inflation adjusted, it cost £8 to rent the tape. If I can subscribe to watch something without adverts, I will. If I can buy or rent it, I will. If I can't do that though, then I'll get it elsewhere.
tmaly 1y ago
I love paying the extra for Paramount+ on Amazon Prime to avoid the ads only to find out that does not include Paramount ads.

timmg 1y ago

> Streaming was fun for a while, but as always these greedy execs are ruining it. I've been doing a lot more digital purchasing. Like movies and TV shows. I know there is some risk to the services shutting down. But Disney's MoviesAnywhere mitigates that some. I typically buy stuff when it is on sale. Generally a digital movie is (way) cheaper than a single ticket at a theater. And I've kinda built a decent sized library where I usually can find something to watch. And, generall, my library is way better than Netflix at any given time. (Though I still have a couple(!) streaming subscriptions...)

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
gchamonlive 1y ago
> digital purchasing That's an oxymoron if you can't have a local copy

giancarlostoro 1y ago

Just let me buy an MP4 legally for $5 and I will buy every movie.

jll29 1y ago
This is a good point. I paid many movies on iTunes, and there's no way to access that content anymore, certaily not from my Linux (main) machines. Also, people who "bought" 1984 on Amazon only to see it disappear from their Kindle will not have been amused. Nobody likes to have things they spend money on cluttered across 20+ services with changing subscription fees and licensing terms. It's a mess.
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  Check out Moviesanywhere lets you sync itunes movies to Google, and other providers including moviesanywhere itself. Its owned by the movie industry iirc so totally legit. Not sure if it will help but it sucks losing an entire movie library otherwise.
ac29 1y ago
Hell, I'd be happy to pay full price to have this option. All my devices run Linux and apparently there is no amount of money that will let me stream paid content above 480p.
- fxtentacle 1y ago
  Maybe we'll soon see another round of "piracy as a paid service", just like Napster and the beginnings of Spotify.
  - deaux 1y ago
    That industry is still worth billions today. IPTV being the biggest one, then there's the debrid sites.
  - plastic_bag 1y ago
    That never went away. You still have tons of debrid services.
    - bacchusracine 1y ago
      Shhhhhhhh....
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  Netflix does 720p and kanopy too, maybe some at 1080p. Need to install widevine.
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  Hell, sell me BluRays that just contain an "unprotected" MP4 file in them, and I'll pay a little extra if I'm allowed to copy it as much as I want. I promise I wont share my files with anyone else, unless they're over my house to watch a movie together. I would go back to buying movies.
tmtvl 1y ago
I'd buy 720p MP4s for $20, though my tastes in passive visual entertainment are rather niche.
titusjohnson 1y ago
We need mandatory licensing. It worked for Radio, it can work for Streaming. There's no reason Netflix and Hulu couldn't both have ALL media available. Then they could actually compete on features and capabilities, not on media catalog.

benbristow 1y ago

Too many services nowadays. Was fine when it was just Netflix, had mostly everything, no ads, full quality. Nowadays Netflix price has gone up, additional plans for 4K/no-ads, anti-account sharing and less content as content now has gone to Amazon/Disney+/Hulu/Discovery+/Paramount+/Peacock/HBO etc. etc. Even if you subscribed to them all you'd still not have everything. Sailing the seas, you get everything for free or for a couple dollars a month for a more premium experience. Time for change.

Barbing 1y ago
Higher price, 1080p cap, no account sharing… that’s one thing. But the content issue is just so dumb (and I’m not blaming Netflix). I suppose next we will have a new streaming service for each film and show.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
  Let me pay $0.1 for each episode I watch, make everything available and route to the right entity that should be paid and then offer one cross-platform client that everyone pooled their efforts into. And since we're dreaming, make it a open collaboration with a FOSS client too. I'd predict most of the piracy would again disappear quickly as long as it's better, faster and has virtually everything people wanna watch. Basically replicate what Spotify did, but more open, so closer to what Grooveshark tried to do I guess.
  - benbristow 1y ago
    Grooveshark, that's a name I've not heard in a while... But even Spotify are putting the price up this year. I bet if something like that happened, it'd quickly soar to $0.2 an episode in the next year, then slowly creep up more and more.
    - CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
      > I bet if something like that happened, it'd quickly soar to $0.2 an episode in the next year, then slowly creep up more and more Yeah probably, until they find the point where more people leave because it's too expensive than they'll earn by raising prices, then they'll oscillate or find a new direction. Isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work?

TechSquidTV 1y ago

I pirated for many years until Netflix had everything when I was in high school. Roughly around the time I got a job I stopped pirating games and bought everything on Steam. There is still some annoyance with other launchers besides Steam but, I endure. Its been a long time now but probably around when South Park left Netflix, I started pirating again. Now I have a massive Plex server and home lab dedicated to piracy. AND I STILL PAY ~$20/m for Usenet lol.

CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
> probably around when South Park left Netflix, I started pirating again Unrelated, but fun example as South Park is probably the only show on TV that also let people watch the entire show (-latest seasons it seems) for free online! https://www.southparkstudios.com/seasons/south-park https://www.southparkstudios.com/seasons/south-park Been like that (in many places) for many many years at this point too :)
- crtasm 1y ago
  Depends where you are, I only see short clips on there.
- justinclift 1y ago
  > let people watch the entire show Isn't that only for people in the US?
  - CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
    I lived in three different countries in my life, and neither of them have been the US, but all of them have apparently had free South Park episodes available to them :) I don't know if that website works/shows full episodes in the US, currently I'm in a EU country and everything except the last two seasons seems available.
ssl-3 1y ago
Why so much? Plex is a pretty light-weight system as long as transcoding is avoided or it has hardware transcoding available to use. And wrangling Usenet is a fairly simple affair on vaguely modern PC hardware, too. So all of that stuff runs in the background on the same desktop Linux box that I also use for everything else. Am I doing it wrong?

dmix 1y ago

I also started torrenting again after I got tired of the quality of streaming content. But I still use Youtube all the time.

wsatb 1y ago

Yep. Piracy getting popular is the market telling you something is seriously wrong. The system is currently broken with tens of services each coming in at $10+ per month (and seemingly increasing every quarter).

zingababba 1y ago

For me personally piracy made a comeback when everyone memory-holed "The Speech" episode from IT Crowd. I had even paid for it on a separate platform when Amazon removed it, only to find the platform I paid for it on removed it also. Say what you will about Graham Lineham, I still think it's one of the funniest IT crowd episodes, on par with "The Work Outing". I'd rather not have media I personally enjoy rug-pulled from me in this manner.

Melonai 1y ago
Yeah Graham Linehan was a great comedy writer (past tense because I don't think he's writing more, not that he is a horrible writer now), and even though IT Crowd had some really weird episodes towards the end, it's really interesting to see how much his views shifted (in my biased opinion, for the worse) after the show was done. For people not in the know, Linehan is nowadays a very outspoken voice against "transgenderism", specifically in regards to trans women, and is quite close to the J.K. Rowling sphere of influence. He seems to have given up a lot to end up where he's now. Now with IT Crowd, it's fascinating that there are the typical early 2000s trans jokes, what with the trans woman getting into a relationship with Douglas because he misheard her saying "I used to be a man", for "I used to be from Iran", after which Douglas and the trans woman get into a fist fight together. This is the episode "The Speech" that the parent is referring to. It's pulled from circulations over allegations of transphobia, but really this wasn't at all abnormal for the time, and there were lots of shows with jokes that, although maybe less physical, were far more cruel to trans women (trans men of course, never really coming up at all, but that's another story). I remember a tweet that called out Linehan for this episode at the time, and he apologized with genuine understanding, no cruelty behind it. That's not something I could ever imagine him doing now. It's a shame in my opinion, I think IT Crowd is one of the better comedy shows of it's time and I don't know if he'll be able to write it now as he used to, as with any deeply held political belief it does seep into the work itself, sometimes making it better, sometimes ruining it, though I will probably not watch anything Linehan will create in the future, sadly.
- pixxel 1y ago
  [dead]

freefaler 1y ago

I'm waiting for TorrentCoin to pay/earn while you're watching/seeding to occur and then the pirating will become profitable and open the flood of dedicated for profit pirates from less regulated parts of the world. When this happens (it's sorta happening right now with Real Debrid & etc...) there will be a napster moment for movies and streaming.

wilg 1y ago

It's not extortion for them to charge money for you to watch TV shows, at historically low prices.

toasterlovin 1y ago

From the point of view of content owners, an moderate amount of piracy is ideal, since it implies that they’re extracting maximum value from everyone who isn’t pirating.

m463 1y ago

I focus a lot on 4k, bluray and dvds. Shuffling physical media is nice. Small used cd/dvd stores like rasputin are a delight. If life gets busy, you pause without racking up subscription fees. Also - there is something deliberate about choosing and watching a movie physically. You buy it deliberately, and later you play it more deliberately. When I had netflix, I could spend the time to watch a movie doomscrolling through not-that-great stuff to not watch.

hedora 1y ago

I’ll just add that bogus DMCA takedowns (for anticompetitive or censorship goals) are a real burden for many YouTube creators, making supporting their monopoly at least as morally dubious as piracy.

Dig1t 1y ago

Also I think the piracy experience has improved significantly. Jellyfin + Infuse makes the watching experience just as good, if not better than, the streaming apps. You get the same nice scrolling interface, trailers, automatic subtitles and it feels just as good as the Netflix app. Except it’s all the content you actually want, nothing you don’t, and there are no ads.

trymas 1y ago

Also some streaming services are not available at some countries or only sold as some bundles with only particular ISPs or cable providers in that country. Hence you cannot buy it legally even if you wished (to change your ISP).

pjmlp 1y ago

I rather keep myself to a single service, I don't suffer from FOMO, do not need to see everything. If ads get too much, then I just shut it off, books don't have ads, and the local library has enough audio books and DVDs to keep me busy on rainy weekends.

listenallyall 1y ago

I think the explanation is less about greed and more that ad-supported programming is almost always the only viable economic model. Cable worked brilliantly because everybody paid for a full range of channels, sure YOU only watched about 8 of them but other people had a totally different 8. Some channels survived many many years without earning any subscriber fees, just getting the distribution was enough and the ads paid the bills. Anyone thinking that paid streaming subscriptions could entirely replace ad-supported for the long-term, never really thought it all through in my opinion.

mrtksn 1y ago

We used to share passwords but as the streaming services begin the crackdown started cancelling the services and just use pirated movie watching sites. Funny enough, our TCL Smart TV has an UI that shows trending movies etc. and when you click on these it just does a web search with the relevant words to find pirate websites. The browser is also able to detect video streams and asks you if you want to just play the video in the video player. The overall experience is not too far away from the legal streaming platforms. Most new films are a trash anyway, so I don't think I feel moral dilemma either. In fact, if the streaming services go away this will be a net win for the movie industry.

ta1243 1y ago

In the 90s we clamoured for being able to subscribe to what we want rather than a single We broadly have that now. I subscribe to Youtube, Spotify, Netflix, Disney, Apple, Paramount, BBC. Only Apple and BBC force adverts on me, and Apple I'll be cancelling because of it. I keep BBC more out of moral reasons as I think it's a net good for the UK. The monthly cost is very reasonable to me, inflation wise its about the same as I paid for BBC and Sky in the 90s. Last night we wanted to watch the 2012 Les Mis film, £3.50 to rent it from Apple. In the 90s, inflation adjusted, it cost £8 to rent the tape. If I can subscribe to watch something without adverts, I will. If I can buy or rent it, I will. If I can't do that though, then I'll get it elsewhere.

tmaly 1y ago

I love paying the extra for Paramount+ on Amazon Prime to avoid the ads only to find out that does not include Paramount ads.