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.
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.
This is a case study in why competitive markets are important in general.
Copyright is a government-granted monopoly but the monopoly is hard to enforce. It works because most people actually want to support the creators, not because DRM is effective or anything like that.
So you have the uncommon situation in which a monopoly (the copyright holder) is operating in parallel to a competitive black market for content distribution (pirates). And then the competitive market -- even though it has to operate underground and makes hardly any profit -- provides the better experience.
Lesson for anyone who thinks market consolidation doesn't lead to consumer harm.
Until recently, 3. (poor connection) has been a huge issue for me and streaming services. When there is a download/watch later, I sigh with relief.
7. is only sort-of an issue, IMHO. Anything that is pirated is usually fairly benign content and I don't care if someone knows how many times I've watched Idiocracy. I just wish I could know how many times I've watched it too.
I would add: Piracy offers the ability to remember content that isn't popular enough to remain in streaming services. I just searched "Big Trouble in Little China" and Google Play wants me to pay $3.79 to rent it or the full original price to purchase it. Tell me, does the original cast get any of that or is it just adding pocket change to Google's coffers?
1. The hardware you buy for these activities, has still residual value after 1, 2, 3 year. Unlike the streaming service you pay for.
2. Its cheap to upgrade / expand over time (if its not a all in one solution)
3. It opens a door to not just store movies/music/images, but as emulator, streaming service, or game streaming to one or multiple.
4. The content will not arbitrarily vanish.
5. Your bookmarks / last viewed / ... will not arbitrarily vanish. Do not get me started on this and how annoying it can be when a services removes content!
6. It serves not only as a device for "linux isos" or other gray zones but also as a legit backup of your own personal data.
7. Saves you from needing "cloud" storage or other cloud services.
8. Can be enhanced with programs that offer image conversion, pdf conversion etc, all private!
9. Run your own chat server for the family, no US/EU "we want to know what you are saying" issues.
10. Can act like your own VPN, to route data from your phone or other devices outside your home.
11. Provides service if you are in area's with horrible internet connection with its ability to "cache isos" at night slowly.
12. Your control over the media means you can stream 4k to your PC. Netflix kuchkuch ... No, its not 4k.
13. You can gain the FULL bitrate of the media. You do not get a washed down version of the supposed media based upon how busy a streaming service their servers are or other limitations.
14. It can be used for so many other activities like programming.
15. Did i mention home automatization?
And so much more ... People are probably doing things with NAS setups that i can not even think about.
Your not investing into a machine for "illegal" stuff, your investing into a machine that frees you as the end user from all those cloud, streaming, and other services their lackluster service. And then provides all the added benefits on top, that a 24/7 running PC can provide.
Lets also not forget the future where LLM's are a thing. Having your own open source LLM that runs at home, can be a major benefit.
But ... it does require more knowledge, especially as you step up beyond simple storage. So that is the real downside, not the money, the time and knowledge buildup.
GOG used to have a small selection of DRM-free movies that you could buy to download and that would then make all those things possible to do in a way that would be legal or at least able to do locally in a way that would have a zero risk of being discovered even if it violated some EULA. Announcement from 2014:
Sadly http://www.gog.com/movies now redirects to http://www.gog.com/games and the movies link that used to be on the front page is gone. Based on a comment in that announcement thread it looks like the movies were silently removed already back in 2023. I only noticed it now. They never seemed to really add any new movies and the existing ones were mostly game-related documentaries.
Also the trust that your favorite music will still be available to you if the streaming service goes bankrupt or cancels its content licensing deal or decides to jack up prices unaffordably or makes its player incompatible with your OS or introduces a service-ending software bug.
I think my favorite thing of not even piracy, just ripping my DVDs, is the ability to watch a random episode of a show. There's some shows like The Simpsons that I don't want to watch in production order any more, nor do I want to manually select. Now I just tap some buttons in Kodi and it randomly picks a recently unwatched episode.
In addition to these and what you replied to, there is also the ability to downgrade the video quality in case you do not need the highest quality (e.g. in case you want to reduce the disk space and bandwidth requirements), and you might have a better UI (and otherwise use your own implementation of various software).
About subtitles, something else I sometimes want to fix is adding an outline to the text and adding a translucent background (many use a opaque background (making it hard to see the picture) or a transparent background (making it hard to see the text)).
You shouldn't need to spend anything like $1k to get yourself going with a simple Jellyfin server running on a $50 TinyMiniMicro and a 4 tb external HDD. $150? 8 months to match Netflix. Substantially less to replace two services.
Funnily enough, ability to watch offline is something the Netflix app for Windows (yes from their app store) lets you do. It is my favorite reason to install Windows apps instead of just using the browser, really handy for a trip when you have a real screen to watch movies from.
Offline watching is a thing with streaming services, too.
Also, there is no reason for a paid streaming service not to implement 1 (but not 1.2), 2, 3 and 4. It's not like these features will affect their bottom line. They just don't see value in implementing and supporting them.
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.
There’s also a number of movies where the best quality publicly available is a pirated rip of an HDTV broadcast from a Malaysian TV network or something similarly odd because the rights holders never released a BD and the official DVD release was a transfer from a crappy VHS or similar.
In cases of TV shows, fans have gone to the lengths of producing the best quality release possible by patching together video, audio, and subtitles from myriad sources, sometimes even splicing individual cuts when their quality varies between sources. It’s so much more effort than you’d see from any official restorations.
The Star Wars project is a bit of an outlier in terms of the insane work and dedication that's gone into it.
However, in the quality-focused corners of online film piracy, it's still pretty routine for people to combine the best features of every retail release available to produce something that's better than what you can get even by just going out and buying a Blu Ray. For example, maybe the best picture quality available anywhere is from a Blu Ray that was released to the German market, but a US Blu Ray release has an extra commentary track, while the best audio track is actually from an old Laserdisc release (crazy but it's happened before).
In the live action world it's pretty rare for a video track or an audio track to be spliced together from multiple sources, though it does happen. But in the anime world it's pretty common and they'll do stuff to fix picture quality issues or localize Japanese text to English on signs or whatever (and they can do it slick enough that you wouldn't even notice).
The most bizarre part of all of this, though, is that people put in all this work only for the communities themselves to be small and fiercely private, meaning it could be hard for most people to actually access the end results (though the popular stuff tends to trickle out). The best place on the Internet to download movies bar none (better than all the major streaming platforms put together) is an invite only site with under 40k members that's extremely difficult to join these days.
That's a bit of an edge case, powered by the absolute, lovely turbo-nerdery of a few dedicated souls. They are called 4K77 / 4K80 versions for people looking for them.
They release better products than trillion dollar corporations.
There are piracy groups out there who are known to source frames from multiple different blu-rays in order to create the best version of a work.
Imagine caring so much about something you compare different releases frame by frame in order to select the best ones so that you can splice them all together to form the highest quality ultimate version of a work.
Meanwhile corporations are perfectly happy shitting out some butchered streaming slop with compression artifacts in 90% black frames.
While that's the best option, there's always AI upscaling and frame gen. These of course won't be as good as native resolution and can sometimes make more errors, but they can make a big difference on low resolutions when you got a big screen.
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
The DnD episode from Community (S2E14) can't be seen on any streaming services because one Asian character wears black makeup while cosplaying as a drow.
There's at least one ALF ('86-90)episode that you can only get the uncensored version via piracy.
(Episode in question is Try to Remember. ALF originally got an electric shock. It quickly got censored in reruns to have ALF slip and hit his head because the network worried kids would get shocked emulating ALF.)
That part really aggravated me. I already pay a hefty premium for Disney/Hulu so the fact that I do not get full experience, because someone thought an episode I pay for with subs is offensive really irks me. I am slowly getting to the point of pulling the plug and each time I see an ad for hulu on disney, I am getting a tiny little bit closer to pissing off wife and making kid cry in one go.
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.
For me, it was when a movie wasn't the way I remembered it. Then I found a pirated copy.
Turned out the 'official' release was heavily edited, with tone, characters, and even some plot had been completely reshaped. I've found this to be increasingly prevalent, and not just in a "made for TV" or "adapted for Flying" type modifications.
This was what made me cancel Netflix 10 years ago.
They decided to remove stuff that cost them nothing to have in their library like Gone with the Wind. I'd never watch it but it was clear then they had decided they would be gatekeepers of what people can and cant watch.
I hate the censorship. But when some groups are willing to kill if you don’t censor then I can’t blame others for not wanting to be martyrs and put their lives on the line for it
This can happen with piracy too. For example, I'm aware of at least one case where the highest quality option for a specific show edited out the gay scenes.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
In the beginning, Netflix was great. Then they became a media company and suddenly EVERYTHING they push on you is THEIR stuff. Gone are the days where you could remember a cool movie and pull it up on Netflix like Fandango or Corvette Summer. I remember going back and watching several seasons of the original Miami Vice back when nobody knew who Michael Mann was.
Not its exactly as you say, you want to watch something but its not on any of the streaming services you're already paying for. I've started to just think of a movie I want to watch, go out to Pirate Bay, download it and then stream it. When I'm done? Delete it.
Its good to know I'm not the only one who has gone back to downloading movies.
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.
Netflix also often only buys the first seasons of an existing show. And of course they love to cancel shows they produce themselves which for me has significantly lowered my loyalty over the years.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This whole thread shows many people don't mind spending time building their own content library and making their own little Netflix on their NAS. I think this is just the beginning.
I have been a happy user of JellyFin for a couple of years. Then when Spotify raised its prices again I realized I mostly listen to the same songs, most if not all I still own the CDs.
So with Navidrome and a couple of Python scripts to transform playlists, I made my own little home Spotify as well (Homify? Hopify?)
Works perfectly. No fees. No ads. No stupid email at the end of the year bragging about all the data Spotify collects and stores about me. Perfect.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
#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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Maybe I'm just lucky with where I've lived, but I've literally never had problems pirating without obfuscating my traffic in any way whatsoever. I've been torrenting since I was a kid, too, and I torrent literally everything you can possibly torrent from software to music.
Do people really get hounded for piracy in other countries?
But you can check out fmhy.net, it's a great resource (unaffiliated, it's just a genuinely great resource for piracy :p)
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.
You have to have real options or people can’t make informed decisions.
I have a background in city planning, and in the US, you’ll constantly hear about how trying to make cities more friendly to pedestrians, bicycles, or public transit is a waste because no one uses it. But the truth is, most people will end up using the system you design. If you build a system just for cars, people will use cars. If you build a city around public transportation, people will happily use it. If you build a walkable city, people will walk.
Streaming services were great back when they were separate from content producers and IP holders.
Once every media company became a streaming company and started using anticompetitive licensing practices in an attempt to drive viewership to their own platforms, the market fractured too much for it to be profitable.
Something smells “prisoner’s dilemma” about it: the best move for any individual streaming service is to have exclusive content (and the best-positioned players to do that are the studios), but when everyone does that, it decreases the overall profit available in the market more than it increases their slice of the pie.
Nah; copyright is a monopoly on specific media/titles. It breaks all of the “market willing to provide” mechanics because there is no free market for Star Wars, it’s Disney or FOAD.
Supply and demand means that corporations attempt to maximise their revenue. If the cost of providing a good service eats into their profits, they will provide a bad service.
This idea that "markets will provide" is eccentric, and obviously empirically wrong.
Markets are there to extract value and reinforce power imbalances. Consumer happiness is reliably at cross purposes with that.
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.
If buying things at the store was as painful as watching stuff on streaming services, and shoplifting was as low risk as torrenting, and my stealing an item didn't make that item disappear from the store, I'd probably do it there too.
I can name at least one country in the European Union in which torrenting copyright content for personal use is legal, people still do very much use spotify and netflix.
Gabe Newell got it right from the very start, piracy is a service problem.
And I thought the problem was (just) limited to fragmentation of complete IPs between services. I'd love for someone in the know to explain how you get to this stage.
It it some kind of hedging strategy by The Pokémon Company to account for the number of different streaming services (thereby actually making the problem worse)? Was there some kind of timed exclusivity deal that's forced them to put different things in different places? Did one of the streaming services come along at a later time to try to undercut the earlier ones but the earlier licencing deals haven't expired? Anything else?
6-13: Prime Video Channels (with 10-13 also available on the Roku Channel)
14-19: Prime Video (with 17-19 also on Netflix)
20-22: Prime Video Channels (and Hulu, and the Roku Channel)
23-25: Prime Video (and Netflix)
So, they're all on Amazon in some sense. I was aware that there was some kind of concept of Prime Video Channels, but when I tried to find an explanation on Amazon's website, I failed.
Following up, "Prime Video Channels" seem to be an Amazon offering in which you have your subscription to a separate video service (the "Channel") billed through Amazon, for "convenience". (And you can also watch their stuff on Amazon's website.) So Pokemon has licensed about half of their series to Amazon, and they reserve the remaining half for people who subscribe to the Pokemon Channel.
>More fragmented
Prime Video has it all which doesn't sound fragmented to me. It seems Prime Video is for old seasons and other services are fine for watching the current iteration of the show.
The problem with Pokémon isn’t that it’s fragmented across streaming services, it’s the anime itself where by Advanced you’re getting enough of the same formulaic bullshit it can drive even a kid crazy. I was that kid.
Except for some slight deviations, such as the beginning of Best Wishes (Black & White), you can put on a sequence of any 10 episodes from any season and it doesn’t matter what streaming service it’s on. By the end of the episode, Team Rocket is blasting off again.
What's the problem with that exactly?
Legacy catalogs having some incomplete coverage?
That the Pokemon Company can't make a good list if pressed?
These are all not new or streaming Problems
The gist is here, that the complete first four season are on YouTube for free and the 5th is being added as we speak? (200+ episodes)
with a sample size of one, there is no obvious problem.
presumably any given household wants to watch more than just pokemon, though and this is where things become unstuck. suddenly, to satisfy the demand for the range of things people in the household want to watch they are forced to make subscriptions to multiple services, perhaps sometimes for one-offs.
scale this up, and you have a population forced to make multiple subscriptions to multiple streaming providers to satisfy their demand for content.
or people just choose a couple of them and that's that. either way it seems that there is a symbiotic relationship between the content authors and the streaming companies.
but wait, read the page carefully, multiple seasons of the same thing spread across different streamers forcing consumers to subscribe to multiple streamers .... and now we are into Phoebus cartel territory.
I remember a few years ago when our niece came to visit. One evening, we started watching a movie on Netflix together.
We only made it halfway before bedtime, but since she was coming back in two weeks, we decided to save the rest for her next visit.
Two weeks later, she returned, bouncing with excitement to finally see how the story ended. We opened Netflix, ready to hit play - and lo and behold… the movie had vanished from the catalog.
> She opens Netflix, and ⅔ of the films have now "expired"
I have given up saving Netflix titles in advance of travel because this has happened to me too many times. What is bizarre is you can only "download" them a certain number of times, despite being expired. So I now cannot download some shows ever again.
Nobody loses money if I cache a Netflix show to my device. The limitation is bizarre.
I tried to download something from Netflix recently. The download wouldn’t process. It got stuck partway.
Not an issue, I’ll just delete it and redownload.
Nope. There’s a limit to the number of downloads on some content. I wasted mine trying to get the download to even work.
Indeed. Recently we purchased season 1 of a reasonably popular U.S. produced show via Apple TV. When played, it is available only in dubbed French in our region (Canada.) None of the info available beforehand said anything about this. Guess where I obtained the subsequent seasons? I will pay for content but not if you lie, or make me jump through ridiculous hoops.
That reminds me of some passengers I sat on a flight next to once.. they tried to watch something on their iPad, but because we were about to depart from a country foreign to theirs, it got region-blocked...
Not that I pitied them, they were obnoxiously late and boarded with 5 bags (the stiff rectangular bags boutique stores have) of shopping...
Why make it complicated? Service means the user experience. If the user needs to do anything other than click pay click play, you done goofed, simple as that.
This is what did it for me too. Why would I pay for a crappy UX and ads? But all these companies need numbers to keep going up, so they keep tightening the screws.
> "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem"
Maybe so, but if media companies invested in fixing the service problems, the pricing problems would remain, and those keep people away just as effectively, so they're not going to do it.
People don't want to pay what the media companies want to charge, at any level of service.
I pay an ungodly combined amount of money to various streaming services, but must still occasionally resort to TPB. Which "just works", unlike said streaming services.
Within reason, it's not a money problem (within reason; media conglomerates would love for me to sell my kidney in order to watch their premium shows, but that's not going to happen).I would rather just pay for the problem to go away, but Netflix, Disney et al just disagree.
Not necessarily true, as the success of streaming shows. The problem comes when the unbounded greed of the billionaires in charge leads them to inflate prices beyond their customers' ability and willingness to pay.
Service problems are usually pricing problems. Advert policy is because people refuse to pay more so to make more money they put in ads. Fragmentation by content/region is also because each service is trying to spend as little as possible on content. If you want to watch unlock video content youd have to pay $100+ a month and people refuse to do that.
Love how this same quote was used in celebration of streaming back in Netflix’s early days as the solution, and now to show the new industry found on those very same ideas as the problem.
Gabe Newell, founder of the largest video game DRM company. Find a way for anyone to download video games for free without risking malware or compromising online play, and see how many people still pay $60 for a new game on Steam.
More importantly, Gabe is fundamentally right. I'm subscribed to most available streaming services in my country, and when I still cannot find what I want due to obscure reasons (e.g. region locked, or Disney decided to not make it available anywhere for who knows which reason), you can be pretty sure I'll be sailing the seas of the corsair.
People can and do download games for free all the time and Steam is still there. People pay for Spotify when music has been openly free since Napster was the zeitgeist.
Ehh, while I agree its 70% about having a way more user-friendly experience, theres still 30% which is that the content needs to justify the price. And HBO and Netflix have missed that mark in my opinion.
I cancelled HBO after their price increase a year or two ago after being pretty happy with their service for a long time (though also the service quality had gotten worse). Too many people share my netflix for me to cancel it.
I actually think pirating encourages a healthier approach to watching TV/movies. I've fully made the switch to pirating instead of subscribing to any streaming services, and it's led to me thinking more critically about what I want to spend time downloading and watching rather than just flipping mindlessly through endless amounts of readily available garbage on a streaming service.
I do still have Kanopy though, which is great for me but obviously depends on your library.
For me, I only seek out media I plan to actually watch. Rather than flipping through what is available and choosing from there. Currently it is stargate sg1/atlantis what I am watching.
Also, a lot of movies/series are only available dubbed here. (I really effing hate "Sie" in dubbed media. So much so, that it's one of the major reasons I go for subbed in english, at most)
When i first used netflix at my friends house, I immediately used the search bar and looked for Jurassic Park... what kind of movie service doesn't have JP, i thought. It must be around 10 years ago, and I never used it once afterwards.
Then don’t be a hoarder and only get what you want to watch
I have my watchlist hooked up to *arr so it pulls that stuff automatically. Once I watched it and it’s not something I want to show to others, I delete it.
> led to me thinking more critically about what I want to spend time downloading and watching rather than just flipping mindlessly through endless amounts of readily available garbage
For me it's a bit different.
I have the *arr stack fully automated (with 22Tb of storage for now maaaaybe it's overkill), for friends and family too.
And the experience is nice because it makes content "crowd sourced". If something is on the server it means someone else purposefully added it, so you can still browse, but it's curated based on your friend/family circle.
But also the automation part can be a bit "mindlessly click download on everything even stuff I probably won't watch", but disk space constraints force you to delete it if nobody's watching.
Radarr and Sonarr are my two favourite pieces of software ever. Together with Plex I get an experience FAR superior to any streaming service. For the record I would be happy to pay for such a service, but they're so greedy they'll never offer such a unified service. Instead they keep making the direct to Netflix content worse. Removing content without any notice. Making the app UX worse, including removing useful reviews from the platform, and making content auto play when browsing. The best example of this clusterfuck is the Pokemon where to watch guide: https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...
I prefer physical media. However, it can sometimes be a chore to start the movie! Each disc is different. Some discs use non-standard methods to access the home menu. Some require that you at least skip past all the previews at the beginning. The worst discs require several minutes of fiddling in addition to finding and inserting the disc before you can watch it. Compare this with double-clicking an mkv and having it just...start.
i wish we could go back to a pre-streaming version of netflix.
the near-infinite library and lack of algorithmic nudging resulted in an era where i had healthy view habits. reasonable levels of screentime and VERY diverse content.
i add so many movies to my queue with the best intentions of watching them someday, but always put them off because something about staring at that endless scroll of options makes me crave something light and simple.
the disk-in-the-mail era was "remember that three-hour subtitled classic film you always said you should watch but haven't? well, today's the day you're watching it." and i always ended up being glad i did.
the streaming era is "ugh, i don't have the mental bandwidth to watch that three hour thing that's been on my queue forever. lets just rewatch some background content to zone out" and i always lament wasting hours of my life in front of the screen.
I was wondering recently whether someone could conceivably start a disk-in-the-mail Netflix again, now that streaming sucks so much and every publisher seems to want their own streaming service. My understanding (possibly wrong, I'm not an expert) is that it's perfectly legal to lend out physical media without any special permission from the publisher under the first-sale doctrine, so it seems like the only way to build a library that has content from many different publishers.
(of course, this could only work as long as publishers keep producing physical media)
Library. I order DVDs to my local library all the time. Maybe your library system is terrible, but if it isn't you certainly can do this. There are hundreds a big wide release films with, effectively, are only available on DVD from a library (legally).
Bonus when I go I can still get that browsing the aisle experience like in an old video store (but in this case I am lucky, my local library has a large DVD / Blu-ray collection to browse)
Before someone comes in and says something moronic (because physical media isn't a VC funded B2B SaaS business), I'd like to remind everyone that Redbox was going strong until Chicken Soup for the Soul bought them. Even in the late 2010s when streaming was really taking off, you could often go down to your local corner store and rent a DVD or BluRay out of a Redbox machine.
The only reason people went to streaming in the first place was that Netflix was cheap and, arguably, a heavily subsidized monopoly in the streaming space.
So yeah, some kind of DVD/BluRay business could very well work in the US and Canada.
I relate to this. Also, I am not the best person in the world, but recently this hit the point where I decided because of these very same thoughts + nudging from my much better partner to donate to NPR, to cancel Netflix and move that money to NPR. Now no more Netflix, which is sort of a relief in ways, and I have to be more intentional about what I download / consume.
For a few years Mubi solved this. They only had 30 movies at a time. Every day the oldest movie left and a new one was added. All well curated and movies you'd remember. No empty calories. Because of the timing it had the same effect as you described. While Mubi is still one of my favorite platforms it now has a regular catalog.
It's no longer as convenient with dozens of streaming services; the streaming bitrate is also subpar, and audio is compressed to the point it feels flat. If you want to be mindful about what you are watching, it will be really hard with Netflix, Prime, and Disney compared to your own media server. When I had a streaming subscription, I was constantly shocked by what was popular in Poland and what people were watching. It took me some time to accept that I am not their target audience.
The quality of shows is also subpar. And there aren’t many shows on Netflix at a given time: Probably 80 things to watch, all categories included (with 70% of overlap in content).
> When I had a streaming subscription, I was constantly shocked by what was popular in Poland and what people were watching. It took me some time to accept that I am not their target audience.
If they were willing to sell movies and tv shows WITHOUT DRM, I’d happily buy what I want and put on my Jellyfin server. I don’t pirate music because I can buy what I want on Bandcamp (and even mainstream music on apple and Amazon without drm).
But since I can’t (and you can’t even find physical media for a lot of things), I feel like I am left with no options.
I am not even trying to get stuff that is recent, as I prefer to wait, especially for tv shows, to finish its run before I decide if it is worth investing my time in.
I mostly go to the library every week and pick up movies and tv shows on Blu-ray and rip them so I can watch them on my schedule. I often delete them afterwards if I feel like they don’t have replay value.
I think Jellyfin also provides a much better interface than any of the streaming apps, and I like to be able to know if I am going to watch them on my theatrical version or some extended version.
> If they were willing to sell movies and tv shows WITHOUT DRM, I’d happily buy what I want
So much this. I take the simple moral position that I won't pirate things I can reasonably buy. That includes almost all music, and almost no movies, TV shows, comedy specials, etc. I still largely avoid pirating things and seek out alternatives instead, but I don't feel bad about it when I do because it's an industry that doesn't consider me a potential customer anyway.
I know this is pedantic but it is so annoying: downloading shows is not piracy. It is totally nuts to conflate unauthorized copying and sharing with the violent act of going on somebody’s boat and killing/threatening them until you loot their stuff.
Calling it piracy was funny during the early Internet when it was all pirate and ninja memes. But really letting them conflate this very minor crime with violence was a big propaganda loss.
No one is conflating piracy with raid boats, killing people and physically stealing items.
Ignoring the nuance is just ignorance and pedantic.
As a matter of fact, most people likely don't even associate piracy with pirates or boats. It's almost universally used to describe obtaining digital content for free.
I think this is the more nuances understanding of the conversation. Using a word associated with violence and theft to describe something like copyright infringement is just over-the-top and ridiculous.
Fair enough, but if you torrent a show - which I assume most people pirating something do - you also share something, unless you explicitly turn off seeding.
Readit News
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.
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.
Copyright is a government-granted monopoly but the monopoly is hard to enforce. It works because most people actually want to support the creators, not because DRM is effective or anything like that.
So you have the uncommon situation in which a monopoly (the copyright holder) is operating in parallel to a competitive black market for content distribution (pirates). And then the competitive market -- even though it has to operate underground and makes hardly any profit -- provides the better experience.
Lesson for anyone who thinks market consolidation doesn't lead to consumer harm.
7. is only sort-of an issue, IMHO. Anything that is pirated is usually fairly benign content and I don't care if someone knows how many times I've watched Idiocracy. I just wish I could know how many times I've watched it too.
I would add: Piracy offers the ability to remember content that isn't popular enough to remain in streaming services. I just searched "Big Trouble in Little China" and Google Play wants me to pay $3.79 to rent it or the full original price to purchase it. Tell me, does the original cast get any of that or is it just adding pocket change to Google's coffers?
1. The hardware you buy for these activities, has still residual value after 1, 2, 3 year. Unlike the streaming service you pay for.
2. Its cheap to upgrade / expand over time (if its not a all in one solution)
3. It opens a door to not just store movies/music/images, but as emulator, streaming service, or game streaming to one or multiple.
4. The content will not arbitrarily vanish.
5. Your bookmarks / last viewed / ... will not arbitrarily vanish. Do not get me started on this and how annoying it can be when a services removes content!
6. It serves not only as a device for "linux isos" or other gray zones but also as a legit backup of your own personal data.
7. Saves you from needing "cloud" storage or other cloud services.
8. Can be enhanced with programs that offer image conversion, pdf conversion etc, all private!
9. Run your own chat server for the family, no US/EU "we want to know what you are saying" issues.
10. Can act like your own VPN, to route data from your phone or other devices outside your home.
11. Provides service if you are in area's with horrible internet connection with its ability to "cache isos" at night slowly.
12. Your control over the media means you can stream 4k to your PC. Netflix kuch kuch ... No, its not 4k.
13. You can gain the FULL bitrate of the media. You do not get a washed down version of the supposed media based upon how busy a streaming service their servers are or other limitations.
14. It can be used for so many other activities like programming.
15. Did i mention home automatization?
And so much more ... People are probably doing things with NAS setups that i can not even think about.
Your not investing into a machine for "illegal" stuff, your investing into a machine that frees you as the end user from all those cloud, streaming, and other services their lackluster service. And then provides all the added benefits on top, that a 24/7 running PC can provide.
Lets also not forget the future where LLM's are a thing. Having your own open source LLM that runs at home, can be a major benefit.
But ... it does require more knowledge, especially as you step up beyond simple storage. So that is the real downside, not the money, the time and knowledge buildup.
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree...
Sadly http://www.gog.com/movies now redirects to http://www.gog.com/games and the movies link that used to be on the front page is gone. Based on a comment in that announcement thread it looks like the movies were silently removed already back in 2023. I only noticed it now. They never seemed to really add any new movies and the existing ones were mostly game-related documentaries.
About subtitles, something else I sometimes want to fix is adding an outline to the text and adding a translucent background (many use a opaque background (making it hard to see the picture) or a transparent background (making it hard to see the text)).
Also, there is no reason for a paid streaming service not to implement 1 (but not 1.2), 2, 3 and 4. It's not like these features will affect their bottom line. They just don't see value in implementing and supporting them.
1.4 Ability to edit the video so your 10 year old can watch Top Secret! without gross anal sex jokes
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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.
In cases of TV shows, fans have gone to the lengths of producing the best quality release possible by patching together video, audio, and subtitles from myriad sources, sometimes even splicing individual cuts when their quality varies between sources. It’s so much more effort than you’d see from any official restorations.
However, in the quality-focused corners of online film piracy, it's still pretty routine for people to combine the best features of every retail release available to produce something that's better than what you can get even by just going out and buying a Blu Ray. For example, maybe the best picture quality available anywhere is from a Blu Ray that was released to the German market, but a US Blu Ray release has an extra commentary track, while the best audio track is actually from an old Laserdisc release (crazy but it's happened before).
In the live action world it's pretty rare for a video track or an audio track to be spliced together from multiple sources, though it does happen. But in the anime world it's pretty common and they'll do stuff to fix picture quality issues or localize Japanese text to English on signs or whatever (and they can do it slick enough that you wouldn't even notice).
The most bizarre part of all of this, though, is that people put in all this work only for the communities themselves to be small and fiercely private, meaning it could be hard for most people to actually access the end results (though the popular stuff tends to trickle out). The best place on the Internet to download movies bar none (better than all the major streaming platforms put together) is an invite only site with under 40k members that's extremely difficult to join these days.
There are piracy groups out there who are known to source frames from multiple different blu-rays in order to create the best version of a work.
Imagine caring so much about something you compare different releases frame by frame in order to select the best ones so that you can splice them all together to form the highest quality ultimate version of a work.
Meanwhile corporations are perfectly happy shitting out some butchered streaming slop with compression artifacts in 90% black frames.
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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
There's at least one ALF ('86-90)episode that you can only get the uncensored version via piracy.
(Episode in question is Try to Remember. ALF originally got an electric shock. It quickly got censored in reruns to have ALF slip and hit his head because the network worried kids would get shocked emulating ALF.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smothers_Brothers_Comedy...
Turned out the 'official' release was heavily edited, with tone, characters, and even some plot had been completely reshaped. I've found this to be increasingly prevalent, and not just in a "made for TV" or "adapted for Flying" type modifications.
They decided to remove stuff that cost them nothing to have in their library like Gone with the Wind. I'd never watch it but it was clear then they had decided they would be gatekeepers of what people can and cant watch.
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.
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.
Well, okay then -- chump don't want the money, chump don't get the money
- ¿could we watch x movie? - let me see. no, it in this other service beside the 3 we are paying.
Not its exactly as you say, you want to watch something but its not on any of the streaming services you're already paying for. I've started to just think of a movie I want to watch, go out to Pirate Bay, download it and then stream it. When I'm done? Delete it.
Its good to know I'm not the only one who has gone back to downloading movies.
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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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com
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.
It's funny in a sad way how much better the UX of a lot of the piracy sites are, too.
I have been a happy user of JellyFin for a couple of years. Then when Spotify raised its prices again I realized I mostly listen to the same songs, most if not all I still own the CDs.
So with Navidrome and a couple of Python scripts to transform playlists, I made my own little home Spotify as well (Homify? Hopify?)
Works perfectly. No fees. No ads. No stupid email at the end of the year bragging about all the data Spotify collects and stores about me. Perfect.
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.
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.
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.
I, too, would pay per show/movie to download and save DRM-free videos to my own drives.
A lot of effort has gone into making physical media work only with pre-approved devices.
- 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.
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.
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-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_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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.)
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.
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
A Netflix presentation to invite advertisers actually boasted how well they could target you for adds.
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.
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.
Cost was/is a non-factor.
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
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).
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.
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.
Do people really get hounded for piracy in other countries?
But you can check out fmhy.net, it's a great resource (unaffiliated, it's just a genuinely great resource for piracy :p)
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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.
I have a background in city planning, and in the US, you’ll constantly hear about how trying to make cities more friendly to pedestrians, bicycles, or public transit is a waste because no one uses it. But the truth is, most people will end up using the system you design. If you build a system just for cars, people will use cars. If you build a city around public transportation, people will happily use it. If you build a walkable city, people will walk.
Once every media company became a streaming company and started using anticompetitive licensing practices in an attempt to drive viewership to their own platforms, the market fractured too much for it to be profitable.
Something smells “prisoner’s dilemma” about it: the best move for any individual streaming service is to have exclusive content (and the best-positioned players to do that are the studios), but when everyone does that, it decreases the overall profit available in the market more than it increases their slice of the pie.
You can't talk about those rules when a single publisher corporation commands exclusivity deals and dictates pricing essentially forever.
Pray they do not alter it further.
This idea that "markets will provide" is eccentric, and obviously empirically wrong.
Markets are there to extract value and reinforce power imbalances. Consumer happiness is reliably at cross purposes with that.
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.
There are (possibly) two streams of demand:
1) How much customers are willing to pay.
2) How much pirates are willing to risk legal consequences.
Both represent sides of the implicit and intrinsic demand that drives acquisition.
They won’t license content to third parties. So market forces can’t work.
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.
Gabe Newell got it right from the very start, piracy is a service problem.
Copying of anything digital is not actual theft, nor will it ever be.
Copyright infringement is generally a civil offence in Australia.
Whereas theft of physical goods is generally not.
Penalties for copyright infringement differ between countries as well.
And that doesn't even actually list the movies, which are even more fragmented.
It it some kind of hedging strategy by The Pokémon Company to account for the number of different streaming services (thereby actually making the problem worse)? Was there some kind of timed exclusivity deal that's forced them to put different things in different places? Did one of the streaming services come along at a later time to try to undercut the earlier ones but the earlier licencing deals haven't expired? Anything else?
So each service buys a single season to tick that box.
Season 1: Amazon Prime Video (also, Netflix)
Season 2: Amazon Prime Video Channels
3-5: Prime Video
6-13: Prime Video Channels (with 10-13 also available on the Roku Channel)
14-19: Prime Video (with 17-19 also on Netflix)
20-22: Prime Video Channels (and Hulu, and the Roku Channel)
23-25: Prime Video (and Netflix)
So, they're all on Amazon in some sense. I was aware that there was some kind of concept of Prime Video Channels, but when I tried to find an explanation on Amazon's website, I failed.
Watch at 8am or at 6pm, whatever episode airs that day, probably a rerun or a skipped.
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Except for some slight deviations, such as the beginning of Best Wishes (Black & White), you can put on a sequence of any 10 episodes from any season and it doesn’t matter what streaming service it’s on. By the end of the episode, Team Rocket is blasting off again.
Sounds like every single mainline game until SV/PLA which tried the open world a bit. People still like it.
The gist is here, that the complete first four season are on YouTube for free and the 5th is being added as we speak? (200+ episodes)
https://www.youtube.com/@OfficialPoke%CC%81monTV/playlists
There was nether the expectation with streaming that third party content doesn't rotate.
If you want a bit more persistent access you can buy them on Apple TV (Season 1-5 and 10-25)
Oh Boy, Pokemon is really not the example I would bring up here, when the aim is completeness on official channels:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_episodes_removed_...
While the pirate goes to his or her favourite torrent site and downloads it all, with the added bonus of having offline, permanent access.
presumably any given household wants to watch more than just pokemon, though and this is where things become unstuck. suddenly, to satisfy the demand for the range of things people in the household want to watch they are forced to make subscriptions to multiple services, perhaps sometimes for one-offs.
scale this up, and you have a population forced to make multiple subscriptions to multiple streaming providers to satisfy their demand for content.
or people just choose a couple of them and that's that. either way it seems that there is a symbiotic relationship between the content authors and the streaming companies.
but wait, read the page carefully, multiple seasons of the same thing spread across different streamers forcing consumers to subscribe to multiple streamers .... and now we are into Phoebus cartel territory.
And I think he was largely correct, although the term _service_ seems like it now has to do a lot of heavy lifting as it now encompasses:
- Availability by Company
- Availability by Global Region
- Stream Quality
- Advert Policy (why does the lowest tier need to be ad supported? What am I paying for aside from being upsold?)
- Quality and availability of captions, audio description and any other media accessibility options
[1] https://www.escapistmagazine.com/valves-gabe-newell-says-pir...
A week ago I downloaded a couple of movies and shows from Netflix for my 6yo daughter, to watch on a 3hr flight. Worked nicely!
Today we made the return flight. She opens Netflix, and ⅔ of the films have now "expired" with no notice and she can't watch the one she wanted.
For the next flight I'll remember to pirate!
We only made it halfway before bedtime, but since she was coming back in two weeks, we decided to save the rest for her next visit.
Two weeks later, she returned, bouncing with excitement to finally see how the story ended. We opened Netflix, ready to hit play - and lo and behold… the movie had vanished from the catalog.
Be a cool uncle, be a pirate.
I have given up saving Netflix titles in advance of travel because this has happened to me too many times. What is bizarre is you can only "download" them a certain number of times, despite being expired. So I now cannot download some shows ever again.
Nobody loses money if I cache a Netflix show to my device. The limitation is bizarre.
As soon as I was back on a US ip, features just came right back.
Last I checked, background play with VLC just works regardless of where you are physically located at the time.
Nope. There’s a limit to the number of downloads on some content. I wasted mine trying to get the download to even work.
Indeed. Recently we purchased season 1 of a reasonably popular U.S. produced show via Apple TV. When played, it is available only in dubbed French in our region (Canada.) None of the info available beforehand said anything about this. Guess where I obtained the subsequent seasons? I will pay for content but not if you lie, or make me jump through ridiculous hoops.
Not that I pitied them, they were obnoxiously late and boarded with 5 bags (the stiff rectangular bags boutique stores have) of shopping...
Went to resubscribe, no option given for no adverts, no money from me.
Annoyingly though, even with that, it'll still show you skipable ads about other shows they have once before you start something in a session.
Maybe so, but if media companies invested in fixing the service problems, the pricing problems would remain, and those keep people away just as effectively, so they're not going to do it.
People don't want to pay what the media companies want to charge, at any level of service.
I pay an ungodly combined amount of money to various streaming services, but must still occasionally resort to TPB. Which "just works", unlike said streaming services.
Within reason, it's not a money problem (within reason; media conglomerates would love for me to sell my kidney in order to watch their premium shows, but that's not going to happen).I would rather just pay for the problem to go away, but Netflix, Disney et al just disagree.
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More importantly, Gabe is fundamentally right. I'm subscribed to most available streaming services in my country, and when I still cannot find what I want due to obscure reasons (e.g. region locked, or Disney decided to not make it available anywhere for who knows which reason), you can be pretty sure I'll be sailing the seas of the corsair.
It is a service problem.
I cancelled HBO after their price increase a year or two ago after being pretty happy with their service for a long time (though also the service quality had gotten worse). Too many people share my netflix for me to cancel it.
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Dead Comment
I do still have Kanopy though, which is great for me but obviously depends on your library.
Also, a lot of movies/series are only available dubbed here. (I really effing hate "Sie" in dubbed media. So much so, that it's one of the major reasons I go for subbed in english, at most)
I have my watchlist hooked up to *arr so it pulls that stuff automatically. Once I watched it and it’s not something I want to show to others, I delete it.
For me it's a bit different. I have the *arr stack fully automated (with 22Tb of storage for now maaaaybe it's overkill), for friends and family too.
And the experience is nice because it makes content "crowd sourced". If something is on the server it means someone else purposefully added it, so you can still browse, but it's curated based on your friend/family circle.
But also the automation part can be a bit "mindlessly click download on everything even stuff I probably won't watch", but disk space constraints force you to delete it if nobody's watching.
the near-infinite library and lack of algorithmic nudging resulted in an era where i had healthy view habits. reasonable levels of screentime and VERY diverse content.
i add so many movies to my queue with the best intentions of watching them someday, but always put them off because something about staring at that endless scroll of options makes me crave something light and simple.
the disk-in-the-mail era was "remember that three-hour subtitled classic film you always said you should watch but haven't? well, today's the day you're watching it." and i always ended up being glad i did.
the streaming era is "ugh, i don't have the mental bandwidth to watch that three hour thing that's been on my queue forever. lets just rewatch some background content to zone out" and i always lament wasting hours of my life in front of the screen.
(of course, this could only work as long as publishers keep producing physical media)
https://scarecrowvideo.org/rent-by-mail
Bonus when I go I can still get that browsing the aisle experience like in an old video store (but in this case I am lucky, my local library has a large DVD / Blu-ray collection to browse)
The only reason people went to streaming in the first place was that Netflix was cheap and, arguably, a heavily subsidized monopoly in the streaming space.
So yeah, some kind of DVD/BluRay business could very well work in the US and Canada.
https://www.dvdinbox.com/
Haven't used them, but I am planning on setting up a dvd player,
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Now I'm genuinely curious
But since I can’t (and you can’t even find physical media for a lot of things), I feel like I am left with no options.
I am not even trying to get stuff that is recent, as I prefer to wait, especially for tv shows, to finish its run before I decide if it is worth investing my time in.
I mostly go to the library every week and pick up movies and tv shows on Blu-ray and rip them so I can watch them on my schedule. I often delete them afterwards if I feel like they don’t have replay value.
I think Jellyfin also provides a much better interface than any of the streaming apps, and I like to be able to know if I am going to watch them on my theatrical version or some extended version.
So much this. I take the simple moral position that I won't pirate things I can reasonably buy. That includes almost all music, and almost no movies, TV shows, comedy specials, etc. I still largely avoid pirating things and seek out alternatives instead, but I don't feel bad about it when I do because it's an industry that doesn't consider me a potential customer anyway.
Calling it piracy was funny during the early Internet when it was all pirate and ninja memes. But really letting them conflate this very minor crime with violence was a big propaganda loss.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Piracy
I don't usually get too many weird looks with "unauthorized copying".
Ignoring the nuance is just ignorance and pedantic.
As a matter of fact, most people likely don't even associate piracy with pirates or boats. It's almost universally used to describe obtaining digital content for free.