Streaming vs Piracy

Never have paid for prime or Netflix.Before I had NO money to spend on "entertainment" and even then, the technical barriers were too high (could not purchase stuff from India outside of India) so naturally, torrenting came to the rescue.That has continued till date. Sure there are "legal ways of paying for content " but as gaben righty says "piracy is a sercice problem" so entertainment is the same.I'm not going to pay arm and a leg to the next stream

For me this future has already arrived. Yesterday I cancelled Netflix because I realized that even if I pay money each month for legal content, I still have to pirate the content that is not on Netflix. Asking people to subscribe to multiple streaming services is not just expensive but also crazy inconvenient.By contrast the music industry manages to cooperate and get their content available across the various streaming services and consequently I haven't pirated music for a long long t

I pay for a pirate streaming site. It's nice, it has everything, it works, nothing ever gets memory-holed, I don't ever have to sign up for a different service to watch something because it got swapped in the middle of my binge, what I can watch doesn't depend on where they guess I am, I can access over a VPN, they have a support staff that actually listens to me and implements features users ask for, and I can download things to watch later drm-free. This isn't a money probl

Or you can pay £0 per month for 99% of the content.I'm a bit like the parent comment. I've always wanted to be able to pay a monthly fee (even a high one, say £50 a month) to have access to a good quality selection of movies and TV shows. The thing is, it's always bugged me that you can get a much better experience by pirating than by paying for legitimate access. That seems the opposite to how things should work.This pre-dates streaming. DVDs came with FBI warnings a

Today it absolutely is harder to pay than to pirate.It was easy when everything noteworthy was on Netflix. You payed for Netflix and got easy access directly on your TV to most trending content. This was more convenient than piracy.Now the landscape is balkanaized and no one subscribes to all streaming platforms. You can never predict if something of interest will be present on the platform you subscribe to. Do you then subscribe to another service? Now you have to remember to unsubscribe.

I pirate movies because it simply provides a better user experience than streaming services.I happily pay the €9.99 for Spotify Premium. I think I actually use it maaaybe 4 or 5 days a month, but it has virtually all the content I listen to, it has a pretty good app, and it Just Works on all my platforms. I probably wouldn't go back to downloading MP3s if you paid me to.Meanwhile, the movie streaming experience sucks. The ecosystem is extremely fragmented (I'd proba

Last I checked, the most effective way to pirate content is via a protocol such as Bit Torrent which requires you to also distribute pirated content. And that has legal ramifications, which then requires non-trivial methods to obscure your activities (paid proxy servers, etc). Most of us use Netflix not for ideological reasons, but for the pure convenience of it. Compared to Bit-Torrent,with Netflix you can easily browse titles, watch a bit, switch to another one, or watch whole seasons witho

Exactly this. For a couple of years, I was onboard with streaming. It was convenient and frictionless. But now I find myself having to search google to find out which service a movie/show is on, only to find its on none of the ones I have. I pay for Hulu, share my inlaws Netflix account, and I have Amazon Prime. If whatever I want isn't readily available on one of those, I immediately just pirate it and put it on my Plex server (and my backup drive), where I'll always have access

I'm capable of pirating and yet I have a Netflix subscription because the service is better and I like some of the shows they produce. There's still a customer base, it's just not held hostage.

Because there's no bullshit like this preventing me from sharing with family who are overseas (gets really fun when we want to watch something together but it's available in their country but not mine). Because I can download the content and store it locally for trips. Because I can now access a wider selection of content than Netflix offers.It's not cheap, but the fact that I and other commenters here are willing to pay that money and spend the effort of setting up piracy engi