Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content
I built a computer with ~30TB of hard drive space. That, conservatively, cost me $1200. It's an older computer, with a lot of hard drives and it's probably costing me around $45 per month in power. I'm going to want to add more storage space soon, and have about $500 slated for that. I pay a usenet subscription, and subscription to indexers, for let's say $10 per month...
So if I stopped pirating I'd have saved $1200 and still have a budget of $55 per month for streaming services.
So why do I still pirate? Well one thing is show availability. There are some must-have shows that simply aren't available in my region (not the US), so I already have to have the piracy infrastructure in place if I want to watch them.
I also very much appreciate having a local copy. It's not like steam where I can just download whatever I want and play it offline (I do mostly buy steam content, if it's on steam I probably don't bother to pirate).
Streaming services still have significant service problems that need to be addressed.
414 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 304 ms ] threadMaybe try not hoarding all the half-decent movies on earth in 4K bluray version? at this point you have more data than a small piracy site...
I don't lose sleep over the blockbuster superhero movie that is geared towards the Chinese market changing because something I did. If I had that power I would shut it down and not spend 100 million.
If every one I know joined me in eating from the bin would the michelin star restaurant go out of business? nope.
For multiple reasons.
First of all when you have a negative net worth you don't care about the royalties of some hollywood rockstars.
2nd of all, I'm not ready to pay 10 different monthly subscriptions while not even being able to watch 100% of what I want.
3rd of all, even though I appreciate the content, I don't necessarily approve the actions of the artist/producer/developer. I don't want to give a cent to a company that ask its underpaid workers for 100 hour work week during crunch time. I don't want to fund a rapist/abuser producer, I don't to fund anyone's yacht or Ferrari.
Even though I absolutely love his movies, I don't want to fund a guy like tarantino who willingly endangered someones life for one scene.
I mostly consume mainstream stuff so most of the money I'd spent would go to people who already are 1000x richer than me.
I don't really enjoy indie games/movies/music, if I were, maybe I'd act differently.
Jokes aside, would you consider deleting your entire collection and then also cancel subscriptions and possibly give away or sell any tech equipment you do not use for work? And then find something else to do with the newly-freed time? Can you do it for 6 or 12 months? If not, why not? Try to figure out why you are doing it to begin with.
Streaming services have a similar issue (re-encoding, bad rereleases due to licensing issues, delistings, crappy format choices in the first place) but generally a bit better SLA-like and a longer timeframe to watch certain content.
The constant availability of the pirated content is a big driver of the cost here. For some of the obscure stuff, this could be on a backup, or even on something like Amazon Glacier (I.e. no one is watching 30tb of video content regularly), and the resulting computer needed for pirating could be significantly less expensive, both to build/buy and for monthly electricity costs (like a laptop).
This sounds pretty dreadful - "Follywood" is hardly clever I'm afraid to say. Especially when linking it to an elite snobbery of being "seriously into movies" .
But please hear me out - I don't mean to just rip on you for a turn of phrase. But there are a couple of things you are maybe overlooking that are sort of implied by tying these concepts together as you have.
Hollywood is a truly magnificent human achievement, but sometimes it's hard to see that when bobbing around in the waves of its deluge. Step back a bit and consider that in the past century it has produced a steady stream of narrative masterpieces that are shared by the whole world. That the stagecraft and special effects have given palpable form to impossible dreams, etc.
In less glowy-flowy terms, it is an overwhelming machine designed to produce and transmit pure culture. A major force in what they call "Cultural Imperialism". To a not insignificant degree it turned the tide in the Cold War, for example. You can see the struggle every time there is a news story about China demanding modification, or rejecting Hollywood output. Eventually Hollywood will win that struggle, even if it takes a few generations.
There are many countries with their own film industries, least of which is China, but including India, Japan, Korea, Italy France, and on and on. But none of them have had remotely the success, popularity or power of Hollywood. The place, the machine is an absolute Triumph.
But to get back to your unfortunate turn of phrase... imagining that you or they have some elite status due to watching films out of the mainstream - A major component of the Hollywood machine is using the mainstream films' revenue to subsidize genre films, student films and often picking up truly independent films. These are the elitist films you seem to be referring to, that or the film output of the other countries. This range of films have always been a part of the machine, since the early days a century ago. Much of it is mediocre or clumsy. Sometimes they are shocking or disruptive. Sometimes they are genuinely brilliant or visionary.
But all of this obscure stuff that movie buffs are glorying in, ultimately this is just the output of the training ground for the Hollywood Mainstream. Consider Sam Raimi or Peter Jackson's filmography to see what I mean. Both started out making quirky indy horror films and once graduated began putting out $Billion dollar joints.
Almost all of the movies/series I watch are somewhat obscure (from a Hollywood perspective) so I like to keep them around. But I don't watch nearly enough movies or care enough about their longevity, that a single, non backed up external drive wouldn't be good enough.
I guess there are many people who pirate for the sake of pirating trying to collect as much content as they can without actually consuming it all. But don't know what proportion this is.
Crushed to death under a stack of computer equipment, they leave behind only 1 Petabyte worth of Seagate 8TB hard disks. Upon investigating, it was found that each drive was completely filled with “boutique furry porn.”
Those who knew the deceased in passing say they cannot imagine where his millions had gone.
The upside is that we have a lot to share with folks (mostly family) who've not necessarily seen this stuff (and can't typically find it on services in our area).
Anecdotally, I have a mild data hoarding hobby and no streaming subscriptions, and had my tech setup offline for about 6 months after moving to a new house. Spent most of the free time running ethernet, replacing dozens of recessed lights, replacing all the lights switches, assembling furniture, painting, picking up nails and rocks that reno guys left all over the lawn, and various other house things.
I bought a TV for black friday, wall-mounted it, and haven't even gotten around to plugging it in. (Or finding a piece of furniture from which to use it.) I'm looking forward to that; watching TV and playing video games is really more fun than patching drywall.
The setup I've got doesn't require very much active maintenance, aside from yelling at my father to tag things better. I'm sure I could just go to sketchy pirate streaming sites (putlocker and the like) if I was concerned about the money. The point of this isn't so much that I'm spending too much on this hobby, but that piracy really is a service problem.
Think you might have to feed the chickens along side your tagging scheme.
I object to the term "pirating" here. Piracy involves depriving people of life and property. You are not doing anything like that. Bootlegging might be a tolerably apt term. Bootlegging is just bypassing onerous restrictions and taxes, with an admixture of freeloading.
My wife pays for various channels, but I torrent the same content because the experience is radically better. Am I pirating? I don't think I am even bootlegging.
The main thing keeping me from doing it more (I hardly ever do anymore) is that I just don't have time to watch things. I have taken to running what little I do grab at 1.5x to 2x so I can spare the time. Now, not running that fast seems intolerably glacial.
All that said, hoarding is a common symptom of depression. Treating depression is a very, very good idea.
Golden rule of data: "90% of it is not accessed after 3 months"
https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html
I'm sure there's alternatives
https://www.hetzner.com/de/storage/storage-box
Do test your backups though.
I haven't torrented or paid for content in years. If I want to watch something and it's not on the server, I message the admin in Bangalore and he adds it.
Sure I don't "have" the content in the sense it's not sitting on spinning disks, but I don't care. Life is too short to try to collect widely available digital media.
Don't even get me started about commercials. Amazon Prime has been putting up movies without commercials, and then adding commercials later. This has bit our movie group a few times lately. Very frustrating.
This came to a head for me not too long ago when my internet went out for a little while. I told my wife we could just watch the antenna TV, and she simply couldn't grok the idea that TV signals were coming to the house without the internet working.
Just shop around and find one with a free trial. It's not very automated, so you'll have to chat with them over Discord, but once it's set up it's completely hands-off. Good luck!
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/plexshares/
What these Plex share owners do is advertise first . Reach the number of users they need then go private and it becomes invite only . This what happened to the one I joined and it's perfect for 2 years now .
What I find odd about these Plex shares is the insane catalog they have which includes Vhs rips of obscure 1980s slasher films
Very helpful when flying for 30h
I also do some digital archiving work (I don't want to get into specifics for anonymity sake), but since that's text it only takes up about 12TB right now. If I run out of space I delete some video.
0. US ISPs are capped but in the TB range so most people never reach the cap.
I've even read the fine print for my current ISP here in the US. Unless you mean cap as in it's not possible to download more than that per month because your download speed is too low.
0. https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/best-internet-providers-w...
In the UK sites like the pirate bay get censored, there are mirrors but they too get censored. Once you find a site you can easily get US content like the US version of the office but the UK version of the office will be harder to find.
You can buy 30TB of spinning disk for ~£600 which is a fair chunk of money but for comparison my 100mbit internet costs £300 a year. To get all your content instantly in one place in hd with no buffering I would say its worth it.
They made it dead-easy to sign up, there was no pushy retention teams or hoops to jump through if you wanted to cancel. That's why I paid them.
Amazon Video launched here, and they had some content that I was interested in, but their UX from day one has been awful. They insist on adding pre-roll ads, despite that I'm paying them. The video quality was pretty awful and was quite regularly at something like 480p quality on my (4k) TV. Yes their X-Ray tech is neat, but the ads just drive me up the wall.
There was a time that I would've happily paid for HBO - they had/have some really great content (at least in the US), but they are or were not available in AU outside of a $120+/month PayTV device that I really didn't want.
Now there are dozens of streaming services, with their own $15-30/month fees, which will have (or not) selections of some of the content I want, each with their own uniquely awful and annoying interfaces or quirks of whether they will or won't play on my TV or device.
If they really want to make it into a thing, it cannot be within amazon.com. Call it something else, rip out and make it into a service not an addon to prime.
The movie selection on NetFlix's DVD service[1] is still fantastic.
The movie selection on their streaming service[2] is absolutely atrocious.
Not sure what accounts for the discrepancy.
[1] - https://dvd.netflix.com/
[2] - https://www.netflix.com/
Conversely, since NetFlix's DVD service doesn't have any competitors they could get away with having a crappy selection, but they have a great selection, and it's been great for at least a decade.
So it still doesn't make sense.
Both of these have way, way, way better selections than NetFlix streaming.
The reason they can rent-out DVD titles from anyone, is because of the First-Sale doctrine[1] in the US. Basically, once they buy the DVD, they can do with it what they want. It's the same law that lets libraries operate.
With streaming, they need permission of the copyright holders. Who, at first, were all "Who gives a shit about streaming, it doesn't make any money and the quality is shit". Once Netflix proved out how to do it right - then all the studios realised there was money to be made by doing their own platform (even if you do a shitty job of it)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
1. I could not download the right Disney+ app on my Android TV because my Google account is French
2. I could download the right app on my iPhone (after temporarily switching stores which is a PITA) so I bought a cable to stream from my iPhone to my TV but the app doesn’t allow me to
3. I bought a Raspberry Pi and installed Plex and al. I can now watch the Disney movies easily on my TV.
I have a subscription to Netflix…
1. I went off-internet for a week, so I synced a couple of movies to be available offline.
2. I started watching one on the first day and 48h hours later it expired…
3. Next time I will use my Plex setup!
I must be very dumb to keep paying for these two subscriptions!
The story looks faked all over the place. 30 TB? I have as much, and the storage price was maybe $600 last year.
In early 2018 an 8TB seagate drive cost ~$200 according to https://jcmit.net/diskprice.htm .
I'm also counting usable storage, not snapraid or anything like that. The reality is it's 39.12 TiB not counting SSD cache.
> The story looks faked all over the place.
I also bought a pretty nice case that can store 10+ hard drives, and a PCIe sata adapter. I probably could have done it for cheaper, but that's not really a reason to call me a liar is it? Why would anyone fake this?
Also, OP included a Usenet subscription in their costs so they might not be torrenting at all.
If anything, assume something more reasonable like, 4x8 2x parity drives. 6 of those, that'd be $1200.
I deal w/ software all day at work. As I've gotten older, the less I want to also deal w/ software at home.
They may also ship to you internationally.
Just looking at a couple of shows that I watched a year ago, I couldn't actually find any of them on Amazon.de. And actually, only found one on Amazon.com, where it was unavailable. Also, the Chinese version for some reason?
Pay $10,000 for a KIA that can only goto McDonalds and Burger King, then buy a $15,000 chevy that's the only car that works on the road to to work, then pay $5,000 for a ford that is the only vehicle that will take you to Burger King and the Apple store, but it stops every 5 minutes to show you the same ad repeated 3 times, and the only car that will take you to grandms's house is $30,000 and for some reason it requires 12 cars worth of parking spots. Taco Bell will only be accepting Mazdas starting in August, so you've got to decide what you want to do about that. Also there's no cars you can buy at any price that can go anywhere you want. Nobody sells the lamborgini you can drive anywhere for free.
Anyways, that's why pirating is good.
Back to discussion, I agree that saving money could apply to almost anything. However my first point is that, in my opinion, there's a material difference between digital piracy and stealing a car. If I possess a car, nobody else can own it. However with digital media, I'm making a copy of something that has zero impact on anybody else's ability to own their own copy of that data. The only thing that's lost is my physical storage space that could've stored something else, but that's my call to make.
A second point is that I mainly pirate things I wouldn't have bought otherwise. I still watch movies in theaters because I can't pirate a theater experience (AMC A-list is great if you enjoy watching in the theaters IMO), I still buy modern games because I'm extremely cautious when it comes to running executables.
A third point is that ethically, I consider supporting a mega-corporation like Amazon worse than committing piracy. Mega-corporations commit much more morally heinous actions, and at an enormously greater scale, than an average pirate would ever commit. In my opinion, the moral sin is not that pirates commit piracy, it's that mega-corporations have been given almost free rein to shape and exploit our society as they see fit
I go to e.g. the South Park website, and I'm greeted by an error message saying they're "working hard to resolve [their] pre-existing contractual obligations," which is the same message they've shown for years. Thanks for trying, I guess, but if I pirated it then I'd just...watch the show, from start to finish, with all seasons and all episodes, no wasteful physical media, no subscription, no data collection, and no ads. That sounds good. I want to be able to pay money, maybe even quite a lot of money, and do that.
(That being said, I do have access to cable television, netflix, and amazon prime streaming as well as the piracy setup, so people are getting paid. I'm not going to go buy a bunch of old red-dwarf and dilbert DVDs though, they just take up too much space)
But I'm so jealous of the user experience for people who buy into a $5/mo plex and get better service than I'm paying for. IMO, that's broken.
So much time wasted, figuring out what service to watch something on, dealing with content ads, bad user interfaces... having content vanish and become unavailable, etc.
I don't even watch much video, but it's still way too much of a sink on my time.
My intent is that someone somewhere reads this and decides to let me buy their damn content. It's not a justification, it's an appeal. Put your album on bandcamp. Put your game on itch/gog/your own website/humble bundle, preferable without intrusive DRM. I have no idea where you'd put a movie or TV show, but there's probably some place.
Please.
Downloadable, ad free, and DRM free. Music has been selling that way for decades. I've spent thousands on that kind of media, I'd have spent 10 times as much if it had been made available that way. Some people purchase a controlled versions to atone for their pirating sins but that just rewards consumer-hostile business models, and most of the money goes to middle-men that only add negative value to the product they're selling.
Most of the time I watch things once, so I rent it if it's not on a platform I subscribe to. Generally then I can watch it on my tv, ps4, phone, computer, whatever.
Consider that money spent on these products are an indication to studios about what people like. Movie studios, production companies, they make stuff they think they can sell for a profit. I suggest that you try renting movies or buying ones you like. If you run into a situation where one of your concerns comes to life, I think it would be very reasonable to pirate something you've made a good faith effort to pay for. This is kind of how I started and now for the most part I rent/buy with some exceptions. Still downloading some trash tv shows.
Most, if not all, things I've downloaded, which isn't much, I've either rented before, seen on TV or in a theater, or have been on one of the streaming services I pay for at some point. Does that cover me ethically? Some people seem to think so. I personally don't care either way and not a single person on this planet is any worse off for my lack of concern.
Actually it's kind of easier than torrenting and copying files around to various devices I want to watch it on.
In my opinion, the most practical solution is to buy things (for the ethics) and then crack the DRM anyway (for usability).
I don't mind throwing down some cash, but I'm not going to throw down cash just to get fucked over.
Right now one of the biggest things on disk are a bunch of Boston Legal episodes. I have family that enjoy it, and I'm too lazy to find a good small release so it's taking up more space than it needs to.
I try to get HEVC encoded video where possible, and when I know there's a particular release group that produces high-quality I'll set up tags to prefer them.
> Today, we’re proud to be launching an entirely new section of Plex, focused on discovering, searching, and personalizing movies and TV shows across virtually any streaming service—whether it’s Plex’s own free movies and TV, or your other subscriptions like Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max
[0] https://www.plex.tv/blog/end-the-streaming-struggle-with-ple...
Worth giving it a shot. I haven't tried it, but it looks promising.
So I sail the high seas and pirate the very movie I was about to watch: 600 Mbit/s symmetric fiber, download using torrents takes a few minutes tops.
Now I don't get it: how do the pirates who "webrip" those have access to the quality stream, when I get a shitty version? I mean: I get it when it's a BRRip (Blu-Ray Rip) but how can they do quality webrips? Why are they getting the quality version streamed when I get bad quality? It may not be noticeable on a regular TV but on the huge diagonal my home cinema projector does, it's night and day.
I don't hoard. Pirating costs nothing as I pay for my fiber optic line and downloading a movie takes a few minutes, during which wife makes tea, kid puts pyjamas on and I pour myself some drink.
> Streaming services still have significant service problems that need to be addressed.
Yup. Pirates makes a better job at providing a quality media compared to the shitty streaming services.
Now we plan to drop Netflix and take Disney for a while: I wonder if I'll also need to pirate the very thing they'll be streaming me or not.
My guess is you're either not using that combination or otherwise blocking DRM / features that prevent desktop 4k.
The front-end players (sometimes) have a UI element that allows you to explicitly set which bitrate is streamed. Otherwise, the player is beholden to what the connection speed deems appropriate. Regardless, if the original file was transcoded to include 1080p, 4k stream, they exist even if your player is downgrading based on a poor connection. This can feel like a loss of control, because it is. "But it's for our the user's own good."
When using tools like ffmpeg or similar, you can simply target the highest bitrate available.
If you ever try to download a ".m3u8" file you'll see it's more or less a manifest that lists all available bitrates.
Paying for content is getting really close to that, but I don't think it's there yet, in that I can't just decide to watch Papa's Delicate Condition [0] on Netflix or Disney+ or whatever service I subscribe to. There are a handful of random movies that I love, own on physical media, but can't just immediately consume when the mood hits. When things get there, I think piracy is in trouble. For many people, it's already there. For you, it may be close.
Streaming's biggest problems, to me, are that there are still so many, and the content libraries are incomplete. Disney+ is a great, well-stocked service, but there's some content that Disney has decided doesn't exist anymore (Song of the South - problematic as hell, for sure, but it existed), and for things like that, I wouldn't ever assume them to be available. Same for the unaltered versions of Star Wars. And if Netflix and Peloton have taught me anything, it's that content can go away over time (see my earlier argument about wanting access to content at random times). And of course, offline support - I fly on planes sometimes, or go places without Internet, and I'd like to take a little bit of content with me to be occupied.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papa%27s_Delicate_Condition
I think that's reasonable (unfortunately). Storage isn't cheap.
> it's probably costing me around $45 per month in power
You don't need your PC running 24/7, and you don't need all your hard drives in your PC. I have one 12TB in my PC and two 12TB external HDDs for backup.
Personally I think piracy is incredibly frugal, the main cost comes from storage. I've almost maxed out my current setup of 12TB backed up across 3 hard drives, so I have to wait until a good price for >=12TB external HDDs before I can upgrade. Other than that, the ~10 bucks a month I pay for a seedbox less than a movie ticket lol.
where do you live that I don't move there ? I rarely ever paid more than 20-25€ / month for electricity for my whole appartment, with multiple computers running 24/7 lol
Anecdotally: In Germany I pay about 100€/month for an apartment (with normal homeoffice PC usage). 3500-4000 kWh/year.
Once you find right goal you won't have time for all this.
Speaking from personal experience