Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?
Given all the streaming services,
cable and sling alternatives being roughly the same price, and just general prices of games/dlcs, Spotify/YouTube premium (the full page ads and frequency of them on YouTube is at a new level without premium).
I just feel like if we’re at peak monetization, I might as well go back to my old teenage ways.
640 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 404 ms ] threadWhat if they had the provided content, but not dubbed/subtitled/cc'ed in the language you need?
I don't deserve to have everything, even if I want it. At the end of the day, it's just a piece of media.
At this point for music there is so much free music available online that makes no sense to pirate anything. But I assume this depends on your music tastes.
For Movies and TV piracy is king especially if you live in a country where many less popular movies don't make it to the movie theaters and some streaming networks (e.g. hulu, disney+ etc) are not available.
Games, always, although I only have a console now, but PS Plus I found to be a very good service, I rarely buy full price titles unless it's something exceptional, otherwise I just wait for something on sale.
I have netflix, and that was good for a while, But now with all the streaming options with exclusives, I can't be bothered to juggle my subscriptions. I tried apple TV for a bit as I got a free offer, but they had about 2 shows I wanted to watch and despite the subscription, it's still seemed to be pushing me to "buy" things (I think being allowed to use the term "Buy" from any of these services is downright fraud if they can remove it anytime they want)
plus the one I seem to consistently want is HBO Max which isn't even available outside the US
Nowadays entertainment is quite accessible through subscriptions and I just wait for decent sales on the games I want to play.
Entire process is probably faster than finding which service the thing you want to watch is streaming on.
Also, media piracy is much more convenient these days thanks to the excellent media server options (Plex/Emby/Jellyfin) and the *arr suite of apps.
You simply add movies and shows to your library and have them “magically” appear in your media server app on release - like a personal streaming service.
Don't even get me started on "there's this movie I heard about and I want to watch, but I need a subscription to this obscure random service and then also pay a rental fee on top to even get to watch it". It's just absurd.
Prime video is quite unique, but I'm very much past them putting pre-roll ads on the content I want to watch. It's universally an advert for their own craptastic, homegrown version of an existing well-defined format. If I was interested in watching Law & Order I can start from Season 1, not from their knockoff version of it.
Amazon Music would be another great service I'd be willing to pay for, but all the available clients are so buggy it's an impediment to me using it.
Their add-on services all felt lackluster too. Most of the prime video content is not well-rated.
Netflix is 15 EUR / month and I honestly just keep it for the kids + my wife..
It's still a decent value to me overall--especially throwing in video.
eBay sellers also tend to ship promptly, which used to be one of the main reasons to use Amazon/Prime. The latter's shipping speeds have increased by orders of magnitude in some parts of the country over the last couple years. It's not uncommon these days for a Prime order to sit in limbo for 3-4 days before being shipped, while the same order to the same city shipped instantly in 2018.
Ebay is fine I guess, but I'd lose my mind if I had to wait a week for something. That makes the $140/yr worth it to me.
You make think that you're sticking it to the man, but you're actually screwing the little guys.
In my case I got a dysfunctional cell phone LCD assembly and seller said I could either ship it back (would cost like half the cost I bought it for) or they would refund me 40% of what I paid. The system to contact the seller has technical measures to prevent you from conversing in Chinese even though that is obviously what the seller is most comfortable with.
I think it's fine if you're either buying nonelectronics or buying in bulk but I will not use it for purchasing electronics again.
Actually you cannot. Only Law & Order SVU is available on streaming. The original series and the other spinoffs only have the most recent season available online.
The whole point is to enjoy the service; if you feel stressed because you feel forced to binge everything to get your "value", well, cancel that service too. It is apparently not bringing you that value. That will help you get over it pretty quickly.
I’ve turned very sour to these monthly renewals and accounts I can’t keep track of anymore.
Similarly, if I'm on the fence about some service, this is the tie breaker for me; the risk of forgetting to cancel it. Even though I do scan my bank account around once a month, I do naturally pay more attention to the bigger transactions and can easily skim past a $8.99 for a few months before noticing I accidentally left something on.
(Fortunately, where I am, it's just an annoyance. Affording individual subscriptions to all the things I may conceivably at some point want to use would be a noticeable kick in the pants, what with the proliferation of them, but accidentally leaving on one service is just an annoyance.)
If I somehow still need it after the first month, I usually get a email reminder or a message about payment processing failure and I can fix that with a non-disposable card.
[0] https://www.justwatch.com/
It's different on the apple store, where Apple forced providers to agree that a subscription could be unilaterally cancelled via the store. Ideally we would pass a law so that credit cancellation also cancels a contract as long as the minimum period is over. Not holding my breath though.
What companies do this in practice. I think I’ve “ghosted” 300 companies and never had a single even send a threatening letter, much less do anything. Usually I get an email of “error processing your card, please fix or we turn off.”
I can’t imagine it is ever economical to pursue in courts over an $11.99/month contract.
The exception is gyms that do seem to go to ends of the earth to collect.
I had a colleague who used to get monthly calls from a cable co. He was divorced from his wife, who had set up the cable contract, so they wouldn't let him cancel it but were still convinced that he was liable for the money because it was supplying his house.
A meta streaming service that dispatches you towars the service that has the show you want to watch. Of course it needs to work in colaboration with the actual streaming services and diatribute revenue proportional to services' use. It would create much more real-time competition.
It's easier to pirate stuff.
Funny that the proliferation of streaming services has just decreased the duration of my subscription to any one of them.
I used House of the Dragon as an example, I watched it on HBO max but I also downloaded it and shared it online. One of my favorite shows (Future Man) is now on D+ but I am not going to delete it from my collection.
It all comes to: "I don't trust others with the data I care for"
Apparently to make them available on other ad supported networks: https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/23513277/westworld-hbo-...
Despite being strongly motivated to find and watch things that are inexplicably unavailable to me (especially new foreign cinema) I usually just wait, and then sign up for a trial of whatever service has it a year or more after I read the review.
Only if you want rare and older stuff (and even then, only sometimes). Anything mainstream, a public tracker is more than enough.
I have a significant legitimate media library (>1TB), I have the Plex/Kodi infrastructure to stream it to my TV, but going one step further and mixing in piracy is a step I'm not willing to take.
As I said in another post, I like to pay when given the option and I don’t have to jump through tons of hoops.
I dont know now that we signed the TPP11 how things are going to change.
you can then just set the seedbox as a source in kodi, I can even add torrents while sitting on my couch on my phone with the mobile interface
I have shared accounts to a variety of streaming services that I pay for but I largely prefer using kodi as it's a much more pleasant experience
It's (almost) as easy as looking something up on youtube.
Why would "normal" people muck about with torrent software? I think it's mostly the groups doing (and monetizing) the re-uploads that bother with torrents
Throw all that on top of not being forced to watch the same ad for Rings of Power the thousandth time in a row, a much broader library of content, a better library of subtitles, and no performance issues.
I'm happy to pay for things that deliver usable experiences. Concretely, I'd gladly pay $200/month for a good streaming service that avoids the pitfalls mentioned. But I'm not going to pay money to subject myself to abusive practices and terrible experiences.
I generally want my lists of books/films/music playlists whatever that I've seen, reviewed or marked as "to watch" to be managed seperately from any one particular vendor, and owned by me.
There seems to be some movement towards this with e.g. smart TVs that will search all your apps for shows, and sites that will tell you where a specific film or show is available, but I've not seen anything either super geeky, or super easy to use.
The former lets you put in a list of shows / movies you want it to download, and it'll check against public and private trackers periodically until it finds what you're after. The media you want doesn't even have to be released - an IMDB or TVDB link is enough.
The latter makes it easy to stream anywhere, download ahead of flights, and tracks watched status. Plex especially is fantastically easy for family to use.
Setup is "easy" in that it's an afternoon or less for the kind of people browsing HN, and using it is actually easy for anyone else you care to share the service with. Combined, it checks all your requirements of pulling in reviews from you and others, watched status tracking, and owned by you.
Couple services with plenty of good content managed to put together teams to build their mobile / web apps that can barely code their ways out of a paper bag (in the non-trivial space of high-capacity video streaming, nonetheless). It's enough to make me yell "Just give me the damn file and I'll play it myself."
As far as I know, the only two companies that have their own video streaming expertise of any note are Netflix and Disney (after the BAMTech acquisition).
Any other company with sufficient funding can outsource it.
Because there's basic fit-and-finish crap in that player that drives me positively bananas (things like "Doesn't remember your close-captioning setting" and "Doesn't let you change the setting when ads are playing"). And that's disregarding the 1 out of 50 times it fails to do the Chromecast-dance and leaves the Chromecast or the mobile device in a wacky state requiring software restarts (to their credit: that's down from approximately 1 in 10, so I've seen improvement there).
But ChromeCast overall I’ve found to be crappy technology.
Absolutely 100% agree. Like Bluetooth and USB, it's built to work with a whole pile of stuff out in the real world that the devs didn't have access to for testing / didn't exist yet when it was standardized, so it's got some grabasstical corner cases.
... problem is, it's also got like 36 million users, so it's incumbent upon anything that claims to be a "streaming service" to account for those quirks to work in 36 million living rooms (in the same sense that it's not Bluetooth's "fault" when the new car or headphones on the market don't pair with already-existing popular brands of mobile phone).
If we had one streaming app to rule them all, it could consolidate the quirks fixes and we'd be all good. The fact that market competition means everyone has to solve for those quirks individually and is disincentivized to share solutions is a PITA for end users.
That's Apple's style and it probably works better for an application like this (there are a lot of problems for which dictatorship is the solution in the technical space... I wish we had a streaming service dictator to solve the Chromecast problem from the other direction).
Netflix allowed a huge library of DVDs to be rented. You could have 3-4 DVDs on rotation for a rather cheap price.
This happened when Blockbuster would charge you $5 per movie, and Netflix would charge $10.99 for unlimited DVDs, but you could only have 3 DVDs checked out.
That's why Netflix was huge and killed Video Store rentals.
Myself and most people I know stopped renting videos when we could stream stuff easily.
My age group, mid 20s during Netflix creation, everyone I knew have a Netflix DVD subscription. We were raised with VHS rentals, so DVD rentals were the natural next step when DVD players got cheap.
Netflix has never dropped their DVD service even though they wanted to many times. There are still places in the US where broadband is unavailable.
Also, due to first sale they don't have same license restrictions as they would on streaming. Once they buy the disc they can rent it as many times they want for as long as they want.
I've considered re-adding the DVD rental, I've been using Netflix since they included the coupons in DVD player purchases, because they have the films that aren't available on Netflix streaming and it would be cheaper than adding the myriad streaming service subscriptions.
But also, I get your stance. I prefer legal routes over gray/black markets.
And then I’d have to remember to cancel HBO Max.
Maybe that's the perfect use case for subscription-based VPNs, renting DVDs from an American IP address... Hope it fits through the IP tunnel.
Downside, there is starting to become a decent number of shows/movies that are exclusive streaming. Second downside is it can be decently slow to get anything. I average about 4 discs per month on a 1 disc out at a time level. It used to be 6-8 per month. But they slowed it down.
I stopped messing with streaming because of the churn of is it on this one or that one. I just gave up and bought whatever boxset I needed. Then found I was not watching the streaming services at all.
People were excited about streaming services because we all got sick of dropping $20+ to buy a shitty movie or album, and there were always availability issues at video rental stores.
Ownership over movies and TV shows isn’t particularly important. I don’t have data to support this, but it seems true that people watch the (probably overwhelming) majority of movies only one time. Why own what I don’t want or need? And if I really enjoy the flick, I can still buy a disc.
Music seems more important to own since owning is the only way to guarantee availability.
I also strongly suspect that, if you look at the numbers, all you can eat for video would come with a price tag that very few consumers would pay--especially if you throw in live TV.
While not perfect, you have a way less unreasonable user experience especially in terms of DRM and hostile in software and APIs, and the fragmentation and balkanization is not even close to at the same level.
Most people who pay seem content with what they do and complement with free and open (mostly legal save for much on the YouTube). Public warez is spotty outside of that and the toplists. Private trackers are extremely exclusive, insular and inaccessible except for the very dedicated.
What's the dominating factor here? IP ownership and legal differences? Market dynamics? Opex costs? Industry corporate cultural differences? Or is it just circumstance that Spotify and Apple Music have been able and willing enough to make it happen while what.cd left a legacy where insular elitism became the norm and video pirates have always been more Tallyho?
Unlike in my teenage years I'm happy to support artists with my money (and do!), but it's often a puzzle to figure out what content is on what service and in what region at what price.
This is why I don't subscribe to any of the streaming services, they all utterly fail at having the movies I want to watch when I want to watch them. These services are mostly for people who want to watch something and don't particularly care what it is. TV as background noise. I expunged that sloppy style of TV watching from my life and I'm never going back to it. The only time I watch something is when I want to watch that thing specifically before I even sat down. And the odds of the streaming services I might have subscribed to having that thing is basically zero.
What I will say is there are certain genres or types of content where I just feel like watching that type of content and any of the services will meet that need. Rarely is there a "killer show" that I will pay for a service that hosts it anymore. If I want to watch documentaries about murderers they all have some version of that, or cop shows or home shows or ... you get the idea.
Maybe this is age showing and just the nature of how Hollywood constantly regurgitates characters, shows or "franchises" where I feel like I've seen things already when they are brand new.
That's not true. There are a number of services/products you can simply purchase or rent content without an additional subscription fee.
I pirate stuff when it's somewhere else or when it's not available anywhere (surprisingly that's 50% of cases, but maybe that's just my country). So the spread availability is one of the problems, but not having a chance to watch something legally is another.
The same problem is with videogames. Some of them can't be bought anymore (excluding used physical copies on CD/DVD, but that's not something I prefer).
Pirating movies is even legal in my coutry - it's legal to download a movie that's already shared - I just can't share it. So at least they can't jail me for this sporadic crime.
Do I feel bad? Partially. I'd prefer to pay, I love paying for stuff that's even free (donations), but I don't want to feel like I'm an animal that predators want to lacerate.
It is.
What's needed is some kind of aggregator; a firm that will sublicence content from the major providers, and sell it to consumers. I'm not going to set up a Netflix account to watch one show.
Of course, the big content providers won't sublicence; they'll have to be forced to. But I would watch more of their content if I could pay for just what I want to watch, without subscribing to a mess of bundles containing mainly dross content.
Beyond that, piracy must be among the top 3 motivations for companies to senselessly subscription-ify everything, so engaging in it is at least participating in incentivizing that behavior.
I still pay for Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube premium etc. but I find myself many of the times I want to watch something, I just use my home server rather than even checking if they exist on Netflix or Prime video.
Can’t give up YouTube premium, but probably will stop having Netflix as soon as they block password sharing.
"Piracy" is the legitimate competitor of streaming services. It seems like we have had a period where streaming offered a better product, but having a credible threat of competition is important to keep the streaming offerings competitive and relevant.
Biggest exception is probably gaming and specifically Steam. It's been a while since the last time I've pirated a game and even then it was probably like a retro ROM.
My choice, of course, is to pay for the content, or just not to consume it. I don't believe I have an inherent right to consume any content I want for free. The counter argument is usually that a copy of creative content doesn't take anything away from the author, but I don't really buy into that one.
We approached a middle ground of pricing and accessibility, but it only lasted so long. The other side over monetized, so the consumer has to counter attack and stop paying.
It’s a wild bargaining scheme, we are in a digital bazaar. Never give up a tool in your tool shed.
If I think that Amazon is being unfair about how they make Rings of Power available, that's totally fine, I just don't consume it.
I guess the usual argument is that a copy of something cannot, by definition be theft. The author still has the object in question.
Sometimes people counter by saying that a potential sale has been lost, but you can’t steal something that you didn’t have in the first place (the sale). The assumption that someone would have otherwise paid always seems to me a bit of a stretch.
I guess you have thought about this more than i have so I’m curious as to what you’ve come up with.
If I spend a lot of time, effort, or money creating something, I may have plans to try to make money on it. If many people copy it for free, they may not be stealing as physical object from me, but they are removing my ability to generate revenue from them based off of my time, effort, or money.
And of course, taking it to the extreme, people simply will stop creating works. Or, some folks may not be able to afford to create works.
I'm well aware that most here won't agree with me, but I think it's on the creator to be able to determine what they want to do with their creations, and that it's not ok for me to arbitrarily tell them that their work is completely worthless, except I really really want to utilize it.
The bit i feel unsure about is if it really removes my ability to generate revenue. To make that claim I’d have to be sure the people that have copied would have otherwise paid. I’m not at all confident that i could assert that.
I think there's also some intersection between cost and ease to pirate as well. Having not really pirated anything for many years, I was shocked when a friend showed me how easy it was with their Plex setup to just grab whatever TV show they wanted. The only anecdotal evidence that I have is that another friend who was with me saw the Plex setup, and within a week had cancelled several subscriptions and switched to Plex.
Being broke has never prevented artists from making great art. In fact, historically and today, the majority of artists have never been fairly compensated for their work, even with insane copyright laws. I do believe that artists should be correctly compensated for their work if they wish it, like any other work, but copyright laws (even if introduced as a way to protect artists) have been transformed into something that doesn't protect the artists, but the copyright holders (which are most of the time record labels and big companies).
Here is the point of view from musical artists:
You have two major scenarios: - you are a musician which does not produce original music. Then you make your money with gig playing mostly (weddings, venues, orchestras, ...). Copyright law is not siding with these musicians, and these musicians don't care about piracy. - you are a composer which produces original music. Here again, copyright law doesn't help, artists are trapped to distribute their music through either record labels or popular streaming services which don't care about their artists (spotify will pay artists 0.004$ per stream).
Often, musicians will be doing both (composing and playing at gigs). But most of the money to be made is in gigs, and maybe a fan base that will buy your CDs and come to your concerts. Distributing your music on popular streaming services is just a way to grow your own fan base, not to make money. So piracy can even help here by making the music even more accessible.
What I want to say is that from the point of view of musicians, copyright law doesn't help. Sometimes it even works against you: if you are a classical musician and putting some public domain music (that you played yourself) on youtube, you will be inevitably copystriked by some random record label that doesn't give a shit about you and there is nothing you can do. Copyright law also prevents musicians to rearrange popular music, to make transformative art unless you pay some fees. You can't play music from somebody even if the author has been dead for 50 years. And these fees won't probably go to the other musician you are arranging from, but to the copyright holder (which will be a record label or big company).
Constantly seeing people behave badly and get rewarded for it has increasingly led to me to believe that obeying the rules is a fools game.
A better phrase would be: "Why pay when you can copy for no cost".
We see their model, we need to stop the growth of it.
How is one to fight back? The traditional way worked for music. I’m happy to pay but I’m not going to be taken advantage of.
What causes corporations to sit up and take note is that when things are presented as a paid option with reasonable terms, people pay. However unreasonable terms (as we see with multiple streaming services, with adverts or minimal good content unless you pay again) increase piracy, not underconsumption.
What motivation would people have, when they feel they are being ripped off, and are presented with an alternative with no demonstrable downsides, to not consume?
People would happily pay but it’s impossible to do so in a reasonable or indeed fair way.
Funnily enough Firefox can apparently use Google Widevine on MacOS: https://www.drm.cloud/platform-compatibility/
I am puzzled at these ridiculous restrictions but I am happy with their effect: a million papercuts driving viewers away.
https://www.defectivebydesign.org/
I think it's fair that artists are rewarded for their work, so I pay for one global service per type of content : Netflix for movies and TV shows, Youtube Premium for music.
However, I abhor the game of 'selling rights to certain platforms for certain duration only in certain countries', and I don't want to have to handle half a dozen subscription just because someone in the marketing team somewhere decided that this movie was going to be exclusive to this platform.
So my go to is, if I want to watch something, I first try to find it on my legal paid platform, and if I can't find it there, I'll pirate it.
Works pretty well so far.
Right now there is much more competition for eyeballs than there ever was in the past (social networks, video shorts, etc). People only have so many hours in the day for entertainment, and these alternative eyeball-grabbers are can only gain eyeballs at the expense of traditional eyeball-grabbers.
For example ...
I've got Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+, and the last time I saw a movie on TV was in 2021, the last series I watched to completion was The Boys (and Umbrella Academy).
I'm literally paying for tons of stuff I am not going to see; is it reasonable to think that I am going to go out of my way to search for, then download something?
It's software that has switched from pay one time per version to subscription only that causes me to feel this way too. And let's not forget what TurboTax has done to the US.
I want a personal collection of movies, imagine a bookshelf of my favorites.
But all the streaming services are like having a messy Blockbuster Video in my living room, which I don't want.
I preferred the old days, with just a single cable/sat set-top box. Might not have been able to stream on-demand, but at least I only had to look in 1 place to record (series link etc) or work out what was available.
https://www.justwatch.com/us
For episode 2 onwards I could buy the season of Discovery through apple tv, which I did. I assume S5 will be on Paramount Plus which is now available in my country, so I subscribe to that if I want to watch it.
As far as I'm concerned if I can't buy it, it's fair game, if I can pay for it then I will, or I won't watch it.
Where the streaming services are getting in trouble is if they are less convinient than piracy. Steam's success is largly built on being more convinient than pirating games, and similarly early Netflix was more convinient than pirating movies. Netflix and Amazon Prime still are on the "more convinient than piracy" side for me, the plethora of other streaming services not so much.
And then there's the question whether watchin Youtube with adblocker and SponsorBlock is equivalent to piracy. It is damn convienient.
Back then, much of our TV viewing was with the old Netflix DVD-through-the-mail thing, and then various torrent sites. When more and more streaming services started popping up, I torrented less and less to being zero. But now with the shake-up with some of the streaming services (like HBO Max), you just can't get some of the shows anymore...or else you have to buy entire seasons from Amazon or wherever. I haven't resorted to it yet, but I can see how pirating will take a new upswing as the streaming services keep damaging themselves.