So not technical and completely unreasonable for content that they own themselves. There's no reason Netflix can't just send me House of Cards in 4K or Amazon can't send me The Grand Tour in 4K. Increasingly those are the shows I actually do want to watch as the two streaming giants overhaul the content business, further consolidating the industry. So they can't really hide behind the licensing restriction argument.
Oh come on, once the content is displayable it's piratable and they damn well know that.
This is more a matter of restrictive terms and conditions they can enact due to their monopoly-like position.
Streaming DRM'd video to a closed system (XBOX, PS4, set top box) is orders of magnitude less piratable than streaming video to an open system like Linux (DRM'd would be harder to pirate but I'm sure someone could lash up their own Chrome to dump the video after the unDRMing step.)
(How would you get the video content out of a DRM'd stream to an XBOX?)
Pirates are determined enough to break all the schemes and once one does the cat is out of the bag and everyone can access it without restrictions. Ultimately this makes the user experience of the pirate service better than the paid one. Netflix used to say, to convince license holders, that once it entered a market pirating went down because convenience went up. They're now falling in the same trap with their own content...
Not really - getting content off Usenet/torrents isn't something your average person will be doing. And then you probably need to transcode it for a closed system like XBOX. etc.etc.
(And yeah, this is probably something everyone on here can do with their eyes closed - but HN is the top 0.0001% of computer users when it comes to competencies.)
That's why you should tell your friends about youtube-dl & vlc and other tools like that. It hardly gets any simpler than that, and it's as good an introduction to terminals/programming for non-techy friends as anything else I can think of.
Well if you can stream your desktop that's half the work done already. Vlc transcodes just about anything you can throw at it so there's the other half.
