> Don't really know what I should think about this to be honest...
Ultimately, piracy is the only remaining option. Because the company has decided it's going to brand you a pirate anyway.
It costs maybe 11$/mo to hire a seedbox running plex that can store whatever media you would want to watch. While it's not next-day or same-day in most cases, in my experience it covers basically everything you would want to watch, along with collaborative watching, which is a perk netflix does not have.
Don’t know if I really buy the “piracy is the only option” line any more. It was for years. But you can now legally pay for the content you want, you just don’t like the price.
Netflix shuffles media constantly, you have to subscribe to five different streaming sites to watch a show and even then it could disappear next month, and you can't share the account with anyone else. To get good coverage of streaming services you need to subscribe to several.
Meanwhile in piracy land, you sign up to a seedbox, press a button to set up Plex+Sonarr/Radarr, then you're done. Type in the names of the things you want, share it with as many people as you want, etc. Literally all you have to bother with is disk usage and most of the sites I looked at last month had a minimum offering of 500GiB, some boasting 1TB of disk space -- so even that isn't much of a problem.
That includes Plex + etc + 4TB Disk. One-button setup for all the supported services.
So like I said, all this measure does is drive people to piracy. They're literally faceplanting on their way to extract more and more money from people.
You could always legally pay. The price was quite high because you needed to pay for cable + premium channels in addition to renting at blockbuster video.
However with all the streaming services it's not just as high if not higher if you want everything. Not to mention the crazy Disney fee ($30+ / movie in addition to the monthly subscription). It's great as a DIS shareholder, but pretty terrible for their fans.
I feel like this is not true in regards to older material. Shows like wkrp in Cincinnati can never be made available with all of the music liceasing issues. Some classic shows like soap get censored. Some shows just go missing. Most never make it to streaming and many aren't available for purchasing.
Piracy is just as important. The reason why more don't is because it is easier to just pay and perhaps the content is not worth the effort anymore. People watch movies on fast forward now, play games on phones while watching and generally tv or movie viewing as a background activity.
When was it not an option to pay for the content people are trying to sell you?
The problem was UX friction. You had to go to a video store, rent a movie, get ready to be raped with fees, or go to a library and hope they have it, or go to a second hand store and browse the selection. You had to have a special piece of hardware or ten, and if a movie you wanted to watch was on a format you didn't have, too bad. That's why people used to watch the same movies every so often. Watch a movie? Doesn't matter if we had seen it already. Let's watch it again anyway. This is how movies like The Big Lebowsky and Friday got their followings, people watching them repeatedly. Like music. This touches on the social impacts of the paid subscription model that is off topic so I won't delve into that.
And then Netflix changed everything. And then everyone else got in on the game, and now you've got worse UX friction than before. You've got to determine which service has the movie you want to watch. You've got to pay for that service, now it looks like per person, for just that movie. And if you want to watch 4 or 5 movies? You might have to have as many as 4 or 5 monthly subscriptions. Or you can rent it for 1.99. But buy it? No, you cannot buy it. I mean, you can, but who has a DVD player and space for a bunch of DVDs?
But tpb has all the movies. And you can own them. And they're all in one place. And as a bonus, they're free if you don't include your VPN service.
Side note, how is tpb different from a library exactly? Besides scale and efficiency, in principle, what's the difference between tpb and a library?
Free is the best price, especially for broke a college kid. It's too tempting to be honest. Streaming a torrent stops me from ever paying for a streaming service.
I'm actually proud to say I've never paid for a streaming service of any kind at all, or cable TV for that matter And I'm not a young kid. I've bought albums and VHS tapes and DVDs before. Rented movies. But never once paid for a subscription service of any kind. And I never will.
Of course I don't "consume content" (I hate that term, what's with PR and marketing people reducing everything to a business case?) so much anymore, so I'm not quite the pirate I once was. In all honesty, if I'm going to sit in front of a screen, I'd rather talk to people like you on the internet than watch the super strong american hero defeat the bad guy for the gazillionth time, except this time they are sure to remind me that I'm a bad bad man for some belief I have.
Ultimately, piracy is the only remaining option. Because the company has decided it's going to brand you a pirate anyway.
It costs maybe 11$/mo to hire a seedbox running plex that can store whatever media you would want to watch. While it's not next-day or same-day in most cases, in my experience it covers basically everything you would want to watch, along with collaborative watching, which is a perk netflix does not have.