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Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?

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Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?

#51

Post by samwillis »

No, but we are at the point where we are going to start cancelling subscriptions. There is more content than we will ever watch. First of the chopping block is Netflix, there just isn't enough really good content to justify it anymore. What we are considering is subscribing for maybe 1-2 months a year, bundle the things we want to see on it then.

From our perspective the two most valuable subscriptions are AppleTV+ and Disney Plus. Apple are making by far the best "prestige" TV, and that seems to be their strategy. Quality over quantity, much like their other product ranges.

My wife and I watch slightly less on Disney, but the value it brings us as a family (8yo + 4yo) is enormous. If we could only have one subscription it would be that one.

Amazon Prime Video is just a value add on a subscription we have anyway, although we increasingly shop less on Amazon, without the free shipping we probably would cancel the video subscription.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?

#52

Post by jesuscript »

version_five wrote: post #17

I see no moral problem with file sharing. Personally it's rarely worth the hassle, though I occasionally convert a youtube video to and mp3 for niche songs I can't find on spotify. I'd say it depends on how you value your time and how difficult it is to find what you want. "Piracy" is the legitimate competitor of streaming services. It seems like we have had a period where streaming offered a better product, but havi…

Well interestingly enough, it really is developers that can make a great piracy user experience. Why don’t we?

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?

#53

Post by Thaxll »

chewmieser wrote: post #6

I pirated a lot when I was younger and couldn't afford it. It's a headache I don't need anymore - worrying about VPNs or seedboxes, torrent sites moving to different domains or being shut down, maintaining ratios, letters from your ISP... Nowadays entertainment is quite accessible through subscriptions and I just wait for decent sales on the games I want to play.

You don't need seebox / ratios, trackers don't know how much you really uploaded, as a matter of fact it's your client that send that information, so you can send anything you want.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?

#54

Post by scrapcode »

The one that blows my mind are the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) pay-per-views. You have to be subscribed to one service that charges monthly, ESPN+ I believe, for the 'privilege' of buying a PPV at ~$80. Not only is it quite expensive IMO, but it is a complete pain in the rear compared to the alternative of googling a couple of stream links.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?

#55

Post by jon-wood »

> I just feel like if we’re at peak monetization.

We're really not. If anything there's more content (for lack of a better word) available for token amounts of money than there ever has been. I don't know how old you are but back in the distant past of the 90s you had two choices if you wanted to watch a film, you could go to a shop and buy a copy, probably for more money than you'd pay for a monthly Netflix subscription now, or you could go to the video rental store and rent it for a few pounds. If you were really lucky someone you know might own a copy and would lend it to you.

Games would cost £40+ new, or you could pick up the really big older ones for £10 or so. If you happened to want a game no one else did you were out of luck. Compare that to something like Steam now, or Game Pass where for ~$15/month you can have hundreds of games to choose from.

Maybe you don't like the model of monthly subscriptions. Guess what, for almost any film you can still buy a copy, either physically on disk, or digitally and be able to watch it right now. Don't like the level of ads on YouTube (which is honestly still better than what you'd see on any TV channel)? You can pay to turn them off.

This whole thing just reeks of entitlement. You don't have a god given right to watch and play anything you choose, whenever you choose, without paying anything for that. That's not how the world works. I'm not aware that ever having been how the world works. So sure, go pirate the things you want, but don't try to justify it as anything other than "I'd rather not pay".

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?

#56

Post by dageshi »

My entertainment consumption has basically moved to reading progression fantasy and litrpg on Royal Road and Kindle Unlimited. It more or less replaced everything, tv, movies, youtube, podcasts, I'd rather just read even if it's not exactly the best writing in the world.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?

#57

Post by jesuscript »

Cyph0n wrote: post #26
chewmieser wrote: post #6

I pirated a lot when I was younger and couldn't afford it. It's a headache I don't need anymore - worrying about VPNs or seedboxes, torrent sites moving to different domains or being shut down, maintaining ratios, letters from your ISP... Nowadays entertainment is quite accessible through subscriptions and I just wait for decent sales on the games I want to play.

Usenet is the answer :) 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.

What’s the hot one now days? I used to sub to Giganews.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?

#58

Post by shadowgovt »

terabytest wrote: post #10

I'm not going to speak about my personal practices, but I find the current landscape of streaming services unusable and unsustainable from a customer perspective. I share a Netflix and Prime account with my parents, and support for that is soon going to end. I don't feel like either of those services provide enough value to me to consider paying for them entirely by myself. The content is mediocre at best, finding an…

Add to that the fact that there's this disquieting connection between the IP ownership and the video tech.

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."

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?

#60

Post by kroltan »

I mostly play smaller or indie games, which have less aggressive monetization.

If I were to go and play the latest AAA like Assassin's Creed or whatever, I would definitely pirate it, but the game doesn't call to me anyway. Not only due to pricing and additional monetization, but mainly to remove the invasive DRM these kinds of titles use.

YouTube Premium I do the janky family sharing thing that makes the price tolerable, but it pays creators better so that's good.

Spotify, I'm on the verge of just going and pirating all the songs I want, because their UI is optimized for entirely the opposite way I listen to music (this could be a rant by itself).

Movies, I never stopped pirating. Just figuring out where I can find a movie in the quality and language I want requires being up to date on the existence, platform support, and terms of like 10 services. And yes, justwatch exists but A) I only watch like one movie a month, but most movies can't be rented, and are only available in a subscription which is a hassle to sign up and cancel every month, not to mention the expense. Versus pirating, where I can use 1 piece of software that will aggregate all the movies and series in the world and provide with an unified access.

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