Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content

Funniest thing: I've got a home cinema projector and somehow when I stream from Netflix (which I pay), it looks like shit. So I paid for an enhanced subscription, supposedly with better quality. Fiber optic at home: problem is not on my side. Still looks like shit.

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.

It works well enough if you’re just playing content you already have and not searching.

I have seen similar thoughts amongst friends who may or may not pirate (I never ask where they get their content), and I think of how my music consumption has changed over the last 20 years. When I got my first iPod, I felt rewarded for having ripped all of the few dozen CDs I owned to my iBook. The idea of having instant access to any song I owned was a feeling I loved, and one I've chased since then. It wasn't until streaming services hit a critical mass and I got back to a reasonable (then unlimited) data plan that I finally took my iPod Classic out of my car. My tastes aren't the same ten albums over and over - sometimes I want rock, sometimes pop, sometimes rap. Who knows.

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

That's a very pessimistic estimate for idling PC-based storage box.

The story looks faked all over the place. 30 TB? I have as much, and the storage price was maybe $600 last year.

> I built a computer with ~30TB of hard drive space. That, conservatively, cost me $1200.

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.