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Only if you stopped pirating before that point, otherwise you're describing a sunk cost fallacy. Which is not to discount your current opex.
Though $45 in power, I'm guessing you're in the USA?, does seem very high for a mostly idle CPU and a small volume of spinning rust + cooling.
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…
My guess is you're either not using that combination or otherwise blocking DRM / features that prevent desktop 4k.
Welcome to Hacker News where everyone makes $500k/year and nobody pays for content. Or at least it feels that way sometimes. I don't make that much money but I also don't pay for content.
I go to e.g. the South Park website, and I'm greeted by an error message saying they're "working hard to resolve [their] pre-existing contractual obligations," which is the same message they've shown for years. Thanks for trying, I guess, but if I pirated it then I'd just...watch the show, from start to finish, with all seasons and all episodes, no wasteful physical media, no subscription, no data collection, and no ads. That sounds good. I want to be able to pay money, maybe even quite a lot of money, and do that.
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…
As an example: at my house, my wife and I mostly only watch things together. We don't spend a lot of time in front of the TV, and so the time we DO spend that way is intentional, and pulls from a list of stuff we BOTH like.
Our tastes are not in perfect accord, though, so there are a few things she watches when I'm working late, and there are some movies I save for when she's out of town or otherwise occupied. One of those was the critically acclaimed Sicario.
Well, when I sat down to watch it when she was camping with a pal, I discovered that it was no longer available to rent online. Or buy. It had been "windowed" out for some reason.
Fuck. That.
20 minutes later, I had it. I wanted to pay for it, but there was no option to do so.
Come to think of it, the same thing happened 20 years ago or so with Battlestar Galactica. For some reason, the rightsholder wasn't releasing the prior season on DVD or digitally until substantially AFTER the new season started airing. This meant that for latecomers like us, it was more or less impossible to "catch up" before the last season started, which is crazy. Again, we WOULD have paid, but they weren't taking money, so we got the content anyway so we could watch the current season in sync with everyone else.
I do wish we still had the "long tail" that Netflix initially offered, but digital delivery leaves rightsholders with, well, too many rights. Right of first sale meant Netflix could rent a given DVD or BluRay in perpetuity, and the copyright owner couldn't do anything about it. With digital delivery, that's no longer true, and it creates crazy situations like the above.
Why do you need 30TB? You can always download again if you need to watch again.
Many countries outside of the US don't have unlimited[0] bandwidth ISPs. So downloading again and again is not feasible everywhere. 0. US ISPs are capped but in the TB range so most people never reach the cap.
I haven't paid for 90-95% of the content I consumed in the past 12 years. I've never spent a cent on it.(and I used to spend many hours watching new movies/shows every single day+Music+AAA games) Maybe try not hoarding all the half-decent movies on earth in 4K bluray version? at this point you have more data than a small piracy site...
Do you ever feel guilty that if everyone did what you did none of the content would exist? That you are stealing from all the hard working artists and tradespeople that made the content you love?
Welcome to Hacker News where everyone makes $500k/year and nobody pays for content. Or at least it feels that way sometimes. I don't make that much money but I also don't pay for content.
Paying for things you don't have to pay for is a quick way to lose money, no matter how much you make.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what world is a server that presumably sits most of the day doing nothing averaging 200W 24/7?
If that content is sourced from torrents you'll have a lot of disks spinning all the time just to seed tiny chunks so that's not unreasonable.
Also, OP included a Usenet subscription in their costs so they might not be torrenting at all.
I too tried to get into usenet for downloading shows I wanted to watch, but I couldn't justify the cost (in time) that it would take to build/maintain a system that automatically downloads the latest episodes of select shows. I deal w/ software all day at work. As I've gotten older, the less I want to also deal w/ software at home.