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

> Music industry figured this out decades ago, I'm not sure why other media hasn't.

It's a learning process. Remember the "old times" were CDs had DRM? It took quite a while to get high quality digital files without DRM - talking about FLAC here.

While I appreciate the concern, I've got a fair bit of free time, and to be clear I'm not actually worried about the financial cost. I'm living well within my means. Tomorrow I'm going to build a chicken coop.

The setup I've got doesn't require very much active maintenance, aside from yelling at my father to tag things better. I'm sure I could just go to sketchy pirate streaming sites (putlocker and the like) if I was concerned about the money. The point of this isn't so much that I'm spending too much on this hobby, but that piracy really is a service problem.

UK internet is kinda pants, you can stream 4k on netflix no issues but try streaming from a pirate site or service like popcorntime and you will be kicked back to standard definition and have a lot of buffering to deal with.

In the UK sites like the pirate bay get censored, there are mirrors but they too get censored. Once you find a site you can easily get US content like the US version of the office but the UK version of the office will be harder to find.

You can buy 30TB of spinning disk for ~£600 which is a fair chunk of money but for comparison my 100mbit internet costs £300 a year. To get all your content instantly in one place in hd with no buffering I would say its worth it.

I think the point being made by other people here still stands though. It's not piracy that costs you money. It's your desire to store/hoard huge amounts of data. Whether or not that's a problem is up to you, but if you deleted things after you watched them the costs would go down to nothing except 4the normal costs of running a computer.

I've quit pirating content a decade ago - combination of time, safety, priorities, and availability of legit content.

I've considered getting back into it occasionally.

Why: Convenience and access. From having everything on Netflix a decade ago, to now having almost as many subscriptions as I used to have cable channels, it's a pain (let alone a cost) to install dozen apps on my phone tablet TV roku etc. Their quality varies WILDLY. The user experience ranges from pretty decent to seemingly user hostile. I've recently watched a set of seasons of a show pirated a decade ago, then last two seasons on actual subscription service, and it sucked: app would not let me download to SD card, had to take precious phone storage. Subtitles were 2 seconds behind with NO way to adjust. Fast forwarding was wonky and basically unusable. And best of all, it auto deleted itself 48hrs after downloading so I had to keep redownloading same stuff over and over. Brutal!

Why Not: As explained above - It's pricey and time consuming, there's a fair amount of risk in pirating, and technology seems to keep changing. I made a post about that a while ago, but I'm no longer at a point in my life where every 6 months I can spare the time to fully rebuild and reconfigure and troubleshoot a stack from sabnzbd and nsbmatrix to udirwioay and fewiap and fdsjei, and then 6 months later again to fdwjieo and wearp routed through wefheio and zxcnzxcv. I have a friend who keeps urging me to set it up because it's so easy - oblivious that whenever I try to use his helpful "how to", a) It's 3 pages long b) it is missing about 10 pages of details and c) It's already out of date so it's "do that, but none of that actually because these days now the cool thing is ____" :D