The added benefit of streaming services is there's an app for almost every device: all TVs, phones, iPads, computers, etc.. That alone is a killer feature you can't really replicate on your own.
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Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content
171–180 of 415 posts
Re: Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well it's costing this guy $45 a month apparently.
$45 a month is a pretty cheap vice as far as things go, though. You could easily be spending $45 a month just on streaming services.
Or he could spend $10 on the tracker, $10 to run a normal computer without 30 drives, and still watch all the same stuff for half the price.
Re: Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content
#173Why not just pay $5/mo for a Plex share with tens of thousands of the most popular movies and TV shows? I haven't torrented or paid for content in years. If I want to watch something and it's not on the server, I message the admin in Bangalore and he adds it. Sure I don't "have" the content in the sense it's not sitting on spinning disks, but I don't care. Life is too short to try to collect widely available digital…
How long do you think that's going to last?
Re: Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content
#174Stop with all the watching (and to a lesser extent listening) and start reading and hoarding books instead. 99% of downloaded content you will never read, but at 0.5~4.0Mb per book just two cheap, but RAIDed with ZFS for safety, 1Tb 3.5" HDDs will last you a lifetime. And that's before turning any kind of compression on!
Re: Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody lets me pay for content. They're all tying themselves in contractual knots trying to find the most lucrative deal, and meanwhile it's impossible to just buy a movie or a TV show without shipping a physical disc. 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 f…
Uh, you can actually buy south park from any number of providers. Amazon and iTunes both list Season 1 for $25. You don't need to only watch things on monthly streaming platforms.
Can you play the media without going through Amazon or Apple to do it? Is the quality guaranteed to be good when I choose to watch it? What kind of ads am I going to get when I click play? Even if there are no ads now, is that guaranteed to be the case forever?
Downloadable, ad free, and DRM free. Music has been selling that way for decades. I've spent thousands on that kind of media, I'd have spent 10 times as much if it had been made available that way. Some people purchase a controlled versions to atone for their pirating sins but that just rewards consumer-hostile business models, and most of the money goes to middle-men that only add negative value to the product they're selling.
Re: Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content
#176You remind me of squirrel storing nuts for a winter that’ll never come.
Re: Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content
#177At least where I live in Europe, it's almost impossible to not pirate. The government has strict controls on media and so it's impossible to even get access to most movies. Netflix, Amazon Prime and other streaming sites have been completely neutered. HBO Go, Criterion, etc. are completely inaccessible. In the US, it's a different story. Everything outside of Karagarga is available to be streamed, or at least purchas…
Same with me. I watched the first seasons of Star Trek: Discovery on Netflix, but this year their contract ended. There is no service available in my country where I can legally watch it.
On the other hand nobody cares about torrents here, so at least I don't need to pay for usenet access to get it :-)
Re: Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content
#178I'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 qualit…
My NAS has a torrent downloading software and an app for my Samsung TV. I just visit my local network web address, add the torrent in the NAS dashboard, and am able to play it from the TV within a few minutes. Most content is great, occasionally there are audio issues or missing subtitles.
Re: Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content
#179I don't think piracy is what is costing you. Data hoarding is.
Even if you wanted to keep a library of all watched movies or series from the past year you'd sit at much lower than 30TB. Do you really need to keep all this data ? How many times in your life will you rewatch all those movies and would it not be faster to find a new download then with the slight risk that it won't be available anymore ? You can probably safely remove/redownload the most popular shows and only keep the more niche ones that may become hard to find, or purge your movie library every few months for stuff that you never rewatch (you can probably even automate that). With decent internet and preferences for popular movies you could even argue that you'd just have to keep around the torrents and re-download your movies on the fly, trading a few minutes of waiting for a much cheaper setup.
There's also ways to optimize the uptime of your server which is essentially a NAS for movies. You could have the big machine off most of the time and use a Raspberry Pi to send Wake On Lan packets when you need it. It's may take an extra minute before it's usable but you would lower your bills significantly.
That $1200 upfront and $55/month sound like at least double what it should be. For a server that may double as a backup for your own files the upfront investment can be seen as worth it. And with the many streaming platforms relying more and more on exclusives, region-locked content that require VPNs that may not even work, time-limited content and increasing pricings your reduced electricity bill may not be far off from what legally viewing the content might cost you.
Re: Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content
#180The added benefit of streaming services is there's an app for almost every device: all TVs, phones, iPads, computers, etc.. That alone is a killer feature you can't really replicate on your own.
Theres an app for that. Plex turns any computer into a streaming service and there are apps for almost every device including old smart tvs.