I gave up on trying to access movies and series legally anymore. There was even a website where you search for a movie and it will show you on which service/subscription its available and for which price. Last straw for me was amazon prime that forced me to buy an older movie which was in a very bad quality and ONLY in one language and NO subtitles. Few google searches away Ive found a pirated stream with full HD quality and in language of choice AND subtitles. Screw all of this. Fuck all of you, who works on this shit at making your customers life miserable.
Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?
21–30 of 641 posts
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?
#22I don't pirate, purely because of the risk of malware. If there was no risk of malware, I would definitely pirate a lot more. Personally, the risk of getting all my accounts/PC hacked isn't worth saving the $X per month to me, and just the inconvenience of trudging through dozens of torrents/trackers/etc.
So you could benefit from security by compartmentalization and start pirating, it seems. You may be interested in Qubes OS: https://qubes-os.org. Can't recommend it enough.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?
#23A few weeks ago I rented the Alien: Covenant movie on youtube because I didn't even know it existed. About 2 minutes in I noticed it was playing at 480p. I paid the extra dollar for HD rental. Lo and behold, if you want to watch rented youtube movies in HD (which you paid for) you can't do it in chrome browser on mac but hilariously safari did let me watch it in HD on the same computer... Those 15 minutes of debugging added about 3 cuts to the 10000 caused by silly restrictions that exist.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?
#24It depends. Games and music - no, I'm glad to pay for Spotify subscription, and I'm happy to buy a game every once in a while. Movies and TV shows - yes, if I cannot find them in Netflix. Sometimes I want to watch something, and it's not available in Netflix in my region, or not on Netflix at all. What choices do I have?
I usually choose not to watch.And not because of morals, but because the life is sad when so much effort goes into consuming content.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?
#25I 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.
That’s one of the reasons I kind of gave up on, but it is 2023. I wonder how streamlined piracy has gotten.
Popcorn time was quite slick when I tried it maybe in 2015 or so.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?
#26I 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.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?
#27I'm doing a bit of both.
I think it's fair that artists are rewarded for their work, so I pay for one global service per type of content : Netflix for movies and TV shows, Youtube Premium for music.
However, I abhor the game of 'selling rights to certain platforms for certain duration only in certain countries', and I don't want to have to handle half a dozen subscription just because someone in the marketing team somewhere decided that this movie was going to be exclusive to this platform.
So my go to is, if I want to watch something, I first try to find it on my legal paid platform, and if I can't find it there, I'll pirate it.
Works pretty well so far.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?
#28Alternative viewpoint: Their (movie, song, game and book content producers) problem is not piracy, it's being ignored.
Right now there is much more competition for eyeballs than there ever was in the past (social networks, video shorts, etc). People only have so many hours in the day for entertainment, and these alternative eyeball-grabbers are can only gain eyeballs at the expense of traditional eyeball-grabbers.
For example ...
I've got Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+, and the last time I saw a movie on TV was in 2021, the last series I watched to completion was The Boys (and Umbrella Academy).
I'm literally paying for tons of stuff I am not going to see; is it reasonable to think that I am going to go out of my way to search for, then download something?
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?
#29100%, and I have hulu, netflix, hbo max etc. I pay for YouTube premium because the amount of savings I've made from it is 10 fold higher than the cost.
It's software that has switched from pay one time per version to subscription only that causes me to feel this way too. And let's not forget what TurboTax has done to the US.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?
#30I wish the UX of streaming services wasn't so horrible. That is what makes me most want to go back to a Kodi box.
I want a personal collection of movies, imagine a bookshelf of my favorites.
But all the streaming services are like having a messy Blockbuster Video in my living room, which I don't want.