Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?

It's too bad that Apple's Season Pass was such a failure. If it would have been successful it's possible it could have attracted almost universal participation by all the majors given its price point, and competitors with a similar model would have sprung up.

$20 or $30 just for a single season of a TV show seemed outrageous. Why pay $20 for a single season of a TV show when you can pay $10/month for unlimited?

Now most people are paying > $50/month for TV subscriptions and still don't get everything they want. So in a year that's $600. That'd buy you 20-30 season passes. How many people watch more than 20-30 shows for their $600?

I'm willing to pay a lot to have all the content I care about in one place. I do that with Steam, for example. I'm lucky that I don't have to pay a lot for all the music I care about in Spotify. For movies and shows, unless the industry can figure out how to be more convenient than Plex, I'll be sticking with Plex.

I pay for my basically all of my games and music, proving Gabe Newell's old quote about piracy being the result of lack of convenience in the legal method of acquiring things (paraphrasing). Steam is convenient and I still have all access to all the games I bought 10+ years ago. And as for music, I stream it like most people, and also buy vinyl records for albums I particularly like which gives me something tangible and sends the artist some actual money in the process.

Movies and TV shows though, I basically pirate all of it. When it was mostly all on Netflix there was a convenient legal offering to watch a lot of content, but these days I have no idea where anything I want to watch is streaming. And even then, stuff moves around because contracts expire, new deals are formed, etc. And it's even worse if you're outside of the US (Canada in my case). You look up where to watch something and all the results tell you one thing, you go check, and it's not there because there's different distribution in Canada. I don't want to subscribe to 10 services when I'm probably not gonna use most of them in a month, and I'm not spending hours managing which services I'm subscribed to every month because it's a waste of time and it's not like I plan what I'm going to watch that far in advance anyway. Some things are only streamable on some network's website where they expect you to login with your account through a cable provider. So yeah, screw that - I flick my VPN on, load a torrent into my client, refresh my Plex and I'm watching in a few minutes. And half the time it's better quality cause it's a Bluray rip instead of running through an ugly compression algorithm.

I still do what I can to support shows I enjoy so they get some of my actual money -- buying merch or physical copies of the show/movie. But even if I buy a physical copy I still usually end up just watching it through my Plex server cause it's more convenient than grabbing a disc from my shelf and loading it into the disc drive that my current PC doesn't even have.

It is still cost-benefit thing for me.

When I was young, I did it a lot with Microsoft Office, Photoshop, Movies, MP3, and etc. Because I didn't have money.

I don't pirate anymore because I make money.

In this day of age, piracy has increased risk with malware that mines bitcoin or locks your disk for ransom, so the risk is much higher and effectively lowers the benefit.

How do you save on YouTube Premium? Is it accounting for the money value of time that you save on ads, replacing another music service, or the value of listening to the videos in background?