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

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

#121

Post by brookst »

I’ve been fortunate and really can’t bring myself to take things without paying for them. Being a movie and sports fan I pay for (deep breath) Netflix, HBO, Peacock, Disney/Hulu/ESPN, Sunday Ticket, Fubo, Paramount+, Prime, and AppleTV/Music.

I don’t mind the money, except Sunday Ticket which is insanely expensive for something that blacks out the biggest games each week.

What I mind is the complete unusability of having different UIs for each of them, and the lack of any unified schedule/guide. It is bizarre that the only way to find a live football game is to try each of the services that it might be on until found.

I don’t begrudge content creators and distributors their money. I just find it insane that the content choosing user experience is so much worse than 30 years ago.

If someone came out with a 100% pirated live+streaming solution with a unified catalog and schedule, I’d happily use it while still paying for the legit services whose various baroque UXes I wouldn’t miss at all.

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

#122

Post by tobyhinloopen »

lbotos wrote: post #23

A 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 debuggin…

Netflix is the same. You can only watch HD netflix on the netflix app or on edge.

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

#123

Post by corobo »

jesuscript wrote: post #12
chewmieser wrote: post #6

I 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.

Chill.institute (manual) and showrss.info (scheduled TV) + put.io + cronjob running `rclone move` into your Plex media directory is one I've seen that seemed pretty neat.

Entire process is probably faster than finding which service the thing you want to watch is streaming on.

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

#124

Post by mr90210 »

Again? With how fragmented the availability of TV Shows is, sometimes there was no other option except for sailing with my boat over the 7 seas.

If you are in the US, you pretty much have access to every streaming service, but outside of the US, some people like me struggle to access shows from Hulu for instance, and sometimes the only viable option is to wait until a TV Channel buys the rights of the shows one desires to watch.

I haven't got time for that!

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

#125

Post by jrib »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #18
terabytest wrote: post #10

I'm not going to speak about my personal practices, but I find the current landscape of streaming services unusable and unsustainable from a customer perspective. I share a Netflix and Prime account with my parents, and support for that is soon going to end. I don't feel like either of those services provide enough value to me to consider paying for them entirely by myself. The content is mediocre at best, finding an…

I have a Prime account, but I'll soon be cancelling it I feel. The same products can had on eBay for less money with no shipping charges added. Prime video is quite unique, but I'm very much past them putting pre-roll ads on the content I want to watch. It's universally an advert for their own craptastic, homegrown version of an existing well-defined format. If I was interested in watching Law & Order I can start fro…

yeah, I canceled Prime a few years ago. I reasoned that if I needed the product fast then it would be faster to physically go to target or walmart. And if I didn't need it fast, then the default shipping would be fine.

Their add-on services all felt lackluster too. Most of the prime video content is not well-rated.

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

#126

Post by vehemenz »

hbn wrote: post #113
100011_100001 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing an important thing. Netflix allowed a huge library of DVDs to be rented. You could have 3-4 DVDs on rotation for a rather cheap price. This happened when Blockbuster would charge you $5 per movie, and Netflix would charge $10.99 for unlimited DVDs, but you could only have 3 DVDs checked out. That's why Netflix was huge and killed Video Store rentals.

Is that why Netflix killed video stores? I don't know anyone who used it when it had DVD rentals (I don't even know if we had that option in Canada). Myself and most people I know stopped renting videos when we could stream stuff easily.

I think you might be an outlier. Netflix DVD rental was huge in the US—can't speak for Canada though. Everyone I know had it.

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

#127

Post by virtual_void »

endisneigh wrote: post #20

Why pay when you can take for free, is the idea?

I think the idea is that it’s problematic to pay for many different streaming services to get the content. Spotify got it right for music - one subscription, everything i want is there. Movies etc, not even close.

How is one to fight back? The traditional way worked for music. I’m happy to pay but I’m not going to be taken advantage of.

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

#128

Post by zonethundery »

Cyph0n wrote: post #26
chewmieser wrote: post #6

I 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.

Usenet is definitely the answer. Old school but it works and its inaccessibility relative to torrents keeps it out of "easy-ish target" territory for IP enforcers.

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

#130

Post by papruapap »

Thaxll wrote: post #53
chewmieser wrote: post #6

I 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.

You don't need seebox / ratios, trackers don't know how much you really uploaded, as a matter of fact it's your client that send that information, so you can send anything you want.

I think trackers eventually can find out that bad actors and bad them out. If you claimed to have sent 100 kb but nobody reported to have received them then you are flagged.
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