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Comment by Numberwang | Hacker News Reader

And if I need Netflix for some tv, HBO for some, Hulu for some, iPlayer for some, Canal+ for some and torrent sites to access Korean thrillers....

I'm going to go 100% torrent sites.

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I have Netflix, Amazon Prime, and one of the most expensive DirecTV packages. Yet I still torrent most of my television. Yes the very same television I can get from satellite I download via internet. For some reason I just find the (watching) experience so much cleaner and easier.

Rewinding/fast forwarding is easier; so are subtitles. It works on the subway, and on airplanes. It works when my neighbors are saturating the local bandwidth.

It's because it's so damn convenient. No dicking about with ads, settings, codes, authentication, drm, whatever. Just look, download, and go. Usually higher res too.

I've got UK Netflix and have found myself torrenting some movies because the Netflix version was not HD due to some stupid licensing arrangement.

This has happened on maybe 6 or 7 movies in the last year and I'm starting to get annoyed enough to consider cancelling my subscription.

The pickings are not very good anymore and new stuff seems so sparse and infrequent.

I'm spending money each month on something i use maybe one or two nights a month.

There is that point too. I think it can be summarized into the "consumers are only willing to jump through so many hoops" tenet.

Unfortunately we'll never see this solved - there are too many parties with conflicting interests to make everybody happy.

The fact that "We need to get in on the streaming thing" is probably said in the boardroom of every media company is exactly what's going to kill it.

I am willing to pay for exactly one streaming service. The idea that streaming services will become the "pay only for the channels you watch" is second to the fact that all but a few streaming sites will wind up being complete shit.

So far only YouTube and Netflix have passable interfaces, cross platform support, and a half-decent discovery algorithm.

So unless they give you everything you want for 8 bucks you are just going to pirate?

Why even pretend you are willing to pay, you clearly aren't.

Who said anything about the money? Having multiple services is a pain in the ass, even if they're free. Non-overlapping device support, DRM, having to waste time searching for a particular work on each one, etc.

Just yesterday, I overheard a conversation in my very own living room that went something like this:

  SPOUSE: We have this movie on DVD.
  SPOUSE: You could watch it without commercials.
  KID: Okay.  Where is it?
  SPOUSE: Somewhere in the DVD cabinet.
  KID: Ummmm.... that's okay.
  KID: I'll just watch it on TV.

These are the same people that trampled all over my "genre, then alphabetical by title" filing system every time they retrieved a disc, until I finally gave up and stopped doing it. Before, I could say "second shelf, third row, on the left," and now I say, "find it yourself, you bogosorting heathens."

The lack of searchable indexes is a huge obstacle in every form of media. Imagine if you went to the library, and rather than a central index, you had to check each floor in the stacks separately to see if a book was available.

I am not big into videos, but muscially I really miss being able to choose cd, stick it in a player and play. Now I have to boot the computer up , open up the music player, find the tracks, and play. 10 seconds versus a few minutes.

Likewise I used to grab a cd or tape for my walkman before leaving the house. Now it takes at least 5 minutes (probably more) to transfer files to an mp3 player though admitedly they can hold way more.

The only place I see this as a win is with the kindle where book sizes are so small, I can store way more than I am likely to read.

I struggle to get the bogosorting heathens to even put the correct DVD in the correct box.

Also I simply cannot get them to watch a movie on a DVD somehow 'missing out' on what is on TV.

Because Amazon Video and Itunes have a huge selection and people won't want to pay 3 dollars a movie or 2 dollars a show.

In fact I recently had to use Amazon video instead of torrent because amazon had what I was looking for and torrents didn't.

If the parents position is that he literally needs everything in one or he'll never leave, it's an unreasonable demand. No business or service will ever have 100%. Not even torrents.

Amazon Video exists in only five countries in the world; most of us don't have access to it. And iTunes only has TV shows in a dozen countries as well.

Look, I don't care about your moral/ethical feelings toward piracy, but one would be completely irrational to not pirate content because $1/$2 a show is a completely ridiculous price and doesn't not in any way reflect it's true value.

Let's assume that we're talking about a show which is an hour long. Which means we're paying $2 per hour.

Netflix charges $8/month with the average usage of 2.4 hours a day in the US which comes out to $0.11/hour. More aggressive users looking to completely replace TV can average 4/5 hours a day knocking the price down $0.05/hour. And a household of three with different preferences can effectively triple that getting us down to $0.04/hour if they're casual users or $0.02/hour if they're aggressive.

Torrenting costs more in time than $0.05/hour so it's no surprise that people are willing to pay for it.

If torrenting is to be defeated it will require cooperation and a realistic view of what content is actually worth to people.

When your legal avenues of getting content become fragmented enough, and you're paying for so much extraneous and/or overlapping content, torrenting becomes the most attractive option. (If you can look past the legal/ethical issues)

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