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Whenever I rent a movie off iTunes, it will fail 2GB in complaining about data corruption. Then it restarts the download. A younger naive me used to give it a 2nd/3rd chance to complete the download but now I turn to torrents with the justification that I already bought the right to watch it.

Netflix/Hulu/Google/Youtube is very reliable and high quality but their library is lacking. It's a shame they don't seem to have the selection Apple does. Compared to any of their libraries, Amazon Instant is more of a bookshelf so I haven't given its streaming reliability a shot yet.

My roommate's family has HBO, so he has an account to watch HBO. But instead we torrent Game of Thrones every Sunday because the video quality is better and there's no risk of buffering interruptions. It's annoying enough for me but this is becoming a small social event and I would gladly pay $5-10 (or I guess break the law) for a guaranteed quality viewing experience for guests.

There really is no legal equivalent to torrents in terms of selection or quality. If there was I would pay for it, like I do for music.

    > If you have time to browse HN you're not poor enough to justify pirating over a $6 rental.

I'm not advocating for piracy and don't think it's generally justifiable in most situations, but I don't think it's really fair for you to claim that people that browse a specific website are at some certain level of status or economic-well-being.

Maybe everyone you know irl who reads HN is a hot-shot rock-star developer, but I assure you the people you know who read HN is not representative of everyone who reads HN.

> between iTunes, Amazon instant, YouTube rentals, Google Play, Microsoft Store and your cable provider the movie is probably a $2-$3 HD rental. $5-$6 if its just released.

That is part of the problem. If I want to watch a movie, I'm gonna use the most convenient and easy method, because as most humans, I am lazy.

So I can either :

* find which service has the movie I want to watch

* create an account on it

* enter billing informations

* watch a DRMed movie

or i can

* find a torrent of the movie

* download it

So even not taking any notion of price into account, the piracy solution is far more convenient. There is a lot of friction with legal solutions.

So even not taking any notion of price into account, the piracy solution is far more convenient.

I'm not convinced by that argument.

It's possible that for a technically-skilled user with everything set up correctly, that could be the case - but you're exaggerating the scale of the difference for most users.

Let's say you're already a Netflix subscriber, for example; you want to watch a movie. It's offered by Netflix. You open the app, select the movie and it starts playing. You want to watch it on your TV? You use your Apple TV/Chromecast and it magically works. There's no waiting for a download, no need to worry about the format or resolution, and no concerns about the legality of it.

The same applies to e.g. Amazon Prime, or iTunes, or whatever cable service you have available. It will probably work, probably won't be a pain in the arse to setup, and won't get you into any trouble with your internet provider.

"Far more convenient" is simply overstating it.

Isn't that the very problem popcorn time is addressing?

If you are in the US, yes.

For me, it works like this:

I want to watch a movie. I look in Netflix, which has less than a few dozen movies. Can’t find it. So I turn on the VPN, for which I pay also money. Ah, there it is. Now, let’s Chromecast it... Oh, fuck, forgot Chromecast doesn’t have the VPN. Let’s set up the VPN on the router...

(by now the person with which I wanted to watch the movie turned on Popcorn Time and has already started the movie, while I try to read the documentation of my router).

In the US, Popcorn Time is not really useful.

But especially in english-speaking european countries with bad coverage from US services, like the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Scandinavia, parts of Germany, etc, Popcorn Time is often the simplest way to watch a movie.

Before Popcorn Time, German online streaming portals like Movie4k.to, Kinox.to, which are built around hosters like streamcloud.eu or megaupload.com (RIP), were so popular that 80% of the German population has used them at least once.

> So I can either :

> * find which service has the movie I want to watch

> * create an account on it

> * enter billing informations

> * watch a DRMed movie

You're not being honest here. Creating accounts and entering billing info is a one time thing. Otherwise there's probably a handful of clicks to get to a movie or less.

Assuming Netflix has what you want to see, it is way way more convenient than torrenting.

Typing in the name of the movie/show in the search bar, and clicking it all takes less than 10 seconds.

Searching for a good torrent takes at least a minute, downloading it can take 15 minutes to an hour. At best, it needs a total of 1000 seconds -- 100x what Netflix requires.

Life is too short to waste 1000 seconds on something that takes 10 seconds, just to save $8.99 a month, especially if you're a developer...

I have a good connection, so usually downloading a torrent of an HD movie takes 5 minutes (20-30 megabyte/s). On the other hand for some reason netflix often seems to think that I can't watch movies in HD or has small issues with streaming.

So I sometimes actually download a torrent of a movie that I started watching on Netflix. Likewise for Game of Thrones, I have a subscription to a TV channel in my country that has all the latest HBO shows but I download them because the quality is better.

alt+control+shift+s brings up the streaming menu while streaming netflix.

From there you can manually select the highest bitrate, so your stream stays in HD - you can also use a different CDN which may have a better cache.

Also, could your ISP be throttling your netflix connections? mine (AT&T) does this regularly, so i use my VPN connection when i stream netflix and have no more issues.

Just thought I would share what worked for me

Thanks I'll try that.

Many of the responders are entirely missing the point - what is most convenient to you and what yields the best viewing experience is totally irrelevant. You have no right to a convenient high quality viewing experience.

People invest time and money to produce movies and they have the right to make up the conditions under which you can watch them. If you don't like those conditions then don't watch the movies and force the content producers to adjust their practices.

It is morally probably more or less okay to pay for movies on one platform but then actually torrent them because the experience is better. But not paying at all because you don't like the conditions and experience is definitely not okay.

The movie (and television) industry hasn't really faced anything that made piracy easier than paying before. This is their Napster moment. One can argue that Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc are easy, but those are different sites/app with different user interfaces. Popcorn Time is one program that has all of their content and more.

Popcorn Time might hurt Netflix a little in the short-term with lost users, but long-term (5+ years) I think it could help. Some of the big players in the movie industry haven't wanted Netflix to become what Apple became for the music industry. If the alternative is piracy (i.e. no money), then their hand may be forced to give Netflix more content on better terms.

I use someone else Netflix account (with permission), and PopCorn time.

For the most part I prefer Netflix, their automatic HD to non-HD switching as needed is great (instead of you having to load the entire thing in HD or non-HD), their servers are good (much faster than some stuff on PopCorn), and there are some other minor advanges.

Still, I use PopCorn because frequently stuff is not available anywhere else, I am from Brazil, many stuff is not available here at all, and Netflix is also kinda limited.

What IS interesting, is that Netflix and PopCorn are killing pirated disc sellers (where I live you see lots of street vendors charging about 5 USD for a disc with pirated content, they were really popular when they were the only way to get what you wanted, but now Netflix and PopCorn are cheaper).

I 'rent' quite a few movies from iTunes, Amazon, and Verizon.

iTunes is generally botched because, as others mention, it requires full download and thus is generally a pain in the ass. Verizon makes it difficult to watch anywhere but my TV. Amazon (though relatively good on my FireTV) doesn't work well on my iPad.

More fundamentally: none release movies fast enough. And, when they do, they require me to 'buy' before they allow me to 'rent', several weeks later. Fortunately, most movies from the last decade have been garbage. But, when something truly great comes out, I have to resort to the black market to get my fix.

Luckily, we have economic principles to fill the gap. Supply and demand.

I know more than a few people who pay for Amazon Prime VOD, Netflix and HBO but choose to pirate shows that could stream easily from those services.

Why?

Because internet bandwidth for video streaming at home is a joke that forces you to watch virtually everything at SD or lower.

Not to mention the way ISPs are going, we are going to be paying for all the content twice, 3 or more times if you want to watch it again.

> the most pirated shows are the ones most easily available.

Another way of interpreting this: 'the shows that are in the greatest demand are the ones for which the distributors feel pressured to offer the best service and availability'.

I'm unconvinced. Then the piracy rate would decrease for these shows as a result of better availability of HBO Go and other services, but I'm pretty sure they're still Game of Thrones is still the most downloaded torrent. I'd be open to data showing otherwise though.

I think the simple answer is that people like free things, and torrenting is easy enough for a large amount of people to do it. Maybe if every show ever was available on Netflix for $9/month, people wouldn't torrent, but that's a pretty absurd expectation.

You are in the US. You want to watch Hitman 47. You do not want to go to the theaters, and would pay the same amount to watch it at home. But no, this is impossible. Hence, Primewire.ag, Movie4k.to.