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Comment by malka | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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