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Comment by chrisBob | Hacker News Reader

No problem. I want to stream the Olympic Channel, and I even pay $100 for a cable subscription that includes it.

Oh, I can't stream it though. Uverse only lets me stream from 3 of the NBC Sports channels, and not that one. Guess I am going to just cancel the cable I pay for and use someone else's Comcast login instead.

I don't mind paying for streaming service, and when HBO cracked down I bought a subscription that night. But some services you can't even pay for if Comcast doesn't run cable to your house.

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I don't like pirating content. I feel it's akin to stealing even though nothing physical is "stolen". (not trying to impose this on anyone else, this is just a personal belief of mine)

However there is one exception, and it's when a company will not allow me to purchase a tv show or movie.

All too many times I've watched seasons 1-4 of a show on something like Netflix, only to find that the most recent 4 episodes of season 6 are on a cable "on demand" service, and season 5 is only available as a DVD box set purchase, with the first half of season 6 literally 100% unavailable anywhere.

I want to pay for their product, they have the product, in most cases they created the product! But they aren't selling it because of reasons that I honestly don't care about any more. I will happily steal that content without remorse.

The BBC is an excellent example of doing it wrong, and giving me the choice between nothing, and piracy.

Have you looked at https://acorn.tv/

Thanks, I agree that’s one of the best ways to access that content, but they can do so much better!

The vast majority of currently-airing shows are available to view on-demand. They're just not always available in the format you want.

Generally, shows available to purchase on DVD are also available to purchase as season passes on for-pay services like iTunes, Xbox Video, Google Play Video, and Amazon Instant. Same goes for back episodes of current seasons. Hulu also has some shows(from a few networks) that are in-season but have fallen out of the cable service on-demand window.

The exception to this rule is sports (which are a whole different can of worms) and shows on "premium" cable networks (HBO, Showtime, etc.) which require you to pay a separate subscription to watch anything in-season before it's released as a box set or as a for-pay stream.

Here in Europe it’s even worse, in my country the only streaming services are Netflix and a Russian-only equivalent (I don’t speak Russian). It’s no surprise that pirating content is so prevalent here, it’s not that people don’t want to pay (although it’s not really fair that the average wage being 4x less than the U.K., Netflix is more expensive here), it’s that they aren’t even given a choice. Most of the time I use a VPN to access U.K. streaming services.

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