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Comment by bitcoinmoney | Hacker News Reader

Most people dont know but you can get P4S (plex for share) where you pay (or free) someone to get added on their plex library. Some of these servers have CDN and have 90+TB storage with automated requests system. Thousands of shows and movies. You can also get IPTV, which is basivally cable TV through internet for 10$/month. 5000 channels. You ask how its possible? Basically fly by night companies redistributing cable. Some have sweared by it being good. Does anybody in HN hsvr more ecperience in

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Am I misunderstanding the idea behind the first thing, or is that just piracy that you pay for? If you're going to go to the trouble and / or risk of pirating things and have enough technical knowhow to setup Plex on your local device, I don't know why you wouldn't just go for an old fashioned approach ... which is usually free, better quality, more reliable, etc.

Being able to setup a legal program like Plex and knowing how to pirate high quality versions of all the media you want are two different things. People bought into Hulu and Netflix when you could get nearly everything you wanted to watch on their services.

Plex is legal to use, but not all that easy to set up, at least in my experience. At least, I would expect anyone capable of using Plex longterm on a TV to also be able to pirate stuff.

The point about legality wasn't about Plex, however. It was about paying someone to torrent stuff for you, which is still copyright infringement.

Setting up plex on a playstation 4 though that you just want to use the plex share feature is not hard though.

True. Running your own server probably costs more than 5$/month on electricity alone. No brainer if you do it yourself vs some other dude.

Pretty simple to set up. Just install the software, navigate to the webpage, and tell it what directories to look in for your media

Some tech-savvy people in here (Poland) also use cardsharing. Basically it's normal, satellite TV, but they don't get a legal card and set top box from the provider. Instead, some shady company hosted in the Netherlands buys them in bulk, puts it in some special module and lets multiple people use them. It's apparently one card per 3 or 4 subscribers at a time, not one card per household. Haven't tried it muself but apparently it's cheap and reliable.

How much are the costs?

around 75zł (around $20) for a 90-day package that offers the two satellite providers in common use, with all channels and PPV events unlocked. A premium TV package with just one of those would be around 120 zł (around $35). Basically all TV that you could ever want over here. There aren't any channels not on one of those two. Everything is paid via bitcoin and you only use the internet to transmit the keys (which are small enough to work well on dial up), so throttling, tracking and flaky connections aren't really that much of an issue. The only downside, and a big one, is that you need to find and purchase an appropriate box (around 200zł or so I've heard) or an extension card for your PC. Then you need to configure everything, install some plug ins, use an english interface, upload a config via ftp etc. I'm only vaguely familiar with the process myself, as I haven't ever set something like that up, but it's definitely not for the sort that can't tell a search engine from a web browser. Bitcoin is also a hassle. That's why no one really uses it, I guess.

It's frustrating that with the fragmentation of Streaming services it's tempting to get back to piracy. It's like we are back to the beginning of piracy. Today you can get a pirate IPTV provider for ten bucks and set it up on your AppleTV and bingo you get 5000+ tv channels, thousands of movies. I have Netflix, Hulu, Molotov using smart DNS but I also have one IPTV provider to be complete...

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