Comment by dcosson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dcosson | Hacker News Reader

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> This makes the piracy route become more and more attractive again - and I don't like that this is the case. I want to pay people for their content.

People like to say this, but, no offense, it just doesn't seem true. It sounds like a justification. (And I'm not judging, I'm just not convinced by this reasoning).

Signing up for 3-4 streaming services is pretty easy. If you use something like an apple tv or fire tv you can even use a global search that links you into the app where the content you searched for lives. If you're willing to pay per episode or movie to rent or buy everything you watch on itunes or amazon, it's even easier and you can get almost anything instantly.

I do agree that in general, the more different streaming services are released the more that people's incentives are starting to tip back towards pirating. But I don't think there's much other reason beyond just cost.

To be clear, I don't pirate and haven't except for niche stuff that I can't get my hands on otherwise.

If money was tight and I didn't have other hobbies I might consider it. But at the moment selling me 3-4 streaming services for $80 a month when I can just watch youtube instead, or pick up a good 4 year old game for $10 is a tough sell to me.

There's excellent Plex servers for <$10/month, which give access to tens of thousands of shows and movies, with the guarantee that anything remotely popular is part of that offering. Versus the more legal option of paying hundreds of dollars a month to access content spread between 5-10 different apps, with stupid limitations such as "no offline viewing" or "check in home every n days", not to mention the incompatibilities due to DRM etc.

Piracy is definitely more convenient nowadays.

I mean I can subscribe to 5 different streaming services and pay $50-60/mo, and how far away are we from having a service that provides a collection of streaming services (i.e. cable TV).

The problem that's happening lately is that streaming services were a way to get away from the expensiveness of cable, but now we're returning the the exact same problem we had then.

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