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Comment by dmitrygr | Hacker News Reader

http://thepiratebay.org does. Like the good old days.

And the media companies did it to themselves...

I get the humor in your statement, but there's a lot of truth there. At the end of the day, when Netflix, Hulu, and Prime don't have it, tpb does. In perfect, uninterrupted HD. The only downside? Waiting 5 minutes for it to download. It's hard to justify the $15/mo I'm paying for Netflix when that is an option, and especially hard to justify paying for all 3 (which I'm doing, for some reason.)

> which I'm doing, for some reason

Convenience has value. Even if tpb is easy enough, there's still friction. So long as streaming services stay convenient and cheap enough, they will keep customers. The interesting dynamic is that the more players enter the space, the less convenience there is. Justwatch.com is already trying to add that convenience back, but the fact that we need that meta step is already frustrating.

Let there be friction so the techies can go back to being alone in pirating. It wasn’t an issue until everybody started doing it!

Maybe it's just because I was doing it for 10 years until Netflix got good, but now that Netflix no longer cuts it for 90% of what I want to watch it has been really easy to slip back into pirating.

> The interesting dynamic is that the more players enter the space, the less convenience there is.

This is exactly what happened to me. When Netflix had literally everything, it was the only place I looked. Now that it doesn't have everything, I'm not going to go through the litany of Hulu, prime, etc, I just go straight to tpb. So I cancelled Hulu etc. And because tpb is second nature and it always has what I'm looking for, I just go there first... so I cancelled Netflix.

It's like watching the 2000 p2p shift all over again. The media companies don't understand how to build a business model that fits seemlessly into society.

> The interesting dynamic is that the more players enter the space, the less convenience there is.

That's only because they're allowed to have exclusive deals. If and when streaming services will get commoditized, this won't be a problem - much like having more grocery stores around you doesn't make shopping more inconvenient.

Well the other downside is having to sign up for a VPN...

On the up side, you now have a VPN.

There are streaming pirating services like popcorn time which means you don't wait 5 minutes. Though these also typically have low selections and low seed counts.

I don't find the quality on tpb to be all that great. Sometimes you get super-compressed audio, or it only has the dialogue dubbed into Russian with no English option, or random other problems. It's kind of a crapshoot.

I know there are other torrent sites and probably private groups that are well curated, but I imagine you have to maintain some seed ratio to be in there and I'm not sure I could get away with that.

Pirate Bay doesn’t have lots of stuff and if it does, the quality varies, sometimes they have baked in subtitles in foreign languages, etc.

If you want to break the law, then of course anything is possible. In any case, all you are doing by pirating is telling the media companies how badly you want their product. That is going to tell them to fight harder against piracy. The only ethical option IMHO is to crowd-fund and pay people directly to create content.

I feel like you're saying the opposite actually. You don't value their product enough to actually pay for it. It's available on TPB? Well, sure I'll watch it, why not. No torrent? Too bad, I'll just watch something else.

We have more options for entertainment than ever. More shows are produced by more studios, we have plenty of foreign options like anime or BBC shows instead of being limited to our region, video games compete for attention, and there's been a huge explosion of independent things online. Some people just sit and watch things on YouTube.

What hasn't increased? An individual's time and attention. There are a finite number of hours in the day.

Static demand, increased supply and an unwillingness to pay the asking price. That sounds like pretty simple economics to me.

Yeah, but content producers still haven't realized that our time is more valuable than their usually garbage product, their product is overvalued, and no one feels bad about pirating because copyright is so fundamentally broken by the same content providers that the contract between the public and producers has been totally violated.

Entertainment still isn't a commodity, though. Just because there are hundreds of sci-fi movies and TV shows, doesn't mean I can pick up any of them and enjoy it as much as one that I wanted to that wasn't available.

If I really want to watch, say, Star Trek movies and Continuum TV show, then if CBS decides to pull the Star Trek movies from Netflix and spin off their own streaming service doesn't mean I'll just find something else on Netflix, or that I'll subscribe to CBS too; I'll keep watching Continuum on Netflix and head to TPB for the missing movies.

If movie studios want to stop piracy, they have to stop being so greedy. Streaming services shouldn't be allowed to get exclusive licensing deals on movies/shows. The market would sort itself out and people would be able to watch all they needed from one or two services whose UI they most like.

(And honestly, UI should be unbundled too. Streaming service's crappy four-button player can't beat VLC.)

> You don't value their product enough to actually pay for it. It's available on TPB? Well, sure I'll watch it, why not. No torrent? Too bad, I'll just watch something else.

I don't buy that argument. Its analogous to saying if Windows was not available on pirate platforms people would "just" switch to Linux.

People making content are very very good at keeping people hooked. It partially explains all the people who binge watch on Netflix..

Alternatively, the only rule about us...t is you don’t talk about us...t.

There is a lot of stuff you can’t find reliable seeds for on bit torrent sites if it isn’t popular.

u mean .org

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