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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

“Your circle” unless it includes families with small kids, isn’t Disney’s primary audience. Most normal middle class people aren’t going to go through the trouble of pirating movies and setting up a Plex server and then worry about setting up their router to get a good connection while they are away from home and even then deal with the abysmally slow upload speed of the typical home network instead of spending $8 a month to just have the convenience of Disney+ to be a glorified babysitter.

In 2003, people said that the iTunes music store was going to be a disaster. Who would pay to download music when they could get it for free. That worked out pretty well.

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>Most normal middle class people aren’t going to go through the trouble of pirating movies and setting up a Plex server and then worry about setting up their router to get a good connection while they are away from home and even then deal with the abysmally slow upload speed of the typical home network instead of spending $8 a month to just have the convenience of Disney+ to be a glorified babysitter.

Depending on the country, you'd be surprised.

I'm not sure why Disney has the hold it has in the US, but in most of Europe I know it's nothing special (to the point of being a "must have" brand). Kids can just sit in front of regular kids TV channels. And normal middle class families can and do pirate all the time...

Moreover, it's not like there aren't pirate streaming services available. In fact, I can't think of anyone non-technical I know who torrents anything; they all stream movies from pirate player sites. It's easier, and also perfectly legal for the viewer.

It's not "easy" on mobile and definitely not easy when you have to depend on cellular connectivity to stream while on the road.

>It's not "easy" on mobile

Short videos maybe, but I don't think I know anybody, young or old, who cares of streaming full movies on mobile. Maybe some outliers who watch their series on their commute...

The vast majority watch movies when they are at home...

So are you saying that all of the media streaming companies are wasting money creating mobile apps based on the "people you know"? Is the whole industry under the delusion that their apps are needed? Should they focus on just “people you know” or the entire mobile market?

>So are you saying that all of the media streaming companies are wasting money creating mobile apps based on the "people you know"?

You make it sound like they waste some fortune on those, so it necessarily has to have a huge market to justify building one.

On the contrary, regardless of whether they have a big mobile watching userbase (and I'm wrong) or not (and I'm right), it still makes sense to have a mobile app.

First, the mobile app budget is a drop in the bucket compared to their operating costs (bandwidth, marketing, offices, license deals, etc). So there's not much of a waste even if nobody uses it, which makes making a mobile app available a no-brainer.

Second, it would bad (competition wise) not having one anyway, even if few really use it...

Third, even if it's just e.g. 10% that watches movies on mobile, why not get them too?

Fourth, it's note that they actually invest specially in their mobile apps to begin with. Usually they use some cross platform framework they use for their web and/or desktop version.

Fifth, do you have better numbers, or some other empirical observations from people you know? Do you see rampant movie watching on the go?

Well seeing that there is no “cross platform framework” to support AirPlay, integration with the TV app, integration with cable providers single sign on authentication that’s built into the OS (you add your TV provider to iOS and most apps use that with your permission) that’s obviously not the case.

As far as the direction that video viewing is going.

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-people-spend-more-...

The difference in time was even more pronounced for younger Americans, with people 18 to 34 spending 1 hour and 51 minutes on live and time-shifted TV and 3 hours and 25 minutes on the web or apps on smartphone and tablets in the third quarter of last year, Nielsen said.

People like the ability to stream from the phone, but the same mobile apps also target tablets, which are very much used as portable TVs.

Still, I don't see your problem. Given how good browsers are on mobile, a pirate streaming site isn't that much worse or less convenient on a phone than Netflix or YouTube app. You select the video you want to watch, tap Play, tap "full screen", and enjoy the show.

Well, we also have statistics on the number of phones sold per year and the number of tablets. People are buying fewer tablets than phones and that is attributed mostly to people buying larger phones.

Also, it takes some amount of extra work to create an iPad app than an iPhone app. Once again, is the entire media industry delusional or should they be taking advice from HN users?

Why do you think them making apps implies they're used a lot? It's enough that they're used some of the time by some subset of users to make it worth it to them - they get to have more control over experience, more ability to scoop data, and they can offer the ability to locally cache whole movies, which they can't do in a browser.

So in other words people pay for the convenience of streaming services and most people don’t want to carry around hard drives, use torrents, etc.

Just like I said....

Yes, and I keep telling you that mainstream movie piracy nowadays isn't torrents but streaming websites operated by pirates, that look and work similarly to YouTube or Netflix, except all the videos are pirated.

Is this what you call “working similarly”?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21005204

No. What I call "working similarly" is the following:

- I type "fili.cc" in my Firefox on Android

- I don't like anything currently in suggestions, so I tap on the search box, type in "Avengers", and press Search

- I tap the first result, as it is the movie I'm looking for

- On the move page, I tap on one of the players listed

- A video box loads, I press its Play button, then Full Screen button, and watch the movie

It's literally one tap more than Netflix; since this is a site curating pirated streaming sources, I have to pick one of the "players" (each representing a movie source with a bundled JS player).

fili.cc is one of many of such sites; different people I know have their own favorites.

And I get a blank screen on ios -- you know the platform that close to half the US mobile phone population in the US use and way more than half of middle and upper income households use.

So do none of the "people you know" use iOS devices?

>And I get a blank screen on ios -- you know the platform that close to half the US mobile phone population in the US use and way more than half of middle and upper income households use.

The US is like 4% of the planet. The world is much bigger than New York, North Platte, Dallas, and Des Moines combined, and there are many countries where what the parent said is common place...

To put it in perspective, Netflix has something like 151 subscribers worldwide. The other 7.3 billion people use something else, and it's not Hulu or Disney...

That’s s very simplistic way of looking at the market. That’s like saying the total market for people who may buy tampons is 7.3 billion.

Do you really think the total addressable market for people who might buy a streaming service is 7.3 billion?

Perhaps one or two of the people I know personally have an iPhone; I'm in Europe, and here Android is the dominant hardware. I do sometimes see people with iPhones as I take the bus, recently increasingly often, but it's still far from dominant platform here. As I said, there are many similar sites - this one is primarily targeted to Polish audience, where Android is dominant. Maybe a different site works better on Safari. Maybe US equivalents care about iOS users more.

According to the stats -- iOS has a 25% market share in Europe. (https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/europe). If it is the same trend as in the US, iOS is more heavily represented by the more affluent population.

More affluent population is more likely to just pay for half dozen streaming services, forgetting they're even subscribed to some of them. But all the remaining majority of the population is both price-sensitive and more likely to use Android.

Anyway, I'm not sure what's your point here.

That the people who are willing to jump through hoops to save $8.99 a month are not Disney’s or any other services target demographics. You can make quite a bit of money ignoring poor people and staying out of the race to the bottom. See Apple.

Or more relevant see Disney. Disney makes a killing with its resorts where the price per ticket is $100+ per day and most people pay for more than one day, but souvenirs, and stay at one of their hotels.

Sadly Disney is a lifestyle choice for a lot of people and the passion they have for the brand can be downright cultish and creepy at times.

Groups like hardcore Disney fans, R. Kelly fans, and Evangelical Christians all share a very similar devotion and loyalty to their idols.

This week, in "Speculative Mergers and Acquisitions Horror Theatre"...

For Star Wars and Marvel fans, they don't really have any choice in the matter these days.

Tell me more about how R. Kelly and Disney fans are similar. Share your point by point analysis and include examples. Maybe you would like to bring Taylor Swift into the discussion?

Your comment is a poorly disguised insult.

It's unclear which you ascribe to but it's curious that you don't take offense to either being compared to Evangelicals.

In either case, they're both almost a Cult of personality. The fans are so adorant of their object that they often overlook glaringly evil deeds. At the same time, the level of manipulation exhibited and the devotion demanded by the personality is extreme to the point that outsiders see it as absurd.

Idk, maybe it's just me but I find fanaticism to be very off putting in general. When the idol asks fans to make sacrifices to stay it in their favor, that's when it crosses a line into creepy.

Disney walks a fine line where it expertly cultivates that culture while simultaneously pretending it doesn't exist and remaining open and accessible to everyone.

"The fans are so adorant of their object that they often overlook glaringly evil deeds."

This verges on the tautological though, given that "fan" is short for "fanatic"; you're complaining that fanatics are fanatics. Well... yeah, but so? I don't think you can directly impute the behavior of the fans on to the target of their fandom. (You can draw some indirect conclusions, but it involves at least a few steps of lower reliability and propositions people will find debatable.)

> that "fan" is short for "fanatic"

Eh, that's its (probable) origin, but I'd say the two have diverged in meaning; "fan" nowadays doesn't have the same connotation of extreme and uncritical zeal of "fanatic."

Hence the "verges", rather than simply saying it "is". It's as close to a complaint about it as you can get without quite 100% being there.

But to be fair R. Kelly is being accused of pretty awful crimes which I don't see an equivalent from Disney...

Perhaps not in depth of harm but in breadth it far surpasses R. Kelly.

Disney has been accused of gross labor and environmental violations across the globe. So while R. Kelly has caused severe damage to a few, Disney has caused minor to moderate damage to a great number.

OK. I don't know if everyone would agree with your somewhat reductive view on Disney, how is it fair to compare an entire company and enterprise to a single man. This feels like you are looking at two wildly different things and connecting them with very thin lines.

Speaking in terms of the fans, a fan of Disney who loves their parks and merchandise is accepting the misdeeds of the enterprise as a whole in much the same way that an R. Kelly fan is accepting his misdeeds.

I'm not stating that a fan of a franchise, like Marvel Comics, specifically is accepting of Disney's scope of misdeeds or even considering them a Disney fan in this case. I'm speaking directly to the Disney fan, those people who specifically travel to Disney parks multiple times a year, go on the cruises repeated, and consume the Disney branded merchandise in volume.

>how is it fair to compare an entire company and enterprise to a single man

Then maybe companies and enterprises shouldn't do all they can to be treated like men...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/corporations-are-people-a_b_5...

I can tell you really like R. Kelly or Disney but I can' tell which.

Although I'd prefer to have everything on Netflix, I'm definitely going to get Disney+. Not a fan of Disney the corporation, but if Disney+ contains everything Star Wars, everything Marvel, everything from Jim Henson, and everything from all their other properties, there's no way I'm going to pay for easy access to that.

We don't even watch regular TV anymore at my home. It's either Netflix or Youtube.

There's just so many Star Wars movies, and so many Marvel movies, and while I've seen most in theaters, they are basically juvenile blockbuster cookie cutter crap.

The first 3 star wars films where important for their era, but most of the later ones are just forgettable sci-fi (for non-discerning fans). Not to mention letting down parts of the canon (e.g. the Solo movie, or "Kylo Ren", a hipster/teenage goth abomination that took Darth Vader's iconic status and pissed all over it).

Marvel too has movie diarrhea, with 1 in 10 movies being anything to write home about (eg. Logan).

I'd vote for less superhero movies and less Star Wars reboots and sequels/prequels, and more original stories. Plus, where's that Foundation series?

Logan not even Marvel Studios it's 20th Century Fox so that makes it 0 in 10 :P For me, it went from I want to see every Marvel movie in the cinema to stream it from Netflix to I won't pay any extra if it's not on Netflix.

I really like the Star Wars universe, but the only good new movie was Rogue One. It worked because it was a completely separate story only loosely tied to the original films.

Rogue One was quite strongly tied to A New Hope, I'd say.

Personally I love both anthologies, and I love them a lot more than the new trilogy (I love Luke's role, but I have doubts about where the trilogy as a whole is going). I know Solo bombed, but for me it was the movie I'd been waiting 30 years for, and I wasn't disappointed.

Seeing that Disney bought Fox, it is a Disney movie now.

Yeah, I'd except Rogue One myself too...

Recent box office history is littered with studios losing money on “original” stories.

Well, that's their problem. My problem is having good original movies...

Obviously since they are making literally billions of dollars on the movies they make now -- they don't have a problem even without your money.

I don't see the MCU movies as a problem. They're doing some ridiculously bold stuff with the way they're bringing comic book attitudes to the big screen. From the weirdness in Guardians of the Galaxy and Thor Ragnarok, to wrapping up a dozen movies with dozens of main characters in Infinity War, and then ending the movie in defeat!

That stuff takes balls, and I'm enjoying it a lot.

It's true that superheroes do dominate the current movie landscape maybe a bit too much. Nerds won and now everything has to be SciFi, Fantasy, Horror or Superheroes. I wouldn't object to dialing that back a bit, but only a bit.

> There's just so many Star Wars movies, and so many Marvel movies, and while I've seen most in theaters, they are basically juvenile blockbuster cookie cutter crap.

There are at least a few of us out there who think the same as you. The one difference is I haven't watched one in the theater in years.

You'll find the richness of content you are after in the graphic novels of both franchises, and also the LONG list of star wars novels.

Got any recommendations?

For Star Wars, the storyline is now split into Legends (pre-Disney acquisition) and the new canon Disney Star Wars storyline.

For the Legends storyline, I loved the X-Wings series of books (basically how the Rebels defeated the major parts of the Empire): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01BJST00W . My favorite book in the series is The Bacta War, there's a lot of small ship action instead of the movies where huge fleets are the norm.

Also in Legends, try the Thrawn trilogy starting with Heir To The Empire https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004WBXM80/ . It's a good set of books with a real threat to the Rebellion.

As for Disney canon, frankly a lot of the books are very meh at best - many of them are just to set up Disney World/Land Black Spire Outpost land. The only one I would recommend is perhaps the new Thrawn trilogy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1101967021/ - be warned that the second book in the trilogy (Thrawn: Alliances) gets rather slow at times, but the third book (Thrawn: Treason) is actually pretty fun.

> My favorite book in the series is The Bacta War

Another X-Wings fan! Bacta War was awesome, I must've re-read it like 10 times :-D

Thanks I'll check them out! There are so many books I had no idea where to start.

There are only one or two Marvel or Star Wars movies a year though. Is that really worth subscribing to a streaming service for?

(Not to mention that only maybe a quarter of these movies are worth seeking out, the rest are something I’d only ever watch for free on an airplane or something. But that’s just personal taste).

There are about 20 Marvel movies, 11 Star Wars movies, and 2 Star Wars TV shows. This is not about watching them when they come out, it's about being able to watch the entire backlog whenever I want. (Assuming they make their entire backlog available, which they should.)

Also: tons of Pixar movies. And I still haven't seen The Lion King and Aladdin. Or pretty much any Disney movie other than Brave.

If it's not your thing, that's fine, but I've got two kids, and Netflix is a bit short on movies for the whole family that are fun for both kids as well as parents. They're great at stuff for just the kids or just the parents, but for the whole family is what Pixar and Disney are good at.

If you throw in the rest of Pixar and Disney animated stuff, you're still probably talking about under 100 movies total, right? One cheap usb hard drive and an afternoon on the public library's wifi and you could own non-DRM copies of all of these movies.

And you still have to get the movies to the mobile devices and TVs....

Plug the hard drive into the TV or mobile device. I'm pretty sure mobile devices support USB harddrives these days, but I know for sure "smart TVs" do. If you prefer dumb tvs (as I do) plug an old computer into that. Or if you want to save power, plug a new computer into it. Or get something that supports DLNA (e.g. a playstation or I believe roku's and roku-like devices) and use a DLNA server on your NAS/workstation (I use minidlna, some people I know use Universal Media Server (cross platform GUI, GPLv2.)) Or use a more commercial DLNA-like solution such as plex.

There are many options here. That's one of the upsides of pirating non-DRM media. Storage is stupid cheap and anybody on HN should be able to figure out how to get an arbitrary mp4 file onto an arbitrary screen.

The people on HN that care more about saving $8 than the headache of both finding pirated media, lugging around an external hard drive, making sure that the movie is a supported format or converting it to a supported format.

HN users seem to be way out of touch with the average user.

Virtually anything you pirate these days will be supported on virtually anything you might want to watch movies on these days. The obscure edge-cases are things that HN users might be aware of, but simply aren't a practical concern in practice. DLNA is generally the case where you might run into issues, but a transcoding DLNA server solves that problem.

Not to mention it greatly simplifies other matters. If you drop a bunch of movies onto your kids tablet, you no longer have to worry about being away from a cell tower or wifi AP. Furthermore, concerning this very article, there is the matter of too many streaming platforms existing. Maybe you only need Disney because you don't let your kids consume any other brand. But probably more likely, there are numerous desirable movies that are on one streaming platform but not another, or on none at all. And a movie that might be on a platform one year could be gone the next. A harddrive full of movies avoids all of this mess. Subscribe to two or three services a year and you'll be spending a lot more than $8 a month. Maybe it still seems trivial to you with an inflated tech salary, but I know a lot of people who think a single netflix subscription is too expensive so they share an account with other friends/family. This is pretty common.

> HN users seem to be way out of touch with the average user.

I am certainly not out of touch with my own friends and family!

Virtually anything you pirate these days will be supported on virtually anything you might want to watch movies on these days.

Roku is the most popular streaming device and it only supports H.264 for attached storage and its very picky on what it will support.

The obscure edge-cases are things that HN users might be aware of, but simply aren't a practical concern in practice. DLNA is generally the case where you might run into issues, but a transcoding DLNA server solves that problem.

So now you've added even more complexity and a regular DLNA server/client has what is far from a user friendly interface like Plex.

If you drop a bunch of movies onto your kids tablet, you no longer have to worry about being away from a cell tower or wifi AP. Furthermore,

So now we have a streaming DLNA server, transcoding, bit torrenting, and copying the movie to the device as opposed to paying $8 a month and just click "download" to put it on the device?

A harddrive full of movies avoids all of this mess. Subscribe to two or three services a year and you'll be spending a lot more than $8 a month. Maybe it still seems trivial to you with an inflated tech salary,

And the people not in tech are going to jump through all of the hoops you are suggesting?

How poor do you think the average household in the US is that close to 50% are paying for iOS devices and not going to pay $25 a month for a few streaming services? Do you realize what they are already paying for cable?

I am certainly not out of touch with my own friends and family!

Your friends and family are not a representative sample....

You don't have to implement every possible solution all at once; you pick one that works for you. If you prefer Plex, use Plex. If you prefer keeping everything on a thumb drive or your phone's SD card, do that instead. With non-DRM media you have the option to implement whatever solution you find preferable, not the obligation to implement those that you don't prefer.

And if my family can do it, I am quite sure your family can too. I think the attitude you're demonstrating here exemplifies a problem with the industry in general these days; giving non-technical people too little credit.

None of this stuff is complicated, but when a technical person such as yourself tells a non-technical person that they're incapable of wrapping their mind around something, it becomes a self-fullfilling prophecy as they're now scared of even trying. And without trying, neither of you will ever learn what their true capabilities are.

If you prefer Plex, use Plex.

Running your own server, finding good torrents, risk getting emails from your ISP or paying for a VPN service, dealing with networking and making sure the correct port is open and then dealing with the crappy upload bandwidth that most Americans have....

If you prefer keeping everything on a thumb drive or your phone's SD card, do that instead.

Most people don't have phones with SD cards and the majority of middle class to upper middle class households in the US have iOS devices...

There are plenty of people that can cook but that doesn't prevent them from eating out. Convenience beats cheap.

It's not about what people can't do -- it's about what people don't want to do. My wife and I both have cars but when we want to spend a night out and go to downtown from the suburbs we take Uber for the convenience.

If you don't want to use SD cards, there are plenty of other methods available; at this point you're being deliberately obtuse. But I do find it amusing that you appeal to the requirements of "the majority of middle class to upper middle class" not long after accusing me of being out of touch.

All of your methods are obtuse.

And if you define the “middle class to upper class”, by definition you get 50% to 60% (3-5 quintile) of the US - the exact population that streaming products are targeting.

Seeing the box office results of Disney’s movies, your anecdotal opinion doesn’t jibe with the overall market. Besides, there will also be Disney original MCU and Star Wars TV series.

>Seeing the box office results of Disney’s movies, your anecdotal opinion doesn’t jibe with the overall market.

Yes, but the overall market also doesn't jibe with taste, as Zappa would say...

By definition, if people are collectively, willingly giving Disney billions of dollars a year for a Marvel and Star Wars movies, the market is jibing where it matters.

Still, and circling back to the main point - a movie or two per year plus a single TV show and some occasional filler content is not by itself worth keeping a service subscription at the current prices.

I really hope and assume Disney+ doesn't limit you to just the most recent movies. The whole point of these services is that you get access to everything they ever made, and in the case of Disney and all the properties they own, that's quite a lot.

I would hope so, but Disney is already known for repeatedly pulling out old works from the market and re-releasing them later on, since AFAIK the VCR era, so I wouldn't bet on them refraining from shenanigans on their streaming service.

The CEO of Disney has said that the "Disney Vault" concept is dead. That being said, they still have to wait for licensing deals to expire to have everything on Disney+.

I guess I need to check carefully what they're going to offer before I sign up.

Also, I may have to wait until my smart TV supports it. We never had these kind of problems when we just had cable. (Or did we?)

https://attractionsmagazine.com/disney-plus-day-one-list/

Thanks. Though with this big a list, a list of what's missing might be more useful.

The Muppet Show seems to be missing, though there's lots of other muppet stuff. Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal are also missing, perhaps because Netflix made a new Dark Crystal show.

The market also jibed on pet rocks and destroying the planet with fossil fuels, not sure whether I should care what "matters" to the market...

Yeah you’re sort of right, 5 of the top 10 on this list are from Disney, including 2 Marvel properties: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2019&p=.htm

But what I’m talking about is if you scroll down this list, 8 of the top 100 are from Disney unless I’m missing a studio name, I’m counting BV and MGM. So those 5 are pretty much all the 2019 blockbusters you’ll get from the service in a few months.

Well 6, SpiderMan was released and financed by Sony but Disney did all of the writing and producing. Sony's last two Spiderman movies before they did a deal with Disney were a flop.

Sony owns the distribution rights and might own them well into the future, which is what we're talking about here.

Two movies time 4 movie tickets pr movie (for a family) is pretty close to one years worth of streaming service.

If you're also the sort of person that considers popcorn an integral part of the movie watching experience then the streaming services is almost certainly cheaper even if you only watch those two movies a year.

Except the adults of families today were the kids who grew up with Napster, Limewire, and TPB so piracy has a sentimental feel to it like pulling a Nintendo out of your mom's basement.

I used Napster when it first came out, I was already 26. But as soon as the iTunes music store came out for Windows, I stopped using Napster and Kazaa. They were no longer worth the hassle. I didn’t buy an iPod until around 2005. I just made CDs.

It’s the same with video now. If I plan ahead, I will still pick up movies that fall off the back of a truck and put them on my Plex server, but often, we don’t even bother. We just rent from Amazon Prime or iTunes.

That’s even considering that I can just go to http://remote.vuze.com from anywhere on my phone and start a download on my home server.

I have actually started buying movie codes off those dodgy looking sites Disney hates. You can usually own a movie for the cost of a rental from Amazon, Google or iTunes.

I have never had a failure but I once had an issue with a purchase porting to Movies Anywhere from Google Play. Google was beyond useless in helping me out, I actually spoke with someone on the phone and it was as if they had never even seen the Play Store before. I emailed the seller about it and got an immediate email response with a couple suggestions to try before refund, the first suggestion worked.

You don't understand how low-friction piracy is these days. Only techies deal with automation and Plex.

Most people just buy a "fully loaded" android box which lists thumbnails for all the latest movies and TV shows on various file storage sites. They select a thumbnail and the movie plays. Nothing local at all, all streamed.

I am quite curious to know the existence of such services or hardware. Any pointers?

I'm not really looking to provide a piracy tutorial here and I don't use these services myself, but another poster is correct in that they're Kodi addons. Kodi runs on pretty much everything but most of the streaming boxes are cheap Chinese android boxes or Amazon FireTVs.

Everything but iPhones, iPads, AppleTVs, most smart devices and Rokus......

Which again doesn’t help when so much video streaming is done on mobile devices....

Ever heard of Kodi? That's a set-top box OS but that also is an Android App.. Then watch some youtube videos on how to install the magic box addons and you have access to millions of movies for streaming.

As hendersoon noted, nowadays, piracy is extremely low-friction.

Two problems -- middle class households in the US are overwhelmingly iOS -- not Android and that still doesn't solve the problem of mobile and having to depend on cellular connectivity to stream. Disney+ and Netflix allow you to download shows.

Middle class households are not overwhelming iOS. But even if that were true Kodi works on iOS and the streaming add-ons have an option to download it also.

Studies show otherwise:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/toddhixon/2014/04/10/what-kind-...

https://gizmodo.com/want-to-appear-rich-buy-an-iphone-182743...

https://buildfire.com/ios-android-users/

Kodi is not available for non jailbroken ios devices.

So, just pay for a good VPN provider and get all content for free?

You don't really need a VPN if you turn off the addons torrent feature. Standard Kodi doesn't share unless you use an add-on with that feature

There's plenty of streaming sites, and since web browsers work so well on mobile devices nowadays...

See my previous comment...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21005204

That sounds terribly complicated. You know you can google "watch ... online free" and get a streamable version in the first two pages of results, right?

And I just did that for Avengers on my iPad. The first result takes me to:

- 5Movies4Free -- which then redirects me

- mobilevpn.download -- and then when I click on "Install and Register Now". It redirects me to

-"app.appsflyer.com" which then

- redirects me to the app store

- and then it just hangs

Is that really the user experience that people want as opposed to just paying $8 a month and they can stream movies to 4 devices, download on mobile so they don't have to worry about poor connectivity and they can stream to almost any device?

Not to mention your solution not only requires them to wade through shady sites, but they also would have to have a computer connected to their TV.

In the US, Apple has close to half the mobile phone market and a much larger share of the market of middle and upper income households. Do you think that people who are willing to pay Apple prices for hardware will even blink at signing up for Disney+ and Netflix instead of going through all of these contortions?

Edit: I forgot to mention that every major cellular carrier and MetroPCS (a sub brand of T-mobile) is bundling at least one streaming option as part of their family plan - except for Verizon.

Edit 2: I would have never gone through the entire process on my computer, too much of a risk of drive by downloads. I knew that it probably wouldn't do too much damage on iOS.

Agree with you. The only consistent experience for me is BitTorrent. But trying to google watching a movie for free? Does someone actually do that? It's always hundreds of popup, fake links, fake ads, and can never really get to the actual content.

Bit Torrent “consistent”? Having to worry about the quality of rips, whether there is a complete seed, titled correctly, has the right language, hard coded subtitles in another language, etc?

This is somehow more convenient than just paying $8 a month?

Even then, I would still need to pay for a VPN and no VPN provider provides the bandwidth to keep up with my gigabit internet.

You're doing it wrong. See my counterpoint elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21008979.

And that didn't work on my iPhone or iPad. But I was going by the suggestion that the parent poster made -- just search Google.

Streaming sites with good SEO tend to be the riskest in terms of malware though.

Actually adding on to that, the timing of this piracy boom is really unfortunate, as the cryptoboom made it advantagous again to target home computers with malware for cryptominers. It's frustrating having to go setup shit like sandboxie for pirated software again like it's the early 2000s

Why does everything have to be "streamed" these days? Hard drives are cheap. Just have a file and playback locally or on your LAN. No special set up of some server, your router, etc. Given the $/GB curve throughout the years you'll likely never run out of space. Do people really need to do a significant amount of movie watching outside their own LAN/home?

So where are these files going to come from? Buying them from some place like iTunes or Amazon Prime Video - which is more expensive? Going through the trouble of finding a good rip on a torrent site? Ripping them themselves?

Do people really need to do a significant amount of movie watching outside their own LAN/home?

Asking this question is close to the old Slashdot meme “I haven’t owned a TV in 20 years, do people still watch TV?” Of course people watch video on mobile devices and they have for over a decade.

> So where are these files going to come from?

I’ve settled on buying physical media and ripping. The physical media serves as your backup in case of HD failure.

> Of course people watch video on mobile devices and they have for over a decade.

I suppose there are people out there who want to watch a full length movie on their 5 inch phone on a bus, but is that really a mainstream use case? I’d bet the vast majority of movie/show watching takes place in one’s home sitting in the sofa. More than willing to consider that I’m just an out of touch old guy though!

EDIT (rather than replying because apparently HN doesn’t let you post more than 5 replies a day ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

Your points are taken and I guess I’m just out of touch! :-)

I’ve settled on buying physical media and ripping. The physical media serves as your backup in case of HD failure.

Do you think most people are going to do that?

I’d bet the vast majority of movie/show watching takes place in one’s home sitting in the sofa. More than willing to consider that I’m just an out of touch old guy though!

Yes, you are an old out of touch guy -- no offense the 74 in my name is the year I was born.

But kids especially watch a lot of movies on mobile. Most middle class adults prefer convenience over cheap and a combination of Disney+, Apple Arcade, and a $329 10.2 inch iPad in a ruggedized case or hand me down phone is a great babysitting device.

The people that do it typically have worked for media companies and just ripped the files.

Fun fact. Disney, ilm and other studio animators used to pirate the shit out of 3d software in the past. They couldn't afford a 30k license for personal learning and use.

For Disney's kids stuff sure, but they're also pulling Marvel movies and Fox shows from Netflix

There are VPS out there geared towards Plex/Torrenting. Mine costs ~$15 a month and came with all the bells and whistles installed, though I did some tweaking because I enjoy it.

No need to worry about your home network speed or configuring your router, it's about the price of 1 or 2 subscription services, and I get to curate my collection of TV shows I watch so I just log in and see which new ones are available.

I suppose the setup could be onerous of you find technology intimidating, but once it's working it's an absolute breeze to use.

I do agree, however, that Disney's target audience is the 'I need a faux baby-sitter' type.

I’m speaking in general. I personally have gigabit up/down, no data caps, eight wired gigabit Ethernet connections throughout the house, 3 Roku TVs, a Roku stick 2 AppleTV 4Ks and my son has an Xbox 360 and PS4 with a wired gigabit connection on his room and a gigabit switch.

Yes that’s a grand total of 6 TVs. I have a Plex server setup.

But I know none of this is normal.

I suggest you step outside of your circle. When I did, I found that many lower and middle class parents were using pirating setups that I didn't even know existed.

For example, I learned about PopcornTime from a single parent who ran it on a laptop connected to their TV. The guy is bus dispatcher.

When I need a recommendation for a streaming site or tracker, I ask my old neighbor who works as a lab tech.

I've found that I'm generally ignorant of such things because everyone in my IT circle just pays for streaming services.

Well, which should I give more weight to -- your anecdotal experience or the published number of subscribers for Netflix, Hulu, etc?

They overlap and aren't mutually exclusive.

One is better to build a business off of.

That's fine, someone else will find a way to profit from the situation you won't consider.

Good luck with that with all of the content being tied up by the studios.

Ask all of the money losing Android OEMs about how profitable it is in a commodity market trying to serve people who aren’t willing/able to spend money.

> Most normal middle class people aren’t going to go through the trouble of pirating movies and setting up a Plex server

But they probably have a friend who has a friend who put in the effort and is willing to share.

I like to quote John Siracusa when people complain about my Plex Server.

"Do not expect five 9's from my Plex Server" (https://player.fm/series/accidental-tech-podcast/ep-309-do-n...)

And you still have the abysmal state of upload bandwidth in the US and what are the chances that they will have all of the Disney movies?

So?

Not everyone in the US is starved for upstream. Not everyone is going to lose their mind if their friend's Plex doesn't have Five 9s availability -- and let's be real, with all the things that can and do go wrong between a user and a service on the Internet, Three 9s is optimistic for anything.

And whose subscription service has Fresh Prince of Bel-Air? Saved by the Bell? Countless other shows and movies that aren't available with any of them?

Disney movies? Add a Trakt list to Radarr, done.

I have gigabit up and down via AT&T, most Americans get their internet via their cable company - cable companies always have crappy upload bandwidth around 30Mbps.

People want a reliable service and will pay for it. I have no idea why this concept is forum. Hulu and Netflix publish their numbers every quarter and about 60% of households have Amazon Prime Video (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-prime-members-59-perce...)

76% percent of households use Netflix (https://www.bestappletv.com/news/more-u-s-households-now-hav...)

It’s also estimated that 40% of households will get Disney+ by 2022 (https://www.fiercevideo.com/video/a-lot-people-are-planning-...)

It doesn’t take too much to understand that enough of the American public values convenience over price to make paying for a service over the hassle of piracy worthwhile.

> values convenience over price

That's the thing. Needing more subscriptions to access the content everyone in a household wants to view is going to lower convenience and raise the (collective) price. Disney+, next is Peacock, and who knows what's next after that.

Nobody's suggesting a mass piracy uprising. But more people will look in that direction and decide that piracy can substitute for another subscription or replace all of them.

Running my own Plex server costs substantially more than subscribing to the major streaming services. I'm paying for the convenience -- it pretty much runs itself, new content appears "by magic" (Radarr/Sonarr/Trakt lists), content never goes away, I have content that no streaming subscription offers, and there's only one place to look for content.

Pirating shows and putting them on an external drive that you plug on any TV and can take with you on trips works fine and most normal middle class people can manage it though.

Any TV except the ones in most hotel rooms that lock down the HDMI input and the ones that don’t exist in most cars. Then you have the issue of the kids fighting over what to watch and wanting to watch video on their phones and tablets.

I use VLC on iOS to copy movies and shows to my iPad from a Windows share. Works perfectly fine.

In some ways it's better than Netflix/Amazon offline mode since I know my files will always work in VLC whereas I don't know ahead of time which streaming content allows offline mode or not.

Yes and the typical household is going to download movies from torrent sites and use VLC.

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