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Comment by LocalH | Hacker News Reader

Piracy is the ultimate cord cutting method

When the product is better (easier, cheaper, higher quality) it's bound to happen.

When Netflix streaming (and Spotify, Steam) became popular it made consuming your favourite content easy, cheap and decent quality.

Now, with so many competing platforms, watching your favourite shows is more expensive and more difficult (having to have loads of accounts and remember which show is where, etc). Piracy will bloom.

As a Canadian, it's definitely hte "remember which show is where" part that has me really disliking where streaming has gone in the past year. Time was I'd open Netflix and my shows were there. Now I have Netflix, Prime, and Crave, and sometimes I'll have the same show on two of them, but different seasons. Maybe I'll start using an aggregator that will launch the streaming service that has my show, which seems like what Netflix was originally supposed to be.

https://www.justwatch.com may be close to what you are imagining, though it's a bandaid over the problem you describe.

Getting more and more tempting over here. I am tired of my monthly video bills going higher and higher just to watch a couple of shows I like.

I used to pirate a lot but I just ended up finding a streaming site to watch the 5 or so movies that I like to watch. Just make sure to wear your internet condoms (VPN, Ublock, Ghostery)

That is still piracy: you are knowingly taking part in unlicensed distribution. The networks don't care if you are downloading for later watching or streaming live, they just care if you are paying or not.

Uploading is a criminal offense. Downloading is just civil (for now, that is).

I've been pirating since age 11. You can have it set up so that it is essentially as easy as streaming netflix.

Pirating is possible, but IMO takes a bit of work.

Out of curiosity I looked to see if there were any bootlegged Beauty and the Beast (original) available for my kids to watch. Couldn't find anything that (1) worked and (2) worked with Chromecast.

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