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Comment by genghizkhan | Hacker News Reader

To rewatch Lord of the Rings? I think not.

The age of cinema is over. The time of the torrents has come.

Torrents have one crucial disadvantage: they require you to make the content publicly available in the process, which is illegal in many countries. It is much better to download it, which is not illegal in most jurisdictions, with one notable exception of proprietary software.

The alternative is servers that get hammered during downloads, as opposed to swarms where the download health improves when more people use it.

The current ecosystem dealt with the problem of hammering by using various filehosters and most of them are DMCA-compliant. But the window between the release and the file being DMCAed is large enough for this business to thrive. This whole system works by providing value to 3 key parties:

* filehosters - they get money from subscribers (some offer a free crippled options just to frustrate users into buying the subscription) * uploaders - they got money from filehosters * downloaders - they got the content they need

There are private trackers.

What's a private tracker?

E.g. iptorrents.com. You pay for access (or have to be invited) to a catalog of torrents that are not publicly-available. You must disable the DHT and peer discovery features of your bittorrent client so that the file content is only seeded back to other members

The better trackers are invite only. If you are found to be selling invites your entire invite tree will be banned. You have to be recruited or personally know a member to get in.

Take for example PTP. It is one of the best movie trackers. It recently exceeded 250,000 unique titles available in many different formats. Netflix in contrast only has 15,000 unique titles and their library is shrinking not growing.

Not true; you can disable uploading in various torrent clients.

So, how does it work now? Last time I checked this was called "leeching" and fought against. Also, if everyone is doing that, it makes the whole protocol meaningless.

I mean, when its an option (being in a big city means this actually is a thing quite often) its kinda cool. Especially if its a good cinema. Bloody expensive though and not the kind of thing you can do on a lazy Sunday afternoon cause you're bored.

I go to the cinema on a lazy Sunday afternoon, possibly that makes an oddity; whatever, horses for courses I guess ...

You live in the US ? So sorry for you guys :/ I live in France and go to the cinema pretty often. I have an unlimited card (yes, a real unlimited, sometimes i can watch 5 movies in one day) and it's only 20€/month

They're referring to watching Lord of The Rings in cinemas, since it's over 20 years old. Though if you have weekly LOTR showings in cinemas I'd strongly consider moving to France ;p

We also have unlimited cards here, they're tied to each movie chain. So if you have the AMC unlimited thing it only works at AMC owned theaters etc. It's a great deal. I canceled mine in early 2020 for obvious reasons though.

Why not?

https://princecharlescinema.com/PrinceCharlesCinema.dll/What...

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