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Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

> The group of people who are comfortable pirating media and find it "easier" than Netflix is at least an order of magnitude smaller than Netflix's user base.

This view is very US-centric.

In most of the "rest of the world", netflix either doesn't exist or has a very very limited show list (even here, in a relatively developed EU country), and piracy literally is the only way to get a lot of the very popular shows.

And if you already pirate 3 of the 5 shows that you watch, why would you pay for the other 2, that are available on netflix, if you can just pirate those too?

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Netflix is US-centric, so that's no surprise: https://www.comparitech.com/tv-streaming/netflix-subscribers...

I don't mean to be rude, but in the grand scheme of things the other countries don't quite matter as much, financially speaking. And those smaller parts of the world pirating isn't a big loss. Similar to the video game industry in Japan; some games may get an overseas following, but if the domestic market is slacking, that studio may not get the chance to make a sequel for those overseas fans.

So back to the US-centric sentiment: American audiences don't have the excuse 99% of the time of "this content is region blocked in my country", so the sentiment here shifts to "I don't want to manage 4 streaming services".

Indeed, pirating is very much an all-or-nothing solution. Torrenting your first movie might be difficult, but the second time it's easy as pie.

In many ways, pirating is like any subscription service: signing on is a difficult decision (whether financially or technically), but once you're there and all caught up with the UI, using it again is the default move for watching your next show/movie.

Pirating has got a lot easier in recent years...

In my country (slovenia) there is a very good local torrent tracker + a lot of people use the few larger general torrent sites, and even "grandpas" can use them, if their "computer-savy" kid installs them a torrent client, and shows them where to search.

In you go further down the balkans, you can find full movies even on youtube, especially local ones (because youtube doesn't remove them). Not that long ago, you could also buy or rent pirated cds/dvds literally from street vendors and "movie clubs" (think blockbuster, but smaller, more local and pirated).

hah yeah I've been told by a close Slovene friend countless times how that local tracker you have is soo amazing :P

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