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Comment by strken | Hacker News Reader

Nobody lets me pay for content. They're all tying themselves in contractual knots trying to find the most lucrative deal, and meanwhile it's impossible to just buy a movie or a TV show without shipping a physical disc.

I go to e.g. the South Park website, and I'm greeted by an error message saying they're "working hard to resolve [their] pre-existing contractual obligations," which is the same message they've shown for years. Thanks for trying, I guess, but if I pirated it then I'd just...watch the show, from start to finish, with all seasons and all episodes, no wasteful physical media, no subscription, no data collection, and no ads. That sounds good. I want to be able to pay money, maybe even quite a lot of money, and do that.

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Uh, you can actually buy south park from any number of providers. Amazon and iTunes both list Season 1 for $25. You don't need to only watch things on monthly streaming platforms.

Can you play the media without going through Amazon or Apple to do it? Is the quality guaranteed to be good when I choose to watch it? What kind of ads am I going to get when I click play? Even if there are no ads now, is that guaranteed to be the case forever?

Downloadable, ad free, and DRM free. Music has been selling that way for decades. I've spent thousands on that kind of media, I'd have spent 10 times as much if it had been made available that way. Some people purchase a controlled versions to atone for their pirating sins but that just rewards consumer-hostile business models, and most of the money goes to middle-men that only add negative value to the product they're selling.

It sounds like you have a lot of concerns about this that all kind of conveniently put you in a place to pirate whatever you want.

Most of the time I watch things once, so I rent it if it's not on a platform I subscribe to. Generally then I can watch it on my tv, ps4, phone, computer, whatever.

Consider that money spent on these products are an indication to studios about what people like. Movie studios, production companies, they make stuff they think they can sell for a profit. I suggest that you try renting movies or buying ones you like. If you run into a situation where one of your concerns comes to life, I think it would be very reasonable to pirate something you've made a good faith effort to pay for. This is kind of how I started and now for the most part I rent/buy with some exceptions. Still downloading some trash tv shows.

I don't need any excuses to download whatever I want. It doesn't cost anyone anything, and no suffering of any kind is introduced into the world for anyone.

Most, if not all, things I've downloaded, which isn't much, I've either rented before, seen on TV or in a theater, or have been on one of the streaming services I pay for at some point. Does that cover me ethically? Some people seem to think so. I personally don't care either way and not a single person on this planet is any worse off for my lack of concern.

Yeah sure, it doesn't really matter. But no need to pretend like it's a service issue at this point. My experience with renting/buying content has been that they're pretty convenient and there aren't many service issues I've run into.

Actually it's kind of easier than torrenting and copying files around to various devices I want to watch it on.

Can buy them or can you only "buy" them aka rent them for a fixed fee for an indefinite but inevitably finite periord with restrictions on how and where you can watch them?

Sure, unfortunately if you buy something on iTunes, it isn't available on amazon and vice versa. I guess you just have to look at your devices and pick a platform based on that. Most of the time I just rent a movie and watch and it expires so it's not really a problem I deal with a lot. I just rent the movie right before I watch it. It's pretty convenient.

Do both. Pay for it to give the creators their cut and send a market signal. Then go pirate it rather than fighting with DRM crippled interfaces.

When I see all the justifications I wonder who are they for? If you feel the need to justify it to semi-anonymous people on the internet, then you're probably trying to justify it to yourself which means you think what you're doing is wrong.

It's not a justification, just an explanation of what needs to change if people want me to pay for that content. Like I say I pretty much never pirate things if they're on steam, I've probably paid tens of thousands out to steam over the years.

(That being said, I do have access to cable television, netflix, and amazon prime streaming as well as the piracy setup, so people are getting paid. I'm not going to go buy a bunch of old red-dwarf and dilbert DVDs though, they just take up too much space)

You started the post with "I have a confession". I felt that guilt was implied.

Ahh, fair enough. I meant it more as just a turn of phrase, implying that it's a sordid affair. A little bit implying that I was going again church heterodoxy, that there were pressures to feel guilty. More "gay in the 70's" than "burn down an orphanage".

* against church orthodoxy

Man-- I don't steal content, because I've made a lot of money from IP and I think other people deserve for their work to be rewarded.

But I'm so jealous of the user experience for people who buy into a $5/mo plex and get better service than I'm paying for. IMO, that's broken.

So much time wasted, figuring out what service to watch something on, dealing with content ads, bad user interfaces... having content vanish and become unavailable, etc.

I don't even watch much video, but it's still way too much of a sink on my time.

I don't have to justify myself to you and do not intend to. I don't actually pirate anything, regardless.

My intent is that someone somewhere reads this and decides to let me buy their damn content. It's not a justification, it's an appeal. Put your album on bandcamp. Put your game on itch/gog/your own website/humble bundle, preferable without intrusive DRM. I have no idea where you'd put a movie or TV show, but there's probably some place.

Please.

Is it really so hard to watch something else?

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