Hacker News Reader

Comment by trh0awayman | Hacker News Reader

At least where I live in Europe, it's almost impossible to not pirate. The government has strict controls on media and so it's impossible to even get access to most movies. Netflix, Amazon Prime and other streaming sites have been completely neutered. HBO Go, Criterion, etc. are completely inaccessible.

In the US, it's a different story. Everything outside of Karagarga is available to be streamed, or at least purchased on Bluray/DVD. The only big thing is quality. Streaming has atrocious quality for the most part.

View on HN

I watched a lot of X-files on German free TV in the ’90s, and I only found out later that it was edited to remove the most graphic scenes. Imagine paying for streaming and not even getting the full content.

Most if not all of the editing in German free TV is done by the station to fit the show to the schedule (ad breaks, fixed time budget, afternoon slot requiring removal of graphic scenes, etc.)

Streaming should not have these problems.

I was trying to Listen to the album "Marching Out" by artist Yngwie Malmsteen. It is unavailable in Tidal, Spotify or Youtube Music both in the US and in Mexico. Spotify has it "indexed" [1] but you cannot actually play the full album.

The only way to stream it is through low quality Youtube rips. I've got the album in my mom's house on CD... it is stupid that I cannot listen to it in any of the 3 stream services I pay for.

[1] https://open.spotify.com/album/4gZ1yplfdbNfdh8DkBHWbM

Same with me. I watched the first seasons of Star Trek: Discovery on Netflix, but this year their contract ended. There is no service available in my country where I can legally watch it.

On the other hand nobody cares about torrents here, so at least I don't need to pay for usenet access to get it :-)

You're not missing much if you can't get series 2 onwards! The crew of all Star Trek ships now appear to need to have a group hug and good cry every episode and tell each staff member how important and unique they are rather than just solving problems in an interesting way.

Not sure where you're from, but for the most part it's not governments who are to blame (France is an exception). Copyright and rights management on a global scale is challenging, but the music industry made it work. It's up to the TV industry to do the same.

The governments are the only ones to blame. They created copyright privileges, and they have the power to revoke them but thus far have failed to do so. Everything negatively impacted by copyright is their fault.

Though in the case of the comment you're replying to, the tone suggests that the barrier to content being available legally is government censorship, not copyright or rights management.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com