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Comment by notsapiensatall | Hacker News Reader

The media market seems to be cyclical. Piracy is always an option, but most people prefer to pay for content if it is reasonably priced with few strings attached.

When a lot of people are paying for content, media companies look for ways to wring more money out of them. This degrades the quality of service and drives customers away.

When few people are paying for content, media companies look for ways to get paid. They become more open to offering discounted rates to platforms with new ideas, distribution models, etc. This improves the quality of service, and draws in more customers.

We fled from the sinking ship of cable to the HMS Streaming, like our parents fled the sinking ship of $20 CDs to the iTunes buffet. I'm excited to see what comes next - maybe a way to pay $5 per DRM-free downloadable episode? Sadly, it will probably be a painful decade until the winds of user experience finally change.

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I don’t even know how I’d get back into piracy. I used to have a seed box, accounts on all the big trackers, then it just became less hassle to sign up to streaming services and I let it all lapse

kind of regretting it now

> I don’t even know how I’d get back into piracy. I used to have a seed box, accounts on all the big trackers, then it just became less hassle to sign up to streaming services and I let it all lapse

Private trackers aren't necessary 99% of the time. Set up Jackett, point it at all the big popular public trackers, and you can find nearly anything.

> Jackett

Prowlarr is the new cool kid in town

There are an endless number of websites that stream virtually every show and movie for free in HD that you can access simply with a websearch and the proper ad blockers.

I often see the intros of shows like Foundation and The Expanse and imagine all of the particles are there as a big F.U. to pirates trying to reencode their paid stream.

Particle Man, particle man. Does whatever a particle can. File size bloat on a pirate boat? Particle Man, particle man.

Business Man, business man. Extracts all the value he can. Residuals to pay, for old shows: no way! Business Man, businessman.

  Why is the world in love again?
  Why are we marching hand in hand?
  Why are the ocean levels rising up?
  It's a brand new record for 1990
  They Might Be Giants' brand new album Flood

Oh heck that's 32 years old

Reminds me of a Princess Chelsea song

https://youtu.be/vOLivyykLqk

You can grab the encoded but decrypted video out of GPU memory. So pirates usually don't need to reencode anything.

I don't know anyone who pirates on torrents any more for things other than video games, just streaming sites. Use yandex and search for the show + stream. Google works too honestly but isn't as good since they respond to dmca requests

In my experience it's the other way around. Most people I know just buy the game on steam because it's a much better experience overall, you get updates, you don't have to worry about malware, etc.

With movies/shows however it's the other way around. You get a better experience if you pirate. You get all the languages and subtitles. No ads. No annoying autoplay of other unrelated content. You get the actual video file so you can watch it without internet connection, on other devices, you get to keep it forever, etc. No invasive DRM. Much faster playback because it doesn't need to buffer.

you can also, uh, pay for music. I subscribe to three streaming services, buy vinyl and cds, and buy digital files as well.

The point is that I don't know when I have the time or the will to watch a series. I watched the sixth season of The Expanse only this month. I think it was released close to the beginning of the year. While I was writing this comment I had to think about who streams the show. It's Amazon. In a perfect world I'd go to YouTube or any other similar service, look for the series at any time and watch the episodes by paying them 1 Euro each (or whatever.) Who cares who makes it, it's like gasoline's brand.

> it's like gasoline's brand

Top Tier Gasoline Worth the Extra Price, Study Shows: https://www.consumerreports.org/fuel-economy-efficiency/top-...

>Top Tier Retailers: Retailers include 76, Aloha Petroleum, Arco, Beacon, Breakaway, Cenex, Chevron, Citgo, Conoco, Costco, CountryMark, Diamond Shamrock, Express Mart, Exxon, Fast Fuel, GetGo, HFN, Harmons Fuel Stop, Hele, Holiday, Kwik Star, Kwik Trip, Marathon, Meijer, Metro Petro, Mobil, Ohana Fuels, Phillips 66, QT/Quik Trip, Reeders, Road Ranger, Rutter’s, Shamrock, Shell, Simonson, Sinclair, Sunoco, Texaco, Valero, Value America, Wow, and Win Win.

Top Tier gasoline is a standard supported by an enormous number of fuel sellers, not a brand per se.

I can open up the TV app on my phone or laptop, search Expanse, and it gives me option to open Amazon to watch season 6. Or I can buy seasons 1 to 5 in the TV app itself.

I assume Google has a similar situation in the YouTube app?

Not in the YouTube app (random videos about the series) and not in Play (nothing about TV or movies - don't they sell movies?), but I'm always logged out so I might be missing something and/or don't know where to find it.

JustWatch is a great app for this, and they do content discovery / suggestions really well too. Also they launched as a Show HN here eight years ago.

> We fled from the sinking ship of cable to the HMS Streaming, like our parents fled the sinking ship of $20 CDs to the iTunes buffet.

I am apparently your parent now.

> Piracy is always an option, but most people prefer to pay for content if it is reasonably priced with few strings attached.

No. Only those people whose income high and work and leisure time is valuable like to pay. I find that all of these condition have to be met and not just one. I know enough people who with their high IT salaries still share Netflix or other service accounts among multiple families. And as expected they are ever ready with righteous explanation on how this is correct thing to do.

Then there are billion plus people in third world who can't pay whatever lowest price content owner might decide. So piracy is not second thought but like most natural first option to watch content.

With the increasingly saturating mix of content with ads, the future I see that there will be plenty of "cheap", "unlimited" plans to consume content for some definition of these terms.

> Then there are billion plus people in third world who can't pay whatever lowest price content owner might decide. So piracy is not second thought but like most natural first option to watch content.

When I lived in a third-world country there were loads of people with Netflix accounts. I didn't have one, but I did have Spotify which was significantly cheaper than Europe (~€1.75/month). Steam games are cheaper too, although I don't recall by how much as I never really use it.

This is why these platforms are so hawkish about regions, because otherwise everyone would be living in Africa or Asia to pay the cheaper prices.

Yep. I’m slowly canceling all of my streaming services. If I can buy an entire show from Amazon, I’ll do that. Otherwise, back to piracy.

"our parents"? you can still buy CDs.

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