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Comment by scrivna | Hacker News Reader

Best thing about streaming subscriptions vs cable IMHO is NO ADS - I find it baffling people spend a hundred bucks a month on cable and still accept like 30% of the airtime is ads…. just no

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Best thing about piracy is that not only is there no ads, it's that you don't have to even think which streaming service has the particular show/movie you want. You also get to watch it on any device of your choice, in any player of your choice, completely offline. And you get to take screenshots. And it's free. I simply see no reason to ever pay for movies and tv shows — you pay money AND get a worse experience.

It's one of those weird things where if everyone chose the superior experience it would cease to exist.

That hasn't always been the case, though - for many years, I put away my parrot and eyepatch and rented or bought content because it offered the best experience, even though it cost a little money. Only recently has piracy again become the least unpleasant way to consume content, and it's not because piracy has become any easier.

Only for certain modes of that experience:

there is already far more content than I will ever be able to consume in 50 lifetimes.

My distaste for a lot of contemporary cultural products aside (I'm okay if they never make another episode of Cheers or MASH, but I can see how that would happen if the creators weren't being paid for that), it feels likely to me that if commercial media ceased production I still wouldn't run out of stuff to watch even if I lived longer than I expect.

I am perfectly fine with that outcome as it would mean a reset on how IP is delivered and owned.

When there are convenient options which respect users, piracy goes down. It’s as simple as that.

It's fiddly, though. You need to pay for a VPN (and try to pick one you can trust, which if you're even a bit paranoid is none of them) or your ISP will shut off your service (happened to me), if you require subtitles there's additional hassle & they're not even always available, quality is sometimes an issue and fake or mislabeled torrents exist.

I got tired of screwing around with it and decided 50 cents or less a day per service was worth not having to. As a side bonus, I get exposed to a lot of things I otherwise wouldn't know existed.

Usenet is worth the price. Sure, you can still VPN if you're super paranoid, and sure, things get DMCA'd (slowly and inconsistently), but with the fairly easy OSS automation out there (radarr, et al, and sabnzbd in my case) everything runs very smoothly (and way faster; I can saturate my gigabit connection for nearly anything regardless of popularity).

The funny thing about subtitles is that there are many, many cases where you can find bootlegged subtitles for content that don’t even exist on the paid streaming service that provides that content. The streaming services seem to be getting better about this, especially for new content, but there is still a vast library of content on e.g. HBO in the U.S. that doesn’t even have Spanish subtitles.

We're probably a couple years away from some AI service that actually translates with character's voices. Heck probably even adjust the mouth visual too.

I'll support A.I. that translates those characters' voices with different mouth visuals per language. That would be convenient for people who get distracted by subtitles and characters' mouths not matching words to different languages.

I'm pretty sure I've found bootlegged subtitles that are just machine translations of official subtitles in the original language. And YouTube's speech-to-text automated captioning is actually pretty good with single speakers in English with good audio production, enough so that I often use them to follow along with videos.

Yes. It's enormously frustrating that I can not pay Netflix, Google, Hulu to deliver me content in a language other than English. Google's own support pages seem to indicate that if I did do a locale switch to, say, France, that this was a fiddly process and that I would lose all my purchases if I switched it back.

Physical media on Netflix DVD, however, still work just fine and tend to have English and French and often Spanish.

Also, a much larger catalog that hasn't been diced up by license holders.

I have an IPTorrents account (private tracker) that I have heavily used for over 10 years without any VPN. Haven't gotten a single DMCA.

> You need to pay for a VPN

Not where I live. We instead use VPNs to access websites blocked by the government.

None of this is true with private trackers.

Well, there are plenty of benefits for all kinds of criminal activity, they just share one common drawback.

I liked Pirates of the Caribean I, II and III !

Having to remember to use a VPN? Hardly a drawback.

Well, there are really two drawbacks. Personal risk (which, as you say, can be well-mitigated) and the externality of other people being less well-off. Yes they could choose to make things that aren't copyable instead of things that are, but most jurisdictions have structures telling them that free copying of the thing they're making won't be tolerated.

I was talking from a purely mechanical perspective.

Myself and several friends have several vpns and as we can mostly use up to 5 devices we share the logins, as required.

Pirating is not a criminal activity in my country.

It likely isn't a criminal activity in your country either.

Considering that HN slants heavily in the direction of the US, I'm not sure the latter statement is that accurate.

It's civil, not criminal in the US. Nobody's going to jail for copyright infringement.

You just might get a crippling fine.

Copyright infringement may or may not be criminal. While it may technically be for the operators of the streaming services, it is a civil matter from a user standpoint.

In this case the drawback is the off chance you get a strongly worded letter from your isp you can throw away

But quality varies, subtitles are an issue, and sometimes the movie isn't complete and sometimes it doesn't match the title at all.

I still prefer reasonable paid alternatives

Yes it’s a better experience but so is getting money by robbing someone over working 40 hour weeks. I’m not saying the two are the same because piracy is effectively victimless (at least in the short term).

You're not robbing someone because you're not depriving them of anything.

You can make a case for the idea that if art is not paid for then you’re eventually stealing from content creators.

Yes now all I have to do is trudge the internet for content, make sure my Plex server is running, wait for content to be available, hope it’s popular enough that it is being seeded. Then have to worry about the quality.

Or I can just pay a few bucks and watch what I want on any of my devices.

This used to be a selling feature of cable. In the not too distant future, all of streaming will have required ads too.

Sure, maybe they all do add ads. I wouldn’t hesitate to cancel everything. I’m happy to pay money for service, but I’m also happy to cut ties with companies that actively disrespect my time.

This creep has already happened. Hulu started free with ads and the paid tier was ad free and had more content. Now the base tier is paid AND has ads. Once the subscriber growth plateaus all the streaming services will look for was to keep revenue increasing. In swoop the advertisers with a big fat stack of cash and an evil smile.

There was never a time that basic cable was ad free.

Many streaming subscriptions have ads on their cheapest tiers, requiring you to pay more if you don't want to see ads. And if you're watching anything live, whether it's streaming or cable, you're getting ads regardless.

I paid extra for the ad-free Paramount Plus. I was getting un-skippable pre-roll ads before and during Star Trek Discovery episodes. I contacted support and they said that ads would sometimes show up during live TV. They didn't have an answer for why ads were showing during Discovery. They pre-rolls would sometimes take 5-10 minutes! I could go fix a snack, put in a load of laundry and when I'd come back the pre-rolls would still be playing.

Anyway, other than the programming the service itself was awful and after going through the Star Trek back catalog I cancelled. I may sign up again but after the bad experience, I am not inclined to watch again. I really wouldn't want to watch with ads if they paid me to do it.

There are plenty of streaming services that have ads - Hulu and Disney+ have an ad-supported tier, for example, and it's foolish to think that Netflix won't introduce an ad-supported tier as soon as they think their customers won't revolt. It's the most obvious solution to login sharing - give a very cheap or free ad-supported tier and then monetize the hell out of them.

Netflix already has ads - just for their own shows.

Netflix has already widely announced their intention to add a with-ads tier.

> Netflix already has ads - just for their own shows.

I think the industry term for this is "in-house ads," and they've existed for as long as I can remember on premium-cable channels like HBO, Showtime, etc. The experience would be better without them, for sure, but they're less ugsome than the typical programmatic ads you get on Youtube or Hulu.

Or you call them trailers in the movie theater (which also have ads). I don't mind them and they're pretty easy to skip in my experience.

Paramount+ has ads even if you pay for the ad free experience. Really irritating.

I ran into this too, It was a bug in my view because according to the service description ads would "sometimes" show up during live programming. I guess it doesn't say that ads WON'T show up elsewhere, but my assumption was that they wouldn't.

I had signed up in '20 or '21 and I am curious if this is still the same way.

I dropped it, but picked it back up for the Nick programming. Still ads, but only a few, mostly at the beginning. Really irritating, but I hear the ads version is practically unwatchable.

For now. Eventually the greed is going to get to the point where ads are mandatory regardless of what package you choose. It's just a slow burn similar to what happened in publishing. First there were ads. Then there were popup ads. It took an entire army of people to get rid of the popups. So they increased the ads, got more sophisticated on placement, and made them far more insidious in terms of privacy violation. Then they added paywalls, but removed the ads. Now they're adding ads to paywalled content because of "added value for our customers" when they aren't also doing sponsored newsletters.

I don't think this is a realistic take. There are a large number of consumers willing to pay for no adds, and fewer barriers to market entry than cable.

Even cable, with its relative monopoly had packages with no adds like HBO.

When cable first started many, many channels had no ads either, and they caved once they realized they could get away with it.

No many channels were not ad free when cable first started. Only channels that were premium,

When cable first started, it was a method to rebroadcast local stations where you couldn’t get a signal over the air. The first basic cable only channels were also ad supported.

I recall hearing about spammers and mailing lists that some advertisers are a special kind of stupid who think "willing to pay not to see ads" means "extra lucrative demographic". Hearsay but it seems consistent with bad advertising practices like "punch the monkey and autoplay banner ads".

If you're attracting eyeballs, and not selling some time in front of those eyeballs to advertisers, then you're leaving a lot of money on the table.

For paying eyeballs is under the assumption that those eyeballs are yours permanently and won't leave. It is that kind of thinking which got cable disrupted hard.

If you're waiting for that golden goose to produce more eggs, instead of cutting it open and taking them all at once, are you also leaving a lot of money on the table?

I am probably more extreme than most, but I simply will not pay you if your offering has ads.

Your publishing analogy is interesting, but I would tweak it, because most of "publishing" online was free and anonymous, not paid, so the analogy to streaming video services isn't a fair one. What _has_ happened, however, is that even paid subscriptions on publishing sites such as the NY Times include ads. That's bullshit, and I really hope streaming video doesn't go that direction.

Do any paid online video services NOT offer an ad-free experience now? To my knowledge they all do. Yes, Netflix has rumblings about starting an ads tier, but the OP is still correct, as far as I know, that the option for ad-free viewing still exists.

> Best thing about streaming subscriptions is that pirate sites have all their content.

FTFY

I just watched the new Game of Thrones show on NowTV. It had ads before and during the show.

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