Have you considered not watching instead? There’s plenty of books in the library with no ads.
Meanwhile HBO lacks english closed captioning for most of its content. They give me subtitles for spanish sometimes even though it's not my native language. Not to mention the obnoxious censorship and inaccurate translations.
> With high quality subtitles and captions missing from the paid services.
Here's my average Netflix experience: I want to watch X. I search X on Neflix, and learn that Netflix doesn't have it because they only have a few thousand movies which is abysmal. I then spend the next two hours aimlessly browsing the Netflix catalogue searching for something kind of similar to X, but nothing is and I have to give up having watched nothing.
Here's my average pirating experience: I want to watch X. I search X on TPB and find exactly what I want with a few seeds. Half an hour later I am watching X.
Or I can just search on Google and usually find it either on a streaming service I subscribe to or it will give me a list of places I can rent it.
I will gladly pay three bucks not to have to deal with bit torrent
A concrete example: I want to watch Sharpe. Netflix doesn't have it, which isn't surprising because they never have anything I'm looking for. Amazon has it for $4 an episode at SD quality, and I have to watch it in my browser with their shitty webplayer because they're afraid I'm going to save it to my harddrive (lmao.)
So instead I pirated it and got 720p for free. It's now on my hard drive and I can watch it with my proper media player. Pirating being free is really just the icing on the cake, I might have paid $4 an episode if they would give me a DRM-free 720p downloads, but that simply isn't an option. Why isn't it an option? I can and do buy DRM-free albums from Amazon. Albums which are smaller and easier to share than movies or TV shows, yet are still offered DRM free. The TV/movie industry get away with offering inferior crippled products because not enough people know how to pirate movies. But I do, so I'm not their chump.
It had absolutely nothing to do with piracy
https://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_pos...
Here’s my average fraud experience. I send out a few thousand scam emails and money starts pouring into my bank account.
It's a crap analogy, not least because you don't actually have the experience you describe but I do have the experience I described above. You have not lived a life of crime, probably because you don't really believe it would go as well as you suppose in your analogy. Do you really believe that crime would be more profitable for you in the long run? Career criminals work harder and make less. They do this because they can't cope with some aspect of regular employment, like staying off drugs and showing up on time. They get caught eventually and their life becomes a ruin. If you really think you have what it takes to become one of the rare successful robber-barons who can steal your way to luxury, then you're probably mistaken. But I can get the movies I want to watch, but not with Netflix. Netflix doesn't have what I want, so I'm simply not going to pay for it. Throw all the insults you want, none of it will change anything.
I did pay for a League Pass. I still watched the illegal stream instead. The streamer would even play music over ads and put gifs and images over the in-game ads during free throws and the like.
That's freaking awesome. I wonder if one day we'll have some kind of machine learning video adblock software to do this automatically...
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-legal-to-leave-ads-in-library-bo...
“Have you ever considered walking?”
Also see: “I haven’t watch TV in 20 years. Do people still watch TV?”
“Have you ever considered walking?”
If the suggested alternative was stealing another Honda Accord, that would be a reasonable question.
Do you think you can still get the TV shows you love if you evade the TV industries monetization mechanisms? Or is the plan that everyone else will continue to pay and so it’ll all be okay? Something else? What’s the end game here?
FWIW I don’t watch TV. Not because I hate the industry or out of principle but because it’s just not very entertaining to me.
People want the government to step in because it’s inconvenient for them to pay for the content they want.