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Comment by f1refly | Hacker News Reader

A service problem is when the media mafia refuses to sell me files that I can keep. I'd like to open some website and pay 15 bucks for a movie (the same as I'd buy for a recent bluray in a store) where I'm then allowed to just download a .mkv that I can throw on my nas. Major streaming sites refuse to serve me content with resolution higher that 480p (I think?) because my computer obeys me and not them. Sure looks great on the big screen in my living room.

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Netflix and friends won’t even reliably serve me 4K, even once you’ve jumped through all the hoops (sufficient network speed, right OS, right browser/application, 4K source content, the expensive plan, a screen capable of 4K etc).

Meanwhile in pirating land:

Pick your desired resolution, want 8/10 bit HDR? You can have that too. Pick your desired format. Downloads quickly, don’t have to worry about network interruptions.

I think it's 720p but yea, it's why I will never pay for Netflix and I often pirate stuff that's available on there despite having access to my mother's account. I've not pirated games since I was a teenager, because Steam is such a good service, and I'm happy to pay for games. Meanwhile I constantly bring up how much better my media consumption experience is because I pirate high quality movies and shows instead of the drivel that online media providers offer

> I've not pirated games since I was a teenager, because Steam is such a good service, and I'm happy to pay for games.

I'm happy to pay for games too, but I've stopped buying from Steam unless they're not available elsewhere. GOG has been my go-to, as they only sell games without DRM.

If Valve someday goes belly-up, or just decides to stop running their license servers, all those games we've bought on Steam are just gone, absent (illegal, in the US, anyway) third-party tools to strip the DRM. I believe some versions of Stream DRM can be removed, but not all.

I just don't see the need to reward a company that treats me like a criminal when I can get the same games from a company that respects me and my purchase.

(Bonus: Steam-the-software even allows you to add non-Steam games to the app, which makes it easy to run non-native games I've bought from GOG under Proton, for example.)

The key point for me with valve is their ongoing efforts to make software they license to me easier for me to use. This is completely opposed to the rest of the media industry, who are working exclusively to make my experience worse. Thanks to valves efforts I can now easily run many games that would've been windows only a few years ago.

Valve also currently sells the best handheld console on the market.

> Major streaming sites refuse to serve me content with resolution higher that 480p (I think?) because my computer obeys me and not them.

This nonsense directly lead to my permanent cancellation of Amazon Prime. It's infuriating to be treated like a second-class citizen even as a paying customer.

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