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Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

Can’t imagine enough people are torrenting these days to make the lawyer fees worthwhile spending for this.

It makes sense for it to be on the rise, the legit landscape now is dire. There are too many platforms to stream or purchase from. If you want to pay it’s difficult.

I understand torrenting offers one easy and convenient search, no ads, can download in advance of a journey, no country lock, no expiring downloads, no series disappearing off Netflix half way through watching.

Also, there are now cases where people legally lose access to purchased TV shows and movies, since the platform you purchased on has a licensing agreement change. Which sounds insane to me and will only encourage torrenting.

You’re often getting better quality from torrents too. Even if I have access to a movie on Netflix, the downloaded copy will likely look worse than a Blu-Ray rip, even one re-encoded down to a more digestible size. Streaming looks like ass, it’s optimized for “good enough for most viewer and not too heavy on the CDNs”.

Tears of the Kingdom had over one million public downloads even before its official release last year. It's probably less common than it used to be (especially for music) but it's still widespread.

I think the biggest change is that people at the bottom have moved on to iptv or paying for shared Plex accounts instead of doing the downloading themselves. The chain is still dependent on torrenting though.

Where is the 1M downloads stat from? I'd have imagined most people are using direct download sites to get such content.

edit: looking at Nintendo's complaint against Yuzu, it doesn't mention bittorrent or explain how they arrived at that number.

I think the daily stats might surprise you https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/stat/daily

Oh boy, here in Germany we have companies specialised in that, they buy isp data, track you down and sends you letters asking for $$$

Given the price and quality of paid services torrenting is coming back fast

Private trackers are alive and well, and demand is if anything increasing as media companies make the same mistakes all over again.

It never did.

The execs don't understand, if a kid cannot torrent a movie the kid cannot afford to buy it. Either way they don't make money.

Solution is very easy and Steam, early Netflix proved it.

Make your service affordable and convenient and you will win people with money.

Make your service expensive and inconvenient and people with money will be pushed to piracy cuz its less hustle and cost only time.

Even if there are a lot of people torrenting, would they actually spend money if they weren’t pirating it? Seems to me that someone pirates something when they weren’t willing to pay for it in the first place. Odds are, they might consume something else instead.

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