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Comment by ANewFormation | Hacker News Reader

Of your primary interests in life where would you rank ESPN+? Now multiply that by $12 to get an overall impact since presumably you would be willing to pay at least as much for things you value more highly.

This is why "just" $x per month is, in general, not a sustainable model for most things for most people and why 'piracy' is booming again.

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The Australian open runs for two weeks, solely in January, so you can subscribe for a single month. ~$12 is roughly the price of a single beer at a game. If you can get 2 weeks of entertainment for $12, I think that’s reasonable.

This is the sort of thing I used to think when I was a student with no money. Now I have a job in tech and I can afford many multiples of $12 a month, thousands even.

What about your time, which is now more valued by others, and probably (hopefully) is extremely valuable to you?

Personally, I wouldn't do it because I don't even want to spend the time subscribing (and then unsubscribing, and dealing with whatever other issues come up), much less watching.

Wait till the H1B come to drive your wage down.

Sports is a multi billion industry. You want to watch your favourite football team you pay up. It seems to be pretty sustainable.

If I am watching my favourite team play in a league via that league's paid broadcast subscription, some of those fees end usually end up with the teams via revenue share. Fair chop.

Tennis players are individuals who rarely have leverage/management in place to negotiate for bigger slices of the pie. You only get paid if you win. The base rate for the Australian Open is about 20k USD, which if you are an international travelling, would barely cover costs if you had multiple support staff you had to support on the road for the two weeks the tournament runs

Is piracy booming again? Google trends show interest in Bittorrent has been flat since 2017.

Piracy is tending to happen via archive services now, rather than torrenting. The pirates are less sophisticated, so the distribution methods are "more familiar" to them.

This is not my experience, at least for major motion picture rips

Bittorrent use has declined, Piracy hasn't particularly.

https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-is-no-longer-the-king-of...

If traffic by application is of interest to anyone, there should be a new 2025 Sandvine Global Internet Phenomena Report out any day now.

See past reports at: https://www.sandvine.com/phenomena

In the 2024 report file sharing was #4 in downstream volume. 9% of total compared to 39% for video. Youtube was 16%, Netflix 12%. Piracy is still way less common compared to streaming, tho I do enjoy the unbeatable quality of a 50GB bluray remux

> Piracy is still way less common compared to streaming

There's been a substantial uptick in pirate streaming - dodgy IPTV Internet Protocol Television apps abound.

https://www.sportico.com/business/media/2024/sports-stream-c...

Are you limiting "Pirating" to "File sharing" or are you including pirate content on demand by means not including either bittorrent of file sharing?

i definitely use free streaming websites when i can't find a show or region locked.

strange how much torrenting i used to do. theres just more content on youtube thats interesting.

There's a lot of overlap and it takes time and resources to determine the status of content.

eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herb_and_Dorothy

via bitTorrent or eDonkey from MVGROUP: https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Herb_and_Dorothy

on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnYcPLLiGFk

Is that a copyright violation on youtube? Do we care enough to find out and or report it?

I used pirate streaming websites as a kid, but I thought fewer people use them today because the video quality sucks. Any stats on the percent of people using them over time?

Not really my focus, you'd have to hunt about.

This is current:

  According to research conducted by NERA Economic Consulting and the US Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation and Policy Center, over four-fifths of all online piracy-related activities are linked to illegal streaming websites. This trend is especially prominent in the TV and movie industry.

~ https://dataprot.net/statistics/piracy-statistics/

but vague on details, there are many sources quoted by no drill down on methodology, context, details that matter to nerds, etc.

Modern piracy sites have 1080p standard. Many titles are in 4K and 720p.

Oh I've noticed that, but the 1080p bitrate is horrible. Looks more like upscaled 480p DVDs

Normies don't pirate using BitTorrent, especially for live-events streaming (which BitTorrent doesn't support): they'll find some dodgy website offering a proxy'd (and downsampled) video stream for free (with ads overlayed) or for a modest one-time fee via PayPal or a cryptocoin, especially when some big event has an extortionate pay-per-view fee.

Music piracy was killed-off by Spotify.

For movies/TV, they'll turn to publicly-shared Plex libraries - I only found out about this a few weeks ago: so in 2025, with more-and-more people having high-upload-bandwidth Internet connections it turns out that now you don't need a distributed DHT-based swarm of chunks of files with hundreds of seeders: all you need is a couple generous individuals running an open Plex box that's served-up behind a cheap offshore VPN provider, using the official Plex App from the Samsung TV app-store.

...I've no idea how long that's going to last: running behind a VPN means the MPAA (et al.) can't do much against those sharing their collections publicly like they did with BitTorrent (c.f. PeerGuardian), and Plex has somehow survived this-far given it does have legitimate uses, and the apps don't violate any app-store policy I'm aware-of, so I'm concerned the MPAA is going to lobby for some laws outright prohibiting apps/software/technology that facilitates piracy for nontechnical users somehow.

(Or they could follow GabeN's advice and start offering a superior service and convenience to the user with a cooperative consolidation of all rightsholders under a single branded tent, but we all know that's not going to happen)

> Music piracy was killed-off by Spotify

I've seen many places playing music from a YouTube playlist, with ads included. And anybody can download the audio stream from YouTube with a minimal software setup. There used to be browser addons that added a Save As button to YouTube pages. I'm not using them, maybe Google banned all of them from its store but there are many ways to do it.

> And anybody can download the audio stream from YouTube with a minimal software setup.

That's the issue. Almost nobody downloads music anymore, however easy it is. Because streaming apps like Spotify make the experience so much better. You are in the middle of the song and wants to cast to your living room speakers? Two clicks. You want to transfer that from your phone to your computer? Just a few clicks. Want to quickly jump back into an album or get recommendations of similar albums? It's all there on the home page. It's hard to beat this experience. The only exception I know is people who rip/pirate FLAC files because they want the best quality possible and don't care about anything else. That's like <0.01% of the users these days.

By "places" do you mean physical establishments like bars and restaurants?

Yes.

What's the correct English word for that?

You used the word correctly, but I asked because those businesses were probably breaking copyright law (at least in the US). They require very specific broadcast licenses to play music in a business. Even though it was subsidized by ads from Google, those agreements are intended to handle personal use.

qBittorrent has been on a very gradual climb. Though, most people pirate through streaming sites, not torrents.

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