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Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

In my circle, piracy is making a comeback. We're tired of having to hunt down streaming services, and be extorted for hundreds of euro a month, just to see ads for their own programs.

Streaming was fun for a while, but as always these greedy execs are ruining it.

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Too many services nowadays. Was fine when it was just Netflix, had mostly everything, no ads, full quality. Nowadays Netflix price has gone up, additional plans for 4K/no-ads, anti-account sharing and less content as content now has gone to Amazon/Disney+/Hulu/Discovery+/Paramount+/Peacock/HBO etc. etc.

Even if you subscribed to them all you'd still not have everything. Sailing the seas, you get everything for free or for a couple dollars a month for a more premium experience.

Time for change.

> Even if you subscribed to them all you'd still not have everything

And even if you could get all the video itself, it's not guaranteed you'd get the right video+audio+subtitles combination that you want, as everything seems to be negotiated separately.

So while one service could offer the right audio and the right video but not the subtitles you want, another service could have the right video and the right subtitles but instead be dubbed without original audio.

It became a whole mess for people and eventually it was again simpler to just resort to piracy for the even the slightly technical consumers.

Man, jellyfin is shockingly absolutely killer for subtitles. I don't remember if it's a plugin or built in, but there's a subtitle search option that cross-references your video's filename into some database that usually gives you a workable set of subs.

Plus it respects your options to default subs on or off, in a language you choose, in a style you like to see. I don't think any streaming services do it this well honestly

Plex also has this

Kodi has this as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if similar functionality was also in plex/emby too

"Some database", could it be opensubtitles.org ? Sigh, if I were them I'd be annoyed that my work is hidden away behind the words "some database".

The plugin does name them, but that's the nature of work so good as to become invisible, you don't actually see it unless you already know (Or care/need to look into it)

Higher price, 1080p cap, no account sharing… that’s one thing.

But the content issue is just so dumb (and I’m not blaming Netflix).

I suppose next we will have a new streaming service for each film and show.

Let me pay $0.1 for each episode I watch, make everything available and route to the right entity that should be paid and then offer one cross-platform client that everyone pooled their efforts into. And since we're dreaming, make it a open collaboration with a FOSS client too.

I'd predict most of the piracy would again disappear quickly as long as it's better, faster and has virtually everything people wanna watch. Basically replicate what Spotify did, but more open, so closer to what Grooveshark tried to do I guess.

Grooveshark, that's a name I've not heard in a while...

But even Spotify are putting the price up this year. I bet if something like that happened, it'd quickly soar to $0.2 an episode in the next year, then slowly creep up more and more.

> I bet if something like that happened, it'd quickly soar to $0.2 an episode in the next year, then slowly creep up more and more

Yeah probably, until they find the point where more people leave because it's too expensive than they'll earn by raising prices, then they'll oscillate or find a new direction. Isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work?

Capitalism is supposed to have perfectly competitive goods to be efficient. IP protection - especially the obscene century-long protection of copyrights - renders capitalist competition into monopolistic competition, which no longer maximises consumer surpluses. Hence mandatory licencing can increase benefits for society - and in the past such models worked - e.g. for radio. Today, the only reason content conglomerates get away with it is that they can pay of sufficiently many legislators.

That's Adam Smith liberalism. You can have a market and competition without capitalism. Just look at what China did for EVs and solar panels, its full liberalism under state planning.

China does have _some_ capitalism, state capitalism but still, capital owners decide what is produced, with state supervision (nuclear, coal, rail sector, Alibaba). Already for its telco sector we knew it was different, it wasn't like the usual, a sort of capitalist liberalism with state planning. Now we have more data, and i'm not the only one to think its EV boom is the perfect example of a non-capitalist liberalism.

... so we end up in the same predicament we are now. Maybe the model doesn't work? And no, I'm not a communist.

I think it's broken, yeah. I think the whole "art for money" thing doesn't make sense in general and something else has to be figured out. Artists should be able to survive without depending on things like "perfectly competitive goods" or whatever.

In 1999 I paid (inflation adjusted) $20 per episode in DS9

If you are only wiling to pay 10 cents then that's a major problem - viewing figures just aren't that high any more. A modern scifi show would need 100 million viewers to cover the production budget at 10 cents a person

The post popular scripted show on US TV - George and Mindy - gets about 5-6 million viewers when it's on for free. At 10c/episode or $2 for the year that would be $10m for the entire season. TV costs a lot more than that to produce.

This is what Hulu started out as... before ABC/Disney bought everyone else out as they shifted to their own separate services, and now Disney is burying Hulu under Disney+. When Hulu started, it seemed like the solution, but everyone was greedy and wanted a bigger piece of the pie. The same goes for TV/Cable and even streaming "live tv" options. YouTube TV option even tried, originally like $35/mo, but now is just as much as any of the other "Live TV" services (in the US at least), north of $80/mo.

Piracy is the answer... though, it's aa couple extra hoops to jump through... using a seedbox over self-hosting that is. I should probably just have a script that does an rsync to my local NAS every few minutes to make it slightly easier... already have a watch script to upload .torrent files to the seedbox.

This is what copyright does though by design. Everyone leverages the monopoly granted by government to maximize profit because its way easier to force people to your service for maximum profit and compete (n offerings rather than everyone ha>ing the same offerings and competing on price and user experience. This is also causing the crazy market dislocation from hige show budgets because they are tryingto invest in their competitive edge when creativity doesnt work on big budgets at all. it needs a constraint to push on.

Plus exclusivity, probably. Music abides by the same copyright laws yet you don't need to subscribe to Spotify to listen to certain artists, or pay YT Music Premium for someone else. I'm not including podcasts here, since they are more of a "production" itself rather than just owning the rights.

The government came in and spanked the music industry back when it was radio primarily and that caused a licencing and payment regime to be codified that forced this as a matter of custom. The situation in video has always been exclusivity to channel partners and replayability didn't play a big role until the industry was pretty mature so no spanking from government has yet to materialize in the video market to fix this situation to the extent possible under the currenty broken copyright regime.

Too many services is a good problem to have in a regular market. The problem is the accessibility and fragmentation of content. If all services had the same content, they would have to compete on the features, price and performance, which would be a healthy form of competition.

Yes, need proper standardisation. we are now in the era when there’s fragmentation in a tape audio players, with dozen of different incompatible cassette tape formats and musicians having lock-in contracts with one format each. To listen to all music you would have to buy each player on the market. Only piracy allows you to buy just one tape player and have copies of all other tapes to play.

> Was fine when it was just Netflix, had mostly everything

This was problematic too. Centralisation is never good in the long-term. Surely, we would have learned that from traditional media, AWS outages or autocratic structures. Humanity as so much to learn still

Centralized marketplaces can work, but it’s hard to maintain those (there is one Centralized Internet, not many various internets, for example).

A subscription service that “covers all” like we usually get with music would be quite nice, even if it was only “older” shows after a year or so.

There isn't one centralised internet, its thousands of autonomous systems which connect to each other using a common language.

Now sure, some companies try hard to centralise it and own it, this leads to a more fragile ecosystem.

I mean that as a customer, you buy "one Internet" and get the "whole thing", you don't have to connect to various internets depending on what you want that day (as you did before by dialing into BBSes).

Companies and countries are doing their darnedest to break the Internet up into separate, smaller networks.

I hope Apple TV doesn't get into the bandwagon

> Even if you subscribed to them all you'd still not have everything.

Do you actually need everything, everywhere, all at once?

Do one at a time and then switch after you run out of shows or if another service has a "must-watch".

Or, just pirate it. The quality will probably be better, anyway.

Eh, depends. Pirates these days need to burn hardware keys for 4K, so only sponsored or high-popularity stuff gets it. Everything else gets 1080p, though some groups do upscaling to try and make up for it.

If the content has a Blu-ray release, the pirated content will usually be better than the stream. But you could also purchase the Blu-ray yourself.

Anyway, pirating is illegal. I totally respect it for those who can't pay due to economic bloc or age, or as a form of protest... but hearing folk with 6-figure salaries bemoan having to pay too much, then act like children when told they could just take turn with the toys does rub me the wrong way.

I'll pay 100 USD a month for an 'everything' subscription. That option doesn't exist, and piracy is by far the best option outside of that.

I'm there with you... I even pay/paid for a number of them at once for a long time... my SO would usually use their dedicated apps for streaming. Me, I'd sail the high seas just because the final landing point on my NAS was easier to watch through Kodi than dealing with the UI of many of the services themselves.

Amazon Prime used to have each season of each show separated, for example... Hulu and Hulu Live TV mess with each other, and fragment older episodes... Disney+ is a pain to use.. Paramount/CBS breaks with the PiHole... they all kinda suck in so many ways. I actually pay for YouTube ad free, it covers music as well... and I tend to watch from the couch. I've started using Rumble a little more, but the TV UX leaves a lot of room for improvement. Similar for Pepperbox and other alt streaming options.

It's not about paying too much, it's about the actual experience.

While streaming has gotten (and continues to) progressively worse, pirating just gets better.

Why are you simping for the shareholders? I should have the choice of anything I want to watch. The unethical option provides all and is cheaper than a subscription for a single one of those services.

Besides, those services often make it difficult to unsubscribe with dark patterns.

And why are you acting like you have a right to unlimited access of all content made, regardless of the economics, for $20 a month at the highest quality of service through one platform?

Things cost money, that's the world we live in. You don't have to like it, but it is what it is.

The unethical option is actually illegal and, as more people do it, only game theories everyone else into having to pay more. Feel free to do it, not going to pretend I'm a saint on the matter, but don't act all incredulous and morally superior. You're still here complaining you could steal oxy cheaper than pay for it at a pharmacy; just a different fix.

WRT unsubscribing, I can't relate. It's, what, 5 buttons? I do it every other month and it's never been a problem. Isn't this forum supposed to be techies?

> right to unlimited access of all content made, regardless of the economics, for $20 a month at the highest quality of service through one platform?

Because the only reason we don't have this is a substantial industry devoted to preventing it? Which simultaneously has a terrible rep for exploiting its workers, the pay non-transparency of Netflix, arbitrary cancellation of incomplete series, and the general fiasco that is David Zaslav.

Heck, I'd take "all content made before 2000 at acceptable quality transfers for $20", but the further back you go the more likely it is that the only online supplier of a movie is a pirate.

(Criterion Channel Online is not available in the UK, which is another bugbear: copyright means arbitrary unavailability)

Because it's totally possible? They've done it with Spotify for music. No reason the same shouldn't be done for films and TV.

Making a movie or a series is way more expensive than record a song

That's an argument for having a more expensive service, not a worse one. Even ignoring price, nothing on the video side comes close to Spotify when it comes to selection, other than Netflix back in the day.

Are we seriously praising Spotify's business model and affect on the creator market?

Not to mention they're up to $12/month. Creating movies and shows is significantly more expensive than music, so it makes sense the price to a catalogue would be scaled by an order of magnitude. Not to mention the increased costs for digital providers for storage, bandwidth, and compute requirements.

I'm, of course, more than happy to hear about how the reruns of Friends could stay on Netflix since it's just a dispute about perceived value. But the rest? Come on, I know you aren't totally ignorant on the economics of these markets.

I think many people would gladly pay somewhere between $60-100/mo for access to everything either ad free or very minimal ads... nobody offers that. And trying to mix-match always leaves a gaping hole. For that matter, I'd probably do somewhere between $25-50 a season of a show, depending on the show, episodes, run-length etc. As it is, you can get close to this where Blu-ray box sets are an option, and that includes media. Easy enough to rip yourself, though time consuming.

The breaking point is generally around 3-4 of the paid streaming services... many people are going to have Amazon as a baseline for shipping... then you get shoved D+ with every kind of bundling (Verizon, etc) under the sum, then Hulu may or may not be attached... People pay for Netflix out of legacy... that doesn't leave much room for Peacock, Paramount+, AppleTV, etc, etc. It's just easier to say f*ck it and pirate.

Hulu was great for the first couple years... minimal ads, new tv shows same or next day. Then the partners all dropped out with greed as primary motivators.

Copyright is supposed to exist for a limited time to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." The current 100 year plus regime is effectively forever and not in line with the original constitutional purpose. With reasonable copyright timeframes, at some point all copyright will expire and then everything will be legal. The notion that an artist is entitled to extract money from each eyeball or ear that encounters the work until the heat death of the universe is unethical.

I agree with you, but that's not what's happening in this conversation. Nor are any of these services a historical archive, they are ongoing catalogues and your subscription funds new shows, as well as servicing cost.

And let's not feign ignorance by saying the overwhelming vast majority of things being watched are exactly that new content, not 30 year old reruns of Frasier.

EDIT: I apologize, only ~2 seasons of Frasier would extend past copyright. It started airing 1993.

What does that have to do with streaming services?

Probably 80% of what is watched is from the last year, a lot of it from the last month. Most of the rest is from the past couple decades. The original US copyright law of 1790 allowed for 28 years.

I mean, I agree current copyright is too long. It's just not that relevant to streaming. Not a lot of people are looking to watch old episodes of Knight Rider for free. (Those who are, I salute you.)

Given that the law is broken and the entertainment industry is generally responsible for that, it seems reasonable enough to decide you don't want to give them money that they will use against you (perhaps making exceptions for indie groups). Once you've made that decision, piracy (at least downloading) becomes amoral. Whether you watch the stuff has no effect on anyone else (personally I don't, but more because I'm not interested).

You'd be surprised how many people watch Seinfeld and Friends on repeat as comfort shows. Old shows is a pretty large part of their business.

I do have the right to do this. In my country downloading isn’t illegal, only uploading is. And rightfully so.

For me personally piracy made a comeback when everyone memory-holed "The Speech" episode from IT Crowd. I had even paid for it on a separate platform when Amazon removed it, only to find the platform I paid for it on removed it also. Say what you will about Graham Lineham, I still think it's one of the funniest IT crowd episodes, on par with "The Work Outing". I'd rather not have media I personally enjoy rug-pulled from me in this manner.

Yeah Graham Linehan was a great comedy writer (past tense because I don't think he's writing more, not that he is a horrible writer now), and even though IT Crowd had some really weird episodes towards the end, it's really interesting to see how much his views shifted (in my biased opinion, for the worse) after the show was done.

For people not in the know, Linehan is nowadays a very outspoken voice against "transgenderism", specifically in regards to trans women, and is quite close to the J.K. Rowling sphere of influence. He seems to have given up a lot to end up where he's now.

Now with IT Crowd, it's fascinating that there are the typical early 2000s trans jokes, what with the trans woman getting into a relationship with Douglas because he misheard her saying "I used to be a man", for "I used to be from Iran", after which Douglas and the trans woman get into a fist fight together. This is the episode "The Speech" that the parent is referring to. It's pulled from circulations over allegations of transphobia, but really this wasn't at all abnormal for the time, and there were lots of shows with jokes that, although maybe less physical, were far more cruel to trans women (trans men of course, never really coming up at all, but that's another story). I remember a tweet that called out Linehan for this episode at the time, and he apologized with genuine understanding, no cruelty behind it. That's not something I could ever imagine him doing now. It's a shame in my opinion, I think IT Crowd is one of the better comedy shows of it's time and I don't know if he'll be able to write it now as he used to, as with any deeply held political belief it does seep into the work itself, sometimes making it better, sometimes ruining it, though I will probably not watch anything Linehan will create in the future, sadly.

Just let me buy an MP4 legally for $5 and I will buy every movie.

This is a good point.

I paid many movies on iTunes, and there's no way to access that content anymore, certaily not from my Linux (main) machines.

Also, people who "bought" 1984 on Amazon only to see it disappear from their Kindle will not have been amused.

Nobody likes to have things they spend money on cluttered across 20+ services with changing subscription fees and licensing terms. It's a mess.

Check out Moviesanywhere lets you sync itunes movies to Google, and other providers including moviesanywhere itself. Its owned by the movie industry iirc so totally legit. Not sure if it will help but it sucks losing an entire movie library otherwise.

Hell, I'd be happy to pay full price to have this option.

All my devices run Linux and apparently there is no amount of money that will let me stream paid content above 480p.

Maybe we'll soon see another round of "piracy as a paid service", just like Napster and the beginnings of Spotify.

That never went away. You still have tons of debrid services.

Shhhhhhhh....

That industry is still worth billions today. IPTV being the biggest one, then there's the debrid sites.

Hell, sell me BluRays that just contain an "unprotected" MP4 file in them, and I'll pay a little extra if I'm allowed to copy it as much as I want. I promise I wont share my files with anyone else, unless they're over my house to watch a movie together. I would go back to buying movies.

Netflix does 720p and kanopy too, maybe some at 1080p. Need to install widevine.

We need mandatory licensing. It worked for Radio, it can work for Streaming.

There's no reason Netflix and Hulu couldn't both have ALL media available. Then they could actually compete on features and capabilities, not on media catalog.

I'd buy 720p MP4s for $20, though my tastes in passive visual entertainment are rather niche.

I’ll just add that bogus DMCA takedowns (for anticompetitive or censorship goals) are a real burden for many YouTube creators, making supporting their monopoly at least as morally dubious as piracy.

I pirated for many years until Netflix had everything when I was in high school. Roughly around the time I got a job I stopped pirating games and bought everything on Steam. There is still some annoyance with other launchers besides Steam but, I endure.

Its been a long time now but probably around when South Park left Netflix, I started pirating again. Now I have a massive Plex server and home lab dedicated to piracy. AND I STILL PAY ~$20/m for Usenet lol.

> probably around when South Park left Netflix, I started pirating again

Unrelated, but fun example as South Park is probably the only show on TV that also let people watch the entire show (-latest seasons it seems) for free online! https://www.southparkstudios.com/seasons/south-park

Been like that (in many places) for many many years at this point too :)

> let people watch the entire show

Isn't that only for people in the US?

I lived in three different countries in my life, and neither of them have been the US, but all of them have apparently had free South Park episodes available to them :)

I don't know if that website works/shows full episodes in the US, currently I'm in a EU country and everything except the last two seasons seems available.

Depends where you are, I only see short clips on there.

Why so much?

Plex is a pretty light-weight system as long as transcoding is avoided or it has hardware transcoding available to use.

And wrangling Usenet is a fairly simple affair on vaguely modern PC hardware, too.

So all of that stuff runs in the background on the same desktop Linux box that I also use for everything else.

Am I doing it wrong?

People use separate computers for wide range of reasons. My desktop isn't always running Linux for example, or even from the same partition always, and to run something 24/7 I need to host it not on my for-work desktop. I also run some less trusted software on separate server and network than say Home Assistant and Frigate.

Sure, I suppose. And I do have a separate computer for HA, because I consider it part of the house.in a way that is simply deserving of (cheap!) dedicated hardware.

But most of my multi-os stuff happens with VMs these days.

After I spent a few years successfully running Windows as my primary desktop OS, as a virtual machine (with its own dedicated CPU cores and accessories like GPU), the lines between separate computers and different operating systems permanently became very blurry to me.

> most of my multi-os stuff happens with VMs these days

Sounds like you could be interested in Qubes OS, which runs everything in VMs by default with an amazing UI. (My daily driver.)

As "lightweight" as it is, you don't even need Plex or a "media server" software. My "media server" has been "files on an NFS share" which has worked for me for the last 15-20 years.

SMB share is the minimum viable. Plex on an android TV device is a lot better. Access to all the media with a simple remote has been a great experience.

Oh, I also use SMB for that. A local file share is more than enough for anyone who lives alone, in a cave, and who never has never physically interacted with another person -- and who never wants to.

Plex, meanwhile? It is much more approachable by the lays.

My elderly mother can watch my media with a cheap little Roku box while she sits on the sofa at her house many miles away with a remote control in her hand, using Plex.

Value adds I get from Jellyfin:

- Each member of my family gets their watch progress individually tracked down to how many minutes they made it into each video, across devices.

- The server's GPU automatically transcodes video into the best format for the device, display resolution, and available bandwidth. Very helpful for streaming stuff off the home server while away from home to optimize battery life and bandwidth.

- Automatically pulling subtitles from opensubtitles. Very handy if you have a multingual family who enjoys foreign media shows together. The paid streaming services are mostly abysmal at subtitling.

- A soft reason: My family members are seriously impressed by how nice the web UI is compared to Amazon Prime Video, Peacock, etc. It's literally opened their eyes to how software doesn't have to be bad - capitalism makes software bad over time.

Yep. Piracy getting popular is the market telling you something is seriously wrong. The system is currently broken with tens of services each coming in at $10+ per month (and seemingly increasing every quarter).

I'm waiting for TorrentCoin to pay/earn while you're watching/seeding to occur and then the pirating will become profitable and open the flood of dedicated for profit pirates from less regulated parts of the world. When this happens (it's sorta happening right now with Real Debrid & etc...) there will be a napster moment for movies and streaming.

I think the explanation is less about greed and more that ad-supported programming is almost always the only viable economic model. Cable worked brilliantly because everybody paid for a full range of channels, sure YOU only watched about 8 of them but other people had a totally different 8. Some channels survived many many years without earning any subscriber fees, just getting the distribution was enough and the ads paid the bills.

Anyone thinking that paid streaming subscriptions could entirely replace ad-supported for the long-term, never really thought it all through in my opinion.

> Streaming was fun for a while, but as always these greedy execs are ruining it.

I've been doing a lot more digital purchasing. Like movies and TV shows. I know there is some risk to the services shutting down. But Disney's MoviesAnywhere mitigates that some.

I typically buy stuff when it is on sale. Generally a digital movie is (way) cheaper than a single ticket at a theater. And I've kinda built a decent sized library where I usually can find something to watch.

And, generall, my library is way better than Netflix at any given time. (Though I still have a couple(!) streaming subscriptions...)

> digital purchasing

That's an oxymoron if you can't have a local copy

Also I think the piracy experience has improved significantly. Jellyfin + Infuse makes the watching experience just as good, if not better than, the streaming apps. You get the same nice scrolling interface, trailers, automatic subtitles and it feels just as good as the Netflix app. Except it’s all the content you actually want, nothing you don’t, and there are no ads.

In the 90s we clamoured for being able to subscribe to what we want rather than a single

We broadly have that now.

I subscribe to Youtube, Spotify, Netflix, Disney, Apple, Paramount, BBC. Only Apple and BBC force adverts on me, and Apple I'll be cancelling because of it. I keep BBC more out of moral reasons as I think it's a net good for the UK.

The monthly cost is very reasonable to me, inflation wise its about the same as I paid for BBC and Sky in the 90s.

Last night we wanted to watch the 2012 Les Mis film, £3.50 to rent it from Apple. In the 90s, inflation adjusted, it cost £8 to rent the tape.

If I can subscribe to watch something without adverts, I will. If I can buy or rent it, I will.

If I can't do that though, then I'll get it elsewhere.

We used to share passwords but as the streaming services begin the crackdown started cancelling the services and just use pirated movie watching sites.

Funny enough, our TCL Smart TV has an UI that shows trending movies etc. and when you click on these it just does a web search with the relevant words to find pirate websites. The browser is also able to detect video streams and asks you if you want to just play the video in the video player. The overall experience is not too far away from the legal streaming platforms.

Most new films are a trash anyway, so I don't think I feel moral dilemma either. In fact, if the streaming services go away this will be a net win for the movie industry.

I rather keep myself to a single service, I don't suffer from FOMO, do not need to see everything.

If ads get too much, then I just shut it off, books don't have ads, and the local library has enough audio books and DVDs to keep me busy on rainy weekends.

From the point of view of content owners, an moderate amount of piracy is ideal, since it implies that they’re extracting maximum value from everyone who isn’t pirating.

It's not extortion for them to charge money for you to watch TV shows, at historically low prices.

Also some streaming services are not available at some countries or only sold as some bundles with only particular ISPs or cable providers in that country.

Hence you cannot buy it legally even if you wished (to change your ISP).

I love paying the extra for Paramount+ on Amazon Prime to avoid the ads only to find out that does not include Paramount ads.

I also started torrenting again after I got tired of the quality of streaming content. But I still use Youtube all the time.

I focus a lot on 4k, bluray and dvds. Shuffling physical media is nice.

Small used cd/dvd stores like rasputin are a delight.

If life gets busy, you pause without racking up subscription fees.

Also - there is something deliberate about choosing and watching a movie physically. You buy it deliberately, and later you play it more deliberately.

When I had netflix, I could spend the time to watch a movie doomscrolling through not-that-great stuff to not watch.

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