I find the attitude that one is entitled to entertainment media fascinating.
People like to say that it’s not stealing because there is no physical product the producer is being deprived of, which is factually true, but even so why are you entitled to it at no cost?
NFL games aren’t water or food.
It used to be that you'd pay one company a little extra, and get all the extra channels you actually wanted. Now you pay multiple companies _a lot_ extra, and still might miss out on what you want.
Many people still remember the original deal.
When there is only one streaming service, being subscribed to that streaming service means you get everything. Now there are 15 different ones to choose from, each licensed to show a different set of content.
Watching NHL hockey in Canada is a strange situation right now, but I'm not sure how it compares to the original cable situation.
HN Search: enshittification - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Every single video they post is full of comments about how short the video is, how it didn't replay this or that important moment, and finishes with an ad for Stan.
Compared to 20 years ago where the only highlights you could get for free were in a news program that might spare 1 minute for just the most important match if you were lucky, these videos are incredible.
Do people need to watch the content? No. Are people entitled to the content? Is it "stealing" or not? That last one is probably up for date.
Regardless, the answers to those questions don't matter in the end. The public has made its demands clear time after time. The rightsholders can either deliver a convenient experience at a reasonable* price, or they can play whack-a-mole with pirates forever. Spotify managed to do it; Steam managed to do it. Only video media companies are so stubborn these days.
*There is always much debate on what constitutes a "reasonable" price, but it is certainly no more than a consumer is willing to pay. If that's less than the cost of producing the product, then perhaps the business model simply isn't viable.
Could you not make enough money in the first 15 years to justify? We don't let other professions profit for 15 years after they do the work (except landlords). People can touch there pipes after there installed. They can read and lend a book after they read it. Digital stroage is essentially free but makes air tight copyright and that is problematic.
It's weird that we give such board lasting complete ownership of the collective stories of society. Maybe the correct timeline is 15 years or 30 years but Life + 70 seems like it way overvalues the creative works and I think steals money from new creative works by making consumers choice between the "classics" and the new. This is not to say you cannot charge for TV service where you store and distribute but that is a service rendered. If you want to do it yourself why is the law so protective here? To me it feels like society is selling out its rights for higher marginal returns for a very small segment of people.
So maybe it's just that. Life feels like it should be better although it's the best it's ever been in many first-world countries. I am sure that entitled attitude is very common among rich people too.
You need this thing called an 'antenna' which captures invisible radio waves and decodes them into a picture with audio. You can't pause or rewind, and you have to be in front of the TV at specific times, so it is not precis the same, but you can access TV this way.
(Personally I only use OTA for sports)
Technically it was "1080p HD", but in reality it was more like 720x480 upscaled and smoothed.
Well, the major services like Google and Facebook provide content without requiring payment because they extract value from their surveillance of user behavior, plus ads. The users have now accepted that they are the product, but they get little kickback in the form of entertainment. Why should TV be any different?
* Continually remove good content
* Continually produce 'new and exciting' series only to cancel them after 1-2 seasons
* Continually raise the price
* Continually split off into ever more services - so instead of having 1 or even 3 good streaming services, there are dozens of them with limited content
I would not mind paying for 1-3 good, well-made services with a reasonable price tag. As it stands, I would need to pay for more like 8+ to get coverage of what I want to watch, and their prices are all $20+ a month. And almost every month I'd find something I really enjoy has been taken down. I'm not paying $160 a month for streaming that I barely use. I cancelled all of mine.
I can understand someone jumping to piracy. These services are terrible and don't need to be - they're that way because of absurd greed.
Frankly, IP should last 7 years, 14 at the most.
Why are we paying for Alf year after year, decade after decade?
Why are we required to pay for stuff while also being advertised to and having our data sold?
Now when you do buy something, you're buying a revokable license you can't even buy it and own it.
We'll if buying isn't ownership, then pirating it isn't stealing it. Plain and simple.
"You can just do things." Public airwaves? Consumer owned compute enabling adversarial consumption and interoperability? Good luck.
Mission Accomplished: NFL to Hit Goodell’s $25B Revenue Goal - https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/mission-accomplished-nfl-h... - February 2nd, 2026