Hacker News Reader

Comment by gtCameron | Hacker News Reader

I am a casual pirate. The last time I pirated stuff was torrenting some HBO shows, which promptly got me an email from my ISP.

At that point I could have done one of two things

1) Start spending $10 a month or so on an SSL Usenet provider, a VPN, or any of the other various tools that would allow me to keep pirating without getting caught

2) Start spending $10 a month or so on HBO, and watch it from the comfort of my couch on my flat screen without messing around with any of that stuff.

There are always going to be ways around whatever system they put in place, but the more obstacles they put in the way the more people will decide its no longer worth the effort.

View on HN

You can spend $10 to get HBO because you have cable. For those of us that don't, HBO Go is not an option.

This is correct. HBO doesn't cost $10, it costs more like $80. Sure, you get a lot more than HBO for the $80 but there is no way to get HBO alone unbundled.

That's why I'm a casual pirate. I'm not arguing that it works for everyone, I'm saying that they do exist.

I have cable because I watch a lot of sports, as soon ESPN lets me pay for streaming without a cable subscription I will drop it, but unfortunately live sports is the one thing than can not be pirated easily, consistently, and in high quality.

>Start spending $10 a month or so on HBO

You can't spend that $10 marginal price for HBO without spending a bunch more money on stuff you will never watch. For example, even if you never watch sports you're pretty much forced to get a cable package with ESPN included, which is a sizable chunk of your subscription cost.

I'd like to see cable companies offer ala carte channel choices, or even better, offer usage-based billing like they do for their data packages. Until that day, many people are going to take the free option instead.

> There are always going to be ways around whatever system they put in place, but the more obstacles they put in the way the more people will decide its no longer worth the effort.

The problem is that there are more obstacles in the way of legal consumption.

You can fix that by putting up artificial obstacles to illegal consumption, or by simply removing the obstacles to the legal consumption which most "pirates" would prefer to use.

Guess which path they've chosen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com