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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Plus I've found "legit" to be a moving goal post. One day a show is on one platform, the next it's on another, or it becomes unavailable except for [insert random foreign country here]. Even HD is a ripoff sometimes when half the episode comes in all compressed looking. They'll blame my bandwidth except I have no problem streaming an episode without adaptive compression over Bittorrent.

People can say what they want about piracy, but it continues to be what I consider a necessity against culturally important media being further tainted by rent seekers looking to make another buck in any way they can.

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Yeah, I was a pirate as a kid. I said “give me a place where I can pay to have legal access to everything and I will.”

Then Netflix came along and introduced streaming. I was happy. It began to fragment a bit, I could live with that.

Now it’s 10 different platforms with rotating content, I need a 3rd party website to know where and when to watch a particular thing, it’s a mess.

Not only that, unlike with cable they make it difficult to record the content they’re serving me so I can watch later myself.

I am now a pirate again.

I've went through the exact same cycle. Also, a year ago I thought I'd gift my elderly dad a Netflix subscription for a year. Just because it was easy for him to use on the TV. When I seen the price and checked the TV shows and movies on it I realised how much stuff was NOT on it! Anyway - I bought a NAS instead and start running a plex server. Everyone's a winner!

i feel like this is an important piece. even if you want to do the "right thing", is it really supporting these platforms that horse-trade content in huge multi-billion dollar deals just so they can increase their userbase with the intent to jam more ads down their throat? have any of these platforms _improved_ the experience for the average creator? they're poison, it almost makes it feel more righteous to steal.

You can stop doing the right thing without doing the wrong thing.

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