Do you find always what are you looking for?
Do you use Torrents when something is missing?
There are so many ways that the paid content providers just can't hang, that even if something is available from them, you'll often get better service by just downloading the equivalent torrent.
So thanks, Lovefilm for sending that Mission Impossible DVD in the mail with so much DRM that it won't play in any of the DVD players in any of my 3 machines using any of their various operating systems. No, don't trouble yourself sending out a replacement disc. I've already watched the movie (turns out there's this website you can type movie names into and simply download them in HD. Who knew?) But thanks for making the effort.
And thanks, NFL GamePass for selling me access to all the games this year for $150, but it turns out that you'll also need to not let your Auth servers go down, say, four minutes before the game kicks off because that way I'd be able to actually watch it. But again, don't sweat it. Somebody actually cut together a nicer, higher resolution version of the same game and stuck it online.
It works out fine, actually. The studios, rightsholders, etc. all get my money like they wanted (and I wanted to give them). And I get to watch the stuff they tried their best to let me watch using their sorta broken infrastructure.
Sorted.
However, Netflix' streaming content in the U.S. has been getting steadily worse, from my perspective, over the past couple of years.
Numerous films and distributors that used to be on there, are gone. "Owners" creating their own channels or shopping around for "better" deals, I guess.
New additions seem to consist largely of TV series -- a few big names, and a bunch of lower-tier stuff -- and B movies as well as an increasingly poor selection of foreign films (including a lot of Korean stuff, amongst others). Sure, they picked up "Iron Man" and a couple of other big names, but these are really outliers. Most of what they are adding and maintaining is "meh", at best.
I'm not willing to sign up for a gazillion different, fragmented services. So, from my perspective, "legal" streaming is already beginning to -- or well on its way to -- failing.
My bandwidth hungry neighbors and increasingly crappy and overpriced ISP aside, the technology actually works pretty well, these days.
It is, once again, the business side that is failing.
Finally, with respect to this, and to O'Reilly Safari and a few other things, I've come to the opinion that temporary, fee-based access to a online library is a bad financial decision. I wish I'd taken the fees I've paid, and just purchased titles. DVD disks and e-books or real books.
And while I'm not a "file sharer", I have no problem with the idea of stripping the DRM from said purchases, for my own use. I'll be damned I'm going to let e.g. a dispute between Amazon and some publisher or some problem with my account result in the compulsory "unpurchasing" of a title, or my entire library, that they've "sold" to me.
I haven't done it yet -- most of my ebooks are DRM-free through O'Reilly -- but they are pushing me in that direction.
I've had netflix for about 6 months (using unlock-us to access all regions) and have probably torrented only 10-20 movies in that time (down from a few a week)
Torrent is the best (read only) option we have. I myself download about 3-4 movies and several seasons of tv shows a week.
I would totally use Netflix if it were available to me. I tire of downloading torrents to watch films and shows - if the producers of this content were more tech-savvy, I'd be quite happy to be paying for it. As long as it worked.
I cannot speak to how good it is in all of those regions but in the UK it is quite good, not quite as good as the US, but well worth the ticket price.
I do have a Spotify account though.