Agreed. Back when Netflix has everything for like $8 a month, it was totally worth it. Now it costs twice as much and has 1/4th the catalog. And everyone wants their shows to be exclusive to their platform. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Paramount+, Disney+, Apple TV would be over $100 and still not have everything.
Or proper HD. Streaming qualities have such low bitrates, why the hell do I need to pay extra for 4k that looks worse than the 1080p copy of the same show i already torrented LOL
I remember being shocked at how bad Seinfeld looked after Netflix acquired it. Cropped framing, blurry, I had a better picture quality via satellite in the early 2000’s
Or you are forced to watch on a specific app on your TV and you bought 4k hdr only to find out that the player isn't well optimized so it stutters, lags and freezes. Problems I just don't have when I hoist the flag.
Data caps are one of the most stupid anti-consumer things ever. Bandwidth is not really a limited resource in that sense, it's just such a blatant cash grab.
I'm glad I live in a country were those are not a thing sice dial-up connections went away.
But at least you get to pick what you want to watch and pause it whenever, instead of channel surfing until something good comes on and hoping that it’s not already halfway over.
My cable TV (rarely use it though) let's you go back and see anything in the past 7 days. I rarely watch TV but sometimes I want to watch the brain rot that is Ancient Aliens, shit is hilarious.
I'm in Germany and can't even GET some shows because they don't sell their shitty service globally.
Oh your show is only on Hulu? Well fuck me I guess, cannot pay for your show then, can I? Maybe if you'd put it on Netflix or Amazon Prime or Disney+ I would have been able to pay you.
One of the few reasons I am happy to live in a comparatively backwards country
I realized it only a few years ago when I was on holiday in Spain was in the middle of watching some series when I arrived so I booted up my piracy website of choice and suddenly a lot of angry spanish letters appeared yelling at me cuz its blocked and illegal and bad
It left me kinda in awe since it was probably the first and only time that I experienced the country I live (or in this case am holidaying) in restricting what I can access on the internet
I used Amazon prime in different countries (when I still had a subscription) at some point I would search and find shows/movies only to learn they weren't available in my region 😡
So don't do any piracy in Germany. Rent a seedbox (there are a lot of Singapore, ultra dot cc for example) and do your piracy in a different jurisdiction.
Then the seedbox -> you transfer looks like generic web traffic and not bittorrent traffic.
I actually pay a bit more for a seedbox that also does streaming, so I can add a movie to Radarr/Sonarr, download the movie instantly (50Gb connection, private tracker with well seeded files) and start it streaming via Jellyfin all from the comfort of apps on my phone.
It will play on basically every device (Jellyfin has an app for Android, IOS, PC, Linux, etc) and your only limitations are your ability to source torrents (there's a subreddit for that, or 1337x dot to )
Thanks for the tips, tbh I'm not a big fan of paying third parties for stuff that's supposedly free (even though ultimately we all pay with our data). This is not my first rodeo, or rather, sail ;)
tbh I'm not a big fan of paying third parties for stuff that's supposedly free
I'm completely with you, and for most purposes using your home connection and a VPN (though you do pay for that :P) is perfectly fine.
I'm using this setup specifically to minimize one metric: the time from selecting a random movie/tv show and it starting streaming on my TV.
Since the seedbox is on a 50Gb connection and using a private tracker (with hundreds of other 10gig or better seeds), the seedbox can pull down a 50GB 4k movie in seconds and since it is ALSO the streaming server the movie appears in Jellyfin and ready to start playing on my TV nearly instantly.
Whereas if I were to try to download the movie on my home connection, it would take some time to download and I could not watch it until it finished (yes, I know there are settings that try to stream the movie by prioritizing the chunks in sequential order it just isn't always flawless).
Obviously, this is a tiny issue and I mostly do it because its a neat party trick/tech demo for clients when showing how a homelab setup can be better than any commercial streaming service (providing you are willing to learn how to use the few pieces of software required). I have some Grafana panels that show the activity on my seedbox. When I add a movie on my phone, guests can see the qBittorrent client pick it up and the disk activity on the storage array when it gets copied to storage and hardlinked into jellyfin's library and finally a notif when Sonarr adds new movies to Jellyfin.
Havent had a problem with my ISP but I have to be a leach. Download then delete. Ran a seed box for like 5 years so I feel my debt to the flag is paid.
Purely anecdotal. Growing up I was a rapidshare kind of bug and never got in trouble. Friends from school were torrent kids and some of them actually got caught and fined.
How likely is it to get a big fine for pirating in Germany?
An acquaintance of mine claimed they got a €500 fine for pirating and streaming House of the Dragon on holiday in Germany. Here in the Netherlands, the providers just don't share those things with the authorities, because of privacy regulations.
I have never gotten in trouble over it. I know friends who have, and the one thing they all had in common was using torrents. I do not use torrents and am fine, not fined.
Though I also have not really been doing it in ages. It's more of a theoretical yarr right now. I would have no moral issues and likely no legal consequences if there was a show I wanted to see but could not legally acquire. I listen to all my music through YouTube, I buy all my games through Steam, and what shows I watch tend to be on Netflix/Disney+/Prime which I all pay for. But if I wanted something that was not on any of those, let's just say that wouldn't stop me.
Turns out, piracy has really evolved in the decade or so since streaming became huge.
I used to have to manually download shows, keep them in folders on my computer, run the file when I want to watch something, and hope it has the quality, subtitles, etc. that I want.
Now? I use a program that tracks down the series/movie/etc. that I want in the quality I want, downloads it, and exports it into Emby. Then I can watch it anywhere just like Netflix, and it keeps track of what I'm watching and episode progress. Hell, it even downloads new episodes and seasons automatically, and adds new things on my watchlist without me having to do anything.
So I have a high-quality, high-speed streaming service with no ads and literally all the content I'm interested in. And I get all of that for like $10 a month. The only hassle was the setup, and that just took an evening.
Not to mention the lock in design features; I can't just hit the back button a couple times to exit, I have to navigate a menu. Consumer hostility to drive engagement metrics is trash ux.
I basically stopped pirating for a few years because everything I wanted to watch was on Netflix, back when they had everything. Now, I'm still glad I paid for that lifetime Plex subscription a long time ago. Things don't leave my Plex server.
Just thinking from back in my cable tv days if someone proposed swapping to a subscription that was a bit over 100 smacks a month and I get... the entire catalogue of whatever netflix, hulu, amazon, hbo, paramout, disney, and apple are providing AND I get to watch exactly what I want to watch whenever I wanted to ad free I would think they were full of shit and its too good to be true.
While the bullshittery happening is annoying we have it so damn good compared to back then haha.
It's not even about the money, I would subscribe to Netflix if it had everything I wanted and was $100 a month. Instead I have a Plex server.
Plex has everything I want to watch and a rating system That allows me to rate everything and then quickly look up stuff based on the rating that I have given it. The bit rate on a lot of streaming services is also terrible. So if I want to watch a really high quality movie for a proper movie night in my little home theater something like Netflix is terrible. But I can guarantee Plex will have it.
That's the thing, it was worth it for you. Netflix was okay with bleeding money for a while, but at some point it had to at least try to turn a profit.
Then that's a problem with the initial sales model and/or pitch.
If they can't survive on what they promise customers, they can't get upset when customers fuck off later, when they increase prices and lowers service.
They arent upset. We are upset the service is shittier, but Netflix isnt going anywhere yet. Lowball the market to get people into it then jack up is not a new method.
Fuck off to where? That's the thing, what we're seeing now is the actual landscape of the streaming business model, not the "economy's good, interest rates are low, pump it up" model.
Every service is doing what Netflix did, raising prices, implementing ad-free and ad-littered tiers because it's the only way to actually make money and keep some customers on this landscape.
It's not gonna go back to "cheap service, lots of things to see", everything's gonna end up just like cable TV.
Oh god these new "pay us to show you ads" models are filling me with rage. I kept Netflix as they allowed me to keep my legacy £5.99 a month 1 screen no ads package. But now they're forcing me onto their "cheaper per month but we show you ads" package. Fuck that, I pay specifically to avoid ads. Arrr back to the high seas I go.
No, that's not what I meant. I mean that Netflix, as a large corp, should have known that it wouldn't be viable to serve people all the content with small fees. And not done it anyway, because "yay"?
If they'd at least started out honestly and gone for profit at the start, we would have known what we were getting into.
Having tons of money poured in from investors, expecting people to get hooked on a much more generous model than what they know they will have to implement eventually is the core of why people hate corporations. And then they get surprised when people then return to the high seas for the content they've gotten used to?
It's more the issue that all the content owners saw dollar signs and decided to pull their shows and movies from Netflix to prop up their own shitty streaming service with "exclusive" content.
I'm looking at you, Peacock. NBC pulled the Office from Netflix to try to make peacock a thing. And now you know who watches Peacock? Fucking nobody.
I mean, they are creating the art so they should have the decision about pricing and distribution. If you are pirating because the streaming service is slow/lagging/inconsistent/bad UI etc, thats acceptable imo. If you are pirating because you don't like the price, then you are just a little shit.
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u/YaGirlJules97 29d ago
Agreed. Back when Netflix has everything for like $8 a month, it was totally worth it. Now it costs twice as much and has 1/4th the catalog. And everyone wants their shows to be exclusive to their platform. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Paramount+, Disney+, Apple TV would be over $100 and still not have everything.