I’m going to chime in with what I think. I’ve been sailing the seas for a while now. And at the end of the day I am all for people doing whatever the fuck they want. Want to pay for streaming? Fine. Want to digitize you library of blurays, cassettes, dvd. etc…? Go for it. Want to share everything you have? Cool. Want to be a bootlicker? Fine, I guess. Want to hit n run every torrent you every come across? You a bitch, but I mean there isn’t anything really stopping you. Luckily, certain communities have ways to weed out people that don’t share similar values (whatever they may be). I am part of a thriving one. I am more of the belief that all media should be available to everyone forever. That’s all I’ma say about that, and at the end of the day I know of the issues with this sort of thinking, but I am not gonna elaborate nor argue with anyone about anything.
At the end of the day people will do what they want (for the most part). With regards to the larger idea of paying for content, that is gonna be done in one way or another depending on what you do. You never want to pirate? That’s fine you’ll just have to pay for internet and whatever streaming services you want. You also run the risk on never again being able to access certain shows, movies for a variety of reasons (licensing issues, because companies can just pull the “fuck you” card, etc). As for pirating, the cost of this is always going to depend on what you want to do and how long. The minimum you will need is a HDD/drive to download your shit, internet, and then a player to play said shit (TV, android box, etc…). If you want to do more you’ll have to pay or have available a computer that will host your shit (old computer, NAS, etc). If you have a robust collection or are digitizing your movies/shows, once again you are gonna need drives. You can get an external drive or invest in those huge drives (20+TB) to get more bang for your buck, but they also aren’t pocket change to throw around. Luckily drives are always getting cheaper, but know that they don’t last forever and they aren’t always super cheap depending on how big you want them. As for services to stream your shit to your devices, there are plenty of free and paid things to make that happen.
There are also tools/services that I pay for that have made obtaining content much easier, but by no means are they necessary to eventually get the media. I’m not gonna lie, it does seem a little ironic that I have had to pay to do/obtain the things I have, but I do not regret it at all. These tool and services allow me to have the my current collection and allowed me to do it quickly for the most part. I am part of a community that is thriving and passionate about what they care about with regards to media. I am not going to go into the whole, “is it moral?”, or “where does piracy stand?” argument cause at the end of the day I don’t give a fuck nor am i going to try and moralize piracy or whatever . People can do that till the cows come home and feel any which way they want. Not my business and has no bearing on what I am doing.
Back to the point of money and piracy, like I said, one “pays” for media in one way or another. Some forms are cheaper, others are more convenient, and some choices are maybe even both. At the end of the day, from how I see things, most thing are never going to be truly free. It is going to boil down to what you care about doing, how fast you want something, how long you want said thing, maintenance, convenience, and finally, money. While you don’t need much money to start pirating there is a bare minimum of required things. Yes, you can acquire them for free if someone gives them (computer, phone, etc…) to you but there are people that don’t even have that. Someone that is destitute (by this i mean someone that literally has nothing, no home, no phone, no computer) will not be able to pirate. Then there’s the internet issue which some people may or may not have regular access to nor have reliability.
Money will always be tied to piracy in one way or another. Depending on who you ask there will be different answers. It varies widely on how you view piracy and what you view as money spent towards it. They money I have spent on drives alone and my NAS compare to years of a subscription to multiple streaming services. Money is part of the equation on any side you take, whether straight laced or eye-patched.
Back to the point of money and piracy, like I said, one “pays” for media in one way or another.
While I agree with you on everything this point is not 100% true. I am paying thousand of $CURRENCY on disks and other hardware every few years but I feel that for every side of the coin, there is a minimum situation (let’s call it a floor situation) on which less privileged people may find themselves.
For example if you are a bachelor already struggling to pay to be in college or a child that has only access to their parent’s computer, piracy is literally free and you can reach to it without paying anything on top of what you have already. On the other hand, netflix is always $CURRENT_PRICE regardless of your situation.
Btw, thank you for making articulate posts. This is why I am on lemmy.
No paid media streaming service could ever topple an automated Jellyfin server. Who wants to scroll through pages of dogshit content just to find something decent to watch?
Question, I’m not techy enough to know anything about jellyfin other than it probably is similar to kodi, which I used briefly but ended up using Stremio instead.
Do you need to download your library? Or can you browse through repositories?
I have my own personal plex server that I pretty much only use for downloading 4K Remux files, so I’m used to pirating shit. I gotta say Stremio w/ Real Debrid sub is super fucking good. I only use it on my phone, so to be able to pull up any movie or tv show on the go for like $4 bucks a month for it’s cheapest option is crazy. I’m sure it’ll get nuked at some point, but currently 6 months goes for $18 dollars. I spend that much on lunch some days. It’s a really good deal that requires 0 effort on my part. I think we should be open to supporting good services and consider ourselves pirates still.
If you are consuming media in any non-DRM format, then you are effectively a pirate.
As much as I like Real Debrid, over a long enough period the subscriptions should get you a raspberry Pi as a home media server. I personally like having more control over my media.
I only pirate because it is more convenient than any alternative.
The best example I experienced was when I tried to watch an apple tv original show with my cousin (who has family access to the service). He wanted to log in to his account on my laptop and needed to verify his dad’s credit card to do so. No problem, but it took a while. After that we still couldn’t watch, because the player didn’t load the video for some reason. Cue my cousin fiddling about trying to fix the issue.
In the meantime I had started to download the first two episodes and copied it on a thumb drive.
Netflix cracking down on the sharers has made Netflix difficult for us non-sharers. I don’t want to watch Netflix on my phone, but I do want to curate my watch list on it. But because now there’s a limit to the number of devices you can use, we have to reserve use for the devices we use most frequently. This means that, when we fly, getting media onto the devices we use infrequently is a PITA.
It’s easier just to grab them elsewhere.
(2 ppl x 3 devices ea) + 3 other household devices > Netflix’s limit. That’s just us, and I’m being conservative… it doesn’t count desktops AND laptops. If we had kids, it’d be worse.
The golden age of streaming was when you could get most good or popular shows and movies on Netflix. But then, as is tradition, everyone else got greedy and decided they had to have their own streaming services. Now streaming is basically just cable TV with extra steps and the value proposition for the consumer is getting to be just as bad as it was with cable, maybe worse. There were quite a few years where I stopped pirating. I didn’t really feel like I had to. Those days are long gone. It took me five minutes to download a movie my wife asked for yesterday, from the time I punched the title into qbittorrent to the time it was playing on our TV. For me this is mostly about convenience with cost as a close second. Film studios like to whine about pirating but as far as I’m concerned they are the main cause of pirating. They make mostly shitty, overpriced content anymore and then make it so inconvenient for the rest of us to get to what little good stuff they put out. Their repeated attempts to squash pirating have not only failed, they’ve indirectly made pirating more sophisticated and increased the quality of pirated content.
If you’re pirating purely because it’s free you’re an asshole.
If you’re pirating because the current platforms are too expensive, just as bad as cable, shows missing and routinely has service issues - you’re good.
This is actually a huge joke on the film and television industry. Back when Napster blew up the music industry was in a full panic that their industry would die while film and TV were cozy because the media was too large to mass-pirate compared to music.
The music guys figured it out. Cheap subscriptions with massive catalogues that don’t disappear.
I don’t think this lends enough credit to how centralized the music industry is and the role that plays. If you want the world’s music catalogue, you need contracts with like three companies. That level of centralization makes it straightforward to get a music catalogue going with basically everything someone might want to listen to, but it also severely hampers your ability to do anything those three companies don’t want. If anyone’s wondering why Spotify is pushing podcasts so hard, it’s because that’s the only way for them to get out from under the thumb of the few music megacorps that they have to license from to stay relevant. Spotify needs a revenue stream less dependent on the big three and it sees podcasts as its way out.
I’m sure music files being smaller and easier to pirate helped light a fire under the ass of the music industry to modernize, but that isn’t the only factor at play here and I don’t even think it’s one of the main ones. If I recall correctly, Spotify is the company who went to the music labels asking for a contract. In order to show that the tech works, they had to pirate the initial catalogue until they had deals with music labels to license the music. Spotify brought their streaming vision to the music industry, not the other way around.
I believe Netflix had a good catalogue at first because every other company was sleeping on the streaming boom that Netflix was ahead of the curve on. Netflix could get good streaming license deals because nobody really cared about this little company they’d never heard of. As soon as everyone realized what was up, they scrambled to copy Netflix and pulled their libraries to fracture the streaming space.
From the start, the music industry knew what Spotify was and could be and knew how to use their leverage to keep themselves on top (Spotify isn’t functionally allowed to be their own license for music creators, for example). I don’t think the movie streaming space realized what Netflix was until it blew up.
I don’t think the problem is that movie/tv hasn’t “figured it out.” The music space would be just as fractured if it wasn’t as centrally organized. I think the problem is that the industries are just structured really differently, so they played out really differently.
To be clear, I’m not defending the music or movie/tv industry. I just think the situations are more nuanced than “music freaked out and got their shit together and movie/tv hasn’t yet.”
Valve is a terrible company and Steam is an awful platform but their stance on piracy is why they deserve a lot of the success they get. In a day and age where everyone was trying as hard as possible to punish their userbase as much as possible for their crappy distribution model, here came a company that actually understood why people pirate in the first place and made a vast majority of the gaming population willingly download DRM then go through it to spend billions on games they will never play.
Lol the valve fanboys found this, yikes. They downvote bombed this like a game which slightly annoyed them.
It’s always fascinated me that companies who understand their core value proposition of their business can be so fucked up in so many other ways and still succeed.
Care to explain why “Valve is a terrible company” and “Steam is an awful platform”? Surely, it has tons of porn games (that you can hide), or shitty games (that is hard to sort through), or CS:GO item gambling problems (don’t really care). But I kind of fail to see how the company or the client could be fundamentally bad.
The 30% cut Steam takes is quite a bit. Considering the near-monopoly it has on game distribution, that could easily mean the difference between turning a profit and not for an indie developer.
Personally their efforts towards things I support (PC handhelds, Linux gaming) and the convenience of the platform outweigh the things I dislike, but being frustrated by its problems is understandable when people don’t really have another choice.
Yes, I agree that 30% is a lot. But let’s look from another perspective: If a developer, for ease of calculation, sells a game for 30$ on Steam, he receives 20$. If he sells it on a competitive platform with 5% cut (that’s 6x less than Steam) he gets 27$.
However, Steam is way bigger, and if a developer can sell the same game more times on Steam (33% more times to be exact), he breaks even.
More people to buy = more people to play = bigger player base => more people buy it. It is a poaitive feedback loop.
I am not arguing that 30% is good, all I am saying is I understand that Steam has to take a big cut to pay for the features it provides for “free” alongside the usual game content (cloud saves, community, workshop, utems, etc.).
Do you think any indie developer has the means to achieve a lower cost to distribution and promotion if they try to sell and support the game themselves?
Valve solves many problems for developers and these problems aren’t imaginary and free to resolve.
Not saying 30% is justified for all games, but if you want a quality title it’s going to cost more than just development. Since the Unity debacle we’ve seen some developers even say openly that costs of promotion and support dwarf costs of development.
To sum it up: about the same as any platform where people can interact? What’s so FOMO about a game being on sale if it’s gonna be on sale next week aswell?
I fail to see how Steam Market is so bad, it is not possible to redeem the cash (unless you do it via black market, which is against the TOS), so all money is still in the system. Yeah, it is being used to do unregulated gambling, but it’s a regulatory problem which should be handled by the countries to define what gambling is, and shut these sites down. Why the fuck should Steam care?
NFTs in crypto space are a joke, and everywhere else they are basically in any online software, failing to see the point here.
Regarding gambling, it’s not quite so simple. Valve doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Many rich people see what goes on in that ecosystem and they lobby their governments to make it easier for themselves to do even more audacious things. Valve can lead by example instead of opening the door
If you didn’t sample 4chan in that time you missed out on a lot of Internet culture. Not everyone posting on there was. It was really entertaining to watch the shitshow.
I can’t imagine any company every wanting to do it the way I would want. I want a single service/platform that houses all the content, that way the experience is the same. For example I don’t know if in one app I can double tap to the right to skip ahead and does it work on the other apps as well? probably not.
For some it is. It used to be a point for me. It still is a factor, but it is no longer the main point. Service and convenience is the most prevalent point for me right now.
What it comes down to for me is that I don’t want to subsribe to and pay for 7 streaming services to be able to watch everything I want. I had gotten used to Netflix being the primary streaming service which offered “everything” (it didn’t but it was plenty). I stopped being a pirate in that time. Then every asshole company pulled their shit from netflix and started their own streaming service. That’s when the convenience stopped and I went back to priacy. Funny how that works, right?
Lol piracy isn’t a fucking political movement. It’s a “I want free shit” thing and that’s OK! we don’t need to justify shit to some stupid moral standards.
Netflix, Disney and Amazon limit the bitrate and resolution on Linux. Amazon is often at 540p or so.
That’s because of DRM, which they use to prevent piracy. Guess what, they lost a paying customer because of their terrible service.
Indeed, many pirates only want free things, but there’re many other valid reasons to pirate. E.g. I’m paying for energy, storage, a usenet provider and indexers. Though I agree I’m going the cheaper piracy route instead of buying Blurays and ripping them myself.
Some of the best piracy options might cost you… Drebid, Usenet, Private Indexers, Seedboxes. They all cost money to varying degrees.
Hell if I’m being honest with myself, I’ve sunk way more into piracy than I probably would have spent just paying for a streaming service. What with building my server and buying extra hard drives, buying blocks of data, paying for API access. That stuff can add up. I know I could do free alternatives, but I really like how I have things set up now, and I love building my media collection and sharing it with my friends and family.
The only streaming service I’ve ever paid for was vrv/seeso because I would comit violent crimes to get another season of HarmonQuest or the My Brother, My Brother, and Me TV show.
idk, a debrid service is so cheap, it costs less to pay than to buy the hard drives and server + power. And it has pretty much everything already, so it’s more convenient, too.
It’s hard to justify dropping a pile of cash on 3 drives for a RAID when it will take about a decade to pay for itself vs. debrid, by which point I’ll need to replace the drives. Plus, it takes more time to set up, maintain, and load the desired media.
I’ve found that for single person purposes, a RAID array is unnecessary. I just buy beefy 8TB drives. If it dies, just download any recent torrents again or pull a backup
Isn’t that just asking for trouble? From the Real-Debrid TOS:
The User acknowledges not to use our service to download copyright infringement digital files punishable by a suspension of his account and reporting to competent organizations and authorities
Logging policy is not great:
Files links that Users download are stored in a database for legal concerns and our internal use. All saved links are erased within 1 month for security reasons and service needs. However all requests made on our site are stored for 1 year, the legal retention period.
Doesn’t look like you can sign up anonymously (unless you consider bitcoin and email anonymous, which they’re generally not).
You could do the free wifi defense and set a super poor password and spend a month or so downloading legal stuff without a VPN before going arr using a VPN. And if someone comes knocking just say you don’t recall having a debrid account and claim you must’ve been hacked.
When they come knocking they usually also confiscate your hardware, question and interview your friends and family, etc… Good luck with that defense :)
Doesn’t look like you can sign up anonymously (unless you consider bitcoin and email anonymous, which they’re generally not).
You can. Paysafecard bought with cash. Only issue is you have to use your normal IP to sign up with (not behind a VPN), though you could use a mobile one or a public one somewhere probably.
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