Consumers are paying more than ever for streaming TV each month and analysts say there’s no reason for the companies to stop raising prices::Finding new subscribers in a saturated streaming video market isn’t easy. And with legacy media companies desperate to recoup revenue declines in their linear TV businesses, the cost of your monthly plan is likely to keep rising.
Streaming:
-Charges you unreasonable amount of money
-If you cancel the subscription, you lose it all
-If they change the terms, you may lose access to some of the things in your library
Torrent:
-Costs a grand total of 0$
-Allows you to retain content for eternity
-Requires a 5 second effort to enter the name of a show/film in Sonarr/Radarr
The choice is clear.
Torrent:
-Unless your a millennial with really good memory… requires a (usually) a good paid VPN + 3 hours of reading and setup so you dont get nasty letters from your ISP.
-Requires requisite ports and knowledge of how to get the shows to your TV
-ideally requires a standalone PC, which most households no longer have
-Requires knowledge of additional programs that need to be researched and have paid competition
-Requires knowledge of how to find the source material, with huge gatekeeping between source pools
I am probably forgetting other stuff, especially for Gen Z and now the oldest Gen Alpha. But if I as a millennial feel it’s a burden to relearn the steps for something I already was doing a decade or so ago. That must be a massive bar for someone who never had their hand in it, so to speak.
I am not saying it’s impossible, just I haven’t found a straight forward guide from beginning to end, with all the new technology included. And the first time they get a love note from their ISP, they will likely just stop.
Edit: The vastly different responses with different solutions, only proves to me that this is more complex than people let on. You have some people giving services that weren’t mentioned in the OP in euros (not that there is anything wrong with Europe, just a different experience. Do EU IPs even send love notes? Then you get a mix of people saying what the best VPN is and other people saying you don’t even need a VPN. Just so much different information, is it surprising that people could feel overwhelmed?
This is the age of information. It would take a grand total of a few hours for the average person to watch a video to give them all the knowledge they need to avoid the pitfalls you listed.
People are afraid and lazy, it’s easy to let fear control your decisions.
I think the age of information has passed. If you try googling/search engine any of this you get scraps of information that don’t tie well together.
All I am saying is I could see people throwing up their hands and thinking it’s too confusing or dangerous.
Information is everywhere, but so is misinformation now. There’s LOTS of AI-generated articles out there telling people nothing helpful, or straight-up incorrect answers from Google searches.
We have a Piracy board on Lemmy with a beginner’s guide.
The skill issues related to piracy can and should be addressed. This is how we form a truly strong resistance to the madness that is going on.
Your point is valid and it’s important to work it through.
The knowledge is extremely easy to obtain though. There are lots of very detailed guides. It’s not extremely complex, anyway.
It’s just hard to know what information even correctly pertains to me. My comment received a half dozen other comments… some seemingly from the US, others from the EU. Some comments saying every house has a PC (not true) others saying a PC isn’t even necessary. Some comments with how to find a good VPN, other comments saying a VPN isn’t even necessary. Then I got recommendations for a half dozen different services from various comments with no idea if they are all necessary and how they interact with each other.
It may not be extremely complex, but until you get your feet wet, it sure seems like it is. In my day you downloaded what you wanted off of Kazaa or BearShare or the like and then watched it on your PC with VLC. or if you were really fancy you burned it on CDS or DVDS. Then when the bad emails or letters came in, you just told your parents it was the neighbors.
Good points, there should be an all-in-one solution which very easily guides you through all the necessary steps
plus, you fight corporate greed.
Theft removes the original, priacy makes a copy.
My main gripe with torrent is that there isn’t always a seeder available. This is a major issue if you’re looking for a movie that isn’t mainstream. There are pirate streaming services but we know that the quality is not usually great. Even if you download from torrent, the quality is not also always great either. I definitely noticed difference in video and sound quality between torrent and what you get from “mainstream” sources. Some torrent say they’re 4k or HD quality, but many files are actually cropped so that uploading and downloading is faster.
Edit: Grammar and wording
I’d also give Usenet and Soulseek a try, lots of rare media in there
I’ve got a setup that has gradually improved over the years, I have put a few hundred $$ in that time too.
But, it was fairly easy to get started, my improvements have made the automatic downloads very consistently high quality, and sonarr/radarr do all the searching and filtering for me.
My wife wanted to watch some Winnie the Pooh, within like 5 minutes the first season was ready to watch, and the rest was finished downloading and ready before the 1 episode was over.
And it only took 5 minutes because I had to help the searcher bc all my auto filters are optimized for recent releases. Though I’m gonna set up some filters for older stuff, so it’s not trying to download a 4K hdr file for something that came out 50 years ago and was never remastered to 4K.
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Piracy is a service and pricing issue. Plenty of people willing to pay, proven by the fact the streaming services were so successful in the first place. They’re just not willing to take substantial pay hikes when they’re going hungry.
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I imagine it’s you portrayed as the soyjak but it’s so well drawn I can’t imagine its effectiveness
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The embodiment of a fool
How I imagine your brain works based on your previous comment.
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Piracy is a capitalism problem.
People don’t pay what it actually costs, people pay that + the revenues the company brings home. And that’s a lot now.
Operating at a loss is a standard practice that is not only meant to drive user adoption, but to (whoops!) remove competition with smaller bags to pay losses from. So we end up with a few services that do whatever they want.
This is not okay.
boo-hoo-hoo poor mega corps, I’m pretty sure the CEOs of these companies were paying by their own money the price difference of the true cost and the decreased subscription price of all the customers and they will walk out poorer. Not with millions in their pockets.
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then explain me why you mentioned the “operating at a loss” thing. What does it prove in your argument? What does this offer in the dialog and please explain me if the CEO of a said company which is “operating at a loss” walks out with millions in their pockets or not. And also what will happen in the owner of a small business which is also operating at a loss. Then compare these two “operating at a loss” and tell me if they are even slightly comparable.
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you didn’t manage to reply to any of the arguments above. You just spitted out some basic principles which all of us are aware of. I don’t understand even why you bothered to type these since they also don’t offer anything valuable in the conversation
Cry me a river
lol I’m like 20 clicks into Sonarr’s website and I still cant find a simple answer: what is Sonarr?
Some sites just assume you know. In short, thing that automates and streamlines series piracy. Radarr is for films, Lidarr for music, Readarr for book, Whisparr for porn, Prowlarr allows to better manage sources for all of the above.