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?

plus, you fight corporate greed.

Theft removes the original, priacy makes a copy.

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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

lol I’m like 20 clicks into Sonarr’s website and I still cant find a simple answer: what is Sonarr?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SLMJpHihykI

I’m kind of amazed how my Gen Z buddies are so adamantly against pirating. They think the cops will bust down their door, literally.

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There’s a scene in Fight Club about how auto companies approach recalls, and a similar method is applied for these price hikes. The company predicts how many people will leave or change plans or whatever with their changes and they price it out so that they end up making more money.

And for a small example let’s say you have two customers paying $10/month for a service. If the price increases by $11, and one customer leaves, you are now making $21/month from the service.

Now it’s not as simple as that in the real world, but that’s the general idea.

The issue here is that even if a vocal minority leave these streaming services, or social media there’s still a large amount of people putting up with their shit.

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Yup, came to say they should move to Plex/Jellyfish to get away from the streaming shitshow.

Why is piracy costing you 4$ a month.

I’ve no problem with paying for good services

Exactly. It used to be that netflix was all you needed to get most quality content, and it was a fair deal for customers: you pay a reasonable monthly amount, and you and your family gets convenient access to most streamable movies and TV series.

Now that quality content is spread out and locked out over half a dozen other streaming services, and subscribing to them all is not just a hassle but also incredibly bad value compared to the original offer.

In a healthy competitive environment, you would expect companies to counter reduced value by increasing customer value in other ways or by reducing prices, but instead we got price hikes, lots of low quality filler content, crack downs on password sharing, advertising, various unpopular UI changes and other service reductions decreasing value even further.

To solve this, I think the content producers and streaming services should be split up, because right now they’re not really competitors in a true sence but small monopolies who each clutch the keys to their own little franchises. It should be noted for example that music streaming works a lot better: there are various competitors that each hold a viable content library on their own, so you don’t need more than one music streaming service. IMO that’s because Spotify, Tidal, YT Music, etc. are merely distributors and not the actual producers.

Yeah some of the arr software is pretty fucking cool for being entirely free.

I have a problem paying for DRM. I want to use open source and DRM is the opposite. I like (and buy sometimes) Creative Commons music/audio-books just because it tastes better when artist isn’t supporting restricting me. Cory Doctorow is a creative worker who lives and breaths anti-DRM, if you’ve not explored this. I recommend his old talk “The Coming War on General Computation”.

Source on better pirate streaming service?

I am actually curious. We like to laugh at the obviously anti-consumer practices these streaming services are pushing, saying they’ll end up losing their customers to piracy, but the point of the article is to illustrate that just isn’t happening and most people will suck it up and pay more for less. Look at how much Netflix gained by killing off password sharing.

I’m paying for the services that produce the best content, not simply platforms that host content from others. It would be nice if they shared it to other streaming services, but then they would have little reason to create them.

Streaming services, digital services in general, should be made to compete on having the best platform, not on exclusive content.

The way to get that is to split them and say: a streaming provider can’t be a content creator as well. That way, content creating companies would be incentivized to sell their content to every streaming provider at a price that the market will bear, and streaming providers would be incentivized to compete on providing the best experience to their users.

It wouldn’t make any sense in this case, their prices never started at 0.