Platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ were supposed to do away with pirated media. Instead, they may make them stronger than ever.
How Disney and Warner Bros. Are Causing Internet Piracy to Boom | Platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ were supposed to do away with pirated media. Instead, they may make them stronger than ever.::Platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ were supposed to do away with pirated media. Instead, they may make them stronger than ever.
My household still subscribes to most streaming services at the moment, but I’ve often considered “alternative means of acquisition” just because it’s now such a pain in the ass to figure out which service has the content I want to watch. Things move around way too much and sometimes disappear completely. It’s just easier to go to one site, download, and watch.
I setup a Plex server with all the Arr’s and it took me maybe 1 hour and about $1500 in hardware such as a desktop PC and 4 x 10TB drives. Then I had to pay for a News Servers service ($100 for 15 months) and I opted to purchase a domain for like $7/year. Quite the upfront cost but easy to setup and maintain and I can watch anything I want with the best possible experience possible. If my internet goes down? I can still watch everything. When my News Servers subscription runs out, I still keep everything I have and can watch it as many times as I want. It’s so simple to use, my wife who LOVES TV now prefers ‘on demand’.
All thanks to the greedy fuckers running literally every streaming service.
I’ve upgraded my server similarly. But I initially just plugged Unraid into an old (~2012) desktop with a handful of old 1-2 terabyte drives. It’s super easy to spread out the cost over time. I just moved machines and it was literally as simple as having all the same hard drives plugged into the new machine.
Yup, good point. You don’t have to buy a new desktop with the latest Intel CPU with massive storage. You can start small and upgrade as needed. I know I wanted this solution so I invested to make sure I had something I can use for a long time. I got a desktop with a 12th gen i5 so it can do transcoding though it’s not needed.
for anyone afraid of the upfront cost: you don’t need to buy so many expensive hard disk drives to self host a media server like Jellyfin/Plex
RAID arrays add complexity and get expensive very fast while not being a proper backup solution at all, it’s nice to have but not required
on a budget buying a large hard disk drive (12~16 TB is a good sweet spot right now) and later down the road another one as periodic backup solution might be the wiser choice while accumulating your collection of media
That’s even more of a reason for me to pirate. I have access to pretty much every TV show, movie, book, comic, etc that I could possibly want from before my existence til now. I can get to it from anywhere in the world and i know that i’m not just gonna arbitrarily remove it. I can also get specific releases or better formats. I have scripts to easily remux audio or subtitles or whatever I want. I’ve even learned how to Web-DL from services I get for free from my ISP and cell carrier. My Plex server is definitely better than any single streaming service and I have quite a bit of stuff that isn’t on any. Would never choose to go back at this point with how convoluted and expensive streaming is now.
I remember Kazaa and LimeWire where you hoped the thing you were downloading for hours/days wasn’t a virus or a joke meme making fun of you for trusting someone. Getting an entire album of mp3s that were actually the band you hoped for and not missing any songs was a minor miracle.
Now there are dozens of automated tools that talk to each other. I type the name of the movie into a search bar, look through a list of posters and click the ‘request’ button. It get’s torrented in the background and then shows up on my Plex server. If I paid for a usenet group all that could happen an order of magnitude faster.
Search in one place, watch in one place.
It’s not quite as instant as streaming, but at this point I have such a back catalogue to work through that that isn’t really an issue.
You ain’t kidding! I recently got Sonarr/Radar/Prowlarr/Overseer setup and oh my gosh is it glorious! Look through trending movies/shows, couple clicks and it’s in Jellyfin in minutes. The industry is going to have to produce something VERY consumer-focused/friendly to even begin to tempt me away from this. They done fucked up. 😂
Maybe this is just a regional thing, but 10 to 20 years ago piracy was everywhere and it was pretty accessible. You could download anything from common social media and forum links with out caring a lot about security. Games, books, music, programs. There where torrent clients dedicated entirely for music and videos, video players for pirated movies filmed by a freaking hero sliding a camera and a tripod to a local cinema and translated by another hero. You got sites to host shit without any restriction and anyone with a hand and a computer could access it. Just click and go.
One of those hosting sites, megaupload, the mecca of piracy got a few lawsuits because of that and the owner ended up taking the site down. That was a dark day and after that hosting sites started falling one by one. Torrents become increasingly popular. There were tons of them, commented and maintain, leaving messages for the christian behind you was a thing. ‘Seed please, seeeeeed!’ And shit. This isnt something that happened in my country, but as I understand, arround that time groups of lawyers tarted monitoring internet to catch people pirating things and vpns polulated everywhere. At one point some torrent sites started being raided (tpb, now accessed through a proxy) or just closed
Both abundancy and easyness to access pirated things have become increasingly difficult over the years… there are still places to go. In spanish, book repositories close from time to time now they have move everything to lib-gen. Standards? You could download them from TPB long time ago. Last time i had to dive in VK to get them, now i dont know what to do if I lose them.
Some things i say could be wrong*
Edit: another jewl from the golden age, i remember downloading MW3 a day before it got launched. Some dudes (teknogods) used a loop in the user agreement to make some sort of a server client, and of course there was no restriction for pirated versions. It was even better than buying the game. I live in sudamerica and always played with 300 ping (MW, cod 4) with teknogods it was closer to 30.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. I guess I’ve gotten so use to today’s pirating techniques that my perception of what is considered easy has changed. Reading through your post, I’m reminded of how much easier it really was back then.
I’m in the same boat. I feel like everything is just regurgitated over and over again. Every twist, every turn. And I’m tired of watching something and be able to predict, what the plot will be. It’s the same with music. Many songs are written to perform by metrics, like length and listener retention in the first 30 seconds, so that you reach the magical monetization line on the streaming platform of your labels choice.
We are saturated in low-quality media these days, most of which is predictable and poorly written. We’ve seen all the whiz-bang CGI, the standard plots, the trite romantic scenes, the heroes and the anti-heroes. Movies, in particular, suffer because of their short format. Movies essentially rely on stock characters and formulaic plots because there isn’t enough time available for a complex story arc or character development. Because of that, I’d wager that well-planned limited series are more popular than movies among people over 40.
I basically don’t pirate music because streaming is convenient.
I generally don’t pirate games because steam and GOG is convenient. (Sometimes if I’m not sure ill enjoy it I’ll pirate as a no limit trail then buy or drop).
I generally have to with movies and shows. Even though I have access to several streaming platforms though stuff like T-Mobile, AT&T, etc. it’s too annoying to jump around a bunch of apps and the quality is bad compared to the UHD rips of stuff
I also recently started pirating again. The cost is too damn high for all these streaming platforms, not to mention a lot of the base packages have ads/commercials (gross). I use Stremio+Torrentio+Real Debrid (which is insanely cheap compared to purchasing 6 different streaming platforms). Until there is a massive change to how media is circulated this is gonna be my setup.
I had almost gotten to the point where I could reasonably pay for most stuff and didn’t have to steal shit that wasn’t even available “in my market”, which, as a concept, can go fuck itself entirely to death as far as I’m concerned; but now everybody’s being dicks to each other and core content is leaving platforms I’m paying for and moving onto platforms i’m not allowed to use, so, no, it’s not the fault of the big guys per se but the collective and progressive brain death of the entertainment industry, whose obscene copyright regime is finally biting it in the ass but they’re still reeling from their latest cocaine decision and haven’t figured out why they can’t sit down yet. … I think that’s the longest sentence I’ve ever written.
But it doesn’t even matter. As soon as the competition dies down and things settle into a pattern, they’ll start putting the screws to us anyway, because that’s just what capitalism is. Enshittification ftw!
When the day will come, and once I pay for something I have the ability to just hit download and it will fetch an .mkv/.mp4 from a CDN, that’s when I’ll pay for it. Sadly that day isn’t even remotely close, so torrenting it is. Oh and fuck you WideVine.
I was sort of like this before, not really caring too much about most movies or TV shows, but that was just because I had higher standards to what I would be willing to take the time to watch. When I did find something I thought was worth my time, like for instance Full Metal Alchemist (yes I know it’s an anime, it still counts as a TV show imo. Also it’s great, I definitely recommend watching it). The general decrease in quality and increase in quantity of shows and movies just made me stop caring to watch really anything; why take a chance with a likely shitty show or movie when I can get much more fun out of playing video games? I know there’s likely some “hidden gem” kind of show that nobody really talks about because it’s hidden away in all the crappy shows, so I usually only decide to watch something if I’ve heard good things about it more than once. Even then, I may still not watch it, like for instance One Piece, which I’ve heard is incredibly long.
I am most definitely far more passive in my consumption than before. YouTube is actually where most of my media comes from now. Then my colleagues are always on about the Masked Singer or whatever is going on. I managed to make it through maybe 2 episodes before it made me sick.
I know it gets quoted a lot, but Gabe was 100% right. It boggles my mind how people in power over these streaming services just don’t get it:
One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.
I never have, I don’t see the point when steam is just so convenient and has sales all the time. Just be patient on pricing, the game isn’t going to go away because you didn’t buy on release.
I also don’t trust downloading unverified, modified, software. An mp3 or mkv is probably going to be safe as you can’t load software through those really, but an exe can do anything
I have, but that’s an access issue where I live, where there are no official stores to buy things from, and the places which do exist don’t have the games I want (on PS4). I download all Disney content as + is not available here either.
Capcom just started adding game breaking DRM to their archive of old single player Steam games because an exec got butthurt over a nude mod for Street Fighter. Now Steam Deck support is broken and my mods don’t work with games I purchased years ago. The pirated version is now better once again.
At almost the exact same time, Valve sent a DMCA notice to Portal64 because for some reason they care about people playing a homebrew port of a $2 15 year old game on 30 year old hardware.
I used to think Capcom and Valve were two of the last good ones. Turns out there aren’t any good ones…
People generally are absolutely fine with paying, so long as it’s not absurd pricing and the service is convenient.
I was happy paying for Netflix until the recent bullshit. I still pay for Spotify. I buy all my games outside of old ones that I need to emulate (again proving Gabe correct - if I could legally access them easily then I’d do that instead, but am I fuck jumping through hoops like spending thousands on old consoles I don’t have the space for nor the time to search for/import games)
P.s. I’m from India. Not one of these “pasty-faced white people” that you seem to take issue with
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NFL this weekend forcing you to have a Peacock subscription for a playoff game. Are you crazy?!?
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American foot-of-the-ball.
Not for life
My household still subscribes to most streaming services at the moment, but I’ve often considered “alternative means of acquisition” just because it’s now such a pain in the ass to figure out which service has the content I want to watch. Things move around way too much and sometimes disappear completely. It’s just easier to go to one site, download, and watch.
I setup a Plex server with all the Arr’s and it took me maybe 1 hour and about $1500 in hardware such as a desktop PC and 4 x 10TB drives. Then I had to pay for a News Servers service ($100 for 15 months) and I opted to purchase a domain for like $7/year. Quite the upfront cost but easy to setup and maintain and I can watch anything I want with the best possible experience possible. If my internet goes down? I can still watch everything. When my News Servers subscription runs out, I still keep everything I have and can watch it as many times as I want. It’s so simple to use, my wife who LOVES TV now prefers ‘on demand’.
All thanks to the greedy fuckers running literally every streaming service.
I’d also put that as a “nice to have”.
I’ve upgraded my server similarly. But I initially just plugged Unraid into an old (~2012) desktop with a handful of old 1-2 terabyte drives. It’s super easy to spread out the cost over time. I just moved machines and it was literally as simple as having all the same hard drives plugged into the new machine.
Yup, good point. You don’t have to buy a new desktop with the latest Intel CPU with massive storage. You can start small and upgrade as needed. I know I wanted this solution so I invested to make sure I had something I can use for a long time. I got a desktop with a 12th gen i5 so it can do transcoding though it’s not needed.
for anyone afraid of the upfront cost: you don’t need to buy so many expensive hard disk drives to self host a media server like Jellyfin/Plex
RAID arrays add complexity and get expensive very fast while not being a proper backup solution at all, it’s nice to have but not required
on a budget buying a large hard disk drive (12~16 TB is a good sweet spot right now) and later down the road another one as periodic backup solution might be the wiser choice while accumulating your collection of media
Raid is exactly as much or as little of a proper backup solution as you configure it to be isnt it?
It basically only protects against hardware failure. It’s not going to protect you from ransomware or even just accidentally clicking delete.
Thanks. I was misunderstanding concepts here in a big way
Meh. None of it is worth watching anyway. The older you get the more you see it’s all trash and always has been trash.
That’s even more of a reason for me to pirate. I have access to pretty much every TV show, movie, book, comic, etc that I could possibly want from before my existence til now. I can get to it from anywhere in the world and i know that i’m not just gonna arbitrarily remove it. I can also get specific releases or better formats. I have scripts to easily remux audio or subtitles or whatever I want. I’ve even learned how to Web-DL from services I get for free from my ISP and cell carrier. My Plex server is definitely better than any single streaming service and I have quite a bit of stuff that isn’t on any. Would never choose to go back at this point with how convoluted and expensive streaming is now.
That’s a big duh. I saw this coming four or five years ago.
“Stronger than ever”… I still feel like the golden age of piracy is long lost
Ship based piracy absolutely.
Digital piracy:
I remember Kazaa and LimeWire where you hoped the thing you were downloading for hours/days wasn’t a virus or a joke meme making fun of you for trusting someone. Getting an entire album of mp3s that were actually the band you hoped for and not missing any songs was a minor miracle.
Now there are dozens of automated tools that talk to each other. I type the name of the movie into a search bar, look through a list of posters and click the ‘request’ button. It get’s torrented in the background and then shows up on my Plex server. If I paid for a usenet group all that could happen an order of magnitude faster.
Search in one place, watch in one place.
It’s not quite as instant as streaming, but at this point I have such a back catalogue to work through that that isn’t really an issue.
You ain’t kidding! I recently got Sonarr/Radar/Prowlarr/Overseer setup and oh my gosh is it glorious! Look through trending movies/shows, couple clicks and it’s in Jellyfin in minutes. The industry is going to have to produce something VERY consumer-focused/friendly to even begin to tempt me away from this. They done fucked up. 😂
Care to elaborate?
Maybe this is just a regional thing, but 10 to 20 years ago piracy was everywhere and it was pretty accessible. You could download anything from common social media and forum links with out caring a lot about security. Games, books, music, programs. There where torrent clients dedicated entirely for music and videos, video players for pirated movies filmed by a freaking hero sliding a camera and a tripod to a local cinema and translated by another hero. You got sites to host shit without any restriction and anyone with a hand and a computer could access it. Just click and go.
One of those hosting sites, megaupload, the mecca of piracy got a few lawsuits because of that and the owner ended up taking the site down. That was a dark day and after that hosting sites started falling one by one. Torrents become increasingly popular. There were tons of them, commented and maintain, leaving messages for the christian behind you was a thing. ‘Seed please, seeeeeed!’ And shit. This isnt something that happened in my country, but as I understand, arround that time groups of lawyers tarted monitoring internet to catch people pirating things and vpns polulated everywhere. At one point some torrent sites started being raided (tpb, now accessed through a proxy) or just closed
Both abundancy and easyness to access pirated things have become increasingly difficult over the years… there are still places to go. In spanish, book repositories close from time to time now they have move everything to lib-gen. Standards? You could download them from TPB long time ago. Last time i had to dive in VK to get them, now i dont know what to do if I lose them.
Some things i say could be wrong*
Edit: another jewl from the golden age, i remember downloading MW3 a day before it got launched. Some dudes (teknogods) used a loop in the user agreement to make some sort of a server client, and of course there was no restriction for pirated versions. It was even better than buying the game. I live in sudamerica and always played with 300 ping (MW, cod 4) with teknogods it was closer to 30.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. I guess I’ve gotten so use to today’s pirating techniques that my perception of what is considered easy has changed. Reading through your post, I’m reminded of how much easier it really was back then.
I’m past 40. I don’t give a fuck about TV or movies anymore. Disney is in trouble.
I’m in the same boat. I feel like everything is just regurgitated over and over again. Every twist, every turn. And I’m tired of watching something and be able to predict, what the plot will be. It’s the same with music. Many songs are written to perform by metrics, like length and listener retention in the first 30 seconds, so that you reach the magical monetization line on the streaming platform of your labels choice.
We are saturated in low-quality media these days, most of which is predictable and poorly written. We’ve seen all the whiz-bang CGI, the standard plots, the trite romantic scenes, the heroes and the anti-heroes. Movies, in particular, suffer because of their short format. Movies essentially rely on stock characters and formulaic plots because there isn’t enough time available for a complex story arc or character development. Because of that, I’d wager that well-planned limited series are more popular than movies among people over 40.
Yup.
I basically don’t pirate music because streaming is convenient.
I generally don’t pirate games because steam and GOG is convenient. (Sometimes if I’m not sure ill enjoy it I’ll pirate as a no limit trail then buy or drop).
I generally have to with movies and shows. Even though I have access to several streaming platforms though stuff like T-Mobile, AT&T, etc. it’s too annoying to jump around a bunch of apps and the quality is bad compared to the UHD rips of stuff
So true!
I used netflix until the majority of my searches didnt show a result. and then went back to pirating.
using jellyfin+jellyseer and radarr/sonarr make it almost as convenient
I also recently started pirating again. The cost is too damn high for all these streaming platforms, not to mention a lot of the base packages have ads/commercials (gross). I use Stremio+Torrentio+Real Debrid (which is insanely cheap compared to purchasing 6 different streaming platforms). Until there is a massive change to how media is circulated this is gonna be my setup.
I had almost gotten to the point where I could reasonably pay for most stuff and didn’t have to steal shit that wasn’t even available “in my market”, which, as a concept, can go fuck itself entirely to death as far as I’m concerned; but now everybody’s being dicks to each other and core content is leaving platforms I’m paying for and moving onto platforms i’m not allowed to use, so, no, it’s not the fault of the big guys per se but the collective and progressive brain death of the entertainment industry, whose obscene copyright regime is finally biting it in the ass but they’re still reeling from their latest cocaine decision and haven’t figured out why they can’t sit down yet. … I think that’s the longest sentence I’ve ever written.
But it doesn’t even matter. As soon as the competition dies down and things settle into a pattern, they’ll start putting the screws to us anyway, because that’s just what capitalism is. Enshittification ftw!
When the day will come, and once I pay for something I have the ability to just hit download and it will fetch an .mkv/.mp4 from a CDN, that’s when I’ll pay for it. Sadly that day isn’t even remotely close, so torrenting it is. Oh and fuck you WideVine.
One day… We hope.
That’s how Louis CK distributes his shows since he was cancelled.
I am partial to Kodi, Seren and real-debrid.
I’m not pirating officer. I’m just collecting information for training my AI model.
All this hasn’t forced me into piracy.
It’s worse than that.
It’s forced me to stop caring about shows or movies entirely.
I was sort of like this before, not really caring too much about most movies or TV shows, but that was just because I had higher standards to what I would be willing to take the time to watch. When I did find something I thought was worth my time, like for instance Full Metal Alchemist (yes I know it’s an anime, it still counts as a TV show imo. Also it’s great, I definitely recommend watching it). The general decrease in quality and increase in quantity of shows and movies just made me stop caring to watch really anything; why take a chance with a likely shitty show or movie when I can get much more fun out of playing video games? I know there’s likely some “hidden gem” kind of show that nobody really talks about because it’s hidden away in all the crappy shows, so I usually only decide to watch something if I’ve heard good things about it more than once. Even then, I may still not watch it, like for instance One Piece, which I’ve heard is incredibly long.
Yes me too, I find myself watching movies less and less.
I find myself buying real books, ebooks online and buying vinyls.
I still stream music though, but the thing is, most music that could be found on Spotify, could be found on Apple Music or Deezer.
That’s odd. I find myself unable to keep up with all the movies I want to see. You should check out the Criterion collection.
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This may come as a shock, but some people happen to enjoy content.
Crazy concept, I know.
The same thing happened to me. It’s really sad.
I’ve been reading a lot more.
im glad i still care because i never let them josh me
I am most definitely far more passive in my consumption than before. YouTube is actually where most of my media comes from now. Then my colleagues are always on about the Masked Singer or whatever is going on. I managed to make it through maybe 2 episodes before it made me sick.
I know it gets quoted a lot, but Gabe was 100% right. It boggles my mind how people in power over these streaming services just don’t get it:
Haven’t pirated a game in over a decade
The last game I pirated was Skyrim, and that mostly because I was unemployed and poor at the time
I have pirated GTA5 and Cyberpunk 2077. Both were a disappointment.
I never have, I don’t see the point when steam is just so convenient and has sales all the time. Just be patient on pricing, the game isn’t going to go away because you didn’t buy on release.
I also don’t trust downloading unverified, modified, software. An mp3 or mkv is probably going to be safe as you can’t load software through those really, but an exe can do anything
I prayed doom eternal, that was the only one. Then I bought it a week later.
That’s called “the mantis movement”.
I have, but that’s an access issue where I live, where there are no official stores to buy things from, and the places which do exist don’t have the games I want (on PS4). I download all Disney content as + is not available here either.
Capcom just started adding game breaking DRM to their archive of old single player Steam games because an exec got butthurt over a nude mod for Street Fighter. Now Steam Deck support is broken and my mods don’t work with games I purchased years ago. The pirated version is now better once again.
At almost the exact same time, Valve sent a DMCA notice to Portal64 because for some reason they care about people playing a homebrew port of a $2 15 year old game on 30 year old hardware.
I used to think Capcom and Valve were two of the last good ones. Turns out there aren’t any good ones…
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removed by mod
He was absolutely right.
People generally are absolutely fine with paying, so long as it’s not absurd pricing and the service is convenient.
I was happy paying for Netflix until the recent bullshit. I still pay for Spotify. I buy all my games outside of old ones that I need to emulate (again proving Gabe correct - if I could legally access them easily then I’d do that instead, but am I fuck jumping through hoops like spending thousands on old consoles I don’t have the space for nor the time to search for/import games)
P.s. I’m from India. Not one of these “pasty-faced white people” that you seem to take issue with
What Usenet groups are people using these days?