Wait so then does playing a game that maxes out my GPU for two hours use enough power to charge 1000 smartphones?

Because that’s a lot.

I got blindsided by this in the same way. I was sitting next to a coworker and they said “Oh hey, a report on what you’ve been watching on Plex!”

Now, I thought that it was reporting what I’d been watching on his Plex server, and I’ve always known he can see what I watch. But he showed me the email. It was stuff I’d been watching on my own Plex server.

Now it wasn’t embarrassing stuff, as it’s my family Plex server, but I was absolutely livid. This is private. Period. I can think of many, many reasons that someone would want to keep this private, even if it’s not about porn.

I alerted my friends, and we all figured out how to turn it off. It seems like it shouldn’t be that big of a deal, but I feel extremely violated. I absolutely know that someone in that meeting said “Hey, some users won’t like this,” and they were overridden. Because some senior director had a metric to hit. And that means they no longer care about their reputation. It’s a sign that they’ve gotten too big to care.

hopefully this is just a ‘blip’ and rates of theft begin to fall again as the economy recovers.

If not, we can expect to see legal channels raising their prices again to cover the losses caused by piracy.

This is a crazy thing to write. Every streaming service already has their prices set at whatever they think will maximize profit. If they raise prices in response to piracy, they’ll push even more people away.

If anything, piracy will serve as competition, and it will cause the streaming services to lower prices.