And then there's the young ones :)
More recently, there's even a new kind of piracy that has arisen: pirate streaming websites, where you just go and watch whatever shows in the browser, and as long as you have a decent adblock, you proooobably won't get a nasty virus.
Where there's a will, there's a way, and there's a lot of will among younger people who aren't already indoctrinated into the idea that we must accept what shows our corporate overlords give us.
These existed a decade ago too, yo be fair.
In reference to the computer literate part of your comment, my parents aren't tech savvy at all, and probably never pirated a movie in their lives until some guy came along with a £200 android TV box that just worked last year.
> there's a lot of will among younger people who aren't already indoctrinated into the idea that we must accept what shows our corporate overlords give us.
This sort of dismissal of "it's the young people" and talking about "corporate overlords" having some kind of magical control is getting tiring here. It's not a meaningful discussion, it's just navel gazing.
You missed one item on your list:
- Any of the free video streaming sites. There's almost always one up at any moment, and all you need to use it is a web browser, and perhaps an adblock to remove the noise (and avoid an occasional crypto miner). These sites tend to disappear after a year or two, but are always replaced by new ones.
(As I understand it, they don't even host the content themselves - they're just a frontend with a search engine, aggregating links to multiple third-party players and video files.)
You might not get 4K quality there, but you'll usually get 1080p, which is more than most people get from Netflix anyway. Such sites are stupidly easy to use, have been popular with non-tech-savvy users for over a decade, and (AFAIK) in plenty of jurisdictions, they're 100% legal to use.
You probably can't get them working on a smart TV (I don't own one, so I can't say), but I guess that's just another reason to buy a dumb TV and a Chromecast instead.
Anyways, appreciate the different perspective, and the alternate use of "everyone". ;-)
I understand you're using "everyone" in a rhetorical sense but just to level-set about the real difficulties of piracy for non-techie viewers:
- downloading videos via bittorrent or visiting dubious warez websites of illegal videos with the risks of javascript popup malware
- downloaded videos not easily playable on smartphones, tablets, or TVs that have the built-in "smart os" such as Android TV and Amazon Fire Stick.
A lot of viewers don't have media computers or laptops hooked up to TVs to take advantage of downloaded pirated videos. Even fewer will set up a DLNA media server so that their tablets can stream self-hosted videos.
This leaves only the computer-literate geeks as the group that can substitute paid streaming with piracy. This small subset is irrelevant to streaming companies. For everyone else, they just pick 1 or 2 streaming subscriptions (e.g. Disney+ for the kids and HBO MAX for the adults) -- and just live with the fact that their choices of shows are more limited and the existing ones may even disappear.
So "everyone" switching to piracy is a really small group of people.