Re:The golden age of streaming TV is over
by TeMPOraL on Monday December 19, 2022 @09:17AM
(#34052275)
> just to level-set about the real difficulties of piracy for non-techie viewers
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.
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.