It’s not really cheap in time or money (hard drives cost money, if you want a good experience the server needs to be on basically all the time which costs meaningful amounts in energy use) but enough things can’t be had any other way that if I want them I’m gonna be doing that regardless… may as well get everything high-quality and in one interface, then.

I would much, much rather just pay some reasonable amount to achieve similar results, but you literally can’t.

Maybe it wouldn't please some, but 1080p is good enough for me, and so a €14/month server from a seedbox provider with a 3TB drive is terrific. It has one click installers for Plex and all the various pirate tools. It's a little slow if transcoding, but again, good enough.

I know there are more works out of the box piracy solutions—I meant that you can’t simply pay for a non-piracy “everything, including these 70 things that can’t actually be purchased at any price right now, in one streaming interface and high-quality”. It’s not an option. I see now that the way I phrased that was unclear.

Ah, yes..I thought you were saying a high-end piracy setup is expensive[1], and it is. So I was trying to say a "good enough" one is cheap.

[1] Though probably never as expensive as the sum of all the legal à la carte services for anything you might want to see.

A reasonable NAS these days is ~£400, with disk.

A Netflix subscription is £17. Pays for itself in two years if you have no other services

The VPN cost to keep from getting sued should be included in that price.

Is that even a risk?

Maybe. A more significant risk is being hassled or throttled by an ISP if (and essentially only if) you're doing (not necessarily illegal[1]) P2P file transfers on their network.

At least given the lack of alternative ISP options in my area, I'd rather pay Mullvad €5/month than assume this risk.

[1] https://i.redd.it/jzf5jegdyb171.png

Or dispense with the hard drives and server, rip or download immediately before watching, and delete immediately afterwards.

Think of it as a video store with one hour delivery.

For backups, assume that if it's readily available via physical media or piracy, it's easily replaced, archiving anything obscure or important by the usual means (hard drive, cloud, tape).

WRT your last point: given that essentially all Blu-ray and streaming releases are immediately and widely pirated anyway, why are official DRM-free downloads of at least older back catalog titles still not a thing? Perhaps in conjunction with a streaming service with a rotating selection that offers discounts to subscribers on currently-streaming titles, à la Game Pass?

There's also that pesky thing called a conscience that makes people prefer legitimate sources first where possible even if the "watching experience" is inferior

I just want to watch things without paying 5$ ppv or 100$ in combined subscriptions.

Charge me $15/mo to watch what I want and they would have my money forever. I would never torrent again.

One guy preferred the experience of using my car to getting his own, so he took it. I suppose it was convenient for him, and a lot cheaper than paying anyone, but I did not enjoy it.

Many differentiate between goods which are not exclusive, but your argument doesn’t.

Then do something else with your $15 a month. No one is entitled to content at their desired price.

Why are you defending monopolies?

Are you claiming Netflix is a monopoly in streaming?

Can I watch same show on any website of my choice?

Entitled no, but I don’t pirate and I don’t pay for streaming either because I simply don’t enjoy the product from any of them.

If I haven’t watched anything in 3 months the value proposition just isn’t there so I cancel. Any yea I’ve cancelled every service because of that basic formula.

You can buy individual seasons of shows for about $15-$25 each.

$5 for a rental is nothing, and you don't need to subscribe to everything at once to watch what you want.

Hello Sattoshi

If I was giving money to groups of attorneys so they can lobby for laws to persecute individuals, build locked down computing platforms, and generally work to destroy the open Internet, that would weigh pretty heavily on my conscience.

Personally, I have a conscience which informs me not supporting platforms. Why can’t I pay the artist directly, with no middlemen taking a cut? Distribution is easy. Put a QR code which links to some industry website that has crypto wallets for each of the artists involved on a project. I want my money to go to them directly.

Until the day where artists start posting their wallet addresses, I’ll keep pirating. The guilds should really get on with being the equivalent of a Patreon.

Why a crypto wallet. Why not a normal bank account? What exactly, does crypto help with?

I generally agree with what you’re saying, but in Netflix’s case, much of the stuff that’s actually worth watching is made by none other than Netflix.

This is a good point. I for one will not be watching the movie Atlas until I see bit coin wallet addresses for all 700+ people listed here: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt14856980/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_cl_...