Television

Is 100% a proportion?

Nice try FBI

I pirate everything. Not out of want but out of necessity. I don't see this as cheating at all, I see it as a necessary move pushed by media companies

I don't want to watch commercials, I'll happily pay for that. I also want to watch whatever I want and not be "oh well, now that we're in the middle of show X, well dump it from our list, now you need to go watch it (and pay separately, AGAIN) on squobble or something.

Then there is shit like for example Spotify. Ohhh, I paid for a VERY shitty app but in the end the musicians I listen to will get almost none of my money. When a world famous artist has to do OnlyFans because her music career isn't doing it, something is wrong

Truth is that most media companies are run by greedy fucks and at some point I just decided I was done with their shit

Piracy is NOT cheap. I pay more, I have to do a lot of work, find the shows and movies, check them, etc etc... then the storage costs, hard drives are expensive! It is worth it, though, because it finally gives me the freedom I want.

Enshittification is a real thing and just about all media has enshittified to the point of being useless, nobody should have a Pikachu surprised face when people move to alternatives

1:1 is a ratio. I feel like that's close to a proportion.

When I was around 9 or so, I remember watching a movie broadcast on public access TV one evening. (I didn't have cable growing up.) They took 2-1/2 hours to broadcast an hour and a half film. It felt like every 10 minutes, we'd get another 5-7 minute ad break!

After the 5th ad break, I got frustrated and walked away from it. I was tired of my story being constantly interrupted by irrelevant ads! I decided right then that advertisements were the worst thing in the world and I'd do everything in my power to avoid being exposed to them.

Fast-forward 3 decades... I'm in my early 40s now and I haven't watched TV since I was a kid. I'm a huge movie and TV show nerd, but I either rented physical media, borrowed from friends, or pirated them.

For a while, I paid for streaming services so I could watch all I wanted without ads. But now ads are encroaching upon paid services, so I've dumped all my streaming services and gone back to pirating.

I was tired of paying for a subscription for sub-par access to content anyway. What if the streaming service decided not to renew their license for a show I was enjoying? It's just gone. What's the point in constantly paying monthly fees when I don't even get to maintain access to the stuff I want? I'd rather make a one-time payment for a physical copy that I have control over forever.

In the last 5+ years, I've been using Plex to host my digital library of movies and shows (and music). I made a one-time payment for the lifetime Plex Pass and now I have access to all their advanced tools and apps without any subscription fees. I can host my own custom-built digital library of media and I can stream it to my phone, computer, tablet, smart TV, etc. anywhere in the world.

I built a NAS server to exclusively host Plex and with my high-speed Internet, I have no problem watching media in 1080p streaming or better. I currently have over 2,500 movies and about 400 TV shows in my personal library, and they only go away if I personally remove them.

I actually use their Plexamp app to stream my digital music library to my phone, which I then connect to my car via Bluetooth. Now I have my own personal radio in the car, which I can customize however I want. Play specific music, skip songs I don't want to listen to, and no ads.

I feel I'm morally right in pirating media because streaming companies are making billions every year bleeding people of their hard-earned cash for a product those people don't technically own, and then riddling it with advertisements to constantly interrupt the vibe. You're giving up money each month and in exchange, experiencing a fleeting moment of temporary access to media. Until I can buy access to specific digital media and have full control over them forever, I'll be pirating all my content.

On a related note, I don't pirate video games at all. I'm a PC gamer (mostly because I hate the artificial "console wars" and got tired of buying a new console every year or two) and I have a Steam library of over 4,000 legitimate games.

I love Steam because you buy individual products and then they're yours forever. Even if Steam is forced to remove a game from their store... if you paid for it, it stays in your library forever. You can always download and install it on any computer you're logged into. I actually dread the day Gabe Newell dies or leaves Valve and some new guy takes over who only cares about making money. If that day ever comes, I'll start pirating games too.

I won't give a cent of my money to Epic Games because of their predatory anti-competition practices. They lock down games to be exclusive to their store for the first year (or forever, if they own the development company). I get that Steam dominates the market, but you don't claim a share of that market by stiffing the competition and forcing gamers to use your product or nothing. Epic can go to hell with that garbage.

If the entertainment industry adopted the same practice Steam does, but with films, TV shows, and music, I'd definitely start buying all my media. But I'm not going to take part in their greedy practice of denying me ownership over content I paid for. So Plex is my personal streaming service, for content I personally control.

Im honestly pirating everything. There is a piracy megathread on github and reddit probably has a lemmy mirror too im unaware of.

Here are some sites and tools i use!

any decent VPN. For torrenting

Qbittorrent for downloading them

Ublock origin on all websites esp. spotify, youtube, + any news/articles.

Alternate player for twitch adblock twitch

Xtra for ad free mobile twitch

Jellyfin for streaming movies and tv. Self hosted

Simpmusic (android)for ad free music on the go.

Linux. OS without ads and ai. Recommend popos/Fedora gnome for beginers

Openlib + libgen for free E-books

Myrient, vimms lair, theromsdepot for classic game roms

Seal (android) for downloading yt vids or songs

Please add to this list below! No links obviously

I loath commercials. So if there's something I want to watch, I either try to pirate it or, if that's not an option, record it so I can skip over the commercials myself.

I used to watch honestly because it was relatively straightforward. You find a show you want to watch and you press play. But it's gotten to a point where I need to scour the web to find which streaming platform has what I want to watch, then subscribe, then have a talk with the missus to see which subscription I can cancel and then I can watch what I want. What ended up breaking the camels back was when the first seasons of The Rookie were on one streaming platform and the later seasons were on another streaming platform and the only reason they were this way was because of some stupid licensing agreements.

I decided that if I'm going to waste so much time juggling different streaming services while paying for the privilege to juggle them I might as well take that time and money and not spend it on a problem the streaming platforms themselves created. If I can create a better service in my home I'm not going to waste money on a subpar service. The only service I'm paying for is my local IPTV because they're local and they're actually providing a good service.

I used to buy a month of whatever streaming service to binge whatever show it was that got my attention, but nowadays there are ads even in a paid subscription, so... Yarrr.

If doing it legitimately ever returns to being the most convenient model, I'm all for it, but we've gone full circle back to the cable era bundles of bullshit, where watching the specific shows you're interested in is a massive pain in the ass, and costs a small fortune. Fuck that.

I no longer pay for anything that exists primarily as an experience in my mind unless I am trying to support the people who made it. If I don't feel paying actually enriches the creators significantly instead of being absorbed by a media conglomerate I won't pay to watch it. If you are worried about your instance being bothered by the politics of piracy just switch to one that isn't, like mine, or lemmy.dbzer0.com

I've moved 100% of my TV, movie and music consumption to my own media server. On there it's probably around 95% pirate content with the occasional legal purchase mixed in. Though even when I own the DVD/BR the copy on my server will be pirated as I can't be bothered to get into ripping myself.

I don't pay for streaming services any more unless there is a reason to have a subscription beyond watching TV/film. For example, I have a Paramount+ subscription for ~8 months of the year to watch the A-League, and occasionally I'll have a Prime subscription for business reasons. So if something is on one of those services, I might watch it through there. I tend to pirate new releases and big budget shows that benefit from a high quality 4K encode, rather than pay to watch ads.

In Australia we have a public broadcaster called SBS, which is the unofficial multicultural broadcaster. Its streaming service has a very high quality and varied catalogue, with TV and film from all around the world, but it is ad-supported and usually in low bitrate 720p. I used to overlook it for those reasons, but these days I find myself going to it more and more. I guess it's a mix of being busier, being increasingly turned off by the generic US slop that paid streaming services churn out (only to cancel halfway through) and wanting to support a public broadcaster which is putting effort into maintaining a high quality catalogue despite a severe lack of government funding. Recently, it acquired an exclusive world premiere license for the new sci-fi thriller 'Smilla's Sense of Snow', for example.

I’ve recently had a lot less time, so I’m down to two services, and I feel like the $30 between them is a fair price for the amount of content I get out of it. I used to have 5 or 6 services, but they all lost their place one way or another.

The only reason I paid $40 for ed edd n eddy full series dvd set is because i'm running low on ssd space after downloading dexter's laboratory.

Most TV shows aren't even worth pirating, lol. But I always take a free sample before buying when it comes to media, whether it's being offered or not. I don't even buy a game unless I've enjoyed the first 15-20 hours, for instance. I'm not gonna get swindled if I can avoid it!

I haven’t actually pirated anything in 20ish years

Just Stremio all the way.

As I usually only watch breakfast TV and public broadcasting news with the occasional informative series in between, and occasionally watch netflix or disney if they have something worthwhile for a change, this is not an issue for me.

Regular TV, just our countrys state owned channels, no commercials and decent programming. But mostly streaming, since the enshittification I mainly use stremio with Torrentio addon which works quite well.