Comment by mojo74
4 hours ago
This is the first year I have cancelled all my subs. Used to be a TPB regular around the time it took off. Years later I tried to go legit and have had subs with all the major streamers (netflix, disney, amazon etc) But the way you get squeezed year on year for what was standard before e.g. 4K or no ads to be gradually offered worse terms and degraded output quality just bites after a while. I can't justify spending €20-30 per month on what isn't the best quality available for the content on offer.
Plus I've found "legit" to be a moving goal post. One day a show is on one platform, the next it's on another, or it becomes unavailable except for [insert random foreign country here]. Even HD is a ripoff sometimes when half the episode comes in all compressed looking. They'll blame my bandwidth except I have no problem streaming an episode without adaptive compression over Bittorrent.
People can say what they want about piracy, but it continues to be what I consider a necessity against culturally important media being further tainted by rent seekers looking to make another buck in any way they can.
i feel like this is an important piece. even if you want to do the "right thing", is it really supporting these platforms that horse-trade content in huge multi-billion dollar deals just so they can increase their userbase with the intent to jam more ads down their throat? have any of these platforms _improved_ the experience for the average creator? they're poison, it almost makes it feel more righteous to steal.
Yeah, I was a pirate as a kid. I said “give me a place where I can pay to have legal access to everything and I will.”
Then Netflix came along and introduced streaming. I was happy. It began to fragment a bit, I could live with that.
Now it’s 10 different platforms with rotating content, I need a 3rd party website to know where and when to watch a particular thing, it’s a mess.
Not only that, unlike with cable they make it difficult to record the content they’re serving me so I can watch later myself.
I am now a pirate again.
Yeah all the streaming services have gotten so bad and they are adding ads and they are lowering quality and they are getting too expensive. Arghgg I say