Almost everyone I know who pirates at this point does so for one of two reasons:
* Getting back content they've purchased that was removed by the vendor, or where their account with the vendor was closed without giving the customer a way to retrieve the things they've bought.
* content was not able to be purchased.
I haven't heard "beats paying" from anyone, almost everyone likes subscription music, Prime Video, Netflix and so on. Where the issues are is purchases, where people thought they bought something only to find out that they had a license that expires.
Example: I signed up for crunchyroll after I learned a show I wanted to watch was there.
Then after I paid, found out that on my country, it is not available.
Or when I bought a ton of books in fictionwise, then Barnes e noble bought them and restricted downloads only to people from USA. Funnily I only bought from that site because was the only site that sold to my country.
This! A lot of young people pirate media to save money. But then when they grow up and start working, they /still/ keep pirating because now they are used to getting their hands on quality media that they like, rather than consuming whatever "curated content" the algorithm deems fit to make available. Usually these people are also subscribed to regular services, but still find it a far better experience to pirate stuff.
I disagree with this. I pirated everything when I was a teenager/in college because I didn’t have money. Now the only thing I pirate is the occasional movie I want to watch that isn’t on Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max or Amazon Prime Video. If it’s not on any of those FIVE subscription services, I’m pirating shamelessly and vindictively.
Pirating music isn’t worth my time with Spotify Premium.
I'm just out of uni and still don't have a lot of money, so still pirating. However-
>the only thing I pirate is the occasional movie I want to watch that isn’t on Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max or Amazon Prime Video.
You maintain 5 subscriptions and still have to pirate every now and again? I just watch whatever I want on plex+radarr/sonarr. That sounds exhausting.
I don't think I'll want to follow in your footsteps. Maybe I'll take out subscriptions for the things I really like, but I'm probably going to keep using pirated content for my actual consumption - its just a better experience at this point.
There’s a balance I think many of us try to strike because we find pirating “everything” to be cumbersome, but at the same time we recognize that pirating is unavoidable as there are some TV shows and movies that aren’t on any subscription service it seems, nevermind the 4 or 5 we happen to have.
You can of course just “download everything” with sonarr and radarr, but then you’re maintaining a server at home with X hard drives to store all the content.
But yeah don’t pay for subscription services if you don’t want to.
That's fair. My server setup is very small (pi with a harddrive) so I'm deleting stuff I don't watch anymore after it's seeded. And it is a hassle to set up. However I've also found now that it is setup, it takes basically no effort to maintain it, and I'd want the pi for other stuff anyway.
No. I started paying for movies and music the moment I could afford them which was relatively early into my adult, independent life. I still pirate content but it's because of regional restrictions, content being removed from my streaming service or otherwise unavailable in digital form.
Wow you have a completely different experience from me. 100% of the pirates I know are pirating entertainment products that they usually wouldn’t otherwise buy. Not, like, getting back at some company who wronged them. Interesting lesson on different cultural groups I guess!
- beats paying, or too expensive
- because I can lol
- because fuck [insert company here]
- because Plex is more convenient
- because I want to apply an english subtitle/patch to it
- because mods
none of my friends were banned from PSN/Netflix/Amazon/etc. It's just cheaper or more convinient for them.
granted, these were mostly for games, and there has yet to be a "Netflix for games" as of now.
* Getting back content they've purchased that was removed by the vendor, or where their account with the vendor was closed without giving the customer a way to retrieve the things they've bought.
* content was not able to be purchased.
I haven't heard "beats paying" from anyone, almost everyone likes subscription music, Prime Video, Netflix and so on. Where the issues are is purchases, where people thought they bought something only to find out that they had a license that expires.