At least for media, piracy websites have a more extensive catalogue (of course) but they also have better privacy which is crazy. And they also allow you to use ad blockers. Sites you pay for would still show ads sometimes and don’t even allow VPNs.
At that point there is no point on paying for streaming and if you wanted to support the creators you could do it separetely with merch, other proyects they have or direct donations if any of those are aviable.
Always, It’s just been about ability to do so. I did nothing but piracy in the 2000s but then went mostly paid in the 2010s and now I’m back to basically pirating everything but YouTube since family premium ends up being easier and cheaper than the effort to get around it.
However YouTube premium is slowly getting to a point where privacy seems inevitable in my case.
And most pirate streaming sites have a better player (and subtitle encoding of new episodes) than HBO Max.
Seriously, there’s no fucking excuse for a multiple billion dollar conglomerate with some of the highest rated entertainment programs in history in their library to care THAT little about UX!
I would say it reached a better service position in the early 2000s with the rise of broadband (1.5Mbps to 3.0Mbps) internet speeds.
Prior to that, you still had IRC and BBS, but there was a divide between filesize and your ability to download that filesize within reason. There also existed a divide between what was accessible to technical users vs everyone else. Non-technical users might copy 3.5 floppies or cassettes but weren’t present in the internet space. Broadband opened the door for services like Napster, Kazaa, and Limewire which granted everyone access.
That service model was so successful to the point that it completely altered the music industry and how people bought music (ex. iTunes).
“Always has been.”
Torrenting has been more stable than paid services for years. I have prime video, but I watch torrents of the content.
if you wanted to support the creators you could do it separetely with merch, other proyects they have or direct donations if any of those are aviable.
Yeah, I’ve been getting more into Bandcamp so I can more directly support the bands that I like. I’ve given my wishlist to family, etc. for gifts.
That’s a tough line to draw; it’s different for everyone.
In the US, it used to go:
- Parents buy kids stuff
- Kids start buying their own, but can’t afford what they want to they bootleg
- Kids get decent-paying jobs that make the time needed to bootleg a bad equation.
- Kids become parents
But the coming and going of cheap music, streaming music, cheap video, and expensive video has wrecked the market.
I stopped pirating when purchasing music became cheap (apple music)
I started again when catalogs weren’t what I wanted. And supported artists directly.
I stopped video piracy when Netflix was cheap and good and started again when they sucked.
If you can bring me long-form entertainment that I enjoy and own for less than a meal out, I’ll buy it.
If you can bring me short-form entertainment that I can re-partake hundreds of times for less than a snack, I’ll buy it.
If I can’t buy it, or it encroaches on my other comforts, that’s where the line is for me
Decades ago when things weren’t available for purchase easily in many parts of the world but they still wanted to get their hands on that product.
It was already the case 20 years ago when I was selling burned CDs in high school for pocket money.
It has always been the case except for a short period of time when Netflix was decent but then streaming turned into cable with ads and shitty content. Now it is all the more enticing due to Jellyfin, arr stack, Seerr and faster Internet speeds. If I had to pay for streaming all the shows I liked, I’d be paying in excess of $200 per month. No, thank you. The seven seas it is for me.
Yes exactly and I always consider Steam (and to a lesser degree the Kindle ecosystem), which make it obvious to me that interoperability and convenience are something consumers are willing to pay for.
Yeah, I have never pirated a game because of steam. My dad taught me about bearshare, limewire, and others from his time for music but I pay, unfortunately for YouTube, get new music from indie artists. It’s so easy to just listen to anything I want. Netflix was the same way. Hell now places are uploading to YouTube for old stuff kike all of myth busters.
Sony rootkit or before.
I dont know when, but in my country community translations of anime are way better than those on an official streaming, if they are available at all. There is no point for paying for streaming when some random teams do better job at voicing anime while being funded by donations.
idk about everyone else but that was the year 2001 when my family got cable internet. I’ve never paid for anything streaming, I’m against subscriptions more strongly than most people admittedly, so I actively avoid them and it changes my hardware buying habits too if there’s paywalled things like online play for example. Consoles are dead to me now. 360, PS4, then the Switch. Now they get none of my money, I bought used and piracy modded them.
idk about better service. I was never convinced by that idea. I was still going to video and game rental stores until they shut down to my dismay, I don’t really get why everyone decided streaming was better, the quality and selection sure fucking wasn’t good and now it’s all fractured cross a bazillion competitor streaming services with exclusive content. Still would go to a rental shop today. I kinda do, my local library. But they have less selection/carrying capacity than my favourite gigantic Video Headquarters shop did. RIP. I despise shitty streaming bitrates even when I’m pirating I opt for an optical disc rip over a rip from a streaming site whenever possible. With Stremio and a debrid service I can stream 4K HDR bluray rips for $5 a month. Pfffff.
Music I buy vinyl and Bandcamp is convenient. I buy more than I pirate. Was the reverse when I was younger.
Games I often buy from GOG first if they have what I’m looking for, then Steam but I buy from 3rd party key shops…the legit ones like Green Man Gaming and such. For awhile barely pirated new. Then CAD dropped and prices eben in USD went way up with bullshit addons and season passes. Now I pirate more again especially if it’s not multiplayer. I don’t pirate anything indie (not just games) tho, personal rule.
Respect for not pirating indie stuff
It’s still a pretty big exception since I play a lot of games every year and increasingly less AAA (actually, looking at my legit libraries and Faugus Launcher/pirate folder, it’s been roughly 85% indie the past few years. Jesus. That’s both perfectly fine with me and sad about the state of gaming corps), but my overall consumption rate hasn’t slowed.
It seems to have gone back and forth a bit. I started pirating 25 years ago in no small part because of price. But then streaming came along and delivered a good and reasonably priced solution that worked well so I stopped pirating about 15 years ago. I got sick of the continuous degradation of service and ever increasing prices a few years ago and now I don’t have any streaming subscriptions anymore. This time it is a combination of poor service quality and high price that caused be to ditch them.
This. Early 2000s pirating was harder and less convenient (no arr stack, no plex/jellyfin) but buying a bunch of dvd’s/cd’s was a lot more expensive, if they even were available, and personally I was pretty broke.
Then streaming came along. It was dope, for a good price you could get good enough quality and quantity, of both music and shows/movies. I stopped pirating.
When I was up to 3 or 4 video streaming services it hit me — I’m paying 40/50 a month, and I STILL don’t have everything I want to watch? This is bullshit.
Went back to pirating, now with all the new software sometimes I’ll download stuff that I have available elsewhere just because it’s all nicely integrated in my setup.
Still don’t pirate music, since music streaming is still convenient — 1 service, pretty much all the music.
I’ve had a similar experience, but for even longer (piracy of ZX Spectrum games was pretty common where I lived back in the 80s).
In my experience, the ebb and flow of piracy very much depends on the media - music was pretty easy to pirate from very early on the internet age as soon as decent sound compression methods were invented (most notably those used in MP3) because each track is a pretty small file then stuff like Spotify reduced it, video piracy actually took off with faster Internet and better compression methods (starting with MPEG) and then fell with cheap streaming, game piracy took increased with faster Internet (though there it was weirder - games sizes and internet speed kinda went up more or less in parallel) and then fell thanks to stores like Steam and GOG.
That said, I personally never switched from piracy to streaming because I saw it back then as “not really owning anything” with all the associated risks (which we’ve seen materializing with the enshittification of the last decade) plus I’m averse to subscription models since financially they tend to end up adding up to more money than just buying because you’re paying subscription to access a ton of mediocre stuff and a handfull of good stuff vs just buying the handful of good stuff.
(I suspect that, because I became familiar with and started working in Tech during the transition to the Internet Era, much earlier than most here, I was more keenly aware of the risks of what you supposedly “owned” not really being in your hands and the real overall financial returns for the user of subscription models, hence I always saw it as a trap).
The funny bit is that when I could just buy the digital media in an unlocked format, I switched away from piracy, which is why I pretty much didn’t pirate games during the DVD era, then games started coming with phone-home DRM and I went back to pirating again and later I discovered GOG and stopped pirating again.
Had I’ve been able to legally just buy and download videos in an open format, I would’ve gladly paid for it, but instead they’ve stopped getting money from me ever since locked-down region-locked Bluray became the norm.
Ditto. I used to nab stuff (movies, audio software) from Usenet. Then DVD rentals via mail came out and I paid for that. Then Netflix started streaming. Lots of content available for a single monthly fee. Nice. Much more convenient. Then the studios decided that what Netflix paid them in royalties wasn’t enough, we should start our own streaming service. That’s when the high seas became alluring to me once again
Back in 1983, when my neighbor copied the Monopoly game for me to play on my C64. Cassette drive. Shit took forever to load. Fun af. At that point, the idea of paying seemed ridiculous. Then came the npd bbs era. Aye, matey. 🏴☠️
I remember walking around my neighborhood with a box of floppies going from friend to friend making mass copies of games we had for the c64 (was popular among my friends). We were just sharing, didn’t even think about piracy then. Cracktro’s were just neat things to my tiny brain then, not “we cracked this, you pirated it!”. I really didn’t get that point of it being piracy until I hit a BBS outside of my normal area that had FULL PROGRAMS to d/l for free! Took a month and a day at 300baud but holy crap, that program costs literally over $1000 but there it is in all it’s free glory. That was really my beginning into donning the hat and setting sail.
We were on the same path! I started my own bbs, which eventually got me access to some of the big time bbs clearing houses that had cd towers worth of stuff. They had isdn lines, 28.8 modem banks, etc. I had to do a phone interview with one of them… I think that was “Phantom West” and another one that happened to be in my calling area called “Transfixus Sed Non Mortus”, which eventually got busted. Those Phantom guys actually produced pirated discs and manuals to sell at computer swap meets and to China.
Dogs were off the leash then. Did I need Harvard Graphics? No. Was I downloading it? Yup!
As I grow older and can afford software, apps mostly, I’m ok with throwing a little back to the dev. Can fuck right off with a subscription, however.
