And this is exactly what is pushing people back to piracy. It's easier to get all your movies from the pirate bay than it is to find it legally and pay for it.

Honestly I put up with doing that when the prices were better. After damn near 15 years I had to dust off the hat and sail the seas. It forced me to learn how to set up a home server which I've never even entertained the idea of until now.

What really annoys me is paying for the biggest Netflix package to get 4K content, then you watch a somewhat recent (non-Netflix) movie like The Equalizer (2014) and it's 1080p or less with a terrible bit rate.

That movie is available in 4K HDR. I know because I downloaded it to my Plex server and switched to watching that after 15 minutes of watching macroblocking and pixelation artefacts via the legal method.

Don't forget that when you search you also need to wade through AI-generated SEO trash that doesn't actually tell you which service it's on.

It's almost like they want us to pirate shit.

When pirating becomes easier and more convenient than using the legit services, the industry is doing something very wrong...

I pirate it, simple

Just Watch is a great app for finding out where something is.

Yes. It is fucking ridiculous that we need an app to find this stuff, but at least there’s an app…

Yo ho

Kill the dvd and blu ray.

Because nobody wants that stuff. It’s old and uncool. Streaming is it.

Now we own nothing.

Just pirate it.

Shiver me timberrs

Just pirate lol

This is by design. It's the intent of copyright law to make getting copyrighted content a miserable deal for the customer and a great deal for the copyright holder, because the thinking goes that this encourages content creation. No technology is gonna change that, only changing the law will.

Yarr!

You can still buy a DVD tho

Try living outside the USA, lots of times stuff is just plain unavailable and if it is available the only way to know is just manually checking every service since googling just tells you where is streaming in the US.

Stremio has everything tho 😉

laughs in plex server with 24TB of content

I haven't had the need to sail the seas, since BluRays are still being pressed, and the local library has a bunch of them. Free of charge. Also found a use for my old PS3.

I just stopped watching movies. I refuse to pay for 7 different streaming services. I refuse to watch 720p content with terrible bitrate on my Linux system. It helps that most movies and series that came out in the last 15 years are straight up garbage. If I really like and want to watch something I get the bluray, so I can re-watch it in the future.

Buy those discs before they go away!

This is why I pirate anime and then buy manga to support the authors. I’m not gonna give streaming services a dime when piracy site I use has better features and services.

buy a dvd, get unskippable ads

You can still buy DVDs can't you? What I miss though is being able to rent movies at a place with a big assortment.

Yeah honestly I'd rather some VPN provider get my $15 so I can torrent in peace rather than giving it to one of ten different streaming providers so they can pay some executive to dream up new ways to extract value from me for sitcoms from the 90s.