Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pharmakon | Hacker News Reader

I think you’re right, and then we’ll see a cycle of renewed piracy, followed by the grudging realization that making some money is better than making no money. It took a while to crack the music industry, but the same inevitable forces are ultimately at play here.

View on HN

For most casual consumers piracy is an inefficient way of getting content, even in the hay-day of piracy I'd bet that most consumers were getting their content via normal channels. A slight uptick in piracy may occur for the technically minded, but most consumers will pay for the convenience of streaming.

Things like Kodi boxes and steaming piracy sites have really changed the landscape. I find that many pirates today are not technical, might not know what bittorrent is, and find the whole experience to be roughly like any streaming service.

It's arguably a better experience if you don't need to be aware of which platform each piece of content is streaming on. And I'd rather see IMDB ratings then the rather meaningless "this is a 92% match for you."

I find piracy to be faster in many cases. Between a nzb downloader and a Kodi plug-in with a drebid service I'll be streaming something just as fast as you don't find it on Netflix.

You would be amazed to know how piracy became consumer grade in the past few years; I heard about streaming sites from non-technical people that were watching their favorite shows there because there was no official way to do it otherwise. Outside top 2-3 markets, most online streaming services have a serious delay that is no longer accepted by consumers, so they turn to piracy. Why wait 1-2 years to see the last episode of Game of Thrones on official channels when you can see it next week on pirate sites?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com