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Comment by jlengrand | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, I used to download a lot of torrents years ago. When Spotify came along, it dropped at least 80%. Add Netflix and Steam and I haven't used torrents in a very long while actually. Simply because everything I need is available at an affordable price.

However, seeing how many streaming services are popping up lately, each with their own specialty and each wanting my money, (and seeing how crappy free Youtube is becoming) I feel more and more like coming back to my old habits . . .

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As Gabe Newell once said,

"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem”

That is a very fitting quote indeed.

That is 100% correct. Soon as Netflix and Steam became a thing, I pretty much stopped pirating. They are so convenient that pirating is actually a subpar experience. If you download a game, maybe there's a miner or malware in it. Download a movie and maybe it doesn't have subtitles or has visual artifacts aplenty. The only cases where I do that is if it's a media property that I particularly love. I download a copy and store it on an SSD to make sure I never lose it in case Steam loses the rights to the game or Netflix decides the movie isn't popular enough and takes it off streaming, etc. However, now that everyone and their grandma is going into streaming, it's turning into cable. So I'm really starting to eye the idea of pirating series and movies simply because I don't want to pay extra money to Disney just to watch Hamilton.

It's easier to grab all the shows I watch from one spot a couple times a week and watch from my nas via kodi on a shieldtv box. Bonus, not commercials and I don't have to care about which network(s) are on what services.

I do pay for Hulu + TV for the fiance, and though I do use it sometimes, I'll tend to prefer torrents.

Yeah, i used to be massively into piracy. now i use spotify and netflix.

I still pirate the odd thing because while it's completely worth it to pay $10/mo (or whatever it is now) for netflix, i'm not about to pay the same just to watch a single show on some other streaming service, or go through the hassle of figuring out what new service i have to sign up for or if it's even available in my country or on my roku.

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