Hacker News Reader

Comment by righthand | Hacker News Reader

Maybe 40% of the time I pirate, you can’t see anything original or cult otherwise. The other time I do try to find it at the library. If I can find it on a service I torrent the 4K version anyways because streaming quality is varied trash.

If streaming didn’t offer such generalized garbage for everyone then it wouldn’t be this way.

If consumers just made a leap for physical copies again it also wouldn’t be this way.

It’s the drive to consume once and move on that causes this, but what if I never consume it in the appropriate time frame, then I’m just out of the loop as it goes in the vault because services lose money otherwise.

View on HN

Agreed, but even if I wanted to see something relatively mainstream like Last of the Mohicans (great movie with Daniel Day Lewis), I'd still go to a certain pirate site to find it. It may be on some of the streaming sites, but which one? Will it be on Apple? I don't mind paying, but where will it be, will it be on Amazon?

Oh forget about Netflix as they don't seem to have anything more than a few years old, unless it's some series they are promoting like Seinfeld.

Also, on a certain pirate site of note, I can also look for the best quality one like a Blu-Ray HD rip if it exists, that'll be something like 20GB - but that's fine!

https://www.justwatch.com/

search for the title here; it tells you where it's available,

Seems the last mohican isn't available on any service in my region, neither for streaming, renting or buying.

Same here. I am in South Africa. Where are you?

Those streaming services are very US centric.

> If consumers just made a leap for physical copies again it also wouldn’t be this way.

How so? When DVDs and VHS were at their most popular not everything was in print or available.

Also: you literally could make a machine where tou insert a dollar and you get a watch link for the whole world.

With physical media you'd have to figure out the whole logistics, produce to demand etc.

The problem we have is that digital rights are such that many distributers will rather let their films rot on old hard drived somewhere than distribute them worldwide. Give me a cheap way to just watch the absolute best variant of a film and I will use it. But the bar to clear in terms of usability and privacy is me downloading a mp4 and putting it into VLC player. This works everhwbere on the world even without internet connection, what doesn't work is your streaming service because you haven't cleared the rights for each region of the world and it sucks.

> If streaming didn’t offer such generalized garbage for everyone then it wouldn’t be this way.

Mubi and Criterion are great.

I am enjoying the stuff on Tubi too, lots of great anime, even if it is teaching me to hit the mute button and zone on my phone.

Also Kanopy if your local library is a subscriber. Basically anything you might see at a film festival, that could be considered "art house", and a remarkably long tail that goes back to pre-Hayes Code Hollywood (for example).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com