its amazing how good services can be if some just skip the corporation-obligatory adding of enshittification. i remember an article about a downloadable (but not very legal) DVD with an installer for a (worthless but very popular) OS that included heaps of expensive industry software and the installer was point-klick what you want and then all is done in background and fully usable once done. reading that article it seemed to be a better installer than ever produced by any company for any product.
however as that payed streaming service seemingly leaves huge amount of bank records and ran for such a long time, i guess it would have been easy to stop their customers from paying them. it rather might seem that the real intentions of content corporations might not truely be what they officially claim.
maybe we learn in 25 years that the content corporations really were behind such services, maybe like "better get money from ALL markets!" or such.
Oh I don't care that the IP owner don't get money.
IDK, I just don't like the ethics of pirating media for profit, the entire idea is that it should be accessible to everyone, not just those with money. Cover your operational cost? Sure....Making millions in subscriptions? That is an asshole move IMO. If you're paying, you might as well pay the people who are making the media in the first place instead of some rando that had nothing to do with it.
This doesn't seem that different from paying for usenet. It's not like they're making DVDs of pirated movies and selling them on the street corner; they were basically just aggregating content and the service they were providing was making it easily searchable and accessible, not doing the actual pirating, from the sound of it, unless I'm misunderstanding the situation.
This doesn’t seem that different from paying for usenet.
i would think it would be a little different from usenet, considering that usenet would be a service that you pay for, and people who use that service would host content on it, so that other users can download that content. Which effectively removes the immediate liability that you would have in this case, where you are explicitly hosting a pirated streaming service, and then charging for it, for the explicit purpose of streaming said pirated content.
Yeah, I suppose I should clarify - that was in response to the objection to paying for pirated content; it's different from the service provider's point of view, but from the end user's point of view, they're paying for pirated content either way.
I don't have an issue paying ISPs to access pirated content either, that's the same as paying for Usenet access IMO. You're paying for network access for a lot of different things, pirated content just happens to be part of it. Paying a streaming service specifically for pirated content is vastly different from paying for general network access, even from an end user perspective.
Check out Softwarr "for free" or Real Debrid and Stremio/Kodi if you wanna spend some well spend money, the latter guarantee more content than Netflix etc, the former everything that could ever exists on the internet.
My guess is because they did all the pirating for you so you didn't have to worry about dealing with the technical hurdles of doing so.
If a service like this came around that allowed me to pay with Monero and did not require any personally identifiable information, I would totally fucking use it.
My guess is It's probably cheaper and has much greater variety. You can watch anything from any streaming service through one single interface at the price of one service.
because IPTV is like $6 per month and has every single channel known to earth.... it's a tiny fraction compared to any cable especially if you watch sports (the only real reason to pay for cable anyway)
The entire system exists for the benefit of business, not customers.
Just look at what happens with accused theft in a store. You get accused of theft? Cops are there in no time, take you to the ground, throw you in the back of the cop car. only after they've gotten the humiliation and brutalization in might someone come and take your proof that you didnt steal anything.
You accuse the store of stealing from you? Due to not following their own policy on returns, or overcharging and an item and not fixing it Police won't even show. just tell you its a civil matter and to suck it up.
I dont subscribe to any streaming service (except the occasional free prime trial, to be full disclosure), not even the one in the news story... but I can still answer your question..
Because I want to pay a single service to watch everything. Like Netflix used to be. Watch everything I want, for one monthly price that was reasonable.
But its not like that anymore. Every company looked at how well Netflix used to do, went "Fuck them! I want all that money for my self!" and took their content off Netflix, and made their own streaming services.
Now if you want to consume any media, You have to subscribe to 50 different subscription services, for hundreds of dollars a month, Which is just Cable 2.0 but with worse service and options.
You pay like $5/Mo for the content of all streaming services and more instead of the $500/Mo it would cost to subscribe to each of them individually. Plus you're not taking any legal risk as a customer.
The pirates provide a better service with more content for cheaper than the legal options; and pirating yourself takes effort as well as cost (hardware, trackers, usenet, etc).
Some people are happy to just pay for decent service; others like to learn about the process, then setup and run their own servers.
183,200 TV episodes is pretty modest compared to alternative "non-approved" sources.
One datapoint is one source (that has a rule against any TV/show content released in the last 5 years) has a total number of 19.5K shows and TV movies/specials, with ~80 K releases. For many shows a single release can be a full season.
It's sad that these people got taken down. Maybe the next people to do it will do it from a country that does not have extradition with the United States, so they would be safe.
Edit: As for payment providers attempting to take such a service down, Monero would be the answer to this.
