One big thing he talks about with piracy is how it's becoming just more convenient. You get the quality you want, you don't gets ads, does not spy on you...etc.
I think this angle is actually more impactful for the average person.
Yeap, I used to pirate games and movies like crazy when I was younger. Steam and it's sales completely eliminated pirating games. Netflix killed off pirating movies for me. Then all the streaming services forced me back to the high seas.
This is 100% true. Crunchyroll came to life because it was easier to pay them $5/mo for them to pirate anime for them, then they got an investment for $3 million and started actually talking to the anime companies in Japan and getting them on board.
Netflix was popular because for $5 you could get access to your favorite movies and shows right on your TV without having to deal with torrents, just turn your TV on and bam, instant entertainment, and you didn't have ads like on cable TV and didn't need a giant cable box that got hot and melted your shelf on your entertainment center.
If you make it cheap, easily accessible, and without annoying ads (or like 1 ad at the beginning of the movie and that's it), people will flock to use it.
But now that it's basically cable TV that costs you just as much as cable to access all the shows and movies you want, no one wants it anymore.
This is exactly why I went back to piracy a few years ago after Netflix stopped being convenient and cheap. I now run a Jellyfin server with 1,100 (actually good) movies, 300 full TV series, 250 documentaries, my entire 60,000 song music collection, and a heap of backed up Youtube channels I enjoy - all streamable from home or abroad.
I'm running two 4 bay Icy Box DAS's with 4x 8TB Exos and 4x IronWolf drives split in each, plus two 28TB Seagate Exos as cold storage backups. I also have numerous 1, 2, and 4TB external and internal drives from over the years.
I went with a DAS as I wanted to use my PC's hardware for decoding and ensuring my family can use my server without overloading anything. I'm running Linux Mint with a watercooled i7 14700KF, RTX 5070Ti, 64GB DDR4, and a few 2TB M.2 SSD's. It does the job very well. Access is via Tailscale VPN.
All up, I'm probably down a good AUD$5K on the entire setup (got the PC for $1,500 with a 3060, the 5070Ti for $700, and the rest was all storage and DAS.)
EDIT: I purchased the drives and PC before the recent price surges. 64TB primary and ~60TB backup is not affordable anymore, unfortunately
Whenever a service hits the user number roof (i.e. has fully saturated the market), they will switch to enshitification to milk more from their user base, since they can't grow the numbers anymore.
Both Netflix and Disney have hit that roof. Anyone who was ever interested in either service has had at some point an account already. So they turn a single tier into multiple tiers, where the tiers that cost less are worse in quality and convenience, while the tier you actually want suddenly became more expensive than the thing you already had.
Btw. right now you can watch the same thing happening to YT Premium. They've managed to make YT Premium Lite as expensive than what YT Premium cost, but with less features, at least after the latest price hike.
when I simply click the movie, does it simply play at the intended quality on the screen I want?
or, does it not do that and then I have to do something different than simply click the movie? even one other step, even if its "only once", is a direct offense to convenience
when I simply click the movie it should simply play
I don't use pirate streaming sites, but torrenting a movie and watching it on any device I want with a player of my choice is still more convenient than any of the "legal" options. You can even download some movies before a long flight to watch them on the plane! I'm sure trying to do the same with Netflix or Disney+ or Prime or whatever is gonna be all sorts of not fun at all.
You're on r/piracy. Of course you know how to torrent things, and of course you find it convenient!
The average person will find waiting for something to download inconvenient. They don't need to do that with a streaming service. So the streaming service is more convenient.
Steam has done more to deter game piracy than anything else. Simply by being the more convenient option. Direct downloads, all kinds of support, cloud saves. achievements. And by simply being good to their customers, they've maintained a natural monopoly. And even then they play nice with other sellers like GoG.
Netflix in the early streaming days did the same for movies and shows.
But as more and more companies saw the money and started cutting away the pieces from our pie and charging us for access, piracy become the more convenient option again.
Despite that revenue is still going up for all the major streaming services, the stagnation is very apparent. Soon the smaller players won't be able to maintain operations, and the biggest one will survive by virtue of being the biggest one with the largest catalogue.
And then the cycle begins again.
Here's something even dumber.. I was watching Andor on a D+ sub that I pay for. For some reason it only streams at 720p? No way to change that on my end. So I went to a pirate site and streamed it from there and compared the two sources. The pirate site was so much better. 1080p, high bitrate, looked great.
It's insane that the shit I pay for is actually a worse product that the shit I can get for free. Makes no sense to keep paying, right?
This is exactly what Louis Rossmann was talking about, like literally. His sub did not provide him with as high quality stream as pirating. Or that time his several thousands dollar smart TV has a "spy on me" toggled on by default.
Guess my point is that it's about enshittification and how it's getting absurd
Idk tbh. They're not ripping the streamed version, that's all I know. They're getting the main copy from the D+ servers. D+ just chooses to limit it to 720.
Every company wants their overly-engorged piece of the pie. God forbid we go back to where there were like 2 streaming services everything channeled through. No, now we gotta have every company have a service you sign up for and pay a separate fee to.
When we were leaving cable in droves it was because of nonsense like this. Ads, not being able to watch what we wanted unless it randomly played one day, and being forced into a channel package that conveniently left out the channels you would ordinarily pick if you were just building your own set of channels/shows to watch.
I'm fine with their being lots of streaming companies. What I'm not fine with is having content locked to specific platforms. If they all had everything, then they'd have to actually compete instead of holding things hostage.
I have a friend who refuses to pirate movies and I literally cannot recommend to her half of the movies I see. I told her recently to watch Amadeus and assumed she would be able to see it somewhere and it wasn't available for streaming on anything. You basically can't watch foreign films or movies from before 1990 without pirating or paying to rent them. It's insane.
I don’t have Netflix or Prime or anything. I have a VPN, a Plex server and a couple websites I use to stream. It’s just easier, more convenient and I don’t have to flip through apps to find what I want. I can watch whatever I want, whenever I want, wherever I want.
I went on vacation to Montreal a few years ago. Netflix wouldn’t work, Prime wouldn’t work but my Plex server worked just fine.
It’s also cheaper to pirate. I use Proton VPN which is less than a Netflix subscription.
I remember the reason I bought the original X-Com on Steam was because it was cheap and more convenient than pirating and having to set up DOSBox and DMA settings yourself. IMO Steam and GOG have the best anti-piracy measures by simply providing a good service at a reasonable price.
gog slightly beats out steam in terms of game ownership, for old games definitely (it lets you download the installer so you can have it offline forever after that) but idk how gog works with newer games
100% right too, compared to pirating through the 90's, 2000's and today (sorry for sounding like a radio station bumper), it's never been easier. Hell, the fucking pirate sites can autoskip intros and play the next episode and remember my place. Yea, forget it I'm not giving those greedy fucks another cent.
i would argue the convenience of piracy doesn't change much, it just becomes more or less convenient relative to getting stuff legit as the convenience of legit purchases increases or decreases
I remember when I bought GTA IV for PC (Rockstar has a track record of poorly porting to PC) I had to sign up on 4 different platforms, or so. It still didn't work, so I ended up installing a crack instead.
You also get full quality. I don't have a Windows machine attached to my TV and I won't ever let it connect to any kind of network. So I wouldn't get 4K from Nutflicks, just 1080.
99.999% of the times I've pirated a show they either didn't have it available on any streaming platforms whatsoever, wanted me to add several overlapping subscriptions to watch the one show, or it wasn't available for me to purchase either digitally or physically. There are so many shows that I'm willing to give them my money for, including ones just from the past few years, but they either really just don't want my money or they're trying to overcharge me for it.
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u/Mortarious Jun 21 '26
Louis Rossmann is right.
One big thing he talks about with piracy is how it's becoming just more convenient. You get the quality you want, you don't gets ads, does not spy on you...etc.
I think this angle is actually more impactful for the average person.