The real winner of the streaming wars.

I have Amazon prime, so I get access to Prime Video.
My family phone plan comes with a Free™ Netflix account per line.
As a student, my Spotify account gives me access to Hulu.
I can use all of these services at zero additional cost to myself and I still ~~steal~~ acquire it through different legal avenues. It takes an extra 2 minutes to make sure that I have it forever and that it'll be easily accessible.
- Not to mention, no ads. Guaranteed
- What pushed be over the edge was trying to watch some older shows in Prime and getting absolute dogshit quality. When I sail I get guaranteed 1080p, no ads, instant seek.
- I got amazon prime mostly for the free games, it's pretty much a steal in my country (if you pay for one year it's about $1 a month) and I still have to pirate things that are available in the prime video. Why? Because I use Linux and amazon won't allow me to play videos in 1080p. Only 480p is available.
- I renewed Prime for the holidays and then realized... I still get ads. Is that a thing? There's several levels of paid Amazon Prime, but they still want more money by serving you targeted ads!?

- I still use UseNet. Almost as often as I use faxes.
  
  Usenet may be old, but it's come a long way. Just about all scene content is there, and I max out my gigabit connection during the download from start to finish every time, without having to care about the quantity/quality of seeders, or needing to seed anything myself after downloading.

I was perfectly happy with streaming services for a couple years when there were only like 2 good ones. I stopped torrenting for a long time and now I'm back to torrenting again
- Do you use a VPN? I downloaded a random movie a few years ago and got the email from my cable company stating something along the lines of "we recently notice a download of blah blah blah was detected on our network. Please call to re activate your Internet". So I called and told them "I just got my son a computer I didn't know you could download movies"
  But laying for a VPN will cost as much as a streaming service and it's so slow. And I guarantee sooner or later VPNs won't even work in a few years (meaning your ip could be backtracked to the original computer)
  
  The best, most reputable VPN, Mullvad costs $5 USD. Plenty are cheaper than that if you pay in advance for a few years.
  The cheapest streaming service will roughly double that.
  
  I use proton vpn
  
  Speed doesn't matter too much, if you use a cheap spare computer off Craigslist to download your stuff. Just download what you want to watch ahead of time. Plus, you get near 100% uptime on seeding

This, plus self hosting jellyfin and *arr and I basically have a better service, with no ads, nice UI, access from all my devices, offline access, 4K resolution, music streaming. Basically the all-inclusive premium plan, not exactly for free, but for a very reasonable cost.
- I dump Blu-rays to my NAS with zero re-encoding. Even for older shows the quality is leaps and bounds superior to any streaming service with plenty of bandwidth.
  
  My brother in Christ please get Handbrake. Your storage space will go much farther if you’re at least re-encoding after the fact.
- I have spent hours trying to get some kind of server set up, without ever really being able to connect. Eventually in my furious troubleshooting Googlepalooza I eventually found a guide that had my problem addressed in it and it boiled down to "you should find a different way to do this." I've long since given up
  
  There are some plug'n'play solutions out there, all off-the-shelf NAS you can find nowadays will have an "app store" type of things that will let you install Jellyfin and others Webservice in one click.
  The DIY way is cheaper, more flexible, more powerful, but it's a journey and it can be very frustrating. I too, regularly spend hours if not days on problems that end up basically as "I'm an idiot and had a typo in the config file the whole time". It's a hobby for me, I don't feel like it's wasted time, I enjoy it, I'm learning stuff.
  
  The best home-lab way to do it is to have a standalone computer to act as a media server, then a NAS to actually store the content. Just grab a pre-built computer with an intel chip that supports QuickSync. The HP EliteDesk is a popular choice, since they’re commonly used in corporate settings; There are always a ton of refurbished units available for super cheap, since corporations will upgrade their entire cubicle-maze and recycle their old computers.
  Some people will try to run things directly on their NAS, but basically every affordable NAS on the market will end up being underpowered for most users.
  As for actually connecting, what part were you having issues with?
  
  Just out of curiosity, what was the issue that made you throw in the towel? Was it a really specific setup you're trying to build for a specific use case or something? I don't have a lot of knowledge, but I can't think of anything that would come up during a simple home server setup that would require you to completely change your approach unless you were doing some advanced custom stuff as a first go

Laughs in usenet
Yea, torrents. Sure. Lol.
- Yeah I run a small service for friends and its almost all Usenet powered now. I still like to seed torrents anyway just as an extra fuck you.
  
  That's the spirit!
- Usenet really is miles better. It blew my mind how quick and hassle free downloading was.
  
  Please don't tell us how to access this magical Dreamland or some people might do something unethical towards the streaming providers.

Torrent+ is seriously a great streaming service. Great selection. Affordable prices.
It's just the best.

As a designer, programmer, and music engraver/editor, I've always paid for all media I've consumed because I've strongly believed creators deserve to be paid.
But after the Napster, Ticketmaster, Netflix, and dozens of other egregious examples of corporate sadism, I’m proud to sail the high seas now.

Torrent in the Disney+ font looks terrible
- That’s because it wasn’t originally meant to be a font; It was a stylized version of Walt Disney’s autograph, which they used as a logo. It later got bastardized into a font, because it became so iconic.
  Imagine how fucking cursed it would probably look if someone turned your signature into a font.
- "Corrent?"

The bottom right one should be tor-rent, not torr-ent. It's a peer-to-peer media rental service running over the illicit TOR network. TOR is yet another project the notorious criminal hacker Linuxos Torvaldos made and named after himself.
People always told Linuxos to keep his legal name and his illegal software separate but he wouldn't listen. He got caught in a San Francisco public library reading with his wife Stella Richman. What a git.
- What is this Linuxos? I only know Lunix, made by a soviet hacker named Linyos Torovoltos

Is it a war or a cartel, though?
- Its a war of cartels.

Hollywood can get bent, we need open source culture

Ooooo I only have Torrent, is Torrent+ better? I rarely use it anyway
- Your missing out big time, Torrent+ comes with a few extra files to play with your computer.
- Torrent+ is not free, you need to download the cracked version on Limewire, and remember to turn off your AV before installing it also don't forget to enter your real name and address to bypass the registration box 😉

I never stopped. Big corp always lulls us into a false sense of security before springing the trap. I streamed for a little while but always kept me sails dusted.
- There was a period of time when streaming video from the official sources was more convenient than piracy and that was worse the price for a lot of people. Their greed eneded this time.
- You dust your sails?

hey! I stole this first!!
- It's called sharing, not stealing, my brother in Christ. ;-
  
  fucking pwned

or nzb, but aye.

I had stopped piracy for probably 12 years? Streaming was easy and cheap and worth it. I have a huge collection of movies I bought on google play. Then everything went to shit and everyone kept hiking the prices while losing anything interesting.
I like my plex server now. To the point where when I had amazon prime for shipping I still torrented the new season of the boys and hazbin.
- This is the way

Use Tribler to avoid (or heavily limit) DMA notices
- The gold standard these days is the arr suite with qBitTorrent and a VPN, and/or a usenet service. Unfortunately the arr suite doesn’t integrate with Tribler, so you can’t easily automate your downloads.
  
  Yeah I think it's more or less the same.
- Why the downvotes?

Rip torrent finder. I miss you.

I use Stremio that plays and streams torrents using sequential downloading. It's like Popcorn time.
- The issue is that this only works when the torrent community is healthy. If everyone used Streamio, nobody would be able to actually use it. Because it doesn’t seed the content, it just leeches and deletes it automatically. So if everyone used Streamio, there would be no seeders, and your streams would never actually work.
  Streamio is the “fuck you I got mine” of the torrenting world.
  
  It keeps a cache that it seeds back. Whenever the app is running you are seeding. I think the default is 2GB of cache, which is less than the average of 1.3GiB for a movie. Mine is set to 5GB.
  I also seed an average of 10 to 1 using qBittorent so I guess I forgot it could be considered a "fuck you" because I always seed.
- Yeah that doesn't work when you live in a rural area.

We just need Torrentz to be more, well umm....... anonymous
- It's as anonymous as you are willing to be, vpn (through a vpn) over i2p, or clear text, it's up to you.

The children yearn for the streams. They make jokes about seeding. The netflixes have won, at least for now.