The Pirates Are Back

That's a good thing. Fuck media corporations!

IMO streaming has always been about convenience, I pay a reasonable price and i have instant access to a decent library. The price is too high now and overall quality (generally) is on the decline, makes sense that people are hoisting the sails.

FTA:

The EUIPO speculates that financial pressures, like inflation, means that people have less money to spend on entertainment. This can be seen in the way that fewer people are signing up for Netflix or Amazon Prime – and some are even cancelling their subscriptions altogether.

Uh… how about content disappearing from one service and appearing on a new/additional service? I’m not subscribing to 10 $25/month services just to watch one show. Please.

I know a number of friends who started to sail the high seas after Netflix’s terrible “no account sharing” rollout, and others who had shows ripped from the services they were paying for, while they were watching - and without notice.

So yeah, it’s not just price increases but wild fragmentation and continued enshitification.

The real answer though is not piracy but rather just not watching altogether. We aren’t “entitled” to the works of others no matter how badly the distributor behaves.

Disappearing content and things like internet outages every now and then all make the case for offline accessible content. I often muse whether I should keep an emergency offline copy of Paw Patrol and Thomas the Tank Engine episodes for the kids, for the time our connection cuts out with our unreliable ISP.