Currently subscribe to a couple of Plex shares after getting tired of running my own server. This works well for the most part but I'm at the mercy of their infrastructure if anything stops working.
I subscribe to 2 providers for redundancy purposes as they have downtime a lot so it's more costly than I'd like but still cheaper than running my own and way less time consuming. Not convinced it's the best or most modern way to pirate / stream.
I've read about real-debrid and stremio or other apps. Sounds like torrents and having to wade through low quality releases?
I was running Plex for ages, but got sick of their endless corpo bullshit. Now I run Jellyfin (with lldap for auth), Radarr, Sonarr, Jackett, qbittorrent, yt-dlp-web-ui and Stash. Its probably not the best solution but its been working for me so far.
That's similar to what I ran before although it was Emby and Usenet (sabnzbd) as I didn't have access to any decent trackers for torrenting. Was fine just for me but I need to provide more of a Netflix experience for my non tech savvy household and the storage cost would make it painful
I mean, my family cant tell the difference between 720p and 1080p so my storage cost is a non-redundant zfs array of $100 ssds.
If you use something like jackett/sonarr/radarr you dont have to be limited to just usenet or torrents. You can also look at things like Jellyseerr to give them something that they cant get on Netflix, the ability to request movies and shows.
I use Jellyfin even for my family they find it extremely easy to use. I have also included Ombi so if there is a show they want that isn't there they can request it and everything is handled automatically without my intervention. The most I do is change what harddrive things save to when I run out of space and add a new drive