And this is exactly what is pushing people back to piracy. It's easier to get all your movies from the pirate bay than it is to find it legally and pay for it.
Honestly I put up with doing that when the prices were better. After damn near 15 years I had to dust off the hat and sail the seas. It forced me to learn how to set up a home server which I've never even entertained the idea of until now.
What really annoys me is paying for the biggest Netflix package to get 4K content, then you watch a somewhat recent (non-Netflix) movie like The Equalizer (2014) and it's 1080p or less with a terrible bit rate.
That movie is available in 4K HDR. I know because I downloaded it to my Plex server and switched to watching that after 15 minutes of watching macroblocking and pixelation artefacts via the legal method.
I just stopped watching movies. I refuse to pay for 7 different streaming services. I refuse to watch 720p content with terrible bitrate on my Linux system. It helps that most movies and series that came out in the last 15 years are straight up garbage. If I really like and want to watch something I get the bluray, so I can re-watch it in the future.
This is by design. It's the intent of copyright law to make getting copyrighted content a miserable deal for the customer and a great deal for the copyright holder, because the thinking goes that this encourages content creation. No technology is gonna change that, only changing the law will.
Try living outside the USA, lots of times stuff is just plain unavailable and if it is available the only way to know is just manually checking every service since googling just tells you where is streaming in the US.
I haven't had the need to sail the seas, since BluRays are still being pressed, and the local library has a bunch of them. Free of charge. Also found a use for my old PS3.
This is why I pirate anime and then buy manga to support the authors. I’m not gonna give streaming services a dime when piracy site I use has better features and services.
Yeah honestly I'd rather some VPN provider get my $15 so I can torrent in peace rather than giving it to one of ten different streaming providers so they can pay some executive to dream up new ways to extract value from me for sitcoms from the 90s.
Definitely the future of television I had in mind was me having to google every movie I want to watch to see if it's currently in one of it's one-month windows on any of the seven streaming services I pay for. This is way easier than buying a DVD. I love it.
I mean I usually just google it, or, most smart TVs now have this built in feature where you can just search it and it appears on whatever relevant service usually. The problem arises when it becomes region locked, or when you can't afford seven services which are now costing like 15 bucks a month for no ads, or how every service uses a different frontend for their video pipeline and they all work like trash and are laggy garbage. It's still way better than normal TV or buying DVDs, though, the only upside to DVDs was bonus features, otherwise they just take up a bunch of space and it costs like 40 or 50 bucks for a new movie.
Just taking a moment to say there are dozens of places out there hosting these current shows and movies and not giving a single wide about copyright. Piracy isn't even necessary anymore, just dig through some sketchy websites some of them even upload before the torrents come up
Oh yes, it was so much easier to get in a car, drive to the store, check if they have it in stock, deal with the checkout person, drive back home, deal with that annoying wrapper, pop the disk in the drive, watch the 5 different ads at the beginning of the DVD, to then finally watch the movie.
Way easier than a Google search. This generation has it so hard.