Tech’s broken promises: Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable. Ubers cost as much as taxis. And the cloud is no longer cheap::Some tech is getting pricier and looking a lot like the older services it was supposed to beat. From video streaming to ride-hailing and cloud computing.

  • kadu@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Luckily for me, qBittorent was free before Netflix, during Netflix’s rise, and remains free today.

    • Moobythegoldensock@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Sure. But torrents are for files which is different from streaming. And Kodi + Trakt is still far beyond Netflix.

      The costs to you with torrents are the relatively small risk you may get sued for a lot of money and/or the cost of covering up your activity with a VPN to make it harder to sue you.

      People who were always going to pirate are still always going to pirate. But companies like Netflix know that people will pay for a convenient, legal service with features they like. But if they start charging too much or make their platform suck, people will be more likely to cancel them and pirate.

      • kadu@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Not where I live - nothing illegal about pirating copyrighted material via torrents, so no fees. Straight up free.

        And with a (also free) Jellyfin server, I get the exact same streaming experience.

        I mostly paid with time - setting up the entire Jellyfin server. But boy let me tell you, this was way cheaper than Netflix’s current price in my country.

        Don’t disagree about your point on convenience though.

      • Strangle@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Well that’s the difference, most people will pirate when it’s more convenient to do so. And as long as prices are so exorbitant.

        I pirate hockey games, because watching hockey is ridiculously inconvenient and/or expensive.

        I do not pirate music anymore, or video games because Apple Music is more convenient and not very expensive and steam has all the games I’d ever want to play, and has enough sales that it’s not that expensive either.

        I don’t pirate movies and tv shows because Netflix and Disney really cover anything I want to watch and anything else I share a crave subscription, like for Game of Thrones

        But I do pirate hockey games.

    • aux@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      I use WebTorrent nowadays, since it allows you to stream torrents. But before that, I also used qBittorrent, great application.