Piracy isn’t even free! People pay thousands of dollars for hardware, and hundreds per year for electricity and various service providers.
But they actually get what they want for that money: Being able to watch whatever you want, anytime, on any device, in high quality and without ads. It must be really hard for streaming services to compete with features as futuristic as that!
Seriously. I’m running a Synology with 12x16TB. That’d buy a bunch of months of streaming services…but this way actually gives me content to watch that I want to watch.
I think many people may view those sort of costs differently than the monthly subscription costs of Netflix, etc. Hardware is generally seen as a “one time” cost, and the added electricity costs are difficult to tease out from all the other variable electricity costs.
My personal argument is that I pay a monthly subscription ($15/mo) for a seed box, which is roughly the same cost as subscribing to a single streaming service.
Back before the password sharing crackdown, I had access to my parents’ Netflix account, and every once in a while, I’d try it out, but I’d always quickly get annoyed and would finish watching whatever I was watching via my Plex server.
The difference is that we own the hardware. We can treat it as bad/good as we wants and we only have ourselves to blame if things go wrong. It also costs exactly the same whether we use it for 1 month or 100 years.
Piracy isn’t even free! People pay thousands of dollars for hardware, and hundreds per year for electricity and various service providers.
But they actually get what they want for that money: Being able to watch whatever you want, anytime, on any device, in high quality and without ads. It must be really hard for streaming services to compete with features as futuristic as that!
Seriously. I’m running a Synology with 12x16TB. That’d buy a bunch of months of streaming services…but this way actually gives me content to watch that I want to watch.
I think many people may view those sort of costs differently than the monthly subscription costs of Netflix, etc. Hardware is generally seen as a “one time” cost, and the added electricity costs are difficult to tease out from all the other variable electricity costs.
My personal argument is that I pay a monthly subscription ($15/mo) for a seed box, which is roughly the same cost as subscribing to a single streaming service.
Back before the password sharing crackdown, I had access to my parents’ Netflix account, and every once in a while, I’d try it out, but I’d always quickly get annoyed and would finish watching whatever I was watching via my Plex server.
The difference is that we own the hardware. We can treat it as bad/good as we wants and we only have ourselves to blame if things go wrong. It also costs exactly the same whether we use it for 1 month or 100 years.