Piracy is a service issue. If the streaming providers are going to punish me for using my preferred browser and operating system by limiting the quality, I will keep my money and get the video elsewhere.

There is also the issue of never knowing when the show will just disappear from the streaming service while you are in the middle of watching it because the licensing changed.

I know, my use case, is very unique and niche

It's not. It's as simple as "download and watch", but thanks to DRM you can't simply do it. Then pirating is the only way for you.

DVD/Blu-ray sitting on my shelf; quicker to download & start watching, than it is to get up, find the disc, pop it in the machine, skip the disclaimers, ads, trailers, menus, etc.

My use case is also impossible or impratical with payed services. And pirated content just gives so much freedom with plex and jellyfin, start watching on my phone then resume on my tv, going rural?download that. I currently share my music with friends and viceversa so there's a new album every week that I've never even heard!

But what really makes me not care, is the constant push and greed of payed alternatives. CD 15$? A book written centuries ago 20$? The same book but digital....also 20$. Netflix used to not have ads at all and was profitable. Then you learn that the tiniest amount of that money goes to the creators....for me it just makes sense to pirate.

I think Edge is the only browser on Linux that can display 1080p videos, not even chromium does.

But yeah I won't install Edge, ever.

@kirk782 i pay for prime video too, and have to go to torrents because amazon refuse to go above 720p in linux.
Also my kids like a show that airs in english in april but in our country until september (because dubbing), and they want to watch it ASAP so, torrents again with community subtitles...
Corporations doesn't care for user needs much less special cases.

I too took my speeds for granted before I learnt many people I know have a cable connection worse than mobile. It's 2023, in a big city. How does it make sense?

What I dislike about all these services is all of them have their own app\UI, many of them are awful and take time to figure out. There are plenty of refined software solutions for playing music and videos, they have plugins you can put your DRM overseer in, they exist for decades. Yet every one of them see their mission in reinventing the bycicle once again. I want my experience and my hotkeys to be consistent, to have the same quality whatever I consume. The only way to achieve that is to invest the same money into a big hard drive and then leech and seed.

We still use cable TV because of the way wi-fi is packaged. So we have a decent selection of free movies/tv that I never watched and could watch through tv. It's the incessant ads that make me pirate the most. It's worse than watching the same movie on a live dvr recording. Funny, since some of the movies they say are free were also just dvr recordings with the TV station logo in the corner still in tact.

Also, Netflix went away too a year or so ago because the cheapest teir made the movies/shows look like they were in 480p every time. It was unwatchable.

the only reason I learned how to pirate in the first place is so I could see the Star Wars films in their original versions without having to use a VCR. I immediately realized how much better the subtitle options on Plex were and have pirated everything ever since whether I had legal access to it or not

So you use VI, huh?

I mean, technically, I could afford paying for all the needed streaming services I would need to pay for, to watch all the media I watch, as well as all the games I want to play, but I would not have enough money left for food for the month. And on top of that, I will get an inferior experience.

I have a mobile data connection only where the carrier offers me free data for six hours post midnight. I can queue torrents on my phone(Yes, I torrent mainly on phone via Flud for Android) for downloading at night; then transfer the downloaded files to my laptop much later for viewing on a slightly larger screen. I couldn’t have done the same with say, Amazon Prime Video. Even if I could get these streaming services to queue at certain time, due to DRM restrictions, the content would only remain playable on phone.

Why are you not able to download shows that are on Amazon Prime Video? It's not like those videos are special. They don't have any DRM, you're just downloading an mp4 or mkv.