For movies? Netflix. For books? Piracy is irrelevant. (See far too many articles from Konrath, who at one point uploaded all his books on a torrent site AND advertised that on his blog... to no effect on his sales.)
I don't know if you know this, but DRM is a core part of Netflix. No studio would ever have signed up with them if they couldn't control distribution.
>See far too many articles from Konrath, who at one point uploaded all his books on a torrent site AND advertised that on his blog... to no effect on his sales
I am not familiar with that example. Any link to the data?
- The DRM of Netflix is irrelevant. The people who want to download the movies will do it anyway, but their number got way lower once Netflix (and probably Hulu and others like them) got a large enough catalog. People like convenience and are willing to pay for it.
- I couldn't immediately find the article where he announced that HE uploaded his books (as an experiment), but here is one of the many articles where he dismisses the issue:
The number of people willing to download movies and TV shows is going to only get higher now that the movie streaming space is getting balkanized, and Netflix in particular is shedding its catalogue faster than my cat sheds its fur.
I pay for Netflix. I'm probably going to reduce my plan in the next month or two, to buy a subscription to HBO. Sure. But there's no way in hell I'm going to pay for Netflix and HBO and Hulu and Disney and CBS and whatever other fly-by-night streaming service that happened to inherit rights to the particular show I wanted to watch. Not even because it's too much money (though frankly, it is), but because it's a hassle. Hassle with managing accounts and subscriptions. Hassle with dealing with everyone's bullshit web UI that's different from everyone else's bullshit web UI. Hassle with dealing with VPN and getting a US CC somehow, because I'm willing to bet region restrictions are only going to get worse.
Compared to all that, BitTorrent just works. And between PopcornTime and Radarrr/Sonarrr, I hear it even works better than the streaming services now. I might need to look into it.
Exactly this. I pay for Netflix, YouTube Premium, Amazon Prime, and BT TV. Recently all of my friends were talking about Chernobyl. It's not on any of these services (Sky TV exclusive in the UK). I take pride in paying for my entertainment and software but I'm not signing up to yet another streaming service just to watch a 5 episode miniseries.
So I torrented it. Same goes for the movies that I can't legally watch any other way.
