this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Paying for a piracy service kind of defeats the purpose for me. At $100 per year I would rather rent the movies and rip them myself.
$100/year is less than $9/month. You’re not going to get very many rentals with that. Whereas Usenet, you can get as much as you want. $9 a month is also less or the same as a single subscription to a streaming service. I’d gladly pay $9 for one place to have everything I want. I’ve never used usenet, just pointing out why it would be worth to some people to pay for it.
Do you know how much a library membership costs where you are? Are you unable to rent movies at your public library? BitTorrent covers the majority of my needs but when I can't find that older movie online I can usually find it at my public library.
Okay you got me. I definitely was not remembering you can rent for free from public libraries. That is highly under utilized feature in my life (and many people’s) but I have, in the last five years, been using it a lot more for audio books.
I used to think paying for defeats the purpose too. But the super fast, easy access to everything and not having to worry about maintaining a ratio anywhere, I am now happy to pay a little something, it's nowhere near $100 per year for me. From what I understand with private trackers now, you're going to need pay for a seedbox to keep a decent ratio or seed forever with a home connection. I don't have the disk space to seed forever, so I pay for usenet.
And I would much rather pay what I am paying every year rather than spending the time to rent and rip the hundreds of hours of movies and tv I download.
When you rip your own you get to control the quality, which I think is the best part, but I suppose if you needed to rip 100s of movies a year it would become a chore. The thing is that the majority of new movies and TV can easily be found on BitTorrent, so I would only need to rent and rip a few obscure or older films in a year, and those could probably be found at the library.
You essentially pay for convenience. If there was a streaming service that had everything I would gladly pay good money for it, since there isn't, I have to curate my own library instead.
Having good indexers/Usenet providers and automations takes away a lot, if not all the time needed to hunt down good releases. That saved time and hassle is what's worth the ~100/year for me.