this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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Somehow I doubt this one.
I mean I can believe that some people have switched from BT to news with the surge of the arr stack, and that streaming has definitely curbed use of BT for a while.
But "pretty much all"? That's harder to believe. Especially since streaming is starting to go to shit again.
There was a blip in time a few years back when you really didn't need to learn how to bittorrent, you could just google what you wanted and you'd get a pirate streaming site showing it. I've been torrenting for almost two decades now and still kissanime/aniwatch/zoto whatever was the faster choice most of the time, and even now I sometimes use the Kodi plugin Otaku when I just want to watch an ep or two while eating, and that grabs stuff from streaming sites. Granted it is getting worse and worse, with the sites being absolutely riddled with ads and seemingly rebranding twice a month due to takedowns which has me going back to nyaa more often.
What I’ve seen from the average person, torrenting safely is for techies and most aren’t bothered with the effort of it. It’s a low hurdle that most people don’t want to waste time on. Building a local collection takes a shit ton of time. I’m currently rebuilding my music collection to roll my own music streaming server and I’m questioning the time value. But I’m sick of music I like getting deplatformed due to licensing
For music I'm just sick of the apps streaming super compressed crap. It sounds like 192kbps MP3 sometimes and you can definitely tell the difference. Setup Airsonic and never looked back, although still have YT music for the fam and finding new music. It is a bit of hassle, but it's worth it and a FLAC collection feels way smaller than it did 10-20 years ago (both in terms of disk and home streaming bandwidth).
I was using streaming-based sites the first few years because it was easy but it had its issues. With uBlock Origin, ads and popups weren't a problem anymore but there were still issues like bad quality, buffering and your progress in a show not being tracked. This promptet me to try out Jellyfin with the arr stack and it's so much better. I had to get used to having to wait for shows and movies to download before being able to watch them but the experience was so much better aside from that. Great quality, a nice interface where your progress is tracked, everything loads perfectly fine, I can make accounts for friends and family and no ads or shit like that. It took some time to perfect my setup but now I have a lot of private torrent trackers and usenet and I can get pretty much everything I want to watch, even in German, in the best quality that is available, especially when something's available in AV1.
You need time, knowledge and money to get a setup as good as I have and it's worth it for me personally (selfhosting is also my main hobby, after all) but most people don't have all that, so I can understand why doing it like this is a pretty niche thing and why not a lot of people are doing it nowadays.
Jellyfin is great, I have it setup with iptv as well, and tailscale so I can reach it from any of my devices from anywhere. It actually saves me a ton of money, since having sport stream subscriptions is cooooostly, and I just use my main computer as host.
I just have it accessible through my domain. IPTV is interesting but I have no idea how it works.
I just dislike having public things. With WireGuard and then tailscale, VPNs got so hasselfree that I've removed most things from the open net. Reduces setup time and management a lot.
IPTV is basically paid piracy. Someone else has grabbed most commercial channels from somewhere and sell it to other people. Usually they have a collection of movies/shows you can stream as well. But I only use it for sports really.
So they basically stream what is being broadcast on these channels to you? What does it cost? I have friends who watch sports too, if it's cheaper it might be worth it if I set it up for them on my server.
Basically, yes. It costs me about $140 a year.