TL;DR - The entire streaming industry's offerings, combined, are vastly inferior compared to what's possible through piracy. Piracy is even more revolutionary than Netflix was in the early days.
Remember how amazing it was when Netflix introduced the world to Streaming in a way that no one had done before? In the early days, for a low monthly payment, I could watch The Office online, ad free, without swapping discs. It truly felt like a digital revolution was taking place.
Fast forward nearly 20 years, the streaming industry is massively fragmented, monthly prices have skyrocketed, certain features (like password sharing) that used to be touted by Netflix and others are now no longer possible or require additional monthly fees, and the ads, OMFG, are everywhere unless you pay even higher monthly fees.
Hulu did it. Hulu broke me with their shitty app and incessant ads. They pushed me over the edge, and I came here to learn everything I could so I could be free. It's been a little more than a year since I cancelled every streaming service and hit the seas for the first time in my life, and I seriously cannot overstate how much of a game changer piracy is.
My media server offers more to me than any streaming service can provide:
- No rotating content based on licensing. What lives on my server is there forever unless I want it removed. This applies to digital purchases too (looking at you, Sony).
- No ads, ever. I don't have feelings a rage after seeing the same shitty, annoying AF ad three or more times during a 20 minute episode of TV. Looking at you, Hulu.
- No quality paywalls. If I want 4k, I can get 4k.
- No awful compression. I remember watching a show on Netflix a few years ago, and despite having amazing internet speeds, that one specific show had horribly bad compression artifacts. And it was a Netflix original! That BS doesn't happen on my server.
- No limits on sharing. If I want to share my server with friends and family, I can do that easily.
- No geo-blocks on content. As soon as something is available in any part of the world, I can also watch it.
- No hopping between five, six, or seven different apps just to watch what I want. Everything I want to watch is located in a single app.
- No hunting for my "continued watching" shelf! Netflix started to get bad about this, though maybe it's better now. I'd have to scroll down just to find the show I wanted to resume.
And the list could go on and on.
Even the hardware and energy costs are less than what I'd spend in a year on streaming services. I've come to the conclusion that even if every streaming service combined into a single entity and offered a subscription as FAST or for a low monthly rate (similar to Spotify), it still wouldn't be enough to make me give up on sailing the seven seas. The seas are just too good to ever go back.
