I haven't pirated in a while. I was happy to pay for some platforms.
The problem is that pretty much all of these services say you get 2 or 4 or however many screens and now they're tightening viewership to within the same household. If I'm one person I'll never need to use 4 screens at once, so why can't I share them with a few family members who live elsewhere?
And on top of that, you get plans that never had ads before now starting to add them (i.e. Amazon Prime Video). So I'm paying the same or more (as prices continue to be increased) for the same base level of content with additional annoying cruft.
With all the extra complexity like this, it's easier to just pirate and maybe set up a server I can just give relatives access to.
>And on top of that, you get plans that never had ads before now starting to add them
It's exactly the same thing that happened with cable TV: it started out without ads, selling itself based on that feature, and then when they had lots of subscribers, they added ads.
I predicted this exact thing would happen not that long ago here on HN and other forums and people called me crazy.
Those people were probably too young to remember pre-ads cable I feel like everyone I knew who lived through that era knew it would come to streaming as well at some point.
At least for now, I'm still sharing netflix and amazon prime video with my parent who live in a different country 10,000 miles away.
The day I get a message stopping me from doing that is the day I cancel my subscriptions.
I haven't been so lucky with Netflix. Relatives who live in other cities have gotten a message that they can't use mine unless I do the thing to add a new user for $7.99 or however much it is. Occasionally it works for them but most times it does not.
I wonder if it depends on countries. I'm based in Asia my parents are in Europe.
I downgraded from the 4-screen option to single screen when they cracked down on password sharing.
The downside is that level subscription is restricted to a maximum resolution of 720p, which doesn't bother me a great deal in terms of picture quality, it bothers me in that it's a technical limitation - maybe it's justified in terms of their costs to deliver 720p versus 1080p, but I feel like 1080p should be a baseline in 2024.