Gonna preface this one by saying I don’t necessarily condone piracy, this isn’t a how-to guide, more just a vent about my frustrations with the modern media landscape. Kay? Kay.
So I finally snapped the other night, and officially gave up watching media the “correct” way (correct being in quotes large enough to blot out the sun).
For some context, I try, or tried, to be a good and capitalist digital citizen. I pay for Youtube & Spotify Premium to avoid ads (32 bucks a month here in Australia), I pay for 4 streaming services currently, Netflix, Binge, Disney+ and Hayu because my wife devours trash television like she’s Oscar the Grouch.
Side <rant>: Hayu is absolute garbage, you really shouldn’t pay for it. This service charges you money to show you ads for it’s other shows in front of every episode you play, and ALSO occasionally shows pop-ups ON TOP OF OTHER APPS - I’m literally paying for the privilege of running malicious adware on my TV. But at least the wife can keep up to date with 9 different groups of women screaming at each other </rant>
Despite understanding the in’s and out’s of internet piracy (as most sysadmin/network/development folks should), I was growing up as a nerdy gamer kid during the titanic rise of Steam and apparently that instilled in me an inherent naive trust that if I pay for a service, it will be safer and smoother than surfing dodgy torrent websites and risking virus installs just to play a game. This was 100% the truth during my teenage years, and as a result i’ve probably spent close to $5,000 on Steam games over the years.
Reality came crashing into me the other night however, when I sat down on the couch to watch the new Stranger Things season.
We hopped onto Netflix, started the first episode, and immediately there was something wrong. Visuals were extremely muddy, I could practically count the pixels on screen. To me it looked like the bitrate was being squeezed for all it was worth. I tried a couple of things, restarting the app, clearing the cache, bumping my router, but the whole ordeal reminded me of being at work trying to deal with an annoying bug. Worst of all, none of that worked, the stream was still garbage.
Since fibre internet exists, I decided to fall back on something I hadn’t done since I was a grimy teenager, I chucked utorrent on my laptop, plugged it into my TV, and downloaded a torrent for the show. This process took me 15 minutes once I re-acquainted myself with the ‘trusted’ sites for this kind of thing, and 15 minutes later we were watching a beautiful, 4K, watchable version of a show we were paying for but not getting.
Golden age of piracy
Imagine, hypothetically, if you hadn’t tried using smartphones for 15 years. The last time you touched a smartphone was 2010 - The iPhone 4 was Apple’s offering this year, while HTC (Desire) was duking it out with Samsung (Omnia 7) for the top spot in the Android market, even BlackBerry’s still existed.
Now imagine through some circumstance or another, let’s say frustration from using a paid deskphone that has terrible quality, you decided to finally pick up a smartphone in 2025. This would be a remarkable jump. Suddenly you’ve got Galaxy Fold’s and iPhone 15’s. Google’s got a phone now? And it’s a pretty solid offering too.
You can see where the metaphor is going - Internet piracy was a little bit like that for me. The way I manually retrieved an episode of stranger things and manually downloaded it, with uTorrent of all things? That’s the internet pirate equivalent of banging rocks together. These guys have had years of open & closed source development to refine and improve the user experience.
For example, there are applications which I will not name here, and integrations which again I will not name here, which effectively replicate the experience of Netflix but are backed by direct downloads (not even torrents!). It is no small feat that even my less technical wife took a crack at one of these applications that I installed on our TV and found it usable. Not perfect, certainly, but not requiring an entire degree in piracy.
So the question is, how much longer are people like me going to accept the user experience provided by streaming if I can get an equivalent service with the same amount of pain associated with using it, but for significantly cheaper?