I had taken a break from Piracy when US Netflix via VPN had the library it used to 10 years ago, it's mainly in the last couple years that it made sense to return to selfhosting.

Yeah. The paid product must be superior.

I don't generally pirate games, because in the case of games, the paid product is superior to use. Automatic updates, online functionality, workshop integration etc. All reasons to prefer the paid version on something like Steam to pirating the game.

With a home media setup, you are probably still paying money. You need storage, things like VPN and Usenet subscriptions etc. It's not like I'm using them because they are free. I have spent money on them. I've just spent money on the superior implementation. It became the superior implementation once corporations predictably all wanted a slice of the pie and now my media server is much more enjoyable and easier to manage than 10 different subscription services I need to juggle because no way am I going to pay exorbitant amounts a month for all of them.

@IsThisLemmyOpen @cccc plus the fact you need 5+ accounts on different platforms if you want to find everything you want. Even then, you won't find old movies I guess

And companies don't do stupid things like half-assed video game ports or beta versions being released as final versions.

where are you from? I'm from Italy and in 2023 people can only eat if you've two working family members and can barely feed children

Jacked up prices, added a ton of crappy content instead of focusing on fewer but better quality shows, “crackdown” on password sharing when they once encouraged it.

Yeah, they started canceling shit long before the pandemic, I think around 2016. Once they decided to go all-in on original content, they began letting licensing contracts expire.

What did they cancel? Legit question because I only had one of my shows cancelled.

Convenience aside, they keep censoring episodes of Tv shows. So even if you pay full price for every single streaming service you still can’t watch every episode of the office or community.

Yeah once plex/sonarr/radarr came along and pirating became both cheaper and more convenient they lost my money.