I got myself Amazon prime, logged in on my computer, and found out I can only watch 480p video because of DRM shenanigans. The app on my TV is no longer supported (TV doesn't run Android), my phone is rooted (Xiaomi stopped making updates after two years) so I sometimes can't even find the app in Google Play let alone play decent quality video and the Chromecast app is a buggy mess.

So yeah, I went back to torrents after that. All of my problems disappeared when I just had an MP4 file I could play anywhere. I'm still paying my subscription but they can take my 1080p video from my cold dead hands.

I get your point, and i may be in the same case as you in a few years (my projector is brand new).

But that doesn't really disprove my point : when the legal streaming service is working fine, then it does have an immediate effect on pirated content consumption.

I thought that not being able to have access to all the content in the world would be a no-go, but i'm surprising myself preferring to watch legal content directly in two taps of the remote than having to search for the torrentz, the subtitles, download it, plug the computer to my projector, etc.

This came as a surprise to me.

When streaming services do work as intended, most of them definitely work better than piracy. I'd stop pirating entirely if they did, for a reasonable price.

Hopefully the industry gets its shit together so I can legally watch shows and movies without waiting a week and so I don't need to consult two different "look up where you can stream something please don't pirate" websites to watch shows anymore. Until that magical day comes, I'll keep pirating.

Dont forget to subscribe to all the other 100+ streaming platforms, as originals will not end up on amazon. Oh, and hopefully you will never need a subtitle that is for a language that's not the main one in your region.

legal streaming is horrible at the moment.

To be able to battle at least some of the reasons to pirate media they need to fix a couple of things (and this is just my shortlist, there's 1000+ more reasons) - allow indexing and playback outside of the official app so 1 app could be used for multiple platform subscriptions - allow access to content no matter where the viewer is on the world. Not only the video, but audio and subtitle languages as well - allow subscriptions for specific content, not a 'one subscription fits all'. I dont want to watch nor pay for yet another Walking Dead something, but I do want to watch See - allow to buy content, and provide that DRM free in high quality (not the streaming quality)

>Dont forget to subscribe to all the other 100+ streaming platforms

These are the "bad legal streaming services" that OP is mentioning.

Streaming is a content ghetto. 9 times out of 10, none of the streaming websites have the media I'm looking for. When I visit friends and family and am made to sit down with their streaming services and find something to watch, it always turns into a disaster of everybody sitting on the couch browsing the various catalogue on their phones, discovering that no service has whatever movie somebody just thought of and suggested.

If you treat streaming like old cable television; you turn it on then decide what you want to watch from what is available, I guess it might seem fine to you. But if you try to decide what you want to watch first, treating streaming as a means to an end rather than the end itself, then streaming is unmitigated trash.

Deciding a movie and then look for it on streaming sites is hopeless. Just rent it on a pay to view site if they don't want to download via torrents.

I agree. It seems like an flippant opinion, and I'm sure many use it that way, but some services, and frankly, regimes have proven that convenience, comfort and ease of access is very attractive to people. If a service can navigate the obstacles such as copyright, they will be more popular than taking the thing for free with a bit of work.

As a mentionned to someone else in the thread, i've realized that i was actually ok seeing less popular content straight from the remote control, than search for the top content in torrents.

Ease of use and guaranteed video & subtitles quality can compensate to some degree to not having access to all the content in the world.

Absolutely they do. Streaming sites see huge traffic even now, being very far from their full potential, and being full of dark patterns.

im an IT and i developed a typical download -> playback workflow that works over my home network and its pretty much convenient too :) ^_^

No doubt! I'm in IT myself and it's second nature doing stuff like this. Most people have a different set of experience and knowledge though. I only experienced the convenience of streaming sites when I began using other devices for media, like my phone. On the phone, it was much easier to use whatever streaming than to search a torrent site, download on phone / seedbox, wait, navigate to the file, play the file. With streaming it's just search and play.