LouNeko

You just made the reference meta.

The problem isn't that people aren't willing to pay for their products, it's the fact that you give companies the little finger and they take the whole hand. They want to have their cake and eat it to. They want you to overpay and to be satisfied with bad service. They re-capitalize on content that has already turned a profit 20 years ago. I'm sorry but if I pay the equivalent of a movie ticket for a subscription and have to watch The Godfather with JPEG artifacts, they can kiss my ass.

Another keyword is "easily reproducible" which is the essence of digital data. If I steal something from the store, I stole a unique physical thing with inherit value attached to it. But if I am presented the choice between paying for lower bitrate movie or downloading the same movie for free in theater quality, I choose the later. Somehow the prices for subscriptions go up every year, but the amount of content and the quality decreases.

Additionally all streaming services take the liberty of revoking your 'license' to a bought (not rented or leased) product at any time. If I buy a movie on Amazon prime, they don't give you a .mp4, no you can only watch it on their app with their quality. They do not disclose that if I buy something with a one-time transaction, it is just a lease and I am in fact not owning what I paid for.

Over the last decade I paid thousands of dollars for subscription services, but I haven't gotten enough use out of them to justify what I paid. Hollywood made enough money off of me, so now I'm just helping myself to break even.

I remember Nord premium had P2P servers, but the speeds where horrendous. Somewhere around 10.000 Kbits. downloading something meant that all the other programs that required bandwidth were almost unusable. I just settled on watching stuff through streams in 'meh' quality. Plus, a VPN just obscures your traffic from your ISP. But almost all mainstream VPNs have at some point either been caught or, admitted to keeping and sometimes selling backlogs. They're just as much of a leach on you wallet as any other subscription service.

The shocking part is, the whole bottle is like $2.

The issue is that some countries punish torrenting copyrighted material harshly. Like from fines to prison sentence, harshly. Because its a P2P connection, you're not only a consumer but also a distributor. And your ISP is fully obligated to give up your traffic data to the authorities, if asked. Almost everybody I know, knows a guy who had to pay +$3000 fines for downloading songs or movies trough torrent. The alternatives are hosting sites. But let's be honest, a 1080p fully length movie is upwards of 2GB, and most hosting sites either limit you to 500MB per day or give you a download speed of 100KB/s. Of course you could pay for a premium account, but A, this will leave a paper trail, and B, there are more hosting sites than streaming services, and the prices are somewhat the same. So for people in these countries it is not viable to just pirate everything.

Most of the people on the list have been successful actors/actress longer than Halle was alive.

Let's not forget this simple aspect:

Interesting character - Seasoned Actor

Interesting character - Seasoned Actor

Interesting character - Seasoned Actress

Interesting character - Seasoned Actress

Interesting character - Just some Chick

In the end studios want money above anything else. And big names rake in bigger money.

This is the equivalent of not being able to get your crush to like you, so you pay hooker just to tell people you got a girlfriend.

"Frequent changes in design"

looks at all the black rectangles

This is the way.

Really hard to adhere to quality if money is being pocketed at every corner and then spend outside the hellhole you created.

Old people when they see a staircase without a railing