[toun]

Ignoring cost, there's two things preventing me from watching content legally in acceptable quality: DRMs and connection speed.

The day streaming providers allow downloading high quality, DRM free video files to watch for later, I'll happily pay 3 bucks per movie.

As it stands, I can't play anything >720p because of DRMs. If you're willing to prevent paying customers from watching what they're paying for, just for the sake of reassuring your shareholders that you're combatting piracy (though failing miserably), then I have no remorse torrenting your content.

[judge2020]

> As it stands, I can't play anything >720p because of DRMs.

Should be able to play 4k via the official Netflix app on Windows, assuming you have the relevant chain of DRM protection (ie. TPM might be required, along with HDCP cables and monitors).

> (though failing miserably),

I'd argue that they're winning, actually - torrenting these days requires some upfront costs (hard drives and a media server) and an initial time investment (dedicate $xx hours to learning and managing a media server + media library software). It's much easier to punch in your credit card to the 3 streaming services you want to use that month.

This is on top of the fact that most media giants contract out a service to automatically send DMCA takedown requests to the ISP of every torrent peer. If you're in the U.S. doing this, you're most likely going to get a letter from your ISP asking you to stop torrenting illegal content. Xfinity in particular has a 3 (or 6?) strike system for DMCAs, after which they'll terminate your service. Any torrenting effectively must be accompanied by a VPN that is torrent-friendly and ignores DMCAs.

[toun]

Yes, but those are all non problems for anyone remotely tech-savvy. The point is, DRMs are hurting paying customers and do not even make it more difficult for pirates: when you download a torrent, DRMs are already completely stripped, so the only people prevented from consuming DRM'd content are paying customers with non-HDCP compliant hardware. That's insane.

[input_sh]

> (hard drives and a media server)

Eh? I'm pretty sure at least 80% of pirates just delete the movie/show from their PC/laptop when they're done watching it, maybe casting it to a TV in the process.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Loading, looking, lösching. It's all so forgettable. Like toilet paper.

[Avamander]

> on Windows, assuming you have the relevant chain of DRM protection (ie. TPM might be required, along with HDCP cables and monitors).

Load of bollocks. The requirements are difficult to figure out and hard to fulfil. The standards in the ecosystem do not help at all either. Cables or monitors shouldn't be certified HDMI-compatible when they don't do HDCP for example.

The "just try and find out, and hope the situation won't change" approach is so customer-hostile I have no sympathy when someone moans about pirates yet again.