[esperent]

I think the point being made by other people here still stands though. It's not piracy that costs you money. It's your desire to store/hoard huge amounts of data. Whether or not that's a problem is up to you, but if you deleted things after you watched them the costs would go down to nothing except 4the normal costs of running a computer.

[pirate-Loo6uoDu]

I don't disagree with that point, you could probably find everything I've got on sketchy streaming sites if you spent enough time.

[spicybright]

That's pretty much my method now a days.

Used to torrent a lot, but realized I'd forget what I actually had and ended up re-downloading a lot.

So now I just go on sketchy streaming sites. I have 2 that are good for movies/ty, 1 for animated content.

Maybe once a year something will go down and I'll find a new site, but it really is as easy as clicking through the first 10 links when googling "watch $movie online free" and picking the most reliable one.

In the extremely rare case I can't find something, I'll drop the 4 bucks or whatever on youtube movies or amazon prime. Probably only happens a few times a year.

~~~

Unrelated to the discussion, but still HN worthy, is how interesting these sites are when they operate.

Websites will constantly lift not just content but entire pages from each other. A lot of the time they'll even just change a X.com to an X.biz and add a banner saying "THIS IS THE REAL X, UPDATE YOUR BOOKMARKS!".

What are they going to do, take legal action?

I'm also suspecting everyone sources their movies from a very small set of places.

I tried watching the movie Multiplicity on one of these sites, but every single site hosted the first 4 minutes 27-ish seconds of it, exact same cut. It makes sense content propagates out, likely by automation. Everysite is a race to get the most ad clicks before getting shutdown.

A very interesting "industry"!