[DaSpood]

I don't think piracy is what is costing you. Data hoarding is.

Even if you wanted to keep a library of all watched movies or series from the past year you'd sit at much lower than 30TB. Do you really need to keep all this data ? How many times in your life will you rewatch all those movies and would it not be faster to find a new download then with the slight risk that it won't be available anymore ? You can probably safely remove/redownload the most popular shows and only keep the more niche ones that may become hard to find, or purge your movie library every few months for stuff that you never rewatch (you can probably even automate that). With decent internet and preferences for popular movies you could even argue that you'd just have to keep around the torrents and re-download your movies on the fly, trading a few minutes of waiting for a much cheaper setup.

There's also ways to optimize the uptime of your server which is essentially a NAS for movies. You could have the big machine off most of the time and use a Raspberry Pi to send Wake On Lan packets when you need it. It's may take an extra minute before it's usable but you would lower your bills significantly.

That $1200 upfront and $55/month sound like at least double what it should be. For a server that may double as a backup for your own files the upfront investment can be seen as worth it. And with the many streaming platforms relying more and more on exclusives, region-locked content that require VPNs that may not even work, time-limited content and increasing pricings your reduced electricity bill may not be far off from what legally viewing the content might cost you.