[antonf]

Personally, I cancelled all my subscriptions (Netflix, Prime, Apple TV+, Hulu, HIDIVE, AMC+) this christmas and reverted to piracy.

Modern piracy (the so called *ARR stack) provide UX that is pretty close to what you get from streaming services. In some cases even better - now I will use just one app on my TV to watch everything, will not be affected by Netflix/Prime/Apple/Hulu or internet provider outages when I am watching a movie or TV show, and will not have to go through 4 or 5 apps when I am searching for something specific to watch.

The UX is slightly worse when I find a movie or TV show via Plex Discovery and want to watch it immediately, since I will have to wait for *ARR to pick it up and download it, but for now I have quite a few TV shows to finish watching before it will become an inconvenience for me, especially given the fact that this stack can subscribe to upcoming shows - I can tell it that I am interested in Fallout for example, and it will monitor releases and download the show once it will become available.

[mlrtime]

The quality difference doesn't bother you? Meaning you can't get UHD versions of a lot of shows, only 1080p and non HDR/DV.

[antonf]

I already had cheaper HD Netflix subscription, and didn't notice difference between it and UHD Prime/Apple TV/Hulu. I only noticed that I didn't have UHD when I was cancelling it, to be honest. Maybe my TV is not big enough or I am too far from the screen for this to be noticeable (65" Sony OLED TV about 3 to 4 meters from my coouch).

Regarding the pirated content - I just started, so my experience have pretty low sample size. Still, majority of shows I downloaded so far are in 4K. The only one in 1080p is older show, for which I think there's no 4K source material.

[wenebego]

I frequently grab 720p and hardly notice