- Pay $$$ for a dozen of separate services, still have a lot of content not available to you
- Be forced into using crappy apps which may or may not be available on your favorite platform
- You could pay for years, but you never own anything - the moment you stop paying, you are left with nothing at all
- Be prepared for your favorite series be yanked from the service in the middle of your watching it because some lawyers didn't agree
- Be shown long idiotic un-skippable ads 4-5 times per hour
- Be unable to share your content with family, at least legally, and often be limited in number of devices allowed to access content
- The content is available only when you are online and with good internet connection
- If the content you're interested in is old or foreign or both - sucks to be you
- Maybe you'll get subtitles. Maybe not. Roll the dice.
- If the company decides the content is "not agreeable with modern sensibilities", they'd just remove it and you have no way to access it anymore
- If you don't know which service owns a particular piece of content, maybe there's a third-party service that knows that. Maybe not. Certainly nobody among content owners cares.
The Arrgh and Jolly Roger way:
- Pay nothing
- No ads ever
- Get access to the content that is convertable to any format known to man and will play on any device
- All the content can be made available offline and ported to any device that can play a video or talk standard media player protocol
- Infinite shareablity to any devices in your household
- You get it once, you have it forever and can store it for as long as you like, for zero cost
- You can get practically any content, no matter how old and what the twitter mob thinks about it
- You can get it translated and with subtitles in many languages, in formats supported by devices from mobile phone to smart TV
- There are many specialized search engines allowing to find any piece of content that exists, and usually it takes minutes, not hours
The law and order way:
- Pay $$$ for a dozen of separate services, still have a lot of content not available to you
- Be forced into using crappy apps which may or may not be available on your favorite platform
- You could pay for years, but you never own anything - the moment you stop paying, you are left with nothing at all
- Be prepared for your favorite series be yanked from the service in the middle of your watching it because some lawyers didn't agree
- Be shown long idiotic un-skippable ads 4-5 times per hour
- Be unable to share your content with family, at least legally, and often be limited in number of devices allowed to access content
- The content is available only when you are online and with good internet connection
- If the content you're interested in is old or foreign or both - sucks to be you
- Maybe you'll get subtitles. Maybe not. Roll the dice.
- If the company decides the content is "not agreeable with modern sensibilities", they'd just remove it and you have no way to access it anymore
- If you don't know which service owns a particular piece of content, maybe there's a third-party service that knows that. Maybe not. Certainly nobody among content owners cares.
The Arrgh and Jolly Roger way:
- Pay nothing
- No ads ever
- Get access to the content that is convertable to any format known to man and will play on any device
- All the content can be made available offline and ported to any device that can play a video or talk standard media player protocol
- Infinite shareablity to any devices in your household
- You get it once, you have it forever and can store it for as long as you like, for zero cost
- You can get practically any content, no matter how old and what the twitter mob thinks about it
- You can get it translated and with subtitles in many languages, in formats supported by devices from mobile phone to smart TV
- There are many specialized search engines allowing to find any piece of content that exists, and usually it takes minutes, not hours
So, am I open to piracy? Hmm... Tough question.