You can pirate whatever shows, including ones that can't even be legally sold, and run your own service.

If you add the Arrs suite, then you can also get dynamic additions of shows you watch, and just have them show up.

And well, if Meta and ilk can use pirate libraries in a commercial setting, I see nothing wrong in piracy in a non commercial setting.

Agreed.

And anyone creating or supporting generative AI built from massive unfettered internet scraping that wants to lecture me on the ethics of violating copyright to sidestep the monstrosity they have built can take a flight to Hypocrite Island and go fuck themselves.

Who is paying for that bandwdith? (It's you)

I had really hoped that the streaming era would have ended up in a better future where I could buy movies and TV shows in the same was as I buy them on Bandcamp: Watch some of it, maybe all of it, for free, and after payment you can either stream it OR download it and play it however the fuck you want on whatever device you want, with whatever software you want.

Ads are not just a question of whether you can pay to turn them off. The mere presence of ads on a platform is pure poison for its content curation, and further gives the streaming vendor incentives to control you as a user and take away your freedom.

I used this guide - https://guides.viren070.me/stremio

Getting a machine with lots of storage is first step. Make sure you also get an Intel graphics card. A380 I think. They're amazing at transcoding and color mapping (10bit->8bit). Transcode is very important to support with hardware, since it allows realtime resolution change, colorspace conversion, and pretty much every video file format to mp4. Can be done in CPU but not recommended.

I'd recommend Linux, but Jellyfin works with damn near everything. Use whatever youre comfortable with.

Getting content? First, use Firefox with Ublock Origin. Turn on all filters. Pirate websites are VERY hostile.

Get a VPN that can port forward. PIA and Proton can both do so, and are reasonable priced. VPN keeps simple copyright scanners from attacking your network, legally speaking.

Sites to look for goods: thepiratebay.org still exists. /r/piracy reddit has loads of links. Yandex search of "show torrent" has all completely relevant links. If you have a Usenet subscription to alt.binaries then you can use that method to grab stuff.

I also grab DVDs and Blurays and rip myself. Doing this is great since you may be able to find shows, but special features are almost never included. I use this tool to quickly rip: https://github.com/xenomachina/dvdrip/blob/master/dvdrip.py

https://www.bfloeser.de/posts/bluray/ covers Linux Bluray ripping, including where to download the AACS keys.

This isn't as true as it used to be. My current Jellyfin server is an old laptop with a 5TB USB hard drive dangling off of it. Syncthing is used to sync the media to another system in my house because I don't really want to rip it all again if something fails.

If you proactively torrent "everything I may conceivably ever want to watch" or are glued to media 12 hours a day but still want it all to be new, then 5TB will go quickly, but 5TB can go quite a ways for people who don't match those conditions.

While a NAS won't hurt anything, the days when you needed one to do anything useful at all are gone. Just like I just slam my entire MP3 collection on to my phone's SD card now... I don't need any sort of windowing setup, or network access, or anything fancy anymore. Not only does it fit, nowadays it's only a fraction of the space anyhow.

https://www.qbittorrent.org/

https://github.com/Jackett/Jackett | https://github.com/qbittorrent/search-plugins/wiki/How-to-co...

I abandoned MythTV and rented DVR from Comcast for just that reason.

Huge list of self hosted stuff.

I personally run Plex(TV/Movie/music), Audiobookshelf(podcasts), Immich(Google photos), along with a bunch of other unrelated stuff like Home Assistant, Apache, etc.

It's all run off an beelink n100 and some NAS drives. Super cheap and useful.

I'm running it on the Windows Pro that came with the device. I'm not saying you should use Windows, I'm just pointing out that you don't need much to run it.

You don't have to use this, but maybe it inspires you.

If you go the torrent route, there are also subreddits about trackers.

Pay for a seedbox and get access to a single private tracker site and that’s all you need.

I'd recommend giving jellyfin a try because it's a worthy project, but it's not even a competition, Plex is hands down much more user friendly, if you can excuse the fact that it's closed source.

Now for findability I can't recommend Kagi enough. You can find virtually anything there, no filters and no bullshit results.

I rename my movies but that takes maybe ten seconds per one I add, tops, and the result is easier to read when managing files later than leaving them as “www.torrenting.com The.Matix.ita.eng.1999[rarbg]” or whatever insane file names they usually come with.

So "reddit NBA stream" and you'll get results. Or duck duck go it.

Find one or two you like, then use Unlock Origin to block all the annoying UI stuff and ads.

The websites come and go so you have to stay on top of the new domains.

“The foundations of our ads business are in place, and going forward, the pace of progress will be even faster,” '

The exact moment they stopped being a movie service and became an ad service. Google showed everyone the way.

One of the two main characters is a veteran BBS-era and Internet movie pirate (among other things). I don't necessarily endorse his actions, but he is who he is...

Well, that's one way to spin "second screen" content that isn't worth paying attention to.

Just imagine how much money loveholidays or Jet2 would pay for an advert midway through a travel show, where a customer could press a button on their remote for a holiday purchase link to be sent to their Netflix email address.

Wait, people are paying to be advertised to? It's like we learned nothing from newspapers.

> Subscriptions aren't affordable for poor people

If people are affluent enough that advertising to them supports the business, then they probably do have the money to pay.

Most people in rich countries certainly can afford to pay. 68% of households in the UK have streaming services, most of the rest pay the TV license fee to the BBC. A lot of those who do not choose not to, rather than being unable to afford to.

> government funding creates a conflict of interest

There are ways of dealing with this and blocking government interference. Hypothecated taxes as in the UK.

> so does relying on philanthropists.

Different conflicts of interest though.

Good news costs money, and the poor get propagandized to.

I'm not even sure how the NyTimes justifies this with their massive subscription revenue. They probably just expect people to suck it up, despite greatly lowering the value of their product.

Anyway, Manufacturing Consent came out almost 40 years ago and we're still stuck in the same place if you only look at cable news, newspapers, and radio. Hell even NPR pimps themselves to the nearest think-tanks and corporations (despite a reputation for delivering unbiased coverage from the perspective of liberals)—during the iraq war people with little subtlety referred to them as "national petroleum radio".

There's a difference too between the type of ad and the companies behind its reach - Uncle Bob's Local Mattress Shop and Citizens United are two entirely different beasts.

Imagining that people use their brains is also unrealistic. Presumably I'm talking to the remaining people in the room.

If paying full-price for the news isn't an option, I'd rather opt out entirely to avoid filling my head with random crap someone really wants me to hear about "terrorists" and "western values" or whatever.

Bittorrent skipped a generation due to the 'convenience of these services, but maybe the iPad kid generation will pick up the torch.

By the time it was available in my area, cable TV was a service to provide better reception and more channels that OTA, but everything aside from subscription channels like HBO were riddled with commercials.

My point is that for most people in the U.S. there was never a bait and switch with cable. It was just more programming (ads). And you paid for it, unlike OTA.

Anyway my Jellyfin instance is growing every week. Used dvd/blu rays + my library’s great movie selection has been worth the effort.

If there was a Bandcamp but for tv/movies, I’d happily buy from there instead of ripping DVDs!

I find it so frustrating that this does not exist in 2025.

I just don’t see a whole lot of TV/movie content worth paying for that isn’t produced by a studio that will lock up the rights to rent it out

I will concede that music has an order of magnitude lower bar of entry.

Imagine being able to tweak an episode post production after analytics show a particular scene results in a dip in engagement.

Imagine being able to AB test movies, because it's dirt cheap now to shit them out.

Imagine being able to dynamically change the brand of a drink in a character's hand based on what you know of the user's preference, and which brand is currently paying the most (e.g. coke gets 80%, pepsi gets 20% views)

Imagine being able to change the sex/race of a character based on what you know of the viewer's biases!

I probably shouldn't be saying these things out loud.

Can a company at its inception (and legally) limit their profit to stakeholders and the surplus be used in investing in it?

Besides, for most countries, there's no alternative to Netflix. In the age of AI and Google translate, Disney doesn't bother having subtitles in the local language.

Profitable is not enough. It needs to grow. In capitalism, growth is an imperative. Did you invest your savings? Do you expect growth? Well, there it is - the source of the imperative to grow. When the possible customers run out, the only way to grow is to enshittify.

And they'd have potentially higher profit margin because they wouldn't deal with the same volume of video, which means savings on things like storage and content moderation.