I’m Gen X and I’ve been pirating since we bought a second VCR when I was a kid and used it to duplicate tapes and then return them to the rental store. Then they added copy protection, so we got a dual-deck VCR that beat it. Then DVDs came out, so we got a dual-deck DVD copier.

Did I mention that my dad was a film historian?

He also would sometimes xerox entire books for himself. And he got himself a CD duplicator and a cassette duplicator later on and started doing the same thing with CDs and audiobooks he got from the library.

Miss you, dad. You would love torrenting if you could figure it out.

they “watch what they want, when they want, where they want, and they don’t pay for it.”

Damn. Are these guys trying to sell me on being a striminal now?

Yar, I don’ be likin’ this new diction, “striminal.” I’ll be a pirate ‘till me dyin’ day.

Nice!

what they want, when they want, where they want

Saying this as if any current streaming service or even Netflix in its prime actually fulfilled this requirement.

You don’t say?

You know, I nearly stopped piracy entirely for a brief period, back when Netflix was top dog of streaming platforms.

Didn’t last very long…

Now I don’t pay for any subscription platform but one; Humble Monthly. All series and movies I either watch with friends through a dedicated Jellyfin server (owned by one of those friends) or through stremio.

So what are Gen Xers who do this called?

The way this is phrased makes it sound like more than a third (60% of 69%) of millenials only ever consume media through piracy, which I find very hard to believe. What seems more likely to me is that the survey asked people if they have ever used piracy and now they’re trying to make this seem like a much bigger deal through misleading phrasing.

They are saying that like it is a bad thing.

Bad for shareholders maybe.

The reason why I don’t pay for a lot of media is because, if I pay for it I won’t be able to watch what, when, where and how I want to.

If I could buy movies and TV series as h265 files with high bandwidth and no DRM I would pay for it.

I would also pay for streaming if it had all content available, no DRM that forces me to use Chrome to watch anything higher than 720p and a good interface.

But those things will never happen because executives are too greedy.

New Rule: Any article that introduces a new tech-based slang term (eg. “phubbing”, “striminals”) is worthless

My main thing that pushes me towards being a striminal is that every service has all exclusive content.

If I wasn’t too watch star trek or star wars, hello Disney+. Stranger things? Netflix. The list is long, I won’t bore you with what you’re probably aware of.

Moving to bring a striminal, as they say, you can watch what you want, when you want, where you want. You get everything in one place, and don’t have to flip flop between services to simply see what’s available.

The cost of all of the services is a problem, sure, because it’s so damn costly for all of them combined. But that’s not my primary factor. It’s just so damned inconvenient to maintain so many disconnected accounts, and agglutinate all of the information into a sensible list of what’s new or available across all services.

I just want it to be easy and they’ve intentionally made it not easy.

I won’t comment if, or how many Linux ISOs I may or may not have.

Nope, just hard working pirates sailing the rough seas

I’m in college, and a lot of striminals don’t pirate streaming services like Netflix, but instead pirate live sports streams, because the legal alternative is pay like $70/mo for an ad-infested service. Nobody is paying that.

Meta torrented terabytes of pirated books for their AI, and they’re the 4th biggest company in US