Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content
by pirate-Loo6uoDu on Hacker News.
I have a confession, I pirate a lot of content. Mostly TV/Movies. That being said, piracy is pretty expensive. I built a computer with ~30TB of hard drive space. That, conservatively, cost me $1200. It’s an older computer, with a lot of hard drives and it’s probably costing me around $45 per month in power. I’m going to want to add more storage space soon, and have about $500 slated for that. I pay a usenet subscription, and subscription to indexers, for let’s say $10 per month… So if I stopped pirating I’d have saved $1200 and still have a budget of $55 per month for streaming services. So why do I still pirate? Well one thing is show availability. There are some must-have shows that simply aren’t available in my region (not the US), so I already have to have the piracy infrastructure in place if I want to watch them. I also very much appreciate having a local copy. It’s not like steam where I can just download whatever I want and play it offline (I do mostly buy steam content, if it’s on steam I probably don’t bother to pirate). Streaming services still have significant service problems that need to be addressed.