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Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content

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.

302 points pirate-Loo6uoDu 4 years ago 396 comments

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