Speaking as a Brit, the only way to get TLoU was to subscribe to Sky TV, which (as far as I’m aware) requires a 12 month contract. Fuck that, quite frankly.
So I took to the high seas because I could.
There’s also Now TV, or NOW as it’s called…err… now.
Amazon Prime is now charging to get rid of ads
Is that worldwide? I just assumed it was US only
Im in the US
/edit; Woops, meant to be a top-level comment, not a reply…
Monitoring torrents, especially public ones, is quite easy.
While the Brits commonly use fortnights and “next Tuesdays” the conversion to months isn’t too complicated if you’re used to it
I’ll see you next Tuesday, if you’d like.
They say it so much they even have an acronym for it.
I was hanging around Chelsea in my new West Ham soccer jersey trying to blend in, and every other person on the street was saying they hoped to see me next Tuesday. Even yelling it from across the street! They must have known I was American because they kept trying to talk to me about football, but they didn’t seem to know any NFL teams.
The Brits really are on of the most polite nations.
Now tv doesn’t require a contract like that, in fact we just used a trial which they’re very generous on giving out to people multiple times. So when a site like that comes out we use a trial if there’s one available and then depending on the runtime we might only have to pay a month and it’s pretty cheap if you just get TV shows and not movies.
Now TV is fucking awful though. They still think 1080p and surround sound are luxury optional extras.
It’s basically just cybersquatting on shows so nobody else can have them, and remind you that you could watch them in decent quality if only you weren’t such a cheapskate and would subscribe to full Sky.
I mean, doesn’t Netflix also charge extra for 1080p? Also I’m not a massive fan of Now, I only get it when there’s a show I really want to watch on it.
Netflix also won’t serve 1080p if you are on PC. Even though you have specifically paid for 1080p or higher.
Additionally, even though Fox sold their shares in Sky years ago, I still can’t divest them in my head from the Murdoch empire.
That’s what happens when it takes 8 separate subscriptions to keep up with TV
I went on a smash and grab of all the shows I’d been meaning to watch, but hadn’t been on any of the services I’d subbed to for the last few years.
Turns out they were all HBO shows.
all HBO shows.
Which isn’t available in the UK so fuck 'em I’ll pirate.
I need some great stuff to watch, mind mentioning some of your favorite shows? Thanks!
True Detective was pretty good. Especially season 1.
It’s already seen The Wire, but catch that if you missed it. Also, We Own This City by the same writer.
And for something lighter, I got Silicon Valley, Flight of the Conchords and Succession.
Not had a chance to watch Peacemaker, Watchmen or Generation Kill yet. I was going to grab The Sopranos but I’m running out of space.
running out of space
I just delete the ones I’ve watched. The more popular ones will always be available
And thanks for the recommendations
Piracy will increase as streaming services get more exclusive and more expensive. Fuck em, we sail the seas again.
Just re-downloaded plex after a 5 year break after I got the email about prime going up. Back to the seas for me!
I just searched and found my old usenet account again after 7 or so years. Still 1TB of data left! Still amazing content and speeds!
We still have a bunch of pirated stuff from years ago, but then we were satisfied with Netflix and didn’t bother using it. Now we’re using it more because stuff we want just isn’t available, and I have several terabytes of space left on it NAS. All I need now is to get less lazy and start filling up again.
… How would you even measure that?
/edit: ah, popular downloads from one particular torrent provider. Not the wider picture.
Add on pirate streams, usenet, and the other half a billion torrent sites and those numbers muddy a bit…
I don’t think it said just 1 specific torrent provider. But even then, as long as it was a decently sized generic torrent provider, what makes you think it would not be representative of the bigger picture?
They explicitly state these are Torrent Freaks numbers. Along with:
It should be noted, as Torrent Freak does, these statistics only reflect a portion of any pirated content this year. The stats are specifically for single-episode torrents, rather than season-wide packages, and even more specifically they’re based on data from the torrenting platform BitTorrent. Just as television has grown and evolved across new formats in the last decade or so, so has piracy, with more and more people turning to sites hosting streams of pirated content, rather than “traditionally” pirating content through downloaded, local copies.
These numbers only reflect piracy of one type and among that type only one, very public, provider. (and not even their entire community, just those that download episodes one by one) That’s quite a limited scope. Lots of pirates don’t like such public services and/or use other protocols/methods of acquiring media.
Personally, I don’t even use Torrents at all anymore, let alone Torrent Freak, yet I pirate hundreds of hours of media every month. I’ve also been hearing far more commonly in the last few years about people using pirate streaming services instead of downloads.
If you want the full picture, you’ve gotta expand your demographics. When you only ask the straight white men, all you get is what straight white men think, instead of the whole community’s opinion.
Torrent Freak is not a piracy website. They are a news publication that talks about torrenting and piracy. They describe themselves as follows:
TorrentFreak is a publication dedicated to bringing the latest news about copyright, privacy, and everything related to filesharing. We are not a news aggregator but focus on unique and fresh stories. TorrentFreak is where news and copyright issues collide.
For this specific article, they mention that they
estimated based on sample data from several sources, including I Know.
The source article in question:
https://torrentfreak.com/the-last-of-us-is-the-most-pirated-tv-show-of-2023-231225/
Ah, my bad. Could have sworn they were an indexer; but it’s been a while since I’ve used torrents.
“several sources” is rather… ‘trust us’. Not a fan of that kind of reporting. But I know what you download is something at least.
That expands the scope to several public indexer sites instead of just one, but it’s still only public peer-to-peer (torrent) traffic being measured. Usenet, direct download, private/pirate streaming, and private peer-to-peer are still left out.
Oh for sure, it’s pretty hand wavey, and doesn’t cover everything, but it’s at least something!
So, back to the original question: what makes you think that using public torrent trackers are not representative of the bigger picture?
Yes, obviously not being able to use private stats from private sources narrows the scope, but what makes you think it cannot be extrapolated? Personally, I think that private trackers or usenet would paint the same picture, and niche providers would be too small to make a dent in the stats.
Because I’m more interested in data than opinion. Maybe they’re the same, maybe they aren’t; without any data to back it up, that’s all it is, opinions.
When I said the numbers muddy, I’m not saying they’re wrong necessarily; just that they become quite unclear. You can’t be sure they’re accurate because you’re making assumptions to reach them.
Part of this stems from an opinion of my own however: that public torrents are a shrinking market share of piracy. More and more I see conversations dominated by streams, private torrent trackers, and usenet. That’s not to say they’ve disappeared or ever will, but other means seem more common lately. Though that’s admittedly hard to gauge.
A small slice can give you an idea of what the bigger picture may be, but the smaller the slice the less chance that idea will be accurate. Take a jigsaw puzzle for example: if I only look at 10% of the pieces I may get enough detail to figure out what the image is supposed to be, or maybe I’ll only get pieces of the empty blue sky… (or is that water… I can’t tell)
“This actual data isn’t data. My personal anecdotes are data”
law of large numbers: it’s probably fairly representative
Well, not like you can own anything anymore.
Yeah bruh, I can’t be bothered with subscriptions & shit.
But it’s this specific show, so I wonder if people were interested enough to check it out but not enough to pay to do so, which would track for TLOU and especially for a video game adaptation.
I don’t get it, the title actually says what the point is… wtf is going on here. Shouldn’t it say “#1 pirated show of 2023 revealed!!!” or “NETFLIX BEATS OUT DISNEY WITH SURPRISE PIRACY RANKING!!”
It’s almost 2024, I didn’t think meaningful titles were allowed anymore.
I will give it my clicks, as a reward.
I’d put money on Australia being the top country to pirate it, no one wants to give Foxtel money to watch a HBO show.
The most popular show is also the one most pirated…
Amazing stuff
I didn’t pirate the show at first, because I could watch it legit on the streaming service I use. But that service consistently shit the bed each Sunday when the show aired.
I think I may have actually pirated this one at some point. Never intended to watch it, just a grab and seed sort of deal
REALLY tried to like it. Watched the whole thing but then afterwards, I felt like I had watched nothing. The farther away I get from the show, the more I dislike it. All of the acting was great. And when they got away from the video game, the story was wonderful. But I felt like I was watching a video game - which I was in a way. And I felt like it was trying way to hard to be profound. It’s sad because I thought that “Chernobyl” was one of the best things I’ve ever watched on television.
Edit: Completely realize that this post was not about TLoU but just needed to get this off my chest. When everyone raves about it, I feel like I’ve been taking crazy pills. On the subject of the post, yes, streaming services are getting way too expensive and I think we’ll reach an inflection point soon where they will all start collapsing at once.
It’s a very plot-driven story with very little deviation from the main mission. I loved the show but I agree that the plot is especially linear (much like a video game) and without the in-between bits where you’d be playing the game in the original story the pacing can feel rushed.
I think the show could have benefited from more time with Joel and Ellie to develop their relationship but I don’t know how they could have done that without bloating the story with filler that wasn’t original to the game, which would not have gone over well.
It was very average. Nothing much happened, the zombies were 0 threat, Joel was a pussy compared to the game. Ellie was just a potty mouth. The gay episode was great in isolation, but a pointless waste of an hour in the grand scheme as it added 0 to the story.
5 or 6 out of 10.
Because Now TV is a piece of shit.
it’s a quantity/quality problem. you really need to need to rely on word of mouth because there’s just so much to sort through and a lot of it is bad or could have been better. Sure , you get your hits like squid games that it’s hard to not know about it , but something like Severance on Apple TV + , I probably wouldn’t have watched it on my own despite having the service.
Yup, I haven’t watched a TV series in ages other than those “gameshows” like “Is it Cake” or whatever, and we’re mostly there to guess who’ll win.
My kids watch lots of shows, but I would honestly be fine cancelling my subscriptions and just playing video games if it wasn’t for them.
Before they changed to HBO max, it was the only streaming service worth paying for. Once they started removing their own god damn shows, it was back to the bay.
You’re welcome
