Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Money is not the issue to me. I'll happily pay for every episode I watch, maybe even per download. I just don't want my content scattered across different platforms in suboptimal quality and be forced to pay a fixed fee even if I just need the one show on that platform.

It's a service issue.

How so?

I have 32tb, bit overkill 8 tb HDD ~$180 X4= $720

Netflix (no ads) 22.99 22.99/720=31.3

As long as you use it for 3 or so years, it pays for itself. The only difference is you have both the hardware and the movies forever.

Not really over a 5 year period, especially if you talk about more than a single subscription service. If you mean by preserve as keeping a full 3-2-1 backup, then yeah sure, but most people don't need that. Double backup the truly important/rare content, everything else can be redownloaded in case of tragedy.

For posterity, 1 year of HBO Max or Disney+ is $150. Over 5 years that's $750. If you are someone who knows you annually rewatch content, then that's likely a guaranteed expense. Btw, if you pay month to month unless it's less than 8 months of the year, monthly is more expensive, so I'm being generous here. No managing monthly subscriptions is also a major benefit.

That price nets you at least six 8TB HDD's at $109 each, which 48TB is far more storage than most people would ever need so some of that cost can go to a power efficient Optiplex and some to spare for a VPN leaving you with at least 32TB.

As mentioned, each additional streaming service is going to exponentially increase that cost, further justifying your investment, and the peace of mind that whatever service hasn't removed it.

Technically you use your time to pay for "setting up and maintaining it" but... That's some BS honestly. Plex/Jellyfin are set up once and forget about them. Us nerds put in time to curate and go the extra mile, but most people can very easily have a simple low power server running. If they can set up the *arrs (not really very hard) then good automation for them, if not manually searching for what you want as you want it is one more step than a subscription. More steps if you need to sign up for the first time ;)

Granted - a streaming service doesn't charge you $325 for the initial server+storage, however streaming services also don't give you a lot of things for 2.10 years of streaming so I'd say it's worth the investment. And it definitely does not cost more to preserve your media if you subscribe to more than 1 service. If you subscribe to only one and cancel monthly and spend your time managing that then maybe. (but if you don't need 4k and consume that little content, you may still be better off with a Pi-like and a hard drive...)

It depends very much how and why you pirate. I guess for many it is a hobby, they are data horders, etc. If you only stream pirated media online and use free cracked software like I mostly do, it is also totally free to pirate. But it costs you another resource then: time! So yes, piracy has a cost, the effort you have to put into it. It's the same like trying to avoid the big five. Installing a custom os on your phone, blocking ads and intrusive trackers, selfhosting stuff etc all takes a lot of time and effort. So most people just pay for this stuff with their money or with their data out of convenience. When it gets too pricey, then they start finding alternatives. I would argue that we shouldn't let convenience deter us from trying to be independent and having our sovereignty over our personal data respected.