Are torrents even the primary methods of piracy now? That's an actual question: I get the impression that a lot of piracy has switched to grey market file hosting and streaming sites, but I don't have the perspective to say if that's accurate.
My impression is that the tech-savvy people still use torrents, but nowadays they share these torrents with their less savvy group using things like Plex (and Plex alternatives).
That's what I've witnessed with my Portuguese and Spanish friends anyway. Extended groups who depend on one or more sources of "private Netflix (ie: Plex)".
The arrs are sweet. Plex serves media. Prowlarr maintains a list of torrent sites to use. Radarr for movies, sonarr for tv, and lidarr for music monitor things and auto download, move, rename, etc., and are tied into prowlarr for where to get them. Some examples, every new Minions movie or every new episode of The Witcher or every new album from IVE you can have auto download once available and get moved to the correct Plex library folder with the correct filename, and you can set up metadata requirements like size, bitrate, etc. for those the downloads. Overseerr has a slick ui for discovering media and requesting downloads; you can have it set up to use plex accounts where you or other users logged in with their plex account can request something, and it reaches out to the correct arr for that to do its thing according to the *arr settings for that media.
What's everything is set up, imagine a Netflix where you can also request something not available and get that added in the time it takes to download in the exact resolution, language, subs, etc., that you want with no more than a search and a click.
Yeah what's killing it though is the static prices of hard drives.
5 years ago I bought some 14TB drives for 229 euro. They are now still more expensive than that. This is really a bummer. Too many people move to cloud so the market for consumer HDDs is shit.
There is a full suite of software that helps with torrenting. They are the ARR software, it’s kind of a lose collection of open-source software. Radarr, sonarr, homarr, there are many others. Together, they make finding and organizing torrents very easy as long as you can set them up, typically with Docker.
I stumbled on a paid sub that i am able to access via IPTV / OTT.
Most of my network that is from LATAM seems to be on it. EU seems to be lagging, but iberians are jumping on it slowly. I have no idea what USA peeps are doing.
Buying it involved whatsapping with someone far away and sending pic of the wire sent page. It was cheap and fast, tho highly unorthodox
Service works well. Main issue is that most of the content is in spanish. Only about 2k movies are native english, but i suspect a big chunk of movies may have 2nd audio channel for eng. Most series seem to have that 2nd channel. Content is brand new and works. Also seems like there are a million live channels.
I dont trust web based streams anymore. Too many poppups and games being played with ads. It was only a matter of time until i got kissed by with drive-by malware.
this is the answer, Stremio is the easy-to-use solution that I setup for my parents and forgot about. the comments above with their complicated usenet setups reminds me of the famous hackers news comment when dropbox was released.
I use a plex share now. Soon as Netflix announced the password lockdown I quit their service and signed up to a plex share where I get 10 times the content, more simultaneous streams and all the way up to 4K resolution. Oh and the cost is slightly less then the cost of Netflix.
I don't believe torrents are the primary source. It's not hard to find illegal streaming websites nowadays and they are probably more convenient, but still a good source for malwares I guess.
I guess it depends on the market. In India, all streaming and file hosting sites with pirated tv / movies materials are immediately blocked now. As are nearly all torrent sites. But sharing torrent magnet links are still easier and cheaper than trying to bypass the ISP blocks. And once someone downloads something, it gets shared around a lot.
