What's your favorite platform for buying shows and movies digitally?
My favorite platform is iTunes, because it lets you download the files for offline viewing, and removing the DRM is trivially simple.
You guys are buying shows and movies?
Well, I want them to keep making shows and movies after all...
Well, an EU study a few years back found that online piracy has little affect on actual legal sales, except for newly released movies which took like a 4.4% knock on their box-office sales.
Games apparently see an increase in sales, with 100 illegal downloads spurring 24 additional legal transactions than would have otherwise occurred.
Here's a link to the study itself for anyone interested in getting into the weeds.
That said, I support studios/musicians/devs that I care about by buying their stuff.
I refuse to subscribe to the 10+ mainstream streaming services, though. I’m voting with my money, and the current streaming landscape is just as anti-consumer as cable TV was before it.
Until the streaming services can come together to create an open, decentralized protocol, they don’t get my money.
Piracy is an accessibility issue.
I recently got into Real-Debrid and I've used it via Stremio. Works wonderfully but I still am uneasy about needing an account where all my activity and very likely IP addresses and all are centralised. All it takes is a single VPN fail to compromise the whole account and myself too. I guess people use the service by constantly creating new accounts and scrapping the old ones?
Meh, Kodi is over complicated and bloated. Stremio, Syncler, Weyd- all are streamlined and work really well.
Need to refigure out how to do this on my roku TV since everything is going up in price next month
Sorry for the rant but I only buy music from Bandcamp because it's DRM-free. I don't want to rely on obscure proprietary programs to remove DRM, and also most of the shows I would buy are region-restricted which means that I cannot legally buy them.
But yes, since I'm an Apple user, I go to iTunes when I want to rent a movie (maybe twice a year).
Aren’t DRM removal tools generally open source though?
I don’t disagree with the sentiment at all. If I can buy something without DRM, I will.
Nice. Yeah nowadays I get something on 4K UHD Blu-Ray if it's in 4K, and if not, I get it in Blu-Ray if I can.
The only case in which I'll get something on iTunes is if iTunes has it in HD and there's no Blu-Ray release yet (like 9-1-1), or there's no physical release at all (like The Carmichael Show). The vast majority of what I buy is still physical media.
I use Amazon prime to buy movies. Mostly because I have a fire stick and it is convenient. Also, I like having all need digital stuff in one places.
Lastly, I think prime uses the movies anywhere features when allowed by the distributor, which means I should be able to watch them with other services.
Nowhere, because you can't buy them, you buy a revocable license to access them.
Piracy is the only stable platform for this. I'm constantly moving between services following the "seasons" of the things I like rather than continuing to pay during the droughts.
It used to be Netflix though. Back when they were one of the only streaming services and had a way bigger back catalogue of syndicated shows.
The worst is Paramount +. They absconded all the Star Trek there, and the service has literally never actually worked for me to watch anything on it, so I end up pirating Discovery, Picard and Lower Decks anyway.
Rigging the sails! Har har!
[repeating 'buying' like the cop in the big lebowski says 'leads']
We got them buying in shifts!
Does rarbg_db.sqlite count?
EBay for discs, Bandcamp for digital audio.
iTunes purchases still let you do that? I might have to get back into it
They're usually 1080p at most for the downloads, FYI. You can't download the 4K versions (at the moment anyway). At least, that was the case the last time I checked.
I believe you can download 4K versions, but the DRM-removing software I use, ViWizard, only works on an old version of iTunes. So for example I bought Trolls World Tour in 4K when it came out, but my DRM free copy is in 1080p because my app is old.
Anything, so long as it is compatible with MoviesAnywhere.
Physical media!
I 100% own a copy. I don't have to hunt it down, pay a subscription, and my caveman brain can hold it and put it on a shelf, and that makes me happy.
Glad you're happy, but isn't 'digitally'...
Hey you don't know, maybe he bought it with his fingers.
It's digital if it's on DVD and Bluray :D
You don't own a copy when you purchase it via physical media. You're buying access to view the content, same as a digital purchase.
If I do purchase a downloadable movie it’s from iTunes. Being in the Apple ecosystem makes this an easy choice.
My preferred option is still physical media.
Sonarr and radarr ¯(ツ)_/¯
Blockbuster, simply because they (at least used to have) the best pricing, though the app is not very good. Now days I tend to use YouTube more since the prices on Blockbuster has gone up. This is probably a local thing. I guess prices probably differ between diffent regions.
IPT. If you know, you know.
I use Cheap Charts in conjunction with Movies Anywhere to take advantage of whatever sales there are across different platforms and to hopefully keep my small collection as platform agnostic as possible. For movies that aren't eligible, I stick to iTunes as my main service.
I pirate them (legally, because our laws are not entirely anti-consumer).
Apple is my platform of choice these days. Full disclosure, I’m pretty well embedded in the Apple eco system and it’s been my consumer tech of choice for over 20 years.
I live in the UK and have recently cut the cord with Sky (for my non UK friends, Sky is essentially the equivalent of a cable service in the states), and I had a number of movies purchased through their store. Although I can still see those movies on an iPad, it’s not easy to watch them on a TV, so I’ve essentially lost those purchases.
In light of that experience, Apple feels the most future proof for me with Amazon Prime a close second.
I also recently “binned” most of my DVD/Blu Ray collection, but before doing so, I looked up what platforms they were available to stream/buy from. Out of just over 200 discs, Apple won with 122 available with Prime on 114.
Amazon.
It’s convenient.
I would download a car before installing itunes again
