And even if I was swimming in money, it's often easier to just download the shows I want and watch them on Plex/Jellyfin than trying to navigate the (often ad-riddled) interfaces of the various platforms and finding where the content I want is.
One example is Rick and Morty, it's made by Adult Swim, but they don't have a streaming service in Canada. It seems to be on Primevideo but under a different system than their regular content. The other way to watch it is to buy it from my cable provider (I don't have cable). So to watch a 20-minutes animated show I'd have to take a +40$ subscription.
Pirating is the only way to get accurate high-quality subtitles. I’ll automatically download them from Opensubtitles and then strip out the very distracting non-dialogue parts like “[ominous music]”. Also streaming services often have out-of-sync subtitles, like DS9 on prime video. With pirated content I automatically get perfectly synced dialogue-only subs in the exact font, size, and styling of my choosing.
Other benefits of pirating include:
- knowing exactly what bitrate/resolution you’re getting. Streaming services love to stealthily downgrade Chrome users to 720p. Pirated content often uses more computationally complex encoding letting you get more quality in fewer bits.
- easy playback of 4K content on the desktop. Often streaming services restrict 4K to certain hardware devices only. (where they can do L1 DRM protection)
- general playback flexibility. Instead of relying on each streaming service's bespoke interface, I can use my preferred media player (IINA/mpv) with all my favourite keybindings. Also, I can try out things like vapoursynth motion interpolation to get pseudo-60fps, or real-time upscaling of cartoons with Anime4K.