zlacker

+1 - Another pirate user here. I have a Prime & NetFlix account but I purposefully never use it and still prefer to download pirated copies of their show (mainly for better video quality, convenience of offline viewing in any device and most importantly protecting my privacy). I have no doubt that there is no stopping advertisement on streaming platform and it will equal the level on television once it becomes normalised, and will be even worse because it will BE accompanied with more datamining of our personal data and tracking. Many smart TVs are already using the built-in webcam and microphone to determine how you watch ads, and all this intrusive method of monitoring is only going to get worse.

>>webmob+(OP)
Unless you have an antiquated internet connection, you should be seeing 4k HDR video. A movie in 4k is anywhere from 10-30 gigs and often you can’t find all content at this quality level. So, in theory using the service directly should give you better video quality unless you’re waiting to download 5-15 gigs per hour of content you want the option to watch.

>>parent+4W6
To clarify, it's about quality and file size - I find that some pirates do a better job of offering high quality videos with better compression (and thus smaller file size). Especially if they use more modern codecs like HEVC. (And right now, I don't really care about 4k quality or Dolby vision). The ability to watch it offline (without any nonsensical 24-48 hour limitation) in any device is the real pleasure (I used to be able to connect my iPad to my TV to watch some series on Prime, but they annoyingly disabled support for that).

But as I also mentioned, all the above pales in comparison to their plan to spy and profile us to serve us ads, when the very reason that people have dumped TV and pay a premium for streaming platform is to avoid advertisements.