I remember a few years ago when our niece came to visit. One evening, we started watching a movie on Netflix together.

We only made it halfway before bedtime, but since she was coming back in two weeks, we decided to save the rest for her next visit.

Two weeks later, she returned, bouncing with excitement to finally see how the story ended. We opened Netflix, ready to hit play - and lo and behold… the movie had vanished from the catalog.

Be a cool uncle, be a pirate.

> She opens Netflix, and ⅔ of the films have now "expired"

I have given up saving Netflix titles in advance of travel because this has happened to me too many times. What is bizarre is you can only "download" them a certain number of times, despite being expired. So I now cannot download some shows ever again.

Nobody loses money if I cache a Netflix show to my device. The limitation is bizarre.

I've lost access to YouTube premium features just because my phone was not the United States for a couple of weeks.

As soon as I was back on a US ip, features just came right back.

Last I checked, background play with VLC just works regardless of where you are physically located at the time.

Getting 'em started early. You arr a great dad!

I tried to download something from Netflix recently. The download wouldn’t process. It got stuck partway. Not an issue, I’ll just delete it and redownload.

Nope. There’s a limit to the number of downloads on some content. I wasted mine trying to get the download to even work.

That reminds me of some passengers I sat on a flight next to once.. they tried to watch something on their iPad, but because we were about to depart from a country foreign to theirs, it got region-blocked...

Not that I pitied them, they were obnoxiously late and boarded with 5 bags (the stiff rectangular bags boutique stores have) of shopping...

In a weird quirk that must be a bug, you can watch the first season of the Good Place in French in the USA but not in Canada.

This is what did it for me too. Why would I pay for a crappy UX and ads? But all these companies need numbers to keep going up, so they keep tightening the screws.

It still exists. I'm currently paying for the ad free add on and often cancel and resubscribe to it before I'm about to watch anything.

Annoyingly though, even with that, it'll still show you skipable ads about other shows they have once before you start something in a session.

This is absolutely not true.

I pay an ungodly combined amount of money to various streaming services, but must still occasionally resort to TPB. Which "just works", unlike said streaming services.

Within reason, it's not a money problem (within reason; media conglomerates would love for me to sell my kidney in order to watch their premium shows, but that's not going to happen).I would rather just pay for the problem to go away, but Netflix, Disney et al just disagree.

Not necessarily true, as the success of streaming shows. The problem comes when the unbounded greed of the billionaires in charge leads them to inflate prices beyond their customers' ability and willingness to pay.

That's a big if.

More importantly, Gabe is fundamentally right. I'm subscribed to most available streaming services in my country, and when I still cannot find what I want due to obscure reasons (e.g. region locked, or Disney decided to not make it available anywhere for who knows which reason), you can be pretty sure I'll be sailing the seas of the corsair.

It is a service problem.

People can and do download games for free all the time and Steam is still there. People pay for Spotify when music has been openly free since Napster was the zeitgeist.