Yeah it’s pretty nice, basically every convenience of paid streaming services for free and every movie and TV show in one place.
If you use it I highly recommend the torrentio add on https://torrentio.strem.fun/configure
That’s why they raise it by 10%, not 5%.
Say sub is currently $100/year, they now have to pay $5, they get $5 less. If they raise by 5% to $105, they have to pay $5.25, they get 25c less than originally. But if they raise to $110, they have to pay $5.50, and suddenly they are getting $4.50 more than before, even though they are paying more taxes. And they can blame it on this so people don’t hate them as much and accept it.
That is supposedly the case in Australia as well but I haven’t got a letter from telstra since around 2004 and I have never used a VPN and watch all my shows and movies via torrents so either I’m extremely lucky or they stopped bothering.
Though recently I started paying the $4 / month for Real Debrid for better streaming performance, which is just as good as a VPN for torrent anonymity. I used to be fundamentally against the idea of paying anything to pirate but honestly this is worth it, I’ve even been able to watch a few shows that had 0 seeders because they were previously cached.
You could implement this for some shows and movies, but there’s one big problem. Disney shouldn’t have exclusivity rights to their own IPs? Netflix should have to give everyone else the shows they pay for and produce?
I get where you’re coming from in theory, but in practice it doesn’t make sense. It would be like saying Nintendo must release their games on xbox and playstation.
I’ve been liking searxng. It aggregates results from search engines you select and returns the results without being tracked by them.
https://docs.searxng.org/
https://searx.space/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SearXNG