After 15 Years, the Pirate Bay Still Can’t Be Killed
Although I am a customer of some streaming services (they are convenient and have good and bad stuff), it is often nice to just get a file for a specific song or movie - and that is <i>most</i> convenient via torrenting.<p>People <i>do</i> sign up for streaming services, but not for like, 10. Furthermore torrenting got really convenient and is very fast with adequate Internet (let&#x27;s say 10MByte&#x2F;s), so you get a decent quality movie in under 5 minutes (obviously only if there are enough seeders - but the availability of torrents completely dwarfs the availability of streaming providers - if it&#x27;s really unpopular and maybe a little bit older you just won&#x27;t find it on streaming services).<p>Beside the fact that BitTorrent is an interesting protocol in itself, imagine just how much simpler Netflix or Spotify could be implemented, if we wouldn&#x27;t <i>stream</i> DRM encrypted blobs, but download files? You just need many big fat file-servers and put your media there - if we wouldn&#x27;t have DRM (AFAIK all streaming providers enforce DRM), this is technically a solved problem.