Whoever prefers the hassle and crappy experience of using Bittorrent instead of spending a few bucks a month for Netflix, their money isn't worth chasing. It would be like Econolodge trying to market to the homeless population.
I'm not in the U.S. so I can't spend a few bucks on Netflix. But your bad experience with BitTorrent is probably purely a function of using the wrong trackers.
I have access to some trackers where the download very rarely goes below 2MB/s, with 5-8MB/s being the average. Some of these have material like discontinued music and foreign films that I could never get where I live, at least not without significant hassle.
With this setup I can initiate a download for a foreign 720p film, go and make some tea, and it'll be there by the time I come back.
That's quality of service I can't even pay for where I live, no matter how much cash I fork out.
Yes. Everything I found was junk; it was like Gnutella all over again. The last time I tried to download a movie torrent, it turned out to be porn of a type that I do not want on my hard drive. (That's why it was the last time.)
To me, that result seems really non-typical. For the majority of movies you're going to have hundreds of seeders -- they're not going to keep mislabeled movies-as-porn.
Most of them are pseudo-private. I.e. they'll open up signups from time to time. It's often only an issue of doing some basic research about what sort of tracker you'd like access to, then subscribing to their news feed.
Well, but that's exactly what I'm talking about - P2P does provide a really useful service, and I use it, too, for the same reasons. It's just that all things considered, I'd rather pay somebody to do it for me, especially given that NetFlix is ridiculously cheap for the convenience it gives me.
P2P is free in terms of money, but it's not at all free in terms of the effort you have to put into it to get reasonable, useful results. I don't want to do that; I have other things to do with my time and the time in my life when I liked ferreting out the dark corners of the world passed long ago (in my case, it was discovering that our stereo's radio band selector could cause it to pick up shortwave when positioned correctly - that summer, I learned that the Soviet Union was a paradise for academics and artists).
I don't have the time to find the right trackers, and there's the ever-present danger of the RIAA sending me a nastygram - or, as happened before I turned on security on my WiFi, sending my ISP a nastygram about movies downloaded. That sucked. This neighborhood is dirt poor, and I didn't mind sparing some bandwidth, but if my ISP is forced to turn me off if I don't police it?
That's the hassle of P2P, unfortunately. My beef is that if the RIAA were roughly as intelligent and mature as my 11-year-old, I'd be able to keep my WiFi open and buy movies online for reasonable amounts of money.
So when an otherwise excellent article like this slips in an incorrect assertion about evil pirates without justifying it, that really burns me. There are perfectly good business opportunities that the "rightsholders" (god how I hate that word) are too fat and lazy to take advantage of - but plenty of lawyers.
I don't think your experience is really that common. First of all, I get most of my TV from bittorrent via RSS. I just subscribe and it's automatically on my harddrive ready to plan less than 24 hours after it aired with the commercials clipped out. No special sites required. No logins. No hassle at all.
For movies, same deal. As long the movie is out on DVD, I can find it in minutes from any popular search site and have it downloaded within 30 minutes. I've never had a bad result. As for RIAA, I do have an IP filter installed but even that was extremely easy.
I suspect you're vastly overestimating the hassle in using Bittorrent. But it is true that most people don't want to bother learning even the simplest things.
I agree with your comment, but it stings to think of myself as a "homeless" - these things tend not to work in Uruguay* (my home country), and even if they do, they're illegal anyways.
Being a small South American country means large corporations often ignore you (it's cheaper than trying to cater to yet another mass of hungry legislators and tiny fiefdoms)
*that means I haven't actually tried Netflix itself despite it would be good for me, but I have tried similar services like Pandora and they aren't legally allowed here.
