It's probably some weird DRM where it needs to authenticate with their server in order to verify you're actually the one with an account. It's silly. The steps they take to try and stop piracy are what in fact drives most people to it.

I started downloading shows from several streaming services I pay for simply because of the number of repeating ads they'll run during a show. A 24 min runtime gets extended to 45 minutes for all the ads, which I was sitting through for months but when they only have two different ads on loop, WTF!? A man can only take so much!

Also, I pay for 4k streaming but because of compression or something else they are definitely not sending me 4k content. I was watching a movie on Netflix that I had forgot I pirated. Both were 4K but the quality of the pirated one was far superior.

That really grinds my gears

I remember a few years ago going on an international flight. I had Spotify premium and I spent a few hours sorting and downloading playlists and podcasts that I wanted to listen to on an eight hour flight. Tested, retested and everything worked fine.

Got on the plane, fifteen minutes in turn on my device to play some music .... NOTHING WORKED ... all the downloaded files I had set for offline were unusable. I couldn't believe it.

My next flights were like yours .... just downloada bunch of stuff and play them freely without headaches.

I remember trying to watch anime on Hulu recently. I have the sub with ads and the ads kept causing a desync in the subtitles. The ads they added kept causing problems with their player. So I just downloaded it because it was unwatchable.

Gabe was right, piracy is a service problem.

That's it. The great availability of streamed music(and downloaded for a fair price) is the reason why there aren't that much people who pirate music anymore, since it's easier to get it the legal way.

I did the same with Lower Decks when it first came out because even though I had a week of Paramount+, not one single thing I tried to view actually worked.

Who the hell would ever actually subscribe if the service doesn't even work when you're doing a free trial?

Pay for Plex and a seedbox or Usenet and be free while also having the best quality there is. I invested my money in a few HDDs and I watch from every service out there for peanuts.

I've done this before with Netflix too. I was trying to watch a show and it was constantly stuttering, pausing and dropping out to unwatchable resolution. I know it wasn't my internet connection because the torrent for the episode downloaded in like two minutes lol.

If you connected to the plane's Wi-Fi disney+ tries to validate before opening downloads or something like that, but the wifi usually blocks streaming requests

You need to put the phone in airplane mode, open disney+, then you can connect the Wi-Fi

On most of these services you can download but you must be connected to the internet to verify that you have the right to watch the file you downloaded.

I'm subscribed to a bunch of services through bundle packages with my phone and Internet and still pirate the shows I want because it's nice to have them all in one place and to know they won't be unavailable in the future.

I recently binged the entirety of Better Call Saul on Stremio using the Torrentio plugin. I have a Netflix sub.

I always pirate media even when I'm subscribed to a service. Most streaming services act up because I'm on Linux.

I am considering this. Since the Disney+ version of Futurama seems to add black bars to the top and bottom of the non-widescreen episodes.

Shiver me timbers.

Not exactly Disney plus but I had a similar issue regarding downloading Netflix shows to an SD card. There's a setting in Netflix to download to SD card however even if you select it, it won't work. You have to enable USB debugging and manually force the Netflix app to have SD card access. It's insane.

i basically have to pirate since that web drm stuff all the streaming sites use doesnt like my ancient laptop and im too broke to get a new one lol

I'm in another country for a while and can't get English subtitles on my Netflix content on my Nvidia Shield TV. I was using a translator app and pausing the video to understand garbled audio and gave up watching.

I don't dare contact support, so I'm planning to cancel and lean into my eye patch.