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Only one techhead person has to setup the system, and then share access to it with all of their friends. And then given everyone's total inability to keep a secret, logins get shared far and wide. Those friends just open the app, find a show, and hit play. On the backend, there's an RSS feed hooked up to an auto-downloader, because DevOps is all about automating toil, and finding, downloading, and then futzing with VLC to find and play the file, is the definition of toil.

I have no idea how many people know someone who's dedicated enough to setup such as system, but there are many such systems, so I don't think it's moot. Nor is this a prediction of the future, this exists, with many users already.

Who's going to pay for it? Netflix. Despite not needing to pay them to watch their shows, Netflix still gets my money. Netflix pays producers for shows that are on Netflix, so those producers still get my money. It's going to be a hard sell to pay for additional services, as the post we're commenting point out.

The non-Netflix services that will survive, regardless, is anything that must be watched in real-time, aka sports. Those add up quick! NFL, NBA, MLB, and UFC all charge a pretty penny to watch their events live. There are pirate streams though, but for dedicated fans, on the real thing is good enough.



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