Yeah sites like 123 movies or fmovies are gray streaming sites. It’s not illegal for you to do so (at least in the U.S) but the site owners are downloading and sharing those copyrighted goods for you to stream.
I think Plex is better for newbies, less setup and most will want to watch outside of their network easily with little setup. That said, Plex is getting a bit enshittified so I’ve been eyeing the switch to jellyfin just in case (I’m not a newbie, k simply was when I started using Plex and don’t want to deal with the change if I don’t have to)
Since this is in nostupidquesrions and not a piracy community I’ll offer a different take:
Try your local library for physical copies. Depending on your library system, it may be free (or low cost) to have copies sent from other branches. Again depending on your system it may be possible to get copies from libraries outside of the system through Inter Library Loans (ILL) if your library participates.
Also library systems may have access to some streaming content, depends on your system. Some large cities, like NYC, offer library cards to everyone in t the state.
Tangentially related, the Internet Archive also hosts tons of material you might not find anywhere else. Probably not what you’re looking for, but I’ve found things like Mister Rogers episodes there that aren’t available on Amazon or DVDs. Quality of content may vary and you’re more likely to find older content there.
Libraries existed before any licensing or copyright even existed lol. The entire point is to ‘copy’ information, which is exactly what happens when you let many people look at the same clay tablet or whatever. Peer to peer.
You could literally sit there and copy from someone else’s scroll on to your own scroll.
Adding on, in what might seem like an inane answer, but also worth checking out the local free to air television. Some of them may have apps or other means of watching on demand, if you don’t feel like taking the traditional route of watching whatever it is is on the television at a given time.
For example, if you have a TV licence, you can just stream stuff from the BBC through their Web player.
Not possible. Even if you have free Internet you’ll never get “all” TV shows and movies for free. Some shows and movies are on subscription services and were born there.
If you happen to find that it is possible, please share.
Pay who? As a Canadian there are TV shows I actually can’t legally pay to watch because of bullshit licensing crap - there are also ones exclusively available to stream through cable providers that don’t operate in my municipality. And, lastly, I was cool paying for Netflix… I am less cool paying for Netflix, Crave, Apple TV, Disney+, Hulu (I actually can’t legally pay for that one), Peacock and whatever the fuck else.
I am a consumer that’s willing to pay a reasonable price for media, I’m not willing to pay 50 companies 15/month.
Wut? Personally the closest thing to TV that I watch is probably Dimension20 on dropout - I just wanted to highlight that it’s actually impossible to watch some TV shows. That’s how shitty streaming has gotten and why pirating is gaining popularity again.
For a while it was actually less of a pain to do things legally, but now greed has enshittified us to the point where it’s less potentially expensive (viruses, legal exposure etc…) to pirate shit than pay for it.
This is also one of the reasons that Steam has drastically reduced video game piracy in most cases - it’s easier to just buy it and accept their ToS… but you’ll still see ubisoft shit pirated all the time: nobody wants uplay on their machine and the games actually run better for pirates after they strip out malware like Denuvo.
Make your product good and reasonably priced and you’ll reduce piracy more than any amount of shitty DRM crap.
Especially with all the price increases + lots of them showing ads anyway? I’m good. Time to put my eyepatch back on and get out on the seven seas bc I ain’t doing this anymore.
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