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Non-tech. I decided to self host first to send media to my TV. I wanted an always-on solid state hard drive computer that didn’t have to do any transcoding. Tried DLNA but Emby just worked better. Jellyfin didn’t have an LG App at the time so I’m still using Emby. Eventually I also asked my poor ARM server with 2 GB of RAM to also run my wireless access points, but the Omada software is a resource hog. So I have a little Intel machine that can do Omada better and also transcoding for Emby on the go. And then I learned about HomeBridge and that’s been great too. I think together the two computers run about 15W of energy I could decommission the ARM one but it does a couple things I haven’t migrated yet. I’ve tried hosting other stuff but those are the main ones used every day.
Media piracy cannot be stopped. Don’t forget there was media piracy before the internet too. But back then it was physical piracy, and somebody made money on another’s work. That kind of piracy will always be shut down, because it is actually stealing. The fat cats want their money.
But now we have a different kind. More like Robin Hood. Digital piracy takes something and copies it, giving it away for free. The biggest risk for piracy, is that the content holders offer their product at a price so low, it would be horribly inconvenient to pirate it. For example if Apple Music just had you pay a few pennies per song instead of monthly. You’d load up $20 and listen to a lot of music. If TV series offered ad-free streaming for like $0.25 per episode. If movies could be watched for $1. If academic journal articles could be accessed for $1.
But that will never happen. They’ve done the math. They make more money with subscriptions and pricing right at the edge of affordability for many. Why would they want to make less money?
Actually now that I’m thinking about it. The way for them to hurt piracy the most would be to give away low-bitrate copies of everything for free. Stream all the music you want at 96 kbps. Watch every TV series or movie at 480p. Download this ebook as a plain text file. Read this article with tiny thumbnail photos. Free version of game has low-res textures and 720p at 30fps. Even that wouldn’t end piracy, but it would be a lot less popular. It would be harder to find somebody to invest the time bypassing paywalls when you can read the text easily.
Anyway torrent cannot be stopped. It’s moving to onion and i2p, fully decentralized. There will be nobody to take down. Besides that there’s always independent nations who don’t care about digital piracy, who can host private trackers.