The old economy is never sustainable because the people it props up die.

Growth is slow but collapse is fast because it takes decades for those people to build, earn their status.

With our eggs in one basket, a small group of elders, they all die off within just a decade or so of each other. A much faster process than the 30-40 years it took to for them to grow their worth to trickle down on us.

Entropy tears apart all structure. Its mechanism for tearing apart society is generational churn.

Time is non-linear. No thing has the same epoch and erodes at the same tick. Endless linear economic growth will never be because once dead belief the elders were rich has to be rethought.

This would be much easier said than done, most video segments are served up by CDNs, so it would have to be done via processing on CDN edge nodes. Cloudflare might support something like this but most CDNs don't as far as I'm aware. Doing it server-side would kill CDN cache hit rates and massively increase cost.

Filter it out with some combination of ffmpeg and LLMs? Super easy if it's being served using HLS and .ts files. Also, in the case of over the air, you can just pull the signal locally out of the air at no cost. You can easily forward that local over the air signal to a private group (using ATSC to IP gateways and converters), and create a mesh if you have folks distributed geographically, each hosting an antenna and shipping an IP stream (which Plex and other systems can consume, not sure if Jellyfin supports this though).

https://www.antennasdirect.com/big-game-tv-station-list.html

https://www.wgal.com/article/consumer-super-bowl-2026-antenn...

https://www.silicondust.com/hdhomerun/

No, because they'd have to decompress and then recompress every stream. This would reduce already-lame quality (not that they'd particularly care) and require a bunch of resources.

i think normally they just display a number on the screen

NFL does ~$23B/year in revenue, and is targeting ~$25B/year by 2027, there is no victim for those not paying them. In various US markets, the content is free over the air. To take the other side of the "entitlement" argument, I am fascinated by the "Felony Contempt of Business Model" mental model.

"You can just do things." Public airwaves? Consumer owned compute enabling adversarial consumption and interoperability? Good luck.

Mission Accomplished: NFL to Hit Goodell’s $25B Revenue Goal - https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/mission-accomplished-nfl-h... - February 2nd, 2026

Desire, convenience, and price are always in tension. Someone may desire to watch something, but it's too inconvenient. It may also be that there is not enough convenience for the price being paid. We see this issue regularly with DRM.

Do people need to watch the content? No. Are people entitled to the content? Is it "stealing" or not? That last one is probably up for date.

Regardless, the answers to those questions don't matter in the end. The public has made its demands clear time after time. The rightsholders can either deliver a convenient experience at a reasonable* price, or they can play whack-a-mole with pirates forever. Spotify managed to do it; Steam managed to do it. Only video media companies are so stubborn these days.

*There is always much debate on what constitutes a "reasonable" price, but it is certainly no more than a consumer is willing to pay. If that's less than the cost of producing the product, then perhaps the business model simply isn't viable.

For me, it’s not that I feel entitled to it. It’s that it’s available, and I don’t feel any moral problems with taking it.

The entitlement comes after being ripped off.

Gonna need quite a large swing back in the favor of regular people since we're being squeezed by endless subscriptions already before I have any sympathy for the multi-billion dollar corporations.

So maybe it's just that. Life feels like it should be better although it's the best it's ever been in many first-world countries. I am sure that entitled attitude is very common among rich people too.

In some areas, you can 'pirate' live TV directly from the sky!

You need this thing called an 'antenna' which captures invisible radio waves and decodes them into a picture with audio. You can't pause or rewind, and you have to be in front of the TV at specific times, so it is not precis the same, but you can access TV this way.

I've given up on tv and while I still pay Netflix for kids programming, I pay ... other people who have a better understanding of the actual value of this sort of entertainment _and_ the way I like to consume it.

I don't think people feel entitled to free entertainment, they're just tired of being so badly ripped off.

It used to be that you'd pay one company a little extra, and get all the extra channels you actually wanted. Now you pay multiple companies _a lot_ extra, and still might miss out on what you want.

Many people still remember the original deal.

>People like to say that it’s not stealing because there is no physical product the producer is being deprived of, which is factually true, but even so why are you entitled to it at no cost?

Well, the major services like Google and Facebook provide content without requiring payment because they extract value from their surveillance of user behavior, plus ads. The users have now accepted that they are the product, but they get little kickback in the form of entertainment. Why should TV be any different?

It can be a bit frustrating that these services:

* Continually remove good content

* Continually produce 'new and exciting' series only to cancel them after 1-2 seasons

* Continually raise the price

* Continually split off into ever more services - so instead of having 1 or even 3 good streaming services, there are dozens of them with limited content

I would not mind paying for 1-3 good, well-made services with a reasonable price tag. As it stands, I would need to pay for more like 8+ to get coverage of what I want to watch, and their prices are all $20+ a month. And almost every month I'd find something I really enjoy has been taken down. I'm not paying $160 a month for streaming that I barely use. I cancelled all of mine.

I can understand someone jumping to piracy. These services are terrible and don't need to be - they're that way because of absurd greed.

I watch cable TV only in hotels and it is infuriating. Almost every channel has 5 min long ad breaks. It’s almost impossible to watch anything since you’re constantly switching channels. I don’t remember it being this bad when I was a kid.

That's because we do feel entitled to it. This century is the first in human history where people in power have decided that once something is created it's IP that belongs to the creator for well over a hundred years and maybe even forever.

Frankly, IP should last 7 years, 14 at the most.

Why are we paying for Alf year after year, decade after decade?

Why are we required to pay for stuff while also being advertised to and having our data sold?

Now when you do buy something, you're buying a revokable license you can't even buy it and own it.

We'll if buying isn't ownership, then pirating it isn't stealing it. Plain and simple.

Information wants to be free. All gatekeepers of information are ontologically evil. Aaron Swartz was a saint and he'd smile on current GenAI systems.

> went around and made exclusive deals and forced us back into the same monthly amounts

I've said this for years but most people probably don't watch more than 2 streamers / month every month. Pay for one month at a time and be pleasantly surprised at how many months you don't pay for 1 or more that you're paying for now.

A decent cable package was around $150/mo in the 90's, before streaming took hold. That's for scheduled programming only, and always with lots of ads.

Do you really think we're worse off today? Is anyone paying close to a 90's cable bill for their various streaming services? And is the quality the same as we endured back then?

It's not just exclusive deals. It's piecemeal deals. Just look at what you have to do to stream all of Pokemon. https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...

This is the reason people steal lol

[delayed]

Live TV streaming such as Youtube TV is just cable TV packaged as an internet streaming service which costs something like $80 USD per month. In addition you have a $10-20+ Netflix subscription, Disney+/Hulu, Paramount, HBO etc. All that on top of your $50-$100+/month internet service. I know people spending over 250/month on multiple streaming services.