Every month, many millions of Americans visit pirate streaming site FMovies to bypass paid subscription services and watch movies and TV series for free. The platform is a thorn in the side of the movie industry and a prime exhibit in the quest for local site-blocking measures. According to SimilarWeb’s Top 10 chart of U.S. ‘Streaming & Online TV’ sites, FMovies beats Disney+ and Crunchyroll.

  • aldalire@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    8 months ago

    Let the free market run its course and let pirate sites compete with streaming services to improve their services.

    • Kichae@lemmy.ca
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      8 months ago

      Let the free market run its course and let pirate sites compete with streaming services to improve their services.

      Hate to break it to you, but regulatory capture is the free market running its course.

    • PirateJesus@lemmy.todayOP
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      8 months ago

      Let the free market run its course and let pirate sites compete with streaming services to improve their services.

      The only way they can loose that race is tying themselves to an anvil and taking a shotgun to both kneecaps, and it would still be close.

      Non Sanctified streaming sites can’t load balance automatically, customers have to manually switch between different video sources. 4K isn’t even an option. So many many ads. And adblockers on mobile aren’t as good. Downloading for offline viewing is a joke. Captions sometimes completely broken, and only a few languages. What’s audio description?

      Netflix so freaked out that people will just download a copy of the whole thing. But it’s happening already, and most people cannot afford to have 4k copies of the office filling up their only harddrive. Datahoarders are a tiny tiny minority.

  • streetfestival@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    Crap, I use FMovies. If the site is making headlines like this I’m probably going to need another site soon

  • Zedstrian@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    8 months ago

    Wouldn’t SimilarWeb not be counting people who watch streaming services via apps rather than their websites? As that would be most of the traffic for those services, it not being counted would skew results in favor of FMovies, since it doesn’t have a comparable app.

      • fosstulate@iusearchlinux.fyi
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        8 months ago

        Are you trolling? No enterprise would ever compete with free. They will scream for an onerous legislative solution, which will make all our lives more difficult.