> Even among pirates, file-sharing is no longer as relevant as it once was. Most pirate sites today are streaming-based and BitTorrent lost pretty much all of its ‘market share’ there too.<p>It seems like having a NAS full of music and movies is starting to become “Grandpa Technology.” To people who have become utterly reliant on streaming, I’d ask: what happens when the pirate stream is taken down, or the (legit) Netflix removes it from their library, or your Internet goes down, or any other event that causes a denial of access? To me, “files on disk” is still the simplest and most reliable way to collect/consume media. The apocalypse could come, and as long as I have a power source, I’ll have access to my 80’s New Wave Hits playlist.<p>It seems so weird to voluntarily replace that with something as fragile and inter-dependent as streaming, but maybe I’m just an old man set in his ways.
> This marks the end of a period of declining dominance that started two decades ago when BitTorrent reportedly accounted for a third of all web traffic.<p>Weird thing to claim because bittorrent traffic is not web traffic at all.<p>> Most pirate sites today are streaming-based and BitTorrent lost pretty much all of its ‘market share’ there too.<p>I don't really agree. Rarbg was a huge loss though. But I don't know anyone that uses pirate streaming sites. And they're so prone to takedowns.
I wonder if this is related to the shift in media consumption habits more than anything.<p>Empirically from my experiences, I’ve shifted from watching “official” content (e.g., TV shows, movies, etc) to watching a lot more YouTube content. I still watch traditional content, but I also watch a boatload more YouTube than I did 5 or even 10 years ago. There’s just so much out there on YouTube you can pretty much always watch something for a certain topic.<p>Since there’s no need to pirate YouTube content, there’s less need/desire to use BitTorrent in the first place.