nah, it's definitely a better UX if you do it right.

There are "shitty" ways to do piracy (usually the sketchy streaming alternatives). But the media management and playback tooling is genuinely great right now.

I still buy most of my media, but I pick up cheap physical copies of things and put them on a NAS for playback through jellyfin.

It's... MILES better than netflix/amazon/hulu/etc. No ads, no bullshit, no marketing, no "self-promotion that's totally not an ad, wink wink". Just your media.

Playback is per-user, it keeps all your stuff just fine, you can resume later from wherever you left off, I can shuffle series (great for kids shows like Arthur or magic school bus), and it's never offline, down, or unavailable.

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Basically - you're very confused. I have "streaming" it just comes out of my own equipment, playing my own content. All the affordances are there and it has none of the bullshit.