Rossmann is a New Yorker who started his own computer repair business and came to fame by creating videos showing and teaching Mac repairs while rambling about Apple screwing their customers. What makes Rossman different is that his repairs actually work (his business has been profitable for about a decade), his videos are highly educational, and his passion leads him to legal battles as a right-to-repair icon in courts around the country.

Yesterday, I watched and enjoyed his video “Piracy is completely justified":

Rossmann tends to get passionate and goes into long ramblings accompanied by strong language and finger gestures, so here’s the gist: He subscribed to Netflix to get access to a show in 4k on a new fancy TV set and ended up getting a much worse experience than he would if he just pirated the show. He provides proof showing that when he blocked his smart TV from accessing the internet (for which he has good reasons), he could only get 720p.

When I started watching Fallout on Amazon Prime the other day on my TV, I had to put up with wasteful Ads (I’m a New Yorker, and ads tend to be about cars and green grass). On my computer, on top of the ads, I had to turn off my VPN, and I couldn’t get rid of the black borders around the picture since it wasn’t cropped correctly for my ultrawide screen. I have iina, an excellent MPV-based player, which can fix the cropping issue while providing other helpful features, but that requires access to the show files, which are blocked and locked by Amazon, of course. If I were to download Fallout somewhere, I’d get the highest resolution experience, the right cropping and format for my screen, no ads, and probably better audio quality while at it.

Back to Rossman’s point: I’d get a better quality for pirating the show and not paying a dime. His clip further points out that even the service quality for pirated material today comes with better out-of-the-box experience and (surprisingly?) support than you’d get from Netflix, or in my case, Amazon. The bottom line is that you pay for a worse experience.