Lingen, soulseek and piratebay are all very much alive from what I've read.

Its not the Napster era of finding any obscure stuff because torrents work on popularity, but should be good enough for 95% of your searches.

Besides, at this point, I believe Piratebay will survive forever.

> Is it as easy to steal as it used to be?

Yes. The quality is better and it can be easily automated with Sonarr, Radarr et al. Torrents are not the way to go imho, but Usenet is amazing (notably it isn’t necessarily free).

There is content that isn’t available in my region or the legal options are worse in some way (resolution, app UI etc).

I pay for several streaming services (mainly to keep my conscience clear) but watch their shows via pirated means as the experience is better.

As the provider options get broader, the piracy option also gets more attractive as it’s all in one place.

As the sibling comment pointed out, it is SO much easier than it was.

I hopped back into it about 3y ago. I’ve got a NAS running on my local network with sonarr to snatch new tv shows and radarr for new movies.

In practice, if I decide I want to watch a movie I can reliably pull down something high quality within 2-10m (depending on how esoteric it is) and then be watching it on our tv.

When paramount decided not to let lower decks season 1 outside the US, I went to pirate bay and got it. Also had to get some torrent software having not used one for years. Worked flawlessly.

The risk of companies that literally refuse to take money for their products is people will just get them elsewhere, but once you force people to open that door, you knock down a major barrier.