What you are describing is alternative frontend, not a piracy site. Alternative frontends hold no unauthorized copy of content. They can potentially infringe copyright by claiming authorship of content. That would make them fall under piracy from the legal standpoint but I never seen such sites.

Piracy normally implies content is physically located on site’s servers. This requires significant infrastructure for storage and content delivery.

Depends on the country

I mean there's more malicious threat actors involved in pirate streaming largely because it's actually very expensive to do. People aren't as likely to do it out of spite or a desire to share like on torrent sites. They must stay profitable against all odds or likely get arrested.

The ads on pirate streaming sites are often the worst out there. It's one of the few places you're still likely to find malicious code hidden in popup or banner ads. Everything else has gotten too corporate for that.

And if getting caught is what scares you about torrenting you can actually just not seed. It is an option, it's just a bit rude. Certainly not more rude than just expecting someone else to host a free streaming site for you and not try to steal your data/money/identity though.

I'm actually pretty sure this meme was made about pirate streaming sites. Hence the direct comparison saying that streaming sites inject more ads in the same way that pirate sites do. In fact I've seen almost this exact meme on Reddit and every comment in that thread was about streaming sites because that's what they all assumed it was about, because that's what piracy is to them. I was being quite literal and direct when I brought up Reddit's take on this.

I'm not saying what people should do, I'm just reporting on trends.

Pirate streaming is the bulk of piracy. Especially when you include sports. Most people just aren't tech savvy enough for torrents anymore. The next generation never learned computers. They don't torrent.

But yeah, libraries are great. I just wish they carried audio books in better formats sometimes. My car doesn't even have a disk drive OR a cassette player. I drive a lot for work, so that's how I read and libraries often leave me disappointed for that.

Am A Librarian I Am Not Your Librarian

I love this.

In what way would I be trolling. A full video file, say you’re watching the Olympics, will be tens of gigabytes. That same file streamed will be maybe 200mb after compression and bit rate changes for your browser.