Technically. But it has been that way for years and I find it useful, so I paid for it.

Reminder that your local library likely carries Blu-rays and CDs.

I went the IPTV route for football season and likely will be rolling that into hockey as well.

For your security we’re going to block your access to FOSS and apps that let you avoid our ads. This is totally not a business decision. Pinky swear.

I haven’t run into any issues with MakeMKV, which I bought years ago. Only issue I ran into was some UHD discs won’t read properly, but that was an issue with my Blu-Ray device. I have a new-ish Pioneer with a firmware flash and it reads everything fine.

One thing to keep in mind is there is no one official arr stack. It is dozens of mix and match services, which leads to the confusion. The very basics are the ability to automatically download movies, TV shows, music, and ebooks, as others have covered. On top of that, there are services that support the core download services. Like to provide VPN to those downloaders, automatic transcoding to other formats, automatic renaming of files and copying to specific folders, or web interface to request new content. And that is a small sample of what you can do.

This screams, “SHOOT THE MESSENGER!” If you wait around looking for a perfect, pristine leader of a movement, you’ll get less done than a petition.

They don’t care. They know they’ll lose subscribers but they’ll make more money overall on the suckers that stick out the monopoly pricing. Same thing is happening in the auto industry where they sell less cars but are more profitable.

Do your ISP a favor and use a VPN when torrenting. They will know you’re torrenting based on traffic patterns, but they won’t know what you’re torrenting. That way they don’t have to serve you a notice or kick you off their service at the behest of movie or music studios. Your ISP may not care what you’re doing, but those businesses do, and the law is on their side.

VPN makes it extremely difficult for your ISP to spy on you, which is the whole point.