It's Usenet babe. Get this... it's been around since 1980! Isn't that wild, babe? It just goes to show, if a distribution system isn't broke, don't fix it.
Hahah I was gonna come mention Usenet but glad you already did.
A month ago I was frustrated waiting on some torrent and decided to finally give Usenet a try. All I gotta say is - why didn't I do this switch years ago???
Yearly rates for a provider and 2 indexers still doesn't come close to the cost of all the streaming subscriptions you'd need to have the same library access. Coupled with the ability to use RSS feeds and other homelab services to essentially automate your collection, it's just absolutely worth every penny.
But I wouldn't know firsthand, because I'm a law abiding citizen, and this is all hypothetical. I just read about it on the internet somewhere.
IIRC that might have been the reason I previously disregarded the idea of trying Usenet. However if it's not on Usenet, one can always fall back to torrents :p Haven't had to do that yet. *knocks on wood*
Retention for 90%+ of providers is at least 4500 days for binary files and 110000 days for newsgroups. Have two providers, one monthly and one block, that run on different backbones with one that takes down for dmca and one that doesn't and you'll be fine. There are very very very few shows or movies that you can't get. Don't have to worry about VPN, ratios, trackers or any of that other crap.
Torrents persist until all seeders disappear for good, which is rare on private trackers. On usenet generally content is uploaded ASAP upon release and then only lasts as long as rentention. Maybe you'll get rereleases on usenet but it didn't seem to be a common occurance
Yeah there was a lot of googling duckduckgoing at first. In my case I decided to start out with NewsHosting as provider and nzbgeek as indexer. So far so good