I'm currently downloading a show that is on a service to which I subscribe

It's probably some weird DRM where it needs to authenticate with their server in order to verify you're actually the one with an account. It's silly. The steps they take to try and stop piracy are what in fact drives most people to it.
I started downloading shows from several streaming services I pay for simply because of the number of repeating ads they'll run during a show. A 24 min runtime gets extended to 45 minutes for all the ads, which I was sitting through for months but when they only have two different ads on loop, WTF!? A man can only take so much!
- Shut up. You're paying for a service and still get almost 50% ads?
  Why? How? Which? And do we in the EU also have this awaiting in our future?
  
  Both Netflix and Disney+ now have "cheap" tiers with ads, at least here in Germany.
  
  Presently, Hulu's the worst I've experienced of the paid streaming apps I own. I recently just cancelled Netflix because they announced they were raising their prices yet again and with the recent account sharing crackdown, it was the last straw. My parents used my account far more than I ever did and they're not tech savvy folks. They get frustrated by tech of any kind. Once they couldn't access Netflix easily, I asked and they don't want an account of their own, it's just too much hassle. So screw the greedy shits! Now they get nothing.
- I hope you're saying that these streaming services are free. I would never subscribe to something that serves me ads. The one reason I don't have cable TV, actually.
  
  My iPhone advertised News+ to me the other day in the settings menu. It’s no fucking different than my LG TV advertising on their Home Screen. Pissed me right off
- Their help page says you can download to watch where you don't have an internet connection. So if there is some DRM BS then that's going directly against what their help page indicates.
  
  Corporations lying?? They'd never!
- then why offer local dl if connection required anyway

Also, I pay for 4k streaming but because of compression or something else they are definitely not sending me 4k content. I was watching a movie on Netflix that I had forgot I pirated. Both were 4K but the quality of the pirated one was far superior.
- Youtube has that too where it says 1080p but actually it's potato quality.
  
  I've noticed a new resolution setting: 1080p Premium HD Enhanced Bitrate.
  So yeah, 1080p confirmed potato. Upgrade to new potatoless 1080p now!
- Really depends on the service. I find 4K streaming from Apple and Disney are “close enough” to my Blu-rays I can’t tell the difference unless I stick my nose up to the TV. Now, Max? Hulu? YouTube? All “4k” garbage is so low bitrate I need to take my glasses off to enjoy it
  
  Close to your 4k blu rays? Because regular blu ray discs they play on regular blu ray players don't do 4k.
  If you're comparing to regular blu rays, you're not comparing to 4k.
  Edit: what a strange reaction to this comment... I imagine the average American would not know that they need a different DVD player for 4k DVDs.
  Was just trying to be helpful by clarifying. Guess I'll just go fuck myself.
  Edit 2: is it really that hard to understand my point? Dude said that his 4k streaming looks way better than blu ray. No specification of 4k blu ray, so I just wanted to clarify for those reading the thread, that yes, 4k streaming will look better than a regular blu ray 100% of the time. No shit.
  Maybe instead of being a dick with your responses, you could have just clarified your original comment to be clear that you were comparing apples to apples (4k stream to 4k blu ray). It would have taken two characters added to your original comment ("4k"), yet instead you chose to be an asshole.
  And no, it's not obvious to a lot of people.
- Louis Rossmann made a video about it noday I think. They (apparently) don't serve 4k in browsers, only if you use their propietary apps and allow to send them all your data
  
  Link for the lazy: https://youtu.be/o4GZUCwVRLs
  Definitely worth a watch.
- Where do you watch it from? You need to use the app on Windows to get 4k content, they don't provide it when watching through the website. Same for Disney and Prime... It made me switch to just using the apps directly on my TV instead...
- I've noticed this, too, with both video and audio. It's ridiculous.
- Netflix is terrible but Disney+ 4k with HDR looks decent.
- if you streamed it at the proper bitrate you would be using a ton of data at 4k, even streaming from my own server to my tv sometimes is too much since my TV only has a 100mbit nic on it on films like 1917 the bit rate would spike on some scenes and it will start to stutter or stop playing all together, for that I had to use my xbox or maybe Ill invest in a roku or shield with a 1gb nic. but for regular streaming you might get the resolution in 4k but you'll see in dark scenes these like squares and artifacts because of how its compressed down to be able to get to you through the internet while not annihilating your bandwidth

That really grinds my gears
I remember a few years ago going on an international flight. I had Spotify premium and I spent a few hours sorting and downloading playlists and podcasts that I wanted to listen to on an eight hour flight. Tested, retested and everything worked fine.
Got on the plane, fifteen minutes in turn on my device to play some music .... NOTHING WORKED ... all the downloaded files I had set for offline were unusable. I couldn't believe it.
My next flights were like yours .... just downloada bunch of stuff and play them freely without headaches.
- I'm not even a FOSS nut and I use antennapod. It's just a good clean app.
- Spotify did this to me twice before traveling. So infuriating.
  
  Weird, I wonder what the issue was. I’ve not had this happen to me with Spotify. Did w Zune back in the day, bc you had to connect to WiFi or a computer every so often to renew the drm license
- Now I will say that Tidal worked flawlessly so I at least had some music.
- I switched to iPhone for work and I listening to podcasts is the worst. Before bedtime I usually download a podcast and put my phone into flightmode. On the normal app + on Castbox everything is acting up. The podcast stops and will not continue. No matter what. Going back 15s? Well how about f* you, I ain't playing anything.

I remember trying to watch anime on Hulu recently. I have the sub with ads and the ads kept causing a desync in the subtitles. The ads they added kept causing problems with their player. So I just downloaded it because it was unwatchable.
- This reminded me I was still paying for Hulu and I just canceled right in time. Jesus fuck what was I doing, paying $8 to watch ads.

Gabe was right, piracy is a service problem.
That's it. The great availability of streamed music(and downloaded for a fair price) is the reason why there aren't that much people who pirate music anymore, since it's easier to get it the legal way.

I did the same with Lower Decks when it first came out because even though I had a week of Paramount+, not one single thing I tried to view actually worked.
Who the hell would ever actually subscribe if the service doesn't even work when you're doing a free trial?
- Paramount+ is even worse in Canada. It was a hot mess on trying to find where show were early on. It's not a full app like the US version. It runs as a add on tier inside the Prime app.
  Then at my Firecube home page it offers to install the full Paramount, and the Paramount+ app then after the install it says the content is not available in my country. Clicking on any of the Paramount show links takes me to a app that won't load the content due to country issues. I need to manually go into the Prime app to find the Paramount shows.
  There a few other apps like this too and some I can't even remove but it sure will notify the crap out of me about the updates for them.

Pay for Plex and a seedbox or Usenet and be free while also having the best quality there is. I invested my money in a few HDDs and I watch from every service out there for peanuts.
- I currently use Stremio and RealDebrid, is there any tangible benefit to doing it with Plex and a seedbox instead?
  
  I wouldn't pay for plex, but i definitely pay for a seedbox and have an *Arr stack with jellyfin to stream it back to the jellyfin client on my tv boxes and I love it. It's all very automated and streamlined. I looked at streamio once, i cant remember specifically what but it didnt satisfy half the things my seedbox could. I'm also very against paying for access to pirated content, so i don't use usenet or debrid, but use a mix of public and private torrent trackers.
  
  Sorry, I don’t know those services.
  I actually don’t use Plex but Infuse, but OP is not in iOS so I went with that recommendation. You can also build your own “seedbox” if you are willing to have a server running 24/7 and have an ok internet. That’s my setup.
  For me the benefit is 4K remuxes from top tier release groups (like Framestor) . If you can get there with your setup, I don’t really see a drawback.
  
  If public trackers offer you anything you want then not really. For me, I also sometimes use stremio and RD but most things aren’t available in my language. That’s why I now mainly use Usenet/private trackers and jellyfin

If you connected to the plane's Wi-Fi disney+ tries to validate before opening downloads or something like that, but the wifi usually blocks streaming requests
You need to put the phone in airplane mode, open disney+, then you can connect the Wi-Fi
- I was on airplane mode on my tablet.

I've done this before with Netflix too. I was trying to watch a show and it was constantly stuttering, pausing and dropping out to unwatchable resolution. I know it wasn't my internet connection because the torrent for the episode downloaded in like two minutes lol.
- I've had issues where Prime does something weird with HDR and it causes the quality to sometimes plummet.
  Only have the issue in Prime on that TV,.so I pirate those shows.
  Doesn't happen with downloaded HDR content or any other service.
  Edit: just to clarify, its not all HDR shows on prime. Only some.

On most of these services you can download but you must be connected to the internet to verify that you have the right to watch the file you downloaded.
- So... what's the point of downloading then?
  
  Download stuff to your phone over wifi and watch away from home without eating up cellular.
- Bloody typical.
  They take our money by offering features that don't meet advertised expectations.
  And, yet, we'd be the ones labelled criminals for downloading via other means.
- Netflix didn't use to do this-- you could watch in airplane mode. Any idea if that changed?

I'm subscribed to a bunch of services through bundle packages with my phone and Internet and still pirate the shows I want because it's nice to have them all in one place and to know they won't be unavailable in the future.
- Yep, I watch everything in plex and it scrobbles to trakt.tv, even though I pay for a couple services. And I don't need to be concerned with whatever is going on with locations/password sharing etc.
  
  My kid likes to watch movies with their friends, and with streaming services this means they all need to have an account and start at the same time.
  With Plex my kid can just share their screen and the video shows up fine.

I recently binged the entirety of Better Call Saul on Stremio using the Torrentio plugin. I have a Netflix sub.
- Just out of curiosity, why?
  
  Not the user above. But I find Stremio to be a way better experience overall. It's more convenient and quicker to get to what I want to watch. I've been off Netflix for a while, but there were times where the Continue Watching section would just be gone. I'd have to search for the show again and resume. The more services you replace with Stremio, the more convenient it becomes.
  I have not looked into offline playback with Stremio so I'm not sure if that's a thing.
  
  Pretty much what lessthanthree said. Cleaner interface too. I still have Netflix cause it's easier for my kids, they're still young and can't search by name, they have to look at the pictures.

I always pirate media even when I'm subscribed to a service. Most streaming services act up because I'm on Linux.
- I use Linux but the only issues I have are 1) lower quality, since the best quality is usually restricted to Chrome and Edge on Windows and Max, and 2) no downloads.
  
  What others issues are possible? Lol

I am considering this. Since the Disney+ version of Futurama seems to add black bars to the top and bottom of the non-widescreen episodes.
- Doesn't do it for me on my TV. I'd be curious to know if it respects the 4:3 aspect ratio if played on such a TV
  
  I've done some research and I think the problem isn't that it's adding bars, but that it doesn't fill the 4:3 material to the full height of a 16:10 screen, it just stops at 16:9. I don't mind that for 16:9 content or other content that is wider but it's annoying that the 4:3 material doesn't use the full height of my screen.

Shiver me timbers.

Not exactly Disney plus but I had a similar issue regarding downloading Netflix shows to an SD card. There's a setting in Netflix to download to SD card however even if you select it, it won't work. You have to enable USB debugging and manually force the Netflix app to have SD card access. It's insane.
- I use the Netflix download to sd every week. It works great for me on my Note 20 Ultra. Never had to force it in debug.
  
  They may have fixed it recently then. This was something I had to do for the Samsung tablets we got for my nephews earlier this year.

I'm in another country for a while and can't get English subtitles on my Netflix content on my Nvidia Shield TV. I was using a translator app and pausing the video to understand garbled audio and gave up watching.
I don't dare contact support, so I'm planning to cancel and lean into my eye patch.
- That's crazy, I haven't used Netflix in a while but when I did one of the main reasons was the variety of subtitles/audio dub options. Even when watching from other countries through my VPN for access to stuff that was blocked in my country, it always had English subtitles and usually like 20 other languages, and for foreign language shows you could choose any combination of dubbed/original language audio and any language subtitles.
  
  The web version lists almost a dozen languages, but the Android TV version only shows locale-based, unfortunately.

i basically have to pirate since that web drm stuff all the streaming sites use doesnt like my ancient laptop and im too broke to get a new one lol

Not sure if Disney+ has this issue but I sometimes leave my Netflix tablet in airplane mode when going to another country. If the show is not available in that country when connected to the internet it will not allow play back of the shows I've downloaded.
- Yeah I was still on the plane and it was in airplane mode.

I use YouTube to watch clips of films I might like, and pirate them.
I use YouTube Music to discover music, and pirate them too.
I don't subscribe to services. Why should I?

I downloaded some stuff on the Disney app on my iPad for my flight to Greece last month and it worked perfectly.
- I'm glad it worked for you. My problem is that if I can't trust it to work reliably I'm just going to use something else.

Get VLC Media Player or another similar of choice. Where it's easy for you to manage & watch/ listen to any media of choice.
Enjoy your upcoming travels.
- VLC won't help you watch media which isn't there.
  
  Sure it will. It fully supports streaming
  Or, you know, if you accidentally typed a YouTube address into the wrong site, and somehow it ended up on your phone. Whoops. It could happen anywhere, even on a layover
  Or if you're uncomfortable with that, Dr horrible's sing along blog is pubic domain, a bunch of big actors and writers made it during the first writers strike. I think the sequel is too. I think you can still download it off the official website... I've got a copy on my phone just in case I find myself desperate for offline content
- Well yeah I use VLC for the stuff I've downloaded.

- Wtf is this Apple astroturfing?
- Dude no. Don't be ridiculous.