All of these functionalities can be provided by a simple WebSocket + REST server. The car connects to the WebSocket, and you can access these functionalities from your phone either with WebSockets or regular HTTP requests.

Cheapest servers with backend written in JS can easily handle thousands of WebSocket connections, and written in Go tens of thousands WebSocket connections. They would not ever need like over 100 of these servers GLOBALLY, which would cost them around $3000 monthly.

That’s the price of 60 subscriptions, which is freaking ridiculous.

You realize that maintaining a server that would allow that costs pennies?

You wouldn’t pay $150 for a lollipop, but somehow people think this is ok.

This problem exists exactly because of people like you, thinking it’s OK to pay for the features you already paid for.

And as always, DRMs fuck only legitimate customers, and pirates can watch anywhere at full quality.

That’s one of the reasons I don’t feel bad about pirating any more. Not even the cost, but the fact that if you pay you’re going to have a worse experience.

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

There are tutorials on youtube on how to create a VM and set up a firewall for external access.

If you’re lucky enough to successfully create an account on Oracle Cloud, you can also try Oracle Cloud Free Tier. You can have free ARM64 x4 CPU and 24 GiB RAM totally free of charge. There might be problems with availability during VM registration, but there are scripts that automate spamming for checking every 80 seconds.

I’ve been using it for 2 years and it’s great. However be aware that your VM might get erased if you have a free account. That too can be remedied if you update to a premium subscription (You still get Free Tier resources without a charge). Nobody has reported an erased VM on a premium plan yet.

Still, I am pretty sure they can erase it if you do illegal stuff with it. I’ve been using it only to host Minecraft Server, as well as other services using Docker. So far so good.

If you’re trying to self-host http service, you can use cloudflare tunnels.

Learn it first.

I almost exclusively use it with my own Dockerfiles, which gives me the same flexibility I would have by just using VM, with all the benefits of being containerized and reproducible. The exceptions are images of utility stuff, like databases, reverse proxy (I use caddy btw) etc.

Without docker, hosting everything was a mess. After a month I would forget about important things I did, and if I had to do that again, I would need to basically relearn what I found out then.

If you write a Dockerfile, every configuration you did is either reflected by the bash command or adding files from the project directory to the image. You can just look at the Dockerfile and see all the configurations made to base Debian image.

Additionally with docker-compose you can use multiple containers per project with proper networking and DNS resolution between containers by their service names. Quite useful if your project sets up a few different services that communicate with each other.

Thanks to that it’s trivial to host multiple projects using for example different PHP versions for each of them.

And I haven’t even mentioned yet the best thing about docker - if you’re a developer, you can be sure that the app will run exactly the same on your machine and on the server. You can have development versions of images that extend the production image by using Dockerfile stages. You can develop a dev version with full debug/tooling support and then use a clean prod image on the server.

how much effort will pirates put into ripping video this way

I have yet to find a video that was DRMd and couldn’t be found on high seas. The DRM is more inconvenient for the user who paid for the content than the actual pirate. It got to this point that I pay for Netflix and watch on pirate sites, because I don’t have to use a special browser on special os just to watch 1080p. Like what in the fuck?

Ok, if I remember correctly, YouTube barely generates, but generates nonetheless revenue for Google. There are many ways to make more money without fucking over its users by cutting costs:

• downgrade old videos with small watch count to 720p30

• make people pay for hosting >1080p60 content

• do not allow private/unlisted videos

• straight up remove 10h looped videos - they take so much space, but are technically spam - both for bandwidth and storage

And my go-to solution: focus on sponsorships as main source of revenue. They are the only ads I can tolerate and are actually effective from my experience. YouTube can just take a cut from every sponsorship on YouTube video and everyone will be happy.