Not as far as i know. Root of this is that usenet files are usually obfuscated. Means that they are encrypted and their filenames are pure gibberish.

You then visist a "newsgroup" which is a forum or some list on the internet. There are posts for everything you want; Movies, shows, games, etc.
Those posts will give you a .nzb file. This is basically just a textfile that has the decryption password and the exact path if you will, for that specific file.

Example: You want to download John Wick 4. You find a post for that on some forum. You get the .nzb file. You throw this .nzb file into your usenet downloader (sabNZBd for example). This downloader takes the file, goes to your usenet provider (the actual server that hosts files) and finds the file for John Wick 4. This file might be called 132907as097fd192070a9sd709asdgsd90g709123907 and is fragmented into 400 .zip files, each with their own gibberish name.

But your downloader knows all the files that belong to each other because of that .nzb file.

Then they all get downloaded, unpacked together and you have your file.

Now this would make it very very hard to actually "stream" directly from usenet. sabNZBd can actually unpack the files while you download them, but i don't know if they are in correct order and if it could produce a streamable videofile.

I heard of a website that claimed it could stream directly from usenet, but i never looked into it and it didn't gain any popularity as it had some other severe issues as far as i know.

If you want a streaming like experience via Usenet, you have to go the Plex/Jellyfin + Overseerr/Ombi/Jellyseerr + Radarr&Sonarr route. It's a suite of applications that will automate the process of finding, downloading and organizing your movies & shows. Overseerr/Ombi/Jellyseerr provide you the catalog where you can pick what you want to watch. They will push that interaction to Radarr&Sonarr. They are responsible for actually searching through the usenet forums you configured and find the correct movie / show you want from there. They will then push that to your downloader (sabNZBd for example again) and once it's downloaded they will organize it and tell Jellyfin or Plex that it's available. Jellyfin & Plex are the final streaming services that run locally on your hardware and can be accessed on your network. They are beautiful and extremely capable streaming applications that handle metadata automatically.

It's quite a complicated and cumbersome process to set it all up properly. But once it's done you never have to touch it again (unless something breaks lol) and you will have a fully automated media server that will get you whatever you want in whatever quality / language profile you want.

And since usenet is blazing fast, depending on your internet connection, you can watch a movie within 20~30 minutes after "requesting" it (requesting is the process of telling the aforementioned Overseerr/Ombi/Jellyseerr that you want John Wick 4 for example).

So yeah, sorry for that long and probably unasked explamation but thanks for listening to my Ted Talk.

Thank you very much :-)

100% - i get 40MB/s on Usenet, something i could only dream about on torrents...also i am in germany, torrenting is quite risky here.

When i find something on usenet, it is there..period. I can get it. On torrents? Just because i found a magnet doesn't mean there is anyone seeding it.

Apparently you know your way around there... can you ELI5 what soulseek exactly is? Is this based on torrenting? Is it comparable to what limewire was back in the day?

Stumbled across it and don't know what makes this so charming for so many people

that's sadly true, but in the past - the pirates turned out to be the fair and square ones that i could trust....unlike the others

No, and that's a good thing.

How should they make money? Services and Storage cost money. Period. That has to be paid by someone. Either be it the users, or some sketchy not-giving-a-shit-about-privacy-advertising company because hosters on the usenet have to sell your data to pay for the servers.

Easy as that.

And since usenet is used for a lot of piracy, i 100% DON'T want it to be financed by shit like this. I pay for it and i know i am safe.
Don't forget. If a product is free - you are the product.

@RandomDevOpsDude

Yes! That's exactly what i was thinking to myself! Just publish the backends, let them connect to our reddit account's API and just let it scrape. Then patch the mobile app so it can connect to our selfhosted backends and get those scraped entries