Streaming became popular because it was easier than piracy and better than TV (watch anywhere, on demand, pickup where you left off etc).
Streaming is no longer easier than piracy, why pay for 8 different services and have to waste your time figuring out whats on what when you can just have one service for free, even if its illegal, and have it all under one roof.
The services have taken the piss and now they'll get the repercussions of it.
Piracy also threatens to damage our business, as its fundamental proposition to consumers is so compelling and difficult to compete against: virtually all content for free,” Netflix writes.
People emphasize the "free" part, but it really is the "all content" part that makes piracy wins.
Especially if you are not in the USA, often specific content isn't available at any price. Even if it is, its split across 5 billion different confusing services.
The killer feature of piracy is thar it just works, not that it is free.
Now, it doesn't just work. You need to download the thing, find the right format, get it to the TV in one way or another, hope that the subs are good.
Compared to that, it's the streaming that just works. Except when it doesn't.
Software has completely automated all of these steps. The only barrier is the initial set up, which a non-technical person can figure out over a weekend.
Don’t say the quiet part loud. There will be enterprising individuals that will take the piss out of our convenience by commercializing it.
How could they commercialize it in ways they already haven't? There already exist good, free torrenting clients, and piracy is illegal. The most they could do is set up a subscription service for exclusive torrents which always have seeders, but that's already being done AFAIK, and it's illegal, so they can't really run ads on TV about it.
Haven't they already? There are people who sell modded versions of kodi with everything setup.
I think you overestimate the capabilities of your average non-technical person.
It seems to be quite a bit harder for dubbed stuff in non-english languages though
But all of this actually just works. Right format is never an issue. To get it to the TV, I just use Plex. There’s even a smart TV app. I can also watch it on my smartphone. And download it if I know I won’t have network. Subtitles are often embedded directly in most downloads, and if not Plex always manages to find the correct ones from OpenSubtitles. These are non issues, most of the times.
I’ve been running Plex since probably 2010, maybe earlier. It just works… once you set it up… and until something needs to change. The concept of running a server is lost on most people. I’ve set it up for some others, and they don’t get it. They just plug a laptop into their TV or use AirPlay instead, because the idea of a server and client (in whatever terminology one wants to use) doesn’t really click. Most people aren’t a custom leaving their computer on all the time in the name of having a server running either.
There is also a matter of getting the content. If they are going to rip DVDs, now they have to use something like Handbrake. But that’s not all, they also need to spend time learning how Plex reads folder and file names to scan the media to lookup metadata. Doing that manually sucks, so then that might lead them to have to search for something like Filebot, where they need to use Filebot’s naming syntax to align its actions with what Plex wants. Then if they get a new computer, there is the issue of migration to the new system. I eventually got a NAS, which meant moving to Docker, which would be a whole new can of worms for them.
And all this just assumes it’s all on the local network. Plex might do some router magic today, I can’t remember, but for a long time I remember setting up port forwarding so I could get at my library from my phone.
I don’t think anything of most of this, and I assume you don’t either, but it’s a lot for someone who doesn’t have any kind of background in this stuff or interest in heading down a rabbit hole with it.
I’d also argue that as Plex became more platform agnostic with its web UI, it became harder for the average user to understand. The first versions, based on XBMC, were just apps. Stick out media in there and it plays it. Then they made PMS with the client/server architecture, but the server still had a really nice GUI on the Mac where things made sense. Now the server launches the browser when opened, so people kind of need to understand the idea that this server is hosting a website to manage the media, which is another layer for someone to get lost in. And now, I go to plex.tv, login there, and it loads the server running off my NAS, which will be even more confusing for people, especially if/when something goes wrong or isn’t working. They also need to keep up with the changes, not of just the UI they use, but the architecture of the backend, to some degree. It’s changed a lot over the years I’ve been using it.
As for subtitles. I typically trash them and don’t care, as 99.9% of the time I don’t want subtitles. But the 1 time I tried to download the subtitles and use them, it didn’t work and I gave up. I watched on a streaming service instead.
Right, streaming can win on convenience but loses so hard on content that it has begun to cancel out any reason to use it. Netflix really was great back when it was just getting really popular and had both consistent content and a just-works video player, but to stay popular it needed to keep both, and it hasn't.
Piracy can do the other things you mentioned automatically by the way, but I agree that it's less "just-works" for the average person given the setup involved.
streaming can win on convenience
It could, but it does not. When you have to hunt for the content you want across a dozen different services you need to be subscribed to and / or that many apps, it’s not convenient.
Even being super basic and not at all in the scene, odds are the first or second piracy site you check has it, it won’t try to upsell you or give you some other content, and if it had the content at one point chances are it still does.
There are a lot of websites for illegal streaming, it's plug and play, even easier to use than Netflix, and their catalog is very often up to date with what you can find on torrent trackers
I believe you are unfamiliar with the current state of piracy.
I'm not going to name the site, because I don't want to run afoul of any rules here... But this site is an even more streamlined experience than the legit sites. It has a searchable catalog that's just as high quality UX as netflix, and you just start watching instantly.
It literally just works.
That's the norm in the piracy world today, but some people are extra about things and set up automation to auto download local copies of things on a media server. There's a bit of initial setup overhead for this, but once it's done it's as convenient as it gets. You can subscribe to shows and they just show up on your media server as episodes are released.
For me one of the biggest draws of file-sharing is that I find it so easy.
The streaming service way would involve finding where the show is, accounts, credentials, godawful UI, ads, spam, potential malware,+ many other constantly changing and evolving inconveniences.
File-sharing way is just so fast and easy to comprehend for me, search for the show on one site, pick the quality I want, download the files and then do whatever I want with them. Also it hasnt changed in decades.
You're being downvoted but i think you have a point for non techies who want to watch things on their tv. Like i don't think my parents would be able to figure out how to pirate by themselves.
But the world is changing. Plenty of people watch primarily on their laptop or phone
Yep. This video is played for laughs but I was shocked to learn how much of it was true and not just satire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvhv7bgmz64
Content being fragmented and constantly coming and going is a massive problem for users. Netflix used to be the go-to to find just about any given show or film, but has become a mystery box where the contents change on a near-daily basis. Piracy is reliable and simple instead, and works like Netflix used to: Just search up what you want to watch and you're golden. It has been and always will be a service problem.
The part about Titanic being split is a joke, right? Right?
Yes, based in fact. Titanic was a major VHS release which was too long at the time to go onto one VHS tape*
Justwatch tells me Titanic is on Disney (in my region), and available to rent or buy from half a dozen stores.
Looking at justwatch US, it seems that US streaming even more fragmented than the UK, but it's available to stream in a few places.
All will give you the full movie
* in the US I assume, I'm sure I had it a single tape in the UK
That Pokemon distribution was insane.
This was the site I think he was showing in the video: https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...
Wow, I thought that had to be a joke.
The fragmentation really has broken the on-demand promise of being able to watch what you want when you want.
great video
Thank you for sharing that. I didn't make it to the end because I actually was laughing out loud so much that I was starting to hurt but those first 2 minutes were great.
The killer feature of piracy is thar it just works, not that it is free
Especially as piracy has its own costs: VPN (French authorities do detect bittorrent), storage, some Jellyfin or Kodi host, some time to manage the whole *arr setup.
The moment legal access to a whole world's worth of movies becomes cheaper and easier than that, piracy becomes unattractive. That was the way Netflix was perceived in its golden age... No longer.
There are websites you can go to and stream any tv show or movie for free in a couple of clicks. It's impossible to get cheaper and easier (ip law) than that.
Don't those have their own problems, though? Like their domain gets blocked, so you have to find it again. They video quality is just kinda ok, and if you want a copy to stream to your TV, it's either not possible, or won't look very good. Years ago my partner used to use some of these sites to watch some foreign-language shows that are just not possible to get in the US at all, and it just always seemed so sketchy and unreliable.
How do these sites fund themselves, anyway? Ads, I guess? Tho not sure what ad networks will show ads on sites that are 100% copyright infringement.
These sites might be advertising things that usual ad networks would prefer to stay away from, like online casinos. Moreover, in some countries, it might be explicitly forbidden to advertise gambling.
French authorities do detect bittorrent
Do they know what you are downloading though? I still use it for a lot of stuff that’s legal. How do they go after people (I guess you imply they do)?
Important to know, authorities usually do not go after downloaders/consumers of piracy. But those who distribute it - but if you participate in bittorrent - you are distributing.
And it is really easy to track the IPs, as it is fundamentally part of how bittorrent works that everyone in the network has the IPs of the other participants. So a VPN is advisable.
Probably the same way other people do it: DHT surveillance of suspected copyrighted works which log IPs of seeders... or some variation of that
Right, it's not like piracy is literally free. There are still monetary costs, software maintenance work that needs to be done, and risks involved.
In that 'golden age' of Netflix, getting a Netflix subscription was a much better choice for loads of people. But now it seems to be swinging back the other way again. It's just so frustrating, because all these content owners actually had a good-enough solution to most piracy, and they ruined it with their own greed.
Steam really did this for games for me and somehow hasn't stopped working for me yet. Maybe Netflix should ask themselves how Steam competes with bootlegs and what they might do like it.
The only reason is that piracy locks you out of MP and updates for the most part
If that were the case, all games including AAA would be exclusively multiplayer. While there have been some MP-only games (because that's a good strategy to acquire users), that's not been the case. In fact, you can get MP on cracked games through steam by abusing the API.
GabeN was right, it's a service problem. Sure, when I was a teen I would crack all my games, but I had no money and was never going to be a paying costumer. Now that I have money I can spend, and since steam has acquired me as a user, if I want to buy a game I will check steam. I still crack some games because I do not have infinite money, but it's always because I checked the price and decided it was too much first.
Steam really works because it remained a private company. Once you go public, it's a slow descent into madness.
My perception (maybe incorrect) is that it's harder to play online multi-player games using cracked copies of games without getting found out and banned. Also the risk of getting some malware with your cracked copy (single- or multi-player) is very real, something you don't really have to worry about with a video file.
Regardless of that, the model is just different: if I can pay Netflix $15/mo for unlimited access to their entire catalog -- and their catalog includes everything I want to watch -- then I'm not going to need to go elsewhere, and I'll be happy. If I do, those monthly subscription fees are going to start to add up and make me unhappy.
But Steam doesn't have a subscription service; you pay individually for each game, and there are pretty frequent sales and discounted bundles. If Steam doesn't have a game you want, you buy it from someone else that does have it, and your cost is essentially the same as it would have been if Steam did have it. (Some games do require a subscription, but that's also not really the same thing as Netflix.)
And the usage is just different, too: if you buy a game, you're probably going to play it for many tens or hundreds of hours, over months or maybe even years. For a movie or TV show, you're going to watch it once, most likely, and that's it. When you think about it, $60 (often less) for a game that you get years of enjoyment out of seems pretty reasonable. But then you look at Amazon Video, where you can rent or buy some titles, and the cost is going to be $3 for an hour or two of entertainment, if you're only renting. $3 bucks for two hours vs. $60 for hundreds of hours? No contest.
The problem with Netflix is that many studios saw how profitable Netflix is and wanted their share, so they stopped licencing content to Netflix and opened their own services.
Super difficult to pirate multiplayer games, keep up with DLCs/patches and to keep the competitive aspect of some games (leaderboards, steam achievements).
Delayed availability also bolsters piracy. In the age of the internet, people don’t want to watch foreign shows weeks or months after they’ve aired in their country of origin, but within mere hours of original airing so they can ride the global wave of discussion after each episode.
A six month delay for example will completely miss the bulk of the show’s online relevance and even a week is enough to seriously dampen enthusiasm in the region. This isn’t the 90s or prior decades where viewers are entirely reliant on local licensees to know what’s available.
Studios, distributors, and streaming services are seriously shooting themselves in the foot by not pulling all stops to make sure all shows are simultaneously available worldwide.
Piracy also solves the opposite problem of "old" movies and TV shows disappearing from streaming services. Especially since many things are exclusive to streaming platforms with no physical release, after they're removed from a streaming service, piracy is the only way to view such stuff.
In addition, piracy ensures that the "original" version -- whether it was released on DVD, Blu-ray or streaming platform -- is "always" there (as long as someone is seeding). These days streaming services take down 50-year-old content because of racial prototypes or other politically incorrectly content given what (some) people believe in 2024, edit them or never put them on the shelve again. If all they do is to add "content advisory", consider yourself lucky.
This is one of the most stupid things that have happened.
I recently watched a 90s show that, because of the context and the country it was made, they used music with no regard for licensing issues. Essentially, no one would have expected or foreseen that it could run into legal issues at any point.
However, when they put it on netflix they changed the soundtrack for that reason.
Some kind soul uploaded the original versions to youtube.
There’s also cases where by far and away the best version of a given piece of media is the recording of an HDTV broadcast from somewhere in southeast Asia or something because the rightsholders never bothered to produce a physical release in anything better than VHS or badly mastered DVD.
Piracy works around negligence on the part of publishers like this.
Delayed availability also bolsters piracy. In the age of the internet
That's been the case since the 1990s. I used to download episodes of Voyager and SG1 the morning they were broadcast in the US because of it
I tried to watch Rick and Morty season 6 here in Australia, only to find that half of it was on one streaming service, a quarter on another, and the rest not available at all. They make it impractical to obtain legitimately and then complain when we pirate.
Every episode is on Netflix in Australia, not sure what you were looking at
Possibly true today... was it true a month ago, or will it be true half a year later?
I see this contend constantly coming and going thing on Spotify also, and it really annoys me. (and no, I won't pay to google even if their crap is better, i'l rather buy CD-s and rent a warehouse for them, or pirate content)
In germany, Rick and Morty on Netflix still only goes to Season 6. But Season 7 was out long ago ... (and it was worth pirating it).
These things change every day. No reason why both statements can't be true.
If it's any consolation, only the first three seasons are worth watching anyway ;-)
Furthermore, some content that's available overseas is also censored in US releases. I'm sure your mind just jumped to interesting places, but let me bring you back by saying one of the worst offenders here is Bluey. A literal kids show; for kids. In Australia! It's not like it's even some huge cultural norm difference like Japan vs America, it's Australia!
There's an episode that's not shown on D+ at all where the dad pretends to be pregnant with the younger daughter and then enlists the help of their neighbor (who is only ever referred to as [neighbor child character]'s Dad") in delivering the "baby". Great episode. Gotta pirate it if you're in America though.
Also lots of weird dumb censorship in smaller ways. There's a roundabout discussion of a vasectomy happening in the "background" (it's the foreground but- look mate don't make me explain it) and Disney replaced what would've been a nice advertisement for the benefits of male contraceptive that many men are hesitant about with whats instead a barely coherent conversation about something trite.
And they censor a horse (an actual animal horse, no I don't know why the dogs are sentient while the horses are just animals) pooping at a state fair while the girls were just remarking how beautiful the horse is (and they run away giggling). Has Disney ever been to a state fair?
That type of censorship has always been a thing. Back in January 1992, the TNG episode "The High Ground" was not broadcast in the UK due to a line about how terrorists can win at their goals. Later broadcasts edited out the line, it wasn't until 2006 that you could see the unedited version.
Note that the neighbor’s dad does eventually get a name, as he assists as a birthday party and then grumbles about how they aren’t doing it correctly.
To netflix's credit, i think they're aware of this. They're in the business of providing content in exchange for money. for the content that they actually own the rights to, they do let people watch it.
the problem is all the other rights holders, who seem to not want to let people watch their content in exchange for money.
Yeah, it does seem that the problem starts with the actual content owners who want to make bug money by selling exclusive licenses or running their own streaming service.
Netflix then gets stuck with no reasonable way to license all of the content.
Not only free and all (most), but less hassle, too. A pirate doesn't need to worry about digital restrictions if they haven't upgraded their TV, HDMI cables, and streaming boxes, web broweswers, etc. to all support whatever BS the the big streaming providers are pushing.
No time wasting intros, warnings, etc. Double click the file, and enjoy.
Even if you are in the USA content is being taken down and unavailable any where.
Also for me it's far more customisable. Want to watch a video at 2x speed, want to add audio normalizer, want to tweak the gamma, etc. Yes vlc does all that and more. Their crummy app won't even play the video with proper scrubbing.
It's like the app vs browser thing for videos too, where you are restricted by the app's player vs using players like vlc that are just awesome!
And also you can pick the best format. Not all content is available is 4k hdr atmos in all apps.
I think they emphasised the piracy is free part because otherwise the solution would be to fix their services, while if they point to piracy is compelling because is free and not because it doesn’t frustrate people, then the solution is in the hand of regulators
How dare you to be so exactly right. Those corp data-driven pms are destroying monopolies from inside with one-fits billion features, which is a perfect illustration of evolutionary self-regulation. Protocols are the future of internet competition, not really products as knew it..
Piracy is a moral imperative. The internet was supposed to be free and break down barriers. Instead what we have now is a show available in the UK but not available in the US. This is not acceptable.
This plus the fact that actual artists get a pittance, means the flag will fly high till companies learn.
Also piracy has become much more reliable these days. There are systems which will make sure you get 4k streams based on any genre you enjoy. New shows from around the world. No need to wait for Netflix to add it to your countries playlist that to hidden behind garbage UX.
At the end of the day it is about availability, user control, artist benefits and showing the middle finger to large corporations.
That is the hacker mindset. That is what I grew up with in the early 2000s and it is substantially better than what we are "supposed" to do now. Hope that makes sense.
I don’t understand how it follows that if artists are paid a pittance, then the moral thing to do is to still consume their content - while depriving them of revenue from residuals.
They get the same amount of residuals if someone doesn't watch something or if they pirate it. Is it immoral to not watch something that gives someone residuals? Do you owe them residuals just because they made something?
You are using the age old argument of “I wouldn’t have bought it anyway, so they won’t get anything from me either way”
This is just a roundabout way of excusing stealing. If the creator of something says “if you want to view my work, you must pay me a dollar”, then yes it is stealing (immoral) if you view it without paying. The context around it as to whether you would’ve watched it anyway is irrelevant.
Apply the same logic to literally any other item and your argument falls apart (I wouldn’t have bought that chocolate bar anyway so they’re not really losing money from me)
I would be curious to know what percentage of pirated movies are actually watched. I think a lot of people download things because they are available and might look interesting, but then never watch it. Does the steeling happen when the content is acquired or consumed? If someone isn’t going to watch it, even when it was free, did they steal anything?
With a chocolate bar there is a physical good that could have been sold to someone else, but instead a new one needs to be produced to sell to someone else. This isn’t the case with digital files.
It doesn't matter how many times you can sell the same item. If someone spent time and money producing something, no matter how small, and they dictate they want $x for you to own/consume it, then you are stealing if you don't give them $x for it.
In terms of "when" it's stolen re downloading vs watching, I would say when you download it personally as you now have access to the content without paying.
If someone spent time and money producing something, no matter how small, and they dictate they want $x for you to own/consume it, then you are stealing if you don't give them $x for it.
Not quite. It's not stealing unless they are deprived of the original item (this is not to be confused with the money they think it is worth if they sell it or "sell" it). What is happening is copying, not stealing.
You are depriving them of revenue, it is stealing.
It’s not though:
* It’s definitely not stealing in the legal sense of the term, which requires a party to be deprived of physical property that they own.
* It’s also not in the colloquial sense of the term, because if you call this stealing you’d also have apply the stealing label to blocking ads/trackers on the web, taking advantage of free trials for services without any intent of becoming a subscriber, or countless other activities that could be considered “depriving someone of revenue.”
In the US, we do in fact have a legal term for the crime at play here — but the term is copyright infringement, not “stealing” or “IP theft” or whatever other stupid label the content cartels want to apply to it.
because if you call this stealing you’d also have apply the stealing label to blocking ads/trackers on the web
Yes that is quite literally also depriving them of revenue, and quite possibly their only source of revenue if they're a free website/app.
taking advantage of free trials for services without any intent of becoming a subscriber
Yeah no, it's in the name...FREE TRIAL. It's literally given out for free.
content cartels
Yes how dare companies/people want to get paid for their creative works, must be a cartel.
Yes that is quite literally also depriving them of revenue, and quite possibly their only source of revenue if they're a free website/app.
I think I made an error here by assuming that every reader of Hacker News would be at least somewhat pro-adblocking.
So since you appear not to be, let me ask you:
* Do you use any ad blocker at all? If yes, can you define precisely when ad blocking is stealing and when it is not?
* If I visit a random website with ads, and I don't have an adblocker, the ads on that site may be used to track me across other sites, build a profile of me to sell to data brokers, serve me malware, bog down my system resources with audio, video, crypto-miners, and other garbage, or a myriad of other undesirable things. Would you consider any of these things to be the website (or the ad network) stealing from me? At what point, if any, does the website's right to extract revenue from me end and my right to privacy/security begin?
Do you use any ad blocker at all?
No
With your second question:
Tracking - Tracking isn't stealing, that's a privacy question.
Building a Profile - I mean not stealing but also vague so not sure what's the point of trying to argue this one? Like if you keep going with this line of thinking you end up with "you looked at me funny which made me feel weird so you're stealing by stealing my joy". (Absurd example but trying to show how abstract arguments don't end up working) Then we would probably loop back to fallacy of composition.
Malware - Serving malware is a criminal act and you can block it, but you're also not usually going to CNN.com and expecting them to download a crypto miner on your hardware. You are, however, expecting advertisements, hence why you're using an adblocker.
Bogging down your resources/other garbage - I mean idk, case by case basis.
You keep trying to paint with broad strokes but that's not how these things usually work. In my original example, it works because it's a simple transaction the artist wanted. Pay me 1$ for my art and you can view it. They created it privately with the intent of selling, and by downloading it for free, you're breaking that intent and depriving them of potential revenue.
Serving malware is a criminal act and you can block it, but you're also not usually going to CNN.com and expecting them to download a crypto miner on your hardware. You are, however, expecting advertisements, hence why you're using an adblocker.
I absolutely expect CNN, Google, and any other website to serve me malware. You can find many historical examples of the largest ad networks serving up malware on just about any site in existence. So that is actually the primary reason why I use adblockers, and blocking the visual noise is just a nice side effect.
How should I legally/ethically block this malware without using a broad ad blocker? AFAIK there's no way for me to know ahead of time when and on what site malware will be served.
I'm sorry if you think I'm painting in strokes that are too broad -- I'm trying to understand your viewpoint here. I would also like to be clear that I do think copyright infringement is a thing, and in your example of "pay me $1 and you can view my art," viewing the work and not paying is ethically dubious and probably could be considered copyright infringement in most jurisdictions. I just vehemently object to it being called "stealing" as you've done here.
I absolutely expect CNN, Google, and any other website to serve me malware. You can find many historical examples of the largest ad networks serving up malware on just about any site in existence.
I would love to see a source of a large company like CNN knowingly serving malware in the guise of ads. I've never heard of that but I'm all ears; I feel like it would be big news if CNN knowingly put a crypto miner on your device.
How should I legally/ethically block this malware without using a broad ad blocker?
I don't know but also now you're committing a fallacy known as "Irrelevant conclusion". Yes, there's a genuine question on how you can block malware without depriving website owners of their ad revenue, however it's irrelevant to the original argument of whether blocking ads is stealing (which we've somehow come to from a piracy argument but whatever). The argument becomes "Is blocking ads stealing when some of them give me malware", but that's separate from "Is blocking ads stealing".
Alternatively you might be trying to argue "but I block ads because some of them give me malware" which can be an appeal to pity[2], but I don't think you're trying to go that far.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrelevant_conclusion [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_pity
Wow, aren't you the fallacy guy. Please, give me more fallacies! I should just change my username to fallaciousgoats.
How about this: I didn't use the word "knowingly" anywhere in my statement, and in fact I have no earthly idea whether the countless examples [1][2][3][4] of malware being served via ad networks on major websites was done knowingly. My guess is it wasn't?
So you've got the beginnings of a straw man fallacy here, questioning an argument that I never actually made.
If you'd like to learn more about why malware shows up on cross-site ad networks, there's a good quick read available at [5].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17550808
[2] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-abuse...
[3] https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2023/01/18/google-ads-increa...
[4] https://blog.fox-it.com/2014/01/03/malicious-advertisements-...
[5] https://theconversation.com/why-bad-ads-appear-on-good-websi...
You broke the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread, and you've broken them in other threads too (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38695587 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38539273 ).
We have to ban accounts that do this, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, that would be good.
I apologize; I’ll review the guidelines and try to do better next time.
Wow, aren't you the fallacy guy. Please, give me more fallacies!
Ad hominem
Haha good one!
You're back at the start again though - if I wasn't going to buy it, then the vendor hasn't lost anything if I steal it. All that happens is I gain a free experience I would otherwise not have had.
Except because you now actually went out, downloaded/took it, and experienced it, it implies there was a non 0 interest in the work, therefore there is lost possible revenue since you might have eventually went and bought the work.
It's also possible I might not have bought the work. There's no sale until money changes hands.
If you run a store, and a customer shows interest in a product and physically touches it is he/she stealing if she chooses not to buy it? Let's say it's perfume, and the customer samples some of the perfume, then decides not to buy it. The customer has experienced it; if the customer doesn't buy the perfume, is that stealing?
I have $1000. Currently, I am not giving it to you, and am therefore actively depriving you of this money. Is this stealing?
You're using a false analogy. You're trying to make a parallel between not paying for an item/produced good and simply not giving someone money in an attempt to downplay not paying for created material.
Both of these have a common element:
A: "Not giving someone money for an item/produced good"
B: "Not giving someone money"
B can apply to a near infinite number of cases. A is one case that is "within" B. So... the root meaning is the same. If you call A stealing, you have to call B stealing, but that's ridiculous because, for example, each day, I literally don't give money to the entire world. According to your logic I would owe the whole world population the value of every item/produced good.
You are stealing... what, exactly?
(It’s not stealing any thing at all)
I wouldn’t have bought that chocolate bar anyway
Please take a logic class before you commit a really basic fallacy.
Agreed.
Work on the chocolate bar analogy some more, especially the part about how it's still there after digital video pirates steal it.
Thanks for actually contributing instead of being obtusely sarcastic...ah wait.
It's interesting that people devalue a good just because it's digital on a tech focused website named HackerNews lol.
Apply the same logic to literally any other item and your argument falls apart (I wouldn’t have bought that chocolate bar anyway so they’re not really losing money from me)
The rest of your argument notwithstanding, that's because stealing chocolate bars is zero sum, whereas copying films is not.
If you want to read this comment, which I created, you owe me $100.
Okay, now pay up. If you don’t, you’re stealing from me.
They get the same amount of residuals if someone doesn't watch something or if they pirate it.
That doesn’t make the actions equivalent.
And in OP’s case, it certainly doesn’t given him any moral authority to speak for the plight of the artists.
I’d be curious if he’s spoken to any of these artists, on the best way to support them. Somehow I doubt most of them will be appreciative of the moral stand the OP is taking here.
They get the same amount of residuals if someone doesn't watch something or if they pirate it.
Someone dying of natural causes and someone being murdered both end up with the person dying, that does not mean they're the same thing.
No, it absolutely isn't a moral imperative, quite the reverse.
I don't know where you get the idea that the internet was "supposed" to be "free" or why the fact that a global transport network for information exists implies that everything transported over it should not require any payment.
The logical endpoint of your position is that you will get what you pay for: content that costs almost nothing to produce.
Note the first paragraph - it's not payment (or lack thereof) that is being called into question. It's a matter of availability. Despite the streaming companies' worldwide reach they can't (or won't bother to) get the rights to stream content to different countries.
You are right, I misread the point being made. I still think piracy is the wrong thing to do, and definitely not a moral imperative.
I do agree that restricted availability is one of the key drivers though.
I did once pirate a second series of a TV show when it was not possible to stream it in my country (after I exhausted every possible way to pay for it). These days I just wait to buy DVDs and stick them on Plex. Takes a bit longer but it's not that urgent, and I'm not dependent on a streaming service to access it.
The internet being free was a 90s cyberpunk ideal. Those ideas were not very well thought out to say the least.
The irony here is from their post history they are a business owner that made 4m in profits last year. Guess it’s a moral imperative to steal from them eh?
My 12 year old self would agree with you. But I was still opening and closing my friends CD ROM drives at 12 also exposing their home computers to anyone who knew what port to scan. Yeah it was fun but I didn’t fully grasp the consequences at the time. The consequences of piracy are severe to the pirate and to the artist. The true spirit of a hacker is indeed an artist … Someone who questions societal norms in expression of their skills that paints their insight or dissonance for the rest of us to enjoy. In this case your moral imperative is cognitive dissonance. If you find a way to pirate and directly support the artist (cutting out the corporations you hate) that would be more of a moral imperative but also ignoring the importance of the suits that support the artist financially, legally, and pragmatically.
The streaming space desperately needs consolidation right now.
Every rights holder having their own service has killed a lot of the convenience because you'll now need several different services to go through an entire TV show, for instance. And also because all services other than maybe Netflix have garbage software for your various devices. Because every service also has to support 8 different platforms. Video playback and scrubbing is buggy and laggy, the GUI for finding stuff is sluggish. On one service(I don't even remember which, they all blur together in my head), I tried to watch some House MD and half the episodes were missing the English audio track.
Consolidation, or interoperability.
Somehow any radio station can play any song they want (or seemingly any), for a standardized set of fees. And there is plenty of competition among radio stations. Couldn't we get the same setup for on-demand streaming of music and video?
That state of affairs was created by compulsory licensing. I'm not sure that really makes sense for TV/movies, since it would also mean a fixed royalty price for everything. But it sure would be nice.
I'm not sure that really makes sense for TV/movies, since it would also mean a fixed royalty price for everything.
Any reason why you think it would be a problem to have a fixed price?
I think the studios would have to swallow it if it was compulsory, no?
Because there's much more variation in what it costs to make a TV episode or movie than what it costs to make an album of music.
If there was one fixed royalty for every movie, it would presumably be too low to recoup the cost of blockbusters, so we just wouldn't get those anymore (I know some people wouldn't care, but most people would). And low-budget stuff would get "too much" (maybe less of a problem ;) ).
Then again, most successful blockbusters make back their budget and then some from theater ticket sales. But there's a lot of stuff out there that goes direct to streaming, or that doesn't find a following in the theater. Not to mention TV shows never end up in theaters, so they rely a lot more on streaming revenue to pay the bills, since selling television advertising is no longer as lucrative as it once was.
I do agree that compulsory licensing could work, but they'd have to come up with royalty tiers, or some variable pricing that depends on some objective measure that is difficult to game, if such a thing exists.
This is interesting. I'm just coming from the perspective that when I go to the theatre, there's just one general admission price regardless of the picture I'm seeing.
But I understand how TV is very different. You have "prestige" TV and you have your network sitcoms.
Hell no -lobbyists
Too bad for them. I would assume that getting a royalty off my streaming of something earns them more money than my piracy of something, but I guess they don't want my money.
It kind of exists for renting/buying. If a movie is available to rent digitally, it’s normally on multiple platforms.
If Netflix had seen themselves strictly as a distribution service, they might have taken an open-to-all, low-margin, high-volume approach, which had a chance to become ubiquitous and unassailable. Basically, they could have been the Cable-over-IP provider for everyone. But it's a lot harder to get there, from here.
They did that, and for a few years their catalog was total crap and getting worse. Then Stranger Things came along.
Did they? I thought pretty early they saw the writing on the wall given the low barrier to entry for a juggernaut like Disney to compete with them, and went hard at their "Originals". I remember an interview with Hastings saying as much, that "in the future we won't have all the content, just the best content."
It would have been bold of them to essentially pull back and try and broker a deal where they accepted lower margins as a mere distributor rather than doing what they did and seek safety with their own library of IP.
It's called "value-chain climbing."
Did this not work because Netflix didn't want to or because the producers decided they wanted to do distribution themselves?
Spotify has the same songs as Apple Music, Deezer or whatever.
Everything should be everywhere. Let the services compete on something other than content.
Qobuz has the same songs as everyone else, but in higher quality.
Because when you compete on content, piracy always wins
Some things they could compete on, just because I'm overthinking this:
- price (do I have to pay or do you offer free with ads?)
- content quality (do you have 4k movies?)
- organization (can I filter by director? Do you have a collection of all the Oscar-nominated movies from this year?)
- advanced controls (can I make a playlist of tv episodes? Maybe I want to watch a series in a different order than it was broadcasted)
- accessibility (do you have subtitles in this language?)
- extras (does this have a commentary? a trailer? the cut scenes?)
- more extras (can I pause and get the name of the actor that's on screen or the name of the song that's playing?)
content quality (do you have 4k movies?)
No, that arguably makes it even worse. You're adding a whole new dimension to the problem of "where can I watch this".
Remember, the UX you're competing against is: 1. Open Kodi, 2. Open a 3rd party add-on that shall not be named, 3. Pick any movie or show that exists, 4. Select any available quality, from 100 GB 4K HDR releases to 1 GB 480p transcodes, 5. Play, anywhere, on any device, at any time
I was drawing a comparison with Qobuz and the lossless tracks.
So maybe everyone has 1080p movies, but that streaming service has 4K.
Also having to look for the hardware that has the right DRM support to be deserving of 1080p streaming rather than 480p.
Netflix has a problem that the front page is now filled with "B-rated" rather than "A-rated" content for more money than before. The amount of content that they spent money on in the past is hardly discoverable, genre search is barely exposed in the interface. You have to rely on 3rd party sites to find links to category selections, say Epic movies based on true events... good luck finding what they have in this category in the AppleTV or Roku apps. They also don't allow to exclude content that one is not interested in, I want no superheroes, no animated stuff, no dei, etc - and yet every time I launch the app it is there front and center and I just hate this. And if I watched 2 WW2 movies it doesn't mean that's the only thing I'm interested in in the recommended section. I want to exclude producing studios as well, like Vox, let me tell Netflix what I don't like.
So if you start looking outside of their interface - why then not just finish and get the movie elsewhere?
Finally, pricing is not flexible, what if I want infrequent 4k UHD streaming on a single device - why do I pay for 4 streams as if I'm streaming 24/7? At this point, I'm better off with Netflix Pay Per View (if this was offered). I keep paying for this service just because I can and just because I might watch something - but I find it more and more frustrating to watch something...
Yeah but if you always have to spend a lot of time finding something to watch, then that shows up in their analytics as increased engagement. Allowing you to remove garbage would make you spend less time in their app.
If you're actually watching content (a whole movie, a series, etc), the total actual usage of the service easily eclipses any time spent bouncing around the UI?
That may be true, but inconveniently, it wouldn’t allow the parent poster to rage fantasize about how stupid the product team at Netflix must be
Isn't it still at least very unaware of them, to force you through such bad UI, even if your search time is 10min compared to 2h movie? If not stupid, then still unaware of significant problems of their product/platform.
Or maybe they're right and that's why piracy is growing rapidly. I share most of their complaints and it's a big part of why I quit paying for subscriptions.
Yeah but many people go in with the goal of watching a single movie. Thus spending more time in the UI is the only way to pad that time.
I mean, I read stories about their excellent software teams who optimise the user experience all the time and their analytics are superb etc. Then when I use Netflix (not a lot) I notice that it keeps recommending me movies and shows I just f’ing watched. I have the same thing with YouTube and Prime. Are these devs just really bad or is there some motive here I don’t understand? I am not going to watch anything again that I watched 10 minutes ago… in all of these platforms now I have to use quite elaborate search to find things I didn’t watch but do find interesting, even though there must be millions of those. In my recommended feeds I get crap I either already saw or I would never watch (I watched romantic comedies literally never, so why do I keep them as recommended?).
This seems to be a reocurring pattern to me. The tech giants hire supposedly the best talend on the market for all their six figures, yet their products and platforms perform subpar for mny users. To me it seems, that all their talent is directed into the wrong channels and therefore cannot bring their skills to bear on something that makes an actually great product for those users.
You can have the best engineers and bright minds, but if your product sucks or your ethics are non-existent, and you don't let those engineers act outside of the limitting borders of the product, then they will not be able to make the product shine. They might be able to make a more dystopian version of your product, within the guidelines and ethical framework.
And lets not forget, that ethics of the engineers also play a big role. A decent developer with good ethics might make something, that the best engineers would never have even considered making or releasing to the public.
The funny thing is they want to have a tech company valuation and everything you are describing is a tech issue that is easily solvable but they won’t do it.
They are a content creation company/studio now. Their price to earnings (PE) ratio is 45 for some reason and they are part of the FAANG acronym for some reason. I can’t even find anything I want to watch on there and we cancelled it until Stranger Things comes out again. Then we will cancel again. The PE for Universal Studios is 12. Paramount is -7.
They are not bugs but features. The problem they have is that their catalog is mostly filler content at this point. If they addressed the "bugs" you'd be looking at a fairly sparsely populated page with mostly stuff you've already seen.
Netflix is designed to suggest that they have more content than they actually have and that the reason you haven't found anything worth watching just yet isn't that they don't have it but that it's behind the next page of filler content. That's why they have the horizontal scrolling and the endless generic groups of the same content that you've already seen. It's all circular. It doesn't matter how you navigate, it's always the same stuff that surfaces.
I cancelled my subscription last year. I'm planning to re-enable it in one month bursts only if/when I know they have something new I actually would like to see. I'm not paying anyone to watch ads.
The FAANG acronym was invented by a TV host of a stock market show based on their value to stock market grifters, not actual tech they're working on (which is why it has Netflix but no Microsoft).
no superheroes, no animated stuff, no dei
Which one here is not like the other?
What point are you trying to make?
I didn't realize Netflix was making "DEI" films
On your last point: Bundling features together in tiers even if not every user needs everything in every new tier is not new in any digital or even non-digital pricing strategy. Doubly so when the cost to Netflix to "grant" you 4 simultaneous streams is effectively 0.
Ehhhhhh, not sure I buy that. Sure, giving one person 4 streams instead of 1 has very little marginal cost, but giving everyone 4 streams instead of 1 is not cheap. They need more servers to serve the extra traffic, and they still have to pay for data transfer, presumably, even in places where they've put PoPs inside ISP data centers.
(Granted not everyone will be using those 4 simultaneous streams all at once, and some people won't even use the extra streams at all, but I'm sure enough will that it won't be free for Netflix to provide it.)
If, as a paying customer, I get an extremely low bitrate stream on Netflix because I'm watching it from Linux, then piracy is 200% justified.
It should work on Linux if you have have a properly set up protected media path.
Not according to Netflix themselves
Reread it. It says it's possible to stream HD content on Linux instead of only SD. Chromebooks with ChromeOS and certain devices with Android use Linux too, but have worked to get L1 widevine drm working so they have higher resolution available.
Yeah, HD, but not "Full HD".
The page has "HD (720p)" as max for all linux browsers. For each of the other OSes you have at least one browser with 1080p (Chrome at least). Why this restriction?
Why this restriction?
It depends on how secure your device is able to keep the decoded contents. The better the security the higher the quality they are willing to allow.
But if I wanted to do something other than watch the film why wouldn’t I just download it from a “pirate” site?
What is the benefit to the rights holder in having a “secure device”
What is the benefit to the rights holder in having a “secure device”
The goal is to make it expensive for it to even make it to a pirate site. We will get to the point where it will require a new hardware exploit to be found for each show that gets cracked. As the industry gets better at security the price per exploit will go up to eventually not be economical to continue doing.
Given it just needs to be done once, and a hdcp stripping device is easy to get, how does that work?
It doesn't, it's a coping mechanism for companies to be able to say they're "doing something". If DRM worked, I wouldn't be able to watch it on my bootleg setup in an hour or less after it officially releases on streaming platforms.
Given it just needs to be done once
Since it is still the early days I think they are hesitant to ban every insecure device once one is discovered. This greatly decreased the cost for attackers.
and a hdcp stripping device
Those only work with older versions of HDCP. Over time newer versions of HDCP will keep making the security better making it eventually impossible for an external splitter to work. No such splitter exists for HDCP 2.3 which came out 6 years ago.
So Chrome on MacOS is more secure than Edge or Firefox on the same OS and gets 1080p while the other two don't. But it is not as secure as Chrome on Linux? I don't get it. What is Chrome on MacOS doing differently from Chrome on Linux? What is possible on Linux that wouldn't also be possible on MacOS?
It looks like 1.5 years ago desktop Chrome got a new CDM designed to support L1 DRM on platforms (I'm not sure why Opera wouldn't have it though and a couple years ago chrome was 720p too). There doesn't seem to be much information about it, but it may not support general hardware on Linux yet. With all sorts of hardware and driver configurations it can be hard to support especially since the desktop Linux community hasn't invested too much into building protected content paths that could be easily used by a CDM.
Thank you for explaining! I guess that is plausible (and much less maddening than the matter-of-fact FAQ page).
Music piracy used to be a big problem. I am not sure if it still is or not?
Anyway, it feels like music piracy isn't close to what it was at its peak and that they figured out how to make it work.
Is there a reason that video is so much different?
It's not fragmented like video is. You go to your favourite music streaming platform and listen. You don't need to check all 10 services you pay for to work out if the artist is available on it.
Right, but why is it that way?
How did they manage to consolidate all music into 1 service and why can't or won't that work for video?
Music downloads became viable a lot earlier, and so the companies are a decade+ ahead on the dealing with sharing angle.
This is why I asked the question.
So if the case is simply that music downloads and streaming were earlier then there is hope for video downloads and streaming to eventually catch up?
It feels like right now though that video access is becoming more fragmented still, rather than more consolidated.
That’s a good point - I wonder why the two industries evolved differently.
I would think exclusive music would add much greater product stickiness than exclusive video content.
Someone might listen to Taylor Swift on every gym session, but how many people are going to watch Stranger Things twice?
That's a good question. I'd love to see Netflix's stats. Some people really are going to watch the same show over and over again. Like the office.
It depends on what artists you listen to. Some artists have pulled out of certain streaming services: famously Neil Young left Spotify after some dispute.
There's also some unfortunate music which seems to be in licensing hell so it never ends up on streaming platforms, but I haven't noticed it with famous artists.
But yeah, for most music you're way less likely to have issues streaming their content.
Music rights management is independant of production and distribution. This means that Spotify, Apple Music and any other music services are able to negotiate rights to large libraries of music quite easily.
I wonder why did the rights management for music and video come about so differently.
Perhaps because streaming services like Spotify pay artists a pittance compared to what they would get from CDs. Artists have to tour to make a living now.
There is no live version of a film.
It's more expensive so they are greedier.
I have one point which I really feel exemplifies the entire Netflix experience: before you sign up, they do not give you a list of what's available to watch.
Seriously, check out their website. It's basically a landing page which says "give us your money". The prices aren't even displayed.
There is no list of shows, save for a few measly screenshots of featured/well-known titles. There is a search box which lets you search for titles, but nothing like a catalogue of offerings, which is the absolute bare minimum I'd expect to see before purchasing a service.
I really cannot fathom why anyone would willingly give their hard-earned money to a company which doesn't even tell you what you're getting in exchange.
They could show you, but that's no guarantee of anything.
They rotate their content, and presumable the studios pull their content off. If they have movie X today, there's no assurance that it'll be there next week.
It's a subscription to a service, not to specific content. I don't see how it could be any other way.
Netflix could definitely make it easier to see what is on now, though. Amazon has a much larger catalog and you can browse it before signing up.
But he's not asking for consistency, but rather transparency.
I read it as "show me what I'm getting" - which is totally reasonable. I'm just pointing out that it is a very perishable answer.
They rotate their content, and presumable the studios pull their content off. If they have movie X today, there's no assurance that it'll be there next week.
That's also why I think piracy will always win, the studios are just too greedy to make it work.
When you do a rug pull on a show just even once, you lost some legal customers forever instantly, those people will have a tainted view of the platform.
If you search "dune streaming" in Australia, the top result (besides Google's little bits) is Netflix with the page title "Watch Dune".
If you visit that page as a subscriber, it doesn't say they don't have it. It just has the metadata and a "Remind me" button. If you visit in incognito, you get a 'not found' error. Maybe they have it for another locale. Maybe they used to have it. Maybe they will have it in the future. But you're left to guess.
A few years back, we were watching the Lucifer series—which, after being cancelled on whatever network it was on, was picked up by Netflix for its last...2 seasons, I think.
One day, it just...disappeared. One of Netflix's own shows (we were, by that time, watching the episodes they had produced).
Every source I could find said that Netflix carried it. But when I searched for it on Netflix, I couldn't find it.
A few months later, it reappeared, as mysteriously as it had vanished. Of course, by that time I'd simply downloaded the remainder of the series and we'd watched it through Plex.
I live in America.
You could try using Yandex instead of Google. They're more than happy to list free options on the first page of results.
Content hiding has become a really popular technique. Recently I reviewd Google's app of 2023 called Imprint and it purposefully hides all content counts to the point where some courses end abruptly with "get notified when next chapter is released". I emailed the team for content counts and got a firm no on that.
Just like with Netflix you can't browse the entire lists of content. All you have a is a search bar and some curated lists which give an illusion of content breadth. Not a fan of these dark patterns to say the least.
Well this approach (the part about not listing the shows/movies carried) worked just fine back in ~2012 when Netflix had pretty much everything.
These days... not so much.
What are non-tech-savvy people actually using for piracy these days?
Torrents require you to own a PC (there's no way to torrent on a phone or smart TV AFAIK), Usenet requires you to have some tech knowledge, same goes for Plex / Jellyfin.
I feel like piracy nowadays is a lot harder for an average Joe than it used to be. People now expect that they can turn on their TV, open an app, enter a title in the search box and start watching, and P2P just doesn't work that way.
Torrenting is very easy on Android.
(there's no way to torrent on a phone or smart TV AFAIK),
I have no idea for "smart tv", but at least for Android phones, F-Droid has plural torrent clients listed:
https://search.f-droid.org/?q=torrent&lang=en
Now, actually 'torrenting' on a phone also sounds like a recipe for rapid battery drain unless the phone is also plugged in to a charger, but that is independent of the "ability" to do so.
Torrents require you to own a PC (there's no way to torrent on a phone or smart TV AFAIK), Usenet requires you to have some tech knowledge, same goes for Plex / Jellyfin.
There are some piracy subreddits you can look at to get some idea, but there seems to be easier ways than that.
Non tech savvy people aren't messing around with torrents. They get android TV boxes from someone and pay them a small monthly fee to have a cable like interface to watch anything you could possibly pirate.
no way to torrent on a phone
Laughs in android
What are non-tech-savvy people actually using for piracy these days?
Where I live, they search for "watch blabla online 1080p free". Way less time consuming than actually using streaming services or torrenting.
Also, you can easily torrent on Android.
All the non-tech-savvy people I know talk about wishing they knew how to do the stuff, but instead they pay for streaming services while complaining about how much they suck.
I haven’t used them, but I think there are pirate sites that work just like steaming services. I don’t know a lot of details, but I think it’s still BT on the backend, and relies on a fast download and maybe it can prioritize chunks to get the start of the movie first? Not totally sure. But it seems a VPN would be important for that. I would say using a VPN requires some degree of savvy, but at the same time, it seems every other YouTuber out there is pushing a VPN app.
There are hundreds of click to play streaming pirate sites with full catalogs and multiple hosting mirrors.
Often they have better ui than legal streams. Auto play/next, auto intro and extro skips, better recommendations, full search engine features, subtitles, etc. Without ad block they can be a banner ad mess, but with adblock there is none.
I have found myself pirating more and more. Netflix and co aren't just losing on the available content and the price, the actual browsing experience is far better on the illegal streaming site I use.
I'd like to compare yours to all streaming sites I've used, which are riddled with ads and deceptive clicks.
There's an app called Stremio that just blows any "official" app away. The app is not for piracy per-se, but it's easy to turn it into a full fledged PopcornTime version that works.
Yeah, but it's obvious. Obvious malicious design is easier to filter out than dark pattern design.
Well, if you are an experienced pirate, this is not an issue. You have an adblocker that filters out all the stupid ads and scams, and you only go to a few sites and know which links you should click. Getting that kind of experience won't take more than a few hours.
If they are using a decent ad blocker they probably dont see 99.9% of that. At most they might note one of the couple mirrors for the video doesn't work.
I stopped using Netflix when they introduced that "feature" that you were never allowed to look at a menu in peace - it would always play the show you were looking at, behind the menu, with sound on, and there was no way to turn it off. It made the site unusable and I eventually gave up on my subscription.
There is a setting -- in "Edit settings" - "Playback settings", turn off "Autoplay previews while browsing in all devices".
It might not be there when this was first introduced happened, but FYI this is possible today.
As someone who rarely watch movies/series, I was paying ~100$/month worth of subscriptions until I cancelled most recently. Why? Content fragmentation is mentioned by everyone, but to me, the main problem was that I could never get a proper watching experience even after finding what I wanted:
1- English subtitles only available with CC: I want subtitles because as a non-native English speaker I cannot understand some of the accents. I hate it when the subtitle says: "glooming musinca playing"
2- Quality issues: I'm watching on a 4k OLED TV. Watching the matrix reloaded for the 10th time, and seeing the actors appear in two places because of some weird compression artifact pulled the plug for me.
3- Quality issues: I used to buy Crave's 4k subscription. It limits content to 720p on my Linux machine. Let's imagine a world in which I'm OK with it, IT DOES NOT GET PROPERLY FULL SCREEN ON ANY OF MY MONITORS/TV. I paid for a 65" TV, I want to see a video fill at least one of the dimensions.
4- UX issues: Sometimes I pause because I want to check something in this scene. Do not dim the scene, I'm not interested in all the details you are spitting to the screen.
5- UX issues: I'm not OK with you showing me ads before I start watching my show
6- UX issues: Sluggish apps on some TVS/streaming devices
7- On my Chromecast, made by Google, I want my guest to use a guest session on YouTube premium, to not mess up my recommendations, ads start playing. This is the same device, I've not even signed out, just using a guest session.
8- I can keep going on
I understand that license holders play content availability, but the problems above could easily be solved if any of the streaming services cared about their customer satisfaction. I canceled because even when I found something to watch, I never enjoyed the experience. Now I'm an inch away from canceling YouTube premium, and then Spotify.
I hate it when the subtitle says: "glooming musinca playing"
Different strokes for different folks. As another non-native speaker, I personally like those descriptions, because they help me label a kind of music, or an emotional outburst.
It's like knowing how to describe a pain you have. You can't just say "it hurts" to a doctor, you need to be more specific ("it's a throbbing sensation with occasional sharp piercing pain")
That's why having a choice matters. To me, In a rare movie/show that's well produced, I want to feel what the authors wanted, not to read it from the screen. A lot of the times, the experience has more layers than just being "gloomy music", there are hidden feelings in the scene, in the character's body language, in a purposefully vague conversation. My only problem is not understanding weird accents. I don't need to read thunders/music feelings, woman screams, etc.
On the other hand, as someone who knows a smattering of words in other languages, I love when I know what a character is shouting in a foreign language. But I don't get that when the subtitles just say "[shouting in foreign language]"
English subtitles only available with CC
The worst part of the subs for the hard of hearing is that the contain so many spoilers. They'll write "JOHN:" an hour before our protagonist learns who exactly this mysterious character is, completely ruining any surprise.
This. There are just too many ways to spoil a carefully planned experience.
Watching the matrix reloaded for the 10th time
You deserve everything you get
Piracy isn't difficult to compete against. You just need to provide a service at least as usable as piracy. I won't mind paying a couple of bucks, I just need a usable service which:
1. Doesn't restrict what content I can watch from which country and doesn't prevent me from using VPN. This is outright ridiculous and I deeply hate streaming services just for that.
2. Has all the content from multiple studios, not just from your "walled garden". Until you solve that, piracy is more usable. There are illegal Netflix-like services that stream all the content without a hassle — and some of them are even subscription-based! Hear me out — people FUCKING PAY pirates to watch content, because their services are more convenient to use than yours that are legal. So yeah, people don't mind paying. They just want a decent service.
3. lets me watch 4k streams on my haiku, aros, openbsd systems.
Artificial DRM-based restrictions ultimately mean not getting the quality you pay for. Netflix specifically becomes 720p garbage.
But I can just rely on less official sources. In this case I get a DRM-free, very high quality file that plays everywhere, forever.
720p garbage
I'm genuinely concerned there's something wrong with my eyes. 720p looks fine, I think? Is there that huge of a difference?
What size and resolution is your screen? 720p on a 4k 27" looks visibly pixelated but on a phone looks just fine...
What an interesting choice of platforms! How / where do you use them? Why them specifically?
Netflix app on my TV crashed when I plugged-in my usb headset :/
I haven't pirated in a while. I was happy to pay for some platforms.
The problem is that pretty much all of these services say you get 2 or 4 or however many screens and now they're tightening viewership to within the same household. If I'm one person I'll never need to use 4 screens at once, so why can't I share them with a few family members who live elsewhere?
And on top of that, you get plans that never had ads before now starting to add them (i.e. Amazon Prime Video). So I'm paying the same or more (as prices continue to be increased) for the same base level of content with additional annoying cruft.
With all the extra complexity like this, it's easier to just pirate and maybe set up a server I can just give relatives access to.
And on top of that, you get plans that never had ads before now starting to add them
It's exactly the same thing that happened with cable TV: it started out without ads, selling itself based on that feature, and then when they had lots of subscribers, they added ads.
I predicted this exact thing would happen not that long ago here on HN and other forums and people called me crazy.
Those people were probably too young to remember pre-ads cable I feel like everyone I knew who lived through that era knew it would come to streaming as well at some point.
At least for now, I'm still sharing netflix and amazon prime video with my parent who live in a different country 10,000 miles away.
The day I get a message stopping me from doing that is the day I cancel my subscriptions.
I haven't been so lucky with Netflix. Relatives who live in other cities have gotten a message that they can't use mine unless I do the thing to add a new user for $7.99 or however much it is. Occasionally it works for them but most times it does not.
I downgraded from the 4-screen option to single screen when they cracked down on password sharing.
The downside is that level subscription is restricted to a maximum resolution of 720p, which doesn't bother me a great deal in terms of picture quality, it bothers me in that it's a technical limitation - maybe it's justified in terms of their costs to deliver 720p versus 1080p, but I feel like 1080p should be a baseline in 2024.
Do they still plan to compete by making their service suck more, through higher prices, more ads, and less content?
I'm so glad I ripped all my DVDs
i read on twitter a while back about some tv writer who was really happy because they managed to find someone who sent them pirated dvds of their work. apparently when disney+ removed the show from their catalog, it was otherwise lost to the world. that is definitely not the promise of streaming services that i remember from when they was first starting to gain popularity.
Pirates are better archivists than any media company. The effort put in to meticulous curation of content libraries on private trackers is really incredible.
Look at the payoffs. The company's payoffs are those primarily of its C suite: bonuses paid based on short term results.
The unsanctioned archivists have the payoff of the enjoyment they get from preserving and sharing media they love, which has no built in time limit like the former.
I'm so glad I ripped all my DVDs
For anyone interested in doing this for DVD or BD, makemkv[0] is where it's at.
Amen.
I'm baffled at the amount of users arguing that piracy is easier than those streaming services.
It feels like such a mental gimmick.
1) finding and downloading torrents requires know-how
2) finding and downloading subtitles that match the audio is often a chore and requires know-how, often time consuming
3) using a decent player on most devices and finding the files on the filesystem requires know-how, especially on mobile devices
While I understand that users on HackerNews are more tech savvy and don't find any of those particularly troublesome, to compare it to the ease of launching Netflix is just mental gymnastics. Average users won't find any of this convenient and will require to acquire know how in search engines and setting up players.
You're behind the times. These days piracy is available through a Netflix-like interface, without any buffering, subtitles are automatically loaded in from all major websites like OpenSubtitles, and this experience is shared across all platforms (desktop, smart TVs, mobile).
It requires a bit of up-front setup (no more than 30 minutes if you're tech savvy and pick one of the less friendly options), but it really is easier than Netflix on a daily basis.
You see? Even though I'm more tech savvy than the general public I knew nothing about that. You're proving this still requires know how.
E.g. How do I set this up on my samsung smart tv?
I don't think this is the right forum to discuss this in depth. Paid Plex sharing used to be great and required no setup at all, but they started cracking down on huge Plex servers.
Kodi doesn't offer the best UX in this space [1], but certain addons 4 kodi should at least set you on the right path. (:
I should mention that this isn't a free solution. It's inexpensive, but someone still needs to be paid to provide the bandwidth for a smooth experience, typically $5/mo or less.
[1] Out of the box, if you're willing to tinker with it you can completely overhaul its look & feel: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=367352
At least for the last point i can recommend jellyfin. It has a web interface, a android tv app and an iphone app. I use it on my phone, tv and in the browser.
Is most of piracy still this style of downloading torrents?
The content diaspora to other services has made Netflix tremendously less appealing; just par for the course as Netflix tries their hardest to lose me as a customer. I just had a support chat with them Friday because my kid has been in the hospital for several weeks after being hit by a car. Since they haven’t been home, Netflix has decided they’re no longer part of the household and we have to manually reauthenticate every two weeks or chip in another $8/mo for their own account. (I asked them point blank, “is it the official position of Netflix that a hospitalized patient is no longer part of a household?” and they just said “the policy applies to all devices”.) I’ve been using Netflix since it was a mail-order DVD rental service…but at this point they’ve sold me on their new most popular plan: cancelling.
What a mess. They should be training their support people better, and giving them more escape hatches to properly handle situations like yours. Even if there are some assholes out there who would lie and make up a hospitalized kid to abuse it, overall the loss of goodwill here (and the loss of your subscription) sounds much worse for their bottom line.
Hope your kid is doing ok, or at least will be doing ok.
It was very, very clear that they’ve outsourced support and their reps have no authority to help. I was either chatting with a very good GPT bot or a very bot-like human with no authority or agency who will be replaced by a good-enough GPT in short order.
I think it would be easy enough for them to…I dunno, ask me for a doctors note? (That’s what everyone else who needs to confirm this situation has asked for.) But that wouldn’t “scale” <eyeroll>.
Thanks for the well-wishes; my kid impresses me every day. Maybe less Netflix will be a silver lining. :-)
This kind of situation should really be gaining more attention from Netflix leadership and management. They're burning so much good-will and being assholes in the process.
The most frustrating part is that there's no accountability by company leadership towards paying customers. To which I'm sure someone would reply "they only have to be accountable to shareholders", which is utterly insane.
I don’t mind them operating as a business and I’m happy to pay for a service that is providing me value. But I am unwilling to put my own time and effort into patching the shortcomings of whatever dumb heuristic they’ve implemented as “household” detection. I have _slightly_ more important things to be doing right now, and as we’ve already noted in this thread: Netflix isn’t the only game in town anymore…
that’s an awful situation. i hope your kid recovers soon
All right, so just off the top of my head we have:
- Netflix
- Amazon Prime
- Disney+
- HBO+
- Hulu
- YouTube Premium
- Apple TV
- Whatever Sky's offering is called
- At least a couple of others that I've forgotten
- Plus some kid-specific services that aren't necessarily included in the base subscription (looking at you, Amazon)
- And then I haven't even got into music streaming services like Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, etc.
You know, competition is a good thing, but overall I'm not that sympathetic.
It's just too damn hard, and unsustainably expensive, to be able to watch what I want to watch when I want to watch it.
Then there's content duplication, content exclusives, and on top of that just this endless churn of huge quantities of content being thrown out that, frankly, isn't necessarily that great and feels like kind of a waste of time to watch.
This isn't really working for me. Let me say it again, I want to watch what I want to watch when I want to watch it and with reasonable pricing. I'm happy to pay. I'm not happy to be bilked. And I'm not interested in the arguments about rights. I just want to watch what I want to watch when I want to watch it.
*Using whatever hardware, OS, and browser I want.
Competition is good, but this isn't competition, almost all of these platforms catalogs are mutually exclusive, so instead of competing to be the platform with the lowest cost/best UX/ network effect, they're just competing to get shows off of another platform and onto theirs, to the detriment of the consumer.
Music streaming is not currently suffering the same fragmentation that video streaming displays. I.e. the same music albums are available on all those music streaming services you mentioned. (I know there are a few exceptions but for the vast majority this is true).
Music streaming services have very few exclusive content. Which is why they tried to sign exclusive deals with e.g. podcasters.
Should they go in the same direction as video streaming, we will see an increase in music pirating again as well.
Hasn't stopped Spotify and co from increasing prices anyway of course.
Videogamedunkey has an entertaining survey of the streaming landscape:
I sometimes wonder if more piracy will lead to more product placement directly in content and other insidious advertising strategies that would make up for the content being scooped up for free. It's still millions of eyes, after all.
I’m not sure if it’s still the case, but Subway used to be big on doing product placements with shows on their last leg. They probably got it for a steal, and they made it really, really obvious. For example, the episode of Community where Subway is a person. Chuck did a lot of obvious Subway stuff at the end too. I remember Zachary Levi (Chuck) posting on Twitter to buy Subway for the finale in hopes that it would boost Subway sales enough to get them to pay to renew it for another season.
I’ve actually been surprised the more subtle product placement isn’t more common. There are always prop bags of chips, boxes of cereal, etc. you’d think it would cost basically nothing to swap it out for a similar soundless bag with a Lays label on it and get some money. Everyone knows what Lets chips are really trying to be. Maybe syndication presents issues. Does the company pay every time the episode runs, in perpetuity, or just once to get the episode made? With a one time payment, getting a spot in a show like The Office would be like winning the advertising lottery. If they have to pay for each viewing, it could turn into a real problem.
I’ve actually been surprised the more subtle product placement isn’t more common
It's more common than you seem to think, just not omnipresent. Look for beer advertising in any scene that takes place at a bar, that's a scenario where not having it would look more out of place so it's almost always done.
It's amusing watching streaming turn into cable, but somehow worse. At least we got some public access programming out of cable.
Piracy is a service problem. Valve proved digital piracy can be beaten by commercial solutions. The problem is the media cartels being intransigent with digital delivery, not piracy.
Gabe's stance was established over a decade ago; I think it's been long enough that we can add Music streaming to bolster that argument, because so many people don't really consider piracy there either. The price isn't outrageous, all the content is there when you search for it, and ads are non-existant. Piracy has been left for the truly frugal (sharing accounts, public trackers) or the die-hards (private trackers or similar).
Uber turned into taxis, but worse.
Airbnb turned into hotels, buts worse.
This is "disruption."
I'll bite - people torrent because they have no other options. People will pay for content if they're able to access content after paying. So, here's my offer:
I will build a torrent streaming site where the torrent file costs some reasonable amount of $$ per download, for fully licensed content, with zero DMA protections.
If you have IP that you are willing to share on this torrent site, I will take 10% of revenue after subtracting costs, you get the remaining.
My email is on my HN profile. If you own IP and are interested in licensing it this way - shoot me a mail. I need a minimum amount of interest from IP holders before I put in any real work building this.
Your move, Hollywood.
The technical side has been solved for 15+ years. It's a licensing/rights issue what is screwing with the video experience.
FWIW Netflix should go back to providing physical content rental (DVD, blueray) with full catalog. Or someone should do WHAT Allofmp3 did in the 2000s with Audio and THE ROMS licensing.
I download said content and share it on a public torrent site. Your move, dilippkumar.
The common supposition about video is that convenience makes the price worth it versus piracy. It'll be very interesting to see this unfold. Not only are streaming services in direct competition with a free option, but they'll have actual, real, not-market-inevitable competition for their "exclusively-negotiated" tv.
Piracy has evolved too; You only need to look at how automated piracy can become; whether its the end of the people buying access to plex, or the automation offered by users of the Servarr stacks /Sonarr/Radarr etc
Netflix invgestment in UX has lead to theUX being valued around piracy, rather than just downloading files from some website.
Yes, this is exactly what I mean—media distribution is inherently a losing war against the internet.
Content fragmentation, platform fragmentation, geo-locking, DRMs, "woke" censorship and revisionism... no wonder piracy is on the rise, again.
At some point I had like 3 different paying streaming services, and they still failed to provide enough content of interest. All canceled now. The dollar bin dvds at my local thrift store is a much better offer... this and piratebay.
"woke" censorship and revisionism
you being the only comment in the whole thread giving this as a reason makes me think this might not really be a reason
Call it what you want, but I'm not gonna pay for content that is revised/censored to fit whatever current trend. I'm old enough that I've seen Darryl Hannah's butt on the silver screen as a youngster from the movie Splash and I won't pay to be lectured either. I wish media corps would consider their content like art works as much as entertainment and distribute them as is, not butchered. That includes "enhancements" like new dubbing and colors.
Last christmas, I want to watch Home Alone series (1-3). I don't know where they are available. Google search result shows it available in Netflix. I checked Netflix, it didn't available there but in Disney+ (Hotstar) in my country. Shit like this why I decide pirate it instead.
Similarly for me with an old movie called Miracle Mile. I wanted to watch it and searched through the 6 paid services I have ... none of them had it in my country, not even for "rental" . I've got the income, and I'd gladly pay $5 usd to rent a movie to watch. Like I did in the 90s . But noooooooo. So yeah, I found it in some torrent site and watched it happily.
Consumer: Netflix is hard to pay for when they raise prices twice in 3 months and describe the 2nd price raise as account lock down, the consequences are growing rapidly.
I definitely cancelled Netflix but I don’t pirate their shows because there’s nothing really worth pirating.
Crocodile tears, piracy beats streaming and will continue to do so as long as availability is a problem.
My example; a certain popcorn-related torrent site provides an archive of 315,669 movies.
Total torrents: 916,518
Webrips, full Blu-ray rips, remuxes, 2160p, 1080p, 720p, 480p; h.265/h.264, x.265/x.264, you also have DVDs and even VHS.
Some movies also offer 3D in various formats, some are director's cut, some are theatrical, some are uncut. I can go on, but just one movie is offered in a myriad of formats and options.
Places like these are equivalent to the library of Alexandria. They must not fall because they hold valuable media that is not even available elsewhere.
I remember Stallman mentioning a universal fee for internet access and all media, wishful thinking but for a subset of internet users this has been a reality for at least a decade.
With self-hosting services, VPNs like WireGuard and nice apps like Infuse on the Apple TV that can connect to any server and play anything you throw at it there's no going back for me personally.
At this point I find it morally imperative to keep seeding in order to keep media alive that would otherwise be lost to time because no-one else cares.
The big companies are all about profits, it's up to the little man to save the ideals of the early internet.
I've heard it claimed that there's actually a decent number of industry insiders that also participate on the popcorn site because it's the only site where you can easily access certain obscure movies.
Even on What CD there used to be a few actual artists that would directly share their albums.
The simple solution is that we need a spotify of all movies.
Netflix tried to do this, but then studios wanted a piece of the pie, so they all spun up their own streaming services and then stopped licensing to their competitors.
Also, artists make virtually no money with Spotify, so it "works" for the consumer, but does it work for the artists?
...it's difficult to compete against even when you have the state willing to make threats of violence on your behalf if they utilize the competing model.
It seems like this says more about the future of so-called "intellectual property" than it does about these particular companies or these particular practices.
(re-reading: this reads like a rant against Netflix, which is mostly isn't meant to be: I honor Netflix's attempt to beat the competing no-IP model by being easy-to-use and comprehensive. Unfortunately for basically everyone, it seems that such a combination can never be sustained under the IP industrial complex.)
Only 6hrs ago this comment summarizes a big part of what's wrong with the streaming model today [1]:
Disney+ removed Crater ~7 weeks after it was released, purely to reduce residuals and claim losses for lower tax bills[2].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39252151
[2]: https://kotaku.com/disney-streaming-crater-tax-rort-scam-wri...
It's a bit like when I delete the movie torrent to free up some disk space.
Thankfully there are other seeds you can download from.
there’s quite a bit of copying going on, as SEC filings from several companies include identical passages
The author is a great financial forensics sleuth! Here is the passage “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth highlighted inside each conpany's 10-K on one site (shameless plug):
NFLX: https://last10k.com/sec-filings/nflx#:~:text=In%20light%20of...
FUBO: https://last10k.com/sec-filings/fubo#:~:text=in%20light%20of...
RDBX: https://last10k.com/sec-filings/rdbx#:~:text=in%20light%20of...
CURI: https://last10k.com/sec-filings/curi#:~:text=in%20light%20of...
To be fair, though, companies really need to put things like this into their SEC filings, regardless if it's actually affecting them or not. Because if it could affect them, and they don't disclose it, some group of shareholders is going to sue, claiming that the company should have anticipated whatever risk to their business ended up coming to bite them, and disclosed it ahead of time.
Granted, there's a balance to be maintained: put too much random, theoretical crap in there, and people will either think a) you're lying about all this stuff just to cover your ass, or b) the business they're in is a complete minefield and not worth investing in.
So I don't really take it as gospel that piracy is truly eating into Netflix's bottom line just because they've identified it as a business risk in their 10-K. (I do believe them in this case, though, since it's an obvious outcome of the fragmentation of desirable content across so many streaming services.)
It's even harder to compete when you don't have the content users want while charging more than ever.
I find it entirely baffling that the top shows on Netflix are lighthearted shows (usually comedies) that go on for many seasons. Friends, Seinfeld, suits, office, Gilmore girls, supernatural
But… Netflix doesn’t make these kinds of shows. They give small orders of episodes to niche shows and cancel them quickly before they have time to gain an audience.
Obviously they know which shows people watch, but why doesn’t that translate into them making those shows at presumably less cost?
“We cracked down on account sharing, added a bunch of ads, DRM, and are seeing the logical response from annoyed consumers”
Oh yeah fuck the DRM... Amazon was even worse with that (got like 360-480p on my laptop wtf), netflix got to 720p. Even then, the bitrate felt so low sadly
I stopped pirating games when Steam made buying games safer and more convenient than pirating them, while being affordable and having lots of sales. It didn't get worse despite being a monopoly for a long time, and now we have that plus another service that throws free games at you every week for attention.
I stopped pirating TV shows and movies when for a small monthly fee I could watch most of what I wanted to watch on Netflix. I wouldn't say it was more convenient or better quality on all counts, but it was good enough.
Now I need 10 different streaming subscriptions that keep increasing in price, often only available in dubbed German because I live in Germany, often in worse video/audio quality than it could be, originals getting randomly axed after a cliffhanger, horrible apps, ads being forced on you, no more entire seasons published at once because you can still cancel subscriptions monthly, and don't get me started about offline viewing which never worked properly in the first place.
The limitations are all artificial and it's clear that it's publicly traded companies scraping the bottom of the barrel for infinite growth again.
The legal system can be challenging - your local Netflix provider probably bought rights only to the dubbed version because it was cheaper...
So what I do now is, I pay for all these services, use absolutely nothing, and then I pirate all my content anyway. People (presumably) get their money, and I get to watch without bullshit from the convenience of my own home.
Way to give them free money for not improving their offering...
I have about $120 in streaming subscriptions (wife, daughter). Lat week I wanted to watch Korean movie “Sleep”, which I then found and rented from both Google and Apple. Turns out that neither had subtitles in English. So I refunded both and comfortably watched it in an “alternative” streaming site. I really try to pay for content but this fragmentation is destroying the business.
Not that hard to compete against. Just stop being assholes.
If Netflix didn't raise their prices at more than double the inflation rate, and didn't crack down on password sharing, and didn't deactivate devices of deployed military members, and didn't keep cancelling and censoring content, maybe they wouldn't have this problem.
modern piracy is all about the 5000 different streaming services that exist and all have their own fee..
OTT destroyed the cinema business for small and medium films.
If piracy kills Netflix and other OTT what happens to films ?
People return to Cinemas or movies start streaming for Peanuts on YouTube ?
the use of this language is widespread and subject to rapid global growth Touché!
Where is the noscript/basic (x)html portal?
when did we steer away from the conclusion that piracy isn't in competition with these services? people who pirate generally aren't going to buy anyways.
even if you magically remove it one day, you lose yourself a bunch of free hype-advertisers and conversations with your title in it.
there's always somehow people who think its a net negative on them, that there's a zero-sum game involved with their product, that end up on the board of some important company and want to get rid of a good thing that they have no real perspective on.
A while ago, I tried to watch the "Jurassic Park" series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Park#Films
Jurassic Park is a cinema classic with ~6 films.
It is simply not possible to do this in any legal way. besides expensive, it is hard to understand if the film is available in each platform. I ended up paying for an extra streaming service and after login & pay, it said "this film is not available in your region".
please grow Netflix. Stop complaining about the "competition" and start working to provide a good service.
Here is an idea - offer video DRM-free. That should be a good competition offer.
It's easy to compete against Netflix. Sit down with the other providers in your space and find a way to make it clear to them that people want one streaming provider for everything and they want an ad-free option at an acceptable price point. Piracy was done for when you were at your top. You (meaning the industry) fucked this up yourselves.
Well, well, well… its seems we’ve come full circle.
Me&family spent like €5k on Apple devices (incl. smart speakers), then another €20+/mo on various subscriptions such as Apple Music. So I play through AirPods from a Mac using Music.app and from Apple's catalogue... the library metadata is a mess, there's entire (well-known) bands whose many albums are not available, Siri keeps mis-interpreting my requests (plays a song that's similarly named by an artist I never heard of even though I used the exact name of an album I listened to dozens of times last year alone), the "smart" playlist seems to play the same 50 songs on shuffle+repeat...
...and now also the playback in Music.app occasionally stutters, on an M1 Mac, with an otherwise idle system. So let's raise the subscription prices.
In my opinions, all of these companies got waaay too comfortable taking our subscription money.
Don't worry, I'll figure out a different way to get these €16.99/mo into the starving artists' hands, plenty of buskers around here.
Me? I'm rooting for the pirates, personally.
It's almost trivial and largely automated to get torrents of just about anything I want to watch for free, without ads, often within an hour of it airing or being released.
Make legal video streaming easy and reasonably priced and I'll give you more money than Comcast or Hulu ever got from me. Ideally, some all in one service that all the content producers use where I can very easily buy and download an episode, season, series, or movie. Or maybe subscribe to a show or channel. Also, no commercials. And no disappearing content, or country filtering. Don't do this bullshit where I'm paying you money to get abused because I won't. Also a video player that doesn't fight me because it seems like some of them do.
It'll never happen. These companies will never cater to the consumers paying them as long as they can abuse their customers and get rich instead.
Netflix may be slightly better in some areas than some of the other streaming services but they have almost no content I find interesting so I won't even bother.
Yes, sure, just make better content and stop increasing fees and taking user-hostile actions.
I think the #1 competitor to netflix is not piracy but short video platforms: youtube, tiktok and instagram really.
A lot of people I know would rather spend 2 hours scrolling short videos of these social medias than have to decide on a show to watch. People have come at a level of lazyness they don't decide what to do and would rather have apps feeding them with stuff to watch they didn't even ask for. And despite removing accounts of all social medias I still get trapped sometimes. A few days ago I was looking for some youtube videos to diy something. When I got the information I needed I ended up watching a nearly 2h video of fails on youtube instead of doing the actual thing I just learned about.
On top of the fragmentation we users have to suffer crap like Netflix or Prime or HBO not streaming movies in 4K HDR Atmos when the movies totally exist in that format. We're in 2024 ffs.
Anyone surprised?
The copyright industry is hugely stubborn and they will keep escalating things -- likely there will again be a few arrests of torrent users in an attempt of scaremongering -- until people start leaving in droves.
Many people act like not watching shows or movies every other day is difficult. Nope, it's just fine, and many other people discover that every day.
I'd like to see the copyright lobby outlaw, you know, your right to just NOT subscribe to anything at all. Like, please incarcerate me for wanting to walk through the park and not sit in front of your streaming service! I'd like to see you try.
Fun times ahead, supposedly, and I take pleasure in watching them bleed.
Netflix: why you not use netflix but pirate movies!!!!1
Meanwhile also Netflix: you cannot take a screenshot for meme purposes due to security reasons
Piracy isn't difficult to compete against. Just put all content under the same (affordable) subscription and everyone will pay you.
And quit the crap about one subscription -> one household. I pay extra for two simultaneous streams, I'd better get my two simultaneous streams.
When we started looking for similar mentions by other businesses, we stumbled upon similar concerns and, strangely enough, some identical ones. Apparently, there’s quite a bit of copying going on, as SEC filings from several companies include identical passages.
I smell a coordinated initiative to buy some "democracy".
Piracy doesn't show me ads, buffer in 720p, remove episodes based on political winds, and then raise the price of service on a whim. I don't pirate movies or shows but at this point I feel pretty stupid for not doing so.
I wonder if torrent sites are a better 1 stop shop place where you can find everything?
I also personally believe as tech makes it easier for indy type groups & average individuals to make longer form content, Netflix may just become irrelevant to companies like YouTube who have better distribution channels.
This is enshittification pure and simple. The CEO or other shot callers need to make their bonus so they can hand it off to the next person to make it worse.
What’s next you may ask: AI generated movies that are on demand on how you want to tweak it, it’s not piratable because the model is on cloud and the processing required is uncommon. Just a thought
Bro who is pirating Netflix trash shows
It's interesting that Netflix uses the term "piracy" in what is more or less a legal document, rather than something more accurate (but likely more wordy), like "illegal distribution of copyrighted materials".
Anyway, I think the article hits it on the nose why this is becoming a problem again:
Netflix amassed hundreds of millions of subscribers, some of whom left their piracy habits behind. However, as the ‘streaming wars’ turned legal and convenient streaming platforms into isolated and pricey content silos, momentum started to shift.
I've been frustrated with this, too. When I first subscribed to Netflix, I was happy and satisfied, and rarely (if ever) need to turn to less-savory sources. Their app and website were both polished, snappy, and worked well. I picked up Hulu and HBO subscriptions too (apps not as good, but decent enough), and I considered those three to be a reasonable amount to pay to watch what I wanted to watch. And I was also pleased that, when watching TV shows, I'd be counted as a viewer for the purposes of allowing the studios to decide if a show I like is popular enough to get renewed.
But now... to watch all the shows I want to watch, I have to subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, Max, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Paramount+, and Apple TV+. That's a lot! Not to mention all these services are considerably more expensive than they were during the period of streaming when I was happy with the services. At this point I might as well just get a cable subscription again, which would probably be cheaper (ok, not remotely serious about that, but...). On top of all that, the streaming quality seems to be worse than it used to be; I expect the illegal sources are of better quality.
As much as I'm generally against corporate consolidation, I think this is a case where that might actually be better for consumers (and for the content owners too). Or perhaps a regime of compulsory licensing under RAND terms would allow all the various streaming services to compete on price, quality of experience, recommendations, etc. Ultimately that sort of thing might result in consolidation too, but at least that would be more fair, maybe.
Beyond all that, seems like most of the streaming services have turned their base tier into an ad-supported tier, and have aggressively bumped up the cost of the ad-free tiers. I refuse to subject myself to gross psychological manipulation whenever it's possible to avoid it, so add that to the cost. And for people who are more cost-conscious, their experience gets much worse.
i agree with almost everyone's takes in this thread. one thing to note - stop talking about where you get your isos.
No, it's not. Sell me downloadable video files.
good, i prefer the old internet
Last week we were going to watch See How They Run on Max, some things came so today we went to watch it... Aaaaand it's gone.
I don't sail and I don't care enough to find an alternative. Today we drown in quality (if you know how to look) entertainment, why should I chase movies and shows that the runners clearly don't care for me to see? I imagine apathy is a bigger competitor to Netflix than even piracy.
This will push streaming services to lobby governments to crack down harder on pirating.
The issue is that the service users don't exist in a cohesive and aligned bloc, whereas rights owners, rights licensers and streaming service providers sort of do.
Anyone that attempts to change licensing laws will experience way more friction than those who advocate for using the existing infrastructure of law enforcement to reduce pirating.
Things will only get better if streaming companies lobby for changing the way licensing works to support delivery to end users and/or government departments advocate for end user experience.
Offering worse content while continually raising prices makes it difficult to compete
These platforms just became inconvinient. A lot shows is geo-locked and spread on multiple services but yeah of course root of the problem is piracy. As always. It is just easier to download it.
When you pull crap like disabling password sharing then yeah it will be very hard to compete. And with tons of services coming out it's just better to pirate stuff than pay for multiple streaming services
Honestly companies got too greedy, I hope piracy teaches them to not go too far
I feel like torrenting is af an all time low if not a local low. Since rarbg went down many of my friends seemed to be less enthusiastic about torrenting.
With the way streaming services are beginning to mirror the cable TV model, I'm surprised that I've not yet been offered streaming service bundles. Similar to paying one monthly rate for HBO, Cinemax, etc., no one has offered me a discounted rate on Netflix, Hulu, etc. as a bundle.
Is this being done somewhere? If not, I suspect it is coming.
There's an alternate version of history, where there's a gentlemans agreement that Netflix doesn't make their own content, the content houses license their stuff to them and don't make a competing service, and everyone gets their share of a bigger pie. But HBO saw Netflix and was like, I could do that, and Netflix saw HBO and said I could do that. And instead of working together for a better outcome, they decided to fight so here we are.
It'd be easier if their UIs weren't absolutely terrible, and missing basic functionality.
There's no simple "mark watched"/"mark unwatched"? I can't have multiple playlists, just one "My List" that gets randomly reshuffled? Who knows where my "Continue Watching" row is going to be on the main page, because it sure isn't at the top! etc...
Conspiracy theory but multiple streaming sites using the same language is an interesting set-up for future(or present) anti-piracy lobbying.
"In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth
I wonder if it somehow has something to do with 5 good shows being exclusively available on 5 separate streaming services, and nobody wanting to pay for 5 streaming services to watch 5 shows ?
So I live in Singapore and wanted to watch Lord of the Rings legally, offline on my Linux machine and I have no idea how to do it. And after dedicating quite a bit of time towards trying to figure it out, I also wasn't really sure why I was so eager to give my money to an industry that is still so backwards when it comes towards sane distribution.
Maybe Netflix should try putting on good content. They lost so much to Disney and HBO and Hulu. Overseas shows like Rick & Morty were on Netflix a day after they came out. Not so in the US. Where all Netflix seems to have are the “Paul Blart Mall Cop”-quality shows.
Where can I go to watch classics? Sopranos, The West Wing, The Wire… even AMC shows aren’t on Netflix anymore. Yet they want to charge more, and I can’t watch Netflix when I travel for work from a hotel room anymore. It’s terrible service. Then they complain about piracy like it’s not their fault for making it harder and more expensive for people.
Comfort often beats free, but Netflix and the streaming wars killed that, so free is back on winning street.
What annoys me about Netflix is that they go out of their way to limit the platforms that you can watch their service from. Currently, I cannot watch Netflix with a modern client that streams better than 480P on my Quest headset.
For decades, I avoided piracy. When friends would ask why I bought movies when I could just download them, I'd talk about wanting to support content producers and wanting to pay my fair share for something I got enjoyment out of. I'm a software engineer, and as much as I value open source, I also appreciate the value of intangible intellectual property. I wasn't an anti-piracy warrior; I just felt that I should pay for the media I wanted to consume.
I've given up. I'm just not doing it anymore. I own hundreds of movies on VHS (hah), DVD, and Bluray. I own hundreds of movies on digital platforms, like iTunes, Prime, and Google Play (or whatever they call it now, if they haven't simply deleted my library). At one point I was paying for at least five monthly-subscription streaming services. I've spent many thousands of dollars on movies.
I've gotten screwed by them all. DVDs and Blurays with DRM that prevented me from copying them (first at all, then just legally). Fried a Bluray drive trying to flash the firmware simply so I could backup and format-shift movies that I paid for. iTunes movies that I couldn't play on my TV. iTunes movies that wouldn't stream at full resolution on some platforms. Limitations on how many devices I could authorize to watch movies that I paid for. iTunes still limits you to five authorized devices. I've got two TVs, four computers, two tablets, and a phone.
Streaming sites that I pay for introducing ads. Movies and shows constantly disappearing from streaming platforms to increasingly isolated silos that double their prices and halve their content offerings. Netflix locking my account because I'm traveling and accessing it from a different place every night. Netflix not working because I'm out of the country. Prices keep going up, content and usability keeps going down.
Despite all this nonsense, I still held the line and wanted to legally purchase all my media. So I built a $3000 media PC, bought a bunch of Bluray movies, bought a Bluray drive to rip them, and got ready to "really own" movies I wanted to watch, pleased that I was no longer going to be the sap who spent $20 on a barely-usable iTunes movie that I didn't actually own, but still feeling like I was doing the right thing.
Well, I couldn't rip most of the movies, because of DRM, which hurts pirates not at all, but strips honest people of their right to backup and format-shift. So I researched Bluray drives, found one that was supposed to work, flashed the firmware to use [some ripping software I can't remember], and it fried the drive.
That's it. I've had enough. Fuck every content producer on the planet. I've got a media PC with 32TB of storage and I'm going to fill that up with everything I can steal and then buy more HDs.
They had their chance. I hope they all go bankrupt. Assholes.
I'm concerned about the artists, the writers, and all the other people who put in the actual work, who deserve a livelihood and recognition.
But the financiers, producers, and distributors have too much power and influence over the culture economy, to an extent where it's not unfair to ask whether they operate like a cartel, with heavy-handed nepotism, blacklisting, and politics.
So yeah, I don't have sympathy for the streaming services.
You know a business is out of ideas when they start lashing out at piracy.
Netflix has a content problem. They lost their licenses for most of the third-party content worth watching, and their own productions are now trash.
Netflix Original was a stamp of quality at one point, but I think they probably saw in the data that cheap content like true crime and docuseries were getting the bulk of their playtime and focussed in on that. However, for many people, that sort of content is not something they'd pay for, it's just background TV to watch while half doing something else, similar to podcasts and YouTube - which are both free.
Their competitors have shows and films that people actually want to watch.
Big distributors should just make a place where you can pay, and download an mkv legally (make the last frame a copyright notice so people won't share mkvs with their friends).
That would be a win-win-win situation for everyone.
Are these claims actually quantified by any of the companies mentioned in the article?
While there’s no disagreement that “piracy” occurs, I’d love to see refreshed numbers around “potential paying customers” vs “because it’s there but wouldn’t otherwise buy” metrics.
Also, that c&p is lazy and raises an eyebrow.
I love Piracy. 99% of the content on streaming services is recycled garbage. Good for the new generation but not for me.
What they don’t understand is that piracy is not a competitor. If I couldn’t pirate I wouldn’t have paid for it. I’m happy with doing something else with my time.
We don’t know where these references originate. Netflix has mentioned it for a while, that’s for sure, and apparently, the use of this language is widespread and subject to rapid global growth.
lol
A lot of stuff I want to watch is geolocked and mostly to the US. And this seems to happen more and more, especially with stuff I liked, watched (partially), pulled and now it’s US only. So then I am going to get to get it from bt.
greed and vultures trying to get their share of the gold, ruining the user experience
I remember there was a movie whose creators decided to get super strict about piracy. They made sure the movie was not available on any pirate website. And they indeed were able to achieve that. However, the movie financially failed. The reason was that nobody heard about the movie — there were no pirates to let the world know about it.
Don’t fight with pirates. Treat them as your free, word of mouth marketing channel.
So after the streaming wars it's back to square one.
At this point it would be cheaper to buy a media pc and a few big drives and simply rip all your media to them, then buy all the movies you want and rip them.
The break even point with the cost of streaming these days is really not that long.
And you don’t have to pirate anything - buy the dvds used on EBay or something. Streaming is no longer cheap for some bs reason.
Well, well, well, if it isn't for the consequences of my own actions!
I mean Netflix has been losing to “just buy it in iTunes” for me for years. I don’t watch a lot of movies, but when I do, it usually can’t be found anywhere to stream so I just buy it.
Their UI sucks, they don’t want to integrate with the Apple TV app on my phone (search, Up Next, immediate access) because of competitive reasons, and they rarely have any decent movies anymore because they turned their entire business model to original serials, where “original” can mean they just bought the international distribution rights.
I'm about as law-abiding a person as you'll probably ever find when it comes to copyright vs. piracy. I don't mind paying a fair price for creative work I enjoy and I expect that obtaining it through authorised sources will ultimately support the people doing that work and the creation of more work that I enjoy in the future. And I find it absolutely infuriating that the experience of paying customers has once again degraded to be so much worse than what the pirates are presumably enjoying.
Content doesn't stick around reliably. I glanced at my "watch it again" list on one of the several streaming services we subscribe to in my household the other day and well over half of the items on it were now tagged as paid options. Those movies and shows were no longer available on the service where I had watched them sometimes only weeks ago.
Content isn't even added reliably to begin with. I've seen the first and third movies in a franchise on the same service but not the second. I've seen TV shows that are part of the same world and occasionally do crossover episodes and a streaming service that has one show but not the other so you can't watch the whole story.
Then there are the ever-increasing ads and the "premium" tiers being introduced to remove them again as if they're doing us a favour. Spare me. And then tell me why I should sign up to the "premium" service when there's no guarantee about the content it will make available or the level of advertising it will also include in the future.
And finally there is a personal irritation that won't affect many people but really upsets me. Some services still insist on crippling the quality of the streams away from big name platforms like Windows and the main phone apps. Some people suggest this is because of DRM junk in their contracts with rightsholders but that doesn't really hold up when other streaming services seem to have no such problem or when the movie/show was an "original" from the same service. It's particularly irritating that the current worst offender seems to be Amazon Prime Video crippling playback on Linux. You know - the same Amazon who have made obscene amounts of money via AWS largely thanks to Linux.
One possible way to overcome these problems is to go "old school" and buy favourite movies and shows on disc. I still do that plenty. There are some that I do expect to rewatch later or lend out to a friend occasionally. But also discs work fairly reliably as long as you don't get caught by region locking or other similar junk - and usually if you do it's obvious immediately and you can send the product back as defective. (Amazon are once again a recurring villain in this story having sent several products that were in fact for different regions than the one ordered and in some cases literally had "Not licensed for distribution outside {somewhere I don't live}" printed on the box.) But this strategy is becoming harder with many distributors only making discs available for a relatively short time after a movie/show is released or only making them available in some countries/regions and not others. And again sometimes they change their mind between a movie and its sequel or from one season to the next of a TV show.
It's really hard to have much sympathy for an industry that offers such a bad experience to its paying customers. Particularly so when a lot of these problems are completely avoidable and avoiding them is realistically in the best interests of the big players when there is an ever-present "free" alternative that obviously a lot of people will be willing to choose even if some of us still prefer not to.
Nowadays they'd have to pay me to watch their stuff
“In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth”
I bet they are seeing this as some sort of push by criminals to take viewers away from streaming platforms, or at least that's how they will present it. And 0% of those millions they invest in fighting piracy will go towards actually making a more compelling consumer proposition.
And I guarantee that none of them will mention how piracy has always existed and was always an option. There is no new tech that suddenly appeared like P2P in the early 2000s.
The real statement should have been "We finally got so greedy and icompetent that it's driving more and more users to piracy."
Whenever such arguments arise, I'm reminded of Gabe Newell, who said something along the lines of "Piracy is a service problem" means that most people pirate because they don't have access (or difficult access) to the product/service they want. They would gladly pay for it, but they can't, or can't be hassled to.
User experience is inversely proportional to piracy.
Every time I have to login using a code, not only am I annoyed that I once again after to re-enter my uid/pwd despite being a paying customer, I'm also reminded I'm paying yet another monthly fee for a service.
Streaming companies: you're asking for it. Begging for it.
The list of canned statements^0 about the dangers of piracy reminds me of Sinclair Broadcasting's famous memo to newsrooms^1.
^0:
Apparently, there’s quite a bit of copying going on, as SEC filings from several companies include identical passages.
Netflix: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth”
Triller Corp: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth”
FuboTV: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth” > Redbox Entertainment: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth”
IMAQ: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth” CuriosityStream: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth”
We don’t know where these references originate. Netflix has mentioned it for a while, that’s for sure, and apparently, the use of this language is widespread and subject to rapid global growth."
They're just pricing themselves out of their target audience with bad price per quality/variety.
Of all the players netflix should be best placed to understand this given that this effect basically made them.
There is like one good show per year. Youtube has enough content to last a lifetime.
I pay for netflix, but I use the pirating software stremio because the UI is much better.
It's a big fail if a billion dollars company can't keep up with with a few geeks in a garage. That's litterally the oldest silicon valley triope.
“In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth” > We don’t know where these references originate.
Search for that phrase. It has a rather large number of hits, in filings from multiple streaming services. Wonder where that phrase was pirated from? And whether this indicates a degree of coordination which suggests the need for antitrust action.
Mainland China has good movies now. There's been progress since "Sky Hunter" (2017), produced by the film unit of the People's Liberation Army Air Force. (You can watch that for free. It's heavy-handed propaganda.) If you like period costume dramas, there are many from China, because the political levels don't care about those. The writers thus have more freedom. "Princess Agents" is probably the best of that genre.
Stuff set in the present day will have clear signs of being forced to follow the party line. There are lots of cop shows. They're about as good, or bad, as American cop shows. There's a good version of "The Three Body Problem", but it's rather slow-paced, following the books closely. There's also a genre we don't see much in the US - business drama.
The US film industry has been eaten by superhero sequels. Just not much worth watching. There's a Hunger Games prequel out, if anybody cares. If you're willing to look outside the heavily promoted stuff, there's plenty to watch.
It’s so strange to hear the term “piracy” in so many legal filings, when I would have thought “copyright infringement” would be the term of art. I’m hypothesizing these companies are not concerned with theft on the high seas.
Crowd funding is easy. I envision a large form with lots of optional spices to pick from.
But then you have to make things for a specific audience (who will scream for more) in stead of the pill of generalized trash that appeals slightly to everyone that is usually cranked out by overly standardized formulas.
Shut up and take my money.
Yeah, also pirated content has:
- 4K HDR video, not whatever the heck the buggy client delivers.
- Atmos/TrueHD audio track that actually works, not whatever the broken app delivers (I'm looking at you Sky and rest of the ilk that still deliver HBO content with stereo).
- Subtitles for ALL the languages, not just one or two. And those languages don't disappear when I go on a vacation, leaving me stuck with german audio and french subtitles.
- Properly functioning offline playback for when I'm traveling, not randomly broken and disappearing offline mode (Netflix, Spotify and YouTube all blessed me with "all your downloaded content is gone" experience on long flights).
- Works on all my devices not a random subset independent on which way greedy execs tried to extract "ecosystem" money from my playback device manufacturer. Looking at you ATV+.
- Is actually available in my region and doesn't randomly disappear from my devices just because I decided to travel to visit my parents or have some time off.
- Doesn't randomly disappear after 6 months when I started watching the series because some license expired.
As you can see, I really tried to pay to get content from these people. And all I got was bunch of frustration. F'em, they brought this upon themselves for being user hostile arseholes. Again.
I personally find that Spotifys offline content has worked reliably over the years. You just gotta remember that when you get a new device you have to go to library and click download and then leave Spotify open for a few hours.
Spotify is also a great example of how to beat piracy. I haven't downloaded an mp3 file since I got a Spotify Premium account in 2007. OK that's probably a slight overstatement, but it's near enough to the truth for this argument. They made it so simple and convenient to pay for access to music that I've had zero reasons to even consider piracy. They have everything (well, enough that I've never felt something was missing anyway), they have clients for everything, the pricing is reasonable, and they have great value-add in the form of playlist generation.
As for the rest, full agreement, the low bitrate of streaming services is the big one for me as I'm a film enthusiast with great gear that definitely doesn't reach its potential using any streaming services. Now that it looks like physical media is going the way of the Dodo I'm wondering where I'm gonna get actually high bitrate content from in the future.
One of Spotify's biggest problems is their terrible UI, lacking even the basic functionality. I don't understand how they haven't been able do the bare minimum for 15 years now.
I've been hoping to Spotify to go out of business since they went and took Rogan's podcast and a few others as Spotify-exclusive. Not always a Rogan fan, but he's occasionally had some interesting guests. However the Spotify experience was so bad I abandoned podcasts that required me to use their client.
(Suppose I should think of dialing back my Spotify hate a little now that apparently in the renewal they're no longer keeping Rogan as Spotify-exclusive)
You hope they go out of business because they bought the rights to some podcasts?
I have no clue who this Reagan guy is. But sometimes you don't want to support people.
Music is usually considered art and you are a boring downer of you complain about artists political or personal controversies. That is another thing. And the artist always have the benefit of doubt of the protagonist in the song not being the artist himself.
Jon Reagan is one of the most famous podcasters lol
His older brother, Ron, is also pretty famous for some stuff he did a while back.
Ron the actor?
He’s a podcaster, not musician. Basically a talk show I suppose?
My point was more the GP wanted to see Spotify go out of business because they bought a podcast. I just thought it was a bit of a wild statement to make.
The OP was annoyed they bought a podcast they liked and then put it behind a UI/UX which is hard to use. Presumably if Spotify went out of business Rogan would end up back on the open market. Turns out the new deal lets Rogan put shows back on YouTube so it doesn't matter.
BTW, I agree about the Spotify UI. I never liked it and was a GPM user until they destroyed it by pushing me to YTM. Now I use AM, since if I'm going to tolerate a poor UI it might as well work well with all my devices.
Out of curiosity I tried to find the podcast in question on the Spotify iPhone app. Literally 3 taps and I’ve found a full list of episodes.
I’ve also tried on my Mac, slightly more presses (four, to be exact) as I had to press ‘podcasts & shows’ to refine the search slightly more.
I don’t see how that’s hard to use. Each to their own though I guess, I’ve not seen how difficult it is your side so can’t really comment.
I don't care for the Spotify UI in general.
For podcasts, I think people who are big into podcasts are also particular about their player. I know I am. For me, there's space for a music app and a podcast app. They are both audio, but otherwise very different.
Like what?
My three biggest pet peeves are:
- You can't turn your queue into a playlist (and you can't see previous queue as part of the queue, only as limited history.)
- Clicking a song or album sometimes clears your queue and starts playing that instead (I know there is a logic to it, but a mistake or mis-click is easy).
- There is no shortcut to add to queue, just long press then find the menu item.
It's possible everyone else is only listening to albums or curating playlists then playing them, but I like to pick things as I go like a jukebox and it sucks at it.
There is, just swipe the song to the right.
that's neat! totally not discoverable though
You can also tap the kebab menu and select “Add to Queue”
Yeah I really wish there was a global history of my plays that I could look at.
What I'm missing is multiple "currently playing" lists, each keeping its current position as I switch to play a different one. Use case: listening to a discography of the band, and if I wish to listen few songs from some other band. I can't go back to where I was with the first band. Foobar had multiple ad-hoc lists since forever. Now I balance between Spotify and Youtube music in these cases.
most of the views (in the iOS app at least, idk about android) are asynchronous, in that they will always prefer to load data from their servers over using locally cached stuff.
meaning that, if you have a bad internet connection and tap on eg an album, it'll open the view for that album and you just have to look at the progress indicator for in some cases up to 20+ seconds, even if you have downloaded that album and all the info is there in the local cache.
this happens annoyingly often, e.g. when leaving an area where you're connected to wifi and your phone hasn't yet switched over to celluar data.
My most hated Spotify feature is the address confirmation of all your family members (family plan). I entered our new home address and it wasn’t even there. My parents are on the other side of the world, Spotify should understand that families are not residing always in the same area.
Spotify isn't a great example because barely anyone makes money with it. It only works because the musicians are exploited to the max. The reason this won't happen with film and TV is because of unionisation. Why not just buy discs? People keep repeating that discs are dying but so many releases are coming out there is way more than I can buy.
Yeah I know discs still exist for now, I'm talking about when they suddenly don't anymore. Hopefully that's far far into the future.
And as for Spotify exploiting artists, I don't know how accurate this[1] is, but if it is then it seems pretty fair to me? Maybe slightly on the lower end of what I had expected, but not that far off.
If you have a million monthly listeners (and today you have access to over 574M monthly active users[2] via Spotify) then you're making $5,000/month in static income, meaning you have zero hours of work and still have enough to live on (depending on the size of the band I guess).
The notion that artists (or movie stars for that matter) should be making 10x that or more is a little ridiculous if you ask me.
1: https://purecalculators.com/spotify-money-calculator
2: https://www.statista.com/statistics/367739/spotify-global-ma...
I don't think you have any idea how much work, luck, work, talent and work it takes to get to a million monthly listens.
"Zero hours of work" - I know artists get underestimated, but this is next level.
Btw, taking the very top .1% of earners in a field, like movie or pop stars, and using their returns to imply that musicians and actors are fairly compensated, is a very silly thing to do. Tbh, as someone who knows a lot of talented and struggling artists (and teachers and janitors and nurses etc), it's revolting.
If you want to give out about overcompensated people why not look at CEO's, like Daniel Ek (Spotify CEO) and his $3.8 BILLION net worth. That's about as clear a signal that there's exploitation happening that you could ever ask for.
1) "Exploitation" of artists has happened long before Spotify. Even the popular ones with music deals. So Spotify isn't making this better or worse.
2) Talent and success in music have never been tightly correlated. Marketing is what sells music, not just talent. Marketing requires a lot of money (And payola).
If anything Spotify levels this playing field a bit.
How exactly does the fact that artists have been exploited before mean that Spotify isn't making things worse?
That's not remotely true. And even pop stars lip syncing songs other people wrote are working very hard, and often exploited.
Sure; like nearly everything else. And guess what - most of the artists on Spotify are doing their own marketing.
"Artists can be paid as little as 13% of the income generated, receiving as little as £0.002 to about £0.0038 per stream on Spotify" [0]. That's not leveling the playing field, that's exploitation; and if you want to defend it I think you need to start bringing actual evidence instead of just spouting your own (deeply unpopular) opinion as fact.
0 - https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/apr/10/music-streamin...
Totally agree with you CEOs are overcompensated. There should be a law regulating how much more a CEO can make over the lowest rung in the company, the problem is there are just so many workarounds to that (stock options, spinning off the actual workforce into a sub-entity, etc) that it would never work.
I do understand that a million monthly listeners is a large amount, sorry I was over-exaggerating a bit in my last comment. My point was that Spotify helps with discoverability through their playlist-generation, but I guess that doesn't automatically mean anything more than the odd play here and there, and not necessarily more "monthly active listeners".
I'd love if artists made more on Spotify than they do today, but isn't the big problem all the middle-men in the music industry? It's my understanding that companies like Spotify shorten this ladder at least a little bit, but thinking about it again I guess I agree that the pay is a little too low.
Continuing to list your existing music on Spotify does indeed require 0 hours of work.
because they are bad for the environment.
Buy mp3s.
tell that to person buying cds, not me.
That’s the issue I think. I listened to music from ~1000 albums last year. At $10 a pop that’s $10k which is just not possible. Spotify is really the only way that listening like that is enabled.
Spotify has never automatically deleted offline content for me, but it does have extremely confusing UI which makes it very easy to wipe all downloads without confirmation.
Basically, the download button is a single down-arrow at the top of your library. When you tap it—and download your music–the down-arrow turns solid green to indicate your music is available offline. It doesn't disappear. It turns green, Spotify's primary color.
The kicker is: if you accidentally (or out of curiosity) press that green arrow again, it will wipe all your downloads without confirmation (disabling "offline mode"). Did that on a flight once and lost all my music. It's absurd how that UX made it out of testing.
Here's a picture of what I'm talking about. Tapping this icon deletes your library from your device:
https://i.imgur.com/zrSid1T.jpeg
Really makes you wonder what "designers" get paid for.
A product manager needed to change stuff to justify their job. A designer who isn't changing things that the product manager wants changed is replaced by one who does. Therefore, designers get paid for doing what product managers want.
Sometimes the changes get A/B tested, sometimes they don't. Sometimes the A/B test is gamed, sometimes it gets gamed by accident, and sometimes the tests get ignored when they are clearly wrong.
Finally, sometimes the directive is "get people to stop using this feature because it's unpopular with management".
Case in point, that time when Spotify removed all references to the word "queue", and replaced it with "up next" while also changing the behaviour of it. Ridiculous change which they eventually reverted thankfully.
Or that one time when they removed the "set as current playlist" feature, which they still haven't restored. That feature was the only way to change playlist without breaking in the middle of a song, besides literally waiting until a song is over and doing it then, wasting time.
I like Spotify, but they do some infuriating things sometimes.
Don't get me started on their beef with Apple which has resulted in my HomePods still not being able to take music requests via Siri almost 3 years after I got the first one.
Yep, I know that, and you're right it's a very confusing UX that's easily invoked by accident.
There really should be at least a modal to confirm if the result will mean deleting more than say an album.
If you're offline or on roaming mobile data (not sure if they can reliably determine this though, at least not on iOS) when invoking it then they should make you answer a somewhat complex question to confirm that you indeed wanted to delete the songs.
Apple Music and Youtube Music both suffer from the issue of vanishing content.
I have playlist where a growing percentage of songs are grayed out, not available, while they do exist in the store, just as part of a different album now.
Very frustrating. Does Spotify do that ?
Spotify does this too, at least in my region (Estonia). It's frustrating, but not that frustrating to go back to downloading MP3.
It does indeed happen. There seems to be a few different types of it. Sometimes a whole band will just disappear off the platform - chalk it up to contractual disagreement. Sometimes a particular album will not be available on Spotify, but other albums from the same band will be - likely some issue with the label that produced the album. Finally, sometimes the particular version of the song you like (e.g. a certain live version, acoustic version, whatever) will disappear but others will remain (e.g. studio version).
However, it really doesn't happen that often. I probably have a few thousand songs save on Spotify and perhaps a dozen have been taken off after many years of using the platform.
It happens, but pretty rarely in my experience, though I'm probably not the most avid consumer of music so other people might have a better grasp of the extent of this issue on Spotify.
Spotify has left me doubting my sanity a couple of times by removing albums I could have sworn I had listened to before in the platform.
And I had, but they removed them since, listing nothing in their place.
I would look into Kaleidescape if you want blu-ray quality viewing in your home with the convenience of streaming (although you have to download ahead of time). Only downside is the price and need for their proprietary player + server.
$9k ($4k player + $5k server) for a basic system is not a very "only" downside, and it seems kind of pathetic if you can't even access it from a regular desktop.
It's great that it exists, but I'm priced out.
Is it, though? Does _any_ of this need unique hardware?
Spotify’s offline content was not been reliable for me. I am rarely offline, but recently I was taking a flight and my whole library was unavailable.
I was so annoyed that I actually cancelled my subscription.
I was on a Grand Canyon river trip and offline content decided to offline itself giving me no music for three weeks. That was annoying and made me cancel my subscription for a couple years. I tried Apple Music but I think Spotify does a better job making recommendations for me.
By being able to compete with it on the price they pay artists. It's a uniquely powerful negotiating position for the publishers that a) won't last b) won't extend to TV/video
I'm glad for you, but at least twice it happened to me that the songs on my phone ended up being unplayable after I enabled Airplane mode. (You just get the exclamation mark next to the supposedly downloaded tracks.)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's funny that Spotify figured out how to do it long before most of these TV streaming services even existed, and they still manage to get it wrong.
They cannot help themselves. Just like buying and watching a DVD/bluray was much worse than a pirated copy, as the DVD/bluray made you sit through an increasing amount of unskippable content. From "do not steal this" to "not for kids" or, worst of all, "did you see this other content?".
Btw. Ads in front of streaming content I just selected, to tell me about other streaming content on the same service I did NOT select should also be on the NO list.
Wait there was unskippable content on DVD/Bluray??
What nonsense is that. That makes no sense at all.
The person is acting like it's several minutes. It's maybe 20 seconds at most. A studio logo or some piracy warning. You can buy Blu Ray players that let you skip it though. Much worse is minutes of ads throughout what you watch.
A studio logo and some piracy warning and ads for other movies and opening animations and...
it's still not okay on a bluray
you bought the thing, you should be able to use it however you want
and putting ads into a bluray you already bought for a probably not so small price is ridiculous
And if you skip some epilepsy warning then that is your responsibility, same with when you pirated it and get caught.
Also why force me to see anti-piracy propaganda (and that's what it is, nothing else, sometime also legally misinforming) when I already DIDN'T pirate it or a logo I already know from the packaging of the bluray (because if I did pirate it I already would have skipped it).
it's just a ridiculous dictation of behavior in context of a bought physical product
Even allowing for exaggeration, some DVDs had a horrifying amount of non-skippable content.
For example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/nx3o1/since_when_di...
But at the minimum, the piracy notices are 20 seconds long now. For an item you paid for instead of pirating.
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/05/10/2238258/dvds-blu-ray...
The worst part of it was when it was time-based advertising content. We were forced to watch commercials for "coming soon" content that was going through a marketing cycle but often turned out to be garbage.
So before you even get to the launch menu for this specific movie you selected, you're subjected to a trailer for a 20 year old movie with a 24% on rotten tomatoes. And an advertisement for a pizza restaurant. And a threat that the film company is going to take all their movies and put them in a vault for 10 years so you really need to go buy more DVDs from them.
Your second paragraph is why BBC radio is unlistenable to me. The source of the advertising is only a minor piece of the irritation - it's still painful to listen to the same ads and jingles multiple times in an hour.
I worked for a while in the DVD authoring industry and we always left a secret code (always the same) to bypass mandatory clips. I don't know if it carry on to BR but I don't see why it wouldn't (until everyone got on the Internet and then clients hear of it and check for the code themselves).
You actually make a very fair point, the only downside of pirated comment is that it comes from a very dubious sources, and sites that are loaded with spyware and whatnot.
Then perhaps s.o. would argue that these all are much harder to get done with free tools or by oneself, but I can definitely argue that having a nice personal cloud which allows video streaming is more than enough for most occasions.
Not actually different from using the streaming services, who sell info on you as a side gig.
Agree 100%, my tiny 10TB collection of literally everything I like in 1080p and selected (and actually available) 4k hdr stuff is enough.
Same for music for me, radios where I live are just tons of talk I don't care about and little (weird) music, so my rock & metal collection from usb key is enough.
If I ever want that randomness that comes with say radio I just let it on or use ad-infested youtube, and probably soon turn it off in disgust from adverts. With small kids, not much time for that anyway which is a good thing.
And all gained legally. I am not losing sleep for poor artists (those I listen/watch are fine, guys in their 40s-60s living in castles or big mansions), I am not type of person what bought 100s of CDs of DVDs before (just to feel like a complete idiot now).
This was the dealbreaker for me.
Also: pirated content is usually available. There have been so many times my wife has spent 15 minutes on imdb searching for something to watch, but then we check where it's available and ... it's only available via torrent.
Sky does not even work on firefox on linux. My tv setup is not smart is xfcestupid
The traveling and losing access to shows you were watching is annoying. But, to be fair, this is a rights holder issue and not a Netflix issue. I think all Netflix owned shows are available everywhere.
Your point still stands that it presents a service problem. Given the connectedness of the world now, regions should have been abolished a long time ago.
Apart from terrible support for subtitles even when they're available (very limited or noexisting choice of font sizes, colors, outlines, etc), the biggest problem for me is no surround channels at all when watching from a browser. You can find surround sound samples on youtube so it's not something browsers can't play. Is it some kind of anti-piracy measure? If it is it doesn't work, since it's all available on pirate sites. So I download content I already have on services I'm paying for and very rarely used them directly. They're for the rest of my family that doesn't care about surround.
Subtitles are a huge issue also when you are an expat. What irritates me the most is leaving out the original subtitles or original audio. I consider this especially hostile behavior.
Not being able to use VPN with certain providers really put me off. What is the reason that I pay so much money if they blacklist the vpn's ips I use because my network is not secure enough? I was not even trying to go through a different country or anything, just the same country I reside and I made my account.
I've definitely had Netflix region-lock most of my content when I made the mistake of briefly switching on wifi to find my connecting gate at some airport. Apparently even though the content was available at my starting point and at my destination that didn't apply to the connecting country.
Have yet to hit that with Youtube, and I really hate Spotify so avoid using it.
A few days back Prime lost both of the two series that I was in the middle of watching at the start of February. Super-annoying!
I too understand this logic and follow it to the T.
You know that indie filmmaker who spent his lifesaving filming a movie I now get to watch on his dime? Well guess what.
No 4k video and no international subtitles makes that guy deserve not seeing any money come back from his hard work.
I'm not a thief. The indie filmmaker is a thief. He stole my subtitles and 4k video.
In all seriousness, I pirate shit too. But am I going to walk around like a idiot justifying what I do? No. I don't lie to myself. I don't need to twist reality in order to explain human evil which is an intrinsic aspect of all of us.
I'm a bit like a psychopath because one other intrinsic aspect of humanity is that we lie to ourselves in order to justify our sins. I don't need to do that. I can pirate shit, and recognize the sin, and then continue pirating and screwing over that indie filmmaker. An ass hole never recognizes himself as the ass hole.
Like seriously the delusions are through the roof. The guy is literally pirating shit, and then calling the party he pirates shit from an "ass hole". If he just didn't buy their content he'd have justification, but he instead pirates the content and still calls them the "arse hole". Wake up. I hate corporations but we are the ones commiting the crime here.
We are the ass holes.
Doesn’t have unskippable segments or content (like in dvds). Doesn’t suddenly start injecting ad breaks.
I've ended up pirating a lot more stuff recently because a lot of services won't set the aspect ratio on the stream properly, so on an ultrawide monitor it displays in 16:9 the size of a postage stamp with both pillarboxing and letterboxing.
Channel 4 (in the UK) is probably the worst offender, as they preserve the aspect ratio, but have it fill the full width of the screen. This results in the top and bottom of the video being cutting off for most TV shows, including the subtitles. They've gone to some effort to make their player run on different aspect ratios, but somehow implemented it entirely the wrong way.
Webrips do suffer from this same issue, but with either FFMpeg or VLC, it can be cropped to the correct ratio without reencoding.
My personal pet peeve is that buggy client will also not start streaming at maximum available quality and most likely has no selector for it either. I sure enjoy watching pixel soup instead of what's happening in the story for minutes on gigabit connection while their player is considering if I am worthy of consuming Their Content in discernible quality /s
One of the awful things about the subtitles is that series episodes wont be released before the subtitles are done. This might introduce a couple day lag to release window -- and at that time all the discussion online has already happened.
Also, H265 encoded 1080p is hitting the sweet spot between quality and file size. About 500-ish MB per hour of content for decent quality.
Its sort of like when VBR encoded MP3s became the standard in the privacy scene in the early 00s. The quality is good enough for most folks plus the reduced file size means that it downloads really fast on average connections and isn't prohibitively expensive to store so you can create a large library very quickly. Also I think the shift to SSDs from spinning rust delayed the adoption of widespread video piracy 10-ish years ago because the cost per GB was just too expensive and most people weren't going to buy a NAS. But now we are starting to move past the inflection point. SSDs are bigger, H265 reduces file sizes, hardware accelerated H265 encoding is easier (meaning more H265 content), and devices that can decode H265 are becoming cheap and ubiquitous. You can install Plex on your laptop, load up on content, and have a better UX than Netflix.
That's still YIFY-quality video, which is a few steps below HBO/MAX, which happens to be among the lowest quality paid streams.
ATV+ is killing it with 30Mbps 4K HDR+ video (it used to be as high as 48Mbps). Disney+ is close. The Netflix 4K plan serves up high 1080p bitrates, 2x better than their 1080p plan. Worth paying for.
Note that Netflix and co. won't stream 4K at all to Linux devices, and they often don't serve 4K if they deem your internet connection to be too slow.
For many folks, pirated 1080p is par with what they'd get streaming, and pirated 2k or 4k is better.
What do you mean by 2k? Because people should not call 2560x1440 2k, and I've never seen a download that size either.
Why do you single out 2k? The term "4k" is just as wrong and purely marketing driven as well.
The resolution that's usually behind 2k, which is 1440p as you've correctly pointed out, is usually available as torrents too.
Rounding 1920 to 2k and 3840 to 4k is not too bad. And yes it's marketing to switch from height to width, but whatever.
Rounding 2560 to 2k is massively confusing. Don't do it. 2.5k or don't use "k" at all.
And when I go look at a couple torrent sites and scroll through movies and tv shows, I'm not seeing a single 1440p in the first couple pages. Some searches show barely anything at all.
I have a proposal for you: Take back the k from the marketers.
Define: k = multiple of 1920x1080 pixel count
1920x1080 ~= 2M pixels = 1k 2560x1440 ~= 4M pixels = 2k 3840x2160 ~= 8M pixels = 4k
So now 1440p = 2k, and k becomes meaningful. Problem solved!
It also gives a solution for ultrawides like 7680 x 2160p, which are 8k.
More interestingly, “8K” TVs now become 16k TVs, which marketers should like. We’ve come full circle! Now the k nomenclature also gives you an idea of how difficult that 16k display will be to drive with a video card relative to your existing monitor.
And how do you propose getting your definition out in front of more people than the combined marketers of all the legit sources of movie, TV and other streaming content in the world?
lol
Pick the battles you have a whelk's chance in a supernova of winning.
A number that scales with pixel count is even more markety. Pixel width or height is a much better metric for quality.
But if you want to go down that path, instead of trying to redefine k just use megapixels.
And now you also have to fight with the cinema/projector standard, where 4k is 4096x???.
Not to mention that 3840x2160 already has a (mostly) separate term : UHD-1.
There's also UHD-2 which is 4 times bigger, but I expect it to be renamed to something else soon enough.
The first site I checked has 317 pages of 50x 2160p listings per page going back seven years.
The most recent entry is:
How To Train Your Dragon The Hidden World (2019) 2160p 4K BluRay 5 1-LAMA
Format : HEVC
Width : 3 840 pixels Height : 1 634 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 2.35:1
Near the top is a recent TV episode:
True Detective S04E04 Night Country Part 4 2160p MAX WEB-DL DDP5 1 DoVi x265-NTb
Format : HEVC
Width : 3 840 pixels Height : 1 920 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 2.000
What makes things problematic is the overbearing love for letterbox like aspect ratios, even pirates have standards and they're having to bundle a slew of aspect ratios together .. this comes from the production companies.
I think you agree with me?
You overwhelmingly see 1280x720, 1920x1080, and 3840x2160, sometimes with a truncated height because of aspect ratio but usually advertised with the full height for consistency reasons.
There's barely any 2560x1440. Anyone going above 1080p goes directly to 4k.
Youtube is pretty much the only place I've ever seen 1440p encodes, and that's because they're super version-happy and make 20 different variants of a video.
1440p isn't really available on official streaming platforms, so it is indeed a lot more rare.
It's pretty much only available on original encodes, i.e. BluRay rips, this makes it a format that very rarely seen on currently airing shows, which are mostly webrips from official streaming platforms.
You'll often see it alongside the usual resolutions for movies that have since been released on disk.
Perhaps, I thought your complaint was not finding enough "4K" (not a term I like much).
If it's about finding 1440p that'd mainly be because it's not a common broadcast format to the best of my knowledge - I just don't see it about much.
Articles such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution
don't mention it as a broadcast format, and articles that are specific to 1440p: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1440p
have it as :
Read the second clause!
1080p = 2k; both are 1920x1080p. p is rows in the vertical dimension (p for progressive, as opposed to i for interlaced; e.g. NZ terrestrial TV is 1080i). k is columns in the horizontal direction, and comes from film making and visual effects (1920 rounds up to 2k and 3840 rounds up to 4k).
Wow, I thought K stood for thousand (as in 4K=4,000)! Nice piece of trivia if true.
Yes, k stands for thousand. Historically, 4k meant 4096 pixels wide in the context of digitised film or digital visual effects, and 2k meant 2048 pixels wide. TVs ended up 1920 pixels wide, which is "close enough" to use the same term, 2k. I think "4k" is used for marketing TVs as it's easier to remember and say than "2160p", so now we mix the terminology.
Wow, I didn't know this! I mistook it for 1440p (that's what my monitor is). I figure that it might be between 1080p and 4k that it was synonymous with 2k, but I'm mistaken.
Most relevant for anyone who also had this confusion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution#2160p_resolution
When looking for a monitor:
[even though it's not usually referred to as 1k, but rather 1080p directly]
Amazon Prime Video is even worse, on Linux they only serve 480p. Any pirated file is much better quality.
Lmao at paying for 2006-youtube quality video.
Still better than using some other OS.
It's unwatchable. I'd cancel Prime because of it, if I didn't want the shipping. What is the real purpose of them limiting the stream? It can't be because of pirating. The movies and shows show up on the torrent sites BEFORE they even hit Amazon Prime. So who's going to "Record" it there? They are only hurting their customers.
Do they even stream 1080p to Linux devices by default now? I always had to use a browser extension to make it do that[1].
However the extension seems to be gone.[2]
[1] https://github.com/vladikoff/netflix-1080p-firefox?tab=readm...
[2] https://github.com/vladikoff/netflix-1080p-firefox/issues/28
720p for Linux.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/16yf3wi/why_do...
Lol. Why should I pay for aggressively hostile software that requires me to install spyware on my machine for the privilege of watching throttled content? No thanks, I'll download an mkv and watch it when I want, where I want, online or offline.
I could do so with DVD and blu-ray. You don't want to let me do so via the internet? Okay, I'll do it anyways.
Maybe your eyesight is a lot better than mine but I can't discern pixels at sub-1080p resolution, especially in a movie where everything is kinda smudged out and individual pixel values don't matter as much.
It's usually blocky compression artifacts that show up at 720p and some 1080p encodes. They're most noticeable in dark or fast moving scenes.
On Netflix, The Sandman looked abysmally bad at 720p. The complex backgrounds became a garbled mess and the dark scenes were filled with banding.
It's just the shitty compression, not the mark of 720p.
This is extremely evident on YouTube now, for a couple of years if the source content is 4K native, they downgrade it to 1080p (so you can stream it with a comfortable bitrate), but despite a good enough resolution (1080p! 2K!) and the need to just downgrade the resolution (yes, double re-encoding, but) the 2K version looks abysmal. Especially evident on live videos with a contrast lights.
Do you like dark scenes?
I grew up with analog TV where the colours used to bend and you had to kick the antenna with a stick after the wind moved it a bit. If I can tell the characters apart and the audio is synchronised, I don't need any better quality!
You and I both. I had the fortune of taking the kids out to look after a field camp years ago, where a storm.in the distance would cut internet and TV signals, and cloudy weather would knock stuff out for days. They learned a different way to use a compass and how to repoint an antenna to get signal using team work. Thoroughly rate it.
Depends on the movie I guess. Planet Earth 2 is a jaw-dropping experience on even an average UHD-1 tv (and it's not ALL about the HDR, I've tried turning it off). Distinctly more impressive than Planet Earth 1 (FullHD only).
It's a real shame that the same store that sold Blu-Ray players didn't have it and I had to pirate it (and also skip buying the player).
25% of all streaming globally is consumed on a mobile device. During the day (commuting to work, during lunch breaks) that number is much higher. Children's programming is also largely consumed on mobile devices (well, tablets).
On small devices like that 4K HDR+ video is kind of meaningless.
It’s also kind of meaningless at regular tv viewing distances. I have a 4k tv but from my couch there’s no way I can tell 4k apart from 1080. And honestly, 480 movies (dvd resolution) still look fine to me too. They have a certain aesthetic softness to them that I quite enjoy. 30 seconds into a 480 film I stop noticing the resolution at all.
There are no 'regular viewing distances' anymore, any guidelines were long ago thrown out of window. Some want to have cinema at home, some want a tiny screen in kitchen or bedroom, some want (or can only afford) something in between.
Just do what works for you. But with lets say 'cinema experience' distance:size ratio you definitely can see the difference. I could clearly see it on Netflix 4k on tiny 55" 4k screen from maybe 2-2.5m.
But of course after 1-2 minutes it becomes meaningless difference and your brain blends it, what you should focus is not seeing big banding pixels due to low bad compression in very dynamic scenes.
That's probably because your TV is seamlessly upscaling every signal it can receive to 4K. Newer TVs are very good at that.
So for 75%, including Youtube, it is meaningful?
This is not correct, the bitrates are actually cca 2x that high. I don't have YIFY much, went for RARBG since they released literally everything I cared about and wanted a bit of uniformity, always with subs, bad releases got PROPER fix etc. But they both aimed at same file sizes.
X265 1080p movies for both rippers are roughly 1.5-2GB per average movie, which is on average 1.5-2h long. You won't find better quality in this size range, in same way 7-10GB seems a sweet spot for 4k (especially with AV1 instead of HEVC). Not sure who & why downloads those 80GB full bluray releases.
I do. But I’m on private trackers where almost all content is well-seeded and long-term seeding is rewarded, so download time is less of a concern.
Why? Because I want the highest-quality possible copy. Same reason I download lossless versions of albums. It’s less about being able to perceive the quality increase, and moreso about archival. Then my Plex server can transcode to appropriate streaming bitrates on the fly without having to re-encode an already heavily compressed video stream.
Man, I want best quality too, I have all my music in FLACs even on my phone. But even on 75" from 4m I simply don't see the difference, so for me thats chasing numbers or similar.
And building and properly maintaining some not-so-small array of massive HDDs for those capacities... I just don't see the point when I can get all I need (and ie in sound much much more), without caring more than buying a single hdd and be done for next 5 years.
Its not the bandwidth, 1gbps is easy to get here, stuff I saw in those sizes was well seeded too, but just overall all added extra work.
I guarantee you can’t hear the difference between FLAC and 256kbps lossy either. The point is that you have the actual, canonical data as it was released by the creator.
You don’t need a massive HDD array, I have my whole collection of 10+ years of Blu-ray remuxes on a single Seagate Exos drive in my NAS.
Meh not everyone has a 4K 120Hz TV :)
I still have an old 1080p 32" LG from 10 years ago and it looks fine. In fact I find the motion upscaling weird, it gives this creepy uncanny effect.
I still download H264 too because not all of my devices support H265 yet.
I was thinking about something new but they're just too expensive.
The first two paragraphs: you are me. The last one: I don't think about upgrading because my TV is off all the time. I watch it on a tablet or on my phone. I use a Raspberry with a TV hat to stream free to air TV on my home network and apps for the IP based content. My TV is the backup device.
About the subject of this thread, too many paid streaming services are maybe too inconvenient. If they are, the market will fix that. That is: some of them won't make enough money and close, or sell to a competitor, or just create content and license it to streaming services.
My preference would be not to pay per month but per view. There are months when I don't watch any series and months when there is something I like. About movies, maybe no movie at all for a year or two, then a few of interesting ones, including old ones that I never watched and I feel like to watch. The last one was Gilda, 1948.
Yeah, same issue. Though I use Raspberry Pi as a backup when the playback doesn't work (it's not just H265, though others formats failing to work on the TV happens much more rarely).
I personally think streaming services are overestimating that the 2k or 4k streams that they offer is a huge advantage they have over "pirate services". I don't think they have properly researched the consumer psychology or the network effect that is making piracy popular among a large segment of the middle-class and lower strata.
An hour long 30 Mbps 4k HDR+ video file will be roughly around 10-15+ GB with H.265 encoding.
As others have pointed out, a well encoded 720p or 1080p video offers a decent enough viewing experience quickly at far, far smaller sizes than a 2k or 4k videos (file sizes will be 10 to 20 times smaller at these resolutions). Note also that some pirates encode videos with the CPU, than using hardware encoders, and thus these videos tend to have a higher quality with better compression (hardware encoders, while blazing fast, tend to do a poorer job than CPU video encoding). Thus, these smaller sized video files don't require high-speed internet, can be downloaded fast and also encourages people to save the videos longer. This allows some to create their own personal video library. So a side effect of this is that people store and share these videos longer, and their smaller sizes now allow streaming torrents of popular content. Some torrent sites today have even started offering this through the browser itself - so non-techies now don't even have to download any torrent software and learn how to use it. That's near-Netflix like convenience, with more content, for "free" - and that's what these services are up against.
We also can't ignore that 4k videos are often only available at higher tier subscription plan. So even if Netflix, or other streaming services, think that some of these people can be enticed to subscribe to their services, with their high quality 2k or 4k videos, they will have to offer them at a lower price to beat the "free" model of piracy. (It's very hard to compete with "free" - just look at Google search engine's market share and its non-free competitors' market share to understand this).
All this is of course irrespective of the fact that 2k and 4k resolution HDR+ videos are also increasingly available now a days on torrents too.
And by "today", you mean a decade ago, which is when Popcorn Time got popular.
Not sure - did Popcorn Time ever allow streaming torrents through the browser itself? Some torrent sites today have a streaming section where you can browse a catalogue and watch torrent videos right in the browser itself. Check out https://ferrolho.github.io/magnet-player/ for an example of this.
You don't necessarily have to pick YIFY.
Qxr's uploads are a much better comparison. x265 encoded 1080p (with 5 - 6.5Mbps bitrate) from the highest quality sources and they look very good even on 55" 4K panels.
Are these, like, famous pirates or something?
They are well-known pirate groups, yes.
What is YIFY?
A pirate group that was known for releasing movies in small files, but with a decent quality.
YIFY encodes were notorious for being bitrate starved to the point where good SD encodes trumped YIFY "HD".
Only if you are lucky and everything aligns well. You can't ask customers to debug their hardware to make it work.
Step 1: use appletv 4k
as much as it pains a certain set of nerds, using a dedicated stream device is still the best way to bypass the arbitrary hurdles that streamers throw at you. To build a general pc that gets Dolby vision and atmos working right requires at best some very specific hardware/software choices and at worst sometimes just don’t work at all on pc (unless you are willing to do things like hackintosh).
The audiovisual space has just always been intensely proprietary, even something as basic as divx was something you paid for or pirated back in the v4.12 days. Same story as HEVC, Fraunhofer and Dolby have been grubbing for licensing fees for decades now, and you either pay it or spend some time working around it. And if you’re a corporation then you just don’t ship that feature in your product.
Apple also does a really good job implementing those features at the margins, Apple TV is a nice device. But even if you buy (eg) something like a shield tv it’s gonna be easier than tilting at getting Netflix to send you a 4k stream on windows 10 or Linux. At some level it is platform discrimination plain and simple - they just won't send full-quality video to "open" platforms and you can either deal with it or go full pirate. Sometimes they won't stream it even if you have widevine set up properly etc - and it's all completely arbitrary and they could break it tomorrow. Or you just buy an apple tv/shield tv.
Plex, Infuse, and VLC also let you interact with plex/jellyfin on the apple tv, and there really is no question about what it can decode, the answer is "basically everything you'd interact with as a consumer", short of weird stuff (idk about something like 4:2:2 or ProRes). Ironically the A17 also might be my fastest processor (in single-thread) at the moment, lol - definitely faster than my laptop, might be faster than my gaming desktop.
Sucks but that's how it is - to this day, AMD doesn't have working HDMI 2.1 support on linux, because HDMI Forum won't do an open license. You either have closed-source blobs or firmware that implement it, or you don't get the feature. These are hard problems and people generally expect to be paid well for staring at them, even in the cases that aren't directly "reverse-engineer support for proprietary protocol" you simply do not have good open implementations of (eg) log-curve selection right now compared to Dolby Vision just working out of the box. Maybe in 10 years, maybe when the patents expire, but people expect to be paid to make your HDR shit work properly, or to develop HDMI 2.1 for you, etc.
I don't pay extra for 4K streaming in part because I just don't have the bandwidth each month to handle 4x larger video downloads.
Even with 1080p and 2-3 downloaded modern video games per month (which are all greater than 100GB now), I tend to get up to my 1TB bandwidth cap each month. I start paying extra after that.
Sorry to focus on such a detail but VBR nevern been the standard in the Piracy scene. Back in the days it was 192kbps
When I quit pirating music, I remember the standard being either LAME -V2 or --alt-preset standard which both are VBR https://opentrackers.org/scenerules.org/html/2007_MP3.html
Maybe metadata is wrong? Somewhere around 2011 it started to report as cbr, but encoding options are -m j -V 4 -q 3 -lowpass 20.5
My memory of old what.cd's and today's Red snatch counters disagrees with you. FLAC ~ V0 > 320
That's not how I remember it but it was a long time ago and memory is unreliable so I won't claim that my statement is a fact.
But I remember a period of time where basically every rip was VBR. 192kbps then took over when bandwidth and disk space were no long were no longer concerns.
lol
Huh? 500GB (and more) drives became available at 2006 and by 2008 dropped below $150.
Also there was no demand for extra-high-wanna-see-every-original-pixel quality, so XviD releases with atrocious quality but a fine file size were common and were fine on 40-80-250GB drives in 2001-2005.
Music library and video library are a different things. While the most people 'store forever' the music they dloaded (well, they were back in 2000s, probably not so much today), the video library is mostly useless for the most, because it's dloaded for 1-time consumption.
A 500GB HDD, yes. I'm thinking of the person who had a laptop in 2010-2012 and either replaced their large capacity 2.5 inch HDD with a smaller capacity 128GB or 256GB SSD for the massive performance increase or bought one that had an SSD preinstalled. This would also be a shared drive so it isn't dedicated to media.
2010-2012 is also when most folks would have already upgraded to a HD display and so there was more demand for HD content.
Nah, by 2012 newcomers didn't bought SSDs en masse yet, USB drives were extremely common (I think my USB3 Transcend 25M3 is from that time) and some still used mobile racks, slowly replaced by USB dock stations.
Most of the time people replaced HDD to SSD in the laptops only to use ODD caddy to move their HDD there.
By 2010 storage was not a problem, at all.
If anything the torrenting reached it's peak ~2008 and on a slow decline (but not in absolute numbers, because the userbase is still rising) ever since, because by 2010 almost any music could be found on YouTube (popular ofc, not something obscure what is known by 3 greybeards on the whole planet) and even a lot of movies too. For the parts of the world where broadband was still costly or capped you could always go to the store and buy 5-in-1 DVD for $2 (talk about quality, eh). After that the succesful multi year campaign by Apple to convince the user what it doesn't need to own music and what it is totally okay to stream "your" music over the cellular networks, along with %he rise of the streaming services, moved the torrenting to a niche of nerds (only lossless music!), nerds (248 variants of StarWars) or nerds (anime).
If we're looking at the storage cost, I'd say the 10x decrease in flash price is doing a lot more than the maybe-2x decrease in file size.
Few people are building flash nas though the price pressure from flash storage on hdd prices did play a big part. Before flash storage prices started pushing pressure on hdd prices per tb larger drives had become more expensive than smaller drives. We are I think just 3-4 years away from 8tb SSD being cheaper than hdd for me that is the point where we will have mass SSD adoption for Nas drives.
I'd guess that the kind of person that makes a NAS wouldn't have been stopped by h.264 sizes. The comment I replied to seemed pretty focused on ordinary system drives.
Av1 doing 1080p at 3-4 mbps will be reach the point of diminishing returns imo for 1080p content. I can’t wait till that become mainstream. It’ll be the perfect archival quality/space effeciency.
Too bad even devices that claim av1 support … even some from the makers of said codec .. ahem chromecast w/gtv .. still stutter or fail.
Also AV1. I got a 1080p version of a movie encoded in AV1 and it looks pretty damn good at only 1.5GB. The x264 version I have at over 2GB has a lot of obvious artifacting by comparison.
Of course this is 100% the correct reasoning.
When I was a broke college kid I pirated all the things, and at the time wished, when I could afford it, I’d rather just pay. When I could, I did, for years. Now we’re back at the path-of-least-resistance is pirating.
But that means companies must sell for the marginal price of their website’s ergonomics, not for the marginal price of producing movies.
(Which is not a big loss, because I can’t imagine producing the Netflix knockoffs be a hundredth the price of a 007).
It’s not about an individual website, it’s about the industry. It’s not that Netflix, or any other service, is hard to use on its own. It’s the fragmentation of the content that makes it hard to use.
This was solved for with music where pretty much every service has pretty much every song. People don’t need multiple music services, they just pick the one that best fits their style and needs. This is what the movie and TV industry needs to do if they want to beat piracy. This is what they should have done 15 years ago. Their greed is hurting them more than it’s helping.
I had Prime Video, and when searching for content I would get told to subscribe to some channel within Prime. Now Crave (in Canada) does the same thing. Netflix doesn't bother integrating with Apple TV's search or aggregation features to try and drive you into the app.
The end result is searching for legitimate content is a terrible experience. If it's a result from Prime, I just pass. If it's from Crave, I pass. If it's on Netflix, I don't see anything at all.
At least a decade ago streaming boxes had one search box and it would return results from all the sources, and if it appeared you knew you could watch it.
What the streamers provide today is a significantly worse experience than piracy, and I don't know how they haven't realized this.
And now prime wants another $2.99 to stream without ads. Something I had previously included. Nickle and diming also drives customers away.
Drove me away. Increasing the price on my yearly renewal wouldn’t have been noticed. Sending me adverts means Amazon have lost out on far more than my cancelled prime subscription - I haven’t bought anything from them, and that’s over $100 a month revenue lost.
You can make the ads go away by paying more? How? Seeing ads on my paid for service is driving me absolutely crazy.
If HBO and all the other content houses would all go to Netflix and say we'll close down our streaming service and license you all our content, and take our share of a household $60/month, everyone would all make more money, but there's negative infinity chance of that happening; on top of Netflix making their own content, so what's the way forwards? He government could step in and say that online distribution platforms can't also make their own non-self-marketing content, but there's also zero chance of that happening either, so it's a tragedy of commons until someone goes bankrupt, and it's not OnlyFans that's going to be the content farm to fail here, so someones is going to have to buy everyone else until the DoJ gets involved for antitrust reasons, and then we're left with two subscription services (US consumers aren't properly able to count higher than that. Apple vs Google, Democrats vs Republicans, McDonald's vs Burger King, CVS vs Walgreens, AT&T vs Verizon, etc)
Yum! Brands (KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, etc.) is slightly larger than Restaurant Brands International (Burger King). McDonald's is larger than both of them put together. Or if you want brands rather than corporations, there are a zillion burger chains.
Rite Aid and Walmart, among others.
The US wireless carrier with the largest market cap is T-Mobile, with only slightly fewer users than Verizon. There are also many smaller ones.
This isn't a result of consumer preferences, it's a result of the first past the post voting system creating a powerful incentive for the most similar parties to merge until there are only two left. (Score voting fixes this.)
This is the only real market duopoly here, and it's the one they have to worry about.
Either they can license their content to multiple services so it's convenient for customers to subscribe to one service and get everything, or those two companies will eventually figure out a way to get the same effect and most likely end up sucking in 30% of their industry's revenue in the process.
Let’s not forget that “music solved this” ignores the fact that Spotify is not profitable, and may never be due to the record labels cut. Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music may or may not be profitable but are undoubtedly subsidized by their corporate parents.
Not sure if Tidal is profitable but they aren’t popular and are much more expensive than people are generally willing to spend. It’s also potentially subsidized by a corporate parent.
There’s also a trail of unprofitable or tiny businesses like SoundCloud and Bandcamp that may or may not survive quarter to quarter.
It’s not a solved problem.
Their stock value doubled in the last year
Their CEO Daniel Ek is worth 3.7 billion dollar.
Both of those numbers are not profit numbers.
I wouldn't want to be involved in a company that isn't turning a profit.
But, in fairness, this is an industry that is adjacent to Hollywood. It is conceivable that they have some sort of weird profit-laundering scheme going to make sure not too much of the money goes back to the artists or something.
Profit and loss can be accounting fiction when needed (eg Amazon), but I think Spotify has the cartel curse. No matter how much money they make, it’s too easy for the labels to see the public finances of Spotify and decide they want to raise the price of licensing. Furthermore, the more people use Spotify, the less profitable the subscription becomes.
I wonder if mandating content licenses being non-exclusive and separating media distributors from producers would help.
It's mostly working for music. Spotify and Apple aren't competing on their catalogs.
Spotify loses money (which is why they keep trying to do things that are not music to keep the company afloat), and while Apple doesn't split out Music it's fairly unlikely that is a profitable business either.
Music is literally a textbook example of why it doesn't work.
Spotify can just raise prices by 50% and make money? If they tell me the choice is between Spotify disappearing and me paying more, the choice is extremely easy.
This seems to be the most obvious solution, and is what solved the movie industry's greed back in the the studio system days. But, the industry will fight it tooth and nail, because they lose control and potential margins on it at the expense of the consumer.
I wish somebody could get all the media execs in a room and just deliver a simple message: "You can't compete on price; your competition is free. You must compete on experience if you're to compete at all."
With just a few hours worth of time and effort, it's possible to get a pretty sophisticated and automatic system set up that essentially makes getting a copy of a movie a literal one-click operation. You won't be able to watch it _right then_ as the find, download, process, import ... etc pipe takes time to run but at the end you'll have a high quality copy that will work on any device anywhere in the world.
Other than the immediacy, piracy is cheaper and less burdensome.
They did... and the execs ordered everyone from OS, hardware to software companies to add more DRM instead.
Yeah that's what I have and I will never go back. I open one app for VOD content and one for audio content. The quality is often superior to the streaming platforms for movies.
Not having to care about which platform something is on is so nice.
Unfortunately, there is the House of the Mouse, aka. Disney Legal Military Industrial Complex, and they don't let individuals or governments tell them what they can or can't compete on.
Which could be rapidly eclipsed, my synology nas is capable of following RSS feeds for new content, torrenting that content, and serving that content through my plex with audio options, subtitles, descriptions, cover art, ratings, age restrictions etc. (All behind a vpn of course)
If I invested a weekend (4 days, maybe 2-3 weekends...) I could probably figure it out, and never ever ever again deal with the BS streaming services. It takes one person pissed off that they missed Ozark and that will be 1 click install, game on, open source tech only ever moves forward, its antifragile, unlike any individual business.
You need to invest about 10 minutes. It’s not complicated at all and makes a much better experience.
Setting it up properly probably takes a day or so.
Which HDDs should you put in the synology (or are there SSDs that make more sense; need to check $/GB…)? Which VPN service makes the most sense? Which RSS thingy is as good as Prime, Netflix, HBO, etc, etc, combined?
Good point. I assumed the synology was already set up as a NAS.
That takes a while.
Setting up the rss is just minutes.
Only if you over-optimize and get decision paralysis. Perfect is the enemy of the good. Cheapest is the enemy of actually-have-it-and-working.
Are there good step-by-step guides? I am on the fence but researching this seems exhausting so far.
There’s a whole ream of linuxserver docker images in the sonarr family that you can run on one machine. I’m sure someone made a docker-compose somewhere.
So pay for several services and then pirate the content because it’s just more convenient. Best of both worlds. You’ve paid and you get the content in the form(s) you need.
and you have finanically supported services that offer shitty usability
It's going to be shitty if I pay or not. Probably even shittier if I don't pay. Either way, I've solutioned around that problem.
The movie industry is enormously wasteful, they could easily make the same movies with 10x less money if they cut out a fraction of their waste and corruption.
Anyway, it's not my problem. It's their problem.
But that means companies must also realize the tech industry is a really bad business for 99% of companies in it.
I’m not sure it has to be exclusive: some people are inveterate freeloaders but most of us understand that the artists have to get paid, so it’s not just a question of being so cheap that piracy isn’t appealing but also having users feel like they’re not being taken advantage of.
The problem feels a lot like the situation MoviePass worked themselves into where they priced it unsustainably low but cheap money allowed that to run long enough to train a generation of customers that their content was only worth that much. I imagine Netflix would dearly love to say that your subscription includes a certain number of movies but you can add on more, or that there’s a premium tier, etc. but there isn’t an easy way to try something like that now that everyone is used to the current model.
The other side of the problem is that studios really don’t want market pricing. Subscriptions are banking on the idea that you’ll still pay $12/month and find something else to watch even if the big series/movie they’re promoting isn’t very good, and they’re keeping the prices for rentals really high which makes means people are often looking at 1-2 months of streaming charges for a single movie rental.
The combination of the two seems likely to make a lot of people pirating for years to come. Most people do not want to juggle multiple services and if they’ve learned how to pirate anything once it’s always going to be there the next time someone jacks up prices or plays games with availability. I think that’s going to last until someone has the courage to let services like YouTube or AppleTV offer rentals of everything at reasonable prices.
This is HACKER news, our central ethos is (should be) all information wants to be free. Sad to see the desire to pay for content is getting upvoted.
I’ve never equated “hacker == free” ever. In that save vein, no, all information should NOT be free.
I sincerely reject your entire premise.
I think information should be free as in freedom, but have a cost that should be paid (in time, money...), is this a better for you? (I disagree with GP BTW).
Many hearts, I am the GP.
Others use it differently, but I think he was using "GP" to mean "grandparent", as in the comment you would get to if you clicked on "parent" twice starting at his comment. In that system, you would be the "OP", not the "GP", although this too is not fully standardized.
Information wants to be free. What people want is irrelevant. Trying to force information to be not free goes against the nature of information. You can try but it costs all of us.
"hacker" = "free information"
??
I've never heard that definition.
Not OP, but this spawned from Woz mentioning this on a video ( https://www.gettyimages.in/detail/video/at-the-first-hackers... ) in the hackers conference.
You may be too young (not an insult) or in a different geography to have been seen this, however it was definitely a thing.
The irony of this being hosted on Getty Images is not lost on me
Including your personal information, browsing habits, purchase history, genome, genetic disorders, medical history, sexual partners, kinks, embarrassing photos and videos, moments of social faux pas, biggest fears, darkest secrets, cheating, illegal behaviors, personal psychiatrist notes, privileged lawyer information, passwords, private keys, bitcoin keys, financial statements, tax records, debts, etc. ?
Based on the frequency of data leaks and such, very much yes, that information tends toward finding freedom. Attempts to secure such records are necessary because they "want" to be free. Avoid leaving a trail of that information where you can, and keep as much as possible off the internet.
The notion of "information wants to be free" should be taken as an observation about the nature of things and the folly of corporations trying to have it both ways—information made broadly available yet on their exact terms—not as a value statement on any inherent goodness behind freeing information.
Yes, going by how easily that stuff all ends us being leaked, it very much appears like that information is desperate to be free. Keeping it tied down is difficult work.
This is "Hacker" news for a bunch of independent definitions of "Hacker", and for most of us the definition isn't "breaks into computer systems and leaks stuff on the internet".
For myself, when I think of the hacker ethos I think of Stallman and the GPL, which is explicitly designed around the idea that information can be ethically sold as long as you're actually selling it [0]. It's free as in freedom, not free as in beer, and under that philosophy being able to pay for services that respect your rights as a free human (which most current streaming services don't) is a desirable end state, not something to be condemned.
[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html
This is the ballpit sandbox forum for YCombinator, a club for software startup investment fund managers who can quote from the Tibetian Book of the Dead.
The lesson here is that attrition and shrinkage will always be with us, it's only the rate that varies in market accordance with the enshittification of product.
The 'better' the product, the lower the shrinkage.
As supported by a majority of thread comments "I used to pirate when I was poor, then I didn't - now I do again as the commercial offering sucks".
[attribution] https://thebillionscompanion.net/all/tag/Tibetan+Book+of+the...
Free as in libre, I agree. Free as in beer, I do not. The marginal cost of copying information may approach zero, but that's only relevant after the costs of creation are covered.
The problem is: how does one make something "free as in libre" without affecting the "not free as in beer".
If you're going to argue that "hackers" are wrong/dumb/whatever for desiring that content creators be fairly compensated for their work, by all means go ahead, but you're definitely going to need to do a lot better than that.
Its revisiting the origin of that phrase, which
“On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other.”
I find this to be a much more intelligent formulation of the concept, as it recognizes the reasons and the tension.
We simply can’t get much of the media I like for free (gratis). That being said, it is maddening to have so much great content locked up. It feels insanely inefficient and that we produce far too much content unnecessarily.
There are probably ways to balance this better- separation of content ownership, production, and distribution; more limits on copyright length; mandatory content licensing; simplification of older content license rules…
That doesn’t mean it’s morally wrong to pay for content or put restrictions on distribution, just that optimum probably isn’t where we are.
YC is the man now dawg.
This is the managed news site of YCombinator. It's a little garden designed to cultivate start-up culture for some of the wealthiest venture capitalists in the world to profit from.
This is not 1999's Slashdot my friend.
Wanting facts to be free is definitely part of that. Entertainment isn't really the same kind of information, and is more complex.
Most of all I want more content. I’m perfectly fine paying for new content if existing content is unencumbered.
I mean, stealing is always easier than paying for something.
I'm sure you yourself can come up with counter-examples for that.
And, furthermore, piracy isn't stealing. It is a major point here that the initial owner of the thing still possesses the thing.
They're trying to assert some unnatural right of control over what other people do. It isn't even all that clear why this is a good idea. I can see how it makes sense for legislators because of the presumably significant kickbacks they get from lobbyists; but there is a still an open question of whether this is a good system. It looks like it has had a big negative impact on our ability to sustain a shared culture. If people have to buy in to a culture, a bunch of people won't.
People still can't freely distribute Lord of the Rings for example. That isn't helping to get people reading it. J.R.R Tolkien has been dead for a while. Anything less famous than that has little chance to stick.
The original owner no longer possesses the commercial value of the thing.
That's what you steal when you pirate.
People have been buying into shared cultures for centuries. Sometimes being able to afford access to a certain culture - and excluding those who can't - is part of the culture itself.
In a bottom-up cultures people are happy to pay because they feel part of the scene and they want to support it. A big part of that is user/costumer/fan experience and a feeling of community.
Top-down cultures feel exploitative and predatory - because they are. They separate the culture into producers and consumers and enforce strict gatekeeping of the relationship between them - which usually means a one-way financial obligation that feels like extortion, and unnecessary complications and frictions in the experience.
The real issue here is the insistence by the media-cos that movies can only ever be top-down.
The predictable outcome is there's now a shared culture of piracy in which people willingly support the pirate sites instead of the official distributors, and running a pirate site can be incredibly profitable.
The pirate hasn't gained any commercial value though. I'm pretty sure that "stealing" involves a valuable thing getting transferred from one person to another. Operative word being transfer. Everything the copyright holder had to start with is either retained by them or not possessed by the infringer. So it can't be (and isn't) theft.
Not exactly: the original owner still has all the commercial value, as decades of piracy has shown that commercial pieces still exist.
What the owner has lost though is monopoly over distribution and thus money exchange. It is possible to get the content from other places, and maybe, maybe not give some money back. The proliferation of exclusive content on numerous platforms only confirms that.
"stealing" is not always easier. Pirating is sometimes easier, sometimes cheaper, it depends.
Thats not true in even the most trivial sense. But the rise of piracy correlates strongly to not cost, but availability.
Granted charging $1 per song is a little egregious as well
I think the cable TV model was a mature business model for extracting the most amount of value possible from paying viewers before they choose to leave.
Every streaming service will converge to what cable TV is like: paid channels, maximum amount of ads, additional premium content, attempts at lock-in, exclusive licensing of content, etc.
Not adopting the cable business model is leaving billions of dollars on the table, so it will happen.
The money's not on the table if people can and will leave. That's the point of competition. Piracy is entirely in the spirit of free market capitalism: the equilibrium price of a good with infinite supply is 0.
The problem ist that a production of f.e. a movie costs money. If the people that make movies don't earn money, they will not make any movies. So they have to earn that money somehow. If the price of their good is 0 why should they bother with filming?
They could earn their money by not actively pissing off their customers. The streaming industry proved that consumers prefer paying for convenient streaming over messing around with privacy.
For some reason, they feel they need to burn their own industry down in order to prove that people prefer piracy (or not watching) over inconvenient streaming setups. Is anyone really surprised by the current outcome?
Everyone else saw Netflix making a lot of money and decided just making a healthy amount of money renting the rights to them they had to try and make more money releasing their own service. Gotta love modern capitalistic greed. I wish streaming services was like movie theaters where production companies are not allowed to own theaters (aka the distribution network).
Owning theaters was forbidden for movie studios, but afaik making movies was always allowed for theaters.
At the time Netflix was literally making a cash loss despite paying less than the cost of production for most of it's output.
Yes, distribution is a service, and providing good service adds value that people are willing to pay for.
I can cook myself using only my free time.
But I'm willing to shell out some money for having someone cooking for me and doing the dishes.
Yet, only if the price is right.
A good legal bargain kills illegal ones. But then capitalism greed comes, with that enshitification, and as that lowers the legal bargain value, illegal comes back.
1. That IF is untested, it's hypothetical corporate propaganda.
2. That's a problem for them to solve, it's not a problem for me to solve by going like "alright Sony, I'll do you this solid and pay and inconvenience myself instead of pirating just because I like you and I know you're struggling" wink wink
If the market sees movies as being worthless (a price of 0), why would they even consider making movies? Clearly nobody wants them.
Because they love making movies, and can find other ways to get people to pay them for their labor rather than for copies of the movie. This is already happening today.
Don't polarize. There are many in-between states.
I pay to see movies in the cinema. A few weeks / months later I could pirate them if I want to watch them again.
I have paid once. I am not paying again. It really is that simple but they will rather die than do honest business.
Honestly that sounds like their problem, not mine. There is a catalogue of movies and TV shows stretching back a century, I don't need more made. The number of worthwhile movies made a year is roughly 100x less than the number of worthwhile movies already made, and there are enough of those to last me forever.
It’s not an equilibrium price, because the average cost is higher than the marginal cost (which is indeed close to zero). Free markets don’t work unless the marginal cost (and the price) is higher than the average cost, for obvious reasons.
The average cost ist always higher than the marginal cost for digital products, for obvious reasons. So you are literally saying free markets don't work for digital products.
That's not true. There are a number of obvious instances of it working.
YouTube/TikTok/etc.: The market price is zero, the service itself and much of the content is funded through ads.
Debian/Firefox/etc.: The market price is zero, the development is provided through user contributions/donations.
Substack/OnlyFans/etc.: The market price is not zero and then the content is often available for free anyway, but enough patrons choose to pay to fund its creation nevertheless, either because they don't know how to pirate or choose not to. Maybe this is the same as the donation model in all but the eyes of the law, but in any event there are objectively people making a living from it.
I'm curious where the equilibrium is. There is some portion of people who will not torrent no matter what. Either because of lack of ability or moral views, or some other reason.
There is a second set of the population that will never pay for media, or at least not more than very trivial amounts. Either because of lack of ability to pay, not thinking it's worth it, or not believing there is anything wrong with piracy.
Then the is the third group that will happily pay for content when it is reasonably priced and, perhaps most importantly, easy and convenient. If it's too expensive or too difficult/annoying, they will pirate.
The size of this third group dictates where the equilibrium is. If it's very small, then media will always converge in the cable style maximum extraction. But if that second group is large, then the cable model might lose more money than it gains by pushing consumers towards piracy.
You're missing a 4th group: people who would enjoy watching content X, but simply won't bother if it's too annoying. The alternative isn't piracy, it's just doing something else with your time. There's not that many shows or movies that I care enough about to keep one subscription open for it. I had an HBO subscription for Game of Thrones, but I also enjoyed Succession, Last Week Tonight, and some other random stuff. After Game of Thrones shit the bed, I canceled HBO and simply don't watch those other shows. I never finished Succession; I'd like to one day, but it's not worth either the subscription or pirating.
This just shows that the availability of piracy is NOT the problem. It shouldn't matter to HBO whether I've pirated it or not: I could be a paying customer if their prices matched their catalog's value, but it doesn't, so they get nothing, piracy or no.
I support your move, it's better than piracy.
The problem with piracy is if you become a fan of a series and gossip with your friends about it, now you're marketing that company's crappy service. It's a weird way to go about things.
It's weird because TV is also culture. Game of Thrones isn't just some random piece of personal, single-player entertainment: it was, and is, an important cultural phenomenon for at least half of the planet.
That's what makes the dynamics so weird: it's not just, or even primarily, about your personal entertainment - there are social aspects involved, from wanting to belong with your peer group (e.g. talk about latest GoT episode with your cow-orkers at the water cooler), to all kinds of rituals (e.g. watching romantic comedies with a date/spouse).
Same applies to books and musics, to a lesser degree to magazines/news media. For some reason, it mostly doesn't apply to videogames; I used to think it was because they're a new thing, but these days, I think it's rather because the experience is much more individualized and requires much more effort (and time), making it a poor social object.
OTOH if you don't have that in common with other people, you just talk about other things. It is the same thing with soccer for example which is the #1 subject around coffee machines for men (and now increasingly women).
What, you mean like babies and mortgages and bills and restaurants and health problems and gossip? I mean I can enjoy talking about those as well to an extent, but at times I like to change it up a bit.
For a lot of people I know, that's all I really have in common with them, besides geek shit. There was like a solid 45 minutes of me sitting quietly at a New Year's Eve party recently, because everyone else started going into all the Marvel and Star Wars TV shows they watched, of which I've mostly skipped (except Loki and a couple seasons of Mandalorian).
For the people who don't even have interests in geek shit, it seems like they're often very limited to the other topics above (or the other topics plus sports if they're into those). At least the people I've encountered.
It's not like I don't have other interests. I have a lot of creative interests, like making games, and writing, and (very amateur) photography, and music. But a lot of adults don't bother with that stuff (or don't bother anymore, at least), and mostly just consume the creative output of others.
Yes. However, attention is finite, the intersection of topics any one in the group is willing to talk about is narrow, and my point is that TV shows occupy significant fraction of it - that's why they have this weird dynamic where seemingly extraneous entertainment product is treated by many as basic human right. Because in some sense, it is: it's a big component of the shared experience, which itself is the glue that holds society together.
Game of Thrones was a massive outlier in its cultural impact, especially for a TV show. Many games have as much or more cultural impact than many TV shows or movies, probably more on average - even than major shows. And among children, it's almost entirely the opposite.
games are culture—shared, social culture—you just need better friends and coworkers.
It absolutely does, but apparently not for your peer group.
I do observe it applying to video games in many circles. This is more true for social (cooperative or competitive) games and in game-adjacent social contexts like Twitch streaming, but it's also applicable to recognizing references and plot beats from widely-known classics or having similar experiences over particular moments or levels, even in single-player. Pokémon, Final Fantasy, Minecraft…
The 4th group is important because they didn’t compete well throughout most of Cable’s tenure. Now, YouTube, TikTok, etc eat away at people’s video diet. Video games are now fully mainstream too. Normal social media (Twitter, Reddit, Meta) take even more.
I’m in group 4. I’ll pay for streaming services to avoid ads, but never linear TV. TV is largely superior content - it’s professionally made and generally high quality. But if I get sick of jumping through hoops, I have plenty of other things to do.
I started using pirated copies of some music software I actually paid for and own, because it became too problematic and inconvenient. Why do I need a kernel extension for this crap? Fuck iLok sincerely.
Next step is not paying for anything altogether. A middle finger is the only thing those kinds of companies are getting from me in the future, and honestly I'd rather see their demise.
If streaming ever becomes like this, I'm also going back to piracy.
I think a lot of that will be answered with even more aggressive lockouts, DRM and "protections". Platform like Apple's iOS really play into this because they're designed to not allow users to bypass the money extraction and vote with their wallets.
Group three depends on means, motive, and opportunity.
Other side of the equation is - Production of Content has become cheap.
Distribution has become free with global reach.
So we have Infinite amount of content floating about. Not even bringing generative AI into the picture.
So infinite growing Supply. Finite demand.
I spend a lot of time in both production and post production. The price for good content has certianly decreased but it most certianly hasn't become any definition of cheap. Consumers want very hogh quality content these days and that only comes with experienced staff, you can use cheaper gear.
Every time someone says this I want to know what where they get this information. So now I am going to ask, prove it. Show me the VOD service or streaming service that is free with global reach. Even network egress from any provider costs a ton of money nevermind compute for transcoding and storage costs. Again prove it.
> The price for good content has certianly decreased but it most certianly hasn't become any definition of cheap.
Big-budget entertainment certainly remains extremely relevant for things like star wars and marvel movies, I agree. Not to mention sports!
But the rise of Youtube and Twitch and suchlike have shown there is a great appetite for cheaply produced niche content.
Linear TV would never have considered it economical to air 30 minutes of chess coverage every day. But it turns out there's a market for 30+ minutes of chess-themed entertainment per day, paying in the low seven figures annually. And the viewers really don't mind if the mic is in shot or the guy flubs his lines, they'll do the whole thing in one take.
And sure it's not literally one guy, I know that low-seven-figures has to pay for video editing and community chat moderation and enough of a creative team to keep things fresh and so on - but compared to the production standards of linear TV, even way back in the 1990s, this stuff is very cheaply produced.
I completely agree with you on this.
We can do phenomenal things for cheao these days. But cheap still isn't that cheap. Just a few 0s disappeared from the end.
Let me put it this way, it's unlikely even a large YouTube channel is creating The Mandalorian or The Witcher or The Boys anytime soon with a budget that only advertising will be covering.
YouTube is an amazing niche and is the only subscription I will happily pay for monthly. But when I want to see creativity who are truly inspiring it's unlikely YouTube is funding it and I will need to have one of the big providers do that.
Porn is free. They are running the same services. They have proved global distribution is possible. Pretty much like Youtube and Tiktok.
Media and Entertainment sector has all kinds of bizarre economics cause it's used by the Telcos(check what AT&T and Comcast own in ME sector), the Tech firms (google/youtube, amazon, netflix, apple) to play empire defense and market capture games.
Demand is not decided by the consumer. Or marketing depts won't be getting the budgets they do for demand engineering from their tech and telco overloads. But all that free cash dries up or slows downs once the market capture phase is over which is what has happened with the end of the streaming wars. Disney, Viacom et al have realized they can't compete against tech platforms or telco subsidized shops on the distribution front.
Open an incognito tab, open <insert popular porn site> what is the very first thing on the page after the age disclaimer.
Let me give you a hint, "Meet sexy single in your area" isn't a meme for nothing. Porn is far from free, it is paid for by advertising, and from my recollection they are the ones that revolutionised the ad industry by bringing in pre-roll ads.
Regardless, if video distribution is free at a global scale, then go do it. Create a video hosting service with global scale with any video, not even ones people want to watch, create one that serves 40 views a month. Then come back with an income statement that proves your point.
That is the point I'm trying to make, you claim it's free purely because you don't know what the actual cost is.
I'm not saying the current providers are doing the correct thing. I end up sailing the 7 seas far more than I like purely because I don't even know which one of the 40 services even have the series I want to watch. You know what does? <Insert streaming site with dubious legality>
Ps:
The majority of porn content is user submitted, you knoe we already have a free video service that does the same thing as porn, it's called YouTube.
I liked cable, except for the price. Cut it by a factor of 3 and I'd probably subscribe again.
For movies pretty much everything I wanted to watch would eventually show up. Typically a movie would first be in theaters, then become available for purchase on disc or digital, rental, and be included in one paid streaming service. Sometime later, maybe two years after it was in theaters, it should show up on some non-premium cable channel.
The only time I couldn't wait for things to show up on non-premium cable was when "Avengers: Endgame" was coming soon. I knew that one would be hard to avoid major spoilers for once it was released in theaters so decided seeing it in theaters was a must. That meant I had to get get a month of Netflix, which had the Marvel movies then, to get caught up enough for "Endgame".
I also liked cable for rewatching TV series. I'm not sure why, but when some channel is showing "The Simpsons" or "South Park" reruns on a regular schedule I like watching much more than I do when I watch an episode on an on-demand streaming service (or on DVD).
I think it has something to do with the latter being more deliberate. I picked that episode, which somehow makes it so I feel like I need to take it more seriously. When it is just "This channel shows a couple episodes every night" then it seems a lot more casual, like listening to music on the radio. It is easier to just sit back and relax and watch.
Why would you pay to be advertised at?
We can argue about how pervasive advertising is and how subtle it can be, but cable TV literally has commercial ad breaks.
Those billions on the table are only theoretical. It's a greedy MBA group-think. They overestimate how many people will pay for their stuff and yes, even regular non-tech-literate folk get disgusted by paying to be advertised at and leave.
There is still a cohort of elderly people like my mother who is just happy I pay her a cable TV (through IPTV) service but they are a diminishing group.
I am more than willing to pay for content subscription assuming they have everything under one roof and no ads. Pay for cable like service - fuck it. I'd rather watch the paint dry.
Whose fault is it really that all content is not available on a single service? It's nobody's fault, it was inevitable given how things work.
How could you "fix" it? You'd need legislation saying that all content must be made available for licensing at the same price for every service. But that's not enough, because why would HBO sell their content to Netflix and vice versa? No, you'd have to force them to make it available. But that's not enough either, as they could just set the price extremely high. And at this point what would be the point in having multiple streaming services at all? Perhaps we need legislation that enforces separation of content producers and distribution, like the Glass-Steagall Act but for TV, or Net Neutrality?
There was a wonderful point made by Gabe Newell a few years ago on this. He said the only thing you need to do to “beat piracy” is provide a better service than piracy offers. And that’s pretty easy, for all manner of reasons. I thought he was way too optimistic at the time - but here I am years later with hundreds of games in my steam library. I haven’t pirated a video game in years.
I think Gabe’s rule is like gravity. It’s inconvenient for space travel, but what are you gonna do? You don’t get to space by complaining about it.
It’s the same in streaming. All the streaming platforms need to do is provide a service that’s better than piracy. And I really do feel for the streaming platforms here. That seems like a hard ask for them. Netflix rarely has content I want to watch any more. Shows I do want to watch are often on a different competing service. And they often remove shows and movies from the platform that I might have otherwise enjoyed. Im not subscribing to multiple streaming platforms at once - that’s ridiculous. I’m not surprised they’re complaining about piracy - they’re rapidly becoming a worse service than piracy and gabe’s law is kicking in for them.
But at the end of the day, like space companies, complain if you want but it’s not my problem to fix. And there are plenty of fixes - make it easy to have a grab bag of streaming services which swaps streaming provider every month. Or give me access to every platform for my $10 and distribute the money based on what I actually watched.
I dunno. Figure it out. Or don’t, and watch piracy eat your lunch. Your call, Netflix.
I think TV and games are meaningfully different. Most people tend to watch way more number of shows in a year than buying/playing video games. Video games have more replayability, so it's something you need to "own" rather than stream. Therefore, subscriptions for games are not a big thing yet (I doubt it will ever be). As it stands now, if a game I want is not on Steam, that's OK, I can just install another game store. It's a bit inconvenient but not too bad. The problem with TV is cost. I'm OK switching between Netflix, Disney, HBO, Youtube, whatever, but I'm not OK with paying $70 a month,
World of warcraft has had a subscription for 20 years and is wildly successful. PSN has a monthly subscription where you get 2-3 games per month added to your account that you can play as long as you're still subscribed. Gamepass has 25+ million subscribers [0]
Honest question, why not? That's what cable TV cost 15 years ago, and $70 now has the purchasing power of ~$50 then.
[0] https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/09/15/xbox-game-pass-30-m...
$840 a year just on watching TV is heaps. $4200 over 5 years. That's a fair wack cash.
No it isn't. Compare that to any other activity and the price would be similar for how often you do it. If you eat out once a week you'd be paying a similar amount if not more. Most people watch things more than once a week.
It's not just TV though, it's TV & movies. I used to go to a blockbuster equivalent with my parents most Fridays, and we would rent 3-5 movies. Usually it would be 1 new releasae and some from the back catalog. I was only about 14 so I don't know exactly how much it cost, but the "New Release, only €5.25" poster is etched into my brain. I'd guess we did that 3 out of 4 weekends, spending probably €10 each time, which is about half of that cost.
I never said it wasn't, but (I would wager) it's most households primary form of entertainment. It being ~2% of the median household's income it's good value.
But didn’t the cable TV cost include the content delivery and hardware? You need to add the cost of your internet connection on top of that, plus whatever box you use to play to the TV etc.
Kind of - the content delivery for Cable TV was basically free. It all just gets blasted down the cable and the box filters out what you're not supposed to have access to. So arguably, you were paying to have a restricted service.
The hardware was often subsidised (although I recall at one point having to pay an extra €99 for a sky box), but assuming a set top box cost €100, that's 1.5 months of payments to pay for the box, the rest is the subscription cost.
Only if you exclusively use the internet for this content. And the vast, vast majority of TV's come with apps for Netflix, Prime etc these days. Those that don't, a streaming stick is ~£35.
Value for money. Most households don't spend their lives watching 4-8h of content every day, I'd think.
I'm likely to watch maximum 12h a month. So 6$ an hour? No thanks. And I'm talking maximum. Most months I spend 6h watching in total. That brings it up to $12 / hour.
Pay-what-you-watch sounds better to me and many others. Show me a gradually increasing bill in the top right corner of the UI and I'll manage. Or give me only one subscription -- much less than $70 though -- and then you distribute my money to the proper rights holders. I shouldn't care who owns what, nor should I be bothered switching services.
It doesn't matter if I'm a billionaire as well. Again, value for money.
I think media like TV/Movies might be fundamentally different than games because of how easy it is to serve pirated content. With games there's a lot of friction with getting cracks working and risks with malware while with TV/Movies you just watch them in your browser. Recently my friends showed me a pirate site that I'm in awe hasn't been taken down. Don't think I can post a link here but it has all the things I'd expect from a paid streaming service (slick and fast ui, large catalog with good discovery options, high quality streams, no lag, random ui niceties like a dimmer switch, skip op/ed and multi language subs). Being honest as long as something like this is available I don't really see what a site like netflix could offer that would convince me to pay.
Actually the more I think about it the less I understand how it hasn't been taken down.
Most people are honest, and will do the the legal thing when faced with two equal options. If the choice is between that UI but it's illegal, and a reskin of that UI but it's £30/mo, I'd pay.
But it's not, as the other comments here said. It's a choice between that for free and a limited catalog of region restricted, ever changing, poor video quality streams spread of multiple services, and given the choice between paying 4 providers for a poor service and getting a good service from one location, people will pick the latter.
You wanting everything for £30 is just not a sustainable cost though. They would lose money like that.
Replace 30 with 60/80, whatever. The entire rest of the post is my point, not the specific number.
That’s their problem though :) bet they lose more money from the $0 they get from pirates - or so they whine.
It's like every technology: if this is how things work, and they are suboptimal, the optimal solution will be applied. If we say "oh to bad, it's how it's established", then people will go against the establishment if that means better capabilities.
Take a look at the music industry, they have solved it pretty well. I can stream everything on Spotify paying very little, I get everything that I want and I don't have to pirate it anymore. So maybe fostering independent creation? Forbidding "exclusivity" clauses? Fostering independent studio creation?
Prices are elastic: bigger price, less demand, same benefit. So that doesn't cut it either.
The reason it works for spotify is because musicians get fuck all on it. This doesn't work with film and TV because they are unionised and have to be paid a certain amount.
Then what are you claiming the difference is? Are music labels inherently less greedy? Is it harder to build music streaming vs video that leads to a monopoly?
Is it because labels have ownership in Spotify? I don't think the HBOs and Disneys will give up their streaming platform unless forced to do it.
It'll be naturally fixed by economics. We'll reach an equilibrium point where offering an exclusive streaming service becomes less profitable than simply licensing your content to another service or services. Obstinance will probably drag out the timeline, but it won't change the outcome.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Those media conglomerates are very stubborn though, they care more about keeping their rights than money itself.
Let them be stubborn. They can't outlaw everything that they don't like. They'll die a slow and painful death.
FRAND licensing is a thing. And forcefully splitting playback/delivery and content creation would create a much healthier market where content companies have interested in distributing their content to as many streaming services as possible to get revenue - e.g. see the situation with audio playback. With Spotify/YTM/Tidal being separate from music labels, there's much MUCH less of this exclusivity BS.
Came here to say this.
People don't care about multiple services, they really care about the hassle. Cable TV sort of already solved this with how they handle movie packages like HBO or Starz. You pay your cable company a little more and you can watch those channels (or stream them). No need to worry about logins, accounts, separate apps/interfaces, etc.
Digital sort of has this, at least on Amazon. I can watch Paramount or Starz or HBO Max content via Amazon Prime if I have a subscription to them, for example.
The larger a company is the more it falls back to "let the market decide." In this case the market is starting to decide (again) to bypass the poor user experience the big players offer and just steal the content. This is the point where it's time for the market to adapt (again) if they want to keep revenue.
Music has compulsory licensing, and yet we have different radio stations, and multiple streaming services (only some of which is covered by compulsory licensing).
If compulsory licensing for tv and movies also implied the service was picking the episodes, you'd have potential for competition if service A just played all of the episodes in order and service B only played the good episodes. Etc.
The way you fix it is through piracy. The media companies then either solve the licensing issue among themselves or go out of business.
One of the possible ways of "fixing" it is natural evolution and selection, the way it happened with communication networks. They once ruled, but eventually the shifted to being "dumb pipes" (leaving aside for a moment how exact that moniker is) and the end-user device manufacturers taking over as the point of delivery of paid services.
The same could theoretically happen for entertainment content, in one way or another. A popular scenario present in a lot of sci-fi is that people subscribe to "channels" or data streams or whatchacallit, and the point of access is actually working as an aggregator and single point of payment. I can see no valid reason why big outfits like Sony or Samsung couldn't do that, effectively defragmenting the subscription craziness and easily dealing with backoffice negotiations on licensing and whatnot (Sony could probably do that without leaving the building).
Again, it doesn't HAVE to be the end-user device manufacturer to present such a single-point service, but I think they are best positioned to be first movers for such a paradigm. And not saying it would be easy, because they are subject to the same brain-dead enshittification attempts in their "smart" devices as anyone else, and that is a habit that is hard to quit.
Then the video stream vendors must find a different way to make things work. If their goal is to be user-friendly, which I highly doubt. Only in marketing-speak (err, marketing lies) they claim "The experience of our user is our utmost goal". But it really isn't.
It's type of licensing called FRAND. Has been utilized with success.
The same price is doable, they just can't be bothered to lift their ass.
People don't care about multiple services, they really care about the hassle. Cable TV sort of already solved this with how they handle movie packages like HBO or Starz. You pay your cable company a little more and you can watch those channels (or stream them). No need to worry about logins, accounts, etc.
Streaming also had no ads which is now gated behind even more pricey plans.
Low price and no ads were two of the main selling points to ditch cable (along with stream whenever you want).
We reached the point were price is almost as high as cable was (with the standard 4-5 subscriptions), and we have ads. This is not a surprise to most though, the question has always been when would it happen.
We are no longer under zero interest rates. Things have to actually be profitable.
Isn't online streaming profitable? Does it absolutely need ads and granular channel subscriptions to be profitable?
It's far less profitable than you'd think. Many of the competitors in the industry lose money.
Licensing fees/production costs/royalties eat a bunch of the money, but the infrastructure to run a streaming service isn't cheap. I know at least one of the competitors that people would call the most successful is paying a 9 figure AWS bill, plus whatever the costs are for all the caching setup that makes most popular content live in ISPs. Add the typical army of developers building apps for the mobile devices, the billing team, people doing recommendation engines, fraud detection/security team, tagging all content, and translating every blurb in a bunch of languages, possibly pay for creating subtitles for all of those languages... it's not cheap.
What is so frustrating about this is that so many of the costs would go down with consolidation. Every company has to handle the fact that age verification and privacy legislation in South Korea has to work in a just-so way, but every streaming service has to duplicate the logic. While the Netflix recommendation system probably can use some tweaks to take on all of D+'s content, I bet it'd be easier to tweak their system than to have every company have their own ML team handling recommendations. A lot of relatively low quality content wouldn't have to be made if we didn't need to make 'filler' to keep people spending sufficient time on a given streaming service while the next top quality release comes out.
In a happy world, competition brings more better content at a cheaper price for consumers, but when I look at the state of streaming, what we have is many competitors that aren't breaking even, in exchange for a streaming experience that keeps getting worse. And there's little chance it's going to get better until at least half of the worst competitors give up and go back to licensing their content to whatever the big 3 end up being.
And yes, we'd all be better off if we moved to the music model, where any subscription has 90% of the content, but do you really see, say, Apple, Netflix and Disney doing worldwide, full catalog cross-licensing deals?
(1) Netflix?
(2) "9 figure". Just say 1B or 5B? There is a big difference.
9-figure cloud bills? What are they doing? Streaming from AWS? Are they mad?
Even with what I'm sure is bulk negotiated bandwidth pricing there is no way this is an economical way to serve bulk content. For those prices you could build out a whole physical IT operation to rack stuff up in data centers and maintain it for a lot less and your bandwidth costs will be a minute fraction of AWS. There's also tons of CDNs that specialize in blasting out bandwidth.
Putting command and control, accounting, signup / signin, etc. on AWS may make a lot of sense. Those are both more complex to run and lower bandwidth work loads.
Netflix is the only streamer (out of the major ones) that is currently profitable
They have to be continually profitable every quarter, and they have to show growth quarter over quarter or the value of the company will take a major hit, which will impact how much capital they can loan for future projects.
No subscriber told streaming services that they needed to drop literal billions of dollars on content production. I do not want to subsidize their poor decision making.
This is why streaming is so expensive.
They did say that, when they decided that what is playing is actually important to them, so if I can't get my Star Trek on my Netflix, I'm not going to pay for Netflix, it means that everyone has to make their own, exclusive content.
The thing is, if I want my Star Trek, I want my Star Trek, not some substitute…
No they don't?
We are no longer under zero interest rates and I need fuel for my Jet(s) and my Yacht(s).
businesses don't need to be just profitable, they need growth and it can be achieved by increasing nr of users, or prices, or some sort of upselling. As result prices will always increase as much as possible to keep most users but grow the profit
But how we lived like kings during those few years of the venture-capital, antitrust, low-interest rate phenomena.
I wonder if entertainment brand loyalty is going to be affected by the diversification of streaming services. I only have Netflix and Amazon Prime (only because I already pay for Prime) and I have no desire to add another streaming service for another show or franchise. I'm happy to just consume what I can find on those two services and call it good. At what point does the desire to watch a specific TV series or movie franchise stop being worth the cost of yet another service?
But then I'm an atypical customer since I only watch maybe 4 hours of content a week on average, at most.
No ads used to be the main selling point of cable, decades ago, which goes to show that advertising is a cancer and will thoroughly corrupt and consume every communication medium over time.
Even an “ad-free” Netflix plan is infested with promotion of their in-house productions.
Yeah, this grinds my gears too.
If i wanted to watch the other productions, i'd be watching the other production. I can see what is available on the 'trending now' list on the exact screen just before starting this video.
I used to try to go 100% online rental (primarily amazon rentals if I didn't want hassle). I figured it was hard to argue a 3.99 rental was any worse than blockbuster.
So on vacation I tried to airplay mission impossible from amazon rental to the TV, and the screen just went black for copy-protection. So I refunded my rental and torrented it instead.
I don't usually torrent, but sometimes the ecosystems put it squarely in my self interest.
(Also, for whatever it's worth I have netflix active about 1 month a year because I find their recent content so unimpressive, but perhaps I'm not the target audience)
Try disabling hardware acceleration in your browser. It'll probably fix the black screen issue.
The situation is still ridiculous though. Streaming is no longer easier than piracy.
No its a DRM issue, its why I run a hidden 25 foot HDMI from my computer to my TV as some broadcasts require the security inside the HDMI cable itself. (I could be wrong on this one but Widevine DRM handles this process I think)
There is no security inside the HDMI cable itself. It's an HDCP negotiation between the source and the sink which occurs over an i2c serial bus along the pair of DDC pins.
You may be able to get away with just an HDMI dummy plug:
https://www.amazon.com/4K-HDMI-Dummy-Plug-3840x2160/dp/B07FB...
I'm not sure if these dummy plugs handle HDCP. If not you can use one in combination with this splitter:
https://www.amazon.com/Splitter-l-b-y-Vision-Atmos-Scaler/dp...
I own this splitter and know for a fact that it handles the HDCP negotiation. But I think it needs a display attached.
What is an HDMI dummy plug? I read the description, but didn’t get it. What does it do?
It makes the source think there is a display connected by responding with an EDID block. It may also handle the HDCP negotiation but I'm not sure about that. Technically an unlicensed device isn't supposed to be able to implement HDCP so while the Chinese manufacturers are totally willing to skirt around that, they also don't go advertising it.
But why would one need it? I don’t get get idea behind it, what’s with me having a fake extra display? Is it somehow tricks the DRM or what?
I don't know what problem ladzoppelin was having that they seemed to need to have an HDCP-compliant display connected. The primary use case I'm aware is for headless computing. But maybe they have a monitor that doesn't do HDCP and it's sufficient to have a second HDCP-compliant display connected to allow DRM protected content to play on the non-HDCP monitor. I'm guessing at this point.
The GP was trying to play back Amazon DRM content via AirPlay, so HDMI/HDCP should only be relevant to the "last-mile" connection between the AirPlay receiver and an external display (so, if the receiver is a Mac laptop's internal display or a smart TV, not at all).
AFAIK, DRM video playback over AirPlay only works from within iOS apps that explicitly support AirPlay[1], not via generic iOS/macOS screen mirroring.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204289#iOS
That's true but my reply was solely to ladzoppelin where they seem to need to have an HDCP-compliant display connected. I was just offering an option besides a 25 ft HDMI cable.
If the DRM means you need a workaround, it's a DRM issue.
Or, you can just pirate it and not have to put up with any of this BS.
Weird. Jellyfin doesn’t make me do that.
It’s a Widevine DRM thing, not a browser video thing.
I think that was the point of the previous comment.
The UX of DRM-laden services breaks. You don’t have that problem with Jellyfin.
I think you overestimate how "easy" piracy is for the average user. Netflix revenue keeps growing (and subscribers), despite the "crackdown" on password sharing that many predicted would cause massive cancellations.
According to TFA piracy is also growing rapidly, so it's apparently easy enough.
You may be thinking of usenet, torrenting, seedboxes etc. when it comes to piracy, but there are also (ad supported) public web sites where you can watch almost any content, or IPTV providers where you can pay a yearly fee and watch most things streaming providers offer once set up.
People that cannot afford Netflix will go to great lengths to get the content they want. They're also not mutually exclusive. Piracy growing doesn't mean Netflix isn't. People pay for Netflix AND download pirated movies all the time.
The number of 'normies' who talk about torrenting casually is a decent amount. Most at least know what it is. If not, they "have a guy" they get media from.
googling "watch X online free" is hard?
It's clicking on the links in the search results that requires a difficult leap of faith.
Apple has spent years teaching people that if it runs without modification, it's safe. End of story. It came from the App Store, or it's allowed by Safari, so it's good to go.
Couple that with malware getting more subtle [0], and Windows Defender getting better, and most people will assume they're virus free and have been for years (even if they're not).
[0] think cryptominers in the background and data exfiltration vs so many browser toolbars you get 3" of any given webpage at a time, and pop-ups on pop-ups
You overestimate your view of piracy. The average person isn't curating libraries of lossless music collections and carefully re-encoding Anime dubs to match their sound system.
People are Googling for the hundreds of sites that will stream a feed of a DirecTV box somewhere showing an NFL game, or show grandma how to connect to the Plex server their cousin runs.
My comment was explicitly replying to an argument about how streaming services would "suffer" because of how piracy is much easier today. There's no signs of that. Just because Netflix mentions that risk in their SEC filings. The article admits as much, it's their responsibility and of course if there were no other alternatives it'd be better for Netflix, but is hardly something that has changed significantly to make a dent in their business. As I said, subscriptions and revenue keeps growing, there's no evidence of them "suffering" because of the alternative (viable to many) that piracy provides.
They talk about piracy "services," which is not your normal torrent user presumably. I guess it's Popcorn Time and the like, which makes it somewhat easier for the general populace.
Yeah, still, it's easier, but not as easy nor convenient or widely available (e.g there's no Popcorn app in that TV you just bought. Defaults matter a lot.
My parents found free sports online when their team was playing a team that wasn't shown locally.
They're completely inept at technology.
It's very easy these days.
It's the lack of content availability that pushed them over the edge. Sports are a special case, notoriously hard that is super stupid and pushing people to piracy. I tried paying many times to watch a game my kid wanted and either the dumb apps or websites would not work on my TV. Make it easy to pay for the content and most people will take the easy route rather than search online for ad-ridded or dubious websites (unless they can't really afford it and then is not a real loss for the company anyway).
I was paying for Netflix 10 years ago in France for a short while, wanted some English subtitles for my wife for some US shows but there were only subtitles in French so had to download the same show elsewhere if you know what I'm saying... with English subtitles readily available. I also remember watching some shows like the first two seasons but then only to find out the third season was licensed by another streaming service lol. Such a UX disaster for paying customers.
I was living in the only english-speaking country in South America. Netflix wouldn't give me French subtitles or secondary audio because apparently south america=spanish for their divisions. I don't see how subtitles would fall under the broader licensing agreements. The subs/langs were available for the same titles in Canada.
(More absurd because France is a part of South America via French Guiana).
They do. Somebody had to produce the dubs/subs and it wasn't necessarily the content creator especially if it wasn't the language it was originally created in. Those French subs or dubs could have easily been created by a Canadian firm who got the Canadian rights and wanted to use it in French Canada, then that got licensed off to Netflix. It may have had little involvement with the original creator and they don't necessarily hold all the rights over the translation effort to spread it worldwide.
What's more absurd is when you can't get CC for the same language as the show.
This is a common issue across Europe. 40 million+ internal migrants (from one EU country to another), yet most shows on Netflix only have the local language for subtitles and often no option to avoid dubbing.
It's worse than when we bought everything on DVD. Region 2 discs (Europe) would have many soundtracks and many subtitles languages on the disc.
This has also bugged me, they must have access to every language, yet they just don't. I'm sure it's licensing issues.
At least normally they have have the original audio versions, but just recently I saw that in Switzerland, they released Suicide squad but the german dubbed version only, why??
I find this term so funny because it kinda makes the problem sound like a physics problem given down from some deity. When it's just the content provider choosing to screw you over by writing a contract that includes regional exclusivity.
Especially when these same companies managed just fine when they put all languages on a DVD disc.
I go on this rant regularly, and apparently Netflix staff never visit Hacker News, or just don't care.
Interestingly, it took quite a bit of dev effort to make their subtitles this bad. They had to figure out which subset of languages to show in each region, for example.
I'm sure these decisions are made by the same team that refuses to show English subtitles, and instead always uses English for the hearing impaired. Because why would any human not be able to understand English unless they're deaf, right? Also... no French people are deaf. Everyone knows that.
By not hiring junior devs, they're missing out on a large chunk of those of us who spend their workday raging at technology on HN.
Same here. I still have Amazon prime here in Spain but a lot of content only has the stupid Spanish dubbed audio. And my Spanish isn't that great.
I mostly pirate everything and I have Amazon prime for the shipping so I don't really care but I would really be pissed if I'd paid top dollar.
Same problem with Netflix absolutely no local subtitles/dubs available.
Meanwhile one local streamer telecom has regional content + Disney for 7 Euros a month with dubs/subs.
Another local telecom streamer has regional content + HBO with subs/dubs for 6 Euros a month.
Not sure how they got HBO and Disney so cheap but these are multi-country regional streamers - half government / Scandinavian owned.
So Netflix had to go.
I'm also pirating everything for my wife because of the subtitles. She's not a native French speaker and the French subtitles MUST align with the voice to help her which is never the case with Netflix.
Fun!
https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...
I read this same thing a lot on Reddit and HN. It surprising to me on HN because I would assume most people on here are making good money.
For my family here is the monthly spend with taxes for my area included:
HBO Max $ 13.53
Hulu $ 7.21
Disney+ $ 0.18 (w/ Hulu)
Paramount+ w/ Showtime $ 10.82
Apple TV+ $ 10.81
AMC+ $ 7.56
Amazon Prime $12.53
$62.64/month. Now, about 20 years ago in 2004 my parents had basic cable and they paid $60/month. An my parents combined made no where near what I make today in my salary alone. And with inflation the cost of entertainment has gone down significantly.
As for figuring out what is on what- Apple TV has made this easy.
Is piracy easier? Legality aside you need a seed box, membership to specific sites, and VPN. Which can add up to more than $30/month just to download pirated content. Not to mention the time investment in figuring out how to get the movies and tv shows to your family members on all of their devices. A budget NAS with 20 TB is going to cost $500. A small PC to transcode also $500. Also all the technical know how required. Backing up 20 TB to the Backblaze is going to cost $13/mo. So lets not pretend piracy is easier.
Your infrastructure costs for pirating content are comical. Try to think of how to pirate the cheapest way possible, instead of the most expensive way to prove your point.
Probably need a 100 TB SSD to pirate a single movie. And definitely gigabit. 16 GB VRAM should do it.
Beyond the Dril-candles-tweet economics already discussed: I already own a PC that could transcode if that was something I actually wanted to do.
A seed box and a VPN is maybe $15 a month, and there are private torrent sites that don't charge monthly membership fees. If you've got a expansive family with lots of kids and want to fully replace Netflix with Jellyfin on a libel server it's a bunch more work, but torrenting shows onto your laptop to watch is fairly easy.
At the end of the day, for someone that's motivated to not give companies money because they see them as greedy rather than a way to compensate the creators, it becomes a labor of spite. That $500 budget NAS, downloading content in native resolution so there's no transcode box needed, spread across all the families and cousins, is easily paid for in car repair favors or what else the family has to offer the uncle or aunt running the pirate video service. $500 vs $60/month? that's just 9 months. 3 if you figure there are three households where you're saving them $60/month.
Personally, I rotate membership between one service and just limit my own tv time, but piracy really is too easy if you know what you're doing and are morally flexible.
This part is trivial nowadays: sonarr/radarr and related handle discovery and library management, and jellyfin does the playback.
Reasons I got back into piracy included trying to watch a series with my wife, and finding it gone. Seasons missing while streaming, UI becoming worse (for the last few years of Netflix I fully relied on an external paid service to discover new things on Netflix because of that). More and more content I cared about being removed, with lots of content I don't care about getting added - while price kept going up _and_ account sharing policies being put in that'd match my non-account sharing use case.
I'm still paying for Disney+ - though based on the Netflix experience I'm adding everything I'm interested in to my local library.
Amazon Prime got kicked out after they got too expensive - and even while I had prime I never actually used the video player as the UI is so horrible, but already back then pirated all the stuff I was paying for.
You're missing Netflix, ironically.
Put.io
It's not about the money, but about convenience, as is often repeated. I regularly buy games on Steam yet pirate movies.
It can take 30+ minutes and multiple account registrations to figure out whether a movie is even accessible where I live in the preferred language at a given day. I don't watch them every day, so a subscription model doesn't make much sense for me. I'd also pay for interruptions in the stream, lower resolution/quality, and in some cases ads. Why would I ever do that?
I don't need a NAS. Transcoding content doesn't need special separate hardware. Technical know-how is also required to troubleshoot streaming issues. Backup is always necessary. Membership to specific sites? Never had one.
If piracy was the dark art you make it seem then it would never be significant enough to make Netflix worry about it.
A lot of people are students, or just don't like paying money for a frustrating experience even if they can afford it.
But then you haven't got access to the things which are currently on Netflix or Peacock or YoutubeTV or whatever it is this time, and feel anxious or resentful that you're paying a monthly fee for whichever one you're not currently watching, or else have to spend time canceling or re-signing up for them all the time.
That's how the people who have the money do it, but they're not doing it for the money.
Why would that take a long time to figure out?
Used PCs are ~free and anyone can get 20TB of storage to put in it for <$160:
https://www.amazon.com/HGST-Ultrastar-HC510-7200RPM-Drive/dp...
Also, people often have these things already.
Why would someone pay money to back up to the internet what they downloaded from the internet to begin with?
oh no. you are trying to set up a full blown alternative. that's not how the majority of world does piracy.
here is how it goes.
you have a laptop/pc. you go to tbp, search for the top 100 for movies/tv shows and download the torrent, watch it and delete the file to save space.
what you are describing is off-limits for majority of the world.
i have rented seedboxes back in 2016 for 2 months to get those "points" to get to a private tracker. never before, never after.
i have been using the above tbp+vlc method on a daily basis since 2005-06.
only recently lookmovie and other streaming sites have made it a bit easier.
oh, also, there is an outlier.
popcorntime. it JUST WORKS. I used it on the 2nd day of its initial release, i saw the whole weeks drama with death threats and the subsequent forks that arose. i have been using that as well so i am confirming and NOT PRETENDING that piracy is easier that actually paying for stuff.
We never stole (cute word pirated) anything. We became cordcutters (OTA and streaming) because we felt we weren't using but maybe $20 of the $180 monthly we were paying to cable. We became cordcutters in 2013. We never stole (cute word pirated) anything.
"Stole" isn't the right word either. Pirating does not deprive any legal entity of ownership. It's merely copyright infringement. It also likely circumvented access controls, thereby running afoul of DMCA. But it is not theft.
I'm speaking as someone who also never pirates. I'd rather not watch something and spend my time doing something else.
It is absolutely theft, nobody is falling for that semantics argument - you're depriving a rights holder of revenue that they would otherwise gained.
There's never been a single proof of a loss of revenue during research.
So no, while it's usually a talking point on the anti-piracy ads, it's an urban legend.
If I wasn't pirating I would most likely have at least one service.
I'm stealing just as much as I would be stealing if I took code from a developer without paying what we agreed to. The entire stealing/not stealing discussion is just useless semantics.
My pockets are absolutely overflowing with revenue big corpo would otherwise have gained, it's ruining my pants!
Do you know where I could stash all this revenue big corpo would otherwise have gained? Or perhaps I could give it to you? Would you be interested in giving me something in exchange for all this revenue big daddy corpo would otherwise have gained?
"If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing"
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-jame...
No, it's absolutely not theft and courts agree.
What is the best way to pirate tv shows these days? Asking for a friend, of course.
Torrents
Cool! Is Popcorn time still recommended? Or what's a good client?
Not a client but check out the *arr[1] family if you're into self-hosting. What client you choose depends on your usage, I like Deluge. There's some initial work to setup and a little bit of maintenance but it's worth it, throw a Jellyfin instance into the mix and have all your media in one convenient place. Linuxserver[2] has containers for all of them.
[1]: https://wiki.servarr.com/
[2]: https://fleet.linuxserver.io/
Interesting, thanks for sharing!
On Mac, Transmission. On Windows, QBittorrent.
Then I just search on various torrent sites. Thepiratebay.org and rutracker.org (use google). But movies and TV shows are easy to find. There are many sites which specialise in it.
Thanks! Any opinions on Popcorn? Seems convenient that the searching and playing is in the same app?
VPN + public torrents. Private trackers have benefits but also annoyances, like impossible to maintain ratios and minimum seeding times.
Direct download (DDL) + a download manager or debride service.
Usenet is actually still a thing and is supposedly ridiculously fast and hassle free, once you have it set up.
IRC still exists but you need connections or something to trade.
There are IPTV services that also provide on demand streaming, i.e. pay for Plex.
Kick.com is banned in Greece as of June. It has some betting streams, not sure if someone bets on the platform, but it got banned anyway for illegal gambling. I don't care personally, just to put it out there.
P2P download of files did fall a lot in the last decade, i think a second wave is coming.
Kick isn't really a streaming site, it's a front started by the Stake bitcoin casino after Twitch changed policy to ban streaming bitcoin slots.
Stake had been handing out huge contracts to major streamers to show themselves having fun gambling on Stake, particularly xQc and TrainwreksTV. These streamers would act as if they were betting with their own money, including getting into six figure bets, without being clear they were on a contract that basically made it all upside to them even if they lost millions. The audience for these streamers slants young, and that didn't sit well with Twitch advertisers, hence the change in policy.
Train et all didn't want their golden goose to end, so they worked with Stake to create Kick, with Train as one of the cofounders, and xQc and others pulling their audience over.
One of Kick's selling points to streamers has been to be a wild west as far as copyright and content goes. They quickly took in all the streamers too toxic for other platforms, including people who'd done things like film themselves committing sexual assaults on Twitch. They've encouraged people to restream copyright content like marvel movies, and even porn.
I don't know what the laws are like in Greece, but considering this free for all approach it's not surprising they'd run afowl of regulations somehow. Frankly it's amazing Kick hasn't gotten nailed by some sort of major anti piracy action, but I suppose being based out of the Seychelles complicates that for copyright holders.
In any case, the point is Kick is an aberration. It's way too toxic for mainstream advertisers, so the only thing sustaining it financially is Stake paying people to stream gambling on Stake.
I didn't know any of that stuff, thanks for sharing. Casinos and betting literally disgust me, but given that in a handful of years, every person on the planet will have his own personal stock and bond market, i wonder how one can differentiate betting from investing. A saying i usually repeat to people, is that in the future, i.e. in a handful of years, everyone will be a billionaire for fifteen minutes.
I have no idea what you're talking about.
The biggest clue is how long you're going to hold ownership. If it's years, then it's almost certainly investing.
Wha? Wouldn't most people cash out? Then most people are billionaires permanently? How does this work?
Well, think about it that way: What's the purpose of copyright? It gives ownership of information, to the people who produced it, some years for a song or a movie. The presupposition is that said information, will be valuable in a year or 10 years.
Along the same lines what's the purpose of investing? It captures ownership of a company, for some time, or indefinitely. The presupposition is that said company, will be valuable in a year or 10 years.
Well as technology advances, everything becomes easier to produce, including movies, songs even car companies. The saying means that everyone will be able to produce something, which will gain big traction for a small amount of time. At that point he will be a billionaire, but someone else will produce something very similar, in fifteen minutes, and his ownership will go to nothing very quickly.
If by "billionaire" you mean "making a hundred dollars a minute" then I think I see what you're saying, but I would word it very differently. If you were even a paper billionaire you could sell a big chunk for something that wouldn't immediately crash. But if everyone knows you're about to crash back down, then that will be priced in to your "stock" and you won't even be a paper millionaire.
Yes, i meant it more like: "Unrealized gains billionaire". The phrase is not meant to be absolutely serious of course, but it passes a point across which i think it's important.
Not only better and better technology gives us more opportunities to compete with one another, but we become better at competing with one another regardless of technology. The edge one holds in anything such as making movies, making cars or what have you, gets smaller and smaller in duration. The timeline of the first mover advantage to capitalize on any gains gets shorter and shorter. In such a situation, copyrights, patents, IP, end up almost irrelevant.
This is correct. Kick is just a front for bringing lifetime gamblers into Stake. That's only reason they were willing to pay xQc $100M for a two-year non-exclusive contract.
Amazon Prime and Apple TV are easy. Just rent the movie. It’s a few bucks like video rental shops back in the old days. You can also buy, though only Apple really allows downloading of bought content.
It’s a few bucks like video rental shops back in the old days.
Of the top 10 in Apple’s current Top Movies Chart in the TV app, 3 cost $5.99 to rent while the other 7 are $19.99 to rent.
Inflation adjusted that’s about right. It was like $4 to rent a new release in 1993.
Generally speaking, the ones that cost $19.99 to rent are still in theaters. The price will drop once they are out of theaters and a more normal home release. This wasn’t an option in the days of video rental shops.
If a family, or even just a couple, was going to go to the movies, buying popcorn and drinks, it’s not cheap. $19.99 is still usually cheaper than going out.
I remember when they started doing this. I think it was a response to theaters being closed during the pandemic, but could be misremembering slightly. Beyond that, I think the general idea was that people have nice big screens and home and don’t feel the need to go to movie theaters anymore, so this gives people an option to see new releases in the comfort of their home. The extra cost is for the early home access.
But they don’t have the show or movie you want, then you have to sign up somewhere else.
The rental options from places like Apple and Amazon typically have a much bigger library than the streaming options. Unless it is a movie or show specifically made for another streaming service, it is probably available as a rental.
Partial agree. Plenty of films aren't available for rent on those services either.
I’ve always liked Apple ITunes store model. (So did Steve Jobs that’s why they were so late to music subscriptions)
Just give me a giant catalogue of every show, movie, and album known to man and let me buy or rent a-la-carte for a fair price.
At the moment I’ve dropped all streaming platforms and am back to Apple. If I want to watch something I just buy it and don’t have to worry about subscribing to yet another service.
1. My time isn’t valuable so who cares if it takes 6 minutes to figure out where to watch Magnum PI.
2. I know I shouldn’t do illegal things so I don’t do them.
"My time isn’t valuable"
uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh sir?
When I’m at home deciding what to watch on TV it really isn’t.
Time is your most valuable and scarce resource. You have a finite amount and you can't get more.
If that's true, then no one should be watching TV anyways.
Ah the No True Scotsman argument
Something being the highest value resource I have doesn’t mean that it’s actually valuable. There’s a highest value turd of all the turds in my septic tank but it doesn’t mean that turd is valuable.
While I directionally agree, I don't know how to reconcile this with antitrust. I wouldn't want Netflix to be the one company with all the content, with no competition. I guess what would be better is if all content was available on all the streaming providers, and then they'd compete on platform quality and price.
I do. There needs to be one international company who is co-owned by all these media companies. They need to "nationalise" streaming amongst themselves.
That way users only have to pay one streaming service, the content is available in every country, the rightsholders are paid fairly by the content consumed instead of these never-ending monthly fees for one show and ignoring the rest of the library.
If they don't do this, piracy again becomes the best option and media companies will only ever get stupid disengaged customers and that's a bad business model because those people eventually leave.
The time of predatory streaming service bullshit is over. Provide a service which puts customers first or they'll all go back to piracy. They already are.
That is exactly what Hulu tried to be initially.
Nationalization is too extreme. What you want is compulsory licensing where the government sets some price by which any streaming service can pay to license the content. How that price gets selected is... complicated and easy to fuck up[0], but I can imagine some metrics that could be used to target prices. e.g. the compulsory license cost must not exceed some multiple of the average negotiated rate.
[0] Notably, radio has a compulsory licensing scheme, but the government turned up the license cost on Internet radio so high that nobody can make a profit unless they sell their soul to the RIAA ala Spotify.
I mean it works for music right?
There is considerable competition in this space and prices are not coming down but going up. Services and content is not improving but getting worse.
Honestly if Apple integrated Netflix and all those other services into a unified UI for Apple TV that transparently lets you go between the apps without realizing it (they do own the OS...) it would be exactly what I want to see happen to these streaming services, that or they somehow share their content to the official Apple TV app itself, and let Apple TV query across all those other streaming apps, it would be great. Sometimes I'll look up something with my Apple TV and it will try to have me go to a paid version, for me to realized I watched it on a completely different app, or it shows me the app that only has 1 single season, when I have every season in a different service.
I think there's room for improvement on the smart TV OS' to better integrate these services into one pluggable app.
This is what amazon prime does.
True. But it only solves half the problem. Or to put it another way, their particular implementation just leads to a different frustration. So Prime aggregates content, which is great. So I can browse a great meta-catalog of content from various services. The problem is I'm not subscribed to all these services. So I scroll through the catalog and find something interesting, but... you need to sign up for a monthly plan to watch whatever show on whatever service. It might be a little more palatable if you could pay (a reasonable amount) per show, or series or movie, or whatever. But as is, it's just an exercise in frustration. I'm not committing to a subscription to watch one show that happened to seem somewhat interesting.
This is exactly what Apple attempted to do, but Netflix never provided API access or data, so Netflix shows never appeared in the unified interface.
Netflix actively fights against these integrations - both on Apple TV and on Google/Android TV they refuse to integrate with the APIs that would give you this exact experience.
They also tend to refuse allowing their customers to watch on platforms they don't like - e.g. they actively blocked casting to Google smart displays and blocked Netflix app from working on Macs and Vision Pro so you can't download things.
That would be great, with the caveat that if a service cannot provide content for your account, it will not be shown in the search results.
Prime is the worst offender of this, but having Crave and Bell TV app installed on an AppleTV means any search returns a result, but you can't watch any of them without buying another subscription to a "channel" they offer.
Which services do you mean?
Netflix? Or do you mean the other 7 services, which didn’t exist back then.
There was a brief window of time when streaming was able to compete with piracy (free) and it’s when there was just one streaming service. Netflix was able to have a robust (if not comprehensive) catalogue (because it had no competitors), and was dedicated to user experience (becaues it was willing to burn money to grow its customerbase), and had just secured multi-year licensing deals for content from all the major film and television distributors at bargain basement prices (because no one else had yet realized how valuable those streaming rights were).
Aren't they raking in millions or billions now? Not enough money to pay for the deals now? What is stopping them?
Also their browser and software limitations are of their own making. Do away with those, and I might even consider a subscription. Obviously I will not, if they continue to discriminate against me.
https://techland.time.com/2011/12/01/hbo-boss-to-netflix-you...
HBO Boss to Netflix: You’ll Never Get Our Shows (2011)
Money can't buy everything.
though apparently 2023 called to say that's no longer true. HBO is exploring licensing their content to Netflix.
https://www.vulture.com/2023/07/hbo-tv-shows-netflix-wbd-lic...
As a pioneer of entitlement-based streaming video who believed in the tech, I pay for every streaming service that remains ad free and is available a la carte as an add-on "channel" to TV+, Hulu, or Prime.
I'm down from most all of them, to just a handful.
Our consulting to content and distribution firms in the 2000s told them they had to do five things to compete:
- eliminate anxiety of appointment viewing
- eliminate anxiety of acquiring media (costs)
- eliminate anxiety of ownership (durability)
- eliminate anxiety of compatibility (devices)
- eliminate anxiety of availability (when, where)
Netflix is undoing several of these. They're adding cost of viewing ads, removing promise of working on all devices, and more aggressively removing deep content.
I think fragmentation is a legitimate problem for end-users but I don’t know how to solve it exactly, because the most obvious alternative is a monopoly where everything is on just one service (and we all know about the bad effects a monopoly can have).
Maybe a system where multiple different services offer the exact same content library or something similar, but a good solution will require some thought I think.
Imagine old school TVs. It would be the same problem as if you had TV be hard wired to a physical channel. You need to have 3 TVs at home to watch different channels. That’s what’s happening today.
The solution is easy technically speaking and has been solved for decades. It’s called interoperability.
Now, the issue is businesses don’t like it. Even though the customer value is huge. Why? Because there’s something they want more than to sell content: to control access. Your player, your recommendations, promotions for more of their content. Heck, why not triple dip and throw in some ads and data harvesting too? The end goal of platform control is to become the only one. Dominance, like Spotify. Then: relax, lean back, raise prices, and watch the stock ticker.
So they only like interoperability when they are small and growing, and then do a 180 when they get bigger. Their end goal is incompatible with yours, the consumer. Back in the day, governments or similar neutral-ground organizations enforced/supported interop (telephone, radio, tv, etc) not perfectly, but enough to break the prisoners dilemma of monopoly-seeking competing businesses. Of course, that’s gone now, in the US. Standards support (the carrot) is only for rudimentary tech, like encryption, and anti-trust (the whip) is back in some other century going after hypothetical cartoon villains.
So… either one of them wins, or a duopoly, whatever is acceptable to the average consumer. Or, more likely, it remains like this: a fragmented shit cocktail and losses to piracy. This works as intended – piracy is an extremely good pressure valve and canary litmus for market failure.
Agreed.
I actually don't think that Piracy was difficult to compete against. Actually there was a time when video streaming platforms competed against it --- and very successful. For normal people, it was cheap enough to make a contract, and much simpler than going the piracy route. No one talked anymore about pirating.
But then things went wrong:
* you paid a monthly fee and STILL suddenly got advertisements force-feds (you couldn't even skip them)
* you wanted to watch some series, but it was taken out of the program (never heard of a public library that removes some author after some months)
* many movies made it only into one specific video stream vendor, so they forced people to make 2 or 3 or even more subscriptions.
And once the inconvenience from video stream vendors reached some threshold, piracy was re-birthed. As soon as it become more convenient again.
And at the bottom of all these issues, you will find the excessive copyright terms which create artificial scarcity.
Just require anything older than 25-30 years to be made available for a nominal fee to any platform that wants it, with no exclusivity agreements allowed. Suddenly, you have a ton of quality content on multiple platforms. And the platforms are incentivized to compete on quality new content.
Also, it shouldn't be allowed for the Film/Music industry want to have it both ways. First use "Hollywood accounting" [1] to avoid paying taxes and contributors because the film "had a loss". And then milk it off perpetually. If you declare a loss on something, it should be enforced to go on public domain in a much shorter timeframe (say 10 years vs. 25-30 for profitable productions).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
Yup. It's a service problem, not a price problem.
I pirate again too. The fragmentation is just crazy now.
Both my streaming boxes (Amazon Fire Stick and Xfinity Flex) handle that for me. I press the mic button on the remote, say what I'm looking for, and they tell me my options. Typically that means they tell me which paid services it is on (Netflix, Max, Peacock, etc) and offer to launch the app for that service, which free with ads services it is on (such as Pluto or Freevee), and show my options to buy or rent it.
The regional licensing and delisting of titles is frustrating too. All the separate walled gardens just making it less likely folks will pay.
I think this is right.
There are like 3 animes I wanted to watch on netflix, but they only have dutch subtitles, Trigun had dutch subtitles for like 4 years until they removed it in the netherlands.
I have to play whack a mole with 4-5 streaming services to find out where the show is 'at the moment'.
The tv apps are so garbage.. each company is pushing more and more visual animations crap, it has gotten to the point that I cant even scroll the titles properly.
Exactly this. I recently wanted to gift my sick mother something to let her watch the shows she likes while she gets better. I check all the major streaming sites, genuinely wanting to buy a subscription because it would be way easier. I considered buying her subscriptions to all the major companies but decided the hassle of managing the logins would be too difficult for her. So in the end I reluctantly ended up torrenting everything onto a single usb stick for her. There is currently genuinely no other way to watch all the things you want in one place other than this. Netflix has accelerated the problem by making their catalogue nothing but shitty self made shows, every year it just gets worse.
Worse yet, most of those services have extremely crappy software (e.g. to watch a series, you have to go through several levels of menu for each epusode and some won't even remember which episodes you watched), put in insane amount of ads even for paid subscription, some have no subtitles, etc. While a good pirate site with proper software - or so I heard from some friends - provide much better service for free.
I can't relate to that kind of dilemma. I don't want to pay for multiple services, but I also would not get much value from juggling them for what little I care to watch. I might in some instance be interested in just one or two shows, in which case I can sign up to watch then cancel.
Streaming is still easy, just more expensive.
Don't forget that when watching in your desktop/laptop is hard to get a good quality, like you have a 4k display, but every service want to serve you 1080p or lower quality when you already pay for the 4k content plan.
More importantly, the pirated content isn't DRM-encumbered, you get to keep it and it can't be pulled whenever the streaming service feels like it. So the same situation as with DVDs all over again.
Netflix also became popular due to people hating ads. Ads or piracy, which funds criminal activity? Hint: Hear social media CEOs testify in congress.
This seems like a PR piece to promote and justify Netflix's change in mind and business model.
Yeah, it's so much easier to just use fmovies, bflix or things like that. Just access your browser and use. Don't even need to torrent in modern times.
Funnily enough their UI is much better and more intuitive as well, in addition to having all the content together. They also offer imdb ratings etc.
I would pay $50 - $100 for a server like fmovies, bflix. So it wouldn't be a complete headache to understand what you can and can't watch in your region.
Everytime I want to watch Netflix nowadays, unless I happened to hear from somebody, that there's something awesome there, then I just browse it, and nothing of interest is popping up, so I just go somewhere else.
I don't pirate because I don't have money to pay or that I don't want to pay. I pirate because using the real services is so impossibly frustrating and disappointing.
It's fine to have multiple services, it's good for the competition, but there needs to be a system to make it so that each service can stream all things. Even if it costs within that service, so be it. Even where you pay per stream or view is good. If you have your own original content then you just ask other streaming services to pay for it while your own end-users can watch it for free, the other service's end users will have to pay.
I have not pirated a game in more than a decade, I bought a bunch on sale over Christmas though I likely won’t have the time (or hardware, HL:Alyx was cheap) to play them any time soon. Though it’s a bit of a minor chore I regularly purchase music I find via streaming (I like albums, offline use, and knowing it won’t go away). I’ve never felt the need to pirate a book.
I don’t pirate tv/movies much, mostly because I don’t watch them much due to all the other entertainment available. I did pirate Taskmaster, until they started publishing the episodes on YT.
Absolutely this. I pirate Apple TV+ stuff right now. I subscribe to like three services. This is my maximum.
I could maybe stretch to four but then the market needs to meet me there and do two things: 1. Make an effort in consolidating media rights and services to these four and 2. Work to lower the price to roughly $10 per service for at least high quality 1080p with no ads in high quality apps across the board. Bonus: Also work to standardize a media protocol so that you can see what you have access to in a common media library regardless what you use, or even in third party apps, as well as stream with whatever as long as you're a subscriber to the respective services.
Do all these things and I actually think they have a good chance against piracy. It's all about what they're willing to do. They can absolutely make some good money on movies and TV shows in a piracy world. I'm convinced of this. Piracy is not the problem; piracy is just the other weight of the scale showing just how anti-consumerist they can become.
Back to legal threats and weaponizing the FBI
Yeah...
When companies fail to uphold their side of the bargain, I don't feel a need to uphold mine.
It's a content problem.
I cancelled my subscriptions when I noticed that I'm not using them anymore. Years ago, I remember me and my friends were eagerly awaiting every new episode of Agents of Shield or The Expanse. But when I was browsing the IMDB top movies and top TV series recently, I just didn't find anything I wanted to watch (and that hadn't been in cinema half a year ago, thus old). The result is that recently, me and my friends all watched a lot less movies and instead played more video games.
TLDR: Netflix's low-effort content is losing against video games.
if I look around to people who did pirate videos or games in the past it always was because of one of following reasons:
- unavailability of the product in the right form in the market they live in (e.g. no OV and terrible translation, no good quality video/audio, not available at all, etc.)
- moon prices (e.g. Anime DVDs at least 10+ years ago where I lived), or being thigh on money (e.g. as a 16 year old)
- it being easier to pirate then to buy ...
- buying the product (in a reasonable convenient way) forces other unwanted things onto you, like automatic self-extending subscriptions or tracking to a point where I can't understand anymore how it's not classified as espionage
All of this except being tight on money hint to a mismatch between products provided and what consumers want/find acceptable. If the movie industry I think it would auto self correct, but it isn't and you could say piracy (on larger scale) is natural marked effect caused by the absence of a proper free market.
But what is I think most important to realize is that outside of the situation of piracy being more convenient then buying in all other cases the actual losses piracy creates is quite limited to a point where it's quite questionable how reasonable the drawbacks users have to suffer because of piracy prevention mechanism/laws are.
Natural if piracy would be fully unconstrained it likely would then cause huge monetary losses. A free market is still a marked so a product produced with some investment (e.g. creating the movie) still should be sold for some value.
They spent their hard earned money to make shows you rip off for free. I pirate shit too. But I'm not going to say they they took a piss. And deserver the repercussions. That's backwards and illogical and lying to yourself.
We are the ones pissing and shitting on their faces. We are the wrong doers here.
I can understand why Netflix et al want to block Apple from their data, but back in the beginning you could just say “Play the latest episode of House of Cards” on Apple TV and it just worked. At the end of day user experience is just degraded… and for what?
I like watching movies/series from 2000-2010s. Trying to access that content through streaming is like a whack-a-mole game. Some content is available to some streaming services, in some countries, for a small amount of time. Give me a break.
Piracy all the way.
I no longer have to track or care about what service a show is on. It's bliss.
Yes, they should look at Spotify, where all the labels are available under one service.
Most of the time piracy isn't even free. You got a server running for downloads which is an investment and uses power (24-7 sometimes), hard disks for storage aren't free. Indexers and newsgroups are paid (good ones at least). Comparing that to a monthly subscription of what used to be €10,- to Netflix and which had it all, makes it nonsense to pirate.
It's even stupider than that. Streaming does not always use standard interfaces. It doesn't always work on every device. (See Roku, Apple TV, Android TV boxes, Smart TVs themselves, etc). There's always some jackass service that decides "we're not partners so I'm not supporting your devices" - leaving customers out of the loop since the people paying the monthly fee don't actually matter to them lol.
There's all the petty "ecosystem" bullshit. Stuff like how Apple used to only let siri control Apple Music instead of spotify or tidal or whatever.
And platform updates. And then the software stops supporting your device because it was made more than 3 years ago or whatever. Or they blocked taking screenshots (hello Crunchyroll, fuck you for making it harder to share random meme moments with my discord buddies!).
yep, as someone who stopped pirating when netflix started streaming, I'm back to pirating and I won't apologize for it.
there are shows for which I cannot even purchase them, which I would be willing to do. You want to lock me into a subscription? jokes on you.
Netflix doesn't allow 1080p streaming to Linux users. The DRM also doesn't allow you to take any screen captures while Netflix is visible. You can't download any content and even on Windows you'd have to watch it within 48 hours.
All these antipiracy measures only invite us to pirate.
Pirating allows us to choose a media player of our children, possibly with 4K upscaling, better compression standards and the ability to download our content.
Steam's Gabe Newell said it best: Piracy is an issue of service, not price. I went from full pirate (we didn't even pay for cable, it 'just worked' -- the beauty of analog) to nearly full streamer. The stuff I kept pirating wasn't available on stream. Then Disney started to take off their stuff from Netflix. HBO suddenly quit in The Netherlands, or I had to combine it with KPN or was it Ziggo (what if you can't have DSL or cable? And, what if you got better; fiber?). I'm still paying for like 6 services, but not forever. Because my children do not know or remember on which service they saw something. Heck, often they can't even remember the name. Or they know the name in our own language and the search doesn't work. And as cherry on top, Dutch public broadcasting organisation (NPO) updated their app which was a step back as it removed a lot of features, such as children profiles, and the navigation of the new UI is atrocious. Series paid for with public money suddenly got removed. I am done with this shit. I am. What I will do is download all my children's favorite series, and put them in Jellyfin. Then every month we pick a different service, and they can watch that, too. I will tell them it is beyond my control (a white lie).
Also the quality of the streams is laughable. Only Apple bring something which deserves the mention 4k (and Apple are part of the problem).
And a piracy setup is very easy. I will get fiber soon. I have a VPN with a container to run BitTorrent on. I have Usenet servers. I have a couple of lifetime ???znab accounts. All cheap.
I wrote this post angrily in less than 10 min, I probably forgot to mention other reasons on top of this all. Yeah, the fuzzy feelings I got for not pirating. I admit, I will miss those.
And they're going from binge-watching ad-free episode of an entire series, to releasing one episode a week... with adverts.
Yeah, no thanks. I'll just VPN+torrent the ad-free version and watch that, thanks. On any device of my choosing as well.
And why should I pay £8.99 or whatever to one streaming service, for one programme, that was previously "free to air" for the other series? Paramount taking back Star Trek from Netflix for example.
I'm not sure how many multi-million dollar, unseen cancelled-after-one-season dramas with 50,000 viewers these studios need to create before they realise 'we need viewers to 'build a franchise' and make a profit'.
Just imagine if these series or dramas were only seen by a few thousand people at most: Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Band of Brothers, Shogun, Dallas, Cheers and so on. Even How I Met Your Mother and Big Bang Theory were pretty much pre-streaming when they started, but syndicated to world-wide terrestrial channels.
Also it's not even better. I have a netflix and disney+ account, and sometimes still watch their series on pirate streaming sites because it's less of a hassle. E.g. I can't watch HD disney+ in firefox. And netflix sometimes just brings stubborn error messages that I can't fix by reloading...
Maybe it's me but consider the content on these streaming platforms which seem to me as a mix of syndicated shows and romantic action films. Where exactly people find value in tv tropes and expensive camera work is something only the producers in Hollywood can answer, pirating is a means to an end and by that I mean, most of it is so shit that it's not worth the price on the label to do the reasonable thing and pay for it.