3 ms·
1,2,5 strike me as by far the most impactful. Legal alternatives are much more prevalent and convenient than ever before. By the same token, people used to stre
by IntronExon 9y ago
1,2,5 strike me as by far the most impactful. Legal alternatives are much more prevalent and convenient than ever before. By the same token, people used to streaming from YouTube or Netflix look for the same experience in their piracy, and pirate streams offer that. For people who want a collection of files to pore over, a VPN is a cheap and reasonable service most in that demo will be familiar with.
Finally, a lot of piracy around the world took the form of downloading files and burning them onto discs form physical distro, which has also changed for the most part.
- losteric 9y agoI think it's important to separate: * People who just want to watch "something", often while multitasking * People who like a show / movie, and want to own it for future re-watching "Watch something" has vastly improved. There are huge collections of content available online, TV/movies from all eras, Youtube's "amateur" video content, Twitch streams, and of course social media as a passive entertaining time-sink. But the experience for fans, in my opinion, hasn't improved much. The choices are: buy disks, or pay for multiple subscriptions to content owners (eg HBO Go for Game of Thrones). Otherwise you depend on a subscription that may drop content in the future, or a purchased stream (eg Amazon instant video) with variable performance and online-only availability. I'd argue we regressed - disks and disk players are more expensive, while streams are added costs if you want to buy the disk. It's also getting harder to rip disks for personal archival. I still regularly pirate movies, even after purchasing the movie - stealing is sadly the easiest way to get a non-DRM digital copy.