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After a marked decrease, piracy appears to be on the rise again [1]. The timing coincides with the peak content availability of Netflix, and then the fragmentat

After a marked decrease, piracy appears to be on the rise again [1]. The timing coincides with the peak content availability of Netflix, and then the fragmentation as every studio decided they needed to build their own streaming service. It's kind of frustrating to see how close things came to actually getting to the ideal (imho, anyway): any show, streamed on demand, on any device, for a reasonable fee. Instead, the studios are going to try to compete on content - which is not really competition. I don't care what studio makes funny_show (either when deciding what to subscribe to, or when trying to figure out what app to launch to watch it), I just want to watch it. I don't want to watch similar_but_not_as_good_knock_off on another service. What's crazy is the seemingly unstoppable train wreck the industry is currently involved in. It's bad enough to not only see what the music industry was forced into (which is basically ideal for consumers, at least without dismantling the entire way music is produced), but the movie industry already went through this a half century ago, when theaters used to be owned by the studios and only show their own exclusive movies [2]. [1] https://www.maketecheasier.com/internet-piracy-is-on-the-rise/ https://www.maketecheasier.com/internet-piracy-is-on-the-ris... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_P....

cageface 7y ago
One big difference between the film and music industries is that film content is much much more expensive to produce. So I don't think we're going to see a comprehensive $10/month service any time soon. Even as cheap as music is to produce now it doesn't seem possible to make a profit with prices that low.
- rorykoehler 7y ago
  There is only so much content one can watch so it makes the point a bit moot. This is about greed. This is about wanting to squeeze every last penny. There is no reason for regional or even non-standard inter-company licensing apart from trying to squeeze the market dry.
- mojuba 7y ago
  It is true that films are more expensive to produce, however: (a) there are fewer films produced every year than music albums, and therefore the revenue can be shared among fewer producers, (b) most expensive films are released to theatres first and many reach break-even during this period, and (c) a comprehensive film streaming service can easily be more expensive than a music one, say $20/mo or more.
  - Mindwipe 7y ago
    > (a) there are fewer films produced every year than music albums, and therefore the revenue can be shared among fewer producers, But there are probably more films and television shows produced than music albums. Not sure why you've focused on films here, because films aren't the market.
    - mojuba 7y ago
      There's definitely more music produced in the world than films. This is due to the fact that music is so much more accessible, cheaper and easier to produce. Just look at the electronic music genre: today it takes one musician, a computer and a few days to weeks to make a professional sounding track. There are of course slightly more expensive genres like indie rock, ethno, then there's classical that require a whole band of musicians and a studio. Still nowhere near what a typical full-feature film production process involves.
      - rorykoehler 7y ago
        Some talented musicians I know can make a track in a morning. That includes all the polish.
        mojuba 7y ago
        I know, but it really depends on the style. I'd say low-effort art is usually less interesting and not so unique.
kyriakos 7y ago
Piracy is also fueled by availability. As long as licensing agreements prohibit a uniform release schedule for movies and TV series Worldwide people will try to pirate. If I am not living in the US and want to watch a hulu series I have zero choice but to pirate it or use a shady vpn.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  Without some very disingenuous mental gymnastics it can't possible count as piracy if you were never able to purchase the media in the first place.
  - gambiting 7y ago
    What would you call it then? Otherwise it's just entitlement to something because you can't buy it - "oh look, this movie is not available to purchase in my country, I guess I'm getting it for free!". It's not anyone's god-given right to be able to get every media ever released - if it's not available in your market then either import it, or....don't get it?
    - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
      You’re over thinking it. No loss has occur. We’re willing to pay.
    - chii 7y ago
      > It's not anyone's god-given right to be able to get every media ever released participating in culture is required by many, esp. the young. If they can't easily get it via a legitimate means, piracy is the default. Not watching it is not an option.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
        I strongly support this perspective. If you create a culturally relevant work then prohibit people from legally participating, you probably deserve disparagement and the forfeiture of your rights.
agildehaus 7y ago
A similar thing is happening in PC gaming. Tons of new stores making exclusivity deals to try to take from Steam which I don't think has ever had an exclusive title. It's quickly ruining PC gaming for me. Thanks DRM.
- ericd 7y ago
  Yeah, I just no longer play EA games, even when I receive free keys, because it would require that I download Origin. And it seems like Ubi is starting to try to do the same thing.
  - logfromblammo 7y ago
    Same here. I can play South Park: Stick of Truth on Steam, but to play South Park: Fractured But Whole, it has to be on Uplay. I wasn't going to buy it because of that, but then I got it as a gift anyway. I could handle Steam and GOG Galaxy as game aggregation programs, and sometimes check out Humble for bargain bin stuff, but after being forced to install Uplay to access the content, it would appear that three stores is my limit. Uplay, Origin, et al, with their platform-exclusive titles, can all suck it. If I need a library to manage my games libraries, I might as well put all the games in the top-level library in the first place. They are removing themselves from even the possibility that I might think about buying. I just don't shop there. If I can't find something that interests me on Steam, GOG, or Humble, I stop looking. And I also didn't really appreciate the constant upsell for SP:FBW DRM, and other Ubisoft titles, while I was still playing. They pulled out from Steam to not pay the "Steam tax", but they didn't lower their prices to compensate; they just made the "Steam tax" into the "Ubi tax". If consumers still have to pay it no matter where they go, they don't really have any incentive to shop at a different store.
- subway 7y ago
  > Steam which I don't think has ever had an exclusive title Aren't all of Valve's titles exclusive to Steam? I remember being annoyed that I had to install steam for some version of Counter Strike in the early 00s, and didn't think the situation had changed.
gempir 7y ago
Interesting that you mention music. I just imagined how bad music would be if every label would have their own platform. Imagine you wanna listen to Artist X and have to subscribe to Warner Brothers, now you wanna listen to Artist Y and now you subscribe to Indie Label Z. I'm interested to see what brings in the most money for studios, getting little money from their own platform (and "suffering" the piracy) or getting paid by netflix.
- KozmoNau7 7y ago
  Even worse would be that very few artists stay on the same label throughout their career. Take Motörhead for instance. I think they had like 10 or 12 labels over their 40 year career.
- hef19898 7y ago
  Seems like the movie and TV industry learned a lesson or two from the music industry. I just have the feeling they drew the wrong conclusions from them.
KozmoNau7 7y ago
The current situation in the music industry is not "ideal for consumers". While Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal et. al. generally all do have the majority of music available, there is still a huge mess of license behind the scenes. Albums are constantly made unavailable for weeks or even months due to licensing issues. Sometimes a badly done remaster is the only version available, sometimes important albums in an artist's discography are completely absent. And don't get me started on the sorry state of their curation and tagging. The release date shown for any album is basically useless. Is it the original release date? A re-release? Or just the date the record company supplied it to the streaming service? It completely messes up discographies.
- josteink 7y ago
  > The current situation in the music industry is not "ideal for consumers". But it’s much better than it used to be, and it’s slowly approaching a healthy market. I can stream most music from most streaming services. I can buy DRM-free albums or songs for almost all artists in a plethora of online stores. “Exclusive releases” does not seem to exist. Compared to the current digital video market, this is pretty much nirvana.
  - KozmoNau7 7y ago
    We can agree that it's better than the old days of only having physical releases, but ideally all music should be available DRM-free in any format you choose, for you to download and keep. Piracy forced the record companies to finally get in on streaming and downloads. Now it's time for the dinosaurs to finally die, the only reason they still exist is because of nonsense copyright laws, where they hold the rights in perpetuity to the "classics".
shmerl 7y ago
It never got to the ideal - DRM-free video stores. They never learn.
- xur17 7y ago
  Exactly. The content is going to get pirated within hours of release, so I'm not sure why they even bother. Instead they encumber the content with drm locking me I to their platform that hopefully stays around. I actively avoid anything but subscription or short term rental options for exactly this reason.
  - oblio 7y ago
    Movies don't seem to be pirated quickly. They seem to pop up after the DVD release is out, at which point the movie's "old news" anyway.
    - rhino369 7y ago
      Movie theaters are the the most effective form of DRM.
      - shmerl 7y ago
        Far from it, since it's filmed with portable cameras and pirated anyway. No amount of scare tactics is stopping that. They should be selling it right away digitally in high quality and DRM-free.
      - oblio 7y ago
        I should clarify: high quality copies appear only after the DVDs are release. Low quality ones appear almost instantly. The actual DRM is, I think, studios closing loopholes and probably threatening anyone who leaks high quality copies with jail time.
tomc1985 7y ago
Hooray for free-market capitalism! On another note, folks: buy your media. Physically own it. Streaming is for suckers.
- ghaff 7y ago
  While I tend to agree about owning, it's easy to say coming from a place where I entered the streaming media age with a large library of ripped/bought digitally/otherwise downloaded music that covered a lot of the music I liked listening to on a day to day basis. It's harder for me to make the case that someone growing up today should spend on accumulating a large digital library. Of course, it's a lot easier for people to make a copy of a digital library than it was to tape albums in the old days. But if everyone is pretty much streaming, that option largely goes away.
  - tomc1985 7y ago
    Maybe, but niche groups will keep physical accumulation alive. There are a lot of folks who like the feel of a hard copy
axaxs 7y ago
Exactly this. As access fades, or price becomes untenable, piracy swoops in to correct the market. Unfortunate that we have to go through these tests, but hopefully it comes out better on the other side.
Mindwipe 7y ago
> After a marked decrease, piracy appears to be on the rise again [1]. Not really. It fits some people's narrative for that to be the case, but the evidence it's actually happening is very sketchy. Sandvine's report shows no real increase in the US - the increase was primarily internationally. And Netflix never had this sort of "peak content availability" overseas, and there isn't a marked increase in content fragmentation this year either. The likely explanation is simply that bittorrent's fall was primarily because pirates were using Kodi plug-ins instead, and the explosive rise there has been chopped off by enforcement actions by the studios and governments. So some of those people have switched back to bittorrent. But that doesn't show piracy overall as increasing.
- Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
  I am overseas (in Spain) and we definitely felt this "peak content availability" thing, maybe not as marked as in the US but it was there. A few years ago, most of the content one would want to watch was on Netflix. There was no HBO, some prominent HBO series like Game of Thrones were on standard TV. So most people just subscribed to Netflix, and watched GoT on regular TV with ads or pirated it if they wanted to watch it earlier or get rid of the ads. Now with content split between Netflix, HBO and Amazon, and threats of other players like Disney incoming, my anecdotal observation is that plenty of people is going back to piracy. Conversations like this one (about the fragmentation of the market and exclusives incentivizing piracy) are common here too. At my home, we don't pirate but what we do is switching subscriptions from one service to the other every few months, which is unnecessarily annoying.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    >At my home, we don't pirate but what we do is switching subscriptions from one service to the other every few months, which is unnecessarily annoying. Which is probably closer to the norm. I rarely use torrents, not out of any great moral imperative, but because it's a pain, involves sketchy web sites, etc. However, the fragmentation of video streaming is also annoying even though it's what lots of people supposedly wanted when they complained about the cable bundle. And, yes, the response will mostly be make do with a few services and either do without or buy a la carte for the rest or actively manage your current subscriptions. (Of course, a typical cable bill will pay for a lot of different services for cord cutters.)
Aeolun 7y ago
For a few years, paying for everything was just the easiest way to watch. Slowly this has morphed now, with all shows being splintered across services, regions, and devices. Somehow, using a torrent is once again the easiest way to watch a show.
- res0nat0r 7y ago
  I think what people mean here is "cheapest". This was the inevitable outcome of trying to move to a pick and choose your channel model. Instead of 1000 channels for $80/month you get 10. Folks are moving back to piracy again just because they don't want to pay the prices it costs to subscribe to 6 services @ $8-15/month is all.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    No. The problem isn’t $60/month. The problem is having to subscribe to 6 services. Half of which are either US or Europe exclusive. Now I need a VPN... Torrent it is. Really, I have the money, but I want to watch my movie now without jumping through any hoops.
    - res0nat0r 7y ago
      There are always "hoops" that folks use as an excuse for piracy.
- throwaway55554 7y ago
  Torrent, nzb, "intitle:index.of mkv <title>" Plenty of ways that are easier.
maccard 7y ago
> the fragmentation as every studio decided they needed to build their own streaming service. Don't forget to mention how awful many of them are in terms of quality, usability and choice. 4OD here in the UK leads with multiple minutes of HD ads, and when it switched to the actual content, the player regularly crashes, forcing you to reload and watch the ads. They also only release content for 30-ish days after airing, and then it disappears until the content appears on DVD. Now TV (the only afaik supported way to access Game of Thrones in the UK other than subscribing for 18 months) caps their streams at 720p and doesn't support an Android TV app. There's also the hell of discovering where and when things are available. I don't know where watch Brooklyn 99 in the UK and in willing to pay for it - as I understand it it's available on Netflix US but the latest episodes aren't on Netflix UK. It's a complete mess.
- Mindwipe 7y ago
  The latest series of Brooklyn 99 is aired on FTA television (E4) and is on All4 (formally 4OD). You don't appear to have looked very hard.
  - maccard 7y ago
    No, E4 aired episode 5 last week, which aired almost 3 months ago in the US (and the fact that both of us could be confused about that is another problem) There's also the question of discovering where I go to find it; Netflix advertises Brooklyn but doesn't show the latest season. Amazon is the first legitimays option that appears (after gomoviestube and i0123movies) - turns out that it's amazonUS not Uk, followed by NBC. If you search for Brooklyn 99Season 6 UK get a bunch of SEO crap talking about air dates, most of which mention Netflix. I can make the same argument for basically every show.
kristianc 7y ago
There seems to be an assumption that everyone is going to want to subscribe to everything they had before, but that's not the case. Netflix / Hulu for $15.99 is going to cover most use cases and act as a general purpose aggregator. Disney+ is primarily a way of getting parents / kids more invested in the Disney universe, but won't be for everyone. The new Apple service may appeal to some people, but definitely bold to suggest that it's in any way going to be a strong Netflix competitor. YouTube Premium - great if you watch a lot of YouTube, and potentially a music use case there too. ESPN etc - probably better served by traditional cable. MLB is great value if you're a baseball but living out of market. The assumption behind cord cutting wasn't that people would replace it with a OTA package that replaced like for like what they had before, it's that they would subscribe to a few services rather than subscribe to an expensive cable service and use 2% of it.
- MivLives 7y ago
  I think the majority of people who have Youtube Premium have it because it comes with Google play music. My dad is one of those original cordcutters. His main concern is sports which he either pays for or borrows someone else's Comcast login. He has Amazon prime but has never figured out Amazon Prime video. Beyond that Netflix and OTA. His question for most people would be, "How much TV do you really need to watch?"
  - Consultant32452 7y ago
    I think the issue isn't so much about quantity of television, but if being able to participate in the social zeitgeist that motivates people. Almost everyone has social groups at work or elsewhere that discuss sports, GoT, whatever reality TV show. By you still can't purchase just the 3-4 things everyone is talking about right now, so you wind up with Netflix, Hulu, GoT, maybe CBS all access, etc.
TheCondor 7y ago
Music may have very well dismantled itself for the future though; the actual IP of your music has become incredibly low in value. Tours and other forms of merch are the revenue generators. There used to be song writers that could sell songs to pop artists to perform and record; that generates much less now. I think the middle ground of interesting bands that aren’t superstars or one hit wonders will sort of dry up. The TV and movie industry have decided that their IP is more valuable than it was in the past. The technology has changed such that they can distribute it on their own and don’t need carriers. It kind of looks like we might be heading for a pay per play model, ultimately. It will be very interesting with Disney+, it will be brave if they really do everything at $7 a month, I suspect that they will want premium tiers though, they have been so protective of their “vault” and now they have Starwars, the marvel universe, Pixar, the simpsons, etc...
SilasX 7y ago
>I don't care what studio makes funny_show (either when deciding what to subscribe to, or when trying to figure out what app to launch to watch it), I just want to watch it. There's a joke that this is exactly what cable TV was. Back then: "This is ridiculous! I'm paying for all these channels when I only watch two or three of them. I should be able to pay for just the ones I use." Now: "This is ridiculous! Every time I find something I want to watch, I have to subscribe to a new service!"
- rcxdude 7y ago
  The problem being you still can't just subscribe to one show (or just buy it outright). You're still buying bundled deals, they've just fragmented so it's even worse.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    >The problem being you still can't just subscribe to one show (or just buy it outright). You can in some cases though the pricing tends to be relatively high compared to streaming unless you really only want to watch a show or two.
  - rhino369 7y ago
    People seem to hate bundles. And they love a huge catalog for one price like Netflix used to have. I think most people would hate paying per show. And I don’t think the pricing per show would be much of a discount. I’d imagine the median number of shows HBO viewer actively watches is 1-3. And the cost of giving you access to shows you don’t Watch is actually less than nothing since it would take resources to lock you out of it.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      People do pay for a la carte content. With a few exceptions, it's how people buy books. And a lot of films are paid for a la carte in some form or other. But the expectation is certainly shifting towards subscription streaming services and there's probably a difference between renting a new film release and paying to watch some random TV show to relax after work.
sureaboutthis 7y ago
Decades ago, when cable TV first came out from Warner(?) in my area, we were promised the vision of monthly payments to view top movies without commercials. That lasted a couple of years, I guess, and then we had to put up with commercials before the movie to howls of complaints. Then commercials afterwards. Then they upped the fees. Now we've come full circle. Online services made the same promises, then introduced commercials, now up their fees without promising uninterrupted viewing.
- rhino369 7y ago
  Cable never promised that unless you subscribed to HBO/Showtime, etc, which were always expensive. Most of the original cable channels always had commercials.
  - sureaboutthis 7y ago
    Neither HBO nor Showtime existed at the time. And NONE of the original cable channels had commercials because there was only one channel, iirc, and all of the shows came via Warner. It's obvious you are too young to know about these things at the beginning. I'm talking early 1980s when cable was making its big move across the country.

cageface 7y ago

One big difference between the film and music industries is that film content is much much more expensive to produce. So I don't think we're going to see a comprehensive $10/month service any time soon. Even as cheap as music is to produce now it doesn't seem possible to make a profit with prices that low.

rorykoehler 7y ago
There is only so much content one can watch so it makes the point a bit moot. This is about greed. This is about wanting to squeeze every last penny. There is no reason for regional or even non-standard inter-company licensing apart from trying to squeeze the market dry.
mojuba 7y ago
It is true that films are more expensive to produce, however: (a) there are fewer films produced every year than music albums, and therefore the revenue can be shared among fewer producers, (b) most expensive films are released to theatres first and many reach break-even during this period, and (c) a comprehensive film streaming service can easily be more expensive than a music one, say $20/mo or more.
- Mindwipe 7y ago
  > (a) there are fewer films produced every year than music albums, and therefore the revenue can be shared among fewer producers, But there are probably more films and television shows produced than music albums. Not sure why you've focused on films here, because films aren't the market.
  - mojuba 7y ago
    There's definitely more music produced in the world than films. This is due to the fact that music is so much more accessible, cheaper and easier to produce. Just look at the electronic music genre: today it takes one musician, a computer and a few days to weeks to make a professional sounding track. There are of course slightly more expensive genres like indie rock, ethno, then there's classical that require a whole band of musicians and a studio. Still nowhere near what a typical full-feature film production process involves.
    - rorykoehler 7y ago
      Some talented musicians I know can make a track in a morning. That includes all the polish.
      - mojuba 7y ago
        I know, but it really depends on the style. I'd say low-effort art is usually less interesting and not so unique.

kyriakos 7y ago

Piracy is also fueled by availability. As long as licensing agreements prohibit a uniform release schedule for movies and TV series Worldwide people will try to pirate. If I am not living in the US and want to watch a hulu series I have zero choice but to pirate it or use a shady vpn.

TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
Without some very disingenuous mental gymnastics it can't possible count as piracy if you were never able to purchase the media in the first place.
- gambiting 7y ago
  What would you call it then? Otherwise it's just entitlement to something because you can't buy it - "oh look, this movie is not available to purchase in my country, I guess I'm getting it for free!". It's not anyone's god-given right to be able to get every media ever released - if it's not available in your market then either import it, or....don't get it?
  - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
    You’re over thinking it. No loss has occur. We’re willing to pay.
  - chii 7y ago
    > It's not anyone's god-given right to be able to get every media ever released participating in culture is required by many, esp. the young. If they can't easily get it via a legitimate means, piracy is the default. Not watching it is not an option.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
      I strongly support this perspective. If you create a culturally relevant work then prohibit people from legally participating, you probably deserve disparagement and the forfeiture of your rights.

agildehaus 7y ago

A similar thing is happening in PC gaming. Tons of new stores making exclusivity deals to try to take from Steam which I don't think has ever had an exclusive title. It's quickly ruining PC gaming for me. Thanks DRM.

ericd 7y ago
Yeah, I just no longer play EA games, even when I receive free keys, because it would require that I download Origin. And it seems like Ubi is starting to try to do the same thing.
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  Same here. I can play South Park: Stick of Truth on Steam, but to play South Park: Fractured But Whole, it has to be on Uplay. I wasn't going to buy it because of that, but then I got it as a gift anyway. I could handle Steam and GOG Galaxy as game aggregation programs, and sometimes check out Humble for bargain bin stuff, but after being forced to install Uplay to access the content, it would appear that three stores is my limit. Uplay, Origin, et al, with their platform-exclusive titles, can all suck it. If I need a library to manage my games libraries, I might as well put all the games in the top-level library in the first place. They are removing themselves from even the possibility that I might think about buying. I just don't shop there. If I can't find something that interests me on Steam, GOG, or Humble, I stop looking. And I also didn't really appreciate the constant upsell for SP:FBW DRM, and other Ubisoft titles, while I was still playing. They pulled out from Steam to not pay the "Steam tax", but they didn't lower their prices to compensate; they just made the "Steam tax" into the "Ubi tax". If consumers still have to pay it no matter where they go, they don't really have any incentive to shop at a different store.
subway 7y ago
> Steam which I don't think has ever had an exclusive title Aren't all of Valve's titles exclusive to Steam? I remember being annoyed that I had to install steam for some version of Counter Strike in the early 00s, and didn't think the situation had changed.

gempir 7y ago

Interesting that you mention music. I just imagined how bad music would be if every label would have their own platform. Imagine you wanna listen to Artist X and have to subscribe to Warner Brothers, now you wanna listen to Artist Y and now you subscribe to Indie Label Z. I'm interested to see what brings in the most money for studios, getting little money from their own platform (and "suffering" the piracy) or getting paid by netflix.

KozmoNau7 7y ago
Even worse would be that very few artists stay on the same label throughout their career. Take Motörhead for instance. I think they had like 10 or 12 labels over their 40 year career.
hef19898 7y ago
Seems like the movie and TV industry learned a lesson or two from the music industry. I just have the feeling they drew the wrong conclusions from them.

KozmoNau7 7y ago

The current situation in the music industry is not "ideal for consumers". While Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal et. al. generally all do have the majority of music available, there is still a huge mess of license behind the scenes. Albums are constantly made unavailable for weeks or even months due to licensing issues. Sometimes a badly done remaster is the only version available, sometimes important albums in an artist's discography are completely absent. And don't get me started on the sorry state of their curation and tagging. The release date shown for any album is basically useless. Is it the original release date? A re-release? Or just the date the record company supplied it to the streaming service? It completely messes up discographies.

josteink 7y ago
> The current situation in the music industry is not "ideal for consumers". But it’s much better than it used to be, and it’s slowly approaching a healthy market. I can stream most music from most streaming services. I can buy DRM-free albums or songs for almost all artists in a plethora of online stores. “Exclusive releases” does not seem to exist. Compared to the current digital video market, this is pretty much nirvana.
- KozmoNau7 7y ago
  We can agree that it's better than the old days of only having physical releases, but ideally all music should be available DRM-free in any format you choose, for you to download and keep. Piracy forced the record companies to finally get in on streaming and downloads. Now it's time for the dinosaurs to finally die, the only reason they still exist is because of nonsense copyright laws, where they hold the rights in perpetuity to the "classics".

shmerl 7y ago

It never got to the ideal - DRM-free video stores. They never learn.

xur17 7y ago
Exactly. The content is going to get pirated within hours of release, so I'm not sure why they even bother. Instead they encumber the content with drm locking me I to their platform that hopefully stays around. I actively avoid anything but subscription or short term rental options for exactly this reason.
- oblio 7y ago
  Movies don't seem to be pirated quickly. They seem to pop up after the DVD release is out, at which point the movie's "old news" anyway.
  - rhino369 7y ago
    Movie theaters are the the most effective form of DRM.
    - shmerl 7y ago
      Far from it, since it's filmed with portable cameras and pirated anyway. No amount of scare tactics is stopping that. They should be selling it right away digitally in high quality and DRM-free.
    - oblio 7y ago
      I should clarify: high quality copies appear only after the DVDs are release. Low quality ones appear almost instantly. The actual DRM is, I think, studios closing loopholes and probably threatening anyone who leaks high quality copies with jail time.

tomc1985 7y ago

Hooray for free-market capitalism! On another note, folks: buy your media. Physically own it. Streaming is for suckers.

ghaff 7y ago
While I tend to agree about owning, it's easy to say coming from a place where I entered the streaming media age with a large library of ripped/bought digitally/otherwise downloaded music that covered a lot of the music I liked listening to on a day to day basis. It's harder for me to make the case that someone growing up today should spend on accumulating a large digital library. Of course, it's a lot easier for people to make a copy of a digital library than it was to tape albums in the old days. But if everyone is pretty much streaming, that option largely goes away.
- tomc1985 7y ago
  Maybe, but niche groups will keep physical accumulation alive. There are a lot of folks who like the feel of a hard copy

axaxs 7y ago

Exactly this. As access fades, or price becomes untenable, piracy swoops in to correct the market. Unfortunate that we have to go through these tests, but hopefully it comes out better on the other side.

Mindwipe 7y ago

> After a marked decrease, piracy appears to be on the rise again [1]. Not really. It fits some people's narrative for that to be the case, but the evidence it's actually happening is very sketchy. Sandvine's report shows no real increase in the US - the increase was primarily internationally. And Netflix never had this sort of "peak content availability" overseas, and there isn't a marked increase in content fragmentation this year either. The likely explanation is simply that bittorrent's fall was primarily because pirates were using Kodi plug-ins instead, and the explosive rise there has been chopped off by enforcement actions by the studios and governments. So some of those people have switched back to bittorrent. But that doesn't show piracy overall as increasing.

Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
I am overseas (in Spain) and we definitely felt this "peak content availability" thing, maybe not as marked as in the US but it was there. A few years ago, most of the content one would want to watch was on Netflix. There was no HBO, some prominent HBO series like Game of Thrones were on standard TV. So most people just subscribed to Netflix, and watched GoT on regular TV with ads or pirated it if they wanted to watch it earlier or get rid of the ads. Now with content split between Netflix, HBO and Amazon, and threats of other players like Disney incoming, my anecdotal observation is that plenty of people is going back to piracy. Conversations like this one (about the fragmentation of the market and exclusives incentivizing piracy) are common here too. At my home, we don't pirate but what we do is switching subscriptions from one service to the other every few months, which is unnecessarily annoying.
- ghaff 7y ago
  >At my home, we don't pirate but what we do is switching subscriptions from one service to the other every few months, which is unnecessarily annoying. Which is probably closer to the norm. I rarely use torrents, not out of any great moral imperative, but because it's a pain, involves sketchy web sites, etc. However, the fragmentation of video streaming is also annoying even though it's what lots of people supposedly wanted when they complained about the cable bundle. And, yes, the response will mostly be make do with a few services and either do without or buy a la carte for the rest or actively manage your current subscriptions. (Of course, a typical cable bill will pay for a lot of different services for cord cutters.)

Aeolun 7y ago

For a few years, paying for everything was just the easiest way to watch. Slowly this has morphed now, with all shows being splintered across services, regions, and devices. Somehow, using a torrent is once again the easiest way to watch a show.

res0nat0r 7y ago
I think what people mean here is "cheapest". This was the inevitable outcome of trying to move to a pick and choose your channel model. Instead of 1000 channels for $80/month you get 10. Folks are moving back to piracy again just because they don't want to pay the prices it costs to subscribe to 6 services @ $8-15/month is all.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  No. The problem isn’t $60/month. The problem is having to subscribe to 6 services. Half of which are either US or Europe exclusive. Now I need a VPN... Torrent it is. Really, I have the money, but I want to watch my movie now without jumping through any hoops.
  - res0nat0r 7y ago
    There are always "hoops" that folks use as an excuse for piracy.
throwaway55554 7y ago
Torrent, nzb, "intitle:index.of mkv <title>" Plenty of ways that are easier.

maccard 7y ago

> the fragmentation as every studio decided they needed to build their own streaming service. Don't forget to mention how awful many of them are in terms of quality, usability and choice. 4OD here in the UK leads with multiple minutes of HD ads, and when it switched to the actual content, the player regularly crashes, forcing you to reload and watch the ads. They also only release content for 30-ish days after airing, and then it disappears until the content appears on DVD. Now TV (the only afaik supported way to access Game of Thrones in the UK other than subscribing for 18 months) caps their streams at 720p and doesn't support an Android TV app. There's also the hell of discovering where and when things are available. I don't know where watch Brooklyn 99 in the UK and in willing to pay for it - as I understand it it's available on Netflix US but the latest episodes aren't on Netflix UK. It's a complete mess.

Mindwipe 7y ago
The latest series of Brooklyn 99 is aired on FTA television (E4) and is on All4 (formally 4OD). You don't appear to have looked very hard.
- maccard 7y ago
  No, E4 aired episode 5 last week, which aired almost 3 months ago in the US (and the fact that both of us could be confused about that is another problem) There's also the question of discovering where I go to find it; Netflix advertises Brooklyn but doesn't show the latest season. Amazon is the first legitimays option that appears (after gomoviestube and i0123movies) - turns out that it's amazonUS not Uk, followed by NBC. If you search for Brooklyn 99Season 6 UK get a bunch of SEO crap talking about air dates, most of which mention Netflix. I can make the same argument for basically every show.

kristianc 7y ago

There seems to be an assumption that everyone is going to want to subscribe to everything they had before, but that's not the case. Netflix / Hulu for $15.99 is going to cover most use cases and act as a general purpose aggregator. Disney+ is primarily a way of getting parents / kids more invested in the Disney universe, but won't be for everyone. The new Apple service may appeal to some people, but definitely bold to suggest that it's in any way going to be a strong Netflix competitor. YouTube Premium - great if you watch a lot of YouTube, and potentially a music use case there too. ESPN etc - probably better served by traditional cable. MLB is great value if you're a baseball but living out of market. The assumption behind cord cutting wasn't that people would replace it with a OTA package that replaced like for like what they had before, it's that they would subscribe to a few services rather than subscribe to an expensive cable service and use 2% of it.

MivLives 7y ago
I think the majority of people who have Youtube Premium have it because it comes with Google play music. My dad is one of those original cordcutters. His main concern is sports which he either pays for or borrows someone else's Comcast login. He has Amazon prime but has never figured out Amazon Prime video. Beyond that Netflix and OTA. His question for most people would be, "How much TV do you really need to watch?"
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  I think the issue isn't so much about quantity of television, but if being able to participate in the social zeitgeist that motivates people. Almost everyone has social groups at work or elsewhere that discuss sports, GoT, whatever reality TV show. By you still can't purchase just the 3-4 things everyone is talking about right now, so you wind up with Netflix, Hulu, GoT, maybe CBS all access, etc.

TheCondor 7y ago

Music may have very well dismantled itself for the future though; the actual IP of your music has become incredibly low in value. Tours and other forms of merch are the revenue generators. There used to be song writers that could sell songs to pop artists to perform and record; that generates much less now. I think the middle ground of interesting bands that aren’t superstars or one hit wonders will sort of dry up. The TV and movie industry have decided that their IP is more valuable than it was in the past. The technology has changed such that they can distribute it on their own and don’t need carriers. It kind of looks like we might be heading for a pay per play model, ultimately. It will be very interesting with Disney+, it will be brave if they really do everything at $7 a month, I suspect that they will want premium tiers though, they have been so protective of their “vault” and now they have Starwars, the marvel universe, Pixar, the simpsons, etc...

SilasX 7y ago

>I don't care what studio makes funny_show (either when deciding what to subscribe to, or when trying to figure out what app to launch to watch it), I just want to watch it. There's a joke that this is exactly what cable TV was. Back then: "This is ridiculous! I'm paying for all these channels when I only watch two or three of them. I should be able to pay for just the ones I use." Now: "This is ridiculous! Every time I find something I want to watch, I have to subscribe to a new service!"

rcxdude 7y ago
The problem being you still can't just subscribe to one show (or just buy it outright). You're still buying bundled deals, they've just fragmented so it's even worse.
- ghaff 7y ago
  >The problem being you still can't just subscribe to one show (or just buy it outright). You can in some cases though the pricing tends to be relatively high compared to streaming unless you really only want to watch a show or two.
- rhino369 7y ago
  People seem to hate bundles. And they love a huge catalog for one price like Netflix used to have. I think most people would hate paying per show. And I don’t think the pricing per show would be much of a discount. I’d imagine the median number of shows HBO viewer actively watches is 1-3. And the cost of giving you access to shows you don’t Watch is actually less than nothing since it would take resources to lock you out of it.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    People do pay for a la carte content. With a few exceptions, it's how people buy books. And a lot of films are paid for a la carte in some form or other. But the expectation is certainly shifting towards subscription streaming services and there's probably a difference between renting a new film release and paying to watch some random TV show to relax after work.

sureaboutthis 7y ago

Decades ago, when cable TV first came out from Warner(?) in my area, we were promised the vision of monthly payments to view top movies without commercials. That lasted a couple of years, I guess, and then we had to put up with commercials before the movie to howls of complaints. Then commercials afterwards. Then they upped the fees. Now we've come full circle. Online services made the same promises, then introduced commercials, now up their fees without promising uninterrupted viewing.

rhino369 7y ago
Cable never promised that unless you subscribed to HBO/Showtime, etc, which were always expensive. Most of the original cable channels always had commercials.
- sureaboutthis 7y ago
  Neither HBO nor Showtime existed at the time. And NONE of the original cable channels had commercials because there was only one channel, iirc, and all of the shows came via Warner. It's obvious you are too young to know about these things at the beginning. I'm talking early 1980s when cable was making its big move across the country.