10 ms·

I stopped torrenting a long time ago. But if the media streaming market shards too much I would start again.

duxup 7y ago
I feel like enough is available now that I don't need to. The system still sucks but effectively there is enough available to keep me going. In the meantime if some media isn't convenient for me to consume, it is off my radar. I don't don't bother either way.
- asdff 7y ago
  I have netflix, hulu, hbogo, and prime, and I pirate stuff that's in the catalog right now as there is no guarentee it will stay in the catalog. Netflix in particular lost a ton of content over the years. Ironically, I even get better quality streaming with piracy over legal channels.
  - duxup 7y ago
    IF you're an enthusiast, big media fan. I get that, there's not enough. For me we've reached a level I'm ok with, but it is very much based on usage.
    - asdff 7y ago
      It's not even being an enthusiast. I'll search netflix for "popular movie I watched on netflix three years ago" and it will be removed from the catalog. I don't pass go, I don't pay amazon $5 or whatever to rent, I pirate the movie.
- zanny 7y ago
  This is in some ways good for piracy. During the 2000s the MAFIAA was heavily invested in their war on sharing sites and protocols because of how popular they were, but now with streaming taking a substantial chunk of that casual pirate audience theres less profit incentive in pushing a lot of prosecution.
  - duxup 7y ago
    Agreed. Piracy seems to have filtered into being an enthusiast thing ... or at least that perception has held off the more rabid prosecution of it, mostly.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    It seems like the courts eventually came around to a more just way of thinking too, for example, they stopped treating the partial uploading of a single song as if the person had stolen the entire value of that song from the publishers.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  It feels like we're probably in, or just over, a local maxima as far as getting content at a reasonable price goes. This has obviously been a reflection of the ease of duplication and acquisition of works for free (gratis) that the internet has brought about. Now we seem to be entering a time where, as media mega-corps have appeared and won us back to paying for content and having content easily accessible, they're starting to think they can ramp up the prices and lock away "their" content in a silo with a hefty price-tag for entry. It seems as if we're going to move back towards a much higher price for taking part in the culture that surrounds current media; and that in turn is going to lead to more copyright infringement. Only this time the media corps have got the internet sewn up pretty well It would be ideal if the reaction were to rest control of culture from the hands of big business a little with some statutory reform. But that in turn rests on whether countries get democratic reform to proportionalise representation and enable the tackling of smaller issues like disenfranchisement from culture and locking away of works so they can't ever enter the public domain.
  - hedora 7y ago
    I used to think this was happening with music, then I realized I completely and accidentally switched to indie distributors. Examples: any music from “nightvale presents”, and “dark compass” podcasts. DC has an epic best of 2019 as the current episode. I’ve had mixed luck finding works from those sources on the big streaming services, but I listen to them legally nevertheless.
NKCSS 7y ago
Yeah, it's a B*tch, wished they'd interop more. I wanted to see if I could watch Power somewhere; I have HBO, Prime Video, YouTube Premium and Netflix... but nope, none of the four have it here in .nl. Usually, between the three I can find the things that I want to watch, but it's starting to get absurd with all the subscriptions...
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  It's planned obsolescence for media, remove the older media and people "have" to watch the new stuff: "you pay more because it's new" and "production of all this new stuff everyone is watching costs more, so we have to put the price up", etc..
  - zrobotics 7y ago
    Which ironically is what caused me to cancel my Netflix subscription. I initially subscribed mainly for the older movies & B movies that were abundant, but as other streaming services have started many of these have fragmented (and many of them just aren't available). About 3 months ago I cancelled Netflix (kept prime for shipping, Youtube premium for ad-free) when I realized that between the 3 services I couldn't even find The Maltese Falcon on 2 of them, and amazon wanted something ludicrous like $13 to rent it. Not exactly an unknown movie. I had zero problems torrenting it, and no no moral qualms about it; I'm pretty sure all the actors & crew are dead by now and not recieving any more royalties, plus I have it on DVD but I hadn't ripped it to my NAS & don't have anything that can play DVD's connected to the TV.
    - filoleg 7y ago
      In case you already know, feel free to ignore my comment, but with your Youtube premium subscription, you also get a subscription to Google Play Music (aka Spotify competitor from Google). I wish they advertised it better, because half the people I know irl who have a sub to either of them, don't realize that they get the other one for free.
      - 7y ago
Endy 7y ago
If the media streaming market reaches a price I'm willing to pay, I might stop torrenting and streaming from other sources for the very limited non-free media I want to see or hear.
- jfk13 7y ago
  Do you steal things from shops if the asking price is higher than you're willing to pay? Is "media" special, such that the producer/distributor isn't entitled to set their price in the way vendors of other things do?
  - scotty79 7y ago
    I would if I could do it from home with zero chance of getting caught and shop wouldn't loose the thing I stole. If you say you wouldn't I think you are lying, mostly to yourself.
    - Endy 7y ago
      As an inveterate and unrepentant pirate, I can tell you that I would not. It is depriving someone else who deserves a thing just as much as I do. I am not paying my grocer for today's goods that I buy, I'm paying him to keep bringing goods in and having stocked shelves for myself and others. I have no such compunction toward any particular artist in any medium. If they keep creating stuff I like, good on them. If they do not, I'm totally unconcerned; because there will be others along to create something new.
      - johntiger1 7y ago
        This is a brutal world viewpoint
  - JudgeWapner 7y ago
    it's just the consumer's version of Hollywood Accounting: sorry, but there's just no money left to pay you :(
  - 7y ago
sanketskasar 7y ago
It is worse in India. You see a lot of popular and lesser known titles on Prime and Netflix, and buy subscriptions to those only to realise the content isn't available in your country. I basically feel Netflix to be a rip off, and Prime's value proposition is faster deliveries, better discounts and a few free Kindle books. And despite trying to use these services for a long time, I am still a fan and a proponent of torrents for such consumption as I get all the content, on time, on my terms and can consume it in a way I like. Music, is sorted. TV and Movies isn't.
- p1necone 7y ago
  I subscribed to prime once here in New Zealand and discovered that the UI (at least on PS4) displays everything, and only tells you that it's not available in your country when you try to play something. As a pretty large portion of the stuff seemed to not be available here this made it basically unusable.
  - ElCapitanMarkla 7y ago
    I just got Prime free with a new 2Degrees account, I haven’t struck that so maybe they’re hiding the inaccessible content now. In saying that though, the content that is accessible is fairly terrible compared to Netflix’s offerings.
- fyfy18 7y ago
  In smaller European countries it's even worse: - Even though the minimum wage here is half that of the UK, for some reason Netflix is more expensive, and has less selection. - They have no content in the official language of the country, not even subtitles. When you go to the cinema, movies are dubbed or have subtitles. - They push a lot of Russian language content, even though most people under 35 don't speak it, and it is not even a semi official language. Amazon don't have operations here, you can sign up to Amazon Prime for video in another country, but it only shows their own content.
  - rarspace01 7y ago
tide_ad 7y ago
Same, it is rare for me to torrent As an American in Europe last month, I experienced: Watching Showtime through Playstation Vue was impossible from European IP, and impossible through US VPN. So I torrented Billions instead of trying a redundant unportable Showtime through Amazon Video subscription, or instead of trying a redundant Showtime subscription through their native app assuming they have one. Watching Game of Thrones through HBO Now also had the same issues. But downloading torrents over VPN worked really fast. I only used VPNs partially out of habit, and partially not to get my host (hotel/airbnb) in trouble. Because VPNs were so readily detected and blocked, it reminded me to consider buying a dedicated IP address in a few different countries for VPN, instead of having IP addresses that all the VPN users use. I have not done this yet, as I also heard that another way to detect VPNs is by knowing if the IP block is associated with a data center. I wonder if this is really done by the services I use. Final note is that I did notice that alot of the torrent providers are doing "webrips" now instead of ripping in the highest quality their TV provides applying compression. The webrips are noticeable worse as the streaming service already is using compression. Kind of weird outcome currently.
hannasanarion 7y ago
Disney recently took full control of Hulu, so theres a little less threat of fragmentation in that piece of the streaming ecosystem.
btilly 7y ago
Did you know that you cannot legally stream My Fair Lady? I found this out when I tried to show it to my daughters. Apparently the copyright agreements don't cover how to split the proceeds from streaming, so nobody can sell Amazon, Netflix, etc the right to stream it. But it is on The Pirate Bay...
- thomasfl 7y ago
  The same goes for Studio Ghibli’s animated movies.
  - CWuestefeld 7y ago
    ...and also for WKRP In Cincinnati. Anywhere you do see it, it's not with the original music. They stripped out all the old radio tracks and replaced it with crap. What a shame that the rights holders are so short sighted. The nostalgia those old tracks would create would surely sell more records. And it's not like anybody is going to be satisfied with replaying the video when they want the song, with the characters talking over the top of it.
    - stOneskull 7y ago
      reminds me of watching Married With Children recently, no Franky title music
      - ElCapitanMarkla 7y ago
        Oh I wondered what happened there. I was thinking that maybe they had changed it in the later seasons but I was sure I’d never heard that version of it before.
    - nitemice 7y ago
      Same thing happened to Daria. All the official releases have had all the then-current songs replaced with sound-alikes, placeholder music, or silence.
jdreyfuss 7y ago
Yes, it feels like it would be a fairly straightforward econ model actually. If the combined price for all the platforms gets too high and the user experience too terrible, then it's an easy flip to piracy. I get that all these publishing companies are trying to get as close to that line as possible, but as they're (naturally) all interested in maximizing their own profits rather than thinking about the collective industry profit, I don't doubt we'll cross that line before too long
bikeshed 7y ago
in Australia there’s absolutely no better way to obtain media besides piracy. Our options are both expensive and terrible. I’ll probably never stop.
shlant 7y ago
The unending walled gardens that the streaming service landscape is becoming is the main driver for torrent usage increasing. The more content becomes exclusive to single streaming services, the less consumers benefit from the convenience that the services originally provided. This video describes the problem really well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDF-S68kx5o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDF-S68kx5o
lostjohnny 7y ago
streaming services lack a lot of content I love to watch. I was trying to show a tv show to my girlfriend last week, it was from 2007, not crazy long time ago, it's just 12 years ago and there was no way to find it legally. Teh only place where I found it was Amazon prime video, as a per episode paid download, not in streaming, but it wasn't available in my country, even though I'm a primenow subscriber. I ended up torrenting it (and the only torrent site where I found it was thepiratebay, nobody else had it)
bahama_mama 7y ago
Which, I believe, is happening, right? With new players starting their streaming services in next 1-2 years, the content will become sharded even more. We circled. Streaming services partially were about to solve the problem of not paying serious $$$ for a cable subscription (lots of programming that people don't care about/watch) by providing a cheap, affordable service with lost of content that is interesting and worth to watch. Today, streaming services are creating the very same problem they were trying to solve.

I feel like enough is available now that I don't need to. The system still sucks but effectively there is enough available to keep me going. In the meantime if some media isn't convenient for me to consume, it is off my radar. I don't don't bother either way.

asdff 7y ago
I have netflix, hulu, hbogo, and prime, and I pirate stuff that's in the catalog right now as there is no guarentee it will stay in the catalog. Netflix in particular lost a ton of content over the years. Ironically, I even get better quality streaming with piracy over legal channels.
- duxup 7y ago
  IF you're an enthusiast, big media fan. I get that, there's not enough. For me we've reached a level I'm ok with, but it is very much based on usage.
  - asdff 7y ago
    It's not even being an enthusiast. I'll search netflix for "popular movie I watched on netflix three years ago" and it will be removed from the catalog. I don't pass go, I don't pay amazon $5 or whatever to rent, I pirate the movie.
zanny 7y ago
This is in some ways good for piracy. During the 2000s the MAFIAA was heavily invested in their war on sharing sites and protocols because of how popular they were, but now with streaming taking a substantial chunk of that casual pirate audience theres less profit incentive in pushing a lot of prosecution.
- duxup 7y ago
  Agreed. Piracy seems to have filtered into being an enthusiast thing ... or at least that perception has held off the more rabid prosecution of it, mostly.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  It seems like the courts eventually came around to a more just way of thinking too, for example, they stopped treating the partial uploading of a single song as if the person had stolen the entire value of that song from the publishers.
pbhjpbhj 7y ago
It feels like we're probably in, or just over, a local maxima as far as getting content at a reasonable price goes. This has obviously been a reflection of the ease of duplication and acquisition of works for free (gratis) that the internet has brought about. Now we seem to be entering a time where, as media mega-corps have appeared and won us back to paying for content and having content easily accessible, they're starting to think they can ramp up the prices and lock away "their" content in a silo with a hefty price-tag for entry. It seems as if we're going to move back towards a much higher price for taking part in the culture that surrounds current media; and that in turn is going to lead to more copyright infringement. Only this time the media corps have got the internet sewn up pretty well It would be ideal if the reaction were to rest control of culture from the hands of big business a little with some statutory reform. But that in turn rests on whether countries get democratic reform to proportionalise representation and enable the tackling of smaller issues like disenfranchisement from culture and locking away of works so they can't ever enter the public domain.
- hedora 7y ago
  I used to think this was happening with music, then I realized I completely and accidentally switched to indie distributors. Examples: any music from “nightvale presents”, and “dark compass” podcasts. DC has an epic best of 2019 as the current episode. I’ve had mixed luck finding works from those sources on the big streaming services, but I listen to them legally nevertheless.

NKCSS 7y ago

Yeah, it's a B*tch, wished they'd interop more. I wanted to see if I could watch Power somewhere; I have HBO, Prime Video, YouTube Premium and Netflix... but nope, none of the four have it here in .nl. Usually, between the three I can find the things that I want to watch, but it's starting to get absurd with all the subscriptions...

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
It's planned obsolescence for media, remove the older media and people "have" to watch the new stuff: "you pay more because it's new" and "production of all this new stuff everyone is watching costs more, so we have to put the price up", etc..
- zrobotics 7y ago
  Which ironically is what caused me to cancel my Netflix subscription. I initially subscribed mainly for the older movies & B movies that were abundant, but as other streaming services have started many of these have fragmented (and many of them just aren't available). About 3 months ago I cancelled Netflix (kept prime for shipping, Youtube premium for ad-free) when I realized that between the 3 services I couldn't even find The Maltese Falcon on 2 of them, and amazon wanted something ludicrous like $13 to rent it. Not exactly an unknown movie. I had zero problems torrenting it, and no no moral qualms about it; I'm pretty sure all the actors & crew are dead by now and not recieving any more royalties, plus I have it on DVD but I hadn't ripped it to my NAS & don't have anything that can play DVD's connected to the TV.
  - filoleg 7y ago
    In case you already know, feel free to ignore my comment, but with your Youtube premium subscription, you also get a subscription to Google Play Music (aka Spotify competitor from Google). I wish they advertised it better, because half the people I know irl who have a sub to either of them, don't realize that they get the other one for free.
    - 7y ago

Endy 7y ago

If the media streaming market reaches a price I'm willing to pay, I might stop torrenting and streaming from other sources for the very limited non-free media I want to see or hear.

jfk13 7y ago
Do you steal things from shops if the asking price is higher than you're willing to pay? Is "media" special, such that the producer/distributor isn't entitled to set their price in the way vendors of other things do?
- scotty79 7y ago
  I would if I could do it from home with zero chance of getting caught and shop wouldn't loose the thing I stole. If you say you wouldn't I think you are lying, mostly to yourself.
  - Endy 7y ago
    As an inveterate and unrepentant pirate, I can tell you that I would not. It is depriving someone else who deserves a thing just as much as I do. I am not paying my grocer for today's goods that I buy, I'm paying him to keep bringing goods in and having stocked shelves for myself and others. I have no such compunction toward any particular artist in any medium. If they keep creating stuff I like, good on them. If they do not, I'm totally unconcerned; because there will be others along to create something new.
    - johntiger1 7y ago
      This is a brutal world viewpoint
- JudgeWapner 7y ago
  it's just the consumer's version of Hollywood Accounting: sorry, but there's just no money left to pay you :(
- 7y ago

sanketskasar 7y ago

It is worse in India. You see a lot of popular and lesser known titles on Prime and Netflix, and buy subscriptions to those only to realise the content isn't available in your country. I basically feel Netflix to be a rip off, and Prime's value proposition is faster deliveries, better discounts and a few free Kindle books. And despite trying to use these services for a long time, I am still a fan and a proponent of torrents for such consumption as I get all the content, on time, on my terms and can consume it in a way I like. Music, is sorted. TV and Movies isn't.

p1necone 7y ago
I subscribed to prime once here in New Zealand and discovered that the UI (at least on PS4) displays everything, and only tells you that it's not available in your country when you try to play something. As a pretty large portion of the stuff seemed to not be available here this made it basically unusable.
- ElCapitanMarkla 7y ago
  I just got Prime free with a new 2Degrees account, I haven’t struck that so maybe they’re hiding the inaccessible content now. In saying that though, the content that is accessible is fairly terrible compared to Netflix’s offerings.
fyfy18 7y ago
In smaller European countries it's even worse: - Even though the minimum wage here is half that of the UK, for some reason Netflix is more expensive, and has less selection. - They have no content in the official language of the country, not even subtitles. When you go to the cinema, movies are dubbed or have subtitles. - They push a lot of Russian language content, even though most people under 35 don't speak it, and it is not even a semi official language. Amazon don't have operations here, you can sign up to Amazon Prime for video in another country, but it only shows their own content.
- rarspace01 7y ago

tide_ad 7y ago

Same, it is rare for me to torrent As an American in Europe last month, I experienced: Watching Showtime through Playstation Vue was impossible from European IP, and impossible through US VPN. So I torrented Billions instead of trying a redundant unportable Showtime through Amazon Video subscription, or instead of trying a redundant Showtime subscription through their native app assuming they have one. Watching Game of Thrones through HBO Now also had the same issues. But downloading torrents over VPN worked really fast. I only used VPNs partially out of habit, and partially not to get my host (hotel/airbnb) in trouble. Because VPNs were so readily detected and blocked, it reminded me to consider buying a dedicated IP address in a few different countries for VPN, instead of having IP addresses that all the VPN users use. I have not done this yet, as I also heard that another way to detect VPNs is by knowing if the IP block is associated with a data center. I wonder if this is really done by the services I use. Final note is that I did notice that alot of the torrent providers are doing "webrips" now instead of ripping in the highest quality their TV provides applying compression. The webrips are noticeable worse as the streaming service already is using compression. Kind of weird outcome currently.

hannasanarion 7y ago

Disney recently took full control of Hulu, so theres a little less threat of fragmentation in that piece of the streaming ecosystem.

btilly 7y ago

Did you know that you cannot legally stream My Fair Lady? I found this out when I tried to show it to my daughters. Apparently the copyright agreements don't cover how to split the proceeds from streaming, so nobody can sell Amazon, Netflix, etc the right to stream it. But it is on The Pirate Bay...

thomasfl 7y ago
The same goes for Studio Ghibli’s animated movies.
- CWuestefeld 7y ago
  ...and also for WKRP In Cincinnati. Anywhere you do see it, it's not with the original music. They stripped out all the old radio tracks and replaced it with crap. What a shame that the rights holders are so short sighted. The nostalgia those old tracks would create would surely sell more records. And it's not like anybody is going to be satisfied with replaying the video when they want the song, with the characters talking over the top of it.
  - stOneskull 7y ago
    reminds me of watching Married With Children recently, no Franky title music
    - ElCapitanMarkla 7y ago
      Oh I wondered what happened there. I was thinking that maybe they had changed it in the later seasons but I was sure I’d never heard that version of it before.
  - nitemice 7y ago
    Same thing happened to Daria. All the official releases have had all the then-current songs replaced with sound-alikes, placeholder music, or silence.

jdreyfuss 7y ago

Yes, it feels like it would be a fairly straightforward econ model actually. If the combined price for all the platforms gets too high and the user experience too terrible, then it's an easy flip to piracy. I get that all these publishing companies are trying to get as close to that line as possible, but as they're (naturally) all interested in maximizing their own profits rather than thinking about the collective industry profit, I don't doubt we'll cross that line before too long

bikeshed 7y ago

in Australia there’s absolutely no better way to obtain media besides piracy. Our options are both expensive and terrible. I’ll probably never stop.

shlant 7y ago

The unending walled gardens that the streaming service landscape is becoming is the main driver for torrent usage increasing. The more content becomes exclusive to single streaming services, the less consumers benefit from the convenience that the services originally provided. This video describes the problem really well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDF-S68kx5o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDF-S68kx5o

lostjohnny 7y ago

streaming services lack a lot of content I love to watch. I was trying to show a tv show to my girlfriend last week, it was from 2007, not crazy long time ago, it's just 12 years ago and there was no way to find it legally. Teh only place where I found it was Amazon prime video, as a per episode paid download, not in streaming, but it wasn't available in my country, even though I'm a primenow subscriber. I ended up torrenting it (and the only torrent site where I found it was thepiratebay, nobody else had it)

bahama_mama 7y ago

Which, I believe, is happening, right? With new players starting their streaming services in next 1-2 years, the content will become sharded even more. We circled. Streaming services partially were about to solve the problem of not paying serious $$$ for a cable subscription (lots of programming that people don't care about/watch) by providing a cheap, affordable service with lost of content that is interesting and worth to watch. Today, streaming services are creating the very same problem they were trying to solve.