5 ms·

Actually, I dont buy this due to the fact that piracy is largly around fresh content, where netflix movie library is fairly old. Sure, it is getting better tit

by phlux 15y ago

Actually, I dont buy this due to the fact that piracy is largly around fresh content, where netflix movie library is fairly old. Sure, it is getting better titles all the time - but given the fact that hollywood thinks that paying $30 to see a movie at home after it has been in the theatres for 60 (or was it 90) days is a viable price - You will always see piracy of the latest content. Further - given the quality of many of the movies that get released it is even more reasonable to expect this to continue. What will be interesting is when we see the first ever movie exclusively made for netflix streaming. That will denote a new era.

ChuckMcM 15y ago
"Actually, I dont buy this due to the fact that piracy is largly around fresh content, where netflix movie library is fairly old." Do you have a citation for this? All of the places where people put numbers to piracy that I've seen (like the lawsuits against various anonymous folks) seem to span a whole range of content from older stuff to newer stuff.
- phlux 15y ago
  My citation is that I am a Netflix subscriber -- and I have seen content available on the Tubes which is still in the theatres. I have a tough time finding new, contemporary content in the streaming lib of netflix.
  - ChuckMcM 15y ago
    Fair enough, so in context your piracy is all about fresh content :-) I try to be strictly legit in my digital content. The areas where I skate the line would be when I use the photocopier at the library to make a copy of a paper from a journal which I'm unwilling to pay $50 for a reprint for but I want a copy in my files. That being said, there is money being left on the table. If the reprints were $1 I would definitely buy them, if they were $5 I would still buy the ones I felt were seminal. Just another example of price elasticity in the digital economy. In my research on this topic most studies posit a more uniform distribution. Some specifically call out first sale doctrine issues like reselling last years version of AutoCAD on ebay. Perhaps our different understandings may be that I'm not thinking specifically of movies.
protomyth 15y ago
I could see Netflix's library of older content taking the place of some fresh content pirating. There was a theory that the iPod dropped sales of new music because people now had an easy way to listen to their entire music library and "rediscovered" old songs. This lead to not purchasing new music for a period. Netflix could inspire much the same phenomena with the added bonus of newer content being added.
- ChuckMcM 15y ago
  This I could see, there is an interesting phenomena that happens when you have your entire music collection on your portable device where suddenly you have lots of stuff to listen to without going to new sources. I know I'm personally stuck in the 70's :-) but sites like Pandora help expose me to artists I wouldn't listen to on a whim. This seeding effect was once the property of radio stations but more and more often I don't listen to the radio. If a similar effect occurs in video then I would guess there is a market opportunity for a video 'exposure' service ala Pandora for video customers. I wonder if any of the new streaming players are looking at that angle.
gojomo 15y ago
Are you sure the 'fresh content' head dominates the aged long-tail? The fresh content will dominate top-N lists, sure. It will also dominate headlines, because it will more often be the subject of newsworthy early-leaks and enforcement actions. But there is so much more old content, and the collection/completist/sampling motivations so important for unauthorized sharing, that I could easily see the old content swamping the new in terms of total copies or total bandwidth.
- phlux 15y ago
  This is HN, hopefully someone smarter than I could come up with an algorithm that could model content bandwidth activity. Content creates a spike of activity when it is "born" on the internet. Content maintains activity over the life of its availability. Activity may be a function of the contents [age, quality, rating, medium, popularity, relation to other content, etc] \It is a sequel, part of a set, etc. It would be interesting to be able to utilize the rating from netflix/imdb to predict how much total activity a piece of content might create.

by phlux 15y ago

ChuckMcM 15y ago

"Actually, I dont buy this due to the fact that piracy is largly around fresh content, where netflix movie library is fairly old." Do you have a citation for this? All of the places where people put numbers to piracy that I've seen (like the lawsuits against various anonymous folks) seem to span a whole range of content from older stuff to newer stuff.

phlux 15y ago
My citation is that I am a Netflix subscriber -- and I have seen content available on the Tubes which is still in the theatres. I have a tough time finding new, contemporary content in the streaming lib of netflix.
- ChuckMcM 15y ago
  Fair enough, so in context your piracy is all about fresh content :-) I try to be strictly legit in my digital content. The areas where I skate the line would be when I use the photocopier at the library to make a copy of a paper from a journal which I'm unwilling to pay $50 for a reprint for but I want a copy in my files. That being said, there is money being left on the table. If the reprints were $1 I would definitely buy them, if they were $5 I would still buy the ones I felt were seminal. Just another example of price elasticity in the digital economy. In my research on this topic most studies posit a more uniform distribution. Some specifically call out first sale doctrine issues like reselling last years version of AutoCAD on ebay. Perhaps our different understandings may be that I'm not thinking specifically of movies.

protomyth 15y ago

I could see Netflix's library of older content taking the place of some fresh content pirating. There was a theory that the iPod dropped sales of new music because people now had an easy way to listen to their entire music library and "rediscovered" old songs. This lead to not purchasing new music for a period. Netflix could inspire much the same phenomena with the added bonus of newer content being added.

ChuckMcM 15y ago
This I could see, there is an interesting phenomena that happens when you have your entire music collection on your portable device where suddenly you have lots of stuff to listen to without going to new sources. I know I'm personally stuck in the 70's :-) but sites like Pandora help expose me to artists I wouldn't listen to on a whim. This seeding effect was once the property of radio stations but more and more often I don't listen to the radio. If a similar effect occurs in video then I would guess there is a market opportunity for a video 'exposure' service ala Pandora for video customers. I wonder if any of the new streaming players are looking at that angle.

gojomo 15y ago

Are you sure the 'fresh content' head dominates the aged long-tail? The fresh content will dominate top-N lists, sure. It will also dominate headlines, because it will more often be the subject of newsworthy early-leaks and enforcement actions. But there is so much more old content, and the collection/completist/sampling motivations so important for unauthorized sharing, that I could easily see the old content swamping the new in terms of total copies or total bandwidth.

phlux 15y ago
This is HN, hopefully someone smarter than I could come up with an algorithm that could model content bandwidth activity. Content creates a spike of activity when it is "born" on the internet. Content maintains activity over the life of its availability. Activity may be a function of the contents [age, quality, rating, medium, popularity, relation to other content, etc] \It is a sequel, part of a set, etc. It would be interesting to be able to utilize the rating from netflix/imdb to predict how much total activity a piece of content might create.