17 ms·

As someone who grew up in Eastern Europe in the early 2000s, with a a taste for Western media, especially movies, and the Internet becoming a widespread thing,

As someone who grew up in Eastern Europe in the early 2000s, with a a taste for Western media, especially movies, and the Internet becoming a widespread thing, it was infuriating waiting for movies to come to theaters months behind the rest of the world. Not to mention the horrible country specific posters and advertising, limited availability and titles. Piracy was the only option. It felt like the Internet would solve all these problems, like you'd be able to experience culture from any part of the world however you liked and at the same time as the rest of the world. Sadly that never happened. It's much better now but it still feels like the media is crippled by old local distributor deals. The fact that e.g. Netflix offers different movies for every country is something that honestly does not make any sense yet everyone accepts it. When I got my first Kindle 12 years ago my Amazon account was registered with my local European address so the books available in store were all complete trash romance pulp novels. Once I simply changed my home address to some random location in New York I suddenly had access to hundreds of thousands more titles. The Internet never delivered on its promise.

bserge 5y ago
Think of entertainment as a hard drug (most of it actually is). And the distribuitors are the dealers. Some will be friendly or make deals with each other, others will keep everyone else off their turf or go to war.
croes 5y ago
The internet is only a medium. It's just used by businesses and businesses are all about profit. Businesses want to be able to choose where they produce and where they pay taxes, but customers should be able to choose where they buy their goods. If you hear the term "free market" it's always about the companies not about the customer.
Boulth6 5y ago
> The Internet never delivered on its promise. The commercial internet never did. Don't forget about Torrents and lib gen rus. They're part of the internet too. > The fact that e.g. Netflix offers different movies for every country is something that honestly does not make any sense yet everyone accepts it. People "accept" it because it's convenient and they are not aware that there are other options. How would you suggest people reject it?
- beardyw 5y ago
  I got so many searches which said old film was on Netflix which turned into "not here mate" I unsubscribed. That's how.
- taneq 5y ago
  > The commercial internet never did. Don't forget about Torrents [...] When you see the internet's "promise" as providing unlimited free content, it's a bit hard for the commercial internet to meet that expectation.
  - Asooka 5y ago
    The promise isn't for the content to be free, but for access to be unrestricted. I want to pay money and get a DRM-free file. Bandcamp delivers on that promise, so that's the only place I buy music from. Media you get via torrent is of higher quality and more useful than the DRM-encumbered media you get by paying. If you are even allowed to pay for it in the first place, that is.
    - nyuszika7h 5y ago
      Purchased (not streaming) music has been DRM-free for ages even on iTunes and other major platforms. But most other content like movies and TV shows isn't.
      - Liskni_si 5y ago
        What other major platforms still sell music though? Since Google Play Music's demise, I haven't been able to find a single one selling music in my region (Czech Republic).
  - nextaccountic 5y ago
    People said the same thing about open source software. And yet here we are.
iso1210 5y ago
As someone who grew up in the UK in the late 90s, with a taste for American media, especially scifi, and the Internet a widespread thing, it was infuriating waiting for TV shows to come to the screen months or even years behind the rest of the world. I do remember one site that allowed me to do download SG1 episodes (about 128kbit, and this was probably cinepak or some form of mpeg1 compression) over a modem, and that was a lifeline. When I got to Uni in Oct 2000, I could use BitchX/IRC on the lab irix machine to use a massive 10 MEGA bit connection to get voyager episodes. Compared with downloading on a 33.6kbit connection over a phone line that cost at least £2.40 (about $5-6 in today's money) that was an amazing experience. Even recently they decided not to bother releasing Lower Decks internationally. Had to get a Bittorrent client to watch it. That's not the case with things like Discovery and Picard which were released pretty much simultaneously. If a media company won't sell me what I want to watch, I'll go elsewhere. I paid $6 to my phone company to get a shocking quality copy of Voyager. For me, Piracy is not trying to avoid paying for it, it's about trying to get it. They've mostly cottoned on to the fact it's a global market now at least.
- 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
  in india, piracy is not seen as bad unless its some bigshot movie star who calls it a "heinous crime" that a user enjoys their movies and they arent getting paid. anyways, i have never paid for a windows license. maybe back in 98 days but never after that. we use cracks and it used to be sold for a dollar or less. get an iso, copy iso, copy crack and thats it. people here have a problem accepting foss because they see windows as free so what benefit is switching to ubuntu? about media. until few years ago, you could only watch movies in theaters or on cable tv. shops would resell torrented movies for few cents a pop because that is at most what people were willing to pay. i am not going to buy an original DVD 6 months after launch for $ 30 if i get screener for $0.2 dollars next day of launch. its not about "robbing" the company, often purchasing parity means $10 is a days manual labour wages. paying $99 for a windows license used to make no sense when they already paid not more than $200-300 for an entire setup or a laptop.
  - magicloop 5y ago
    In those days Microsoft had a "curious" business strategy. They wanted Windows to be the dominant standard whilst trying to avoid monopoly litigation. So they'd charge everyone a license fee knowing that standard businesses would pay up, and those that wouldn't or couldn't were allowed to crack the software and use it. That portion of the market, the "piracy" sector wasn't in their view part of their market share numbers (they would say they weren't a monopoly). But having this in place meant it was harder for competitors to sub-divide the market into other Operating Systems and Enterprise productivity software. So it would end up as either Open Source or Windows. This is why they didn't reduce their prices for purchasing power parity purposes (to make it equally affordable in each market). The rich countries could drive their profits, and everyone else had a "free" ride just to shut the door on a competitor. Of course, the history of Microsoft and Anti-trust litigation is well documented. Things didn't entirely work out for them.
stavros 5y ago
> The Internet never delivered on its promise. The internet is what brought you piracy.
- UI_at_80x24 5y ago
  >> The Internet never delivered on its promise. >The internet is what brought you piracy. The BBS's I visited in 1986 might disagree with you.
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    The guy with a suitcase of tapes would also disagree, but the Internet enabled a huge increase in scale.
  - nine_k 5y ago
    While I see what you mean, a BBS was an inherently local thing, unless you fancied paying long-distance fees even if a distant BBS would accept LD calls at all. That might be acceptable for important texts and other very compact formats (small pictures, MIDI tracks), but for pirating music, let alone video, it was out of question.
    - zorked 5y ago
      The problem there is just technological: the problem with movies and video was the unavailability of good enough codecs/large enough media+bandwidth. Otherwise BBS would have been a hell of a party for those too. For software my local BBSs, very very far from any rich country, somehow managed to get every major software release a few days before launch day. Yes, before. It was all one huge global network already, just a bit asynchronous.
  - johnchristopher 5y ago
    The BBB's from 1986 didn't bring piracy to this person in the 2000's. Internet did.
  - dariosalvi78 5y ago
    people selling pirate movies and music on the street (pretty common in Italy at least) may disagree
kome 5y ago
"Once I simply changed my home address to some random location in New York I suddenly had access to hundreds of thousands more titles. The Internet never delivered on its promise." You hate the market, not the internet.
johnchristopher 5y ago
> The fact that e.g. Netflix offers different movies for every country is something that honestly does not make any sense yet everyone accepts it. It does make sense when you know distributors still have to strike deals with cable TV operators. > When I got my first Kindle 12 years ago my Amazon account was registered with my local European address so the books available in store were all complete trash romance pulp novels. Once I simply changed my home address to some random location in New York I suddenly had access to hundreds of thousands more titles. The Internet never delivered on its promise. At least it did since you have access to the books you want.
wccrawford 5y ago
At least you get them eventually! Imagine never getting them. I've been studying Japanese for about 15 years. Japanese media almost never comes to the US, and if it does, it's usually dubbed. Anything that isn't dubbed is forced subtitled. The one exception is anime, but even that has no JP subs. The best you can do is JP audio and no subs. But if I buy media from Japan (at a huge markup over their already-insane media prices) I can get JP audio and subs. And this is pretty much true for all foreign video, except certain British shows like Doctor Who. Even a lot of Canada-specific shows don't make it here (Canada's Worst Driver), though there are a lot of shows/movies produced in Canada with the US in mind from the start. It's ridiculous. Sell digital goods to anyone willing to buy them. Period.
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  Netflix is pretty great for this. Most of the Japanese stuff they have has both Japanese audio and subtitles even outside Japan. It's pretty anime heavy though. Rakuten Viki has some too but it's done by fans and not always complete!
  - fomine3 5y ago
    I watch anime in Netflix Japan. I can confirm that there are many new anime without any sub/dub except Japanese, maybe because those anime won't get enough enjoyable foreign watchers (except weebs).
    - nvarsj 5y ago
      As someone that follows seasonal anime, I'm surprised how little isn't subbed. I haven't found a single thing yet which didn't have subs. Every popular show is subbed by crunchyroll/funimation, and less popular things (like Godzilla S.P. in the last season, stuck in Netflix jail) had fansubs.
- haunter 5y ago
  At least there is now a dedicated japanese media torrent tracker and a lot of anime and tokusatsu have JP subtitles
bamboozled 5y ago
In hindsight, it seems like the fight against piracy, was really an effort to make it harder to access certain types of information and have people funneled to certain sources. The fact that it used to be easy to access all kinds of useful data, and now you can't isn't an accident, The Internet is still the same, the governance around it isn't. People believe they have access to free thought, speech and completely objective information. Really though, your world view became limited, bias, censored, crafted and curated. People who truly hold alternative views are often banned from the few places left Joe Sixpack would try find important, unbiased, real (sometimes controversial) information. The Internet was real freedom for a brief while, and it was fucking great!
- fao_ 5y ago
  > People believe they have access to free thought, speech and completely objective information. Really though, your world view became limited, bias, censored, crafted and curated. Objective information is still there (google scholar, etc.) but what the last two decades have shown is that people do not have the training or the time in the day to read it. So you get people reading websites like Natural News (which while it sources scientific material, the actual article about it does not represent anything that's stated in the paper, and often states the exact opposite of what the paper claims), and getting drawn into it. Next thing you know, they're anti-vaxxers who believe that Bill Gates himself is putting microchips in their body as some kind of obscure cartoon-villain hive-mind scheme (I have literally seen this happen to multiple people around me, and it is just utterly depressing). > People who truly hold alternative views are often banned from the few places left Joe Sixpack would try find important, unbiased, real (sometimes controversial) information. IDK man, Alex Jones is raking in millions and he's said some downright ludicrous bullshit. Naziism and racism as a whole seems to be 'in-vogue' (Look at Joe Cox's killer and the whole UKIP thing). Alternative views seem to suck-ass aside from some transhumanism ones -- but even they are all "Torturing a guy for 60 years is ok if it stops dust specks getting into an impossibly large number of human eyes". Probably the best thing I ever did was find out I was trans -- since then I've met a lot of absolute geniuses. People like Micah Elizabeth Scott who have several contributions to "Proof of Concept or GTFO" that make people say "woah what the fuck!!!", one woman who made an antenna cane (A mobility aid that can also pick up WiFi from a distance), people taking photography and music to whole new places -- bona fide synthesizer witches and code sorcerers who perform stunning feats of artistry, and thousands of people biohacking their endocrine system based off the latest available scientific information, simply to get boobs and cure themselves of gender dysphoria. Now that's a REAL alternative movement / counterculture.
fnord123 5y ago
>The fact that e.g. Netflix offers different movies for every country is something that honestly does not make any sense yet everyone accepts it. Do they accept it?
- ipaddr 5y ago
  I do. It makes sense. Sell rights regionally so you get the highest price available in each location. The US will pay billions more for the olympics than Malta but they both watch the same events. That allows Netflix India to sell netflix for a dollar and charge 15 for Americans.
  - shaan7 5y ago
    And that is why pretty much any American movie you want to watch is not available on Netflix India :P
  - fnord123 5y ago
    I'm sure there's a diversity of opinion. But for many people if it's not on the streaming service(s) they decided to pay for, they will just pirate it. Especially HBO Max which has top tier content but don't exist in most locations. >The US will pay billions more for the olympics than Malta but they both watch the same events. I can't let this tangent go even if it's not either of our points... The Olympic coverage in the US is infamous worldwide for being absolutely terrible. And being a live event it's harder to pirate using magnet links.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      I'm a big fan of piracy. The more taking part the better the torrent strength. My comment was in terms of rights holders. I could see why they would want that. Netflix is caught in the middle.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Like with most things related to technology, they have no choice :). People can only choose from what's available on the market.
Nitrolo 5y ago
Growing up in Italy around the same time my experience was very similar, movies would come out weeks or months later, and access to english media wasn't great until fairly recently. Piracy and torrents were amazing though. We could find any movie no matter how obscure, as well as books, comics and all kinds of stuff (my uncle gifted me a kobo e-reader many years ago, it was amazing and I loved it). I basically learned English that way, and I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that that's the most important skill I have. So much access to information, travel, and relationships to other people just would not have been possible if I didn't speak English well. In a way piracy has improved my life tremendously, while not really hurting anybody (as if a kid in Italy without any money would have been able to buy all those movies even at a 90% discount).
dariosalvi78 5y ago
I have Netflix and Amazon prime in Sweden, but still need to get pirate content if I want to watch it in Italian (my mother language). It's not the Internet, it's copyright that has failed us.
ekianjo 5y ago
> The Internet never delivered on its promise. Only if you look at the commercial offering.
raspyberr 5y ago
Piracy allows us to live in the year 2100.
VoodooJuJu 5y ago
Reminds me of something similar. My local library loans out ebooks, which are loaned out, reserved, and returned just like physical books. An ebook someone wanted had all its "copies" checked out, and there was a long wait list. But the physical book was available, so they just went with that instead. We have the means to sidestep these physical impediments, yet we just recreate them digitally. And in the case above, the physical actually turned out to be the solution to the digital impediment. It's just too funny. The greatest barriers in this world aren't technological - they're social, economic, and political; always have been. Just another reminder that we're living in clown world.
- blooalien 5y ago
  So much truth to your entire comment!
lutoma 5y ago
And then even if you do pay, and the show you want is available on one of the services you're subscribed to, you often get a worse experience than with a torrent. I have a 4k screen, but Netflix's DRM only allows 4K in Microsoft Edge, on Linux I'm stuck with 720p which looks awful on that screen. Amazon Prime Video has ads (for their other shows, but still) and an awful user interface, and so on. I find it incomprehensible why Netflix still does that since clearly it does nothing to prevent piracy: Every new Netflix show is instantly available as 4K torrent.
- MiddleEndian 5y ago
  >I find it incomprehensible why Netflix still does that since clearly it does nothing to prevent piracy: Every new Netflix show is instantly available as 4K torrent. I assume they are appeasing technically illiterate movie execs or something similar.
mewpmewp2 5y ago
I would easily pay 50eur/month if it meant I could easily select any movie or tv show I wanted as it's released. Right now there doesn't seem to be such experience provided anywhere and my Netflix subscription is basically running without me using it, because I rarely find anything worth watching where I live. So if I want to watch something I really want to watch I have no choice, but to select the piracy approach.
- strictfp 5y ago
  Agree. The movie industry hasn't been disrupted in the same way that Spotify disrupted music distribution. The same balkanization used to happen with music licenses. Spotify disrupted that by simply pirating and offering the record companies a piece of the cake after the fact. Someone would need to pull something similar with the movie industry.
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ta1234567890 5y ago
> When I got my first Kindle 12 years ago my Amazon account was registered with my local European address so the books available in store were all complete trash romance pulp novels. Once I simply changed my home address to some random location in New York I suddenly had access to hundreds of thousands more titles. The Internet never delivered on its promise. Sometimes I’ll gift a kindle book to someone and then they’ll message me back saying that Amazon won’t let them claim the book, giving them an error message about it not being available in their country. They can’t redeem it for anything else, so then I have to go talk to support and ask for a refund of the gift.
- Siira 5y ago
  Why do you bother in the first place? Books are the easiest to pirate. Email the author to open a Patreon or sth, and pay them directly.
grishka 5y ago
In Russia, piracy is still the default option for most people. It's literally easier to torrent something than to bother with Netflix or other streaming services. Like, you pay money and get a worse result, because there's DRM and other licensing-related restrictions — why in your right mind would you even consider that? Some people do use Netflix though because they tell themselves "law is law" or "the creators need to be paid" or something similar. And all those news of people's "bought" content disappearing, or accounts getting banned without a way to appeal, aren't exactly doing any good to the "legal" entertainment services either.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  Not just Russia. With every content owner building their own walled gardens piracy will be on the rise again everywhere.
agilob 5y ago
Nothing has been solved because of corporational. Things are more complicated, Netflix made it more complicated, then HBO/Sky, Disney+, Amazon came and it's all nightmare again. Geolocking, lack of standardised translation service, very different pricing models per country. From all services I use or hear about, Steam is still the best value per money. Steam is 18 years old this year.
mannerheim 5y ago
Netflix offering different movies to different countries is going to be inevitable with the protectionist legal landscape that's shoring up. Even if they own 100% of their content, it won't be tenable. The EU is requiring 30% of the content from streaming services to be from Europe. France requires 60%. They're discussing not counting UK films as part of this. It's certainly easier to geolock content than to produce extra content, but even if Netflix et al. produce more content, what happens if/when other countries follow suit? The Canadian senate may have killed Bill C-10 for now, but Trudeau still seems likely to win in the fall, so there's a good chance it still passes in the next couple of years. So France requires 60% in the EU, Canada requires 30% in Canada, and what happens if other countries get in the game? If those percentages add up to over 100%, there is no possible way to make all your content available in all countries, no matter how much content you produce in these countries. Geolocking is the only possibility.
CRConrad 5y ago
> grew up in Eastern Europe in the early 2000s ... it was infuriating waiting for movies to come to theaters months behind the rest of the world. "Months"... Muahahaha! Sheesh, kids nowadays: Spoiled rotten, but don't even know it, so think they have something to whine about. In my youth -- in a Western European country -- it was years.

bserge 5y ago

Think of entertainment as a hard drug (most of it actually is). And the distribuitors are the dealers. Some will be friendly or make deals with each other, others will keep everyone else off their turf or go to war.

croes 5y ago

The internet is only a medium. It's just used by businesses and businesses are all about profit. Businesses want to be able to choose where they produce and where they pay taxes, but customers should be able to choose where they buy their goods. If you hear the term "free market" it's always about the companies not about the customer.

Boulth6 5y ago

> The Internet never delivered on its promise. The commercial internet never did. Don't forget about Torrents and lib gen rus. They're part of the internet too. > The fact that e.g. Netflix offers different movies for every country is something that honestly does not make any sense yet everyone accepts it. People "accept" it because it's convenient and they are not aware that there are other options. How would you suggest people reject it?

beardyw 5y ago
I got so many searches which said old film was on Netflix which turned into "not here mate" I unsubscribed. That's how.
taneq 5y ago
> The commercial internet never did. Don't forget about Torrents [...] When you see the internet's "promise" as providing unlimited free content, it's a bit hard for the commercial internet to meet that expectation.
- Asooka 5y ago
  The promise isn't for the content to be free, but for access to be unrestricted. I want to pay money and get a DRM-free file. Bandcamp delivers on that promise, so that's the only place I buy music from. Media you get via torrent is of higher quality and more useful than the DRM-encumbered media you get by paying. If you are even allowed to pay for it in the first place, that is.
  - nyuszika7h 5y ago
    Purchased (not streaming) music has been DRM-free for ages even on iTunes and other major platforms. But most other content like movies and TV shows isn't.
    - Liskni_si 5y ago
      What other major platforms still sell music though? Since Google Play Music's demise, I haven't been able to find a single one selling music in my region (Czech Republic).
- nextaccountic 5y ago
  People said the same thing about open source software. And yet here we are.

iso1210 5y ago

As someone who grew up in the UK in the late 90s, with a taste for American media, especially scifi, and the Internet a widespread thing, it was infuriating waiting for TV shows to come to the screen months or even years behind the rest of the world. I do remember one site that allowed me to do download SG1 episodes (about 128kbit, and this was probably cinepak or some form of mpeg1 compression) over a modem, and that was a lifeline. When I got to Uni in Oct 2000, I could use BitchX/IRC on the lab irix machine to use a massive 10 MEGA bit connection to get voyager episodes. Compared with downloading on a 33.6kbit connection over a phone line that cost at least £2.40 (about $5-6 in today's money) that was an amazing experience. Even recently they decided not to bother releasing Lower Decks internationally. Had to get a Bittorrent client to watch it. That's not the case with things like Discovery and Picard which were released pretty much simultaneously. If a media company won't sell me what I want to watch, I'll go elsewhere. I paid $6 to my phone company to get a shocking quality copy of Voyager. For me, Piracy is not trying to avoid paying for it, it's about trying to get it. They've mostly cottoned on to the fact it's a global market now at least.

2Gkashmiri 5y ago
in india, piracy is not seen as bad unless its some bigshot movie star who calls it a "heinous crime" that a user enjoys their movies and they arent getting paid. anyways, i have never paid for a windows license. maybe back in 98 days but never after that. we use cracks and it used to be sold for a dollar or less. get an iso, copy iso, copy crack and thats it. people here have a problem accepting foss because they see windows as free so what benefit is switching to ubuntu? about media. until few years ago, you could only watch movies in theaters or on cable tv. shops would resell torrented movies for few cents a pop because that is at most what people were willing to pay. i am not going to buy an original DVD 6 months after launch for $ 30 if i get screener for $0.2 dollars next day of launch. its not about "robbing" the company, often purchasing parity means $10 is a days manual labour wages. paying $99 for a windows license used to make no sense when they already paid not more than $200-300 for an entire setup or a laptop.
- magicloop 5y ago
  In those days Microsoft had a "curious" business strategy. They wanted Windows to be the dominant standard whilst trying to avoid monopoly litigation. So they'd charge everyone a license fee knowing that standard businesses would pay up, and those that wouldn't or couldn't were allowed to crack the software and use it. That portion of the market, the "piracy" sector wasn't in their view part of their market share numbers (they would say they weren't a monopoly). But having this in place meant it was harder for competitors to sub-divide the market into other Operating Systems and Enterprise productivity software. So it would end up as either Open Source or Windows. This is why they didn't reduce their prices for purchasing power parity purposes (to make it equally affordable in each market). The rich countries could drive their profits, and everyone else had a "free" ride just to shut the door on a competitor. Of course, the history of Microsoft and Anti-trust litigation is well documented. Things didn't entirely work out for them.

stavros 5y ago

> The Internet never delivered on its promise. The internet is what brought you piracy.

UI_at_80x24 5y ago
>> The Internet never delivered on its promise. >The internet is what brought you piracy. The BBS's I visited in 1986 might disagree with you.
- Symbiote 5y ago
  The guy with a suitcase of tapes would also disagree, but the Internet enabled a huge increase in scale.
- nine_k 5y ago
  While I see what you mean, a BBS was an inherently local thing, unless you fancied paying long-distance fees even if a distant BBS would accept LD calls at all. That might be acceptable for important texts and other very compact formats (small pictures, MIDI tracks), but for pirating music, let alone video, it was out of question.
  - zorked 5y ago
    The problem there is just technological: the problem with movies and video was the unavailability of good enough codecs/large enough media+bandwidth. Otherwise BBS would have been a hell of a party for those too. For software my local BBSs, very very far from any rich country, somehow managed to get every major software release a few days before launch day. Yes, before. It was all one huge global network already, just a bit asynchronous.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  The BBB's from 1986 didn't bring piracy to this person in the 2000's. Internet did.
- dariosalvi78 5y ago
  people selling pirate movies and music on the street (pretty common in Italy at least) may disagree

kome 5y ago

"Once I simply changed my home address to some random location in New York I suddenly had access to hundreds of thousands more titles. The Internet never delivered on its promise." You hate the market, not the internet.

johnchristopher 5y ago

> The fact that e.g. Netflix offers different movies for every country is something that honestly does not make any sense yet everyone accepts it. It does make sense when you know distributors still have to strike deals with cable TV operators. > When I got my first Kindle 12 years ago my Amazon account was registered with my local European address so the books available in store were all complete trash romance pulp novels. Once I simply changed my home address to some random location in New York I suddenly had access to hundreds of thousands more titles. The Internet never delivered on its promise. At least it did since you have access to the books you want.

wccrawford 5y ago

At least you get them eventually! Imagine never getting them. I've been studying Japanese for about 15 years. Japanese media almost never comes to the US, and if it does, it's usually dubbed. Anything that isn't dubbed is forced subtitled. The one exception is anime, but even that has no JP subs. The best you can do is JP audio and no subs. But if I buy media from Japan (at a huge markup over their already-insane media prices) I can get JP audio and subs. And this is pretty much true for all foreign video, except certain British shows like Doctor Who. Even a lot of Canada-specific shows don't make it here (Canada's Worst Driver), though there are a lot of shows/movies produced in Canada with the US in mind from the start. It's ridiculous. Sell digital goods to anyone willing to buy them. Period.

salamandersauce 5y ago
Netflix is pretty great for this. Most of the Japanese stuff they have has both Japanese audio and subtitles even outside Japan. It's pretty anime heavy though. Rakuten Viki has some too but it's done by fans and not always complete!
- fomine3 5y ago
  I watch anime in Netflix Japan. I can confirm that there are many new anime without any sub/dub except Japanese, maybe because those anime won't get enough enjoyable foreign watchers (except weebs).
  - nvarsj 5y ago
    As someone that follows seasonal anime, I'm surprised how little isn't subbed. I haven't found a single thing yet which didn't have subs. Every popular show is subbed by crunchyroll/funimation, and less popular things (like Godzilla S.P. in the last season, stuck in Netflix jail) had fansubs.
haunter 5y ago
At least there is now a dedicated japanese media torrent tracker and a lot of anime and tokusatsu have JP subtitles

bamboozled 5y ago

In hindsight, it seems like the fight against piracy, was really an effort to make it harder to access certain types of information and have people funneled to certain sources. The fact that it used to be easy to access all kinds of useful data, and now you can't isn't an accident, The Internet is still the same, the governance around it isn't. People believe they have access to free thought, speech and completely objective information. Really though, your world view became limited, bias, censored, crafted and curated. People who truly hold alternative views are often banned from the few places left Joe Sixpack would try find important, unbiased, real (sometimes controversial) information. The Internet was real freedom for a brief while, and it was fucking great!

fao_ 5y ago
> People believe they have access to free thought, speech and completely objective information. Really though, your world view became limited, bias, censored, crafted and curated. Objective information is still there (google scholar, etc.) but what the last two decades have shown is that people do not have the training or the time in the day to read it. So you get people reading websites like Natural News (which while it sources scientific material, the actual article about it does not represent anything that's stated in the paper, and often states the exact opposite of what the paper claims), and getting drawn into it. Next thing you know, they're anti-vaxxers who believe that Bill Gates himself is putting microchips in their body as some kind of obscure cartoon-villain hive-mind scheme (I have literally seen this happen to multiple people around me, and it is just utterly depressing). > People who truly hold alternative views are often banned from the few places left Joe Sixpack would try find important, unbiased, real (sometimes controversial) information. IDK man, Alex Jones is raking in millions and he's said some downright ludicrous bullshit. Naziism and racism as a whole seems to be 'in-vogue' (Look at Joe Cox's killer and the whole UKIP thing). Alternative views seem to suck-ass aside from some transhumanism ones -- but even they are all "Torturing a guy for 60 years is ok if it stops dust specks getting into an impossibly large number of human eyes". Probably the best thing I ever did was find out I was trans -- since then I've met a lot of absolute geniuses. People like Micah Elizabeth Scott who have several contributions to "Proof of Concept or GTFO" that make people say "woah what the fuck!!!", one woman who made an antenna cane (A mobility aid that can also pick up WiFi from a distance), people taking photography and music to whole new places -- bona fide synthesizer witches and code sorcerers who perform stunning feats of artistry, and thousands of people biohacking their endocrine system based off the latest available scientific information, simply to get boobs and cure themselves of gender dysphoria. Now that's a REAL alternative movement / counterculture.

fnord123 5y ago

>The fact that e.g. Netflix offers different movies for every country is something that honestly does not make any sense yet everyone accepts it. Do they accept it?

ipaddr 5y ago
I do. It makes sense. Sell rights regionally so you get the highest price available in each location. The US will pay billions more for the olympics than Malta but they both watch the same events. That allows Netflix India to sell netflix for a dollar and charge 15 for Americans.
- shaan7 5y ago
  And that is why pretty much any American movie you want to watch is not available on Netflix India :P
- fnord123 5y ago
  I'm sure there's a diversity of opinion. But for many people if it's not on the streaming service(s) they decided to pay for, they will just pirate it. Especially HBO Max which has top tier content but don't exist in most locations. >The US will pay billions more for the olympics than Malta but they both watch the same events. I can't let this tangent go even if it's not either of our points... The Olympic coverage in the US is infamous worldwide for being absolutely terrible. And being a live event it's harder to pirate using magnet links.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    I'm a big fan of piracy. The more taking part the better the torrent strength. My comment was in terms of rights holders. I could see why they would want that. Netflix is caught in the middle.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
Like with most things related to technology, they have no choice :). People can only choose from what's available on the market.

Nitrolo 5y ago

Growing up in Italy around the same time my experience was very similar, movies would come out weeks or months later, and access to english media wasn't great until fairly recently. Piracy and torrents were amazing though. We could find any movie no matter how obscure, as well as books, comics and all kinds of stuff (my uncle gifted me a kobo e-reader many years ago, it was amazing and I loved it). I basically learned English that way, and I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that that's the most important skill I have. So much access to information, travel, and relationships to other people just would not have been possible if I didn't speak English well. In a way piracy has improved my life tremendously, while not really hurting anybody (as if a kid in Italy without any money would have been able to buy all those movies even at a 90% discount).

dariosalvi78 5y ago

I have Netflix and Amazon prime in Sweden, but still need to get pirate content if I want to watch it in Italian (my mother language). It's not the Internet, it's copyright that has failed us.

ekianjo 5y ago

> The Internet never delivered on its promise. Only if you look at the commercial offering.

raspyberr 5y ago

Piracy allows us to live in the year 2100.

VoodooJuJu 5y ago

Reminds me of something similar. My local library loans out ebooks, which are loaned out, reserved, and returned just like physical books. An ebook someone wanted had all its "copies" checked out, and there was a long wait list. But the physical book was available, so they just went with that instead. We have the means to sidestep these physical impediments, yet we just recreate them digitally. And in the case above, the physical actually turned out to be the solution to the digital impediment. It's just too funny. The greatest barriers in this world aren't technological - they're social, economic, and political; always have been. Just another reminder that we're living in clown world.

blooalien 5y ago
So much truth to your entire comment!

lutoma 5y ago

And then even if you do pay, and the show you want is available on one of the services you're subscribed to, you often get a worse experience than with a torrent. I have a 4k screen, but Netflix's DRM only allows 4K in Microsoft Edge, on Linux I'm stuck with 720p which looks awful on that screen. Amazon Prime Video has ads (for their other shows, but still) and an awful user interface, and so on. I find it incomprehensible why Netflix still does that since clearly it does nothing to prevent piracy: Every new Netflix show is instantly available as 4K torrent.

MiddleEndian 5y ago
>I find it incomprehensible why Netflix still does that since clearly it does nothing to prevent piracy: Every new Netflix show is instantly available as 4K torrent. I assume they are appeasing technically illiterate movie execs or something similar.

mewpmewp2 5y ago

I would easily pay 50eur/month if it meant I could easily select any movie or tv show I wanted as it's released. Right now there doesn't seem to be such experience provided anywhere and my Netflix subscription is basically running without me using it, because I rarely find anything worth watching where I live. So if I want to watch something I really want to watch I have no choice, but to select the piracy approach.

strictfp 5y ago
Agree. The movie industry hasn't been disrupted in the same way that Spotify disrupted music distribution. The same balkanization used to happen with music licenses. Spotify disrupted that by simply pirating and offering the record companies a piece of the cake after the fact. Someone would need to pull something similar with the movie industry.

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ta1234567890 5y ago

> When I got my first Kindle 12 years ago my Amazon account was registered with my local European address so the books available in store were all complete trash romance pulp novels. Once I simply changed my home address to some random location in New York I suddenly had access to hundreds of thousands more titles. The Internet never delivered on its promise. Sometimes I’ll gift a kindle book to someone and then they’ll message me back saying that Amazon won’t let them claim the book, giving them an error message about it not being available in their country. They can’t redeem it for anything else, so then I have to go talk to support and ask for a refund of the gift.

Siira 5y ago
Why do you bother in the first place? Books are the easiest to pirate. Email the author to open a Patreon or sth, and pay them directly.

grishka 5y ago

In Russia, piracy is still the default option for most people. It's literally easier to torrent something than to bother with Netflix or other streaming services. Like, you pay money and get a worse result, because there's DRM and other licensing-related restrictions — why in your right mind would you even consider that? Some people do use Netflix though because they tell themselves "law is law" or "the creators need to be paid" or something similar. And all those news of people's "bought" content disappearing, or accounts getting banned without a way to appeal, aren't exactly doing any good to the "legal" entertainment services either.

dmitriid 5y ago
Not just Russia. With every content owner building their own walled gardens piracy will be on the rise again everywhere.

agilob 5y ago

Nothing has been solved because of corporational. Things are more complicated, Netflix made it more complicated, then HBO/Sky, Disney+, Amazon came and it's all nightmare again. Geolocking, lack of standardised translation service, very different pricing models per country. From all services I use or hear about, Steam is still the best value per money. Steam is 18 years old this year.

mannerheim 5y ago

Netflix offering different movies to different countries is going to be inevitable with the protectionist legal landscape that's shoring up. Even if they own 100% of their content, it won't be tenable. The EU is requiring 30% of the content from streaming services to be from Europe. France requires 60%. They're discussing not counting UK films as part of this. It's certainly easier to geolock content than to produce extra content, but even if Netflix et al. produce more content, what happens if/when other countries follow suit? The Canadian senate may have killed Bill C-10 for now, but Trudeau still seems likely to win in the fall, so there's a good chance it still passes in the next couple of years. So France requires 60% in the EU, Canada requires 30% in Canada, and what happens if other countries get in the game? If those percentages add up to over 100%, there is no possible way to make all your content available in all countries, no matter how much content you produce in these countries. Geolocking is the only possibility.

CRConrad 5y ago

> grew up in Eastern Europe in the early 2000s ... it was infuriating waiting for movies to come to theaters months behind the rest of the world. "Months"... Muahahaha! Sheesh, kids nowadays: Spoiled rotten, but don't even know it, so think they have something to whine about. In my youth -- in a Western European country -- it was years.