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The big takeaway (for me) from this article is that streaming services are actively removing shows from their archives to save on residual payments. So it's no

• b3nji 4y ago
  Sadly, piracy.
  • reset-password 4y ago
    I'd argue that it isn't sad but in fact quite wonderful that piracy is an option. These companies don't deserve our sympathies. They are doing it to themselves.
    • falcolas 4y ago
      > These companies don't deserve our sympathies. No, but then neither do we deserve to watch their shows. Just as they have no inherit right to our money, we have no inherit right to their product.
      • bentley 4y ago
        In a sense, I agree with you. But in another sense, I think it’s important to remember that copyright is a restriction on people’s behavior that does not naturally exist, but has been created by law. It’s easier to see the moral case for this if we think about cases other than the simple “pirating” of a show. For example, preservation. Doctor Who is a popular show that predates the practice of saving the original tapes. There are several episodes that have been lost forever because the BBC did not routinely record (or did routinely record over) their own broadcasts. Many other episodes were thought to be lost, but thanks to enterprising individuals who made unauthorized copies, have since been preserved. Is the world worse off or better off with those people? Or take Star Wars. George Lucas famously hated that anyone could prefer the pre‐Special Editions of the original trilogy, and only grudgingly allowed it to be released once afterward, in a highly compressed anamorphic format on one set of DVDs. No other version has been released since. People who like the original special effects, dialogue, and editing have since done 4k scans of original theater prints from the 70s and 80s. People don’t deserve to be able to watch copies of those—legally speaking, the copyright holder Lucas (and now Disney) is the arbiter of that. But would a world without the option be better than our world today? And remember, laws are capricious. The movie industry was terrified of home video. They thought it would materially damage them by removing the desire to watch movies in theater, where they made their money. (Remember MPAA president Jack Valenti testifying before Congress? “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”) The VCR came within one vote of being outlawed as a piracy tool by the Supreme Court. A 5–4 decision. Because it survived, though, the people received a huge benefit from the new capabilities (like time shifting and media shifting) provided by this technology. And the movie industry benefited too, earning billions of dollars by embracing this new market… after they had tried to murder it in its crib. How would today’s world look if one justice had voted the other way?
        • falcolas 4y ago
          > But in another sense, I think it’s important to remember that copyright is a restriction on people’s behavior that does not naturally exist, but has been created by law. So is physical property ownership. Someone not walking up to your car and taking it from you at the end of a shotgun is a restriction placed on everyone by law. The only natural right you have to your car is whether you can keep it from everyone else by sheer force. And yes, just like piracy, people can still break the law and take your car regardless. But you at least have the force of the state on your side. Possession grants no "natural" rights by itself.
          • drewcoo 4y ago
            > So is physical property ownership. Someone not walking up to your car and taking it from you at the end of a shotgun is a restriction placed on everyone by law. The only natural right you have to your car is whether you can keep it from everyone else by sheer force. Good point. Property implies violence. Point for the pirates, I mean.
        • joe463369 4y ago
          These are interesting points, and worth making. But it's quite clear that the most pirated films/Tv programmes are the ones that have recently been released and are freely available if you're willing to pay.
• etrautmann 4y ago
  I think you nailed it at the end. This likely will send people back to piracy
  • lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Or maybe they spend their time watching TikTok or playing video games or any of the other multitude of options.
    • TeMPOraL 4y ago
      TikTok and other social media need to be fed culture to have something to work with. Enough people watching current TV shows is what allows TikTok riffs and commentary to get popular in the first place. Case in point, AFAIK the most recent craze on TikTok (and subsequently, on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, as these days they're downstream from TikTok and just rehashing or commenting on it) is "Wednesday dance" and other memes related to the new Addams family show on Netflix.
• AmVess 4y ago
  Services trimming their libraries will certainly become more commonplace as they seek to cut costs and drive up profits. This will remove a giant reason to subscribe to them in the first place. Compound this with ever more streaming services, and it is an easy bet people will turn back to piracy. In this case, I think it is an ease of access issue vs a cost issue. Having 3-4 streaming subs is still vastly cheaper than cable, but when shows start vanishing and libraries become smaller and smaller or filled with junk, people will look to alternatives. These days, VPN's are cheap and it has never been easier or better to set up a media streaming app in your own home. I've seen one that automatically downloads shows and movies with no input from the user. That is the type of ease of use coupled with the notion that content will always be available is likely to be a draw for a lot of people.
• synu 4y ago
  This may not work for everyone, but I’m quite happy again with dvds so I can watch what I want when I like.
  • AntoniusBlock 4y ago
    But then you'd be stuck with 480p quality media.
    • mr90210 4y ago
      When somebody these days mentions DVD, you can count Blu-ray as well.
      • 7jjjjjjj 4y ago
        Which is stupid. I'm not paying a premium price for a deliberately crappified version of a film.
        • germinalphrase 4y ago
          What’s ‘crapified’ about Blu-Ray? I’ve watched Blu-ray at (small) theater scale, and it held up remarkably well.
    • danaris 4y ago
      Oh no—the horror! Not 480p! I know some people swear they can never go back to anything less after watching one 4K show, but I, for one, have no problem watching lower-quality media when there's no convenient way to get a high-quality version. Some of us lived through the RealPlayer era.
      • AntoniusBlock 4y ago
        When there's no other way, I'd agree with you. I personally can't watch low quality videos because it strains my already very poor eyesight (even with prescription glasses on). HD videos have a kind of soothing affect on my eyes.
• jasode 4y ago
  >That or this will just send everyone back to piracy. I understand you're using "everyone" in a rhetorical sense but just to level-set about the real difficulties of piracy for non-techie viewers: - downloading videos via bittorrent or visiting dubious warez websites of illegal videos with the risks of javascript popup malware - downloaded videos (e.g. .mkv files) not easily playable on smartphones, tablets, or TVs that have the built-in "smart os" such as Android TV and Amazon Fire Stick. A lot of viewers don't have media computers or laptops hooked up to TVs to take advantage of downloaded pirated videos. Even fewer will set up a DLNA media server so that their tablets can stream self-hosted videos. This leaves only the computer-literate geeks as the group that can substitute paid streaming with piracy. This small subset is irrelevant to streaming companies. For everyone else, they just pick 1 or 2 streaming subscriptions (e.g. Disney+ for the kids and HBO MAX for the adults) -- and just live with the fact that their choices of shows are more limited and the existing ones may even disappear. So "everyone" switching to piracy is a really small group of people.
  • danaris 4y ago
    I dunno. During the earlier age of piracy (before the described "golden age"), I was seeing talk from a lot of less-computer-literate people who were doing just fine with pirating shows. More recently, there's even a new kind of piracy that has arisen: pirate streaming websites, where you just go and watch whatever shows in the browser, and as long as you have a decent adblock, you proooobably won't get a nasty virus. Where there's a will, there's a way, and there's a lot of will among younger people who aren't already indoctrinated into the idea that we must accept what shows our corporate overlords give us.
    • maccard 4y ago
      >pirate streaming websites, where you just go and watch whatever shows in the browser, and as long as you have a decent adblock, you proooobably won't get a nasty virus. These existed a decade ago too, yo be fair. In reference to the computer literate part of your comment, my parents aren't tech savvy at all, and probably never pirated a movie in their lives until some guy came along with a £200 android TV box that just worked last year. > there's a lot of will among younger people who aren't already indoctrinated into the idea that we must accept what shows our corporate overlords give us. This sort of dismissal of "it's the young people" and talking about "corporate overlords" having some kind of magical control is getting tiring here. It's not a meaningful discussion, it's just navel gazing.
• wellpast 4y ago
  Can/Should writers, actors, etc unions contractually obligate availability? Seems shitty for HBO to drop content just to avoid having to pay residuals.
  • Mountain_Skies 4y ago
    Or tie it to copyright law. Products that aren't readily available lose their copyright protections so others can make that content available to the people. Actually writing the law in such a way that doesn't enable the media companies to come up with some sort of malicious compliance, like requiring a VPN to Nepal and a payment of $10,000 for each episode of an show, would be challenging but since many of these tricks are already known from the music industry, the most common ones could be addressed. Problem is that the media companies have multiple branches of government in their pocket so such a solution will always be theoretical.
  • Mindwipe 4y ago
    Could they ask? Sure. Will they? No. Given the obvious counter from a studio is "sure, but we won't pay any residuals on that given we can't commit to a blank cheque for seventy years. And you'll have to be liable for the music rights."
• j1elo 4y ago
  > the loss of access to existing shows For a moment, Netflix was so great because they had "all" the stuff! (not all, but a lot of good stuff). Now every company and their mother are retiring their contents so they can have their own smaller subscription service. I have a couple of them, and that's my limit on all these companies' greed; for anything else that happens to not be available, I feel no issue with appealing to Jack Sparrow. Problem with piracy, torrent at least, is that finding older stuff tends to be difficult. But that's exactly the kind of contents companies are removing, so there would be not much to gain by going with them.