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It seems that "Piracy is a service problem" is still not in people minds. Steam already proved that. Spotify already proved that. The netflix of 7 years ago

It seems that "Piracy is a service problem" is still not in people minds. Steam already proved that. Spotify already proved that. The netflix of 7 years ago proved that. Best sellers such as witcher3 that had no DRM what so ever also proved that. It's not about long tails or any other argument, it's much simpler than that. People are willing to pay for a decent service, people are unwillingly to have extra work. A Pirate website is never going to be more accessible than an official one always because of funding to do proper UX, so, even if all kinds of DRM were forbidden, actual legal services would always have the upper hand, and the better their service the less of a need for piracy. When steam started getting traction, PC piracy plummeted. When spotify became available, same thing happenned for music. When each film studio didn't have its own streaming service, the piracy was falling. Witcher 3 was a best seller on PC (and this is an AAA game, not a 5$ indie) when you could just copy paste your friends installer instead of buying. Everything is so goddam simple, provide good service, good value, and only people that don't actually have the budget to buy your stuff will pirate. Piracy is like union strikes, yes they are annoying and bring profits down, and it's bullshit that I have to wait 5 hours for a train because of a strike. But it is a necessary mechanism of power balance. > If people can trivially access content 'for free' they generally will do that. "trivially" is not so simple. what about app store access in every device? from tv boxes, phone to PC. what about shared settings, data etc between them? there is no success pirate story on that, only techies that have such hobie have something compared to an actual nice setup. It's the "why dropbox" comment. Pirates can't get enough money or legal ground to build something comparable to what a legal company can build. This means it's ok if it is forbidden to block bullshit practices like DRM and remote deletion, if you actually care for the customers, no pirate app/website can compete with you.

jasmer 3y ago
If there were no DRM at all, it'd be trivial to host content with a few ads and the UX would be just fine. Spotify only came to exist because of the massive piracy problems of MP3 - it was all available there for sale, but people wouldn't pay. Spotify just provides a model that will work in the age of privacy, aka 'next to zero pricing' aka 'ad supported unlimited streaming' which sucked the money out of the business. Consider if all films had to try the 'Spotify model' which is to say it's all free with a few ads, the industry would be wiped out. This is 100% about a game of laws, DRM, 'accessibility' and price. 'Piracy' is absolutely unnecessary for the market to operate effectively, the evidence for that is all around you: physical goods can generally not be pirated! How does the 'economy' work for your Milk and Cereal producers? Just fine. "if you actually care for the customers, no pirate app/website can compete with you. " Again, a fallacy, Netflix provides a great service, they already face 'piracy' of people sharing logins, and if those movies were available at 'piratedmovies.com' without any IP laws etc. it'd be the #1 site the the world, bigger than Google, the UI would be irrelevant. You could make some arguments about broadcast TV, which is abysmal, and the ultra high prices for sports these days when some people just want to watch a game or two, but for most media it's very simple: people don't want to pay.
- tm-guimaraes 3y ago
  Netflix UX has been falling year after year. Netflix is extremely profitable, its stock price droppings are due to our current system of expecting never ending growth, not on business model sanity. It is way more threatened by having to produce its own content, or its new found shitty business practices (that tend to pile up) than account sharing. > Consider if all films had to try the 'Spotify model' which is to say it's all free with a few ads, the industry would be wiped out. or maybe not. Why would it? Blockbusters/Pop would survive because merchandise pays much more than tickets, it could even be better for them. More alternative stuff always had to deal with less funding, and limitations are what brings art forward. > if those movies were available at 'piratedmovies.com' without any IP laws the bad pirate bay still has an enormous catalog. And i never mentioned any ablishment of IP laws, just new laws to forbit DRM and its equivalents of restricting usage. I'm okish with mass sharing websites being forbidden, I'm not ok with a random joe not being able to share with his friends or have local copies. Or because of some stupid DRM, gets his SDD worn out, or not getting full quality on certain un"protected" OS/browser/cable. > people don't want to pay People pay for actual convenience, always did, always will. If you can't provide better service that a random project that can't even get funds legally, what does it tell about your business? Checkout icloud, plenty of profits, but you could just have your 2TB network disk at home, much cheaper overall, dropbox proved the concept, it just lacked integration, and it all rests on one thing: convinience. > physical goods can generally not be pirated! How does the 'economy' work for your Milk and Cereal producers? Just fine. it's about reproduction cost. digital goods are almost free to distribute in a small scale. > How does the 'economy' work for your Milk and Cereal producers? Just fine. So fine that without tax payers money they go broke. So fine that they have to destroy the goods to keep prices and subsidies where they want them. Nothing as cool as throwing away milk to not crash the market while getting subsidized to produce more milk. Food industry is the one most reliant on tax payer money and you dared to use it as an example. If media and entertainment are so goddamm important that you have to put so much effort protecting their ventures with DRM and lots of other bulshit, maybe just apply what we do with those "working economies": subsidize. Non violent civil disobedience vs abstract entities (ie corps, agencies, governments) is more than ok, most of the time is the only way, and power must be kept in check.
AngryData 3y ago
I completely agree it is a service problem. Many pirate streaming sites are way better than paid streaming. The site I watch anime on, besides having basically everything, has both dubs and subs for all their programs, auto plays the next episode without delay or prompting, allows you to auto skip intro and exit songs or press a button to do it if you don't want it done automatically, has a timer on on-going shows telling you when the next episode will arrive, links to any sequels, prequels, remakes, or spinoff shows, gives you all the basic info like when it originally aired, genres it belongs to, who produced it, etc., you can sort by multiple genres, multiple rating scores, views and favorites, has recommendations, even comments. Paid streaming sites are just often not that good, loading slower, harder to view and sort their full catalogues, and often lack anything but the most basic features.
- tm-guimaraes 3y ago
  an interesting data point, as that one of the few quality platforms is on a "niche" (if we call it that now) that is very badly serviced by the big streaming players.
morkalork 3y ago
I can go on Spotify right now and access music from long dead musicians from decades ago with absolutely no problem. The back catalog is huge. Where is that with streaming services? It's absolute a service problem.
- AA-BA-94-2A-56 3y ago
  Yep, Spotify, even at its current pricing of $12 USD is so much more convenient than using torrent websites to download music that it's a no-brainer to purchase it. Whereas even booting up Netflix, and trying to find something to watch in their limited catalogue (I am in Australia), is a lot more hassle than just typing what I want into a torrent site and downloading it.
Izkata 3y ago
> It's not about long tails or any other argument, it's much simpler than that. People are willing to pay for a decent service, people are unwillingly to have extra work. > When each film studio didn't have its own streaming service, the piracy was falling. On top of this, something my co-workers and I were talking about some time ago: We were all several times more likely to pay for something than we were to sign up for something free. Being able to just pay for something without having to create an account and a subscription - like how physical media works - would probably also help. The examples you listed are (were) all centralized places where the account creation is a one-time thing, and when streaming fractured into so many places that model broke. Now you need to sign up for each of them, which adds a lot to the friction.

jasmer 3y ago

If there were no DRM at all, it'd be trivial to host content with a few ads and the UX would be just fine. Spotify only came to exist because of the massive piracy problems of MP3 - it was all available there for sale, but people wouldn't pay. Spotify just provides a model that will work in the age of privacy, aka 'next to zero pricing' aka 'ad supported unlimited streaming' which sucked the money out of the business. Consider if all films had to try the 'Spotify model' which is to say it's all free with a few ads, the industry would be wiped out. This is 100% about a game of laws, DRM, 'accessibility' and price. 'Piracy' is absolutely unnecessary for the market to operate effectively, the evidence for that is all around you: physical goods can generally not be pirated! How does the 'economy' work for your Milk and Cereal producers? Just fine. "if you actually care for the customers, no pirate app/website can compete with you. " Again, a fallacy, Netflix provides a great service, they already face 'piracy' of people sharing logins, and if those movies were available at 'piratedmovies.com' without any IP laws etc. it'd be the #1 site the the world, bigger than Google, the UI would be irrelevant. You could make some arguments about broadcast TV, which is abysmal, and the ultra high prices for sports these days when some people just want to watch a game or two, but for most media it's very simple: people don't want to pay.

tm-guimaraes 3y ago
Netflix UX has been falling year after year. Netflix is extremely profitable, its stock price droppings are due to our current system of expecting never ending growth, not on business model sanity. It is way more threatened by having to produce its own content, or its new found shitty business practices (that tend to pile up) than account sharing. > Consider if all films had to try the 'Spotify model' which is to say it's all free with a few ads, the industry would be wiped out. or maybe not. Why would it? Blockbusters/Pop would survive because merchandise pays much more than tickets, it could even be better for them. More alternative stuff always had to deal with less funding, and limitations are what brings art forward. > if those movies were available at 'piratedmovies.com' without any IP laws the bad pirate bay still has an enormous catalog. And i never mentioned any ablishment of IP laws, just new laws to forbit DRM and its equivalents of restricting usage. I'm okish with mass sharing websites being forbidden, I'm not ok with a random joe not being able to share with his friends or have local copies. Or because of some stupid DRM, gets his SDD worn out, or not getting full quality on certain un"protected" OS/browser/cable. > people don't want to pay People pay for actual convenience, always did, always will. If you can't provide better service that a random project that can't even get funds legally, what does it tell about your business? Checkout icloud, plenty of profits, but you could just have your 2TB network disk at home, much cheaper overall, dropbox proved the concept, it just lacked integration, and it all rests on one thing: convinience. > physical goods can generally not be pirated! How does the 'economy' work for your Milk and Cereal producers? Just fine. it's about reproduction cost. digital goods are almost free to distribute in a small scale. > How does the 'economy' work for your Milk and Cereal producers? Just fine. So fine that without tax payers money they go broke. So fine that they have to destroy the goods to keep prices and subsidies where they want them. Nothing as cool as throwing away milk to not crash the market while getting subsidized to produce more milk. Food industry is the one most reliant on tax payer money and you dared to use it as an example. If media and entertainment are so goddamm important that you have to put so much effort protecting their ventures with DRM and lots of other bulshit, maybe just apply what we do with those "working economies": subsidize. Non violent civil disobedience vs abstract entities (ie corps, agencies, governments) is more than ok, most of the time is the only way, and power must be kept in check.

AngryData 3y ago

I completely agree it is a service problem. Many pirate streaming sites are way better than paid streaming. The site I watch anime on, besides having basically everything, has both dubs and subs for all their programs, auto plays the next episode without delay or prompting, allows you to auto skip intro and exit songs or press a button to do it if you don't want it done automatically, has a timer on on-going shows telling you when the next episode will arrive, links to any sequels, prequels, remakes, or spinoff shows, gives you all the basic info like when it originally aired, genres it belongs to, who produced it, etc., you can sort by multiple genres, multiple rating scores, views and favorites, has recommendations, even comments. Paid streaming sites are just often not that good, loading slower, harder to view and sort their full catalogues, and often lack anything but the most basic features.

tm-guimaraes 3y ago
an interesting data point, as that one of the few quality platforms is on a "niche" (if we call it that now) that is very badly serviced by the big streaming players.

morkalork 3y ago

I can go on Spotify right now and access music from long dead musicians from decades ago with absolutely no problem. The back catalog is huge. Where is that with streaming services? It's absolute a service problem.

AA-BA-94-2A-56 3y ago
Yep, Spotify, even at its current pricing of $12 USD is so much more convenient than using torrent websites to download music that it's a no-brainer to purchase it. Whereas even booting up Netflix, and trying to find something to watch in their limited catalogue (I am in Australia), is a lot more hassle than just typing what I want into a torrent site and downloading it.

Izkata 3y ago

> It's not about long tails or any other argument, it's much simpler than that. People are willing to pay for a decent service, people are unwillingly to have extra work. > When each film studio didn't have its own streaming service, the piracy was falling. On top of this, something my co-workers and I were talking about some time ago: We were all several times more likely to pay for something than we were to sign up for something free. Being able to just pay for something without having to create an account and a subscription - like how physical media works - would probably also help. The examples you listed are (were) all centralized places where the account creation is a one-time thing, and when streaming fractured into so many places that model broke. Now you need to sign up for each of them, which adds a lot to the friction.