7 ms·

The Pirates Are Back

34 points by grammers 3y ago

x3n0ph3n3 3y ago
We never left.
ttyprintk 3y ago
The top 10 countries for inflation and piracy have only a few outliers. https://dataprot.net/statistics/piracy-statistics/ https://dataprot.net/statistics/piracy-statistics/
stuaxo 3y ago
With streaming prices increasing and also fragmenting it's not suprising.
- sbarre 3y ago
  Yep, when everything was available on 1 or 2 services, of course everyone signed up.. Canceling your $200/month cable subscription (for hundreds of channels you didn't watch) in exchange for a few $20/month on-demand services was extremely attractive and was cheap enough that it competed with piracy for many people. All the big studios licensed their stuff to Netflix because that's where everyone was going, but that wasn't as profitable, and in the process they destroyed the rest of their channel-by-channel and appointment TV business without really thinking about sustainability for the workforce in the long term. Then the big media companies wanted those profits back, so they started fragmenting into multiple streaming services as their Netflix deals expired, and now we're back to $200/month to get all the shows. But the workforce isn't seeing any of that money this time around due to the lack of streaming covering in the contracts, which is what led to the current strikes. It's a tricky problem for that industry: I suspect I'm not alone in wanting to see creators and working class people get paid for their work, but also not willing to go back to the old system of having to over-pay for a ton of content I don't want just to get the fraction of content I do want because it's spread across a ton of different "channels" that all need to be paid for separately.
amiga-workbench 3y ago
The UX of a single torrent tracker is better than needing umpteen streaming services. No brainer.
- tjpnz 3y ago
  As is the customer support you'll receive on many private trackers - even the free ones.
- grujicd 3y ago
  Not only that, but you can play pirated media files on any device, with highly customizable media players, without active internet, and with community based subtitles. Most streaming service provide subtitles to only handful of languages. And you can get surround sound on a PC which is afaik still not available when you watch using official browser based players. For some of these reasons I still reach for khm khm "downloadable" content even if it's available on services I'm paying.
II2II 3y ago
While the article suggests the increase is due to external pressures (e.g. inflation meaning that people have less to spend on entertainment), something that I've noticed over the past couple of years in my neck of the woods is an increase in the cost of streaming services. When you throw in the proliferation of streaming services with exclusive content, which has been happening for several years, I'm not terribly surprised that people would be trying to cut costs.
franciscop 3y ago
This is an "antivirus software" company article, thus using language to spread fear, the infamous FUD. There's many issues in the article so I flagged it, to name few: > "stealing digital content" Most of the definitions for "steal" involve the word "property" in the way that you deprive the owner of their property. When someone steals something, the owner loses that exact thing. This is not true when copying digital content. Some studies have found that in some cases, piracy can even enhance legit sales, which makes this even fall apart further "he stole $10 from me so I ended up $50 richer" doesn't make any sense, does it? > "content that should be paid for." Who decides what content should be paid for? "Okay guys, you should all pay me for all my tweets. Oh and since you are technically 'downloading' them by reading them, pay up a fine" would def not fly, so this definition holds water. And even if we go to a more practical approach where we imagine copyright holders, international licensing deals, etc. are no problem at all (which they are), copyright law still varies greatly from country to country for different reasons, for example in most countries you can copy a small part of whatever content you want for educational purposes (not-profit), or e.g. critique, even if the author or copyright owner vehemently oppose it.
tjpnz 3y ago
Piracy is almost always a service problem.
- Hamuko 3y ago
  I'd love to see a breakdown of what aspects of piracy are increasing. TV shows, movies, video games, music. Are all of these being pirated more now than previously, or just some? Because the business models for them are very different.
pgeorgi 3y ago
Not a single word about the proliferation of official services recently that makes it harder to access content because unless you're signed on with all of them (which gets expensive fast) you're missing out on _something_ while still paying dearly for the privilege. DVDs don't require a monthly payment to remain accessible, and there's no executive who can decide on a whim to deny access even when paying. Nobody cares that the season 1 DVDs come from studio A, while season 2-4 DVDs are from studio B. They can be shared or swapped with friends. Some DVDs are even available to loan at the public library for a modest annual membership fee (and we're members anyway because they also have gasp books!)
- Nursie 3y ago
  Yep, this is the primary reason I've considered it again. So I have Prime (which is kinda/sorta effectively free to me because I pay for it for the delivery service), Netflix, Disney (I like Star Wars and Marvel), we sometimes subscribe to Apple. Then over here in Aus there's also Stan and Binge, who have some of the tv content we want. This is already a far cry from what Netflix used to be - the place to go to for most stuff. It's also a far cry from the music situation, where I can pick my streaming service (I use Deezer) and more or less have the same catalogue available whichever one I pick. (I know, none of them pay artists very well, I also buy CDs and t-shirts.) And now on top of this, the various studios are trying to get me to subscribe to their offerings, either as standalones or as add-ons to Prime - AMC, Paramount etc, so I can get their one flagship show on there. How about no? This is getting more expensive than the old cable and satellite packages that streaming was supposed to replace, and they're putting prices up at the moment. And that's before we get into stuff that's not available on any service legally here. That show you like? Yeah we're only going to give you access to the first few seasons, even though there have been five more seasons made. Why won't you let me pay? So yeah, piracy is quite appealing, especially when I can go to yandex.com, type "Stream <movie>" or "Stream <show>" and I'll be taken to a site where I can watch it immediately. Maybe it's not always the best quality stream, but the pirate bay still seems to be up too.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    >This is getting more expensive than the old cable and satellite packages that streaming was supposed to replace, and they're putting prices up at the moment. Definitely not in the US. People were paying minimum $100 per month for a fraction of the content, not inflation adjusted, not on demand, not on nearly any device anywhere, 15 years ago. Not to mention you can simply cancel and resubscribe so you only pay for one or two services per month, an option that was never available before. Apple: $10 Netflix: $23 Amazon: $9 WarnerBros Discovery: $20 Disney: $20 Comcast: $12 Paramount: $12 The only one missing is Sony, but I don’t think they offer streaming. $106/month gets an individual on demand access to almost everything except sports, without advertising breaks. Family sharing would make it much cheaper. Either way, I would take this situation over having to pay Comcast/DirecTV/Dish Network/Verizon to be a middleman any day.
manicennui 3y ago
"The emergence of streaming services like Netflix, Apple Music and Spotify make it easy to access unlimited content – and ensure that artists are paid for their creations." That's laughable.
- tjpnz 3y ago
  The residuals earned from streaming tell an entirely different story.
- politelemon 3y ago
  And also completely misunderstands or ignores that they are part of the problem.
Obscurity4340 3y ago
Boys are back in town
- FergusArgyll 3y ago
  "Take what you can --
  - Obscurity4340 3y ago
    Wats this reference?
    - FergusArgyll 3y ago
      https://pirates.fandom.com/wiki/Take_what_you_can,_give_nothing_back https://pirates.fandom.com/wiki/Take_what_you_can,_give_noth...
buro9 3y ago
> There are two main problems with digital piracy. First, it robs the creator of their income. It’s not just big companies who suffer – the people working behind the scenes lose out too. Whilst this is true, we've spent the last decade hearing how the intermediaries (streaming services) and media companies continually screw over artists. It is more true to say any drop in revenue due to any alternative way to consume media (of which piracy is just one way) results in the _intermediaries_ seeing the biggest drop in revenue as they were the ones who took the most from the artists. Perhaps if labels and studios paid artists more their argument would resonate more with the fans who consume the art. The internet never did fully deliver on the dream to disintermediate the studios and labels, but there's always a hope that there's still time.
- II2II 3y ago
  > Perhaps if labels and studios paid artists more their argument would resonate more with the fans who consume the art. Granted, I'm probably an outlier here since I'm not a big consumer of the type of media they're talking about, but it seems like affordability and convenience would be much bigger factors. Keep in mind that people were doing things like sharing accounts even when streaming services were undergoing massive growth. It doesn't sound like they had much concern about artists or other people working behind the scenes.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  > it robs the creator of their income. Yawn... sounds like 1999, when the piracy was supposed to kill the music industry. It survived, and thrived just fine. So tired of seeing this bullshit.
  - jowea 3y ago
    Don't the artists now get a much bigger share of their income from shows? That's not really an option for the TV/Movie/Video media producers.
    - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      There was a time when many artists said "It’s OK if people download, as long as they come to the show and buy merch, where the money goes directly into our pockets." However, touring has become more expensive for bands. It is now common to hear of even fairly popular acts canceling a tour somewhere, just because they can’t make it work out financially. Add to this two years of restrictions on live performances under COVID in many countries and there was no obvious way for acts to generate a decent income.
loughnane 3y ago
My biggest beef with streaming services—-and I have a few—-is privacy. I know I’m in the minority here, but I just can’t accept someone keeping a record of everything I’ve ever watched, read, or listened to.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  It’s interesting how this has become a concern. In the MP3 era, pretty much every obsessive music fan I knew IRL was signed up to Last.fm and scrobbling (i.e. uploading a recording of listening) every track that was played on their MP3 player. You could then compare your listening to your friends’, meet new people in your town with the same tastes, etc. There were no concerns back then about privacy, because no companies had yet so clearly abused it. But considering how Last.fm has always struggled with monetizing the data it does get, even now the site sparks few concerns. (For those whose privacy concerns would prevent them from using Last.fm to keep track of their music listening over time, there is Libre.fm. However, all it is good for is keeping personal records, not socializing with many other listeners.)
  - demetrius 3y ago
    There is an important difference: with Last.fm, you choose what you share. If you want to listen to something one time, you could just open the same file in another player and that's it. With Spotify or Yandex.Music, however, everything is shared, and you can't use a different player.
  - politelemon 3y ago
    Your comment misses a fundamental point about privacy. Privacy is not about being hidden away, it's having control over your data. Last FM had a good set of privacy controls, in that users could send their tracks over and if memory serves, correct me, they could choose to socialise it.
    - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      Yes, that is one view of privacy. But on HN, privacy concerns are also about use of data for targeted advertising regardless of what controls are there. Last.fm’s heyday predates the modern ad tracking that creeps so many out.
papaver-somnamb 3y ago
> What is the problem? > There are two main problems with digital piracy. First, it robs the creator of their income. It’s not just big companies who suffer – the people working behind the scenes lose out too. How risible! Over the decades we have come to learn that those who pirate are those who are willing to expend their time and use their technical competence to consume media that they otherwise wouldn't pay for or cannot afford to begin with. Like younger folk. And the economically disadvantaged (George Carlin vocetto). A small % of the media corps' "attention base." It's just a rhetorical talking point in the service of effecting leverage for the incumbents, but does the average Joe know that? And what would change if they did? Now I'm falling into cynicism, albeit well founded ... Oh, let's go devil's advocate: And what of the societal consequences of the copyrighting of what is effectively a very large number (encoded media file IP). As though ideas can be owned.
AraceliHarker 3y ago
EUIPO concluded that there is an inverse correlation between the consumption of legal and pirated content. During the COVID-19 pandemic, legal content consumption increased and pirated content consumption decreased. This suggests that people who feel that the price is too high for a service they do not use for a long time are consuming TV shows and other content through illegal streaming or torrents.
fbrncci 3y ago
>The EUIPO speculates that financial pressures, like inflation, means that people have less money to spend on entertainment. This can be seen in the way that fewer people are signing up for Netflix or Amazon Prime – and some are even cancelling their subscriptions altogether. This does play a part, but I'd wager that a larger part of piracy becoming more attractive is these services becoming more expensive (I really doubt that in this case its inflation...), while they have less to offer. And that you now need accounts with multiple streaming services to watch all the popular shows. And then also a crack-down on account sharing started happening. It shouldn't come as a surprise that piracy is becoming popular again.
ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
Piracy and media hoarding are also about control or at least the lack of control of streaming services. So, here in the UK, we more or less have to pay the BBC license fee if we want to use a TV service, and so we pay for the BBC's programming and they put some of their stuff onto iPlayer (their streaming service). However, iPlayer often time limits programmes (30 days is common) and there's a lot of older stuff that isn't available on there, but is available on torrents or sometimes people upload old obscure stuff to YouTube. Once I've downloaded something away from the official BBC iPlayer service, I can keep it for as long as I like and it doesn't matter if it's obscure. With other streaming services, there's a focus on popularity and so less popular products either never get added or get removed. I worry that this is going to lead to the cultural disappearance of many older films and TV. That article is very poorly written or at least it just regurgitates the fallacies from the big media companies. Piracy is most definitely not "stealing" as copying doesn't deprive the owner of their copy. They just wish to impose artificial scarcity to increase their profits and to wield control over their customers e.g. region locking
- spicyjpeg 3y ago
  Lack of control and content constantly jumping to different services and/or disappearing due to licensing shenanigans certainly play a role, but the vast majority of people only watch the latest, most popular shows. The main factor at play here is simply that many people do not feel like they are getting their money's worth out of increasingly more expensive subscriptions to services from which they are only going to watch a handful of shows at best. During the pandemic, spending a few bucks on Netflix or Disney+ made sense if you had heaps of free time every day and could binge anything you wanted from their massive back catalogs. But the value proposition of $20 for a month of access to such catalogs changes when you only have an hour a day or less to dedicate to content consumption (and this is without taking into account price hikes, password sharing crackdowns and whatnot).
  - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
    Absolutely - most people are not interested in old horror films from the 1940s (I'm currently updating some of my horror collection to 1080p copies), and the streaming services definitely go for popular titles. As a long-time pirate, I'm encouraged to see the break-up of streaming services into different fiefdoms as it is enticing people back into piracy. I think that media companies (not just tv/film ones) have far too much power and influence over people and society, so I prefer to see them having to listen to their customers. I find the way that the big companies have bought their way into politics and legal areas to be very concerning (e.g. Sony Music vs Quad9). (In the interests of full disclosure, I also pirate and watch a lot of new popular stuff as well)
fullspectrumdev 3y ago
Not terribly surprising, given that you now need to subscribe to like 5-10 streaming services with regularly increasing prices, as opposed to maybe 2 a few years ago, to get the same content.
living_room_pc 3y ago
The article seems out of touch when it comes to the causation... > The EUIPO speculates that financial pressures, like inflation, means that people have less money to spend on entertainment. I cancelled Netflix because of the drop in quality of the content over the years. It just isn't worth it to keep it around for the few shows which are decent. I don't pirate, I have other hobbies, but I could imagine many people in the same circumstance would pirate content to catch a good show. This is doubly true of movie geeks that would subscribe to multiple streaming services at once to get their content. This feels akin to Chrystia Freeland saying families should cut a $8 streaming subscription to balance their budgets... during a COL crisis where people are spending >$3000 a month for basics.
- verve_rat 3y ago
  Yes, it is not that people can't afford these services (although some probably are in that boat) it is that people don't see the value in these services any more. The price has gone up and the quality has gone down. The content is not as good and the UI is increasingly user hostile. No wonder people are going back to piracy, it's just better in every way.
  - living_room_pc 3y ago
    Yeah, as before piracy (audio/video) was never primarily a cost issue, but an access issue. Another example, even if I rent a movie online, I can't often get it in my language's audio or subtitle because of my region. It is funny that the industry can't seem to get that.
Podgajski 3y ago
I don’t see what the problem is. well actually I do. The problem lies within ourselves. If you cannot access the media, why not just not watch it? I know it’s hard because of our addictions and boredom, but that is an option. The reason why these companies can keep charging higher and higher prices and keep giving less and less quality service is because of our addiction.
sputr 3y ago
Funny how they recognize a cause of decrese (easy and affordable licensed access) but don't recognize it's becoming less easy and less affordable. They also recognize a cause of increase (less disposable income due to inflation) but don't recognize the solution (reduce prices, increase value) instead threaten with increasing prices which will just cause a negative feedback loop. But I'm sure they'll soon demand the "big government" to "meddle in the free market" by implementing freedom and privacy distroying monitoring and evforcement in order to protect their government enforced monopoly. Or, you know, they could just do what the music and game industries have done (offer convinient, affordable access) and stop being assholes.
beej71 3y ago
They say: > New subscription services make it easier for people to access whatever digital content they want, when they want it. And because these services are relatively affordable, more people are choosing to pay for content. And then they say: > hopefully this is just a ‘blip’ and rates of theft begin to fall again as the economy recovers. > > If not, we can expect to see legal channels raising their prices again to cover the losses caused by piracy. I don't know what to tell you, content providers. Maybe you'll figure it out someday.
GaryNumanVevo 3y ago
Yeah, my 32TB Plex library that I can stream native blu-ray quality in my home is gonna win out every time. When I travel I just take my AppleTV and VPN back to watch / download literally any piece of media I want. On a related note, I've also been building an offline cache of the internet, basically any web resources that I bookmark (blog / youtube / a few others) will automatically get indexed and stored locally.

34 points by grammers 3y ago

We never left.

The top 10 countries for inflation and piracy have only a few outliers. https://dataprot.net/statistics/piracy-statistics/ https://dataprot.net/statistics/piracy-statistics/

stuaxo 3y ago

With streaming prices increasing and also fragmenting it's not suprising.

sbarre 3y ago
Yep, when everything was available on 1 or 2 services, of course everyone signed up.. Canceling your $200/month cable subscription (for hundreds of channels you didn't watch) in exchange for a few $20/month on-demand services was extremely attractive and was cheap enough that it competed with piracy for many people. All the big studios licensed their stuff to Netflix because that's where everyone was going, but that wasn't as profitable, and in the process they destroyed the rest of their channel-by-channel and appointment TV business without really thinking about sustainability for the workforce in the long term. Then the big media companies wanted those profits back, so they started fragmenting into multiple streaming services as their Netflix deals expired, and now we're back to $200/month to get all the shows. But the workforce isn't seeing any of that money this time around due to the lack of streaming covering in the contracts, which is what led to the current strikes. It's a tricky problem for that industry: I suspect I'm not alone in wanting to see creators and working class people get paid for their work, but also not willing to go back to the old system of having to over-pay for a ton of content I don't want just to get the fraction of content I do want because it's spread across a ton of different "channels" that all need to be paid for separately.

amiga-workbench 3y ago

The UX of a single torrent tracker is better than needing umpteen streaming services. No brainer.

tjpnz 3y ago
As is the customer support you'll receive on many private trackers - even the free ones.
grujicd 3y ago
Not only that, but you can play pirated media files on any device, with highly customizable media players, without active internet, and with community based subtitles. Most streaming service provide subtitles to only handful of languages. And you can get surround sound on a PC which is afaik still not available when you watch using official browser based players. For some of these reasons I still reach for khm khm "downloadable" content even if it's available on services I'm paying.

II2II 3y ago

While the article suggests the increase is due to external pressures (e.g. inflation meaning that people have less to spend on entertainment), something that I've noticed over the past couple of years in my neck of the woods is an increase in the cost of streaming services. When you throw in the proliferation of streaming services with exclusive content, which has been happening for several years, I'm not terribly surprised that people would be trying to cut costs.

franciscop 3y ago

This is an "antivirus software" company article, thus using language to spread fear, the infamous FUD. There's many issues in the article so I flagged it, to name few: > "stealing digital content" Most of the definitions for "steal" involve the word "property" in the way that you deprive the owner of their property. When someone steals something, the owner loses that exact thing. This is not true when copying digital content. Some studies have found that in some cases, piracy can even enhance legit sales, which makes this even fall apart further "he stole $10 from me so I ended up $50 richer" doesn't make any sense, does it? > "content that should be paid for." Who decides what content should be paid for? "Okay guys, you should all pay me for all my tweets. Oh and since you are technically 'downloading' them by reading them, pay up a fine" would def not fly, so this definition holds water. And even if we go to a more practical approach where we imagine copyright holders, international licensing deals, etc. are no problem at all (which they are), copyright law still varies greatly from country to country for different reasons, for example in most countries you can copy a small part of whatever content you want for educational purposes (not-profit), or e.g. critique, even if the author or copyright owner vehemently oppose it.

tjpnz 3y ago

Piracy is almost always a service problem.

Hamuko 3y ago
I'd love to see a breakdown of what aspects of piracy are increasing. TV shows, movies, video games, music. Are all of these being pirated more now than previously, or just some? Because the business models for them are very different.

pgeorgi 3y ago

Not a single word about the proliferation of official services recently that makes it harder to access content because unless you're signed on with all of them (which gets expensive fast) you're missing out on _something_ while still paying dearly for the privilege. DVDs don't require a monthly payment to remain accessible, and there's no executive who can decide on a whim to deny access even when paying. Nobody cares that the season 1 DVDs come from studio A, while season 2-4 DVDs are from studio B. They can be shared or swapped with friends. Some DVDs are even available to loan at the public library for a modest annual membership fee (and we're members anyway because they also have gasp books!)

Nursie 3y ago
Yep, this is the primary reason I've considered it again. So I have Prime (which is kinda/sorta effectively free to me because I pay for it for the delivery service), Netflix, Disney (I like Star Wars and Marvel), we sometimes subscribe to Apple. Then over here in Aus there's also Stan and Binge, who have some of the tv content we want. This is already a far cry from what Netflix used to be - the place to go to for most stuff. It's also a far cry from the music situation, where I can pick my streaming service (I use Deezer) and more or less have the same catalogue available whichever one I pick. (I know, none of them pay artists very well, I also buy CDs and t-shirts.) And now on top of this, the various studios are trying to get me to subscribe to their offerings, either as standalones or as add-ons to Prime - AMC, Paramount etc, so I can get their one flagship show on there. How about no? This is getting more expensive than the old cable and satellite packages that streaming was supposed to replace, and they're putting prices up at the moment. And that's before we get into stuff that's not available on any service legally here. That show you like? Yeah we're only going to give you access to the first few seasons, even though there have been five more seasons made. Why won't you let me pay? So yeah, piracy is quite appealing, especially when I can go to yandex.com, type "Stream <movie>" or "Stream <show>" and I'll be taken to a site where I can watch it immediately. Maybe it's not always the best quality stream, but the pirate bay still seems to be up too.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  >This is getting more expensive than the old cable and satellite packages that streaming was supposed to replace, and they're putting prices up at the moment. Definitely not in the US. People were paying minimum $100 per month for a fraction of the content, not inflation adjusted, not on demand, not on nearly any device anywhere, 15 years ago. Not to mention you can simply cancel and resubscribe so you only pay for one or two services per month, an option that was never available before. Apple: $10 Netflix: $23 Amazon: $9 WarnerBros Discovery: $20 Disney: $20 Comcast: $12 Paramount: $12 The only one missing is Sony, but I don’t think they offer streaming. $106/month gets an individual on demand access to almost everything except sports, without advertising breaks. Family sharing would make it much cheaper. Either way, I would take this situation over having to pay Comcast/DirecTV/Dish Network/Verizon to be a middleman any day.

manicennui 3y ago

"The emergence of streaming services like Netflix, Apple Music and Spotify make it easy to access unlimited content – and ensure that artists are paid for their creations." That's laughable.

tjpnz 3y ago
The residuals earned from streaming tell an entirely different story.
politelemon 3y ago
And also completely misunderstands or ignores that they are part of the problem.

Obscurity4340 3y ago

Boys are back in town

FergusArgyll 3y ago
"Take what you can --
- Obscurity4340 3y ago
  Wats this reference?
  - FergusArgyll 3y ago
    https://pirates.fandom.com/wiki/Take_what_you_can,_give_nothing_back https://pirates.fandom.com/wiki/Take_what_you_can,_give_noth...

buro9 3y ago

> There are two main problems with digital piracy. First, it robs the creator of their income. It’s not just big companies who suffer – the people working behind the scenes lose out too. Whilst this is true, we've spent the last decade hearing how the intermediaries (streaming services) and media companies continually screw over artists. It is more true to say any drop in revenue due to any alternative way to consume media (of which piracy is just one way) results in the _intermediaries_ seeing the biggest drop in revenue as they were the ones who took the most from the artists. Perhaps if labels and studios paid artists more their argument would resonate more with the fans who consume the art. The internet never did fully deliver on the dream to disintermediate the studios and labels, but there's always a hope that there's still time.

II2II 3y ago
> Perhaps if labels and studios paid artists more their argument would resonate more with the fans who consume the art. Granted, I'm probably an outlier here since I'm not a big consumer of the type of media they're talking about, but it seems like affordability and convenience would be much bigger factors. Keep in mind that people were doing things like sharing accounts even when streaming services were undergoing massive growth. It doesn't sound like they had much concern about artists or other people working behind the scenes.
ekianjo 3y ago
> it robs the creator of their income. Yawn... sounds like 1999, when the piracy was supposed to kill the music industry. It survived, and thrived just fine. So tired of seeing this bullshit.
- jowea 3y ago
  Don't the artists now get a much bigger share of their income from shows? That's not really an option for the TV/Movie/Video media producers.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    There was a time when many artists said "It’s OK if people download, as long as they come to the show and buy merch, where the money goes directly into our pockets." However, touring has become more expensive for bands. It is now common to hear of even fairly popular acts canceling a tour somewhere, just because they can’t make it work out financially. Add to this two years of restrictions on live performances under COVID in many countries and there was no obvious way for acts to generate a decent income.

loughnane 3y ago

My biggest beef with streaming services—-and I have a few—-is privacy. I know I’m in the minority here, but I just can’t accept someone keeping a record of everything I’ve ever watched, read, or listened to.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
It’s interesting how this has become a concern. In the MP3 era, pretty much every obsessive music fan I knew IRL was signed up to Last.fm and scrobbling (i.e. uploading a recording of listening) every track that was played on their MP3 player. You could then compare your listening to your friends’, meet new people in your town with the same tastes, etc. There were no concerns back then about privacy, because no companies had yet so clearly abused it. But considering how Last.fm has always struggled with monetizing the data it does get, even now the site sparks few concerns. (For those whose privacy concerns would prevent them from using Last.fm to keep track of their music listening over time, there is Libre.fm. However, all it is good for is keeping personal records, not socializing with many other listeners.)
- demetrius 3y ago
  There is an important difference: with Last.fm, you choose what you share. If you want to listen to something one time, you could just open the same file in another player and that's it. With Spotify or Yandex.Music, however, everything is shared, and you can't use a different player.
- politelemon 3y ago
  Your comment misses a fundamental point about privacy. Privacy is not about being hidden away, it's having control over your data. Last FM had a good set of privacy controls, in that users could send their tracks over and if memory serves, correct me, they could choose to socialise it.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    Yes, that is one view of privacy. But on HN, privacy concerns are also about use of data for targeted advertising regardless of what controls are there. Last.fm’s heyday predates the modern ad tracking that creeps so many out.

papaver-somnamb 3y ago

> What is the problem? > There are two main problems with digital piracy. First, it robs the creator of their income. It’s not just big companies who suffer – the people working behind the scenes lose out too. How risible! Over the decades we have come to learn that those who pirate are those who are willing to expend their time and use their technical competence to consume media that they otherwise wouldn't pay for or cannot afford to begin with. Like younger folk. And the economically disadvantaged (George Carlin vocetto). A small % of the media corps' "attention base." It's just a rhetorical talking point in the service of effecting leverage for the incumbents, but does the average Joe know that? And what would change if they did? Now I'm falling into cynicism, albeit well founded ... Oh, let's go devil's advocate: And what of the societal consequences of the copyrighting of what is effectively a very large number (encoded media file IP). As though ideas can be owned.

AraceliHarker 3y ago

EUIPO concluded that there is an inverse correlation between the consumption of legal and pirated content. During the COVID-19 pandemic, legal content consumption increased and pirated content consumption decreased. This suggests that people who feel that the price is too high for a service they do not use for a long time are consuming TV shows and other content through illegal streaming or torrents.

fbrncci 3y ago

>The EUIPO speculates that financial pressures, like inflation, means that people have less money to spend on entertainment. This can be seen in the way that fewer people are signing up for Netflix or Amazon Prime – and some are even cancelling their subscriptions altogether. This does play a part, but I'd wager that a larger part of piracy becoming more attractive is these services becoming more expensive (I really doubt that in this case its inflation...), while they have less to offer. And that you now need accounts with multiple streaming services to watch all the popular shows. And then also a crack-down on account sharing started happening. It shouldn't come as a surprise that piracy is becoming popular again.

ndsipa_pomu 3y ago

Piracy and media hoarding are also about control or at least the lack of control of streaming services. So, here in the UK, we more or less have to pay the BBC license fee if we want to use a TV service, and so we pay for the BBC's programming and they put some of their stuff onto iPlayer (their streaming service). However, iPlayer often time limits programmes (30 days is common) and there's a lot of older stuff that isn't available on there, but is available on torrents or sometimes people upload old obscure stuff to YouTube. Once I've downloaded something away from the official BBC iPlayer service, I can keep it for as long as I like and it doesn't matter if it's obscure. With other streaming services, there's a focus on popularity and so less popular products either never get added or get removed. I worry that this is going to lead to the cultural disappearance of many older films and TV. That article is very poorly written or at least it just regurgitates the fallacies from the big media companies. Piracy is most definitely not "stealing" as copying doesn't deprive the owner of their copy. They just wish to impose artificial scarcity to increase their profits and to wield control over their customers e.g. region locking

spicyjpeg 3y ago
Lack of control and content constantly jumping to different services and/or disappearing due to licensing shenanigans certainly play a role, but the vast majority of people only watch the latest, most popular shows. The main factor at play here is simply that many people do not feel like they are getting their money's worth out of increasingly more expensive subscriptions to services from which they are only going to watch a handful of shows at best. During the pandemic, spending a few bucks on Netflix or Disney+ made sense if you had heaps of free time every day and could binge anything you wanted from their massive back catalogs. But the value proposition of $20 for a month of access to such catalogs changes when you only have an hour a day or less to dedicate to content consumption (and this is without taking into account price hikes, password sharing crackdowns and whatnot).
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  Absolutely - most people are not interested in old horror films from the 1940s (I'm currently updating some of my horror collection to 1080p copies), and the streaming services definitely go for popular titles. As a long-time pirate, I'm encouraged to see the break-up of streaming services into different fiefdoms as it is enticing people back into piracy. I think that media companies (not just tv/film ones) have far too much power and influence over people and society, so I prefer to see them having to listen to their customers. I find the way that the big companies have bought their way into politics and legal areas to be very concerning (e.g. Sony Music vs Quad9). (In the interests of full disclosure, I also pirate and watch a lot of new popular stuff as well)

fullspectrumdev 3y ago

Not terribly surprising, given that you now need to subscribe to like 5-10 streaming services with regularly increasing prices, as opposed to maybe 2 a few years ago, to get the same content.

living_room_pc 3y ago

The article seems out of touch when it comes to the causation... > The EUIPO speculates that financial pressures, like inflation, means that people have less money to spend on entertainment. I cancelled Netflix because of the drop in quality of the content over the years. It just isn't worth it to keep it around for the few shows which are decent. I don't pirate, I have other hobbies, but I could imagine many people in the same circumstance would pirate content to catch a good show. This is doubly true of movie geeks that would subscribe to multiple streaming services at once to get their content. This feels akin to Chrystia Freeland saying families should cut a $8 streaming subscription to balance their budgets... during a COL crisis where people are spending >$3000 a month for basics.

verve_rat 3y ago
Yes, it is not that people can't afford these services (although some probably are in that boat) it is that people don't see the value in these services any more. The price has gone up and the quality has gone down. The content is not as good and the UI is increasingly user hostile. No wonder people are going back to piracy, it's just better in every way.
- living_room_pc 3y ago
  Yeah, as before piracy (audio/video) was never primarily a cost issue, but an access issue. Another example, even if I rent a movie online, I can't often get it in my language's audio or subtitle because of my region. It is funny that the industry can't seem to get that.

Podgajski 3y ago

I don’t see what the problem is. well actually I do. The problem lies within ourselves. If you cannot access the media, why not just not watch it? I know it’s hard because of our addictions and boredom, but that is an option. The reason why these companies can keep charging higher and higher prices and keep giving less and less quality service is because of our addiction.

sputr 3y ago

Funny how they recognize a cause of decrese (easy and affordable licensed access) but don't recognize it's becoming less easy and less affordable. They also recognize a cause of increase (less disposable income due to inflation) but don't recognize the solution (reduce prices, increase value) instead threaten with increasing prices which will just cause a negative feedback loop. But I'm sure they'll soon demand the "big government" to "meddle in the free market" by implementing freedom and privacy distroying monitoring and evforcement in order to protect their government enforced monopoly. Or, you know, they could just do what the music and game industries have done (offer convinient, affordable access) and stop being assholes.

beej71 3y ago

They say: > New subscription services make it easier for people to access whatever digital content they want, when they want it. And because these services are relatively affordable, more people are choosing to pay for content. And then they say: > hopefully this is just a ‘blip’ and rates of theft begin to fall again as the economy recovers. > > If not, we can expect to see legal channels raising their prices again to cover the losses caused by piracy. I don't know what to tell you, content providers. Maybe you'll figure it out someday.

GaryNumanVevo 3y ago

Yeah, my 32TB Plex library that I can stream native blu-ray quality in my home is gonna win out every time. When I travel I just take my AppleTV and VPN back to watch / download literally any piece of media I want. On a related note, I've also been building an offline cache of the internet, basically any web resources that I bookmark (blog / youtube / a few others) will automatically get indexed and stored locally.