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Streaming became popular because it was easier than piracy and better than TV (watch anywhere, on demand, pickup where you left off etc). Streaming is no longe

• jerjerjer 3y ago
  Streaming also had no ads which is now gated behind even more pricey plans.
  • DoughnutHole 3y ago
    Even an “ad-free” Netflix plan is infested with promotion of their in-house productions.
    • worthless-trash 3y ago
      Yeah, this grinds my gears too. If i wanted to watch the other productions, i'd be watching the other production. I can see what is available on the 'trending now' list on the exact screen just before starting this video.
  • cocoa19 3y ago
    Low price and no ads were two of the main selling points to ditch cable (along with stream whenever you want). We reached the point were price is almost as high as cable was (with the standard 4-5 subscriptions), and we have ads. This is not a surprise to most though, the question has always been when would it happen.
    • api 3y ago
      We are no longer under zero interest rates. Things have to actually be profitable.
      • gchamonlive 3y ago
        Isn't online streaming profitable? Does it absolutely need ads and granular channel subscriptions to be profitable?
        • boring-alterego 3y ago
          They have to be continually profitable every quarter, and they have to show growth quarter over quarter or the value of the company will take a major hit, which will impact how much capital they can loan for future projects.
          • helf 3y ago
            Which us fucking asinine. You can thank shareholders and the stock market in general with their lunatic "perpetual growth" bullshit for the enshittification of everything.
        • relyks 3y ago
          Netflix is the only streamer (out of the major ones) that is currently profitable
        • ta_1138 3y ago
          It's far less profitable than you'd think. Many of the competitors in the industry lose money. Licensing fees/production costs/royalties eat a bunch of the money, but the infrastructure to run a streaming service isn't cheap. I know at least one of the competitors that people would call the most successful is paying a 9 figure AWS bill, plus whatever the costs are for all the caching setup that makes most popular content live in ISPs. Add the typical army of developers building apps for the mobile devices, the billing team, people doing recommendation engines, fraud detection/security team, tagging all content, and translating every blurb in a bunch of languages, possibly pay for creating subtitles for all of those languages... it's not cheap. What is so frustrating about this is that so many of the costs would go down with consolidation. Every company has to handle the fact that age verification and privacy legislation in South Korea has to work in a just-so way, but every streaming service has to duplicate the logic. While the Netflix recommendation system probably can use some tweaks to take on all of D+'s content, I bet it'd be easier to tweak their system than to have every company have their own ML team handling recommendations. A lot of relatively low quality content wouldn't have to be made if we didn't need to make 'filler' to keep people spending sufficient time on a given streaming service while the next top quality release comes out. In a happy world, competition brings more better content at a cheaper price for consumers, but when I look at the state of streaming, what we have is many competitors that aren't breaking even, in exchange for a streaming experience that keeps getting worse. And there's little chance it's going to get better until at least half of the worst competitors give up and go back to licensing their content to whatever the big 3 end up being. And yes, we'd all be better off if we moved to the music model, where any subscription has 90% of the content, but do you really see, say, Apple, Netflix and Disney doing worldwide, full catalog cross-licensing deals?
    • TeMPOraL 3y ago
      No ads used to be the main selling point of cable, decades ago, which goes to show that advertising is a cancer and will thoroughly corrupt and consume every communication medium over time.
      • edmundsauto 3y ago
        As far back as I can remember (mid 80s) cable always had ads. The premium channels like HBO did not, but most channels did. Did you mean premium channels, or was there a time in the early 80s when >50% of channels carried by your provider didn't have ads?
        • int_19h 3y ago
          Mid-80s is exactly when that became to change. https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-invaded-by-commercials.html https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...
    • offices 3y ago
      But how we lived like kings during those few years of the venture-capital, antitrust, low-interest rate phenomena.
    • godshatter 3y ago
      > We reached the point were price is almost as high as cable was (with the standard 4-5 subscriptions), and we have ads. I wonder if entertainment brand loyalty is going to be affected by the diversification of streaming services. I only have Netflix and Amazon Prime (only because I already pay for Prime) and I have no desire to add another streaming service for another show or franchise. I'm happy to just consume what I can find on those two services and call it good. At what point does the desire to watch a specific TV series or movie franchise stop being worth the cost of yet another service? But then I'm an atypical customer since I only watch maybe 4 hours of content a week on average, at most.
• dgfitz 3y ago
  Of course this is 100% the correct reasoning. When I was a broke college kid I pirated all the things, and at the time wished, when I could afford it, I’d rather just pay. When I could, I did, for years. Now we’re back at the path-of-least-resistance is pirating.
  • eastbound 3y ago
    But that means companies must sell for the marginal price of their website’s ergonomics, not for the marginal price of producing movies. (Which is not a big loss, because I can’t imagine producing the Netflix knockoffs be a hundredth the price of a 007).
    • al_borland 3y ago
      It’s not about an individual website, it’s about the industry. It’s not that Netflix, or any other service, is hard to use on its own. It’s the fragmentation of the content that makes it hard to use. This was solved for with music where pretty much every service has pretty much every song. People don’t need multiple music services, they just pick the one that best fits their style and needs. This is what the movie and TV industry needs to do if they want to beat piracy. This is what they should have done 15 years ago. Their greed is hurting them more than it’s helping.
      • jowea 3y ago
        I wonder if mandating content licenses being non-exclusive and separating media distributors from producers would help.
        • deaddodo 3y ago
          This seems to be the most obvious solution, and is what solved the movie industry's greed back in the the studio system days. But, the industry will fight it tooth and nail, because they lose control and potential margins on it at the expense of the consumer.
        • 3y ago
• api 3y ago
  Amazon Prime and Apple TV are easy. Just rent the movie. It’s a few bucks like video rental shops back in the old days. You can also buy, though only Apple really allows downloading of bought content.
  • upupupandaway 3y ago
    But they don’t have the show or movie you want, then you have to sign up somewhere else.
    • al_borland 3y ago
      The rental options from places like Apple and Amazon typically have a much bigger library than the streaming options. Unless it is a movie or show specifically made for another streaming service, it is probably available as a rental.
  • facialwipe 3y ago
    It’s a few bucks like video rental shops back in the old days. Of the top 10 in Apple’s current Top Movies Chart in the TV app, 3 cost $5.99 to rent while the other 7 are $19.99 to rent.
    • api 3y ago
      Inflation adjusted that’s about right. It was like $4 to rent a new release in 1993.
    • al_borland 3y ago
      Generally speaking, the ones that cost $19.99 to rent are still in theaters. The price will drop once they are out of theaters and a more normal home release. This wasn’t an option in the days of video rental shops. If a family, or even just a couple, was going to go to the movies, buying popcorn and drinks, it’s not cheap. $19.99 is still usually cheaper than going out. I remember when they started doing this. I think it was a response to theaters being closed during the pandemic, but could be misremembering slightly. Beyond that, I think the general idea was that people have nice big screens and home and don’t feel the need to go to movie theaters anymore, so this gives people an option to see new releases in the comfort of their home. The extra cost is for the early home access.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• emporas 3y ago
  Kick.com is banned in Greece as of June. It has some betting streams, not sure if someone bets on the platform, but it got banned anyway for illegal gambling. I don't care personally, just to put it out there. P2P download of files did fall a lot in the last decade, i think a second wave is coming.
  • jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
    Kick isn't really a streaming site, it's a front started by the Stake bitcoin casino after Twitch changed policy to ban streaming bitcoin slots. Stake had been handing out huge contracts to major streamers to show themselves having fun gambling on Stake, particularly xQc and TrainwreksTV. These streamers would act as if they were betting with their own money, including getting into six figure bets, without being clear they were on a contract that basically made it all upside to them even if they lost millions. The audience for these streamers slants young, and that didn't sit well with Twitch advertisers, hence the change in policy. Train et all didn't want their golden goose to end, so they worked with Stake to create Kick, with Train as one of the cofounders, and xQc and others pulling their audience over. One of Kick's selling points to streamers has been to be a wild west as far as copyright and content goes. They quickly took in all the streamers too toxic for other platforms, including people who'd done things like film themselves committing sexual assaults on Twitch. They've encouraged people to restream copyright content like marvel movies, and even porn. I don't know what the laws are like in Greece, but considering this free for all approach it's not surprising they'd run afowl of regulations somehow. Frankly it's amazing Kick hasn't gotten nailed by some sort of major anti piracy action, but I suppose being based out of the Seychelles complicates that for copyright holders. In any case, the point is Kick is an aberration. It's way too toxic for mainstream advertisers, so the only thing sustaining it financially is Stake paying people to stream gambling on Stake.
    • emporas 3y ago
      I didn't know any of that stuff, thanks for sharing. Casinos and betting literally disgust me, but given that in a handful of years, every person on the planet will have his own personal stock and bond market, i wonder how one can differentiate betting from investing. A saying i usually repeat to people, is that in the future, i.e. in a handful of years, everyone will be a billionaire for fifteen minutes.
• PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  yep, as someone who stopped pirating when netflix started streaming, I'm back to pirating and I won't apologize for it. there are shows for which I cannot even purchase them, which I would be willing to do. You want to lock me into a subscription? jokes on you.
• Fnoord 3y ago
  Steam's Gabe Newell said it best: Piracy is an issue of service, not price. I went from full pirate (we didn't even pay for cable, it 'just worked' -- the beauty of analog) to nearly full streamer. The stuff I kept pirating wasn't available on stream. Then Disney started to take off their stuff from Netflix. HBO suddenly quit in The Netherlands, or I had to combine it with KPN or was it Ziggo (what if you can't have DSL or cable? And, what if you got better; fiber?). I'm still paying for like 6 services, but not forever. Because my children do not know or remember on which service they saw something. Heck, often they can't even remember the name. Or they know the name in our own language and the search doesn't work. And as cherry on top, Dutch public broadcasting organisation (NPO) updated their app which was a step back as it removed a lot of features, such as children profiles, and the navigation of the new UI is atrocious. Series paid for with public money suddenly got removed. I am done with this shit. I am. What I will do is download all my children's favorite series, and put them in Jellyfin. Then every month we pick a different service, and they can watch that, too. I will tell them it is beyond my control (a white lie). Also the quality of the streams is laughable. Only Apple bring something which deserves the mention 4k (and Apple are part of the problem). And a piracy setup is very easy. I will get fiber soon. I have a VPN with a container to run BitTorrent on. I have Usenet servers. I have a couple of lifetime ???znab accounts. All cheap. I wrote this post angrily in less than 10 min, I probably forgot to mention other reasons on top of this all. Yeah, the fuzzy feelings I got for not pirating. I admit, I will miss those.
• patrickaljord 3y ago
  I was paying for Netflix 10 years ago in France for a short while, wanted some English subtitles for my wife for some US shows but there were only subtitles in French so had to download the same show elsewhere if you know what I'm saying... with English subtitles readily available. I also remember watching some shows like the first two seasons but then only to find out the third season was licensed by another streaming service lol. Such a UX disaster for paying customers.
  • interestica 3y ago
    I was living in the only english-speaking country in South America. Netflix wouldn't give me French subtitles or secondary audio because apparently south america=spanish for their divisions. I don't see how subtitles would fall under the broader licensing agreements. The subs/langs were available for the same titles in Canada. (More absurd because France is a part of South America via French Guiana).
    • Symbiote 3y ago
      This is a common issue across Europe. 40 million+ internal migrants (from one EU country to another), yet most shows on Netflix only have the local language for subtitles and often no option to avoid dubbing. It's worse than when we bought everything on DVD. Region 2 discs (Europe) would have many soundtracks and many subtitles languages on the disc.
    • goosedragons 3y ago
      They do. Somebody had to produce the dubs/subs and it wasn't necessarily the content creator especially if it wasn't the language it was originally created in. Those French subs or dubs could have easily been created by a Canadian firm who got the Canadian rights and wanted to use it in French Canada, then that got licensed off to Netflix. It may have had little involvement with the original creator and they don't necessarily hold all the rights over the translation effort to spread it worldwide. What's more absurd is when you can't get CC for the same language as the show.
      • 3y ago
• heavyset_go 3y ago
  I think the cable TV model was a mature business model for extracting the most amount of value possible from paying viewers before they choose to leave. Every streaming service will converge to what cable TV is like: paid channels, maximum amount of ads, additional premium content, attempts at lock-in, exclusive licensing of content, etc. Not adopting the cable business model is leaving billions of dollars on the table, so it will happen.
  • MostlyStable 3y ago
    I'm curious where the equilibrium is. There is some portion of people who will not torrent no matter what. Either because of lack of ability or moral views, or some other reason. There is a second set of the population that will never pay for media, or at least not more than very trivial amounts. Either because of lack of ability to pay, not thinking it's worth it, or not believing there is anything wrong with piracy. Then the is the third group that will happily pay for content when it is reasonably priced and, perhaps most importantly, easy and convenient. If it's too expensive or too difficult/annoying, they will pirate. The size of this third group dictates where the equilibrium is. If it's very small, then media will always converge in the cable style maximum extraction. But if that second group is large, then the cable model might lose more money than it gains by pushing consumers towards piracy.
    • whstl 3y ago
      I started using pirated copies of some music software I actually paid for and own, because it became too problematic and inconvenient. Why do I need a kernel extension for this crap? Fuck iLok sincerely. Next step is not paying for anything altogether. A middle finger is the only thing those kinds of companies are getting from me in the future, and honestly I'd rather see their demise. If streaming ever becomes like this, I'm also going back to piracy.
    • feoren 3y ago
      You're missing a 4th group: people who would enjoy watching content X, but simply won't bother if it's too annoying. The alternative isn't piracy, it's just doing something else with your time. There's not that many shows or movies that I care enough about to keep one subscription open for it. I had an HBO subscription for Game of Thrones, but I also enjoyed Succession, Last Week Tonight, and some other random stuff. After Game of Thrones shit the bed, I canceled HBO and simply don't watch those other shows. I never finished Succession; I'd like to one day, but it's not worth either the subscription or pirating. This just shows that the availability of piracy is NOT the problem. It shouldn't matter to HBO whether I've pirated it or not: I could be a paying customer if their prices matched their catalog's value, but it doesn't, so they get nothing, piracy or no.
• zug_zug 3y ago
  I used to try to go 100% online rental (primarily amazon rentals if I didn't want hassle). I figured it was hard to argue a 3.99 rental was any worse than blockbuster. So on vacation I tried to airplay mission impossible from amazon rental to the TV, and the screen just went black for copy-protection. So I refunded my rental and torrented it instead. I don't usually torrent, but sometimes the ecosystems put it squarely in my self interest. (Also, for whatever it's worth I have netflix active about 1 month a year because I find their recent content so unimpressive, but perhaps I'm not the target audience)
  • bilalq 3y ago
    Try disabling hardware acceleration in your browser. It'll probably fix the black screen issue. The situation is still ridiculous though. Streaming is no longer easier than piracy.
    • 9991 3y ago
      Weird. Jellyfin doesn’t make me do that.
      • jackson1442 3y ago
        It’s a Widevine DRM thing, not a browser video thing.
        • ncallaway 3y ago
          I think that was the point of the previous comment. The UX of DRM-laden services breaks. You don’t have that problem with Jellyfin.
    • ladzoppelin 3y ago
      No its a DRM issue, its why I run a hidden 25 foot HDMI from my computer to my TV as some broadcasts require the security inside the HDMI cable itself. (I could be wrong on this one but Widevine DRM handles this process I think)
• paulcole 3y ago
  > why pay for 8 different services and have to waste your time figuring out whats on what when you can just have one service for free, even if its illegal 1. My time isn’t valuable so who cares if it takes 6 minutes to figure out where to watch Magnum PI. 2. I know I shouldn’t do illegal things so I don’t do them.
  • Madmallard 3y ago
    "My time isn’t valuable" uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh sir?
    • paulcole 3y ago
      When I’m at home deciding what to watch on TV it really isn’t.
      • danparsonson 3y ago
        Time is your most valuable and scarce resource. You have a finite amount and you can't get more.
        • Consultant32452 3y ago
          If that's true, then no one should be watching TV anyways.
          • xref 3y ago
            Ah the No True Scotsman argument > If people’s time was truly valuable then no one should be ______ anyway.
        • paulcole 3y ago
          Something being the highest value resource I have doesn’t mean that it’s actually valuable. There’s a highest value turd of all the turds in my septic tank but it doesn’t mean that turd is valuable.
• mhss 3y ago
  > Streaming became popular because it was easier than piracy and better than TV (watch anywhere, on demand, pickup where you left off etc). I think you overestimate how "easy" piracy is for the average user. Netflix revenue keeps growing (and subscribers), despite the "crackdown" on password sharing that many predicted would cause massive cancellations.
  • blibble 3y ago
    googling "watch X online free" is hard?
    • shermantanktop 3y ago
      It's clicking on the links in the search results that requires a difficult leap of faith.
      • xethos 3y ago
        Apple has spent years teaching people that if it runs without modification, it's safe. End of story. It came from the App Store, or it's allowed by Safari, so it's good to go. Couple that with malware getting more subtle [0], and Windows Defender getting better, and most people will assume they're virus free and have been for years (even if they're not). [0] think cryptominers in the background and data exfiltration vs so many browser toolbars you get 3" of any given webpage at a time, and pop-ups on pop-ups
  • NoPedantsThanks 3y ago
    They talk about piracy "services," which is not your normal torrent user presumably. I guess it's Popcorn Time and the like, which makes it somewhat easier for the general populace.
    • mhss 3y ago
      Yeah, still, it's easier, but not as easy nor convenient or widely available (e.g there's no Popcorn app in that TV you just bought. Defaults matter a lot.
• nerdix 3y ago
  Also, H265 encoded 1080p is hitting the sweet spot between quality and file size. About 500-ish MB per hour of content for decent quality. Its sort of like when VBR encoded MP3s became the standard in the privacy scene in the early 00s. The quality is good enough for most folks plus the reduced file size means that it downloads really fast on average connections and isn't prohibitively expensive to store so you can create a large library very quickly. Also I think the shift to SSDs from spinning rust delayed the adoption of widespread video piracy 10-ish years ago because the cost per GB was just too expensive and most people weren't going to buy a NAS. But now we are starting to move past the inflection point. SSDs are bigger, H265 reduces file sizes, hardware accelerated H265 encoding is easier (meaning more H265 content), and devices that can decode H265 are becoming cheap and ubiquitous. You can install Plex on your laptop, load up on content, and have a better UX than Netflix.
  • Dylan16807 3y ago
    If we're looking at the storage cost, I'd say the 10x decrease in flash price is doing a lot more than the maybe-2x decrease in file size.
    • xbmcuser 3y ago
      Few people are building flash nas though the price pressure from flash storage on hdd prices did play a big part. Before flash storage prices started pushing pressure on hdd prices per tb larger drives had become more expensive than smaller drives. We are I think just 3-4 years away from 8tb SSD being cheaper than hdd for me that is the point where we will have mass SSD adoption for Nas drives.
      • Dylan16807 3y ago
        I'd guess that the kind of person that makes a NAS wouldn't have been stopped by h.264 sizes. The comment I replied to seemed pretty focused on ordinary system drives.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• mgh2 3y ago
  Netflix also became popular due to people hating ads. Ads or piracy, which funds criminal activity? Hint: Hear social media CEOs testify in congress. This seems like a PR piece to promote and justify Netflix's change in mind and business model.
• giancarlostoro 3y ago
  Honestly if Apple integrated Netflix and all those other services into a unified UI for Apple TV that transparently lets you go between the apps without realizing it (they do own the OS...) it would be exactly what I want to see happen to these streaming services, that or they somehow share their content to the official Apple TV app itself, and let Apple TV query across all those other streaming apps, it would be great. Sometimes I'll look up something with my Apple TV and it will try to have me go to a paid version, for me to realized I watched it on a completely different app, or it shows me the app that only has 1 single season, when I have every season in a different service. I think there's room for improvement on the smart TV OS' to better integrate these services into one pluggable app.
  • thepasswordis 3y ago
    This is what amazon prime does.
    • jaredhallen 3y ago
      True. But it only solves half the problem. Or to put it another way, their particular implementation just leads to a different frustration. So Prime aggregates content, which is great. So I can browse a great meta-catalog of content from various services. The problem is I'm not subscribed to all these services. So I scroll through the catalog and find something interesting, but... you need to sign up for a monthly plan to watch whatever show on whatever service. It might be a little more palatable if you could pay (a reasonable amount) per show, or series or movie, or whatever. But as is, it's just an exercise in frustration. I'm not committing to a subscription to watch one show that happened to seem somewhat interesting.
  • data-ottawa 3y ago
    That would be great, with the caveat that if a service cannot provide content for your account, it will not be shown in the search results. Prime is the worst offender of this, but having Crave and Bell TV app installed on an AppleTV means any search returns a result, but you can't watch any of them without buying another subscription to a "channel" they offer.
• underyx 3y ago
  While I directionally agree, I don't know how to reconcile this with antitrust. I wouldn't want Netflix to be the one company with all the content, with no competition. I guess what would be better is if all content was available on all the streaming providers, and then they'd compete on platform quality and price.
  • bcardarella 3y ago
    There is considerable competition in this space and prices are not coming down but going up. Services and content is not improving but getting worse.
  • suprjami 3y ago
    I do. There needs to be one international company who is co-owned by all these media companies. They need to "nationalise" streaming amongst themselves. That way users only have to pay one streaming service, the content is available in every country, the rightsholders are paid fairly by the content consumed instead of these never-ending monthly fees for one show and ignoring the rest of the library. If they don't do this, piracy again becomes the best option and media companies will only ever get stupid disengaged customers and that's a bad business model because those people eventually leave. The time of predatory streaming service bullshit is over. Provide a service which puts customers first or they'll all go back to piracy. They already are.
    • mdavidn 3y ago
      That is exactly what Hulu tried to be initially.
    • kmeisthax 3y ago
      Nationalization is too extreme. What you want is compulsory licensing where the government sets some price by which any streaming service can pay to license the content. How that price gets selected is... complicated and easy to fuck up[0], but I can imagine some metrics that could be used to target prices. e.g. the compulsory license cost must not exceed some multiple of the average negotiated rate. [0] Notably, radio has a compulsory licensing scheme, but the government turned up the license cost on Internet radio so high that nobody can make a profit unless they sell their soul to the RIAA ala Spotify.
• slothtrop 3y ago
  I can't relate to that kind of dilemma. I don't want to pay for multiple services, but I also would not get much value from juggling them for what little I care to watch. I might in some instance be interested in just one or two shows, in which case I can sign up to watch then cancel. Streaming is still easy, just more expensive.
• WWLink 3y ago
  It's even stupider than that. Streaming does not always use standard interfaces. It doesn't always work on every device. (See Roku, Apple TV, Android TV boxes, Smart TVs themselves, etc). There's always some jackass service that decides "we're not partners so I'm not supporting your devices" - leaving customers out of the loop since the people paying the monthly fee don't actually matter to them lol. There's all the petty "ecosystem" bullshit. Stuff like how Apple used to only let siri control Apple Music instead of spotify or tidal or whatever. And platform updates. And then the software stops supporting your device because it was made more than 3 years ago or whatever. Or they blocked taking screenshots (hello Crunchyroll, fuck you for making it harder to share random meme moments with my discord buddies!).
• tilwidnk 3y ago
  > Streaming became popular because it was easier than piracy We never stole (cute word pirated) anything. We became cordcutters (OTA and streaming) because we felt we weren't using but maybe $20 of the $180 monthly we were paying to cable. We became cordcutters in 2013. We never stole (cute word pirated) anything.
  • mdavidn 3y ago
    "Stole" isn't the right word either. Pirating does not deprive any legal entity of ownership. It's merely copyright infringement. It also likely circumvented access controls, thereby running afoul of DMCA. But it is not theft. I'm speaking as someone who also never pirates. I'd rather not watch something and spend my time doing something else.
    • Daz1 3y ago
      It is absolutely theft, nobody is falling for that semantics argument - you're depriving a rights holder of revenue that they would otherwise gained.
      • realusername 3y ago
        > you're depriving a rights holder of revenue that they would otherwise gained. There's never been a single proof of a loss of revenue during research. So no, while it's usually a talking point on the anti-piracy ads, it's an urban legend.
        • worksonmine 3y ago
          If I wasn't pirating I would most likely have at least one service. I'm stealing just as much as I would be stealing if I took code from a developer without paying what we agreed to. The entire stealing/not stealing discussion is just useless semantics.
        • scaryclam 3y ago
          The inverse has also been suggested over the years: people who pirated at some point are more likely to pay for content now, whether or not they continue to pirate content
• throwaway2474 3y ago
  Exactly this. I recently wanted to gift my sick mother something to let her watch the shows she likes while she gets better. I check all the major streaming sites, genuinely wanting to buy a subscription because it would be way easier. I considered buying her subscriptions to all the major companies but decided the hassle of managing the logins would be too difficult for her. So in the end I reluctantly ended up torrenting everything onto a single usb stick for her. There is currently genuinely no other way to watch all the things you want in one place other than this. Netflix has accelerated the problem by making their catalogue nothing but shitty self made shows, every year it just gets worse.
• arthur_sav 3y ago
  I like watching movies/series from 2000-2010s. Trying to access that content through streaming is like a whack-a-mole game. Some content is available to some streaming services, in some countries, for a small amount of time. Give me a break. Piracy all the way.
• DaleNeumann 3y ago
  Maybe it's me but consider the content on these streaming platforms which seem to me as a mix of syndicated shows and romantic action films. Where exactly people find value in tv tropes and expensive camera work is something only the producers in Hollywood can answer, pirating is a means to an end and by that I mean, most of it is so shit that it's not worth the price on the label to do the reasonable thing and pay for it.
• tzs 3y ago
  > why pay for 8 different services and have to waste your time figuring out whats on what Both my streaming boxes (Amazon Fire Stick and Xfinity Flex) handle that for me. I press the mic button on the remote, say what I'm looking for, and they tell me my options. Typically that means they tell me which paid services it is on (Netflix, Max, Peacock, etc) and offer to launch the app for that service, which free with ads services it is on (such as Pluto or Freevee), and show my options to buy or rent it.
• corethree 3y ago
  They spent their hard earned money to make shows you rip off for free. I pirate shit too. But I'm not going to say they they took a piss. And deserver the repercussions. That's backwards and illogical and lying to yourself. We are the ones pissing and shitting on their faces. We are the wrong doers here.
• smsm42 3y ago
  Worse yet, most of those services have extremely crappy software (e.g. to watch a series, you have to go through several levels of menu for each epusode and some won't even remember which episodes you watched), put in insane amount of ads even for paid subscription, some have no subtitles, etc. While a good pirate site with proper software - or so I heard from some friends - provide much better service for free.
• wkat4242 3y ago
  Yup. It's a service problem, not a price problem. I pirate again too. The fragmentation is just crazy now.
• fxtentacle 3y ago
  It's a content problem. I cancelled my subscriptions when I noticed that I'm not using them anymore. Years ago, I remember me and my friends were eagerly awaiting every new episode of Agents of Shield or The Expanse. But when I was browsing the IMDB top movies and top TV series recently, I just didn't find anything I wanted to watch (and that hadn't been in cinema half a year ago, thus old). The result is that recently, me and my friends all watched a lot less movies and instead played more video games. TLDR: Netflix's low-effort content is losing against video games.
• hiddencost 3y ago
  Yeah... When companies fail to uphold their side of the bargain, I don't feel a need to uphold mine.
• masklinn 3y ago
  > One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue > 12 years old, and as perfect as the day it came out of GabeN’s mouth. I have not pirated a game in more than a decade, I bought a bunch on sale over Christmas though I likely won’t have the time (or hardware, HL:Alyx was cheap) to play them any time soon. Though it’s a bit of a minor chore I regularly purchase music I find via streaming (I like albums, offline use, and knowing it won’t go away). I’ve never felt the need to pirate a book. I don’t pirate tv/movies much, mostly because I don’t watch them much due to all the other entertainment available. I did pirate Taskmaster, until they started publishing the episodes on YT.
• napierzaza 3y ago
  [dead]
• anothernewdude 3y ago
  I no longer have to track or care about what service a show is on. It's bliss.
• chrischen 3y ago
  I can understand why Netflix et al want to block Apple from their data, but back in the beginning you could just say “Play the latest episode of House of Cards” on Apple TV and it just worked. At the end of day user experience is just degraded… and for what?
• sharkjacobs 3y ago
  > the services have taken the piss? Which services do you mean? Netflix? Or do you mean the other 7 services, which didn’t exist back then. There was a brief window of time when streaming was able to compete with piracy (free) and it’s when there was just one streaming service. Netflix was able to have a robust (if not comprehensive) catalogue (because it had no competitors), and was dedicated to user experience (becaues it was willing to burn money to grow its customerbase), and had just secured multi-year licensing deals for content from all the major film and television distributors at bargain basement prices (because no one else had yet realized how valuable those streaming rights were).
  • zelphirkalt 3y ago
    Aren't they raking in millions or billions now? Not enough money to pay for the deals now? What is stopping them? Also their browser and software limitations are of their own making. Do away with those, and I might even consider a subscription. Obviously I will not, if they continue to discriminate against me.
    • fragmede 3y ago
      https://techland.time.com/2011/12/01/hbo-boss-to-netflix-youll-never-get-our-shows/ https://techland.time.com/2011/12/01/hbo-boss-to-netflix-you... HBO Boss to Netflix: You’ll Never Get Our Shows (2011) Money can't buy everything. though apparently 2023 called to say that's no longer true. HBO is exploring licensing their content to Netflix. https://www.vulture.com/2023/07/hbo-tv-shows-netflix-wbd-licensing-deal.html https://www.vulture.com/2023/07/hbo-tv-shows-netflix-wbd-lic...
  • Terretta 3y ago
    >> the services have taken the piss? > Which services do you mean? As a pioneer of entitlement-based streaming video who believed in the tech, I pay for every streaming service that remains ad free and is available a la carte as an add-on "channel" to TV+, Hulu, or Prime. I'm down from most all of them, to just a handful. Our consulting to content and distribution firms in the 2000s told them they had to do five things to compete: - eliminate anxiety of appointment viewing - eliminate anxiety of acquiring media (costs) - eliminate anxiety of ownership (durability) - eliminate anxiety of compatibility (devices) - eliminate anxiety of availability (when, where) Netflix is undoing several of these. They're adding cost of viewing ads, removing promise of working on all devices, and more aggressively removing deep content.
• martindbp 3y ago
  > The services have taken the piss and now they'll get the repercussions of it. Whose fault is it really that all content is not available on a single service? It's nobody's fault, it was inevitable given how things work. How could you "fix" it? You'd need legislation saying that all content must be made available for licensing at the same price for every service. But that's not enough, because why would HBO sell their content to Netflix and vice versa? No, you'd have to force them to make it available. But that's not enough either, as they could just set the price extremely high. And at this point what would be the point in having multiple streaming services at all? Perhaps we need legislation that enforces separation of content producers and distribution, like the Glass-Steagall Act but for TV, or Net Neutrality?
  • somenameforme 3y ago
    It'll be naturally fixed by economics. We'll reach an equilibrium point where offering an exclusive streaming service becomes less profitable than simply licensing your content to another service or services. Obstinance will probably drag out the timeline, but it won't change the outcome. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
    • realusername 3y ago
      Those media conglomerates are very stubborn though, they care more about keeping their rights than money itself.
      • pdimitar 3y ago
        Let them be stubborn. They can't outlaw everything that they don't like. They'll die a slow and painful death.
  • ReptileMan 3y ago
    It's type of licensing called FRAND. Has been utilized with success.
  • 3y ago
• mike_hock 3y ago
  More importantly, the pirated content isn't DRM-encumbered, you get to keep it and it can't be pulled whenever the streaming service feels like it. So the same situation as with DVDs all over again.
• Double_a_92 3y ago
  Also it's not even better. I have a netflix and disney+ account, and sometimes still watch their series on pirate streaming sites because it's less of a hassle. E.g. I can't watch HD disney+ in firefox. And netflix sometimes just brings stubborn error messages that I can't fix by reloading...
• iwontberude 3y ago
  Back to legal threats and weaponizing the FBI
• jug 3y ago
  Absolutely this. I pirate Apple TV+ stuff right now. I subscribe to like three services. This is my maximum. I could maybe stretch to four but then the market needs to meet me there and do two things: 1. Make an effort in consolidating media rights and services to these four and 2. Work to lower the price to roughly $10 per service for at least high quality 1080p with no ads in high quality apps across the board. Bonus: Also work to standardize a media protocol so that you can see what you have access to in a common media library regardless what you use, or even in third party apps, as well as stream with whatever as long as you're a subscriber to the respective services. Do all these things and I actually think they have a good chance against piracy. It's all about what they're willing to do. They can absolutely make some good money on movies and TV shows in a piracy world. I'm convinced of this. Piracy is not the problem; piracy is just the other weight of the scale showing just how anti-consumerist they can become.
• norman784 3y ago
  Don't forget that when watching in your desktop/laptop is hard to get a good quality, like you have a 4k display, but every service want to serve you 1080p or lower quality when you already pay for the 4k content plan.
• izacus 3y ago
  Yeah, also pirated content has: - 4K HDR video, not whatever the heck the buggy client delivers. - Atmos/TrueHD audio track that actually works, not whatever the broken app delivers (I'm looking at you Sky and rest of the ilk that still deliver HBO content with stereo). - Subtitles for ALL the languages, not just one or two. And those languages don't disappear when I go on a vacation, leaving me stuck with german audio and french subtitles. - Properly functioning offline playback for when I'm traveling, not randomly broken and disappearing offline mode (Netflix, Spotify and YouTube all blessed me with "all your downloaded content is gone" experience on long flights). - Works on all my devices not a random subset independent on which way greedy execs tried to extract "ecosystem" money from my playback device manufacturer. Looking at you ATV+. - Is actually available in my region and doesn't randomly disappear from my devices just because I decided to travel to visit my parents or have some time off. - Doesn't randomly disappear after 6 months when I started watching the series because some license expired. As you can see, I really tried to pay to get content from these people. And all I got was bunch of frustration. F'em, they brought this upon themselves for being user hostile arseholes. Again.
  • rekoil 3y ago
    I personally find that Spotifys offline content has worked reliably over the years. You just gotta remember that when you get a new device you have to go to library and click download and then leave Spotify open for a few hours. Spotify is also a great example of how to beat piracy. I haven't downloaded an mp3 file since I got a Spotify Premium account in 2007. OK that's probably a slight overstatement, but it's near enough to the truth for this argument. They made it so simple and convenient to pay for access to music that I've had zero reasons to even consider piracy. They have everything (well, enough that I've never felt something was missing anyway), they have clients for everything, the pricing is reasonable, and they have great value-add in the form of playlist generation. As for the rest, full agreement, the low bitrate of streaming services is the big one for me as I'm a film enthusiast with great gear that definitely doesn't reach its potential using any streaming services. Now that it looks like physical media is going the way of the Dodo I'm wondering where I'm gonna get actually high bitrate content from in the future.
    • 3y ago
• aequitas 3y ago
  > when you can just have one service for free Most of the time piracy isn't even free. You got a server running for downloads which is an investment and uses power (24-7 sometimes), hard disks for storage aren't free. Indexers and newsgroups are paid (good ones at least). Comparing that to a monthly subscription of what used to be €10,- to Netflix and which had it all, makes it nonsense to pirate.
• MichaelMug 3y ago
  I read this same thing a lot on Reddit and HN. It surprising to me on HN because I would assume most people on here are making good money. For my family here is the monthly spend with taxes for my area included: HBO Max $ 13.53 Hulu $ 7.21 Disney+ $ 0.18 (w/ Hulu) Paramount+ w/ Showtime $ 10.82 Apple TV+ $ 10.81 AMC+ $ 7.56 Amazon Prime $12.53 $62.64/month. Now, about 20 years ago in 2004 my parents had basic cable and they paid $60/month. An my parents combined made no where near what I make today in my salary alone. And with inflation the cost of entertainment has gone down significantly. As for figuring out what is on what- Apple TV has made this easy. Is piracy easier? Legality aside you need a seed box, membership to specific sites, and VPN. Which can add up to more than $30/month just to download pirated content. Not to mention the time investment in figuring out how to get the movies and tv shows to your family members on all of their devices. A budget NAS with 20 TB is going to cost $500. A small PC to transcode also $500. Also all the technical know how required. Backing up 20 TB to the Backblaze is going to cost $13/mo. So lets not pretend piracy is easier.
  • dijit 3y ago
    You're missing Netflix, ironically.
  • cvalka 3y ago
    Put.io
  • 2Gkashmiri 3y ago
    oh no. you are trying to set up a full blown alternative. that's not how the majority of world does piracy. here is how it goes. you have a laptop/pc. you go to tbp, search for the top 100 for movies/tv shows and download the torrent, watch it and delete the file to save space. what you are describing is off-limits for majority of the world. i have rented seedboxes back in 2016 for 2 months to get those "points" to get to a private tracker. never before, never after. i have been using the above tbp+vlc method on a daily basis since 2005-06. only recently lookmovie and other streaming sites have made it a bit easier. oh, also, there is an outlier. popcorntime. it JUST WORKS. I used it on the 2nd day of its initial release, i saw the whole weeks drama with death threats and the subsequent forks that arose. i have been using that as well so i am confirming and NOT PRETENDING that piracy is easier that actually paying for stuff.
• tonylemesmer 3y ago
  The regional licensing and delisting of titles is frustrating too. All the separate walled gardens just making it less likely folks will pay.
• DrBazza 3y ago
  And they're going from binge-watching ad-free episode of an entire series, to releasing one episode a week... with adverts. Yeah, no thanks. I'll just VPN+torrent the ad-free version and watch that, thanks. On any device of my choosing as well. And why should I pay £8.99 or whatever to one streaming service, for one programme, that was previously "free to air" for the other series? Paramount taking back Star Trek from Netflix for example. I'm not sure how many multi-million dollar, unseen cancelled-after-one-season dramas with 50,000 viewers these studios need to create before they realise 'we need viewers to 'build a franchise' and make a profit'. Just imagine if these series or dramas were only seen by a few thousand people at most: Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Band of Brothers, Shogun, Dallas, Cheers and so on. Even How I Met Your Mother and Big Bang Theory were pretty much pre-streaming when they started, but syndicated to world-wide terrestrial channels.
• throwaway71271 3y ago
  I think this is right. There are like 3 animes I wanted to watch on netflix, but they only have dutch subtitles, Trigun had dutch subtitles for like 4 years until they removed it in the netherlands. I have to play whack a mole with 4-5 streaming services to find out where the show is 'at the moment'. The tv apps are so garbage.. each company is pushing more and more visual animations crap, it has gotten to the point that I cant even scroll the titles properly.
• shafyy 3y ago
  What is the best way to pirate tv shows these days? Asking for a friend, of course.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • Synaesthesia 3y ago
    Torrents
    • shafyy 3y ago
      Cool! Is Popcorn time still recommended? Or what's a good client?
      • worksonmine 3y ago
        Not a client but check out the *arr[1] family if you're into self-hosting. What client you choose depends on your usage, I like Deluge. There's some initial work to setup and a little bit of maintenance but it's worth it, throw a Jellyfin instance into the mix and have all your media in one convenient place. Linuxserver[2] has containers for all of them. [1]: https://wiki.servarr.com/ https://wiki.servarr.com/ [2]: https://fleet.linuxserver.io/ https://fleet.linuxserver.io/
        • shafyy 3y ago
          Interesting, thanks for sharing!
      • Synaesthesia 3y ago
        On Mac, Transmission. On Windows, QBittorrent. Then I just search on various torrent sites. Thepiratebay.org and rutracker.org (use google). But movies and TV shows are easy to find. There are many sites which specialise in it.
        • 3y ago
• holgerschurig 3y ago
  Agreed. I actually don't think that Piracy was difficult to compete against. Actually there was a time when video streaming platforms competed against it --- and very successful. For normal people, it was cheap enough to make a contract, and much simpler than going the piracy route. No one talked anymore about pirating. But then things went wrong: * you paid a monthly fee and STILL suddenly got advertisements force-feds (you couldn't even skip them) * you wanted to watch some series, but it was taken out of the program (never heard of a public library that removes some author after some months) * many movies made it only into one specific video stream vendor, so they forced people to make 2 or 3 or even more subscriptions. And once the inconvenience from video stream vendors reached some threshold, piracy was re-birthed. As soon as it become more convenient again.
  • m000 3y ago
    And at the bottom of all these issues, you will find the excessive copyright terms which create artificial scarcity. Just require anything older than 25-30 years to be made available for a nominal fee to any platform that wants it, with no exclusivity agreements allowed. Suddenly, you have a ton of quality content on multiple platforms. And the platforms are incentivized to compete on quality new content. Also, it shouldn't be allowed for the Film/Music industry want to have it both ways. First use "Hollywood accounting" [1] to avoid paying taxes and contributors because the film "had a loss". And then milk it off perpetually. If you declare a loss on something, it should be enforced to go on public domain in a much shorter timeframe (say 10 years vs. 25-30 for profitable productions). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
• zogrodea 3y ago
  I think fragmentation is a legitimate problem for end-users but I don’t know how to solve it exactly, because the most obvious alternative is a monopoly where everything is on just one service (and we all know about the bad effects a monopoly can have). Maybe a system where multiple different services offer the exact same content library or something similar, but a good solution will require some thought I think.
  • klabb3 3y ago
    Imagine old school TVs. It would be the same problem as if you had TV be hard wired to a physical channel. You need to have 3 TVs at home to watch different channels. That’s what’s happening today. The solution is easy technically speaking and has been solved for decades. It’s called interoperability. Now, the issue is businesses don’t like it. Even though the customer value is huge. Why? Because there’s something they want more than to sell content: to control access. Your player, your recommendations, promotions for more of their content. Heck, why not triple dip and throw in some ads and data harvesting too? The end goal of platform control is to become the only one. Dominance, like Spotify. Then: relax, lean back, raise prices, and watch the stock ticker. So they only like interoperability when they are small and growing, and then do a 180 when they get bigger. Their end goal is incompatible with yours, the consumer. Back in the day, governments or similar neutral-ground organizations enforced/supported interop (telephone, radio, tv, etc) not perfectly, but enough to break the prisoners dilemma of monopoly-seeking competing businesses. Of course, that’s gone now, in the US. Standards support (the carrot) is only for rudimentary tech, like encryption, and anti-trust (the whip) is back in some other century going after hypothetical cartoon villains. So… either one of them wins, or a duopoly, whatever is acceptable to the average consumer. Or, more likely, it remains like this: a fragmented shit cocktail and losses to piracy. This works as intended – piracy is an extremely good pressure valve and canary litmus for market failure.
• dathinab 3y ago
  if I look around to people who did pirate videos or games in the past it always was because of one of following reasons: - unavailability of the product in the right form in the market they live in (e.g. no OV and terrible translation, no good quality video/audio, not available at all, etc.) - moon prices (e.g. Anime DVDs at least 10+ years ago where I lived), or being thigh on money (e.g. as a 16 year old) - it being easier to pirate then to buy ... - buying the product (in a reasonable convenient way) forces other unwanted things onto you, like automatic self-extending subscriptions or tracking to a point where I can't understand anymore how it's not classified as espionage All of this except being tight on money hint to a mismatch between products provided and what consumers want/find acceptable. If the movie industry I think it would auto self correct, but it isn't and you could say piracy (on larger scale) is natural marked effect caused by the absence of a proper free market. But what is I think most important to realize is that outside of the situation of piracy being more convenient then buying in all other cases the actual losses piracy creates is quite limited to a point where it's quite questionable how reasonable the drawbacks users have to suffer because of piracy prevention mechanism/laws are. Natural if piracy would be fully unconstrained it likely would then cause huge monetary losses. A free market is still a marked so a product produced with some investment (e.g. creating the movie) still should be sold for some value.
• amelius 3y ago
  Yes, they should look at Spotify, where all the labels are available under one service.
• Levitating 3y ago
  Netflix doesn't allow 1080p streaming to Linux users. The DRM also doesn't allow you to take any screen captures while Netflix is visible. You can't download any content and even on Windows you'd have to watch it within 48 hours. All these antipiracy measures only invite us to pirate. Pirating allows us to choose a media player of our children, possibly with 4K upscaling, better compression standards and the ability to download our content.
  • kevincox 3y ago
    > The DRM also doesn't allow you to take any screen captures while Netflix is visible. I remember when I first hit this and was shocked. I was going to send a funny still to my friend and tell them that they should watch the show. But Netflix apparently doesn't want free advertising. DRM really does seem to harm the customers and the content owners far more than any pirate.
• mewpmewp2 3y ago
  Yeah, it's so much easier to just use fmovies, bflix or things like that. Just access your browser and use. Don't even need to torrent in modern times. Funnily enough their UI is much better and more intuitive as well, in addition to having all the content together. They also offer imdb ratings etc. I would pay $50 - $100 for a server like fmovies, bflix. So it wouldn't be a complete headache to understand what you can and can't watch in your region. Everytime I want to watch Netflix nowadays, unless I happened to hear from somebody, that there's something awesome there, then I just browse it, and nothing of interest is popping up, so I just go somewhere else. I don't pirate because I don't have money to pay or that I don't want to pay. I pirate because using the real services is so impossibly frustrating and disappointing. It's fine to have multiple services, it's good for the competition, but there needs to be a system to make it so that each service can stream all things. Even if it costs within that service, so be it. Even where you pay per stream or view is good. If you have your own original content then you just ask other streaming services to pay for it while your own end-users can watch it for free, the other service's end users will have to pay.
• monster2control 3y ago
  And now they are all adding ADs on top of it
• cdeutsch 3y ago
  I haven't pirated content in a decade but I'd estimate I'm a year or two away from going back for the reasons you stated. So sick of the rate hikes and fragmentation. Once ads become common place I'm out.
• happymellon 3y ago
  We used to have it too. RIP Boxee.
• fennecfoxy 3y ago
  As with many problems, the cause is suit-and-tie hand-shaking. The 1% exists because we let it. We should be asking a lot more of our governments/legal systems such that businesses are forced to run in the interests of consumers.
• leokennis 3y ago
  Yep. Contrast with music, where every major service has “all” music and as a consequence piracy is very low.
• cchance 3y ago
  Dear god this! And the fact that if you don't use some special app or special magic combination of a device type and app, you won't get the 4k streams your f*cking paying extra for! I discovered after 2 years of paying for netflix premium whatever its called the most expensive that i was only getting 1080p on most of my devices because of the app i was using or browser i was using or god knows what other reason.
• tomaskafka 3y ago
  Also, shows are just disappearing. My most recent torrent was series 1 and 2 of Bluey, which disappeared overnight from Disney+ in Europe. Try explaining that to kids who love it (and I do as well).