6 ms·

What ended piracy for common films was not DRM or videocassette seizures but the offer of cheap tapes and eventually cheap streaming that made it simply "not wo

What ended piracy for common films was not DRM or videocassette seizures but the offer of cheap tapes and eventually cheap streaming that made it simply "not worth it" to pirate. The same is true of video games where paid players far outweigh pirates. In other words, if the art film industry wants piracy to stop, it needs to bring all its materials together in a cheap subscription store that people can afford. Criterion[0] is one such product with outstanding content, real human curation, and a lower price than mainstream movie providers. [0] https://www.criterionchannel.com/ https://www.criterionchannel.com/

rolph 2y ago
this also needs to be commonly accessable, no matter how you download or "stream" it into your device.
ilvez 2y ago
Video game pirating was mostly killed by viruses. At one point it was too just too risky. Probably good sources still around but it's too much hassle, maybe only if you game a lot and don't have a job to pay for a hobby.
- BossingAround 2y ago
  You probably need a seedbox + private trackers for the best pirating experience. If you play <5 games a year, probably not worth it.
  - Supermancho 2y ago
    I'm thinking more like a vm/container.
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
      Even for non pirated content, I built a dedicated gaming pc. Kernel level anti cheat is becoming more prolific and it is impossible for me to trust the code quality going into those. Even games are not immune to ad tech revenue and are sending system telemetry to their servers.
- Sakos 2y ago
  Is this a joke? I don't see it being any less prevalent than at any time in the past. There are plenty of trustworthy sites and plenty of people know about them. It's all over Reddit for anybody who's interested and it doesn't take a rocket scientist. It's easier now than it's ever been before.
  - ilvez 2y ago
    Wasn't meant as a joke, thanks for the response. I honestly thought it so. Now I know..
- jorvi 2y ago
  > Video game pirating was mostly killed by viruses. At one point it was too just too risky. It wasn’t, teenagers don’t give a shit, and torrent sites like Piratebay had trusted uploaders (green/pink skull) and comments. Steam sucked initially but it kept increasing its value add (cloud saves / settings sync, easy voice chat before Discord, Steam Workshop for mods, etc) and simultaneously the sales got better and better. Why pirate a game when you can wait a couple of months to buy it for 66% off, niceties included.
downWidOutaFite 2y ago
Depending on how you look at it Criterion's $11/month for 1,000 titles is not cheaper than Netflix's $15/month for 5,000 titles.
- Supermancho 2y ago
  Quantity is not the important factor in entertainment channel selection. Most people do not pay for a streaming service, if there's only 1 thing they want. Consumers aren't concerned with what they dont want, unless it gets in the way of what they do want.
- squidsoup 2y ago
  Just about everything is worth watching on Criterion however, and unless you have very low standards, I don't think you can say that about Netflix.
  - ascagnel_ 2y ago
    The worst movies on Criterion Channel are interesting, even if they're not good. The worst movies on Netflix are just boring.
- tortila 2y ago
  I was using Criterion subscription extensively for about 2 years. What I loved the most is that I could make a random pick from their main page and be sure it’s going to be a good quality film. I could never say this about Netflix, there I have to struggle to find something that’s at least decent
Supermancho 2y ago
Notably, Sega is halting the last legal way to purchase many games. https://support.sega.com/hc/en-us/articles/29776767664145-SEGA-Classics-FAQ#h_01JBWBDET2BT55YPJKK0K537Z0 https://support.sega.com/hc/en-us/articles/29776767664145-SE... I can buy most of these games on steam with a classic bundle ~36$ now. https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/10143/SEGA_Mega_Drive_and_Genesis_Classics/ https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/10143/SEGA_Mega_Drive_... A great price at 1$ a game. I can also boot up an emulator and play all these games, plus more for free. I don't feel compelled to buy the bundle.
- favorited 2y ago
  While I think it's still an unfriendly move on Sega's part, they're presumably delisting these specific titles in advance of releasing new products/packages for them. That's what happened a couple years ago – they removed Sonics 1-3 (+ Knuckles) from Steam as individual titles, then released Sonic Origins, which included all of those plus Sonic CD. The SEGA Classics games came out 14 years ago, so they probably want to release these titles again with an updated emulator and market it as a new collection. This seems especially likely to me, since they're delisting the existing Classics Collection title on consoles.
BossingAround 2y ago
This is certainly true for me. As a kid, I used to pirate movies/tv shows on my slow 1Mbps connection. Nowadays, I just want to turn on my TV and start Netflix/HBO/Disney/... But, with the advent of pretty severe content locking and geolocking on various services, pirating is starting to be very enticing once again. The thing I would miss the most is the recommendation algorithm, which tends to be pretty good on Netflix.
- daveslash 2y ago
  Downloading The Matrix over a 28k dial-up modem (on a shared house/family line) was an exercise in patience! I didn't, but a friend did... and we all waited weeks for it to finish.
  - im3w1l 2y ago
    Weeks... that's gotta have cost more than buying it?
    - daveslash 2y ago
      Ha, that's a good point. We were broke kids in a rural town without drivers licenses a hundred miles from anywhere that sold physical VHS or DVDs. We didn't have money, and if we did we didn't have the means to get to a store, and if we did it was far far away, and if we could I don't think most of us had DVD players at home. The phone bill, on the other hand - parents pay for that. ;-) IIRC, our dial-up ISP was a "local call", which was free then. I'm pretty sure my friend capitalized on the phone line during night times when the house was asleep.
- homebrewer 2y ago
  > with the advent of pretty severe content locking and geolocking on various services It's been the norm for many of us for decades. Even if you want to pay and stay an "honest citizen", you're not found of being worthy by most streaming/distribution platforms. For the longest time I thought geolocking will die out and we will be able to access the same stuff you have, but it's going the opposite way. As the result, "piracy" never died out here, it's more alive than it's ever been. Take the hint. It's a true pleasure to see dozens of countries from around the world represented in the peer list of my torrent client. At least there is one area where we can work together for the good of all. (Gabe is one of very few exceptions, and Steam is a very successful platform commercially speaking, once again proving the old quote, by gaben himself IIRC.)
KMnO4 2y ago
I don’t know a single person who pirates music anymore. It’s way too convenient to pay $5-10/month for unlimited access to nearly every record ever created. And there was a brief period in the 2010s where I could almost say that about movies. But now, most people I know are back to pirating because it doesn’t require an eclectic taste to find that you need 6 different streaming services to meet your needs. The film industry was so close, and dropped that ball.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  > I don’t know a single person who pirates music anymore. What do you think the biggest category is, by every measure, on YouTube? There are lots of distribution and payment mechanics changes over the years across creative industries. So it's very hard to generalize. But strictly in terms of piracy, there are more than enough non-monetized audio uploads on YouTube to say, music piracy is alive and well.
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    YouTube's Content ID systems ensures that the vast majority of uploads pay royalties to the performer. Those royalties may be miniscule, but they are paid.
    - doctorpangloss 2y ago
      Sure. I too have heard many “performers” celebrate the effectiveness of content ID. They all talk about how that was the end of piracy. Thats exactly how they put it: “Content ID ended piracy.”
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Implementation detail. What matters is the UX: think of a song, search for it, there it is on YouTube. Open the link and it plays. No payment needed, for a long time not even an account. The platform itself was pretty inobtrusive for most of its lifetime; it's gotten quite bad recently, but for most of those who care enough to do something about it, uBlock Origin clears out the UX of all the bullshit. Pirates couldn't possibly beat that if they tried. But it only exists because of an accident of history: YouTube got big on pirated content early enough and fast enough they could transition to "content id" instead of getting sued to oblivion.
romwell 2y ago
Sure, but I remember pirating La Maman Et La Putain specifically because it was yet-to-be-released by Criterion in any form - and it was Jean Eustache's masterpiece that made a splash at the Cannes back in 1972, not an obscure film by any measure (even if not mainstream by any measure either). Piracy still remains a supremely important means of both accessing and archiving content after it stops being a moneymaker, or simply when it pauses being one. Case in point - plenty of stories about games on being officially published by the content owners... with cracks, after the source code was lost (or wasn't in a shape to be rebuilt), and officially selling the pirated version was the only thing the publisher could figure out how to do[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_and_the_Whore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_and_the_Whore [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/16ahvqk/rockstar_is_selling_cracked_game_copies_on_steam/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/16ahvqk/rockstar_is_...
daveslash 2y ago
Agreed. The same with Music - with the rise of services like the iPod and more modern streaming services like Spotify, the effort just wasn't worth it. It turns out that people will happily pay for that content if its in an easy and convenient format. Regarding video specifically, one problem I see with the streaming services is the increasing push of New content. Streaming services like Netflix or Hulu or Paramount+ are really dependent on new subscribers, which means they tend to focus on new and exclusive content to draw in new people, so they prioritize that (to a fault imho). Many of us still want to rewatch those shows from the 90s we loved. Paramount+ specifically is "The Star Trek Streaming Service", and I know the folks over on reddit have their beef with P+ for seemingly de-prioritizing it instead of milking an extensive library like a cash cow. The past few years I've been digging into older movies - some black and white, silent, foreign, or weird avant-garde stuff. Streaming really drops the ball there, but I can understand how the business model doesn't really favor that.
mzi 2y ago
> Criterion[0] is one such product with outstanding content, real human curation, and a lower price than mainstream movie providers. "Sorry. This is currently unavailable in your region." This has been the case since before launch and is also a reason why pirates are still a thing.
- Yeul 2y ago
  Distribution rights for obscure cinema are complex. Apparently Prime video has "suicide club" according to where to watch. But not in my country lol.
  - squidsoup 2y ago
    Sion Sono is such an odd film maker, I seem to vacillate between "this is genius" and "this is garbage" every other minute while watching his films.
  - triceratops 2y ago
    > Distribution rights for obscure cinema are complex. That's what I don't understand. The odds that more than 10 people in Mongolia are going to give two shits about say an arthouse drama about an immigrant Latino family in Yellowknife are incredibly low. No matter how well-drawn the characters, or compelling the story, obscure arthouse films are not expected to find a big paying audience. So why not make that film free to watch in any market that you don't expect to be interested in it? How much revenue do you really stand to lose?
    - rolph 2y ago
      i do belive loss leader is a sound marketing principle, if you can eliminate an all or nothing mentality [ its all mine or you get nothing ]
- cptaj 2y ago
  Yeah, totally nonexistent product for most of the world
bayareacommie 2y ago
[dead]
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
Worth pointing out that video gaming piracy has a number of challenges that make it less appealing. No connected experience (usually); you have to play in offline modes only, sometimes with more compromised. Game updates are often lagging. Others have mentioned viruses already. Steam sales are frequent so /r/patientgamer types can just wait till the game becomes affordable where-as there's a rarely discounts available & a patchwork of streaming services.
artimaeis 2y ago
MUBI[0] is another streaming service that's focusing on curation and smaller lists of films available. Their service is available in a lot of countries, and each region has its own curation. I'm a huge fan of this ultra-curated approach, since it lets me find a lot of things that I'd otherwise have to hunt for, and would likely miss out on. [0] https://mubi.com https://mubi.com
- mega_dean 2y ago
  In 2008/2009, I bought a DVD of this movie called "The Fall": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_(2006_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_(2006_film) . I'm a sucker for visually-appealing films so I loved it, but I eventually lost the DVD and was never able to find another copy, despite checking every year or two. The wikipedia page says: > As of September 2023, The Fall had been unavailable on streaming services or rental services, making it notoriously difficult to access with secondhand Blu-ray copies of the film being very expensive. But apparently that isn't the case anymore! MUBI bought the rights earlier this year, and it looks like I can watch it through Amazon Video if I sign up for a MUBI trial. EDIT: I maybe should have visited https://mubi.com/ https://mubi.com/ before commenting - clips from The Fall is the very first thing they show.
jdietrich 2y ago
True to the article's point, The Criterion Channel is only available in the US and Canada. Mubi and BFI Player offer a good selection of independent films at a fair price in my country, but that's part of the problem - there's an annoyingly complex matrix of services and regional restrictions. Rarely does anyone have to ask "where can I listen to that album?", because essentially all of the music streaming services have the rights to essentially all music. "Where can I watch that film?" is still a very real problem.
tortila 2y ago
Last time I checked Criterion was only available in the US because of publishing rights. It could be easily bypassed by using VPN (location is actually only checked at account registration), but I’m wondering: is it really different from pirating if you’re breaking the rules anyway? Here in Europe MUBI[0] is an alternative to Criterion. I’ve tried it during lockdown but the streaming quality was seriously lacking, and their library was really small. I’m curious if they improved in those areas [0]: https://mubi.com/en/ https://mubi.com/en/
- squidsoup 2y ago
  The concept behind MUBI is that they provide a small set of curated films which change frequently - sort of like a little independent movie theatre. Criterion is possibly a better offering if you want a large catalogue.
  - dtagames 2y ago
    Criterion also rotates through human-curated collections. They do not offer a full library archivally, which was initially a disappointment when I subscribed. It turns out the curated content is great, changes all the time, and really has movies that are worth watching and I don't already know about -- along with lots of favorites.
JoblessWonder 2y ago
There are many hurdles but one of the biggest I see is that there isn't a common/market leading way for independent films to self-publish their films to an independent streaming service. Something like Steam but for films. I'm sure YouTube, Vimeo, and others may offer the ability to do this... but none of them are winning that market or advertising themselves to potential viewers. And it isn't cost effective for a streamer to go after independent films that are very niche.
nasmorn 2y ago
I would even buy it out right but the rare movies I am interested in almost never have any distribution. Which is strange since that surely can’t be the most lucrative way to monetize it
pacifika 2y ago
Perhaps It’s not the cost per se but the convenience that made it not worth it.
soulofmischief 2y ago
That isn't enough. A big motivator for these kinds of people is preservation, and a subscription service doesn't solve that problem. Licenses and agreements end, many culturally significant works are completely unavailable today except for pirating. This goes for music, film and video games. Until we live in a world where the conglomerates taking their huge slice of the revenue from artists and creatives are also stewards of culture, acting in the best interest of culture itself, I couldn't care less about their bottom dollar.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
> What ended piracy for common films was not DRM or videocassette seizures but the offer of cheap tapes and eventually cheap streaming that made it simply "not worth it" to pirate. Piracy has all but ended for movies. The issue with streaming is that there are movie streaming apps (for TVs, browsers, etc.) that basically offer the Netflix interface. I know of people with hundreds of TB of movies and series: catalog in the five digits (so more than 10 000 movies and series). In Europe there's also the totally rampant "IPTV" craze: where even retired boomers (not necessarily the most tech savvy audience) buy/rent an illegal little box with all of Disney+Netflix+HBO etc. plus also all the regular TV channels (of the entire world). I don't know in which world movies and series piracy disappeared but it's certainly not in the world in which I live in (FWIW I pay Netflix). I actually don't know if there's ever been an era with more movie piracy than nowadays!?
cameldrv 2y ago
This used to be true with the original Netflix where they mailed you DVDs. They really had almost everything you could think of, you just had to wait a day or two to get it. I watched so many obscure movies, it was fantastic!

rolph 2y ago

this also needs to be commonly accessable, no matter how you download or "stream" it into your device.

ilvez 2y ago

Video game pirating was mostly killed by viruses. At one point it was too just too risky. Probably good sources still around but it's too much hassle, maybe only if you game a lot and don't have a job to pay for a hobby.

BossingAround 2y ago
You probably need a seedbox + private trackers for the best pirating experience. If you play <5 games a year, probably not worth it.
- Supermancho 2y ago
  I'm thinking more like a vm/container.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    Even for non pirated content, I built a dedicated gaming pc. Kernel level anti cheat is becoming more prolific and it is impossible for me to trust the code quality going into those. Even games are not immune to ad tech revenue and are sending system telemetry to their servers.
Sakos 2y ago
Is this a joke? I don't see it being any less prevalent than at any time in the past. There are plenty of trustworthy sites and plenty of people know about them. It's all over Reddit for anybody who's interested and it doesn't take a rocket scientist. It's easier now than it's ever been before.
- ilvez 2y ago
  Wasn't meant as a joke, thanks for the response. I honestly thought it so. Now I know..
jorvi 2y ago
> Video game pirating was mostly killed by viruses. At one point it was too just too risky. It wasn’t, teenagers don’t give a shit, and torrent sites like Piratebay had trusted uploaders (green/pink skull) and comments. Steam sucked initially but it kept increasing its value add (cloud saves / settings sync, easy voice chat before Discord, Steam Workshop for mods, etc) and simultaneously the sales got better and better. Why pirate a game when you can wait a couple of months to buy it for 66% off, niceties included.

downWidOutaFite 2y ago

Depending on how you look at it Criterion's $11/month for 1,000 titles is not cheaper than Netflix's $15/month for 5,000 titles.

Supermancho 2y ago
Quantity is not the important factor in entertainment channel selection. Most people do not pay for a streaming service, if there's only 1 thing they want. Consumers aren't concerned with what they dont want, unless it gets in the way of what they do want.
squidsoup 2y ago
Just about everything is worth watching on Criterion however, and unless you have very low standards, I don't think you can say that about Netflix.
- ascagnel_ 2y ago
  The worst movies on Criterion Channel are interesting, even if they're not good. The worst movies on Netflix are just boring.
tortila 2y ago
I was using Criterion subscription extensively for about 2 years. What I loved the most is that I could make a random pick from their main page and be sure it’s going to be a good quality film. I could never say this about Netflix, there I have to struggle to find something that’s at least decent

Supermancho 2y ago

Notably, Sega is halting the last legal way to purchase many games. https://support.sega.com/hc/en-us/articles/29776767664145-SEGA-Classics-FAQ#h_01JBWBDET2BT55YPJKK0K537Z0 https://support.sega.com/hc/en-us/articles/29776767664145-SE... I can buy most of these games on steam with a classic bundle ~36$ now. https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/10143/SEGA_Mega_Drive_and_Genesis_Classics/ https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/10143/SEGA_Mega_Drive_... A great price at 1$ a game. I can also boot up an emulator and play all these games, plus more for free. I don't feel compelled to buy the bundle.

favorited 2y ago
While I think it's still an unfriendly move on Sega's part, they're presumably delisting these specific titles in advance of releasing new products/packages for them. That's what happened a couple years ago – they removed Sonics 1-3 (+ Knuckles) from Steam as individual titles, then released Sonic Origins, which included all of those plus Sonic CD. The SEGA Classics games came out 14 years ago, so they probably want to release these titles again with an updated emulator and market it as a new collection. This seems especially likely to me, since they're delisting the existing Classics Collection title on consoles.

BossingAround 2y ago

This is certainly true for me. As a kid, I used to pirate movies/tv shows on my slow 1Mbps connection. Nowadays, I just want to turn on my TV and start Netflix/HBO/Disney/... But, with the advent of pretty severe content locking and geolocking on various services, pirating is starting to be very enticing once again. The thing I would miss the most is the recommendation algorithm, which tends to be pretty good on Netflix.

daveslash 2y ago
Downloading The Matrix over a 28k dial-up modem (on a shared house/family line) was an exercise in patience! I didn't, but a friend did... and we all waited weeks for it to finish.
- im3w1l 2y ago
  Weeks... that's gotta have cost more than buying it?
  - daveslash 2y ago
    Ha, that's a good point. We were broke kids in a rural town without drivers licenses a hundred miles from anywhere that sold physical VHS or DVDs. We didn't have money, and if we did we didn't have the means to get to a store, and if we did it was far far away, and if we could I don't think most of us had DVD players at home. The phone bill, on the other hand - parents pay for that. ;-) IIRC, our dial-up ISP was a "local call", which was free then. I'm pretty sure my friend capitalized on the phone line during night times when the house was asleep.
homebrewer 2y ago
> with the advent of pretty severe content locking and geolocking on various services It's been the norm for many of us for decades. Even if you want to pay and stay an "honest citizen", you're not found of being worthy by most streaming/distribution platforms. For the longest time I thought geolocking will die out and we will be able to access the same stuff you have, but it's going the opposite way. As the result, "piracy" never died out here, it's more alive than it's ever been. Take the hint. It's a true pleasure to see dozens of countries from around the world represented in the peer list of my torrent client. At least there is one area where we can work together for the good of all. (Gabe is one of very few exceptions, and Steam is a very successful platform commercially speaking, once again proving the old quote, by gaben himself IIRC.)

KMnO4 2y ago

I don’t know a single person who pirates music anymore. It’s way too convenient to pay $5-10/month for unlimited access to nearly every record ever created. And there was a brief period in the 2010s where I could almost say that about movies. But now, most people I know are back to pirating because it doesn’t require an eclectic taste to find that you need 6 different streaming services to meet your needs. The film industry was so close, and dropped that ball.

doctorpangloss 2y ago
> I don’t know a single person who pirates music anymore. What do you think the biggest category is, by every measure, on YouTube? There are lots of distribution and payment mechanics changes over the years across creative industries. So it's very hard to generalize. But strictly in terms of piracy, there are more than enough non-monetized audio uploads on YouTube to say, music piracy is alive and well.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  YouTube's Content ID systems ensures that the vast majority of uploads pay royalties to the performer. Those royalties may be miniscule, but they are paid.
  - doctorpangloss 2y ago
    Sure. I too have heard many “performers” celebrate the effectiveness of content ID. They all talk about how that was the end of piracy. Thats exactly how they put it: “Content ID ended piracy.”
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Implementation detail. What matters is the UX: think of a song, search for it, there it is on YouTube. Open the link and it plays. No payment needed, for a long time not even an account. The platform itself was pretty inobtrusive for most of its lifetime; it's gotten quite bad recently, but for most of those who care enough to do something about it, uBlock Origin clears out the UX of all the bullshit. Pirates couldn't possibly beat that if they tried. But it only exists because of an accident of history: YouTube got big on pirated content early enough and fast enough they could transition to "content id" instead of getting sued to oblivion.

romwell 2y ago

Sure, but I remember pirating La Maman Et La Putain specifically because it was yet-to-be-released by Criterion in any form - and it was Jean Eustache's masterpiece that made a splash at the Cannes back in 1972, not an obscure film by any measure (even if not mainstream by any measure either). Piracy still remains a supremely important means of both accessing and archiving content after it stops being a moneymaker, or simply when it pauses being one. Case in point - plenty of stories about games on being officially published by the content owners... with cracks, after the source code was lost (or wasn't in a shape to be rebuilt), and officially selling the pirated version was the only thing the publisher could figure out how to do[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_and_the_Whore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_and_the_Whore [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/16ahvqk/rockstar_is_selling_cracked_game_copies_on_steam/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/16ahvqk/rockstar_is_...

daveslash 2y ago

Agreed. The same with Music - with the rise of services like the iPod and more modern streaming services like Spotify, the effort just wasn't worth it. It turns out that people will happily pay for that content if its in an easy and convenient format. Regarding video specifically, one problem I see with the streaming services is the increasing push of New content. Streaming services like Netflix or Hulu or Paramount+ are really dependent on new subscribers, which means they tend to focus on new and exclusive content to draw in new people, so they prioritize that (to a fault imho). Many of us still want to rewatch those shows from the 90s we loved. Paramount+ specifically is "The Star Trek Streaming Service", and I know the folks over on reddit have their beef with P+ for seemingly de-prioritizing it instead of milking an extensive library like a cash cow. The past few years I've been digging into older movies - some black and white, silent, foreign, or weird avant-garde stuff. Streaming really drops the ball there, but I can understand how the business model doesn't really favor that.

mzi 2y ago

> Criterion[0] is one such product with outstanding content, real human curation, and a lower price than mainstream movie providers. "Sorry. This is currently unavailable in your region." This has been the case since before launch and is also a reason why pirates are still a thing.

Yeul 2y ago
Distribution rights for obscure cinema are complex. Apparently Prime video has "suicide club" according to where to watch. But not in my country lol.
- squidsoup 2y ago
  Sion Sono is such an odd film maker, I seem to vacillate between "this is genius" and "this is garbage" every other minute while watching his films.
- triceratops 2y ago
  > Distribution rights for obscure cinema are complex. That's what I don't understand. The odds that more than 10 people in Mongolia are going to give two shits about say an arthouse drama about an immigrant Latino family in Yellowknife are incredibly low. No matter how well-drawn the characters, or compelling the story, obscure arthouse films are not expected to find a big paying audience. So why not make that film free to watch in any market that you don't expect to be interested in it? How much revenue do you really stand to lose?
  - rolph 2y ago
    i do belive loss leader is a sound marketing principle, if you can eliminate an all or nothing mentality [ its all mine or you get nothing ]
cptaj 2y ago
Yeah, totally nonexistent product for most of the world

bayareacommie 2y ago

[dead]

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

Worth pointing out that video gaming piracy has a number of challenges that make it less appealing. No connected experience (usually); you have to play in offline modes only, sometimes with more compromised. Game updates are often lagging. Others have mentioned viruses already. Steam sales are frequent so /r/patientgamer types can just wait till the game becomes affordable where-as there's a rarely discounts available & a patchwork of streaming services.

artimaeis 2y ago

MUBI[0] is another streaming service that's focusing on curation and smaller lists of films available. Their service is available in a lot of countries, and each region has its own curation. I'm a huge fan of this ultra-curated approach, since it lets me find a lot of things that I'd otherwise have to hunt for, and would likely miss out on. [0] https://mubi.com https://mubi.com

mega_dean 2y ago
In 2008/2009, I bought a DVD of this movie called "The Fall": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_(2006_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_(2006_film) . I'm a sucker for visually-appealing films so I loved it, but I eventually lost the DVD and was never able to find another copy, despite checking every year or two. The wikipedia page says: > As of September 2023, The Fall had been unavailable on streaming services or rental services, making it notoriously difficult to access with secondhand Blu-ray copies of the film being very expensive. But apparently that isn't the case anymore! MUBI bought the rights earlier this year, and it looks like I can watch it through Amazon Video if I sign up for a MUBI trial. EDIT: I maybe should have visited https://mubi.com/ https://mubi.com/ before commenting - clips from The Fall is the very first thing they show.

jdietrich 2y ago

True to the article's point, The Criterion Channel is only available in the US and Canada. Mubi and BFI Player offer a good selection of independent films at a fair price in my country, but that's part of the problem - there's an annoyingly complex matrix of services and regional restrictions. Rarely does anyone have to ask "where can I listen to that album?", because essentially all of the music streaming services have the rights to essentially all music. "Where can I watch that film?" is still a very real problem.

tortila 2y ago

Last time I checked Criterion was only available in the US because of publishing rights. It could be easily bypassed by using VPN (location is actually only checked at account registration), but I’m wondering: is it really different from pirating if you’re breaking the rules anyway? Here in Europe MUBI[0] is an alternative to Criterion. I’ve tried it during lockdown but the streaming quality was seriously lacking, and their library was really small. I’m curious if they improved in those areas [0]: https://mubi.com/en/ https://mubi.com/en/

squidsoup 2y ago
The concept behind MUBI is that they provide a small set of curated films which change frequently - sort of like a little independent movie theatre. Criterion is possibly a better offering if you want a large catalogue.
- dtagames 2y ago
  Criterion also rotates through human-curated collections. They do not offer a full library archivally, which was initially a disappointment when I subscribed. It turns out the curated content is great, changes all the time, and really has movies that are worth watching and I don't already know about -- along with lots of favorites.

JoblessWonder 2y ago

There are many hurdles but one of the biggest I see is that there isn't a common/market leading way for independent films to self-publish their films to an independent streaming service. Something like Steam but for films. I'm sure YouTube, Vimeo, and others may offer the ability to do this... but none of them are winning that market or advertising themselves to potential viewers. And it isn't cost effective for a streamer to go after independent films that are very niche.

nasmorn 2y ago

I would even buy it out right but the rare movies I am interested in almost never have any distribution. Which is strange since that surely can’t be the most lucrative way to monetize it

pacifika 2y ago

Perhaps It’s not the cost per se but the convenience that made it not worth it.

soulofmischief 2y ago

That isn't enough. A big motivator for these kinds of people is preservation, and a subscription service doesn't solve that problem. Licenses and agreements end, many culturally significant works are completely unavailable today except for pirating. This goes for music, film and video games. Until we live in a world where the conglomerates taking their huge slice of the revenue from artists and creatives are also stewards of culture, acting in the best interest of culture itself, I couldn't care less about their bottom dollar.

TacticalCoder 2y ago

> What ended piracy for common films was not DRM or videocassette seizures but the offer of cheap tapes and eventually cheap streaming that made it simply "not worth it" to pirate. Piracy has all but ended for movies. The issue with streaming is that there are movie streaming apps (for TVs, browsers, etc.) that basically offer the Netflix interface. I know of people with hundreds of TB of movies and series: catalog in the five digits (so more than 10 000 movies and series). In Europe there's also the totally rampant "IPTV" craze: where even retired boomers (not necessarily the most tech savvy audience) buy/rent an illegal little box with all of Disney+Netflix+HBO etc. plus also all the regular TV channels (of the entire world). I don't know in which world movies and series piracy disappeared but it's certainly not in the world in which I live in (FWIW I pay Netflix). I actually don't know if there's ever been an era with more movie piracy than nowadays!?

cameldrv 2y ago

This used to be true with the original Netflix where they mailed you DVDs. They really had almost everything you could think of, you just had to wait a day or two to get it. I watched so many obscure movies, it was fantastic!