16 ms·

Reminds me of the old Gabe Newell (Valve founder) quote: "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem... If a pirate offers a product a

• greyskull 13y ago
  A similar quote came out of Google recently: http://torrentfreak.com/google-piracy-availability-pricing-problem-140310/ http://torrentfreak.com/google-piracy-availability-pricing-p...
• pippy 13y ago
  Being from New Zealand, it hits us kiwis hard. No Netflix. No Hulu. Even when Cartoon Network uploads to YouTube their videos are often unavailable in my country. So the next best thing is piracy. You can piss around with DNS settings or wait for the DVDs to be available, but piracy is just so much more convenient.
  • PostOnce 13y ago
    I'm watching netflix from NZ, bandwidth caps here are killer, netflix scales down to 300kbit and no seeding, so it beats torrenting in a lot of cases for me, but then, I know how to configure a VPN, so I can understand why torrents are super appealing for most. Also, where is the redbox clone? Quickflix is a joke as a netflix competitor, and there's no redbox clone that I know of. 40GB bandwidth caps? 80 for $100nzd/month? Even piracy is hard at that level.
    • wmboy 13y ago
      Bandwidth caps? I pay $130/mo for unlimited data on a fibre connection through Orcon. Even if fibre isn't available yet in your area you can still get a standard broadband connection for $100/mo with unlimited data.
      • Matsta 13y ago
        I'm paying $170/mo for 500gb on Telecom fibre. I never seem to go over 300gb even when I try so it suits me. I always see people complaining about international speeds on Orcon unlimited. I can max out 11mb/s with torrents on a Sunday night no problem. I have Netflix setup as well, super convenient but you never seem to get HD.
        • hrkristian 13y ago
          With those speeds you might want to try forcing bandwidth, if you haven't already. ctrl-alt-shift-S brings up a bandwidth selection in the Netflix player.
          • Matsta 13y ago
            100 megabits = 12.5 megabytes. Close enough. I don't solely have fibre just for netflix. I was assuming using a 3rd party dns server to unblock Netflix they are actually proxy'ing some of the content, so it's really their server that limits the download speed (I mostly watch on my Apple TV so not many options there). I might try that on the desktop version even though I don't use it much.
        • kayoone 13y ago
          11mb/s is roughly 100mbits, you don't need $170 fibre for that.
        • peterashford 13y ago
          I have the same Telescum account - except it's ADSL not fibre. I get the same D/L speeds :o)
      • lostlogin 13y ago
        In central ish Auckland, and the fastest I can get is 5Mb. No fibre available. Tried their "unlimited" and it's throttled to hell. Worthless. For about $100 I now have throttled but capped. But on the bright side, fibre may be available in 2019 according to our joke of a minister, Amy, when she emailed me.
    • ctdonath 13y ago
      bandwidth caps here are killer I remain amazed that no ad-hoc network solutions are available. Every wireless device & router should provide at least some off-official-network connectivity. It's not even a hardware problem. Over time, enough overlap should provide a pretty good alternate network service with no caps on bandwidth or content, giving incentive for providing bridges and "unapproved" services. Certainly would have its issues, but would provide more options with almost zero cost.
      • Locke1689 13y ago
        I have no idea what kind of network you are suggesting.
        • ctdonath 13y ago
          Every wireless-network device is capable of connecting directly to other wireless devices rather than (or in addition to) just connecting to a router/hub. Imagine every wireless device recursively within range of your device (connected to yours, or connected to another device connected to yours, or ...), all capable of forming an ad-hoc network operating independently of the routers/cell-towers/etc normally used, a wireless network bridging all censorship/control boundaries, operating for free, no way to shut it all down. Insofar as there are limits to its extent, some people would provide gateway points to Internet backbones.
          • Locke1689 13y ago
            I think you're missing about 4 layers of the OSI stack.
            • ctdonath 13y ago
              Pardon my lack of encyclopedic thoroughness in a casual discussion.
              • Locke1689 13y ago
  • syllogism 13y ago
    https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hola-better-internet/gkojfkhlekighikafcpjkiklfbnlmeio?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hola-better-intern...
  • chetanahuja 13y ago
    oh well.. you can watch .. uh... rugby or something.
• nlawalker 13y ago
  This quote conveniently leaves out that the pirate's product doesn't cost the end user any money. When would the pirate's service not be more valuable?
  • PostOnce 13y ago
    finding a virus-free torrent with up-to-date patches and enough seeds to download at >1megabyte/sec may take more time than people are willing to invest to save $2 on a steam sale for something that guaranteed works and is up to date.
  • chimeracoder 13y ago
    > This quote conveniently leaves out that the pirate's product doesn't cost the end user any money. This is not necessarily true. There are people who spend more on a seedbox or VPN each month than a Netflix + Rdio/Spotify subscription cost. Furthermore, private trackers have restrictions on them (ratio limits, etc.). Depending on what kind of content you're looking for, it's not exactly "free" either in money or time to be an active Bittorrent user. It just so happens that that cost is still less than the "legal" alternative - if a legal alternative even exists (look at pippy's comment about accessing content in New Zealand).
    • derefr 13y ago
      > Furthermore, private trackers have restrictions on them (ratio limits, etc.) You know, I've never understood the point of private "community" trackers. Anything mainstream will be on TPB. Anything extremely fresh will be on the release group's own (almost-always-public) tracker. And for the really long-tail stuff--unpopular nonfiction books from the 80s, for example--they've just never been digitized at all. What's an example of the sort of thing people find private trackers uniquely valuable for?
      • PhasmaFelis 13y ago
        Curation and organization is one. For example, search a good movie tracker for Pulp Fiction and you'll get a dedicated page for that film--including stuff like poster image, YouTube trailers, and IMDB link--with torrents organized by quality, resolution, special features, and so forth. The other is, well, you're wrong about the long-tail stuff. TPB, for example, has lots of audiobooks but is very short on printed material. A dedicated book tracker may have a much better selection of fiction, textbooks, and other sorts of specialty books (tabletop RPGs, for example).
• elyrly 13y ago
  Popcorn Time fills a void the film industry has neglected. Unless major change is done developers will continue to challenge the legality of piracy.
  • forrestthewoods 13y ago
    The void where people are willing to spend zero dollars to consume media? Damn, can't believe that got missed. I bet some people would even spend five, perhaps as much as ten, dollars per month for infinite access to all movies ever created ever. With generosity like that they're practically god damned saints.
    • jkrems 13y ago
      It's not about the price, it's about the timing. I don't like going to a cinema that much but I like discussing recent movies with friends (that live half a world away from me). I would pay the full cinema price (or at least a considerable percentage) for access on my computer. It's not about the price, it's about the product/market that just isn't legally available. P.S.: Btw - I don't usually download movies and wait until they are released on GooglePlay/iTunes/Amazon. But you know what? From all of those back in Germany only iTunes was available and even then you had to be lucky to get good quality and original language instead of the German dub. There are countries outside of the US.
    • toomuchtodo 13y ago
      > I bet some people would even spend five, perhaps as much as ten, dollars per month for infinite access to all movies ever created ever. Bring back sane copyright laws (Life + 70 years?) and we'll talk about what is and isn't reasonable. Copyright and laws are in a race against storage, bandwidth, and technology. I'm pretty confident technology is always going to win.
      • forrestthewoods 13y ago
        That's pretty soft moral justification for whatever infringing acts you're defending. You'll get no argument from me that copyright durations have gotten out of control, but that doesn't exactly give you fair cause to download Game of Thrones or whatever it is you want.
• ekianjo 13y ago
  Yet Steam is introducing region locks recently as well as region-pricing. I hope they realize they are creating a service problem on their own.
  • tominated 13y ago
    I believe that is the will of the publishers that are using Steam, not Valve.
    • baddox 13y ago
      And yet Valve has the final word on what they allow on their network.
      • akiselev 13y ago
        I agree with you but I have this nagging feeling that it's more complicated than that. I wouldn't be surprised if Valve was nearing dangerous antitrust territory with the dominance of the steam platform.
        • MichaelGG 13y ago
          Do you think that's why Amazon gave in to publishers' moronic demands to disable text-to-speech on Kindle?
        • ekianjo 13y ago
          Where is antitrust? There's Origin and anyone (i.e. any publisher or indie gamer) is free to make their own store online anytime. There's monopoly where the cost of entry is high, but in that case, the cost of making an online store to sell your own games is close to nothing. There's also Desura, Humble Bundle (they don't only sell Steam keys), and lets' not forget the plethora of online and retail distributors which sell physical games still.
          • akiselev 13y ago
• forrestthewoods 13y ago
  I hate that quote. I don't think it's a service problem or pricing problem at all. The problem is that humans are incredibly selfish. However Valve has very cleverly come up with a service and pricing solution to that problem.
  • 0x0 13y ago
    Have you ever lived outside the US?
  • sillysaurus3 13y ago
    The problem is that humans are incredibly selfish. Given the choice between spending time or spending money, people usually spend money. It's one reason Steam is so profitable. So it can't be true that most people inherently want to steal. It seems like people want convenience. When faced with a choice, people usually choose whichever option is least bothersome. That implies a goal for content creators: be the least bothersome option, and users will pay you. Unfortunately for the movie industry, Popcorn Time is currently the least bothersome service. It's free, decentralized, and tastefully designed. The industry should clone Popcorn Time, because that would put them in a better position than they're currently in.
  • kbar13 13y ago
    really? Have you considered how difficult it is to obtain media legally nowadays? Even Netflix is a pain in the butt, what with ISPs purposely throttling it in addition to an incomplete library due to licensing and incompatibility due to silverlight.
    • forrestthewoods 13y ago
      Bull. Fucking. Shit. It has in fact never been easier in the history of time to legally acquire media. It takes approximately 4 mouse clicks in iTunes to purchase and start downloading any movie, TV show, or music. You can start streaming it in after about 30 seconds, or you could let the whole thing download. The quality is also higher than pirated content because they have a fantastic encoding off of source material. If I gave you an iTunes account with free access to to everything on iTunes it would be far faster and easier to use than even Pirate Bay. Toss in a cheap $99 AppleTV and you can get it in your living room hassle free. The only downside, of course, is that it costs money. Of course renting a movie on iTunes is faster, easier, and cheaper than renting a VHS from the store 15 years ago but when you can pirate it for free who gives a shit? <insert snarky comment about not all media being available on iTunes or in all countries>
• jiggy2011 13y ago
  That seems like an odd statement considering that one of the biggest draws of Steam is the cheap prices and sales. I find it unlikely that there would be so many $5 games were they not facing competition from the pirates.
  • csense 13y ago
    I think it's more that online distribution reduces distribution costs and breaks the publishers' ability to charge monopoly pricing. 15 years ago, when games were sold mostly in stores, you had to go through a publisher to get your product in front of customers. And there was a limited amount of physical space in stores -- so games had to compete with all the other physical goods that store might offer. With digital distribution, both development and publishing are closer to perfectly competitive. It'd be pretty easy to build all the technical functionality of a basic online game store -- although building relationships with gamers and developers is harder. What bothers me is that Steam is starting to get lock-in -- many developers feel pressured to be on Steam, that a significant fraction of their market will be inaccessible if they don't. And as Steam builds more features into their client libraries, it's getting more tempting for developers to use those features, making non-Steam versions of things harder to keep feature parity (or even maintain two different builds of the code). Once Steam has lock-in, I think they'll try to take control of pricing from developers, and we'll see prices for Steam games rise. I try to vote with my wallet and avoid buying games on Steam, but it's getting harder and harder to do that.
• kevinchen 13y ago
  http://www.marco.org/2012/02/25/right-vs-pragmatic http://www.marco.org/2012/02/25/right-vs-pragmatic That is all.
  • jonnathanson 13y ago
    To this day, Marco's analogy is one of the simplest, most creative, and best I've ever read on this topic. It's even more apt when you look at the numbers and see that piracy isn't hurting the top or bottom line for the movie business to any appreciable degree. To some extent, that's because the movie business has been very good at stomping out piracy (at least among mainstream, non-tech-savvy consumers). But even at its peak, piracy wasn't hurting movies the way it was hurting music. The problem for Hollywood is that "moving the trash can" is extremely hard. Primarily, because nobody has any idea where it needs to be moved to. Secondarily, because "Hollywood" isn't a single entity. It's an industry full of competing companies with conflicting agendas. When we say "Hollywood should just do X," we're talking about herding cats. (Extremely fat, lavishly well fed cats, who have no individual incentives to be herded.) The MPAA seems large and monolithic, but it's basically a lobbying organization. It doesn't set any grand, strategic agendas within the industry itself. The head of a movie studio doesn't answer to the MPAA; he rarely even interfaces with the MPAA (if at all). He answers to the C-level execs of the media conglomerate who owns the studio, and those guys answer to Wall Street.
• K0nserv 13y ago
  As an anecdote I have resorted to pirating Rick and Morty. I love the show, it's amazing really. If you haven't go watch it now. You might think that I am selfish a-hole who wants to rob the creators of one of my favourite shows of their income, but that's not the case. I am simply not located in the right part of the world. Not being an American is a huge hassel when it comes to digital content consumption. I am willing to pay, nay I would love to pay, for Rick and Morty, but from my research I have found no way, short of VPN + US credit card, to buy a season pass. So you have potential customers who have to resort to piracy because the industry has no interest in distributing to their region. Am I going to buy Rick and Morty when it eventually comes out in Sweden? Not very likely as I will already have watched all episodes. The same holds true for The Walking Dead, thankfully HBO has started releasing episodes of Game of Thrones the same day in Sweden as in the US and I can and am paying for that.
  • pgsandstrom 13y ago
    I'm a swede, and I watched Rick and Morty on their official youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SutlAKqlmNo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SutlAKqlmNo
    • K0nserv 13y ago
      It's only up on the youtube channel for a limited amount of time.
• altero 13y ago
  Also cinemas are really becoming hostile. I have to subject my bag to inspection. I also risk arrest every time I take phone out. They also ask me to leave my laptop at reception...
  • choult 13y ago
    To be fair, I'd be calling for your arrest (under my breath) if you pulled your phone or laptop out during a movie...
    • deleted 13y ago
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    • altero 13y ago
      Sometimes I need to check time on my phone. And I carry laptop from work, I never actually used in cinema. Anyway 'movies from internet' just provide better services. And in most countries in Europe it is actually legal.
      • driverdan 13y ago
        > Sometimes I need to check time on my phone. No you don't. You know the time when you go in and you know how long the movie is so you have a good idea of when it ends. Why does the time matter while you're watching it? Put the phone away and enjoy the movie.
        • deleted 13y ago
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        • altero 13y ago
          So you prove my point :-)
• Springtime 13y ago
  Ironically enough it's Steam that sometimes region locks games. Take the recent Thief 4 release that was region locked in Europe much to the dismay of fans who we're artificially prevented from even playing pre-order copies while the US Steam had no such restriction.
  • TheCraiggers 13y ago
    I think you're misunderstanding the roles of developer, publisher, and distributor. If you look (like I just did) you'll find that Steam isn't region locking games, the publisher is. And yes, Valve is acquiescing, but we don't know what kind of agreements exist between Valve and the publisher.
    • Springtime 13y ago
      It's ultimately the publisher's decision, although it's still an issue that affects such platforms. In that particular case Steam itself was not disclosing this to users in those countries. So on release day in the US, when the countdown timer reached 0, those in region locked countries had the surprise of not being able to play their pre-ordered game. It's simply another frustration that made customers wonder what they had paid for, with some trying to use a workaround like a proxy (not always successful), or even considering pirating the game in the meantime.
• deleted 13y ago
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