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There would be less incentive toward this kind of piracy if content producers and distributors could get their collective acts together with more liberal licens

by lvs 12y ago

There would be less incentive toward this kind of piracy if content producers and distributors could get their collective acts together with more liberal licensing. Popcorn Time is winning because it's easier to use and find content than any pay service. Like anything, you compete by making a better product/service -- not by complaining that your competitors are unfair. Of course, they are certainly unfair here, but the rules of competition are the same.

ersii 12y ago
One of the incentives is ironically, the ability to actually pay and get access to the content - regardless of price. If you're not in a prioritized market (Or maybe it's fairer to say "privileged market"?) - you can't even pay for the content and see it in a way you want. (Like, pay immediately and stream it). "Sorry, this content is not available in your region :/"
natdempk 12y ago
This is true to the point where you can barely believe services release the products they do. The experience on Popcorn Time vs HBO GO isn't even comparable. HBO GO serves their content through a laggy flash player that you can't even force to play HD. Why would anyone watch non-HD content in a terrible browser player that wastes additional battery when they can open Popcorn Time in the time that it takes for the HBO player to load and start watching in HD immediately? Some services like Netflix get this and give the end user a better experience than Popcorn Time, but others only seem to exist for the hour before shows get uploaded as torrents.
- wmf 12y ago
  Are you using a computer? I think most people watch TV on a TV, where "legit" apps aren't based on Flash.
  - NathanCH 12y ago
    I think that further proves his point. It shouldn't matter what device I'm consuming the content on.
  - w4rh4wk5 12y ago
    i have a sony bravia at home and using its interface with the provided apps simply sucks. it's slow and cumbersome, while in contrast it's so easy to plugin a PC with wireless keyboard / controller / remote and just use regular applications, a state-of-the-art web browser and so on.
    - ddingus 12y ago
      This was our experience with a Samsung Smart TV. The TV apps are crappy, with the exception of Netflix, which is actually quite good. Best thing on the TV itself. Over time, my family has consistently preferred either a PC for viewing (laptop), or a game console or a PC connected to a TV for viewing. The little boxes are crappy, and using a TV remote is too.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > I think most people watch TV on a TV HBO Go is an online service for people with an HBO subscription through a Cable/Satellite provider that's billed as making HBO content available on other devices; while you might get some utility out of HBO GO on a TV (e.g., for streaming back catalog content that isn't available through HBO On Demand), its not really the primary use case. OTOH, neither is using it through a browser; I think the mobile app (which does support HD) is the main vehicle. I'm somewhat surprised if the browser version doesn't, but not that surprised
  - natdempk 12y ago
    The HBO GO apps for things like Roku are also laughably bad. One of the best examples of truly not caring about UX is their default sorting of episodes. All shows sort episodes by most-recent air date, including shows that have fully aired, so if you want to get to the first episode of a show you have to scroll through a full season's worth of episodes. This is after having to scroll through all HBO shows alphabetically to find the one I want with no concept of recently watched. Again compare to Netflix where it takes a single button press to start watching a new series on every platform. There is a clear pattern that some companies just don't care about customer experience.
    - yellowapple 12y ago
      To be fair, there's good reason why a "newest first" (LIFO, I suppose) approach would make sense (namely, if it's assumed that most users have already been watching the series in question and just want to jump straight to the newly-aired episode that they haven't seen yet).
      - fragmede 12y ago
        Which is a fair point, but NETFLIX KNOWS WHAT I'VE WATCHED. They even added profile selection so different individuals using the same account get a better user experience. Watching a show at a friend's house (and thus on their account) should be considered the degenerate case. LIFO order also has the added problem of showing screenshots for the latest episode which may contain spoilers. Even if the service (Hulu) doesn't require users to login, cookies can still be used to track which episodes have been watched.
    - atom-morgan 12y ago
      > The HBO GO apps for things like Roku are also laughably bad. I'm working on an app for DirecTV boxes right now. The experience on that won't be much better. They are horrible platforms for development. I'll never do a project like this again.
  - rasz_pl 12y ago
    old, not most. Old people watch commercials with occasional break for content on tv
    - ddingus 12y ago
      Until a younger one shows them what streaming is. No joke. Commercials are so goddamn brutal now. Just about anyone will do the work to get a better experience. Same with cord cutting. Just show 'em. They weigh that monthly $150 or so, commercials, etc... against just buying stuff they want and it's a no brainer, save for sports. That's the reason ESPN is brutal. They know they are an anchor for much of the Cable TV business. Anybody who can ditch that probably is doing so right now.
  - IanCal 12y ago
    > Are you using a computer? I think most people watch TV on a TV, where "legit" apps aren't based on Flash. Not too important, but quite a few legit TV apps are Flash based. YouView and TiVo in the UK are both entirely flash (AS3 for YV, TiVo was AS2 last time I worked on it). Roku I think were AS2. Samsung TVs used to support flash but that might not be handled any more, I think their browser is pretty decent now. Most TVs have moved to HTML+JS though, that's true. Thankfully many actually moved to sensible browsers too, there used to be massive inconsistencies between devices. Actually a bit of a shame. Although flash can be really annoying, you can control when frames are drawn and position things accurately. You also had much better control over the memory (which things are cached, what's still a vector), which is important if you've got only a few megs of RAM and you're sliding around 1280x720 images. Flash could have been hugely better, but the compiler was terrible (thanks to motion-twin though, you saved my sanity so many times on AS2 projects) and the runtime needed a lot of work on slower devices. But for animating things when you know the exact resolution you're always going to be running at? Brilliant. Source: worked on apps for smart TV and set top boxes.
- lvs 12y ago
  I completely agree re: the quality of streaming service apps. The Amazon Prime Video player is a joke. HBO GO is one of the buggiest apps I've ever used on Android. Netflix has gone a long way to improving their service and is probably the most satisfactory of them. Generally speaking, though, the experience of using these apps and the predictability/accessibility of content is not going to outcompete free & easy.
  - higherpurpose 12y ago
    The saddest part is that if they wanted they could adopt a hybrid central seed/P2P model, too, and be able to offer HD content without overwhelming their servers (in fact there more would people watch a certain episode at a given time, the better it would work).
    - digi_owl 12y ago
      From elsewhere i have gotten the impression that some central legal figures within the business have some kind of stuck up idea about counting copies. There was a company trying to offer cloud based DVR service, and found that the only way they could get big media legal approval was to not use deduplication of any kind. This meant that their storage costs skyrocketed.
      - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
        I think this is to do with media controllers (the managers of the megacorps) predicating value on number of copies reproduced. Shows are not to be allowed to be given only the value of production but must be talked up to have a value according to the number of copies - the more expensive the copies can be made to appear the more realistic it seems that a copy should cost more. Charging $20 per viewer for content that cost $0.20 per viewer to make is hard; you have to pay off politicians to maintain that sort of control. If content creation is pushed to a point where the actors, production team, etc. just get a seriously good wage and no further profits are produced then there's no place for media magnates. They must do everything to push against the concept of economy of scale. I'm imagining a utopia in which a $50M movie takes $100M, everyone gets a bonus (down to the caterers and toilet cleaners), the people who front it get 10%, the rest is fed back in to other projects and the movie is now in the public domain. We need to support content creators not make those who control the media even more ridiculously wealthy. Then we have people like the car manufacturer controllers not happy to make piles of money from the effort of the people who work beneath them they want to cripple the product and make cars impossible to repair ... If you ever buy a supercar society should have you stripped naked and left to beg for scraps in a favela whilst all your personal assets are liquidised to feed the poor. /rant [Dammit, I'm really ready to go off on one, enjoy the rants of an over-tired slightly drunk person. Free at source! License: CC0!!]
- rbritton 12y ago
  I feel the same applies to physical media releases too. Trying to watch a DVD is an absolutely miserable experience with menus and restricted actions. It's for this reason that I have the majority of the content I own ripped and stored in an iTunes library where I can access it quickly from my Apple TV.
  - Ntrails 12y ago
    And ripping is actually more effort (in my limited experience) than just torrenting the damned thing even if you own the physical DVD. It's magic
  - ddingus 12y ago
    Yep. Way back in the day, I happened to setup the Open Source OGLE DVD player software. I think it was Mandrake Linux, running on some PC with a Matrox G400 card --the one with nice 2D, and great DVD support. Insert disc, press T, then P, and you are watching the movie, no BS. Took maybe 5 seconds tops after disk mount. Turned out to be popular, so I bought a real DVD player for the family, and we hated that thing. "Aladdin" is talked about a lot, but it's true! Every single time the kids wanted to watch that thing, it was something like 15 minutes of previews for all this other cool stuff, over and over. That was the first DVD I ripped. Couldn't stand it. And once setup for that, I ripped 'em all, and also got the benefit of younger ones not destroying fragile media at some considerable expense all the time too. That and losing it, or swapping with friends... For a number of years, I replaced that "real" DVD player with OGLE setup to just play the movie no matter what. Was great OSS advocacy. Suddenly, a whole bunch of people knew who a "geek" and "hacker" was, what software was, how it can impact lives, and all sorts of other good things just because DVD media producers just HAD to annoy the crap out of people. Funny that!
- giancarlostoro 12y ago
  Reminds me of what Gabe Newell said about piracy: It's not a pricing issue, but a service issue.
  - rhino369 12y ago
    Then why are so many Steam games pirated? I'm not doubting that service can be a cause. But I think it's crazy to pretend getting something for nothing isn't a good motivation.
    - MichaelGG 12y ago
      I'd play a pirated version of a game before using the Steam version. Steam implements DRM and is generally obnoxious, trying to force itself all over games (popups), showing sdverts, etc. It just shows how terrible things are in game-buying-land. Look at the Xbox 360. A marketplace UI so laggy, you wonder how they technically able to make it that slow.
      - waps 12y ago
        At least in steam you can turn off the popups : Settings -> Interface -> Uncheck "Notify me about additions or change ..."
      - pjc50 12y ago
        I'm surprised. Steam has been quite successful because for most people the intrusion is acceptable, the portability/redownloadability useful, the social side works acceptably, and they regularly offer big discounts. It never ceases to amaze me how slow the steam store browser is, though.
      - stfnppv 12y ago
        GOG is a nice DRM-free alternative. I've been trying to buy as much as I can through there, in order to support their DRM-free initiative.
    - sbarre 12y ago
      There will always be people who will pirate no matter what. You can't do anything about that, and they will never be your customers. And for games, the percentage of the audience is probably higher than elsewhere because it is a mostly young and tech-savvy audience. But the explosion of indie and smaller games on Steam should be evidence that their platform works, and that it makes economic sense to distribute digitally in that fashion because there are tons of us who want it, even with the ongoing piracy (that has been around since floppy disks and will never go away). My Steam library has over 100 titles in it. I mostly buy during sales and via Humble Bundles mostly, but I also occasionally buy full-priced launch games that I really want to play. I can't remember the last time I bought a boxed game for PC.. Probably 2006? And before Steam I bought maybe 4-5 games per year? The service absolutely works. One last thing: games piracy also has the added layer of protection cracking, which is pretty much a social contest in itself that incentivizes the activity (and leads to distribution as a measure of recognition etc).
- lobster_johnson 12y ago
  It's also rather bizarre that you have to go to a provider's app to get their content. All the content is siloed and walled off by each provider, so you have to remember whether a show is on HBO or Netflix or whatever. The old TV model of "channels" doesn't work with streaming.
- meric 12y ago
  HBO NOW isn't built by HBO and is much better than HBO GO.
JonoBB 12y ago
I'd be interested to know how the piracy of music compares to the piracy of video. Which industry has better (legal) streaming options, and does this correlate with lower piracy?
- PebblesHD 12y ago
  Music streaming without a doubt. Spotify has claimed a massive drop in music piracy over the last few years since its widespread introduction.
- dethstar 12y ago
  Everyone who I knew used to pirate music (think of p2p programs like Ares or Limewire) now uses either youtube or spotify.
  - yellowapple 12y ago
    Former such pirate; can confirm. While downloading music from YouTube probably still counts as piracy, my needs are effectively met between that and the various legal options for unlimited streaming (particularly Amazon Prime Music as of late).
  - amorphid 12y ago
    I like rdio.com.
duaneb 12y ago
At some time pirates will need to address the convenience of being free. I use amazon video, which has had a grand total of three films I wanted but could not find. These are extremely convenient, easy to use services. The argument that piracy is more convenient may still hold water, but less each year.
- voltagex_ 12y ago
  Amazon Video doesn't work in Australia
  - dagw 12y ago
    Or anywhere else in the world that isn't the US.
  - realusername 12y ago
    Same over here, it can be as convenient to use as you want, I'm not going to use a VPN to use a paying service.
- dublinben 12y ago
  Amazon Instant Video doesn't work on GNU/Linux. It also doesn't work offline. It also requires proprietary software at every turn. None of these problems are the case with p2p sharing.
  - Touche 12y ago
    The number of people who care about those things are a rounding error.
    - peatmoss 12y ago
      However the people who care vehemently about such things are the ones with the motive and means to set up a global convenient alternative content delivery network.
rhino369 12y ago
Amazon Instant and iTunes work pretty well and have almost anything that Popcorn Time has. I really doubt people are doing Popcorn time because it is easier. Not paying anything is a huge feature.
- madez 12y ago
  I'm not going to pay for revocable licenses, jailed ecosystems or DMRed media. Give me high quality flat files with good metadata, and I'll pay.
- donut2d 12y ago
  Amazon Instant Video on PS3 and on my Vizio is pretty bad. Slow, unresponsive interface, very difficult to accurately skip ahead, not a great selection. Netflix does a great job interface wise, way better than Amazon Instant Video.
  - yellowapple 12y ago
    Unsurprisingly, I've had the opposite experience with Amazon Instant Video on my Fire TV, while the mobile experience is a bit mediocre (though not terrible). I guess it varies greatly depending on the device.
  - Touche 12y ago
    How good is the Popcorn Time interface on the PS3?
anigbrowl 12y ago
I would take these arguments more seriously if they reflected the actual market. Films are licensed to distributors in different countries on a case-by-case basis and license periods typically run for 10 years. Only the 6 major studios have offices on every continent and even they don't run distribution operations in every single country. compete by making a better product/service -- not by complaining that your competitors are unfair. Of course, they are certainly unfair here, but the rules of competition are the same. I'm pretty sure I could outdo you in competitive economic terms if I could just help myself to any of your assets that I feel like using whenever I feel like using them. If you would find that situation unfair, would the solution be for you to just work harder?
- tsotha 12y ago
  You're right, of course, the studios will never be able to compete with pirates on price, and they're never going to get people determined to pay nothing to sign up. However, there are a lot of people who are willing to pay for what they consume, and it's not in content providers' best interest to make these people feel like fools by delivering a product that's inferior to the illegal one.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    I agree about the quality issue, but I was answering a comment that was specifically about licensing terms.
- lvs 12y ago
  I'll respond to this because I think you're missing the point. I'm saying that the "market makers" have made the "actual market" in a way that is self-defeating when technology no longer favors their historic distribution model. Like you say, the market is hobbled by artificial barriers, like geographic restrictions, that don't really exist on the internet. A significant factor in the inferior experience of streaming services is the content licensing hurdle, which makes the availability of content a moving target. You can complain day and night about the fact that technology no longer fits your business model, but that isn't going to solve the problem.
parallelist 12y ago
The Internet broke the whole idea of charging for a digital copy of something. We’re seeing a struggle of powers as old power tries to cling on to the idea of charging people for digital copies but it will end sooner or later. One needs to think outside the box of capitalism being an appropriate system for all aspects of society.
- manigandham 12y ago
  What does that even mean? We have to switch the entire economic paradigm we live in so that people can be paid for their work?
  - camgunz 12y ago
    The problem is having to be paid at all. There ought to be a system whereby people can exist at a reasonable standard of living and still do the work they want to do, i.e. Basic Income. There's enough food, shelter and medicine to accommodate everyone on the planet right now, but the top 10% hoard way more than their share. Do they deserve it because they work harder? No, they're just born into luxury, and there's nothing capitalistic or meritocratic about it. You ought to be able to make a show or a film without having to leverage everything you own. You ought to be able to work on making cameras and stages if you like to do that stuff. You ought to be able to watch one of these shows/films made using those cameras/stages for free, and then go to your house and work on a project of your own, and not worry about whether that project will be profitable enough to allow you to eat or be housed. The key point is we have the resources. Eventually we'll get there, but it's gonna take a long, long time.
    - manigandham 12y ago
      I'm not sure where to begin with your comment and all the strange and inaccurate things it says... but this kind of idyllic utopia (which to me seems like some horrible mind-numbing lifestyle) will never exist. Economic incentive is the cornerstone of modern effective society. Basic Income might work but it's far more complicated than you make it seem and it's not something that just lets everyone do whatever they want, it's a way to raise living standards and equalize some of the disproportions in power and wealth but there will need to be industry and incentive to create the income in the first place.
NovaS1X 12y ago
I came here to say this, more or less. Maybe when streaming services offer what I want to watch in better than current quality I'll consider stopping. Until then I'll be using Canadian Netflix for 10% of my viewing and other methods for the other 90% that I can't pay for because I happen to not live in the US. Copyright laws are killing the industry.
- jsmeaton 12y ago
  I'd argue that region based licensing is killing the industry, along with the reluctance for content producers to serve content through Netflix or something comparable. Netflix just launched in Australia. If it had all the shows I wanted, I'd sign up in a heart beat. But it's still missing a good chunk because of the licensing deals that already exist over here. I want to support the Netflix model and content producers that support them. I've considered signing up and not using it at all because my combination of usenet/sickbeard/kodi is far superior to anything else available. I pay about $150 a year for that setup, so I'm not adverse to paying.
  - Touche 12y ago
    Your $12.50 per month is not paying for all of the content you consume.
    - jsmeaton 12y ago
      Correct. I'd be happy to pay more for a decent service that had all the content I wanted, or even for multiple services. But paying $100 a month for non-HD cable is about my only option at the moment, and that's not on demand. Again, region specific licensing to blame.
- dorian-graph 12y ago
  This question is for you and everyone else: why don't you simply not watch something if it's not legally available? It seems like almost all pro-piracy people act and talk as if there's some unwritten and unspoken right and need to consume all media.
oldmanjay 12y ago
Given how much energy people spend defending their moral right to free entertainment as a reward for going through the trouble of being born, I'd be interested to see if you're correct about that. I mean NSA et al spies on the entire world with no restriction? Barely matters, people go on about their lives. Some lawmaker proposes getting ISPs to enforce copyright? INTERNET ARMAGEDDON!
- ForHackernews 12y ago
  If the NSA really is tracking all internet traffic, maybe we could just build a "media tax" into the federal budget, and distribute the revenues according to NSA-verified download numbers.
vlunkr 12y ago
Exactly, this has happened before, the entertainment industry needs to learn their lesson. Remember when Napster was huge and the music industry was in a big panic for a few years? They finally got it shut down, but by the time they did there were several alternatives out there. The thing that finally made a difference was iTunes downloads. It was a reasonable alternative to piracy and people appreciated that. Instead of trying to insist that people keep buying physical albums they met them halfway. Sure you had to pay, but you could do it all from your own computer, you could pick only the songs you wanted, and there was no risk of malware or sleazy ads that you could get from the illegal services. People will pay if you try to give them what they want, trying to fight these battles legally is a game they will never win.
- pyre 12y ago
  > they met them halfway iTunes' success was a bit of a fluke. The music execs didn't really think that it would amount to anything, so they threw Steve Jobs a bone.
- ddingus 12y ago
  Oh, there is a much bigger lesson there. Not only did they generate very serious incentive to create alternatives, but each one was an escalation of forces! At the time Napster was running high, something like 40 plus million users were on the thing. Might have been more. And this is in the dawn of broadband too! Nothing was as huge as Napster was, and it was spreading like wildfire too. At one point, blanket licensing was discussed. Something like 2+ Billion annually, to be sourced by monthly subscriptions. Add up that money from that time, and all the pain, etc... through today, and that's one hell of an opportunity cost, and for what? Only to center in on streaming today? Yeah, that's working, but what did it cost to get there? Had they taken that deal, much would be different today, and they would have a centeralized source for marketing, huge mindshare, and who knows what else? iTunes was born out of the basic realizations you mention. Nobody talks about the cost of actually getting there though. Similar costs are happening right now for video. Painful.
task_queue 12y ago
There will be less incentive when developers are raided and brought to court for their high crimes against the industry. Why not have the FBI go after the pirates instead of changing the structure of their business? It works well for them when it comes to unlicensed reproductions and hardware that facilitates piracy. If Popcorn time could turn a dime while playing the game legally, and become a threat like Netflix was, I'd believe it. It's easier to crack a few skulls legally when pirates start getting flagrant than it is to treat them like a legal competitor.
- zanny 12y ago
  This is a great strategy. As the dozens of popcorn time forks have shown us it not only does not work, but it is also taking intelligent nonviolent programmers and ruining their lives in prisons around the world. The MPAA and friends couldn't look more evil if they wore a fake mustache and tried twirling it.
  - task_queue 12y ago
    It works great if your intention is to intimidate and fragment communities that promote widespread piracy into irrelevance.
    - ionised 12y ago
      The last ten years have shown that to be false.
return0 12y ago
You are asking for the impossible, people are not going to pay for what they can always get at better quality for $0. Fans are happy to curate the art the like and will always do a better work , and for free. The only thing that might make sense is if they distributed an original instead of a copy, i.e. a different movie to every user, a different song etc. Copyright is just not compatible with the digital world, it worked for a while copies were physical, but now we re going back to the pre-copyright era where culture was spreading freely. We can blame piracy for that, but it's not just piracy. The Entertainment industries are largely based on building hype and celebrities, while the cost of production keeps falling thanks to digital production. There is an oversupply of creativity which obviously should drive their profits down. Even without piracy these industries would face big problems.
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  It's easy for people making money off of distribution to do a better job than fans. But they're largely stubborn or lazy. Hell, they could copy popcorn time and provide some beefy servers, as a simple example of how it's not anywhere near impossible.
- StavrosK 12y ago
  > people are not going to pay for what they can always get at better quality for $0 Sure, but I already pay Netflix. If I had to pay a bit more and it included everything that's on Popcorn Time, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
  - return0 12y ago
    Then download the torrent and tip the producer somehow. Why pay for another service that is clearly not needed? I actually thought someone should have already built a startup selling 'virtual tickets'.
    - anigbrowl 12y ago
      tip the producer somehow The most anyone has ever raised that way (following a particularly egregious leaking of a film before release in Russia, albeit probably for political reasons) is $14,000. I don't personally know anyone who's made any money from tips, and it's not exactly a promising business model. https://meduza.io/en/news/2015/02/02/leviathan-collects-1-million-rubles-in-fan-support-after-being-hit-by-piracy https://meduza.io/en/news/2015/02/02/leviathan-collects-1-mi...
forrestthewoods 12y ago
I call bullshit. Absolute bullshit. If I gave you a credit card that gave you unlimited access to digital content you probably wouldn't be complaining. Certainly not if you live in the US or much of Europe. If you have a $69 AppleTV then iTunes is a spectacular user experience. Search for almost anything you want and hit play. If it didn't cost $5 to rent a movie it's superior to torrents. This is where someone chimes in with something snarky related to offline viewing (airplane) or not living in the US and having access to less comments. This is true. It's also largely irrelevant. If you think those are the primary reasons users torrent then I'd challenge you to back it up with statistics. For Americans in particular the primary reason to pirate content these days is selfish greed.
- xasos 12y ago
  Wow, that was harsh. Why is the rationale for Americans pirating 'selfish greed'? People, in general, pirate because it's free and really, really easy. There are many cases where services like Spotify and Netflix have reduced piracy. People are lazy, and if you can make it easier and more seamless than pirating, most people won't mind shelling out a couple of bucks a month for paid service. http://www.slashgear.com/netflix-piracy-rate-goes-down-when-we-arrive-03280546/ http://www.slashgear.com/netflix-piracy-rate-goes-down-when-... http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/04/21/canadian-tech-leaders-oppose-c-51_n_7111150.html http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/04/21/canadian-tech-leader...
  - forrestthewoods 12y ago
    Yes, people are very lazy. iTunes is great for lazy people. It's easy to use, extremely high quality, and has the vast, vast majority of pirated content (for Americans). The only thing missing is free. If iTunes were free there would be almost no reason to pirate content. Certainly not in the majority use cases. Therefore the only reason to pirate over iTunes is money. Therefore people are greedy and selfish.
    - yellowapple 12y ago
      Or because your opinion that iTunes is "easy to use" and "extremely high quality" is just that - an opinion - and is not an opinion which is universally shared among all people or even a significant majority of them (myself included). Now, with that said, between Amazon Prime and Netflix I haven't found many reasons to pirate things, but right now that involves jumping back and forth between two different marketplaces because of the fragmented content. This is where Popcorn Time (for example) reportedly shines, and thus might be a compelling reason to at least investigate that particular avenue.
baudehlo 12y ago
It's fascinating that people are arguing so vehemently against you and yet iTunes (and later Spotify and friends) did exactly that. My friends who all subscribe to Spotify or Rdio now say they haven't downloaded a single song since (anecdote is not data etc, yes I know).
- tjbiddle 12y ago
  Exactly this. Since I switched to Spotify, and then Google Play Music, I haven't downloaded a single song. It's honestly easier to use these services than to go through the process of downloading. Now what I don't get is the friends that I have that refuse to switch because they like "owning" their own music. I have immediate access to an entire cornucopia of music and they're stuck with what they have downloaded.
touristtam 12y ago
That is was is happening in a world where we allow monopolies and oligopolies to exist. The price of new entrance is too high, and the conservatism of the existing actors is detrimental to bringing any additional value to technology and to the consumer market. Just a thought.
pjc50 12y ago
This is a slight tangent to the usual piracy discussion, but I seem to be the last person watching (well, recording) broadcast TV and I'm at the point where I have far more recorded than I'm able to watch. I'd need to make a serious commitment to watching 3+ hours of TV every night for months just to clear the backlog.
- bloat 12y ago
  I'm with you. I don't have time to watch anything else. I have a PVR connected to a satellite dish with only free to air channels. I tape more movies than I can ever get around to watching - all you have to do is wait and everything appears. A new free channel just started showing Breaking Bad a couple of weeks ago. I didn't have to search any torrent site for it, I was just patient.
jameshart 12y ago
Honest actors can't compete with people who ignore the law though - you acknowledge yourself that the competition here is unfair. Yes, by ignoring copyright and not compensating content creators at all, you can create a service that offers vast amounts of content for free. A legitimate business can't do that. Saying 'well, sorry, the market has spoken and the price they are willing to pay for your content is $0' is just not reasonable. It's like pointing to a guy selling stolen iPhones for $20 and telling Apple they need to adjust their prices to the new reality.
- ddingus 12y ago
  They can. There are a few use cases here: 1. Massive pirate. Won't pay for anything. If we made it a perfect world, they would just mooch off other people in the extreme, never paying for anything. They won't be customers. Ever. But they do talk about stuff, make recommendations, etc... So they can be leveraged in that way. Show them an AD, or have them do some other minor league thing of value, and trade on that for some value. Good as it gets. And it's important to factor these people in. Their copies and views don't devalue anything. Ignore their $0, and consider anything of value derived from their mindshare as a bonus. 2. Casual pirate. These people will pay, but don't want to be annoyed. Good service, making it easy, etc... all counts, and massive numbers of them will subscribe to lots of things. Cord cutters fall in to this bucket too. Cut out the $150 cable bill, and sign up for a few services, then buy things on top of that. Big cable loses a revenue stream, but content creators and service providers gain one. 3. Buyer. They typically have more means than most, and just pay because it's not a big impact to them. Upper middle class and above here mostly. What people make, and what $10 means to them is absolutely a factor in how to compete with free works. The difference between #2 and #3 here is important. Secondly, entertainment dollars are largely fixed for many people. Actually, my experience is this is true for most people. There is some flex in it, but there aren't billions laying around unspent somehow as most entertainment centric arguments imply. Most people have a coupla hundred bucks to spend. And the various forms of entertainment compete too. A summer of good movies? Yeah, maybe buy one less game. Recognition of this means understanding price points, incentives to spend and how / when / why to compete with other entertainment forms to optimize revenue. Very little is being said about this, but we are seeing flat rate services compete fairly well while delivering consistent revenue. All of this is particularly relevant to #2 above. Considering all of these together highlights some ways to compete with free. Be the free source. Pirating has some negatives attached to it. So side step those and give people options that can send value your way. Increasingly, it's possible to stream now. I am a fan of AMC "Halt And Catch Fire" and do not have cable. I can't go and buy AMC just yet, and they didn't put the show on the services I do subscribe to. On a quick check, there it was! Right there on the AMC site, and they want me to watch an AD, maybe participate in the little activities and potentially do other things in return for my eyeballs on the show. Result? Incentive to pirate goes way down. I've got a path in, and would gladly have gave them money for the views too. Cory Doctrow does this with his books too. If you want to read 'em, he's the source for that. Grab and go. If you want to translate, or do fan derivatives, he will source that too. I did that with "Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom", and really liked his work. Bought a lot of hard copies of his stuff since then. Had it not been that easy and obvious, I might have gotten some PDF, or other, or more likely, not done anything and would not know the guy at all. Mindshare matters. Buying it with views to compete is a perfectly valid business model. And giving people options like sharing / recommending / gifting means those who can pay with dollars will, and those who can't or won't, can do some work that leads to dollars. It's all dollars in the end, done right. So there are a couple of ways right there. Both compete with free, both leverage mindshare to get some value while at the same time offering purchase opportunities. The more of this there is, the less people will pirate, leaving us with just that use case #1 above, and there is nothing to be done with those people, other than to leverage their mindshare somehow. Maximizing revenue is all about the other use cases and recognition of the nature of entertainment dollars and pricing on that understanding, IMHO.

by lvs 12y ago

ersii 12y ago

One of the incentives is ironically, the ability to actually pay and get access to the content - regardless of price. If you're not in a prioritized market (Or maybe it's fairer to say "privileged market"?) - you can't even pay for the content and see it in a way you want. (Like, pay immediately and stream it). "Sorry, this content is not available in your region :/"

natdempk 12y ago

This is true to the point where you can barely believe services release the products they do. The experience on Popcorn Time vs HBO GO isn't even comparable. HBO GO serves their content through a laggy flash player that you can't even force to play HD. Why would anyone watch non-HD content in a terrible browser player that wastes additional battery when they can open Popcorn Time in the time that it takes for the HBO player to load and start watching in HD immediately? Some services like Netflix get this and give the end user a better experience than Popcorn Time, but others only seem to exist for the hour before shows get uploaded as torrents.

wmf 12y ago
Are you using a computer? I think most people watch TV on a TV, where "legit" apps aren't based on Flash.
- NathanCH 12y ago
  I think that further proves his point. It shouldn't matter what device I'm consuming the content on.
- w4rh4wk5 12y ago
  i have a sony bravia at home and using its interface with the provided apps simply sucks. it's slow and cumbersome, while in contrast it's so easy to plugin a PC with wireless keyboard / controller / remote and just use regular applications, a state-of-the-art web browser and so on.
  - ddingus 12y ago
    This was our experience with a Samsung Smart TV. The TV apps are crappy, with the exception of Netflix, which is actually quite good. Best thing on the TV itself. Over time, my family has consistently preferred either a PC for viewing (laptop), or a game console or a PC connected to a TV for viewing. The little boxes are crappy, and using a TV remote is too.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > I think most people watch TV on a TV HBO Go is an online service for people with an HBO subscription through a Cable/Satellite provider that's billed as making HBO content available on other devices; while you might get some utility out of HBO GO on a TV (e.g., for streaming back catalog content that isn't available through HBO On Demand), its not really the primary use case. OTOH, neither is using it through a browser; I think the mobile app (which does support HD) is the main vehicle. I'm somewhat surprised if the browser version doesn't, but not that surprised
- natdempk 12y ago
  The HBO GO apps for things like Roku are also laughably bad. One of the best examples of truly not caring about UX is their default sorting of episodes. All shows sort episodes by most-recent air date, including shows that have fully aired, so if you want to get to the first episode of a show you have to scroll through a full season's worth of episodes. This is after having to scroll through all HBO shows alphabetically to find the one I want with no concept of recently watched. Again compare to Netflix where it takes a single button press to start watching a new series on every platform. There is a clear pattern that some companies just don't care about customer experience.
  - yellowapple 12y ago
    To be fair, there's good reason why a "newest first" (LIFO, I suppose) approach would make sense (namely, if it's assumed that most users have already been watching the series in question and just want to jump straight to the newly-aired episode that they haven't seen yet).
    - fragmede 12y ago
      Which is a fair point, but NETFLIX KNOWS WHAT I'VE WATCHED. They even added profile selection so different individuals using the same account get a better user experience. Watching a show at a friend's house (and thus on their account) should be considered the degenerate case. LIFO order also has the added problem of showing screenshots for the latest episode which may contain spoilers. Even if the service (Hulu) doesn't require users to login, cookies can still be used to track which episodes have been watched.
  - atom-morgan 12y ago
    > The HBO GO apps for things like Roku are also laughably bad. I'm working on an app for DirecTV boxes right now. The experience on that won't be much better. They are horrible platforms for development. I'll never do a project like this again.
- rasz_pl 12y ago
  old, not most. Old people watch commercials with occasional break for content on tv
  - ddingus 12y ago
    Until a younger one shows them what streaming is. No joke. Commercials are so goddamn brutal now. Just about anyone will do the work to get a better experience. Same with cord cutting. Just show 'em. They weigh that monthly $150 or so, commercials, etc... against just buying stuff they want and it's a no brainer, save for sports. That's the reason ESPN is brutal. They know they are an anchor for much of the Cable TV business. Anybody who can ditch that probably is doing so right now.
- IanCal 12y ago
  > Are you using a computer? I think most people watch TV on a TV, where "legit" apps aren't based on Flash. Not too important, but quite a few legit TV apps are Flash based. YouView and TiVo in the UK are both entirely flash (AS3 for YV, TiVo was AS2 last time I worked on it). Roku I think were AS2. Samsung TVs used to support flash but that might not be handled any more, I think their browser is pretty decent now. Most TVs have moved to HTML+JS though, that's true. Thankfully many actually moved to sensible browsers too, there used to be massive inconsistencies between devices. Actually a bit of a shame. Although flash can be really annoying, you can control when frames are drawn and position things accurately. You also had much better control over the memory (which things are cached, what's still a vector), which is important if you've got only a few megs of RAM and you're sliding around 1280x720 images. Flash could have been hugely better, but the compiler was terrible (thanks to motion-twin though, you saved my sanity so many times on AS2 projects) and the runtime needed a lot of work on slower devices. But for animating things when you know the exact resolution you're always going to be running at? Brilliant. Source: worked on apps for smart TV and set top boxes.
lvs 12y ago
I completely agree re: the quality of streaming service apps. The Amazon Prime Video player is a joke. HBO GO is one of the buggiest apps I've ever used on Android. Netflix has gone a long way to improving their service and is probably the most satisfactory of them. Generally speaking, though, the experience of using these apps and the predictability/accessibility of content is not going to outcompete free & easy.
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  The saddest part is that if they wanted they could adopt a hybrid central seed/P2P model, too, and be able to offer HD content without overwhelming their servers (in fact there more would people watch a certain episode at a given time, the better it would work).
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    From elsewhere i have gotten the impression that some central legal figures within the business have some kind of stuck up idea about counting copies. There was a company trying to offer cloud based DVR service, and found that the only way they could get big media legal approval was to not use deduplication of any kind. This meant that their storage costs skyrocketed.
    - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
      I think this is to do with media controllers (the managers of the megacorps) predicating value on number of copies reproduced. Shows are not to be allowed to be given only the value of production but must be talked up to have a value according to the number of copies - the more expensive the copies can be made to appear the more realistic it seems that a copy should cost more. Charging $20 per viewer for content that cost $0.20 per viewer to make is hard; you have to pay off politicians to maintain that sort of control. If content creation is pushed to a point where the actors, production team, etc. just get a seriously good wage and no further profits are produced then there's no place for media magnates. They must do everything to push against the concept of economy of scale. I'm imagining a utopia in which a $50M movie takes $100M, everyone gets a bonus (down to the caterers and toilet cleaners), the people who front it get 10%, the rest is fed back in to other projects and the movie is now in the public domain. We need to support content creators not make those who control the media even more ridiculously wealthy. Then we have people like the car manufacturer controllers not happy to make piles of money from the effort of the people who work beneath them they want to cripple the product and make cars impossible to repair ... If you ever buy a supercar society should have you stripped naked and left to beg for scraps in a favela whilst all your personal assets are liquidised to feed the poor. /rant [Dammit, I'm really ready to go off on one, enjoy the rants of an over-tired slightly drunk person. Free at source! License: CC0!!]
rbritton 12y ago
I feel the same applies to physical media releases too. Trying to watch a DVD is an absolutely miserable experience with menus and restricted actions. It's for this reason that I have the majority of the content I own ripped and stored in an iTunes library where I can access it quickly from my Apple TV.
- Ntrails 12y ago
  And ripping is actually more effort (in my limited experience) than just torrenting the damned thing even if you own the physical DVD. It's magic
- ddingus 12y ago
  Yep. Way back in the day, I happened to setup the Open Source OGLE DVD player software. I think it was Mandrake Linux, running on some PC with a Matrox G400 card --the one with nice 2D, and great DVD support. Insert disc, press T, then P, and you are watching the movie, no BS. Took maybe 5 seconds tops after disk mount. Turned out to be popular, so I bought a real DVD player for the family, and we hated that thing. "Aladdin" is talked about a lot, but it's true! Every single time the kids wanted to watch that thing, it was something like 15 minutes of previews for all this other cool stuff, over and over. That was the first DVD I ripped. Couldn't stand it. And once setup for that, I ripped 'em all, and also got the benefit of younger ones not destroying fragile media at some considerable expense all the time too. That and losing it, or swapping with friends... For a number of years, I replaced that "real" DVD player with OGLE setup to just play the movie no matter what. Was great OSS advocacy. Suddenly, a whole bunch of people knew who a "geek" and "hacker" was, what software was, how it can impact lives, and all sorts of other good things just because DVD media producers just HAD to annoy the crap out of people. Funny that!
giancarlostoro 12y ago
Reminds me of what Gabe Newell said about piracy: It's not a pricing issue, but a service issue.
- rhino369 12y ago
  Then why are so many Steam games pirated? I'm not doubting that service can be a cause. But I think it's crazy to pretend getting something for nothing isn't a good motivation.
  - MichaelGG 12y ago
    I'd play a pirated version of a game before using the Steam version. Steam implements DRM and is generally obnoxious, trying to force itself all over games (popups), showing sdverts, etc. It just shows how terrible things are in game-buying-land. Look at the Xbox 360. A marketplace UI so laggy, you wonder how they technically able to make it that slow.
    - waps 12y ago
      At least in steam you can turn off the popups : Settings -> Interface -> Uncheck "Notify me about additions or change ..."
    - pjc50 12y ago
      I'm surprised. Steam has been quite successful because for most people the intrusion is acceptable, the portability/redownloadability useful, the social side works acceptably, and they regularly offer big discounts. It never ceases to amaze me how slow the steam store browser is, though.
    - stfnppv 12y ago
      GOG is a nice DRM-free alternative. I've been trying to buy as much as I can through there, in order to support their DRM-free initiative.
  - sbarre 12y ago
    There will always be people who will pirate no matter what. You can't do anything about that, and they will never be your customers. And for games, the percentage of the audience is probably higher than elsewhere because it is a mostly young and tech-savvy audience. But the explosion of indie and smaller games on Steam should be evidence that their platform works, and that it makes economic sense to distribute digitally in that fashion because there are tons of us who want it, even with the ongoing piracy (that has been around since floppy disks and will never go away). My Steam library has over 100 titles in it. I mostly buy during sales and via Humble Bundles mostly, but I also occasionally buy full-priced launch games that I really want to play. I can't remember the last time I bought a boxed game for PC.. Probably 2006? And before Steam I bought maybe 4-5 games per year? The service absolutely works. One last thing: games piracy also has the added layer of protection cracking, which is pretty much a social contest in itself that incentivizes the activity (and leads to distribution as a measure of recognition etc).
lobster_johnson 12y ago
It's also rather bizarre that you have to go to a provider's app to get their content. All the content is siloed and walled off by each provider, so you have to remember whether a show is on HBO or Netflix or whatever. The old TV model of "channels" doesn't work with streaming.
meric 12y ago
HBO NOW isn't built by HBO and is much better than HBO GO.

JonoBB 12y ago

I'd be interested to know how the piracy of music compares to the piracy of video. Which industry has better (legal) streaming options, and does this correlate with lower piracy?

PebblesHD 12y ago
Music streaming without a doubt. Spotify has claimed a massive drop in music piracy over the last few years since its widespread introduction.
dethstar 12y ago
Everyone who I knew used to pirate music (think of p2p programs like Ares or Limewire) now uses either youtube or spotify.
- yellowapple 12y ago
  Former such pirate; can confirm. While downloading music from YouTube probably still counts as piracy, my needs are effectively met between that and the various legal options for unlimited streaming (particularly Amazon Prime Music as of late).
- amorphid 12y ago
  I like rdio.com.

duaneb 12y ago

At some time pirates will need to address the convenience of being free. I use amazon video, which has had a grand total of three films I wanted but could not find. These are extremely convenient, easy to use services. The argument that piracy is more convenient may still hold water, but less each year.

voltagex_ 12y ago
Amazon Video doesn't work in Australia
- dagw 12y ago
  Or anywhere else in the world that isn't the US.
- realusername 12y ago
  Same over here, it can be as convenient to use as you want, I'm not going to use a VPN to use a paying service.
dublinben 12y ago
Amazon Instant Video doesn't work on GNU/Linux. It also doesn't work offline. It also requires proprietary software at every turn. None of these problems are the case with p2p sharing.
- Touche 12y ago
  The number of people who care about those things are a rounding error.
  - peatmoss 12y ago
    However the people who care vehemently about such things are the ones with the motive and means to set up a global convenient alternative content delivery network.

rhino369 12y ago

Amazon Instant and iTunes work pretty well and have almost anything that Popcorn Time has. I really doubt people are doing Popcorn time because it is easier. Not paying anything is a huge feature.

madez 12y ago
I'm not going to pay for revocable licenses, jailed ecosystems or DMRed media. Give me high quality flat files with good metadata, and I'll pay.
donut2d 12y ago
Amazon Instant Video on PS3 and on my Vizio is pretty bad. Slow, unresponsive interface, very difficult to accurately skip ahead, not a great selection. Netflix does a great job interface wise, way better than Amazon Instant Video.
- yellowapple 12y ago
  Unsurprisingly, I've had the opposite experience with Amazon Instant Video on my Fire TV, while the mobile experience is a bit mediocre (though not terrible). I guess it varies greatly depending on the device.
- Touche 12y ago
  How good is the Popcorn Time interface on the PS3?

anigbrowl 12y ago

I would take these arguments more seriously if they reflected the actual market. Films are licensed to distributors in different countries on a case-by-case basis and license periods typically run for 10 years. Only the 6 major studios have offices on every continent and even they don't run distribution operations in every single country. compete by making a better product/service -- not by complaining that your competitors are unfair. Of course, they are certainly unfair here, but the rules of competition are the same. I'm pretty sure I could outdo you in competitive economic terms if I could just help myself to any of your assets that I feel like using whenever I feel like using them. If you would find that situation unfair, would the solution be for you to just work harder?

tsotha 12y ago
You're right, of course, the studios will never be able to compete with pirates on price, and they're never going to get people determined to pay nothing to sign up. However, there are a lot of people who are willing to pay for what they consume, and it's not in content providers' best interest to make these people feel like fools by delivering a product that's inferior to the illegal one.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  I agree about the quality issue, but I was answering a comment that was specifically about licensing terms.
lvs 12y ago
I'll respond to this because I think you're missing the point. I'm saying that the "market makers" have made the "actual market" in a way that is self-defeating when technology no longer favors their historic distribution model. Like you say, the market is hobbled by artificial barriers, like geographic restrictions, that don't really exist on the internet. A significant factor in the inferior experience of streaming services is the content licensing hurdle, which makes the availability of content a moving target. You can complain day and night about the fact that technology no longer fits your business model, but that isn't going to solve the problem.

parallelist 12y ago

The Internet broke the whole idea of charging for a digital copy of something. We’re seeing a struggle of powers as old power tries to cling on to the idea of charging people for digital copies but it will end sooner or later. One needs to think outside the box of capitalism being an appropriate system for all aspects of society.

manigandham 12y ago
What does that even mean? We have to switch the entire economic paradigm we live in so that people can be paid for their work?
- camgunz 12y ago
  The problem is having to be paid at all. There ought to be a system whereby people can exist at a reasonable standard of living and still do the work they want to do, i.e. Basic Income. There's enough food, shelter and medicine to accommodate everyone on the planet right now, but the top 10% hoard way more than their share. Do they deserve it because they work harder? No, they're just born into luxury, and there's nothing capitalistic or meritocratic about it. You ought to be able to make a show or a film without having to leverage everything you own. You ought to be able to work on making cameras and stages if you like to do that stuff. You ought to be able to watch one of these shows/films made using those cameras/stages for free, and then go to your house and work on a project of your own, and not worry about whether that project will be profitable enough to allow you to eat or be housed. The key point is we have the resources. Eventually we'll get there, but it's gonna take a long, long time.
  - manigandham 12y ago
    I'm not sure where to begin with your comment and all the strange and inaccurate things it says... but this kind of idyllic utopia (which to me seems like some horrible mind-numbing lifestyle) will never exist. Economic incentive is the cornerstone of modern effective society. Basic Income might work but it's far more complicated than you make it seem and it's not something that just lets everyone do whatever they want, it's a way to raise living standards and equalize some of the disproportions in power and wealth but there will need to be industry and incentive to create the income in the first place.

NovaS1X 12y ago

I came here to say this, more or less. Maybe when streaming services offer what I want to watch in better than current quality I'll consider stopping. Until then I'll be using Canadian Netflix for 10% of my viewing and other methods for the other 90% that I can't pay for because I happen to not live in the US. Copyright laws are killing the industry.

jsmeaton 12y ago
I'd argue that region based licensing is killing the industry, along with the reluctance for content producers to serve content through Netflix or something comparable. Netflix just launched in Australia. If it had all the shows I wanted, I'd sign up in a heart beat. But it's still missing a good chunk because of the licensing deals that already exist over here. I want to support the Netflix model and content producers that support them. I've considered signing up and not using it at all because my combination of usenet/sickbeard/kodi is far superior to anything else available. I pay about $150 a year for that setup, so I'm not adverse to paying.
- Touche 12y ago
  Your $12.50 per month is not paying for all of the content you consume.
  - jsmeaton 12y ago
    Correct. I'd be happy to pay more for a decent service that had all the content I wanted, or even for multiple services. But paying $100 a month for non-HD cable is about my only option at the moment, and that's not on demand. Again, region specific licensing to blame.
dorian-graph 12y ago
This question is for you and everyone else: why don't you simply not watch something if it's not legally available? It seems like almost all pro-piracy people act and talk as if there's some unwritten and unspoken right and need to consume all media.

oldmanjay 12y ago

Given how much energy people spend defending their moral right to free entertainment as a reward for going through the trouble of being born, I'd be interested to see if you're correct about that. I mean NSA et al spies on the entire world with no restriction? Barely matters, people go on about their lives. Some lawmaker proposes getting ISPs to enforce copyright? INTERNET ARMAGEDDON!

ForHackernews 12y ago
If the NSA really is tracking all internet traffic, maybe we could just build a "media tax" into the federal budget, and distribute the revenues according to NSA-verified download numbers.

vlunkr 12y ago

Exactly, this has happened before, the entertainment industry needs to learn their lesson. Remember when Napster was huge and the music industry was in a big panic for a few years? They finally got it shut down, but by the time they did there were several alternatives out there. The thing that finally made a difference was iTunes downloads. It was a reasonable alternative to piracy and people appreciated that. Instead of trying to insist that people keep buying physical albums they met them halfway. Sure you had to pay, but you could do it all from your own computer, you could pick only the songs you wanted, and there was no risk of malware or sleazy ads that you could get from the illegal services. People will pay if you try to give them what they want, trying to fight these battles legally is a game they will never win.

pyre 12y ago
> they met them halfway iTunes' success was a bit of a fluke. The music execs didn't really think that it would amount to anything, so they threw Steve Jobs a bone.
ddingus 12y ago
Oh, there is a much bigger lesson there. Not only did they generate very serious incentive to create alternatives, but each one was an escalation of forces! At the time Napster was running high, something like 40 plus million users were on the thing. Might have been more. And this is in the dawn of broadband too! Nothing was as huge as Napster was, and it was spreading like wildfire too. At one point, blanket licensing was discussed. Something like 2+ Billion annually, to be sourced by monthly subscriptions. Add up that money from that time, and all the pain, etc... through today, and that's one hell of an opportunity cost, and for what? Only to center in on streaming today? Yeah, that's working, but what did it cost to get there? Had they taken that deal, much would be different today, and they would have a centeralized source for marketing, huge mindshare, and who knows what else? iTunes was born out of the basic realizations you mention. Nobody talks about the cost of actually getting there though. Similar costs are happening right now for video. Painful.

task_queue 12y ago

There will be less incentive when developers are raided and brought to court for their high crimes against the industry. Why not have the FBI go after the pirates instead of changing the structure of their business? It works well for them when it comes to unlicensed reproductions and hardware that facilitates piracy. If Popcorn time could turn a dime while playing the game legally, and become a threat like Netflix was, I'd believe it. It's easier to crack a few skulls legally when pirates start getting flagrant than it is to treat them like a legal competitor.

zanny 12y ago
This is a great strategy. As the dozens of popcorn time forks have shown us it not only does not work, but it is also taking intelligent nonviolent programmers and ruining their lives in prisons around the world. The MPAA and friends couldn't look more evil if they wore a fake mustache and tried twirling it.
- task_queue 12y ago
  It works great if your intention is to intimidate and fragment communities that promote widespread piracy into irrelevance.
  - ionised 12y ago
    The last ten years have shown that to be false.

return0 12y ago

You are asking for the impossible, people are not going to pay for what they can always get at better quality for $0. Fans are happy to curate the art the like and will always do a better work , and for free. The only thing that might make sense is if they distributed an original instead of a copy, i.e. a different movie to every user, a different song etc. Copyright is just not compatible with the digital world, it worked for a while copies were physical, but now we re going back to the pre-copyright era where culture was spreading freely. We can blame piracy for that, but it's not just piracy. The Entertainment industries are largely based on building hype and celebrities, while the cost of production keeps falling thanks to digital production. There is an oversupply of creativity which obviously should drive their profits down. Even without piracy these industries would face big problems.

Dylan16807 12y ago
It's easy for people making money off of distribution to do a better job than fans. But they're largely stubborn or lazy. Hell, they could copy popcorn time and provide some beefy servers, as a simple example of how it's not anywhere near impossible.
StavrosK 12y ago
> people are not going to pay for what they can always get at better quality for $0 Sure, but I already pay Netflix. If I had to pay a bit more and it included everything that's on Popcorn Time, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
- return0 12y ago
  Then download the torrent and tip the producer somehow. Why pay for another service that is clearly not needed? I actually thought someone should have already built a startup selling 'virtual tickets'.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    tip the producer somehow The most anyone has ever raised that way (following a particularly egregious leaking of a film before release in Russia, albeit probably for political reasons) is $14,000. I don't personally know anyone who's made any money from tips, and it's not exactly a promising business model. https://meduza.io/en/news/2015/02/02/leviathan-collects-1-million-rubles-in-fan-support-after-being-hit-by-piracy https://meduza.io/en/news/2015/02/02/leviathan-collects-1-mi...

forrestthewoods 12y ago

I call bullshit. Absolute bullshit. If I gave you a credit card that gave you unlimited access to digital content you probably wouldn't be complaining. Certainly not if you live in the US or much of Europe. If you have a $69 AppleTV then iTunes is a spectacular user experience. Search for almost anything you want and hit play. If it didn't cost $5 to rent a movie it's superior to torrents. This is where someone chimes in with something snarky related to offline viewing (airplane) or not living in the US and having access to less comments. This is true. It's also largely irrelevant. If you think those are the primary reasons users torrent then I'd challenge you to back it up with statistics. For Americans in particular the primary reason to pirate content these days is selfish greed.

xasos 12y ago
Wow, that was harsh. Why is the rationale for Americans pirating 'selfish greed'? People, in general, pirate because it's free and really, really easy. There are many cases where services like Spotify and Netflix have reduced piracy. People are lazy, and if you can make it easier and more seamless than pirating, most people won't mind shelling out a couple of bucks a month for paid service. http://www.slashgear.com/netflix-piracy-rate-goes-down-when-we-arrive-03280546/ http://www.slashgear.com/netflix-piracy-rate-goes-down-when-... http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/04/21/canadian-tech-leaders-oppose-c-51_n_7111150.html http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/04/21/canadian-tech-leader...
- forrestthewoods 12y ago
  Yes, people are very lazy. iTunes is great for lazy people. It's easy to use, extremely high quality, and has the vast, vast majority of pirated content (for Americans). The only thing missing is free. If iTunes were free there would be almost no reason to pirate content. Certainly not in the majority use cases. Therefore the only reason to pirate over iTunes is money. Therefore people are greedy and selfish.
  - yellowapple 12y ago
    Or because your opinion that iTunes is "easy to use" and "extremely high quality" is just that - an opinion - and is not an opinion which is universally shared among all people or even a significant majority of them (myself included). Now, with that said, between Amazon Prime and Netflix I haven't found many reasons to pirate things, but right now that involves jumping back and forth between two different marketplaces because of the fragmented content. This is where Popcorn Time (for example) reportedly shines, and thus might be a compelling reason to at least investigate that particular avenue.

baudehlo 12y ago

It's fascinating that people are arguing so vehemently against you and yet iTunes (and later Spotify and friends) did exactly that. My friends who all subscribe to Spotify or Rdio now say they haven't downloaded a single song since (anecdote is not data etc, yes I know).

tjbiddle 12y ago
Exactly this. Since I switched to Spotify, and then Google Play Music, I haven't downloaded a single song. It's honestly easier to use these services than to go through the process of downloading. Now what I don't get is the friends that I have that refuse to switch because they like "owning" their own music. I have immediate access to an entire cornucopia of music and they're stuck with what they have downloaded.

touristtam 12y ago

That is was is happening in a world where we allow monopolies and oligopolies to exist. The price of new entrance is too high, and the conservatism of the existing actors is detrimental to bringing any additional value to technology and to the consumer market. Just a thought.

pjc50 12y ago

This is a slight tangent to the usual piracy discussion, but I seem to be the last person watching (well, recording) broadcast TV and I'm at the point where I have far more recorded than I'm able to watch. I'd need to make a serious commitment to watching 3+ hours of TV every night for months just to clear the backlog.

bloat 12y ago
I'm with you. I don't have time to watch anything else. I have a PVR connected to a satellite dish with only free to air channels. I tape more movies than I can ever get around to watching - all you have to do is wait and everything appears. A new free channel just started showing Breaking Bad a couple of weeks ago. I didn't have to search any torrent site for it, I was just patient.

jameshart 12y ago

Honest actors can't compete with people who ignore the law though - you acknowledge yourself that the competition here is unfair. Yes, by ignoring copyright and not compensating content creators at all, you can create a service that offers vast amounts of content for free. A legitimate business can't do that. Saying 'well, sorry, the market has spoken and the price they are willing to pay for your content is $0' is just not reasonable. It's like pointing to a guy selling stolen iPhones for $20 and telling Apple they need to adjust their prices to the new reality.

ddingus 12y ago
They can. There are a few use cases here: 1. Massive pirate. Won't pay for anything. If we made it a perfect world, they would just mooch off other people in the extreme, never paying for anything. They won't be customers. Ever. But they do talk about stuff, make recommendations, etc... So they can be leveraged in that way. Show them an AD, or have them do some other minor league thing of value, and trade on that for some value. Good as it gets. And it's important to factor these people in. Their copies and views don't devalue anything. Ignore their $0, and consider anything of value derived from their mindshare as a bonus. 2. Casual pirate. These people will pay, but don't want to be annoyed. Good service, making it easy, etc... all counts, and massive numbers of them will subscribe to lots of things. Cord cutters fall in to this bucket too. Cut out the $150 cable bill, and sign up for a few services, then buy things on top of that. Big cable loses a revenue stream, but content creators and service providers gain one. 3. Buyer. They typically have more means than most, and just pay because it's not a big impact to them. Upper middle class and above here mostly. What people make, and what $10 means to them is absolutely a factor in how to compete with free works. The difference between #2 and #3 here is important. Secondly, entertainment dollars are largely fixed for many people. Actually, my experience is this is true for most people. There is some flex in it, but there aren't billions laying around unspent somehow as most entertainment centric arguments imply. Most people have a coupla hundred bucks to spend. And the various forms of entertainment compete too. A summer of good movies? Yeah, maybe buy one less game. Recognition of this means understanding price points, incentives to spend and how / when / why to compete with other entertainment forms to optimize revenue. Very little is being said about this, but we are seeing flat rate services compete fairly well while delivering consistent revenue. All of this is particularly relevant to #2 above. Considering all of these together highlights some ways to compete with free. Be the free source. Pirating has some negatives attached to it. So side step those and give people options that can send value your way. Increasingly, it's possible to stream now. I am a fan of AMC "Halt And Catch Fire" and do not have cable. I can't go and buy AMC just yet, and they didn't put the show on the services I do subscribe to. On a quick check, there it was! Right there on the AMC site, and they want me to watch an AD, maybe participate in the little activities and potentially do other things in return for my eyeballs on the show. Result? Incentive to pirate goes way down. I've got a path in, and would gladly have gave them money for the views too. Cory Doctrow does this with his books too. If you want to read 'em, he's the source for that. Grab and go. If you want to translate, or do fan derivatives, he will source that too. I did that with "Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom", and really liked his work. Bought a lot of hard copies of his stuff since then. Had it not been that easy and obvious, I might have gotten some PDF, or other, or more likely, not done anything and would not know the guy at all. Mindshare matters. Buying it with views to compete is a perfectly valid business model. And giving people options like sharing / recommending / gifting means those who can pay with dollars will, and those who can't or won't, can do some work that leads to dollars. It's all dollars in the end, done right. So there are a couple of ways right there. Both compete with free, both leverage mindshare to get some value while at the same time offering purchase opportunities. The more of this there is, the less people will pirate, leaving us with just that use case #1 above, and there is nothing to be done with those people, other than to leverage their mindshare somehow. Maximizing revenue is all about the other use cases and recognition of the nature of entertainment dollars and pricing on that understanding, IMHO.