1. Unrestricted access to an absolutely huge library of movies, music and TV shows, nearly unlimited. Certainly not limited by opaque "licensing deals" between various companies.
2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release.
3. No arbitrary device/OS limitations.
4. Can watch/listen/download from any location on earth with sufficient bandwidth.
I didn't even mention that it's free or that there are no ads, because that's pretty much the least important attribute to me. If any company came out with a service that offered those four points, I'd probably be willing to pay a lot for it. How much? Who knows, we don't know how much this is worth because nobody is even trying to offer it.
2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release.
Arguably higher. For example, fans of Star Wars have scanned the original 1977 theatrical release with very high quality film scanners and created a 4K release complete with film grain and the original scenes intact which is not available through approved channels.
What gets to me is exclusivity deals. Wanna watch this? Subscribe to that. Wanna watch that? Well itnisnt available on this so you'd have to subscibe to that. New streaming service launches with promotional exclusivity of something you like? Gotta get on that too. And don't get me started on sports!
Streaming was OK when it was fighting cable, because it was cheaper and on-demand. With the constant greed, we're back to paying more than we used to pay for cable, it doesn't make sense anymore.
I swore off streaming services when they started pulling episodes of comedy shows and editing out scenes because they were worried someone might be offended
There's at least one ALF ('86-90)episode that you can only get the uncensored version via piracy.
(Episode in question is Try to Remember. ALF originally got an electric shock. It quickly got censored in reruns to have ALF slip and hit his head because the network worried kids would get shocked emulating ALF.)
I hate the censorship. But when some groups are willing to kill if you don’t censor then I can’t blame others for not wanting to be martyrs and put their lives on the line for it
They also often time have versions of old movies and shows that have been modified due to silly things like license agreements on music expiring! I have felt gaslighted when I rewatch and old movie and some scene isn’t how I remember.
I was so surprised and bummed when I discovered this was a thing. My wife and I started watching the original Beverly Hills 90210—a sort of ridiculous snapshot of American pop culture in the early 1990s—on some streaming service, and after a few episodes I noticed the music was just...super wrong.
Reading online, I learned that a lot of the original music had been licensed only for the original run of the show, so even when it went to DVD in the early 2000s they had to remove a whole bunch of the original music. It's terrible on two fronts: one, the show is an awesome snapshot of 90s music, with tons of great stuff featured both as background music and in extended live performances, but they cut whole scenes and entire episodes that had too much of it, and two, whoever managed the process of picking replacement music clearly did not care at all, and used awful generic music that sounds like it came from a file called "BeachRiff.aiff" on a $29.95 CD library of royalty-free 60 second stock music samples.
I admit to finding a source of video files patched together from various sources with the original soundtracks intact, and it's simply MUCH more enjoyable. It seems, though, that some episodes of live performances are lost to time—or at least lost to the corporate owners who'd rather sit on the tapes in a warehouse somewhere than make them available.
the DVD/streaming releases of Daria suffer from this. i used to have old TV rips of the show with the original contemporary MTV soundtrack but i'm not sure what happened to them. the stock music just doesn't carry the weight of the times.
Netflix and to some level spotify drowned piracy for a time. But then a lot of companies tried to rap the same "winings" splitting the ecosystem and trashing the user experience.
- ¿could we watch x movie?
- let me see. no, it in this other service beside the 3 we are paying.
At some point I'm willing to just pay a few dollars for a movie. But even then you cant get them all in one place! And they like to charge a premium for some. Im not paying a premium for anything I've already seen a while back.
In the beginning, Netflix was great. Then they became a media company and suddenly EVERYTHING they push on you is THEIR stuff. Gone are the days where you could remember a cool movie and pull it up on Netflix like Fandango or Corvette Summer. I remember going back and watching several seasons of the original Miami Vice back when nobody knew who Michael Mann was.
Not its exactly as you say, you want to watch something but its not on any of the streaming services you're already paying for. I've started to just think of a movie I want to watch, go out to Pirate Bay, download it and then stream it. When I'm done? Delete it.
Its good to know I'm not the only one who has gone back to downloading movies.
All of which could be solved via a VPN of Seedbox.
The point being, my movements around the homepage aren't tracked and used for pushing more ads. My microphone isn't being recorded for AI training or recommendations algorithms. The intricate ways I use the platform isn't being sold to some third party data company. I just open the film, and it works..
Your IP address being logged in a bittorrent swarm is far less concerning to me than the 100 page privacy policy which explains how they will take rectal scans and sell them to cancer research agencies or something.
It fails on all of them if it's not available to purchase, and none of them are of relevance if I want it right now vs having to wait 1-7 days to get hold of that physical copy and there's an easier alternative where I can have it right now.
and arent' there retro-active device blocklists on bluray? I seem to recall sth of the sort. Sure, they can be circumvented, but then why bother buying in the first place if you're gonna be the bad guy anyhow?
> Who knows, we don't know how much this is worth because nobody is even trying to offer it.
Note that this was the original concept of Netflix's streaming service. The service got steadily dismantled as copyright holders demanded higher fees.
Which means that we do have a good idea how much it's worth; it should lie between the range of what Netflix was able to sell successfully and what they weren't.
Supply and demand might argue that if there was real demand for something like this that people were actually willing to pay a lot of money for, then the market would be all too happy to provide.
I think the inconvenient truth here is that when anyone has got close to doing such a thing the price has been high enough that it turns out nobody actually turns up to pay for it, not at least outside a small niche.
You have to have real options or people can’t make informed decisions.
I have a background in city planning, and in the US, you’ll constantly hear about how trying to make cities more friendly to pedestrians, bicycles, or public transit is a waste because no one uses it. But the truth is, most people will end up using the system you design. If you build a system just for cars, people will use cars. If you build a city around public transportation, people will happily use it. If you build a walkable city, people will walk.
Great analogy. I'm visiting a particularly car-centric city atm, and from the car driver's perspective, "nobody uses the bike lanes, I never see them, so why build them, it constrains traffic". Well ya, there's so much car traffic because it's car-first, and nobody wants to be around tons of cars, not even people in cars. It's like arguing that you never see cyclists on the freeway, therefore nobody likes biking and we should discourage it.
Streaming services were great back when they were separate from content producers and IP holders.
Once every media company became a streaming company and started using anticompetitive licensing practices in an attempt to drive viewership to their own platforms, the market fractured too much for it to be profitable.
Something smells “prisoner’s dilemma” about it: the best move for any individual streaming service is to have exclusive content (and the best-positioned players to do that are the studios), but when everyone does that, it decreases the overall profit available in the market more than it increases their slice of the pie.
That's the part that might not be true, unfortunately. If each individual content producer sees more return on their own streaming service than they did sharing revenue from one of the independent services, then that's better for them, even if the total pie got smaller. If that wasn't the case, you'd think we'd see some of them shut their services down and go back to independent services once their income drops.
Sacrificing a wide audience to extract more from the most dedicated portion of the fanbase isn't an entirely new concept, and it financially makes sense short-term (until you start losing some of those dedicated fans over time and don't have the mindshare outside your bubble to attract new ones).
IMHO not really, supply here is the limiting factor since the constrain is in licensing the work. The goal of the right holders is not to maximize access to the work or those stated by OP, but to maximize profit for the company, which when at odds with those other goals still prevails.
e.g. someone calculated/believes that having a big catalog from Disney at X/month is more worth more for Disney than sublicensing to Netflix at Y/month.
>> having a big catalog from Disney at X/month is more worth more for Disney than sublicensing to Netflix at Y/month.
But sometimes that leads to really stupid things. At one time all Star Trek TV shows were on Paramount while all the movies were only on Max. I believe they're all owned by Paramount, but apparently the shoes are the big draw (the new series "Picard" was exclusively on Paramount) and they could get more profit by putting the movies elsewhere and collecting a bit more than if it were all on their service. GAK!
Yes I considered the same but decided to keep the point simple.
And I still can’t help but think that if there really was a large market of people willing to pay a premium for a more permissive access model then we might already see trends in this direction. My hunch is the most folk don’t really care and price remains the dominant factor.
The essential point of the article was that it’s higher prices that’s pushing people towards piracy (either through price rises or fragmented subscriptions). It wasn’t that it is the restrictive streaming model that is pushing people towards piracy.
I’m fact it was precisely this restrictive streaming model that was the one to finally beat piracy. At low prices, that’s already been proven and it’s higher prices that is brining piracy back.
Unpopular opinion here but I wonder how much of the justification for piracy in this thread, broadly around what is perceived to be unfair business practices (“if only the terms were fairer and I would pay”), would actually stand up if the terms were actually fairer but the prices higher.
Or how much is really just the simple rational economic idea that piracy is better value for money.
I personally buy physical media (BluRays and/or DVDs). But I often feel too lazy to deal with the content ripping, so I just download it.
I like Youtube Premium and I'm gladly paying for it, although I'm considering switching to an alternative YouTube client because the official YT App is crap. But then the creators will lose income from my subscription.
Sigh. I wish content providers just gave us API to get the content in exchange for payment.
I really wish we had laws that producers of content cannot also be distributors. That just creates perverse incentives to use content to lock people into their distribution platform.
If they had to be separate, that gives content producers the ability to cross license and those licenses to be better deals. We’d actually have competition in distribution companies as distribution providers would then be competing on price, quality, convenience, and other things that matter, not locking content away.
Nah; copyright is a monopoly on specific media/titles. It breaks all of the “market willing to provide” mechanics because there is no free market for Star Wars, it’s Disney or FOAD.
Bingo. When distributors get exclusive rights to media, there is no competition anymore. You either do whatever the publisher wants, pirate, or go without.
The aggravating part about this: that was not the intention of the copyright clause. "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Authors and inventors. Authors and inventors.
Not companies. Not entities, or even individuals, who purchased the "rights" and now "own" works. That has nothing to do with the intent here, which was to encourage actual authors and inventors to make more stuff. Walt Disney has been gone for more than half a century; he's not going to be able to come up with another Mickey Mouse.
"Intellectual property" is an oxymoron. Pray, tell me, which part of my brain does Disney own? Do they own the part that knows what Mickey Mouse looks like?
Subtitles is a big one for me. I can stream something in Japan, that I have seen other places has english subs, but due to licensing I cannot see them.
I know I could vpn around this, but why should I pay even more just for subtitles?
In the end I'm paying for Netflix, Disney and Amazon. My son uses those as he is bilingual, I just pirate what I want to watch personally.
This is kinda what netflix was for many peak for a brief moment in time. It wasn't perfect, but it was pretty great, it had most of what you wanted to see.
Then EVERY studio wanted their own meh streaming system, and fragmented the system again.
Also in any language. I am so tired of reading a list of audio/subtitles languages available, only to find out that they don’t work after purchase. Am all platforms. Good lord. Just tired of that bs
If buying things at the store was as painful as watching stuff on streaming services, and shoplifting was as low risk as torrenting, and my stealing an item didn't make that item disappear from the store, I'd probably do it there too.
Wait, I absolutely would download a car if I could... or food... or clothing... I'd download the shit out of physical goods if the technology existed. Who wouldn't? You could solve scarcity. If we had Star Trek Replicators, we'd be living in a literal utopia.
I can name at least one country in the European Union in which torrenting copyright content for personal use is legal, people still do very much use spotify and netflix.
Gabe Newell got it right from the very start, piracy is a service problem.
When billion dollar companies, which are praised and supported by governments, download pirated material and do not pay, why should ordinary people restrain themselves and pay? I cannot see how one can make moral arguments against piracy now. It makes no sense to pay if others are not paying and not punished for it. People also have a right to train their real neural network for free without paying.
Plus the idea that if you pay someone to "purchase" and "own" (their terms!!) content, then it's yours forever. Unless, of course, they renegotiate something upstream and subsequently remove the content from your "library" or your device. Or perhaps they lock you out of those things altogether. This means it wasn't ownership, it was subscription.
So as they say, “if buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.”
Stealing is when you take something from him, and he no longer has the thing you took.
Piracy is when you see something for free that everyone else paid money for. You watching doesn't prevent anyone else from watching.
Piracy isn't stealing: piracy only deals in intangibles. Stealing is for finite goods.
There's a whole "how do we pay to make stuff if people can watch for free" argument around piracy, but it's fundamentally a different thing than stealing.
The film and music industries really shot themselves in the foot when they got a tax on recordable media introduced in Canada.
OK, CD-R's and flash memory cost a bunch more now. Streaming is legal, because customers already paid the record companies for their music they downloaded and put on that media.
At least, someone explained this was the current state of Canadian law ~10 years back when I first visited.
We pay a tax on every piece of recordable media (don't think it's only SD cards or hard drives, it applies to phones, laptops, mp3 players, ebooks, even smartwatches). In exchange, sharing media for personal use is legal, and P2P is sharing media.
Doesn't stop corporations from trying to scare people off and complaining about piracy though of course.
Tax on recordable media is unfair because honest people who don't pirate anything also have to pay. As with the case above, honest people get screwed the most.
I was in film school in the 00s, when the media companies were in the news for trying to bankrupt the families of high schoolers to make a point that piracy is bad. This was the "you wouldn't download a car" era, when they tried to redefine "stealing" to include piracy.
The executives of these companies would come speak to our class in the evenings. I didn't even bother counting the number of times one of them would be making elated chitchat before/after class about how he had just been on some flight and watched some series on his iPod. On the one hand, everyone is just people. The people at the heads of film studios are also out of touch grandparents whose grandkids show them how to use modern tech over the holidays.
But it was pretty disgusting to see the people in charge of the companies that were trying to ruin people's lives over widespread behavior, themselves participating in that behavior, and with no sense of irony or remorse. It never occurred to them that the thing they were doing in their personal lives is the same thing they were vilifying in their professional ones.
I actually think pirating encourages a healthier approach to watching TV/movies. I've fully made the switch to pirating instead of subscribing to any streaming services, and it's led to me thinking more critically about what I want to spend time downloading and watching rather than just flipping mindlessly through endless amounts of readily available garbage on a streaming service.
I do still have Kanopy though, which is great for me but obviously depends on your library.
For me, I only seek out media I plan to actually watch. Rather than flipping through what is available and choosing from there. Currently it is stargate sg1/atlantis what I am watching.
Also, a lot of movies/series are only available dubbed here. (I really effing hate "Sie" in dubbed media. So much so, that it's one of the major reasons I go for subbed in english, at most)
And I thought the problem was (just) limited to fragmentation of complete IPs between services. I'd love for someone in the know to explain how you get to this stage.
It it some kind of hedging strategy by The Pokémon Company to account for the number of different streaming services (thereby actually making the problem worse)? Was there some kind of timed exclusivity deal that's forced them to put different things in different places? Did one of the streaming services come along at a later time to try to undercut the earlier ones but the earlier licencing deals haven't expired? Anything else?
What's the problem with that exactly?
Legacy catalogs having some incomplete coverage?
That the Pokemon Company can't make a good list if pressed?
These are all not new or streaming Problems
The gist is here, that the complete first four season are on YouTube for free and the 5th is being added as we speak? (200+ episodes)
The pirate redownloads the same show in Divx, mp4, DVD-ISO and any remastered formats grabbed from streaming services any time a new release comes out. But never watches them. There is rarely such a thing as a definitive version for a show like Pokemon, even for pirates. They are limited by what's being released to the public too. The grass is not really greener over there, just more confusing and more FOMO. Then still needs to watch it in a convenient and organizable way. So you would need to run a server, which is not free either.
Looking into 5 different platform seems to be the easier choice here at some point.
with a sample size of one, there is no obvious problem.
presumably any given household wants to watch more than just pokemon, though and this is where things become unstuck. suddenly, to satisfy the demand for the range of things people in the household want to watch they are forced to make subscriptions to multiple services, perhaps sometimes for one-offs.
scale this up, and you have a population forced to make multiple subscriptions to multiple streaming providers to satisfy their demand for content.
or people just choose a couple of them and that's that. either way it seems that there is a symbiotic relationship between the content authors and the streaming companies.
but wait, read the page carefully, multiple seasons of the same thing spread across different streamers forcing consumers to subscribe to multiple streamers .... and now we are into Phoebus cartel territory.
That's not how streaming worked, ever.
You had to deal with what Netflix had to offer and that was it. These were the happy monopoly days.
It was simply the lack of choice and nobody felt left out at watercooler talks.
The paradox now, is that if you're FOMO inclined you feel the need to subscribe to multiple ones at all times to satify all needs in a household. You don't have to. You can keep baseline Disney if you really have to, but everything else can be easily rotated or just cought up on for a month or three on the usual discounted offers. The social pressure was not some invention of the streaming companies.
Also pirating has a hardware and energy cost, that's not trivial and mostly subsidized by parents.
On a ROI basis of adults with disposable income "buying" (aka personal licenses, ideally shareable with some other accounts what some might call a family) 4-5 movies for like 5 dollars on platforms like Apple TV each a month is actually cheaper than pirating. Streaming is not everything. And don`t kid yourself that your DVD or Bluray collection is worth something or usable in 20+ years. That's a niche hobby. Go visit a flea market. People are that lazy when it comes to couch and home entertainment stuff.
6-13: Prime Video Channels (with 10-13 also available on the Roku Channel)
14-19: Prime Video (with 17-19 also on Netflix)
20-22: Prime Video Channels (and Hulu, and the Roku Channel)
23-25: Prime Video (and Netflix)
So, they're all on Amazon in some sense. I was aware that there was some kind of concept of Prime Video Channels, but when I tried to find an explanation on Amazon's website, I failed.
The problem with Pokémon isn’t that it’s fragmented across streaming services, it’s the anime itself where by Advanced you’re getting enough of the same formulaic bullshit it can drive even a kid crazy. I was that kid.
Except for some slight deviations, such as the beginning of Best Wishes (Black & White), you can put on a sequence of any 10 episodes from any season and it doesn’t matter what streaming service it’s on. By the end of the episode, Team Rocket is blasting off again.
>More fragmented
Prime Video has it all which doesn't sound fragmented to me. It seems Prime Video is for old seasons and other services are fine for watching the current iteration of the show.
I remember a few years ago when our niece came to visit. One evening, we started watching a movie on Netflix together.
We only made it halfway before bedtime, but since she was coming back in two weeks, we decided to save the rest for her next visit.
Two weeks later, she returned, bouncing with excitement to finally see how the story ended. We opened Netflix, ready to hit play - and lo and behold… the movie had vanished from the catalog.
I tried to download something from Netflix recently. The download wouldn’t process. It got stuck partway.
Not an issue, I’ll just delete it and redownload.
Nope. There’s a limit to the number of downloads on some content. I wasted mine trying to get the download to even work.
Indeed. Recently we purchased season 1 of a reasonably popular U.S. produced show via Apple TV. When played, it is available only in dubbed French in our region (Canada.) None of the info available beforehand said anything about this. Guess where I obtained the subsequent seasons? I will pay for content but not if you lie, or make me jump through ridiculous hoops.
That reminds me of some passengers I sat on a flight next to once.. they tried to watch something on their iPad, but because we were about to depart from a country foreign to theirs, it got region-blocked...
Not that I pitied them, they were obnoxiously late and boarded with 5 bags (the stiff rectangular bags boutique stores have) of shopping...
> "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem"
Maybe so, but if media companies invested in fixing the service problems, the pricing problems would remain, and those keep people away just as effectively, so they're not going to do it.
People don't want to pay what the media companies want to charge, at any level of service.
Not necessarily true, as the success of streaming shows. The problem comes when the unbounded greed of the billionaires in charge leads them to inflate prices beyond their customers' ability and willingness to pay.
Why make it complicated? Service means the user experience. If the user needs to do anything other than click pay click play, you done goofed, simple as that.
Love how this same quote was used in celebration of streaming back in Netflix’s early days as the solution, and now to show the new industry found on those very same ideas as the problem.
Ehh, while I agree its 70% about having a way more user-friendly experience, theres still 30% which is that the content needs to justify the price. And HBO and Netflix have missed that mark in my opinion.
I cancelled HBO after their price increase a year or two ago after being pretty happy with their service for a long time (though also the service quality had gotten worse). Too many people share my netflix for me to cancel it.
This is what did it for me too. Why would I pay for a crappy UX and ads? But all these companies need numbers to keep going up, so they keep tightening the screws.
Service problems are usually pricing problems. Advert policy is because people refuse to pay more so to make more money they put in ads. Fragmentation by content/region is also because each service is trying to spend as little as possible on content. If you want to watch unlock video content youd have to pay $100+ a month and people refuse to do that.
i wish we could go back to a pre-streaming version of netflix.
the near-infinite library and lack of algorithmic nudging resulted in an era where i had healthy view habits. reasonable levels of screentime and VERY diverse content.
i add so many movies to my queue with the best intentions of watching them someday, but always put them off because something about staring at that endless scroll of options makes me crave something light and simple.
the disk-in-the-mail era was "remember that three-hour subtitled classic film you always said you should watch but haven't? well, today's the day you're watching it." and i always ended up being glad i did.
the streaming era is "ugh, i don't have the mental bandwidth to watch that three hour thing that's been on my queue forever. lets just rewatch some background content to zone out" and i always lament wasting hours of my life in front of the screen.
I was wondering recently whether someone could conceivably start a disk-in-the-mail Netflix again, now that streaming sucks so much and every publisher seems to want their own streaming service. My understanding (possibly wrong, I'm not an expert) is that it's perfectly legal to lend out physical media without any special permission from the publisher under the first-sale doctrine, so it seems like the only way to build a library that has content from many different publishers.
(of course, this could only work as long as publishers keep producing physical media)
I relate to this. Also, I am not the best person in the world, but recently this hit the point where I decided because of these very same thoughts + nudging from my much better partner to donate to NPR, to cancel Netflix and move that money to NPR. Now no more Netflix, which is sort of a relief in ways, and I have to be more intentional about what I download / consume.
It's no longer as convenient with dozens of streaming services; the streaming bitrate is also subpar, and audio is compressed to the point it feels flat. If you want to be mindful about what you are watching, it will be really hard with Netflix, Prime, and Disney compared to your own media server. When I had a streaming subscription, I was constantly shocked by what was popular in Poland and what people were watching. It took me some time to accept that I am not their target audience.
The quality of shows is also subpar. And there aren’t many shows on Netflix at a given time: Probably 80 things to watch, all categories included (with 70% of overlap in content).
I've always chosen piracy for the privacy. I don't need a bunch of services building a profile on my viewing habits and tastes, then sharing that data with other businesses and governments. If I want a recommendation, I'll ask a friend, not an algorithm.
Black markets are usually the result of failed markets, and i think its no different here. Copyright is a monopoly so there is no competition. Sure different streaming services compete with each other, but they essentially sell different products. It'd be like if only one resturant was allowed to sell hamburgers. There might be other resturants but they arent really in direct competition.
The streaming services are relying on enforcement to preserve their business model.
This only works as long as there's no other nations with significant digital infrastructure that can be used for VPN egress points who don't care a whole lot about US copyright enforcement (or copyright enforcement in general).
Our government just pissed off a lot of other governments. Enforcement is good within the US, but not outside, even nations which the US has a lot of control over.
I wouldn't have minded the newly inserted ads in Netflix or Prime Video. But they just throw the ads in during mid-sentence. Are they putting ads in using a random number generator? What happened to the accepted practice of putting in ads where they natural break occurs? It really throws out the flow of the moment. Major irritation. You know, how TV and Cable typically have done it.
If they were willing to sell movies and tv shows WITHOUT DRM, I’d happily buy what I want and put on my Jellyfin server. I don’t pirate music because I can buy what I want on Bandcamp (and even mainstream music on apple and Amazon without drm).
But since I can’t (and you can’t even find physical media for a lot of things), I feel like I am left with no options.
I am not even trying to get stuff that is recent, as I prefer to wait, especially for tv shows, to finish its run before I decide if it is worth investing my time in.
I mostly go to the library every week and pick up movies and tv shows on Blu-ray and rip them so I can watch them on my schedule. I often delete them afterwards if I feel like they don’t have replay value.
I think Jellyfin also provides a much better interface than any of the streaming apps, and I like to be able to know if I am going to watch them on my theatrical version or some extended version.
This mirrors my experience as well. I used to pirate everything, it was relatively inconvenient to get the exact thing you wanted on physical media. Then streaming, Steam, and app stores came about. I pivoted 100%, it was sooo much more convenient than trying to find legitimate and quality copies of content and managing a set up to do so.
Then the streaming side started to fragment a bit, but I just grabbed all of the subscriptions (HBO, Hulu, YouTube, Netflix, etc). It was getting a bit iffy on value, but at least it was still convenient. Now it's just ridiculously _in_convenient. Search around to see which service might have the thing you're actually trying to watch and use this device with this app to get a decent quality version of the content delivered, all while hoping it doesn't force automatic quality "for your benefit". With Steam it's a bit less severe, but it did reach the "and the games you want are split across 5 services in exclusivity" and "DRM is getting to be an extreme pain on some of these" stages.
Recently, I also switched to Jellyfin. I still have access to Netflix and Disney through family plan. The service problem was the quality issue. I have the Ultra plan's while Netflix keep pushing SD (due to Widevine certificates). Simply cannot stand watching 480p on WQHD+ screen. For the content I have legitimate access, but cannot get good service, I don't consider it pirating.
For me worse than the can't pay is the lack of options. In the VHS time I had more good movie options than in the current streaming services. I remember when I bing watched Kurozawa or Mario Monicelli's movies. Now it's very hard to find non American cinema. The tech is there, but the System fail us.
Even many American movies are no shows on most streaming platforms. Sometimes I'm like: "Let's take the top 30 movies that critics loved the most in US in year X".
As soon as it's earlier than 2005 you're gonna find less than half available across most streaming platforms, unless for renting/buying.
Even after the DVDs, Netflix had a much bigger catalog before everyone else decided they needed to copy Netflix and launch their own service, then IP rights got restricted and redistributed.
Streaming was great when I only needed to subscribe to a single service to watch most everything I wanted. It's not so great when I need to subscribe to 5+ services and still not have everything I want to watch.
Yeah, monopolies are bad but the way IP is distributed right now across so many different services just ends up being worse for consumers.
Netflix found that while it was a nice advertising tool to boast about the broadness of its catalogue, most customers rarely ordered the more niche stuff so it wasn't particularly profitable.
> most customers rarely ordered the more niche stuff
I'm sure that's true, but the flip side is that the niche stuff is what pulls in the hardcore film buffs. And guess who those of us who aren't big film buffs turn to when picking films and services? The hardcore film buffs we know.
They may not generate a ton of revenue if you look only at "how many people request obscure movie X", but having those movies pulls in the people who will, in turn, influence others.
That’s what happens when you have a big library. The usage is going to be some 80:20 rule. A small slice drives the numbers. Yet it is nice to be able to consume some long tail content. Without the DVD catalog, access to the long tail has disappeared from mainstream providers.
The streaming landscape is now terrible and no different than the incumbent CATV providers that it sought to replace. In 2011, streaming services were the hotness because CATV subscriptions were expensive. In 2011, people were subscribing to 1-2 or 2-3 services because they were all less than $10USD/month. That was still 10x cheaper than the alternative.
However, 15 years later, those numbers exceed or are the same as CATV costs combined with all the streaming/smart device headaches.
All we did was change the pipe. The providers didn't change except for consolidation and erosion of policy, both of which lead to worse outcomes for consumers.
As with most things, I think we leaned in too hard to streaming services.
Part of the appeal of streaming services back then was being able to cherry pick what you wanted so you only paid for what you actually wanted to watched.
Because of how fragmented all the shows are, people sign up for multiple streaming services just to watch the shows the want to watch, and then wish for everything to be bundled together...again. Also, each streaming service charges a hefty premium compared to what you're actually getting, so it's not as worth the money.
I spent last few days chasing down a Bravo/peacock show from outside the US trying to watch legally, only to find it on watchseries and realize how good the experience has gotten. It's not even released on torrents or nzb. Watchseries UI is kind of peak now. Nuts. Does anyone know how Watchseries manage to stay up?
The service effectively rebroadcasts all the streaming services to provide exactly what you suggest. It’s still paying the streaming services, and users pay it.
I think we are already seeing some packaged stream services and we will probably see more. It’s a lot of overhead to maintain a separate service to do the exact same thing (with only a different library and branding).
I think the NHL uses the streaming backend developed by MLB Advanced Media (they adapted it in 2015, not sure if still the case).
What these companies would "sell" would be DRM crusty shit that wouldn't work on my devices. And the 'Authorization servers' would be decommissioned at some unstated future date. Hell, even Microsoft couldn't manage to maintain these DRM servers.
If MS cant, why would I expect any company to properly maintain them?
Maybe the incentives would be better, but i also dont really want to keep track of budgeting when watching TV. I'm here to relax. I dont want to stress about how much i watched this month and if im going to blow my entertainment budget.
That would incentivize services to make their shows longer. Maybe they play them back at 95% speed, maybe they add their own intro or credits to the end. maybe if they make their own shows like Netfliz does, they stretch them out.
And/or pay-per-episode, pay-per-season or pay-per-show. So I don't have to start thinking ahead too much about the _length_ of something and can just enjoy the thing itself based on some pre-determined price.
Perhaps pay-per-episode with a discounted price for an entire series (and an option to buy the remainders taking that into account). It seems fair to be able to dip your toe into a series and try a few episodes before committing. On the other hand, that seems just a bit too consumer-friendly...
For the subset of Amazon-available content that isn't counted as Prime Video I think yes, but not for the rest of it. Apple TV+ possibly too, though they also have what feels like their own confusing model that shows some things as being available with the caveat that it's actually available through either a) a proxy with a subscription to a third party or b) a one-time purchase from them. I'd hate to be in the meetings where the details of these licensing agreements get hashed out.
I was thinking along the lines of how much I actually watch, if I only watched 10 minutes of your show, I only pay for 10 minutes, not the entire thing.
You're also saving on bandwidth.
Paradoxically, I'd still want to pay per minute of viewing time, if I'm watching the show on 2x the speed.
A bundle of streaming services. That you can surf and choose one from and just watch. And a TV guide that tells you what's running where.
Gee...sounds a lot like Cable TV.
Sarcasm aside, the one problem folks had with Cable was the inability to upgrade without getting locked into another 2 year contract. Streaming solves that one problem while enshittifying all the other good things.
Honestly, Cable companies could make a comeback by using their relationships with producers to actually be a "one stop shop" streaming services. There's definitely a pain point to having to be subscribed to so many different services just to cover the gamut of shows and movies
I thought the main complaint was "I'm paying for channels I don't watch!" while not realizing the channels they were watching were actually what they were paying for, and the rest of the stuff was just lumped in for nearly free to make the lineups look bigger and more appealing.
Chances are that's not what was happening unless you were watching the channels nobody else watches.
I haven't looked into cable pricing for a while but i remember a few of the contract disputes that caused some big channels to drop off big cable providers in the 2010s. The price-per-customer those channels were asking the cable companies were significant chunks of what a package would cost the customer (eg upwards for $1).
Meanwhile some of the less common ones were a few cents per customer.
That means that unless you weren't watching any of the $1+ ones, you were mostly actually "paying for what you're watching".
That would only suit a portion of their user base and completely ream people who use Netflix to entertain/occupy their kids, who use TV shows to fall asleep, etc. Not to mention throwing away valuable subscriber dollars from idle users like me who maintain a subscription but rarely watch anything (mostly because there's nothing good on the entire platform).
I still have streaming services, mostly because my family uses them. I’m slowly getting back into the self hosted ways. But it’s also pushing me to just stop watching altogether. I’m finding better ways to spend my time than in front of a tv. Or rather, I guess I’m spending it more behind a computer screen. Haha
I think we have it backwards by attaching it to the life/death of the creator (or the works’ creation). People should be alive to experience the works they consumed in new and open ways. Creation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It builds on the collective works. There’s no point in a work becoming public domain if no one is alive from the time when it first had an impact on culture. Seniors should be freely able to listen to access the culture of their youth and experience it in new modified ways without restriction.
15 years or less from the date of first public consumption.
Oh, I have a question to all of the people who pirate but live in a country where that’s illegal and punished (with huge fines, I assume). I’m very interested in listening to some stories of how it’s technically done (vpn, a seedbox, or you just keep things simple and don’t care). E.g. I’ve been trying sophisticated backlists of IPs, but I have no idea whether they work. But even more I am interested in a legal aspect, meaning how serious these copyright claims are. Do you know anyone personally, who was punished for downloading a TV show? Which country? Personally, I know many folks who do, but none who was fined.
With torrents you'll want a VPN. Usenet is generally safe just thanks to TLS unless you're uploading content. For that I'd use a VPN. But unlike torrent, Usenet isn't P2P so I can just download at my full internet bandwidth and don't need to hope there are enough seeders out there maintaining it or that I maintain some magic upload / download ratio.
I rarely watch something off Netflix. And when I watch something I love watching in highest quality (4K HDR if available). If they'd let me pay-as-I-watch I'd be happy to do so, but I don't want to pay every month for a service I rarely use, and sometimes never for a few months.
Another reason is availability. Apple TV+, for some reason, isn't available in my country. I've heard great thing about Severance which is available only there. I can't legally watch it even if I were to pay it. I'd have to pirate it if I want to watch it.
My pet peeve is when streaming services only allow me to watch something in the language of the country I live in. I'm sorry, but why? Why would I want to watch a 1988 movie with horrible German dub?
I know this is pedantic but it is so annoying: downloading shows is not piracy. It is totally nuts to conflate unauthorized copying and sharing with the violent act of going on somebody’s boat and killing/threatening them until you loot their stuff.
Calling it piracy was funny during the early Internet when it was all pirate and ninja memes. But really letting them conflate this very minor crime with violence was a big propaganda loss.
About 10 years ago Netflix became available in the country where I was living back then. I was very excited about it, I was on their email list for years, waiting for the announcement. As I got the email that they are available, after work literally the first thing I did was to grab my credit card, and subscribe.
I found 4-6 movies I wanted to watch, but when I saw that they had Godfather 1 and 3 without 2, I had a good laugh. Then I watched all the Archer episodes they had, and tried to find something interesting for 2 more days before I cancelled my (still trial) account.
Though I stopped watching movies some years ago, until than I used to watch them on the same old pre-netflix way.
Of course I have heard that they have spent many billions on content since then, I'm sure they have some interesting stuff... but that came way too late for me.
The only thing they say is "the powers that be in Hollywood chose to highlight your product", but surely the information content regarding quality is as close to zero as it is possible to get.
Some of those are other networks shows that just happen to be distributed by Netflix. For example, Wallace & Gromit. This is not a useful set of data to draw conclusions from. Which is precisely the problem that Netflix has.
I mean when your company has enough money to essentially bankroll the creation of a greater-than-average number of productions and simply pay the individuals involved in the production of these films whatever it takes to get them on board, isn't it sort of inevitable that you end up featuring in the list of awards a greater-than-average number of times?
I don't know why you're being downvoted because you're absolutely right. I'd say for me Netflix movies have less than a 5% hit rate. They're an excellent place to start if you desire a suitably (and needlessly) racially and sexually diverse cast, the most bland cinematography and grading possible, and scripts explicitly designed for viewers who are paying more attention to their phones than the show[1].
Great place to stream cartoons and anime for free, no account. It feels like they have almost everything, as I found anime as far back as the 1970s on there.
When I discovered Food Wars was split between two streaming platforms, I hoisted the sails.
I started buying Blu-ray discs and ripping them to my computer, where I run Plex. Why? I had a long-time subscription to HBO Max, but a few years ago, I went to watch Westworld, and it was gone from HBO. I ended up buying a season on Apple for the price of a monthly subscription to HBO. I cancelled my HBO subscription. I realized that second-hand Blu-ray discs of shows were selling for dirt cheap. I spent $40 to buy the rest of the seasons of Westworld on Blu-ray.
Clearly, new shows aren't getting Blu-ray releases, so this won't work for you if you care about new shows. My wife and I are so over the dystopian view from modern science fiction that we started focusing on shows from the late 1900s (80s/90s) to get more of a positive outlook from our entertainment. We are now going through Stargate SG-1.
Sucks that the Blu-ray experience is dreadful for 4K content. You've gotta find specific Blu-ray drives with specific firmware versions to do rips, or watch on a PlayStation or similar locked-down console. There isn't even a non-pirate way to watch on a laptop or desktop anymore since Intel SGX is dead.
Same. I'm 45 and lately I've been thinking about picking up a Blu-ray player. Not a drive to rip discs—a player to hook up to my TV. It's definitely an elder millennial thing, but I just want to own a physical copy of the movie and not have to worry about where it's streaming or whether the one I "bought" on iTunes has been quietly swapped for another version.
The sad thing is, I don't think Blu-ray is long for this world. But I at least want plastic copies of the classic movies I know I'll go back to.
> I went to watch Westworld, and it was gone from HBO.
Wait, isn't that their own IP? I get shows not running on 3rd party streaming services due to IP rights and stuff, but how/why would they be in a position to not stream their own IP?! That's like going to Netflix and not being able to see Stranger Things. It's insane!
There are quite a few devices these days that’ll allow you to capture streams by stripping HDCP so you can at least record it instead of having the service put it in “the vault,” to appease some bozo in a suit.
I have been trying to put my data hoarding data days behind me, but like the article, I’m being pushed back that direction. Doubly so since I use Linux and they restrict quality to 1080p. The only thing preventing me from it right now is a lack of a computer/server with ECC support (so I can run ZFS). Though encrypting a bunch of data and archiving it into Amazon Glacier seems more and more reasonable as time goes on.
I was trying to watch The Big Short the other night, after checking 7 streaming websites I came to my senses and downloaded the 4k rip off the pirate bay
I was trying to put on a show for background noise this morning. Just two nights ago I was able to sign in with my cable provider and watch it. Now it's telling me there's a network (as in the channel the network is on) authorization error, customer support can't tell me why it doesn't work and they are not authorized to issue me a credit.
So I pirated that too.
And what the fuck is up with Netflix? Why do I have to install a browser extension to hide the games? I don't want games I want to watch The Big Short.
They are innovating where no innovation is necessary. And in the process they are making everything more shitty. Why change the UI every couple of months. It's fine, it's a UI for a media catalog, it's not rocket science. Why not work with other companies to collaborate and create a unified way to search catalogs but no that would be good for the consumer. Greed is an ugly thing.
I just want to give one more example. I wanted to watch “Just Beyond” (2021 Disney), but it’s impossible to find anywhere. So what am I supposed to do?
My main issue is that they're now slowly testing the waters to see if they can make you watch ads while still paying for the subscription, and at that point, might as well take advantage of Romania's lack of law enforcement and hit the torrent websites.
It really doesn't seem like it has to be that complicated, yet somehow we've gone from channels with markedly anti-consumer fixed bundles to a massively fragmented ecosystem where it genuinely seems like the streaming services _don't_ actually want you to subscribe by the amount of the effort that goes into making things hard to watch or doing everything that could make the streaming experience worse (region availability, paid tier ads, lower bitrate stream quality, and so on).
It already came full circle some years ago when we started seeing new streaming services every year, and those companies pulling their content from other platforms to put on their own. Then you had to start thinking about what servces you need, whether you still want those services, etc. Just like cable!
True, although I guess this is sort of understandable. It's the "you're paying us, but here are some ads" that really gets me.
Either way, 5 bucks a month to Emby, a really easy to get membership to a large private torrent site, and a 16TB hard drive solves these problems for me, and will continue to.
Thanks for the tips!
Could you explain how can one get about "getting a membership to a large private torrent site"?
Also, why Emby rather than, say, Jellyfin or Plex?
The private trackers tend to be a pain in the butt to remain active enough on to keep your account, as they tend to require a certain amount of upload:download ratio. This can be difficult to achieve since so many members have high-speed seedboxes.
Just use https://1337x.to/ or any other public tracker. You'll be able to find 99% of whatever you want.
One friend, who is a film enthusiast, told me that he doesn't understand why there aren't more titles on the streaming services vs. the scale of albums on Spotify. He often download old and new movies via Torrent.
Pay a bunch of money to Disney+ to watch any popular release and get terrible streaming quality and functionality. It makes complete sense to me why consumers would toss their hands up and find better and more accessible options.
I pay for a pirate streaming site. It's nice, it has everything, it works, nothing ever gets memory-holed, I don't ever have to sign up for a different service to watch something because it got swapped in the middle of my binge, what I can watch doesn't depend on where they guess I am, I can access over a VPN, they have a support staff that actually listens to me and implements features users ask for, and I can download things to watch later drm-free. This isn't a money problem, as evidenced by the fact that I pay to steal. It's a product problem. I pay for this because their product is better and I want it to continue to exist.
Luckily search engines like Yandex.com provide the easiest way to find unusual streaming sites. Using AdBlock saves us from the pop-ups and weird ads. If Netflix goes back to $9 per month with every show in existence, I will reconsider them. Until then, these streaming sites will continue to exist and thrive.
Yeah, because you pay for the thing and you still can't watch it!
Last year they brought Andor to Hulu and every time I played it on my brand new LG TV, the video would be completely green while I could hear the audio underneath. It only happened to Andor because apparently they had some super special DRM, which ostensibly would restrict people who weren't authorized from viewing it, but had the effect of also preventing authorized people from viewing as well. So in the end, they can't even satisfy willing customers who have their wallets open. Of course they're going to turn to piracy.
Of course, the rights holders got my money and as far as they're concerned, their DRM move was great for the bottom line.
I haven't bothered checking, but I assume the hardware sucks too - I'd expect the Apple TV SOC to be like an order of magnitude faster than any smart TV.
Screw streaming. I bought a smart TV a few years back. Services discontinued within 3 years. No external commercial streaming boxes work because of HDCP issues. Back to piracy until the TV gives up. Streamers and smart TV people, you had your chance and you blew it. I'm not paying through the nose any more.
i for I, ... quit Netflix and Prime (and deleted AirBNB and UBER) because they are US companies, and second ... all of what ryandrake said https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44906021
All of these streaming services have started cracking down on family and friend account sharing to game their stock price. Turns out kicking off the broke college students doesn’t lead to them signing up for ~$80/mo. smattering of streaming services.
It’s also getting tiring of this massive fragmentation of streaming services as a whole combined with a weird game of rebundling various providers in either deals direct from the streaming platforms/their overlords, or rebundling all of these streaming services into “free” offers with other service providers and THEIR offerings.
Even my goddamn cable company does this now offering me one of the streaming services? with my Spectrum plan. I don’t even know which one(s).
Quite frankly, I’m tired of my Verizon plan trying to cram Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ and crap down my throat, I’m tired of Walmart trying to cram Paramount+ at me with Walmart+. However, the market of ‘average (dumb) people’ seems to love this concept as “little extras” that eventually cause scope creep to their bill over time (and we all lose as a result).
There are services I already pay for that I'd likely save a handful of dollars on per month if I bundled them with my other services... but I can't bring myself to do it out of stubborn principle.
My thing is that we are expected to pay in perpetuity for the privilege of accessing content. It's rent, and it is just tiresome.
Yes I understand that we have content available on far more devices than 30 years ago, when all we had was the TV in the living room. But should I have to pay in perpetuity to show my kids Moana?
Piracy offers:
1. Unrestricted access to an absolutely huge library of movies, music and TV shows, nearly unlimited. Certainly not limited by opaque "licensing deals" between various companies.
2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release.
3. No arbitrary device/OS limitations.
4. Can watch/listen/download from any location on earth with sufficient bandwidth.
I didn't even mention that it's free or that there are no ads, because that's pretty much the least important attribute to me. If any company came out with a service that offered those four points, I'd probably be willing to pay a lot for it. How much? Who knows, we don't know how much this is worth because nobody is even trying to offer it.
2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release.
Arguably higher. For example, fans of Star Wars have scanned the original 1977 theatrical release with very high quality film scanners and created a 4K release complete with film grain and the original scenes intact which is not available through approved channels.
Wow. I thought it was impossible to watch the original release of star wars. I need to hunt this down.
"4k77" should get you to the right places
Yup. Team Negative One are doing some very important work in terms of film preservation/digital archeology.
There's also a DVD release of the theatrical versions. Usually goes for $50-75 for OG trilogy.
What gets to me is exclusivity deals. Wanna watch this? Subscribe to that. Wanna watch that? Well itnisnt available on this so you'd have to subscibe to that. New streaming service launches with promotional exclusivity of something you like? Gotta get on that too. And don't get me started on sports!
Streaming was OK when it was fighting cable, because it was cheaper and on-demand. With the constant greed, we're back to paying more than we used to pay for cable, it doesn't make sense anymore.
This might fall under 3/4 but to me the biggest issue is being able to watch without having to turn my vpn off! I had already accepted the rest
Don't forget censorship-free
I swore off streaming services when they started pulling episodes of comedy shows and editing out scenes because they were worried someone might be offended
Fair to be upset. Just noting that has been happening for about the whole history of televised comedy:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smothers_Brothers_Comedy...
That's a problem that predates streaming.
There's at least one ALF ('86-90)episode that you can only get the uncensored version via piracy.
(Episode in question is Try to Remember. ALF originally got an electric shock. It quickly got censored in reruns to have ALF slip and hit his head because the network worried kids would get shocked emulating ALF.)
I hate the censorship. But when some groups are willing to kill if you don’t censor then I can’t blame others for not wanting to be martyrs and put their lives on the line for it
They also often time have versions of old movies and shows that have been modified due to silly things like license agreements on music expiring! I have felt gaslighted when I rewatch and old movie and some scene isn’t how I remember.
I was so surprised and bummed when I discovered this was a thing. My wife and I started watching the original Beverly Hills 90210—a sort of ridiculous snapshot of American pop culture in the early 1990s—on some streaming service, and after a few episodes I noticed the music was just...super wrong.
Reading online, I learned that a lot of the original music had been licensed only for the original run of the show, so even when it went to DVD in the early 2000s they had to remove a whole bunch of the original music. It's terrible on two fronts: one, the show is an awesome snapshot of 90s music, with tons of great stuff featured both as background music and in extended live performances, but they cut whole scenes and entire episodes that had too much of it, and two, whoever managed the process of picking replacement music clearly did not care at all, and used awful generic music that sounds like it came from a file called "BeachRiff.aiff" on a $29.95 CD library of royalty-free 60 second stock music samples.
I admit to finding a source of video files patched together from various sources with the original soundtracks intact, and it's simply MUCH more enjoyable. It seems, though, that some episodes of live performances are lost to time—or at least lost to the corporate owners who'd rather sit on the tapes in a warehouse somewhere than make them available.
the DVD/streaming releases of Daria suffer from this. i used to have old TV rips of the show with the original contemporary MTV soundtrack but i'm not sure what happened to them. the stock music just doesn't carry the weight of the times.
Netflix and to some level spotify drowned piracy for a time. But then a lot of companies tried to rap the same "winings" splitting the ecosystem and trashing the user experience.
- ¿could we watch x movie? - let me see. no, it in this other service beside the 3 we are paying.
At some point I'm willing to just pay a few dollars for a movie. But even then you cant get them all in one place! And they like to charge a premium for some. Im not paying a premium for anything I've already seen a while back.
In the beginning, Netflix was great. Then they became a media company and suddenly EVERYTHING they push on you is THEIR stuff. Gone are the days where you could remember a cool movie and pull it up on Netflix like Fandango or Corvette Summer. I remember going back and watching several seasons of the original Miami Vice back when nobody knew who Michael Mann was.
Not its exactly as you say, you want to watch something but its not on any of the streaming services you're already paying for. I've started to just think of a movie I want to watch, go out to Pirate Bay, download it and then stream it. When I'm done? Delete it.
Its good to know I'm not the only one who has gone back to downloading movies.
Also doesn’t track user and send a bunch of telemetry
Except for our ip address, timestamp and torrent metadata
https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com
All of which could be solved via a VPN of Seedbox.
The point being, my movements around the homepage aren't tracked and used for pushing more ads. My microphone isn't being recorded for AI training or recommendations algorithms. The intricate ways I use the platform isn't being sold to some third party data company. I just open the film, and it works..
Your IP address being logged in a bittorrent swarm is far less concerning to me than the 100 page privacy policy which explains how they will take rectal scans and sell them to cancer research agencies or something.
Physical media offers the first three, but not option four.
I, too, would pay per show/movie to download and save DRM-free videos to my own drives.
So how come you can't (legally) watch Blue-Rays using a Linux computer, or when viewing it on an ancient CRT using an HDMI-to-analog converter?
A lot of effort has gone into making physical media work only with pre-approved devices.
It fails on all of them if it's not available to purchase, and none of them are of relevance if I want it right now vs having to wait 1-7 days to get hold of that physical copy and there's an easier alternative where I can have it right now.
The elder might remember a time where you could drive to a place and rent physical copies of a movie.
But of course, these places dried out a long time ago.
In NZ we have aliceinvideoland.co.nz which overnights you x DVDs. They have a pretty extensive library and a lot of lesser known and local content.
I used them for a few years, they are great and I'm happy to see they're still around.
Physical media has arbitrary device limitations.
and arent' there retro-active device blocklists on bluray? I seem to recall sth of the sort. Sure, they can be circumvented, but then why bother buying in the first place if you're gonna be the bad guy anyhow?
> Who knows, we don't know how much this is worth because nobody is even trying to offer it.
Note that this was the original concept of Netflix's streaming service. The service got steadily dismantled as copyright holders demanded higher fees.
Which means that we do have a good idea how much it's worth; it should lie between the range of what Netflix was able to sell successfully and what they weren't.
Supply and demand might argue that if there was real demand for something like this that people were actually willing to pay a lot of money for, then the market would be all too happy to provide.
I think the inconvenient truth here is that when anyone has got close to doing such a thing the price has been high enough that it turns out nobody actually turns up to pay for it, not at least outside a small niche.
You have to have real options or people can’t make informed decisions.
I have a background in city planning, and in the US, you’ll constantly hear about how trying to make cities more friendly to pedestrians, bicycles, or public transit is a waste because no one uses it. But the truth is, most people will end up using the system you design. If you build a system just for cars, people will use cars. If you build a city around public transportation, people will happily use it. If you build a walkable city, people will walk.
Great analogy. I'm visiting a particularly car-centric city atm, and from the car driver's perspective, "nobody uses the bike lanes, I never see them, so why build them, it constrains traffic". Well ya, there's so much car traffic because it's car-first, and nobody wants to be around tons of cars, not even people in cars. It's like arguing that you never see cyclists on the freeway, therefore nobody likes biking and we should discourage it.
> If you build a walkable city, people will walk.
No, they won't. If you build a walkable city and then make it impossible to do anything else, then people will walk.
It's a subtle difference, but it's there.
it's a welcome change from "if you build a driveable city and then make it impossible to do anything else, then people will drive".
Streaming services were great back when they were separate from content producers and IP holders.
Once every media company became a streaming company and started using anticompetitive licensing practices in an attempt to drive viewership to their own platforms, the market fractured too much for it to be profitable.
Something smells “prisoner’s dilemma” about it: the best move for any individual streaming service is to have exclusive content (and the best-positioned players to do that are the studios), but when everyone does that, it decreases the overall profit available in the market more than it increases their slice of the pie.
> more than it increases their slice of the pie.
That's the part that might not be true, unfortunately. If each individual content producer sees more return on their own streaming service than they did sharing revenue from one of the independent services, then that's better for them, even if the total pie got smaller. If that wasn't the case, you'd think we'd see some of them shut their services down and go back to independent services once their income drops.
Sacrificing a wide audience to extract more from the most dedicated portion of the fanbase isn't an entirely new concept, and it financially makes sense short-term (until you start losing some of those dedicated fans over time and don't have the mindshare outside your bubble to attract new ones).
Supply and demand rules go out the window when the product is infinitely replicable.
IMHO not really, supply here is the limiting factor since the constrain is in licensing the work. The goal of the right holders is not to maximize access to the work or those stated by OP, but to maximize profit for the company, which when at odds with those other goals still prevails.
e.g. someone calculated/believes that having a big catalog from Disney at X/month is more worth more for Disney than sublicensing to Netflix at Y/month.
>> having a big catalog from Disney at X/month is more worth more for Disney than sublicensing to Netflix at Y/month.
But sometimes that leads to really stupid things. At one time all Star Trek TV shows were on Paramount while all the movies were only on Max. I believe they're all owned by Paramount, but apparently the shoes are the big draw (the new series "Picard" was exclusively on Paramount) and they could get more profit by putting the movies elsewhere and collecting a bit more than if it were all on their service. GAK!
Yes I considered the same but decided to keep the point simple.
And I still can’t help but think that if there really was a large market of people willing to pay a premium for a more permissive access model then we might already see trends in this direction. My hunch is the most folk don’t really care and price remains the dominant factor.
The essential point of the article was that it’s higher prices that’s pushing people towards piracy (either through price rises or fragmented subscriptions). It wasn’t that it is the restrictive streaming model that is pushing people towards piracy.
I’m fact it was precisely this restrictive streaming model that was the one to finally beat piracy. At low prices, that’s already been proven and it’s higher prices that is brining piracy back.
Unpopular opinion here but I wonder how much of the justification for piracy in this thread, broadly around what is perceived to be unfair business practices (“if only the terms were fairer and I would pay”), would actually stand up if the terms were actually fairer but the prices higher.
Or how much is really just the simple rational economic idea that piracy is better value for money.
I personally buy physical media (BluRays and/or DVDs). But I often feel too lazy to deal with the content ripping, so I just download it.
I like Youtube Premium and I'm gladly paying for it, although I'm considering switching to an alternative YouTube client because the official YT App is crap. But then the creators will lose income from my subscription.
Sigh. I wish content providers just gave us API to get the content in exchange for payment.
I really wish we had laws that producers of content cannot also be distributors. That just creates perverse incentives to use content to lock people into their distribution platform.
If they had to be separate, that gives content producers the ability to cross license and those licenses to be better deals. We’d actually have competition in distribution companies as distribution providers would then be competing on price, quality, convenience, and other things that matter, not locking content away.
> I really wish we had laws that producers of content cannot also be distributors.
We have laws like that for beer and cars, and they're disasters in both cases.
Why would we want to implement an incredibly stupid idea a third time?
Nah; copyright is a monopoly on specific media/titles. It breaks all of the “market willing to provide” mechanics because there is no free market for Star Wars, it’s Disney or FOAD.
Pray they do not alter it further.
Bingo. When distributors get exclusive rights to media, there is no competition anymore. You either do whatever the publisher wants, pirate, or go without.
The aggravating part about this: that was not the intention of the copyright clause. "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Authors and inventors. Authors and inventors.
Not companies. Not entities, or even individuals, who purchased the "rights" and now "own" works. That has nothing to do with the intent here, which was to encourage actual authors and inventors to make more stuff. Walt Disney has been gone for more than half a century; he's not going to be able to come up with another Mickey Mouse.
"Intellectual property" is an oxymoron. Pray, tell me, which part of my brain does Disney own? Do they own the part that knows what Mickey Mouse looks like?
Subtitles is a big one for me. I can stream something in Japan, that I have seen other places has english subs, but due to licensing I cannot see them.
I know I could vpn around this, but why should I pay even more just for subtitles?
In the end I'm paying for Netflix, Disney and Amazon. My son uses those as he is bilingual, I just pirate what I want to watch personally.
This is kinda what netflix was for many peak for a brief moment in time. It wasn't perfect, but it was pretty great, it had most of what you wanted to see. Then EVERY studio wanted their own meh streaming system, and fragmented the system again.
Also in any language. I am so tired of reading a list of audio/subtitles languages available, only to find out that they don’t work after purchase. Am all platforms. Good lord. Just tired of that bs
>I didn't even mention that it's free or that there are no ads
It's free in the same way shoplifting is free, until you get caught. You are very much in violation of copyright laws if you pirate.
If buying things at the store was as painful as watching stuff on streaming services, and shoplifting was as low risk as torrenting, and my stealing an item didn't make that item disappear from the store, I'd probably do it there too.
Only consequences, physically speaking the two are not the same at all.
Copying of anything digital is not actual theft, nor will it ever be.
"You wouldn't download a car!"
Wait, I absolutely would download a car if I could... or food... or clothing... I'd download the shit out of physical goods if the technology existed. Who wouldn't? You could solve scarcity. If we had Star Trek Replicators, we'd be living in a literal utopia.
The “download” catchphrase is a joke, it was originally “You wouldn’t steal a car”, which I’d argue is true for most people.
Thanks to 3D printing this is starting to become reality and not just science fiction.
no true scotsman
wordsmithing on theft is the only defense thieves have
Do you sneak into concerts or hop turnstiles too?
I can name at least one country in the European Union in which torrenting copyright content for personal use is legal, people still do very much use spotify and netflix.
Gabe Newell got it right from the very start, piracy is a service problem.
It's not comparable, because copying a bread with a bread copying machine should be completely fine.
Thank god they overturned Butter Krust v. Jesus Christ!
When billion dollar companies, which are praised and supported by governments, download pirated material and do not pay, why should ordinary people restrain themselves and pay? I cannot see how one can make moral arguments against piracy now. It makes no sense to pay if others are not paying and not punished for it. People also have a right to train their real neural network for free without paying.
Plus the idea that if you pay someone to "purchase" and "own" (their terms!!) content, then it's yours forever. Unless, of course, they renegotiate something upstream and subsequently remove the content from your "library" or your device. Or perhaps they lock you out of those things altogether. This means it wasn't ownership, it was subscription.
So as they say, “if buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.”
https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2023-12-08...
Stealing is when you take something from him, and he no longer has the thing you took.
Piracy is when you see something for free that everyone else paid money for. You watching doesn't prevent anyone else from watching.
Piracy isn't stealing: piracy only deals in intangibles. Stealing is for finite goods.
There's a whole "how do we pay to make stuff if people can watch for free" argument around piracy, but it's fundamentally a different thing than stealing.
The film and music industries really shot themselves in the foot when they got a tax on recordable media introduced in Canada.
OK, CD-R's and flash memory cost a bunch more now. Streaming is legal, because customers already paid the record companies for their music they downloaded and put on that media.
At least, someone explained this was the current state of Canadian law ~10 years back when I first visited.
This is basically the case right now in Spain.
We pay a tax on every piece of recordable media (don't think it's only SD cards or hard drives, it applies to phones, laptops, mp3 players, ebooks, even smartwatches). In exchange, sharing media for personal use is legal, and P2P is sharing media.
Doesn't stop corporations from trying to scare people off and complaining about piracy though of course.
Tax on recordable media is unfair because honest people who don't pirate anything also have to pay. As with the case above, honest people get screwed the most.
Nothing dishonest with pirating. You wouldn’t download a car? Well I would.
I can't believe people still fall for the 'piracy bad' propaganda in 2025
There were never any good moral arguments against digital 'piracy' to begin with.
Your ignorance and weak dismissals aren't evidence of absence.
I was in film school in the 00s, when the media companies were in the news for trying to bankrupt the families of high schoolers to make a point that piracy is bad. This was the "you wouldn't download a car" era, when they tried to redefine "stealing" to include piracy.
The executives of these companies would come speak to our class in the evenings. I didn't even bother counting the number of times one of them would be making elated chitchat before/after class about how he had just been on some flight and watched some series on his iPod. On the one hand, everyone is just people. The people at the heads of film studios are also out of touch grandparents whose grandkids show them how to use modern tech over the holidays.
But it was pretty disgusting to see the people in charge of the companies that were trying to ruin people's lives over widespread behavior, themselves participating in that behavior, and with no sense of irony or remorse. It never occurred to them that the thing they were doing in their personal lives is the same thing they were vilifying in their professional ones.
I actually think pirating encourages a healthier approach to watching TV/movies. I've fully made the switch to pirating instead of subscribing to any streaming services, and it's led to me thinking more critically about what I want to spend time downloading and watching rather than just flipping mindlessly through endless amounts of readily available garbage on a streaming service.
I do still have Kanopy though, which is great for me but obviously depends on your library.
For me, I only seek out media I plan to actually watch. Rather than flipping through what is available and choosing from there. Currently it is stargate sg1/atlantis what I am watching.
Also, a lot of movies/series are only available dubbed here. (I really effing hate "Sie" in dubbed media. So much so, that it's one of the major reasons I go for subbed in english, at most)
Not always. Now I just flip mindlessly through endless amounts of readily available garbage on my jellyfin server instead.
Why not purchase the discs and copy them yourself? At least artists can get paid that way.
Most shows don't get a dvd release anymore.
And then sometimes you have to deal with a bunch of bullshit changes because of music licensing or something.
Ehh sounds like an automation issue. Buy another hard-drive and just have everything new auto download.
To really sum it all up in one place, check out the absurdity of the official guide on where to watch the Pokemon cartoon: https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...
And that doesn't even actually list the movies, which are even more fragmented.
And I thought the problem was (just) limited to fragmentation of complete IPs between services. I'd love for someone in the know to explain how you get to this stage.
It it some kind of hedging strategy by The Pokémon Company to account for the number of different streaming services (thereby actually making the problem worse)? Was there some kind of timed exclusivity deal that's forced them to put different things in different places? Did one of the streaming services come along at a later time to try to undercut the earlier ones but the earlier licencing deals haven't expired? Anything else?
Well, "Gotta Subscribe 'Em All!"
What's the problem with that exactly? Legacy catalogs having some incomplete coverage? That the Pokemon Company can't make a good list if pressed? These are all not new or streaming Problems
The gist is here, that the complete first four season are on YouTube for free and the 5th is being added as we speak? (200+ episodes)
https://www.youtube.com/@OfficialPoke%CC%81monTV/playlists
There was nether the expectation with streaming that third party content doesn't rotate.
If you want a bit more persistent access you can buy them on Apple TV (Season 1-5 and 10-25)
Oh Boy, Pokemon is really not the example I would bring up here, when the aim is completeness on official channels:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_episodes_removed_...
It’s pretty obvious that no one wants to subscribe and look for some content on 5 different platforms.
While the pirate goes to his or her favourite torrent site and downloads it all, with the added bonus of having offline, permanent access.
The pirate redownloads the same show in Divx, mp4, DVD-ISO and any remastered formats grabbed from streaming services any time a new release comes out. But never watches them. There is rarely such a thing as a definitive version for a show like Pokemon, even for pirates. They are limited by what's being released to the public too. The grass is not really greener over there, just more confusing and more FOMO. Then still needs to watch it in a convenient and organizable way. So you would need to run a server, which is not free either. Looking into 5 different platform seems to be the easier choice here at some point.
with a sample size of one, there is no obvious problem.
presumably any given household wants to watch more than just pokemon, though and this is where things become unstuck. suddenly, to satisfy the demand for the range of things people in the household want to watch they are forced to make subscriptions to multiple services, perhaps sometimes for one-offs.
scale this up, and you have a population forced to make multiple subscriptions to multiple streaming providers to satisfy their demand for content.
or people just choose a couple of them and that's that. either way it seems that there is a symbiotic relationship between the content authors and the streaming companies.
but wait, read the page carefully, multiple seasons of the same thing spread across different streamers forcing consumers to subscribe to multiple streamers .... and now we are into Phoebus cartel territory.
That's not how streaming worked, ever. You had to deal with what Netflix had to offer and that was it. These were the happy monopoly days. It was simply the lack of choice and nobody felt left out at watercooler talks.
The paradox now, is that if you're FOMO inclined you feel the need to subscribe to multiple ones at all times to satify all needs in a household. You don't have to. You can keep baseline Disney if you really have to, but everything else can be easily rotated or just cought up on for a month or three on the usual discounted offers. The social pressure was not some invention of the streaming companies.
Also pirating has a hardware and energy cost, that's not trivial and mostly subsidized by parents. On a ROI basis of adults with disposable income "buying" (aka personal licenses, ideally shareable with some other accounts what some might call a family) 4-5 movies for like 5 dollars on platforms like Apple TV each a month is actually cheaper than pirating. Streaming is not everything. And don`t kid yourself that your DVD or Bluray collection is worth something or usable in 20+ years. That's a niche hobby. Go visit a flea market. People are that lazy when it comes to couch and home entertainment stuff.
You think pirating videos will raise your electric bill by $25 / month?
For reference:
Season 1: Amazon Prime Video (also, Netflix)
Season 2: Amazon Prime Video Channels
3-5: Prime Video
6-13: Prime Video Channels (with 10-13 also available on the Roku Channel)
14-19: Prime Video (with 17-19 also on Netflix)
20-22: Prime Video Channels (and Hulu, and the Roku Channel)
23-25: Prime Video (and Netflix)
So, they're all on Amazon in some sense. I was aware that there was some kind of concept of Prime Video Channels, but when I tried to find an explanation on Amazon's website, I failed.
Wow. It's like an advertisement for torrent sites... I had no idea it was that bad out there...
The problem with Pokémon isn’t that it’s fragmented across streaming services, it’s the anime itself where by Advanced you’re getting enough of the same formulaic bullshit it can drive even a kid crazy. I was that kid.
Except for some slight deviations, such as the beginning of Best Wishes (Black & White), you can put on a sequence of any 10 episodes from any season and it doesn’t matter what streaming service it’s on. By the end of the episode, Team Rocket is blasting off again.
And it doesn't even reflect availability outside the US it seems as my Netflix catalog does't have some of the seasons that list says it should.
I have seen this before, but I never realized that was an official product! Thought that started as a joke by a disgruntled fan.
Holy mother of God, that’s insanity. How could someone come up with that and get it approved is beyond human understanding.
I wonder if they will eventually go the LEGO route and host their shows on youtube while also letting streaming services have them.
>More fragmented Prime Video has it all which doesn't sound fragmented to me. It seems Prime Video is for old seasons and other services are fine for watching the current iteration of the show.
Thanks for sharing OP, that is just ridiculous, makes cable looks like a sane option.
With cable you didn’t get this fragmentation cause you also didn’t get many options.
Watch at 8am or at 6pm, whatever episode airs that day, probably a rerun or a skipped.
"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" -- Gabe Newell [1]
And I think he was largely correct, although the term _service_ seems like it now has to do a lot of heavy lifting as it now encompasses:
- Availability by Company
- Availability by Global Region
- Stream Quality
- Advert Policy (why does the lowest tier need to be ad supported? What am I paying for aside from being upsold?)
- Quality and availability of captions, audio description and any other media accessibility options
[1] https://www.escapistmagazine.com/valves-gabe-newell-says-pir...
Absolutely right!
A week ago I downloaded a couple of movies and shows from Netflix for my 6yo daughter, to watch on a 3hr flight. Worked nicely!
Today we made the return flight. She opens Netflix, and ⅔ of the films have now "expired" with no notice and she can't watch the one she wanted.
For the next flight I'll remember to pirate!
I remember a few years ago when our niece came to visit. One evening, we started watching a movie on Netflix together.
We only made it halfway before bedtime, but since she was coming back in two weeks, we decided to save the rest for her next visit.
Two weeks later, she returned, bouncing with excitement to finally see how the story ended. We opened Netflix, ready to hit play - and lo and behold… the movie had vanished from the catalog.
Be a cool uncle, be a pirate.
I tried to download something from Netflix recently. The download wouldn’t process. It got stuck partway. Not an issue, I’ll just delete it and redownload.
Nope. There’s a limit to the number of downloads on some content. I wasted mine trying to get the download to even work.
Getting 'em started early. You arr a great dad!
> service problem and not a pricing problem
Indeed. Recently we purchased season 1 of a reasonably popular U.S. produced show via Apple TV. When played, it is available only in dubbed French in our region (Canada.) None of the info available beforehand said anything about this. Guess where I obtained the subsequent seasons? I will pay for content but not if you lie, or make me jump through ridiculous hoops.
That reminds me of some passengers I sat on a flight next to once.. they tried to watch something on their iPad, but because we were about to depart from a country foreign to theirs, it got region-blocked...
Not that I pitied them, they were obnoxiously late and boarded with 5 bags (the stiff rectangular bags boutique stores have) of shopping...
In a weird quirk that must be a bug, you can watch the first season of the Good Place in French in the USA but not in Canada.
> "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem"
Maybe so, but if media companies invested in fixing the service problems, the pricing problems would remain, and those keep people away just as effectively, so they're not going to do it.
People don't want to pay what the media companies want to charge, at any level of service.
Not necessarily true, as the success of streaming shows. The problem comes when the unbounded greed of the billionaires in charge leads them to inflate prices beyond their customers' ability and willingness to pay.
Why make it complicated? Service means the user experience. If the user needs to do anything other than click pay click play, you done goofed, simple as that.
Love how this same quote was used in celebration of streaming back in Netflix’s early days as the solution, and now to show the new industry found on those very same ideas as the problem.
Yes but price has also become a huge part of it netflix raised prices like 5 times in 1 year lol
Ehh, while I agree its 70% about having a way more user-friendly experience, theres still 30% which is that the content needs to justify the price. And HBO and Netflix have missed that mark in my opinion.
I cancelled HBO after their price increase a year or two ago after being pretty happy with their service for a long time (though also the service quality had gotten worse). Too many people share my netflix for me to cancel it.
I cancelled prime when they told me they were putting adverts on
Went to resubscribe, no option given for no adverts, no money from me.
This is what did it for me too. Why would I pay for a crappy UX and ads? But all these companies need numbers to keep going up, so they keep tightening the screws.
Service problems are usually pricing problems. Advert policy is because people refuse to pay more so to make more money they put in ads. Fragmentation by content/region is also because each service is trying to spend as little as possible on content. If you want to watch unlock video content youd have to pay $100+ a month and people refuse to do that.
It's almost like the corporate culture of being a bunch of greedy control freaks will push customers away when they have an alternative.
That quote is literally in the article you didn't read.
[dead]
i wish we could go back to a pre-streaming version of netflix.
the near-infinite library and lack of algorithmic nudging resulted in an era where i had healthy view habits. reasonable levels of screentime and VERY diverse content.
i add so many movies to my queue with the best intentions of watching them someday, but always put them off because something about staring at that endless scroll of options makes me crave something light and simple.
the disk-in-the-mail era was "remember that three-hour subtitled classic film you always said you should watch but haven't? well, today's the day you're watching it." and i always ended up being glad i did.
the streaming era is "ugh, i don't have the mental bandwidth to watch that three hour thing that's been on my queue forever. lets just rewatch some background content to zone out" and i always lament wasting hours of my life in front of the screen.
I was wondering recently whether someone could conceivably start a disk-in-the-mail Netflix again, now that streaming sucks so much and every publisher seems to want their own streaming service. My understanding (possibly wrong, I'm not an expert) is that it's perfectly legal to lend out physical media without any special permission from the publisher under the first-sale doctrine, so it seems like the only way to build a library that has content from many different publishers.
(of course, this could only work as long as publishers keep producing physical media)
Scarecrow Video does this in Seattle. Their library is amazing.
https://scarecrowvideo.org/rent-by-mail
I relate to this. Also, I am not the best person in the world, but recently this hit the point where I decided because of these very same thoughts + nudging from my much better partner to donate to NPR, to cancel Netflix and move that money to NPR. Now no more Netflix, which is sort of a relief in ways, and I have to be more intentional about what I download / consume.
It's no longer as convenient with dozens of streaming services; the streaming bitrate is also subpar, and audio is compressed to the point it feels flat. If you want to be mindful about what you are watching, it will be really hard with Netflix, Prime, and Disney compared to your own media server. When I had a streaming subscription, I was constantly shocked by what was popular in Poland and what people were watching. It took me some time to accept that I am not their target audience.
The quality of shows is also subpar. And there aren’t many shows on Netflix at a given time: Probably 80 things to watch, all categories included (with 70% of overlap in content).
I've always chosen piracy for the privacy. I don't need a bunch of services building a profile on my viewing habits and tastes, then sharing that data with other businesses and governments. If I want a recommendation, I'll ask a friend, not an algorithm.
This to me is the biggest feature I’d love to see in paid services. It skeeves me out to know that everything I watch or listen to is recorded.
That and owning the media.
Black markets are usually the result of failed markets, and i think its no different here. Copyright is a monopoly so there is no competition. Sure different streaming services compete with each other, but they essentially sell different products. It'd be like if only one resturant was allowed to sell hamburgers. There might be other resturants but they arent really in direct competition.
The streaming services are relying on enforcement to preserve their business model.
This only works as long as there's no other nations with significant digital infrastructure that can be used for VPN egress points who don't care a whole lot about US copyright enforcement (or copyright enforcement in general).
Our government just pissed off a lot of other governments. Enforcement is good within the US, but not outside, even nations which the US has a lot of control over.
I wouldn't have minded the newly inserted ads in Netflix or Prime Video. But they just throw the ads in during mid-sentence. Are they putting ads in using a random number generator? What happened to the accepted practice of putting in ads where they natural break occurs? It really throws out the flow of the moment. Major irritation. You know, how TV and Cable typically have done it.
My decision on this matter was made when MGM kept running the "ok, who wants SG-1 exclusivity this year?" Gauntlet.
I have to wonder if Amazon bought them just to stop playing the game. (I doubt it)
If they were willing to sell movies and tv shows WITHOUT DRM, I’d happily buy what I want and put on my Jellyfin server. I don’t pirate music because I can buy what I want on Bandcamp (and even mainstream music on apple and Amazon without drm).
But since I can’t (and you can’t even find physical media for a lot of things), I feel like I am left with no options.
I am not even trying to get stuff that is recent, as I prefer to wait, especially for tv shows, to finish its run before I decide if it is worth investing my time in.
I mostly go to the library every week and pick up movies and tv shows on Blu-ray and rip them so I can watch them on my schedule. I often delete them afterwards if I feel like they don’t have replay value.
I think Jellyfin also provides a much better interface than any of the streaming apps, and I like to be able to know if I am going to watch them on my theatrical version or some extended version.
This mirrors my experience as well. I used to pirate everything, it was relatively inconvenient to get the exact thing you wanted on physical media. Then streaming, Steam, and app stores came about. I pivoted 100%, it was sooo much more convenient than trying to find legitimate and quality copies of content and managing a set up to do so.
Then the streaming side started to fragment a bit, but I just grabbed all of the subscriptions (HBO, Hulu, YouTube, Netflix, etc). It was getting a bit iffy on value, but at least it was still convenient. Now it's just ridiculously _in_convenient. Search around to see which service might have the thing you're actually trying to watch and use this device with this app to get a decent quality version of the content delivered, all while hoping it doesn't force automatic quality "for your benefit". With Steam it's a bit less severe, but it did reach the "and the games you want are split across 5 services in exclusivity" and "DRM is getting to be an extreme pain on some of these" stages.
Recently, I also switched to Jellyfin. I still have access to Netflix and Disney through family plan. The service problem was the quality issue. I have the Ultra plan's while Netflix keep pushing SD (due to Widevine certificates). Simply cannot stand watching 480p on WQHD+ screen. For the content I have legitimate access, but cannot get good service, I don't consider it pirating.
For me worse than the can't pay is the lack of options. In the VHS time I had more good movie options than in the current streaming services. I remember when I bing watched Kurozawa or Mario Monicelli's movies. Now it's very hard to find non American cinema. The tech is there, but the System fail us.
Even many American movies are no shows on most streaming platforms. Sometimes I'm like: "Let's take the top 30 movies that critics loved the most in US in year X".
As soon as it's earlier than 2005 you're gonna find less than half available across most streaming platforms, unless for renting/buying.
Yep. I swear I liked the old Netflix with DVDs better. I could rent pretty much any movie I wanted.
Even after the DVDs, Netflix had a much bigger catalog before everyone else decided they needed to copy Netflix and launch their own service, then IP rights got restricted and redistributed.
Streaming was great when I only needed to subscribe to a single service to watch most everything I wanted. It's not so great when I need to subscribe to 5+ services and still not have everything I want to watch.
Yeah, monopolies are bad but the way IP is distributed right now across so many different services just ends up being worse for consumers.
Netflix found that while it was a nice advertising tool to boast about the broadness of its catalogue, most customers rarely ordered the more niche stuff so it wasn't particularly profitable.
> most customers rarely ordered the more niche stuff
I'm sure that's true, but the flip side is that the niche stuff is what pulls in the hardcore film buffs. And guess who those of us who aren't big film buffs turn to when picking films and services? The hardcore film buffs we know.
They may not generate a ton of revenue if you look only at "how many people request obscure movie X", but having those movies pulls in the people who will, in turn, influence others.
That’s what happens when you have a big library. The usage is going to be some 80:20 rule. A small slice drives the numbers. Yet it is nice to be able to consume some long tail content. Without the DVD catalog, access to the long tail has disappeared from mainstream providers.
We don’t have that problem with books for the most part, why do we have it with TV shows and movies?
Criterion Channel and Kanopy are very good (not perfect) for international films.
MUBI is a good option for the more high cinema stuff, one of the few subscriptions I'd feel sad canceling.
The streaming landscape is now terrible and no different than the incumbent CATV providers that it sought to replace. In 2011, streaming services were the hotness because CATV subscriptions were expensive. In 2011, people were subscribing to 1-2 or 2-3 services because they were all less than $10USD/month. That was still 10x cheaper than the alternative.
However, 15 years later, those numbers exceed or are the same as CATV costs combined with all the streaming/smart device headaches.
All we did was change the pipe. The providers didn't change except for consolidation and erosion of policy, both of which lead to worse outcomes for consumers.
As with most things, I think we leaned in too hard to streaming services.
Part of the appeal of streaming services back then was being able to cherry pick what you wanted so you only paid for what you actually wanted to watched.
Because of how fragmented all the shows are, people sign up for multiple streaming services just to watch the shows the want to watch, and then wish for everything to be bundled together...again. Also, each streaming service charges a hefty premium compared to what you're actually getting, so it's not as worth the money.
I spent last few days chasing down a Bravo/peacock show from outside the US trying to watch legally, only to find it on watchseries and realize how good the experience has gotten. It's not even released on torrents or nzb. Watchseries UI is kind of peak now. Nuts. Does anyone know how Watchseries manage to stay up?
It's been taken down plenty of times. They just host a mirror somewhere else under a new TLD.
All streaming services should have a pay per minute system as an alternative to the fixed monthly subscription.
That way, I'd happily use any service to watch whatever cause it would be convenient, instead of piracy.
And it would be a reason for them to really improve their recommendation systems.
Idea for a service.
The service effectively rebroadcasts all the streaming services to provide exactly what you suggest. It’s still paying the streaming services, and users pay it.
Better not set it up in the US .
This is like cable with extra steps ;)
I think we are already seeing some packaged stream services and we will probably see more. It’s a lot of overhead to maintain a separate service to do the exact same thing (with only a different library and branding).
I think the NHL uses the streaming backend developed by MLB Advanced Media (they adapted it in 2015, not sure if still the case).
https://www.sportsnet.ca/hockey/nhl/a-closer-look-at-nhls-pa...
Na, not like cable. It’s all on demand so you can watch what you want when you want. You don’t pay a cent for stuff you don’t watch.
You can pay by minute, or episode, or season or whatever.
Like Netflix but with the catalog of every streaming service in existence, better per-use pricing, no ads.
What these companies would "sell" would be DRM crusty shit that wouldn't work on my devices. And the 'Authorization servers' would be decommissioned at some unstated future date. Hell, even Microsoft couldn't manage to maintain these DRM servers.
If MS cant, why would I expect any company to properly maintain them?
https://community.spiceworks.com/t/how-to-play-content-prote...
So, unless these are MP4's or MKV's with correct subtitling and appropriate audio, I'm not going to pay a cent here.
Lets go back to old good CD/DVD era.
Maybe the incentives would be better, but i also dont really want to keep track of budgeting when watching TV. I'm here to relax. I dont want to stress about how much i watched this month and if im going to blow my entertainment budget.
That would incentivize services to make their shows longer. Maybe they play them back at 95% speed, maybe they add their own intro or credits to the end. maybe if they make their own shows like Netfliz does, they stretch them out.
> pay per minute system
And/or pay-per-episode, pay-per-season or pay-per-show. So I don't have to start thinking ahead too much about the _length_ of something and can just enjoy the thing itself based on some pre-determined price.
Isn't this just renting, which is already offered by Amazon, Apple, Google ...
Pay per episode could be an ok granularity. Anything above that I'm not ok, there is too much garbage
Perhaps pay-per-episode with a discounted price for an entire series (and an option to buy the remainders taking that into account). It seems fair to be able to dip your toe into a series and try a few episodes before committing. On the other hand, that seems just a bit too consumer-friendly...
Isn't this precisely what Amazon already does?
For the subset of Amazon-available content that isn't counted as Prime Video I think yes, but not for the rest of it. Apple TV+ possibly too, though they also have what feels like their own confusing model that shows some things as being available with the caveat that it's actually available through either a) a proxy with a subscription to a third party or b) a one-time purchase from them. I'd hate to be in the meetings where the details of these licensing agreements get hashed out.
Would be fine with that. I want a demo before committing, essentially
Some Disney series are already 20mins about the show and 10mins credits/something else. Don’t give them new ideas to reduce the actual content…
I was thinking along the lines of how much I actually watch, if I only watched 10 minutes of your show, I only pay for 10 minutes, not the entire thing.
You're also saving on bandwidth.
Paradoxically, I'd still want to pay per minute of viewing time, if I'm watching the show on 2x the speed.
For movies at least it's usually no problem to find them for "rent", i.e. 48h for an absurd amount of money.
Sling TV now has a "day pass" option for $5. (A weekend for $10.) https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/sling-tv-off...
A bundle of streaming services. That you can surf and choose one from and just watch. And a TV guide that tells you what's running where.
Gee...sounds a lot like Cable TV.
Sarcasm aside, the one problem folks had with Cable was the inability to upgrade without getting locked into another 2 year contract. Streaming solves that one problem while enshittifying all the other good things.
> Gee...sounds a lot like Cable TV.
Honestly, Cable companies could make a comeback by using their relationships with producers to actually be a "one stop shop" streaming services. There's definitely a pain point to having to be subscribed to so many different services just to cover the gamut of shows and movies
I thought the main complaint was "I'm paying for channels I don't watch!" while not realizing the channels they were watching were actually what they were paying for, and the rest of the stuff was just lumped in for nearly free to make the lineups look bigger and more appealing.
For some reason I always saw it in reverse, that I had to pay to subsidise a set of channels I'm _not_ interested in for the one I am.
Chances are that's not what was happening unless you were watching the channels nobody else watches.
I haven't looked into cable pricing for a while but i remember a few of the contract disputes that caused some big channels to drop off big cable providers in the 2010s. The price-per-customer those channels were asking the cable companies were significant chunks of what a package would cost the customer (eg upwards for $1).
Meanwhile some of the less common ones were a few cents per customer.
That means that unless you weren't watching any of the $1+ ones, you were mostly actually "paying for what you're watching".
I assure you that there are many people who do not need nor want ESPN and knew damn well they were directly paying it.
And those people were having part of their package subsidized by the people who were watching ESPN but not the other channels.
> .. the one problem folks had with Cable was the i...
and hardware rental fees
ads on top of your service
bundling a bunch of channels you didnt ask for and increase price
outages
the list goes on
I think they know how many dead / inactive subscriptions they have.
That would only suit a portion of their user base and completely ream people who use Netflix to entertain/occupy their kids, who use TV shows to fall asleep, etc. Not to mention throwing away valuable subscriber dollars from idle users like me who maintain a subscription but rarely watch anything (mostly because there's nothing good on the entire platform).
Now more than ever before, for me, it’s exclusively because of UX and not price.
The most recent example: every Star Trek (TNG, Voyager, etc) on Netflix simply doesn’t work on my Chromecast.
After a minute the video goes all screwy, split 1/3 across the screen and loses half its colour. But this doesn’t happen with Plex.
I still have streaming services, mostly because my family uses them. I’m slowly getting back into the self hosted ways. But it’s also pushing me to just stop watching altogether. I’m finding better ways to spend my time than in front of a tv. Or rather, I guess I’m spending it more behind a computer screen. Haha
We need to shorten copyright just so that the classics stay available online.
50 years from first publication. No more.
I agree no more. If I had to pick a perfect number I’d probably go to 25 or 30
I think we have it backwards by attaching it to the life/death of the creator (or the works’ creation). People should be alive to experience the works they consumed in new and open ways. Creation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It builds on the collective works. There’s no point in a work becoming public domain if no one is alive from the time when it first had an impact on culture. Seniors should be freely able to listen to access the culture of their youth and experience it in new modified ways without restriction.
15 years or less from the date of first public consumption.
https://archive.ph/Q9lvm
Oh, this one's spicy! Looks like the industry goons are back out with their swords.
Thank God for VLC, the greatest app ever created!
https://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Oh, I have a question to all of the people who pirate but live in a country where that’s illegal and punished (with huge fines, I assume). I’m very interested in listening to some stories of how it’s technically done (vpn, a seedbox, or you just keep things simple and don’t care). E.g. I’ve been trying sophisticated backlists of IPs, but I have no idea whether they work. But even more I am interested in a legal aspect, meaning how serious these copyright claims are. Do you know anyone personally, who was punished for downloading a TV show? Which country? Personally, I know many folks who do, but none who was fined.
With torrents you'll want a VPN. Usenet is generally safe just thanks to TLS unless you're uploading content. For that I'd use a VPN. But unlike torrent, Usenet isn't P2P so I can just download at my full internet bandwidth and don't need to hope there are enough seeders out there maintaining it or that I maintain some magic upload / download ratio.
I rarely watch something off Netflix. And when I watch something I love watching in highest quality (4K HDR if available). If they'd let me pay-as-I-watch I'd be happy to do so, but I don't want to pay every month for a service I rarely use, and sometimes never for a few months.
Another reason is availability. Apple TV+, for some reason, isn't available in my country. I've heard great thing about Severance which is available only there. I can't legally watch it even if I were to pay it. I'd have to pirate it if I want to watch it.
My pet peeve is when streaming services only allow me to watch something in the language of the country I live in. I'm sorry, but why? Why would I want to watch a 1988 movie with horrible German dub?
I know this is pedantic but it is so annoying: downloading shows is not piracy. It is totally nuts to conflate unauthorized copying and sharing with the violent act of going on somebody’s boat and killing/threatening them until you loot their stuff.
Calling it piracy was funny during the early Internet when it was all pirate and ninja memes. But really letting them conflate this very minor crime with violence was a big propaganda loss.
Agreed. I do my part to avoid using the word at least since seeing it on gnu's words-to-avoid page several years ago.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Piracy
I don't usually get too many weird looks with "unauthorized copying".
Oh, that’s funny. Actually I feel a bit Stallman-y when I point this out.
You are a couple of centuries late: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#%22Pira...
Some words are overload with more than one meaning. That’s like, a thing in many languages.
You're not being pedantic, you're being wrong.
About 10 years ago Netflix became available in the country where I was living back then. I was very excited about it, I was on their email list for years, waiting for the announcement. As I got the email that they are available, after work literally the first thing I did was to grab my credit card, and subscribe.
I found 4-6 movies I wanted to watch, but when I saw that they had Godfather 1 and 3 without 2, I had a good laugh. Then I watched all the Archer episodes they had, and tried to find something interesting for 2 more days before I cancelled my (still trial) account.
Though I stopped watching movies some years ago, until than I used to watch them on the same old pre-netflix way.
Of course I have heard that they have spent many billions on content since then, I'm sure they have some interesting stuff... but that came way too late for me.
Maybe I'm getting old, lol
If a movie has a Netflix label in it, it is a sure signal of a bad movie with a boring script made based on data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accolades_received_by_...
The Academy Awards? Who the heck cares for those?
The only thing they say is "the powers that be in Hollywood chose to highlight your product", but surely the information content regarding quality is as close to zero as it is possible to get.
This includes movies "streamed or distributed" by Netflix. Like the parent mentioned, Netflix has streamed the Godfather.
If you click through the movies on that list, you will find that almost none of them were actually produced by Netflix.
Movies produced by Netflix are highly likely to be as described, with a small handful of exceptions.
Some of those are other networks shows that just happen to be distributed by Netflix. For example, Wallace & Gromit. This is not a useful set of data to draw conclusions from. Which is precisely the problem that Netflix has.
Yes, very damming considering their spend to not ever have won a best picture/actor/actress/screenplay.
I mean when your company has enough money to essentially bankroll the creation of a greater-than-average number of productions and simply pay the individuals involved in the production of these films whatever it takes to get them on board, isn't it sort of inevitable that you end up featuring in the list of awards a greater-than-average number of times?
That has been my experience as well. When I see that logo it's a bad omen on how the film is going to be.
We should coin a new term: "Straight to Netflix"
I don't know why you're being downvoted because you're absolutely right. I'd say for me Netflix movies have less than a 5% hit rate. They're an excellent place to start if you desire a suitably (and needlessly) racially and sexually diverse cast, the most bland cinematography and grading possible, and scripts explicitly designed for viewers who are paying more attention to their phones than the show[1].
[1] https://comicbook.com/movies/news/netflix-reportedly-has-biz...
Based on data (and Twitter) part is true of any studio since a decade, in any case Netflix has produced or co-produced a good bunch of movies.
Also, some excellent documentaries.
Streaming services surprised that customers left them like they left cable TV for them once they turned into cable TV.
Tip: Watch Cartoons Online (search it)
Great place to stream cartoons and anime for free, no account. It feels like they have almost everything, as I found anime as far back as the 1970s on there.
When I discovered Food Wars was split between two streaming platforms, I hoisted the sails.
I started buying Blu-ray discs and ripping them to my computer, where I run Plex. Why? I had a long-time subscription to HBO Max, but a few years ago, I went to watch Westworld, and it was gone from HBO. I ended up buying a season on Apple for the price of a monthly subscription to HBO. I cancelled my HBO subscription. I realized that second-hand Blu-ray discs of shows were selling for dirt cheap. I spent $40 to buy the rest of the seasons of Westworld on Blu-ray.
Clearly, new shows aren't getting Blu-ray releases, so this won't work for you if you care about new shows. My wife and I are so over the dystopian view from modern science fiction that we started focusing on shows from the late 1900s (80s/90s) to get more of a positive outlook from our entertainment. We are now going through Stargate SG-1.
Sucks that the Blu-ray experience is dreadful for 4K content. You've gotta find specific Blu-ray drives with specific firmware versions to do rips, or watch on a PlayStation or similar locked-down console. There isn't even a non-pirate way to watch on a laptop or desktop anymore since Intel SGX is dead.
Are you over 40?
I ask because I'm over 40 and I've had enough of this too.
Also check out cafedvd.com.
Same. I'm 45 and lately I've been thinking about picking up a Blu-ray player. Not a drive to rip discs—a player to hook up to my TV. It's definitely an elder millennial thing, but I just want to own a physical copy of the movie and not have to worry about where it's streaming or whether the one I "bought" on iTunes has been quietly swapped for another version.
The sad thing is, I don't think Blu-ray is long for this world. But I at least want plastic copies of the classic movies I know I'll go back to.
> I went to watch Westworld, and it was gone from HBO.
Wait, isn't that their own IP? I get shows not running on 3rd party streaming services due to IP rights and stuff, but how/why would they be in a position to not stream their own IP?! That's like going to Netflix and not being able to see Stranger Things. It's insane!
There are quite a few devices these days that’ll allow you to capture streams by stripping HDCP so you can at least record it instead of having the service put it in “the vault,” to appease some bozo in a suit.
I have been trying to put my data hoarding data days behind me, but like the article, I’m being pushed back that direction. Doubly so since I use Linux and they restrict quality to 1080p. The only thing preventing me from it right now is a lack of a computer/server with ECC support (so I can run ZFS). Though encrypting a bunch of data and archiving it into Amazon Glacier seems more and more reasonable as time goes on.
I was trying to watch The Big Short the other night, after checking 7 streaming websites I came to my senses and downloaded the 4k rip off the pirate bay
I was trying to put on a show for background noise this morning. Just two nights ago I was able to sign in with my cable provider and watch it. Now it's telling me there's a network (as in the channel the network is on) authorization error, customer support can't tell me why it doesn't work and they are not authorized to issue me a credit.
So I pirated that too.
And what the fuck is up with Netflix? Why do I have to install a browser extension to hide the games? I don't want games I want to watch The Big Short.
They are innovating where no innovation is necessary. And in the process they are making everything more shitty. Why change the UI every couple of months. It's fine, it's a UI for a media catalog, it's not rocket science. Why not work with other companies to collaborate and create a unified way to search catalogs but no that would be good for the consumer. Greed is an ugly thing.
Fantastic movie by the way. Worth rewatching a couple of times
I just want to give one more example. I wanted to watch “Just Beyond” (2021 Disney), but it’s impossible to find anywhere. So what am I supposed to do?
A useful distinction is that upload is piracy and download is not.
True pirates maintain > 1.0 ratio
Neither is piracy, it is just unauthorized copying and sharing.
> unauthorized copying and sharing
Which is known in English as "piracy".
It's nice to see some good news now and then.
Instead of making their shows exclusive they should make them time exclusive (1 year?) then sell a license
is buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing :)
My main issue is that they're now slowly testing the waters to see if they can make you watch ads while still paying for the subscription, and at that point, might as well take advantage of Romania's lack of law enforcement and hit the torrent websites.
It's amazing how blurred the line is getting between streaming and cable TV.
It really doesn't seem like it has to be that complicated, yet somehow we've gone from channels with markedly anti-consumer fixed bundles to a massively fragmented ecosystem where it genuinely seems like the streaming services _don't_ actually want you to subscribe by the amount of the effort that goes into making things hard to watch or doing everything that could make the streaming experience worse (region availability, paid tier ads, lower bitrate stream quality, and so on).
It already came full circle some years ago when we started seeing new streaming services every year, and those companies pulling their content from other platforms to put on their own. Then you had to start thinking about what servces you need, whether you still want those services, etc. Just like cable!
Absurd.
True, although I guess this is sort of understandable. It's the "you're paying us, but here are some ads" that really gets me.
Either way, 5 bucks a month to Emby, a really easy to get membership to a large private torrent site, and a 16TB hard drive solves these problems for me, and will continue to.
Thanks for the tips! Could you explain how can one get about "getting a membership to a large private torrent site"? Also, why Emby rather than, say, Jellyfin or Plex?
The private trackers tend to be a pain in the butt to remain active enough on to keep your account, as they tend to require a certain amount of upload:download ratio. This can be difficult to achieve since so many members have high-speed seedboxes.
Just use https://1337x.to/ or any other public tracker. You'll be able to find 99% of whatever you want.
Thats what they said about cable too, pay for it so no ads. Then the ads came.
they are done testing the waters. its standard practice for the majority.
One friend, who is a film enthusiast, told me that he doesn't understand why there aren't more titles on the streaming services vs. the scale of albums on Spotify. He often download old and new movies via Torrent.
Pay a bunch of money to Disney+ to watch any popular release and get terrible streaming quality and functionality. It makes complete sense to me why consumers would toss their hands up and find better and more accessible options.
Is it? NFLX is at an all-time high right now.
Driving back???
I pay for a pirate streaming site. It's nice, it has everything, it works, nothing ever gets memory-holed, I don't ever have to sign up for a different service to watch something because it got swapped in the middle of my binge, what I can watch doesn't depend on where they guess I am, I can access over a VPN, they have a support staff that actually listens to me and implements features users ask for, and I can download things to watch later drm-free. This isn't a money problem, as evidenced by the fact that I pay to steal. It's a product problem. I pay for this because their product is better and I want it to continue to exist.
Luckily search engines like Yandex.com provide the easiest way to find unusual streaming sites. Using AdBlock saves us from the pop-ups and weird ads. If Netflix goes back to $9 per month with every show in existence, I will reconsider them. Until then, these streaming sites will continue to exist and thrive.
I suppose you can't really complain when big tech pirates your IP to be used with AI.
All streaming services should just interoperate, Give me access to everything, and just charge based on title to who ever has it.
Having multiple streaming accounts just to watch a couple of shows I like is such an unnecessary hassle. It's much more easier just to pirate.
Yeah, because you pay for the thing and you still can't watch it!
Last year they brought Andor to Hulu and every time I played it on my brand new LG TV, the video would be completely green while I could hear the audio underneath. It only happened to Andor because apparently they had some super special DRM, which ostensibly would restrict people who weren't authorized from viewing it, but had the effect of also preventing authorized people from viewing as well. So in the end, they can't even satisfy willing customers who have their wallets open. Of course they're going to turn to piracy.
Of course, the rights holders got my money and as far as they're concerned, their DRM move was great for the bottom line.
Fwiw the LG operating system kind of sucks. I got an Apple TV and it's been infinitely better. Paramount Plus was wholly unusable on the TV
I haven't bothered checking, but I assume the hardware sucks too - I'd expect the Apple TV SOC to be like an order of magnitude faster than any smart TV.
Screw streaming. I bought a smart TV a few years back. Services discontinued within 3 years. No external commercial streaming boxes work because of HDCP issues. Back to piracy until the TV gives up. Streamers and smart TV people, you had your chance and you blew it. I'm not paying through the nose any more.
In the end, people will use what is easiest to use.
The entertainment industries are going to need to come up with a solution fast.
If they can't find a way to make it so that you can sign up once and get all the content you need, they are screwed.
I cancelled Netflix years ago when they started blocking VPNs, limiting me to their extremely limited Australian library.
Back?
I think a lot of the services competed themselves into a pricing corner with low subscription costs.
Now the audience is used to that pricing and doesn't like pricing relative to the price of the content.
i for I, ... quit Netflix and Prime (and deleted AirBNB and UBER) because they are US companies, and second ... all of what ryandrake said https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44906021
All of these streaming services have started cracking down on family and friend account sharing to game their stock price. Turns out kicking off the broke college students doesn’t lead to them signing up for ~$80/mo. smattering of streaming services.
Except that so far results have shown that it does lead to a net increase in signups:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/netflix-subscriber-boom-th...
It’s also getting tiring of this massive fragmentation of streaming services as a whole combined with a weird game of rebundling various providers in either deals direct from the streaming platforms/their overlords, or rebundling all of these streaming services into “free” offers with other service providers and THEIR offerings.
Even my goddamn cable company does this now offering me one of the streaming services? with my Spectrum plan. I don’t even know which one(s).
Quite frankly, I’m tired of my Verizon plan trying to cram Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ and crap down my throat, I’m tired of Walmart trying to cram Paramount+ at me with Walmart+. However, the market of ‘average (dumb) people’ seems to love this concept as “little extras” that eventually cause scope creep to their bill over time (and we all lose as a result).
It's on AppleTV+ but only if you also have the entity formerly known as paramount+ or for 3.99 (14 to own).
Poob. Poob has it for you. [0]
0 https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/poob-has-it-for-you
>I’m tired of my Verizon plan trying to cram Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ and crap down my throat
And of course when they do its never the ad-free versions.
There are services I already pay for that I'd likely save a handful of dollars on per month if I bundled them with my other services... but I can't bring myself to do it out of stubborn principle.
I mean netflix saw a pretty big jump in subscribers when they started doing this so maybe it actually does work?
My thing is that we are expected to pay in perpetuity for the privilege of accessing content. It's rent, and it is just tiresome.
Yes I understand that we have content available on far more devices than 30 years ago, when all we had was the TV in the living room. But should I have to pay in perpetuity to show my kids Moana?
No. Go buy a Moana DVD. USD 9.99.
https://www.amazon.com/Moana-Ron-Clements/dp/B01MAZGH7Z/ref=...
In the UK you can get it second-hand, including postage, for £2.07. And it's been expertly refurbished!
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/292095014239
It is easier to download from a torrent or illegally stream.
What a surprise, it’s easier to steal than to pay content creators. (I know, someone will now chime in and say it isn’t really stealing, etc etc.)
Actually I disagree though. Software and UX for torrenting is a pain. It’s easier to buy a $10 DVD.
> What a surprise, it’s easier to steal than to pay content creators.
They make it this way.
Buying a second hand DVD does not give any money to content creators, and I still get to watch the movie.
> Actually I disagree though. Software and UX for torrenting is a pain. It’s easier to buy a $10 DVD.
You probably haven't checked back in in the last 5-10 year then. Honestly the UX is almost too good.
Almost every digital movie provider has a rental option. Moana on Prime Video is 3.99 to rent.