Or neither streaming subscriptions nor piracy. I’ve gotten to the point that I don’t need or want to be entertained enough to justify either the financial or ethical cost.
> at peak monetization
That and peak attention saturation.
Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?
391–400 of 641 posts
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?
#392> I just feel like if we’re at peak monetization. We're really not. If anything there's more content (for lack of a better word) available for token amounts of money than there ever has been. I don't know how old you are but back in the distant past of the 90s you had two choices if you wanted to watch a film, you could go to a shop and buy a copy, probably for more money than you'd pay for a monthly Netflix subscrip…
Well, here’s the thing. That is how the world works. You do get shit delivered to you within a day or two. You do get to watch whatever you want, either for free, or for a price. We do get to do those entitled things simply because we were deadly serious about being entitled fucks.
So, with that said. I do want prices to a) drop b) services to consolidate and if they don’t, I will get all my shit for free. And so will others.
And we’ll have a better world because of it. The same way we have everything else at our fingertips.
See, if we want to talk about reality and how the world works, then the truth is everything is built on leverage. If users opt for free, well then that’s a whole lot of leverage. No huffing and puffing will solve that, now will it? That’s reality.
If we couldn’t get it for free, then we’d have no leverage, they would. Then they can charge anything, and no huffing and puffing would solve it.
Calling them greedy, or calling us entitled, is just huffing and puffing. That’s how the world works.
The consumer and business are never in a discussion (there’s nothing to discuss). It is always a barter based on leverage. “Why don’t you pay this price, you are being entitled”, is not something the business can say to me, and likewise, “Why don’t you lower the price, you are being greedy”, is not something I can say to the business.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you can wait, most Amazon products are on Aliexpress for much less, sometimes 50% less, up to 90% for electronic components.
I return a lot of products bought from Amazon. How is the return policy and cost with Aliexpress?
It sucks.
In my case I got a dysfunctional cell phone LCD assembly and seller said I could either ship it back (would cost like half the cost I bought it for) or they would refund me 40% of what I paid. The system to contact the seller has technical measures to prevent you from conversing in Chinese even though that is obviously what the seller is most comfortable with.
I think it's fine if you're either buying nonelectronics or buying in bulk but I will not use it for purchasing electronics again.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?
#394I am growing really frustrated with the legal options.
Buying DVDs / Blurays is not an option.
Delivering the media takes days, the DVD menus are a real pain to deal with, binge watching is a chore due to constantly having to change disks. Old TV series often cost a small fortune when the DVD box set for one season costs almost 50€ and there are 9 seasons.
Streaming was fine for a few years, but it's beginning to erode really fast.
I'm definitely not going to pay for a bazillion subsciptions.
If it's not an in-house production, you can never rely on a specific show or movie being available just because it was yesterday.
And the quality of in-house productions is constantly going down.
But should you happen to actually like that new Netflix (or whatever) show, the chance that they'll leave you hanging after 2 seasons before any story arc came to conclusion is really high.
So yeah, I'm growing increasingly frustrated and piracy is beginning to look really attractive again.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?
#395It depends. Games and music - no, I'm glad to pay for Spotify subscription, and I'm happy to buy a game every once in a while. Movies and TV shows - yes, if I cannot find them in Netflix. Sometimes I want to watch something, and it's not available in Netflix in my region, or not on Netflix at all. What choices do I have?
Pretty much the same, although I'll not get spotify, I can still buy albums DRM free and know my streaming provider won't then remove them.
Games, always, although I only have a console now, but PS Plus I found to be a very good service, I rarely buy full price titles unless it's something exceptional, otherwise I just wait for something on sale.
I have netflix, and that was good for a while, But now with all the streaming options with exclusives, I can't be bothered to juggle my subscriptions. I tried apple TV for a bit as I got a free offer, but they had about 2 shows I wanted to watch and despite the subscription, it's still seemed to be pushing me to "buy" things (I think being allowed to use the term "Buy" from any of these services is downright fraud if they can remove it anytime they want)
plus the one I seem to consistently want is HBO Max which isn't even available outside the US
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?
#396There is so so much content out there that I'm content just to watch the little bit that's available via Netflix, Amazon Prime, and YouTube. I don't watch multiple hours per day though.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?
#397I'm not going to speak about my personal practices, but I find the current landscape of streaming services unusable and unsustainable from a customer perspective. I share a Netflix and Prime account with my parents, and support for that is soon going to end. I don't feel like either of those services provide enough value to me to consider paying for them entirely by myself. The content is mediocre at best, finding an…
My household has one streaming service at a time. We have lists (shared reminder lists in iOS) that we make for whenever a friend mentions a good movie - it goes on the Apple TV list, or Disney plus list, etc. then once enough films build up (can take 2-6 months sometimes) we purchase a subscription and watch all those shows for one month.
it's too much work for entertainment, that's the whole problem. We as users, shouldn't be doing anything clever to get our content. I have 5 streaming services, and sometimes I hope from one to another, searching for a movie to find out that no one of them have it. Then going to google and find out that the movie is hosted on a different streaming service. No fun.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
My household has one streaming service at a time. We have lists (shared reminder lists in iOS) that we make for whenever a friend mentions a good movie - it goes on the Apple TV list, or Disney plus list, etc. then once enough films build up (can take 2-6 months sometimes) we purchase a subscription and watch all those shows for one month.
Considering how frecuently movies (and third party shows) disappear from one platform to appear in other that seems hellish. It's easier to pirate stuff.
I do the same thing as the parent commenter, I pay for service, but will move from one service to another based on content and what I've watched.
Funny that the proliferation of streaming services has just decreased the duration of my subscription to any one of them.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
Add to that the fact that there's this disquieting connection between the IP ownership and the video tech. Couple services with plenty of good content managed to put together teams to build their mobile / web apps that can barely code their ways out of a paper bag (in the non-trivial space of high-capacity video streaming, nonetheless). It's enough to make me yell "Just give me the damn file and I'll play it myself."
Video tech for streaming is more or less off the shelf from cloud providers (disclaimer: I work for one). As far as I know, the only two companies that have their own video streaming expertise of any note are Netflix and Disney (after the BAMTech acquisition). Any other company with sufficient funding can outsource it.
So why does Paramount+ feel like it was put together by attention-deficit badgers relative to YouTube? Just age of software and years spent on polish?
Because there's basic fit-and-finish crap in that player that drives me positively bananas (things like "Doesn't remember your close-captioning setting" and "Doesn't let you change the setting when ads are playing"). And that's disregarding the 1 out of 50 times it fails to do the Chromecast-dance and leaves the Chromecast or the mobile device in a wacky state requiring software restarts (to their credit: that's down from approximately 1 in 10, so I've seen improvement there).
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?
#400> I just feel like if we’re at peak monetization. We're really not. If anything there's more content (for lack of a better word) available for token amounts of money than there ever has been. I don't know how old you are but back in the distant past of the 90s you had two choices if you wanted to watch a film, you could go to a shop and buy a copy, probably for more money than you'd pay for a monthly Netflix subscrip…
> You don't have a god given right to watch and play anything you choose, whenever you choose, without paying anything for that.
Why not? Some sense of morals towards HBO or etc? Life is too short for me to receive a worse experience just because it might hurt Casey Bloys' massive paycheck. If they want me to pay for it they need to offer it at a reasonable quality. Because I CAN watch anything anytime I want without paying. And they don't have a God given right to demand otherwise. They have a police-enforced right to demand otherwise, but good luck doing anything about it when I'm behind a VPN.