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The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

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Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#291

Post by brooot »

phil248 wrote: post #205
jimmies wrote: post #62

I can't read the article because the website is down. But I have something to say about torrenting movies. Late last year, my old parents who don't speak English came to visit me for a couple of months in the US. I'm just a graduate student with a limited budget, and my mom is car sick so we couldn't go out every night. I didn't want them to waste time on Facebook after dinner until we went to bed, so I had to think…

Torrenting for me has always been about convenience, not money. I recently wanted to watch a new show called A.P. Bio. It's free on NBC's website. But after struggling through one episode with lags and ads with no volume control, I gave up and just torrented the show. Until they master such exotic technologies as "streaming video" and "volume control" they're going to keep driving people to torrenting. Netflix figure…

This is how Steam basically single handily defeated video game pirating. Newell himself is on record saying that piracy is an issue of not making something accessible enough, and he was obviously right. People will pay for convenience. We are no longer in the age of, "I want to watch/listen/play something, lets drive to the store". If the platform they use sucks, it will have the same problem. Last pirating site I was apart of that had a game library, you would see games on shittier platforms pirated more often.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#292

Post by gamblor956 »

jedberg wrote: post #120
distances wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a major issue with streaming services. Netflix usually doesn't offer even English subtitles to an English-speaking movie if you're in a non-English speaking country! At least with DVDs you could rip it and add subtitles yourself if needed.

> Netflix usually doesn't offer even English subtitles to an English-speaking movie if you're in a non-English speaking country! Sadly, this has nothing to do with streaming and everything to do with rightsholders (aka "Hollywood"). The rights on the subtitles are held by the company that makes them, are then sold to the company that distributes the movie, which are then resold to regional distributors, separately fr…

This means that if you want to show, say Transformers, you have to negotiate with one company to show the picture, another company to license the sound, and yet another company for each set of subtitles.

Sound is part of the film license in the US and Europe. This includes music and songs within the film. Studios pay out big bucks to license songs for films.

For example: my current employer would pay a license of approximately $500 to license major label music that will be played at an event to a live audience, broadcast globally, and streamed to 10 million viewers. (The total music budget for a 3-day event is maybe $5000, and that covers hours of music.) A movie studio licensing that same song for a movie would pay a minimum of $25,000, just for that song, assuming that it's part of the back catalog. A song that made the top 100 of the Billboard lists when it was released could command more than $100,000.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#293

Post by merb »

ehsankia wrote: post #182
masklinn wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PS: Mostly thanks to Bandcamp.com music torrenting is completely dead for me. Seconded. My music search these days is Find interesting band + | v not sure I can Is on bandcamp? +-no-> be arsed to even + check torrents | yes | v buy entire discography on bandcamp

Oh the other hand, if it's on iTunes it's almost an instant piracy. Not only you can't buy it without installing a huge application, you can't even preview it either.

well to be fair iTunes isn't as bad as it is on windows. granted it was better when I started using a mac. around ~10.9 but I regulary buy music there. it's simple and iTunes is fast on mac and I like how it organizes music.

but yeah I never liked it/like it on windows.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#294

Post by [deleted] »

eximius wrote: post #270
falcor84 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But do note that hosting is actually only a very small percentage of where money goes. In 2017, Wikimedia received ~87M in donations while only ~2M were spent on hosting. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/da/Wikim...

What the hell? Why do they need my money if they have 50 Million dollars in cash or cash equivalents? Am I reading that right? And who the hell are their employees that are getting paid 33 million dollars a year? How many employees are there? EDIT: Reading a related comment's linked OP-ed, it appears that the Wikimedia Foundation spends a lot of money on non-wikipedia things. That is disturbing to me. I would like to…

[deleted]

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#295

Post by takeda »

mulmen wrote: post #223
kbenson wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Netflix, a Californian company, simply couldn't fathom that some people might understand English and Spanish. Or they just decided the path that serves the most people without complicating matters is to assume you want subtitles for any language not selected as the primary audio language. I think the relevant question here is how would you design a control panel that allowed you to define which of the many language…

In the app settings you have a list of languages and the user selects the ones they speak. When CC is on subtitle everything, when CC is off subtitle what is not selected.

Yes, that's probably the right way to implement this, but it is still more complex.

No one on this site will have problem with that UI, but I personally know people who have issues with much simpler things.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#296

Post by mulmen »

takeda wrote: post #295
mulmen wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the app settings you have a list of languages and the user selects the ones they speak. When CC is on subtitle everything, when CC is off subtitle what is not selected.

Yes, that's probably the right way to implement this, but it is still more complex. No one on this site will have problem with that UI, but I personally know people who have issues with much simpler things.

Sane defaults are easy to set in this scenario so the average user gets the same behavior as today but those people who want more control can still do so.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#297

Post by wpietri »

remir wrote: post #110

P2P forced the industry to adapt and now we have good streaming services, but the content selection is nowhere as good as what you can find on torrent sites. What the Popcorn Time devs did was simply amazing. It had a Netflix-like interface plus a huge selection of content that you could watch right away. The industry should learn from these guys. Just make your content available, easy to obtain and people will pay f…

> Just make your content available, easy to obtain and people will pay for it. It's that simple.

No, that's just easy from a consumer perspective. But it's not simple at all from the business perspective. Making movies and TV is expensive and complicated. Getting them to break even means a lot of careful work to maximize revenue and profit from a variety of revenue streams. It means dealing with a lot of players that are trying to maximize their own revenue and profit.

Things can and will get better. But not by ignoring the essential complexity of the domain.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#298

Post by gamblor956 »

MereInterest wrote: post #245
tomp wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how English subtitles for an English movie can even be copyrighted... they're definitely not a work of art, not transformative, just a plain old transcript.

I could see an argument made that the placement of the subtitles in an arrangement for ease of reading, without blocking key visual information, placed such that a viewer can identify which subtitle is spoken by which character, timed such that jokes are not given away prematurely, has a creative aspect in order to make sure that all such constraints are met when creating subtitles. It isn't a good argument, but I co…

Subtitles are literally just the scripted dialogue in textual form, so the copyright would belong to the studio (having purchased the script from the screenwriter).

Translated subtitles would be copyrighted by the translator under a derivative license from the studio owning the film.

Subtitles of the type you suggest don't currently exist as standalone products; the level of detail and information you are describing would require the subtitles to be part of the film itself (see e.g., Atomic Blonde or John Wick for good examples).

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#299

Post by snissn »

Movies and TV shows are a lot less watchable now. I'm not really as excited about the new block buster as I used to be. Maybe this is the perennial "I'm getting old and don't realize it" but I also understand box office and movie revenue to be down. Definitely steaming is a big source as well

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#300

Post by rhizome »

petre wrote: post #121
lostcolony wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally. Which is why it ends with the author's death. OH WAIT. But it's totally necessary; back before it existed no one ever made any money for their creative works, so with no incentive no one ever made anything creative before copyright law. OH WAIT.

What if the author is a company? Like Disney.

IBM can't patent anything if none of the inventors sign on. Copyright can be the same.
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