131–140 of 180 posts
"The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates." - Gaben
This is why we can't have nice things. Because people feel entitled to others people's work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Don't really know what I should think about this to be honest... Ultimately, piracy is the only remaining option. Because the company has decided it's going to brand you a pirate anyway. It costs maybe 11$/mo to hire a seedbox running plex that can store whatever media you would want to watch. While it's not next-day or same-day in most cases, in my experience it covers basically everything you would want to watch,…
Don’t know if I really buy the “piracy is the only option” line any more. It was for years. But you can now legally pay for the content you want, you just don’t like the price.
However with all the streaming services it's not just as high if not higher if you want everything. Not to mention the crazy Disney fee ($30+ / movie in addition to the monthly subscription). It's great as a DIS shareholder, but pretty terrible for their fans.
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> PPV is available for most movies, you can rent them from iTunes or amazon for $3-5 for a single watch in my experience. Which is insanely expensive. $5 buys a month of Apple TV+, almost 2 weeks of Netflix, or 2 hours of PPV.
But this was in response to: > Should my grandma pay $240 per year, to watch two movies I recommend to her (and are ONLY watchable on Netflix)? So that's $10. Or sign up for just a month and then cancel. I know people who have Netflix for a few months, and then another service for a few months and so on. I still remember having to rent movies/TV or buying on DVD as my main way of watching... at 4-6 movies a month and…
> Pay-per-view is probably more appropriate for those who only want to watch a couple movies every month, put ppv isn't available.
and
> PPV is available for most movies, you can rent them from iTunes or amazon for $3-5 for a single watch in my experience.
Yes, PPV is available, but it costs the same to watch a couple movies every month as to subscribe to a whole streaming service. That makes it effectively unavailable (at a reasonable price) for many consumers.
Why isn't a la carte video available at a reasonable markup (say, 200% the cost of 2 hours of a streaming service given the average monthly viewing time)?
"The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates." - Gaben
Let's use the same analogy for a young struggling artist - "The best way for me to stop buying $1 copies of your $100 paintings is for you to give me a service that better than what I get from pirates." This is why we can't have nice things. Because people feel entitled to others people's work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or you could switch to renting a seedbox and using plex/jellyfin
The average HN user can pull that off, but not the average netflix user.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Don't really know what I should think about this to be honest... Ultimately, piracy is the only remaining option. Because the company has decided it's going to brand you a pirate anyway. It costs maybe 11$/mo to hire a seedbox running plex that can store whatever media you would want to watch. While it's not next-day or same-day in most cases, in my experience it covers basically everything you would want to watch,…
Don’t know if I really buy the “piracy is the only option” line any more. It was for years. But you can now legally pay for the content you want, you just don’t like the price.
Meanwhile in piracy land, you sign up to a seedbox, press a button to set up Plex+Sonarr/Radarr, then you're done. Type in the names of the things you want, share it with as many people as you want, etc. Literally all you have to bother with is disk usage and most of the sites I looked at last month had a minimum offering of 500GiB, some boasting 1TB of disk space -- so even that isn't much of a problem.
Streaming services (Netflix ($9) + Disney ($7ish) + Amazon ($13)): $27
A Randomly-chosen Popular Seedbox: $17.89/mo
That includes Plex + etc + 4TB Disk. One-button setup for all the supported services.
So like I said, all this measure does is drive people to piracy. They're literally faceplanting on their way to extract more and more money from people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Don't really know what I should think about this to be honest... Ultimately, piracy is the only remaining option. Because the company has decided it's going to brand you a pirate anyway. It costs maybe 11$/mo to hire a seedbox running plex that can store whatever media you would want to watch. While it's not next-day or same-day in most cases, in my experience it covers basically everything you would want to watch,…
Don’t know if I really buy the “piracy is the only option” line any more. It was for years. But you can now legally pay for the content you want, you just don’t like the price.
The problem was UX friction. You had to go to a video store, rent a movie, get ready to be raped with fees, or go to a library and hope they have it, or go to a second hand store and browse the selection. You had to have a special piece of hardware or ten, and if a movie you wanted to watch was on a format you didn't have, too bad. That's why people used to watch the same movies every so often. Watch a movie? Doesn't matter if we had seen it already. Let's watch it again anyway. This is how movies like The Big Lebowsky and Friday got their followings, people watching them repeatedly. Like music. This touches on the social impacts of the paid subscription model that is off topic so I won't delve into that.
And then Netflix changed everything. And then everyone else got in on the game, and now you've got worse UX friction than before. You've got to determine which service has the movie you want to watch. You've got to pay for that service, now it looks like per person, for just that movie. And if you want to watch 4 or 5 movies? You might have to have as many as 4 or 5 monthly subscriptions. Or you can rent it for 1.99. But buy it? No, you cannot buy it. I mean, you can, but who has a DVD player and space for a bunch of DVDs?
But tpb has all the movies. And you can own them. And they're all in one place. And as a bonus, they're free if you don't include your VPN service.
Side note, how is tpb different from a library exactly? Besides scale and efficiency, in principle, what's the difference between tpb and a library?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t know if I really buy the “piracy is the only option” line any more. It was for years. But you can now legally pay for the content you want, you just don’t like the price.
Free is the best price, especially for broke a college kid. It's too tempting to be honest. Streaming a torrent stops me from ever paying for a streaming service.
Of course I don't "consume content" (I hate that term, what's with PR and marketing people reducing everything to a business case?) so much anymore, so I'm not quite the pirate I once was. In all honesty, if I'm going to sit in front of a screen, I'd rather talk to people like you on the internet than watch the super strong american hero defeat the bad guy for the gazillionth time, except this time they are sure to remind me that I'm a bad bad man for some belief I have.
The Netflix I pay for is currently used by: Me, Mom, Dad, Grandparents, GF, GFs Mom. Other than myself and my GF, most of the people on this list watch something on Netflix every couple of months, when I or someone/something else recommend them a movie or show. I don't want them to use my profile, because we then obviously can't watch the same things, and it'll break my recommendations. I get why Netflix wants to spl…
> Should my grandma pay $240 per year, to watch two movies I recommend to her (and are ONLY watchable on Netflix)? This seems more like an edge case. If grandma is only watching a couple movies per year, would Netflix even bother throwing up a warning message? If she didn’t have her own profile in your account, it would be difficult for Netflix to even know if this was a shared account or if you were just logging in…
Yes. In every scenario that a company could cut cost, they've done it. If they haven't done it yet, they will do it. Absolutely 100% Netflix is going to cut grandma off.
What's it to Netflix to throw up a message saying "little Timmy, if you're there in the room with grandma then it shouldn't be a problem for you to enter the 6 digit code we just sent to your phone." That's what they're trialing now. Next you're going to have to enter a code even if you don't share your account just in case or due to some error or other excuse when it becomes a PR problem, such as when Netflix bans a customer and cancels their account because boyfriend was trying to watch a movie while girlfriend was at work and didn't see the code on her phone until it was too late, which is also inevitably going to happen, and you're going to read a reddit thread about it that has a score of 35k and 10x gold and Netflix is going to formally apologize for the error and reinstate her account and then it is going to become par for the course after that. That's where this is going, bad UX all round because some middle management can make a bonus by cutting costs, or because Netflix's revenue is falling and they just don't want to admit the cause and refuse to correct the error, like IBM and every other failing company did.
"The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates." - Gaben
Let's use the same analogy for a young struggling artist - "The best way for me to stop buying $1 copies of your $100 paintings is for you to give me a service that better than what I get from pirates." This is why we can't have nice things. Because people feel entitled to others people's work.