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A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

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Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#131

Post by Ekaros »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #106
wswope wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s economics: much like with car insurance, the market is a zero-sum game because the quality providers all more or less have equivalent levels of service - thus advertising becomes the most effective way to capture revenue, because prospective buyers don’t generally have complete enough information to e.g. assess a firm’s “operational excellence” or technical qualities on their own.

I don't agree that it's zero sum - this is a niche market that, if it could reach a broader audience, would experience an influx of new customers. That could potentially benefit all the players in the market, though of course it would benefit the company driving the popularisation the most. Personally I think that in marketing like this NordVPN are not trying to convince existing VPN users that their service is bette…

VPN marketing seems to boil down to two things. Either scaring people about their ISPs and "hackers" trying to steal something. Or circumventing geo-ip blocks... Now later is valid, but somewhat questionable use. And first depends, but probably not needed unless they really want to use that unsecured airport wlan...

So it is really convincing people they need it. For those reasons...

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#132

Post by Jensson »

Ekaros wrote: post #130
notsapiensatall wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that their shares are not publicly offered. Their shareholders much more likely to be people with vested interests in the company's long-term health, rather than retail investors and hedge funds who reliably demand short-term returns.

Also I'm pretty sure they are making enough money as they are. And don't need to chase that ever increasing stock valuation. Which might not even mean increased profits.

But public stocks seems to focus on valuation over profits, which is reasonable given how things turned out.

Apple going from 1 trillion to 2 trillion valuation is much more valuable to shareholders than Apple paying out 100 billion in profits. But if the stocks aren't publicly traded then the main pay-out are the profits, so they try to maximize profit over growth, which is probably much healthier for the economy overall.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#133

Post by 88840-8855 »

pdimitar wrote: post #38

I have YouTube premium and download everything that I like. A home NAS is extremely handy like that. Mine is not even 10TB and I still have more than a year worth of watching. Also it's not illegal because I don't distribute anything. I use a local website run by volunteers that ask permission of publishing houses before putting every scanned & OCR'd & spell-checked book in their online library. Again, not illegal, t…

Can you be so kind and explain the setup behind the youtube-NAS bridge? Are videos being downloaded automatically? Are subtitles added to the local files? Do you have to manually select all videos you want to archive/safe on your NAS?

What NAS do you have?

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#135

Post by gopher_space »

newaccount74 wrote: post #113
wongarsu wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam's most important advertising is actually quite in your face, and used to occupy a good part of the gaming sphere for a couple of weeks each year: their sales with discounts between 50-90% (calculated from the current "regular price" which for older games is often already far below original retail price). They've switched it up in recent years, making the summer sales tamer in exchange for more weekly sales, but…

They are really good at it, too. Fallout 4 for just 8€? Brilliant, I've heard so much about it, let me check it out. But just 5€ more and I get all the DLC? And there's a bundle with Skyrim? Before I realise whats going on I spent 30€ on games released a decade ago that I don't really have time to play anyway.

Bethesda releases aren't games you play, they're hobbies you pursue. Imagine all the enjoyable hours you'll spend browsing nexus and creating a stable environment for each of the games you own. It's almost like having an aquarium.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#136

Post by somenameforme »

gonehome wrote: post #28
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #13

Media embedded advertising has already been a thing for years, but companies hate leaving money on the table so they cannot resist the temptation of showing more ads. I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up. You're competing with piracy, but you throw ads in my face. I can download any show or movie I wan…

> “ I can download any show or movie I want and have it playing in minutes without having to deal with multi platform bullshit.” Is this as true as it once was? It seems most of the old trackers are offline or dead now. I’d guess because of the success of streaming services finally meeting the market demand. It’s also possible I’m just old and out of the loop now.

More so than ever before. The only difference is that it's all a lot more decentralized. The easiest source of information is from legal filings. A lazy way to get this it to search Google for whatever, and at the bottom it will state something like 'In response to US DMCA we've removed [x] results from this page. You can read the complaints here, here, here...' Read the complaints. Otherwise you can search for more select filings. For instance this [1] is an older report from the RIAA on "Notorious Markets." They're quite a friendly organization - providing URLS, descriptions, and details on each site even including their modus operandi.

Also if you happen to speak a language outside the big Western languages, then it's all trivial and a simple search anywhere will yield even better than above.

[1] - https://torrentfreak.com/images/Notorious_Markets_Submission...

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#137

Post by buzer »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #128
buzer wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Finland you are not allowed make a copy if you need to bypass a strong copy protection. According to decision from 2008 from appeals court (supreme court did not grant appeal) DVD's CSS is considered to be such. Given that it's not very strong from technical point of view and that pretty much all CDs do contain some form of copy protection it's hard to say if you are allowed to make personal copies of most of the…

Fair enough. I don't really care for movies, so I wouldn't go through that trouble, but I don't recall having encountered any audio CD with copy protection. Would those work in a regular, old-style cd-player, like, say, in a stereo?

There has been various ones over the years. These include e.g. key2Audio, Cactus Data Shield & Copy Control. They generally played without issues on normal CD players, but I did hear that especially car stereos did sometimes have issues with them. The way most of them worked were by attempting to hide the audio tracks from computer CD drives to make the ripping harder.

I haven't really used audio CDs for ~15 years so I don't know what the situation is these days. At least the technologies I mentioned are no longer being used to according to Wikipedia. One way to tell if the disc has these kind of copy protections or not is to check if it has the Compact Disc Digital Audio logo. It's trademarked and Philips does not allow using the logo for CDs that break the specification. They do however allow setting the "no copy" bit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit). No clue if that would be strong copy protection or not in Finnish courts.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#138

Post by boredtofears »

AstralStorm wrote: post #40
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #13

Media embedded advertising has already been a thing for years, but companies hate leaving money on the table so they cannot resist the temptation of showing more ads. I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up. You're competing with piracy, but you throw ads in my face. I can download any show or movie I wan…

Steam is successful because its advertising is rather low key, showing a popup with offers, and providing a search, directory plus suggestions. Their gain is from consumer analytics too. (They also take a cut for using their platform from the game developers or publishers. It also provides some added value like achievements, basic social media in forms of forums and chat, some (somewhat broken at times) controller ha…

I often wonder how much better the click through rates are for Steam than the ad industry as a whole. I’d estimate that I typically click on at least 4-5 ads on the steam home page a week. I actively enjoy scrolling through them to see if there’s anything that looks interesting to me.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#139

Post by nasmorn »

jcranmer wrote: post #49
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #13

Media embedded advertising has already been a thing for years, but companies hate leaving money on the table so they cannot resist the temptation of showing more ads. I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up. You're competing with piracy, but you throw ads in my face. I can download any show or movie I wan…

> I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up. Well, Youtube's ad problem comes from the fact that it is run by the largest internet advertiser. Netflix--video streaming in general--suffers from the fact that there are very few major content producers, and after seeing the monetary success of Netflix, the con…

Origin is so bad that nobody would ever install anything but an exclusive from there. I would rather install a new App Store.

Re: A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

#140

Post by nemothekid »

Jiro wrote: post #97
no_time wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The availability of content is still superior to paid offerings. The problem is discoverability. 10+ years ago you could get a well seeded torrent anything by googling "anything+torrent". Nowadays you can still get anything but you have to be way more tech savvy and have to break out of your comfort zone. This could mean invite only sites,Russian speaking sites,Fiddling with baidu download scripts etc. Seeing how muc…

I've literally looked for things that I could reasonably expect to be on the Internet and couldn't find them on the Internet. The newest hot thing is still available, of course, but an obscure 5 years old show may not always be.

>I've literally looked for things that I could reasonably expect to be on the Internet and couldn't find them on the Internet.

Everything is in private communities now. Almost all the content you can think exists on usenet, but all the good indexers are invite-only (and often pay to play. My usenet subscription + the yearly fees to various private trackers was just a little less expensive than Netflix (up until the most recent price hike).

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