Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

What are non-tech-savvy people actually using for piracy these days?

Torrents require you to own a PC (there's no way to torrent on a phone or smart TV AFAIK), Usenet requires you to have some tech knowledge, same goes for Plex / Jellyfin.

I feel like piracy nowadays is a lot harder for an average Joe than it used to be. People now expect that they can turn on their TV, open an app, enter a title in the search box and start watching, and P2P just doesn't work that way.

I’m not sure it has to be exclusive: some people are inveterate freeloaders but most of us understand that the artists have to get paid, so it’s not just a question of being so cheap that piracy isn’t appealing but also having users feel like they’re not being taken advantage of.

The problem feels a lot like the situation MoviePass worked themselves into where they priced it unsustainably low but cheap money allowed that to run long enough to train a generation of customers that their content was only worth that much. I imagine Netflix would dearly love to say that your subscription includes a certain number of movies but you can add on more, or that there’s a premium tier, etc. but there isn’t an easy way to try something like that now that everyone is used to the current model.

The other side of the problem is that studios really don’t want market pricing. Subscriptions are banking on the idea that you’ll still pay $12/month and find something else to watch even if the big series/movie they’re promoting isn’t very good, and they’re keeping the prices for rentals really high which makes means people are often looking at 1-2 months of streaming charges for a single movie rental.

The combination of the two seems likely to make a lot of people pirating for years to come. Most people do not want to juggle multiple services and if they’ve learned how to pirate anything once it’s always going to be there the next time someone jacks up prices or plays games with availability. I think that’s going to last until someone has the courage to let services like YouTube or AppleTV offer rentals of everything at reasonable prices.

I’ve been running Plex since probably 2010, maybe earlier. It just works… once you set it up… and until something needs to change. The concept of running a server is lost on most people. I’ve set it up for some others, and they don’t get it. They just plug a laptop into their TV or use AirPlay instead, because the idea of a server and client (in whatever terminology one wants to use) doesn’t really click. Most people aren’t a custom leaving their computer on all the time in the name of having a server running either.

There is also a matter of getting the content. If they are going to rip DVDs, now they have to use something like Handbrake. But that’s not all, they also need to spend time learning how Plex reads folder and file names to scan the media to lookup metadata. Doing that manually sucks, so then that might lead them to have to search for something like Filebot, where they need to use Filebot’s naming syntax to align its actions with what Plex wants. Then if they get a new computer, there is the issue of migration to the new system. I eventually got a NAS, which meant moving to Docker, which would be a whole new can of worms for them.

And all this just assumes it’s all on the local network. Plex might do some router magic today, I can’t remember, but for a long time I remember setting up port forwarding so I could get at my library from my phone.

I don’t think anything of most of this, and I assume you don’t either, but it’s a lot for someone who doesn’t have any kind of background in this stuff or interest in heading down a rabbit hole with it.

I’d also argue that as Plex became more platform agnostic with its web UI, it became harder for the average user to understand. The first versions, based on XBMC, were just apps. Stick out media in there and it plays it. Then they made PMS with the client/server architecture, but the server still had a really nice GUI on the Mac where things made sense. Now the server launches the browser when opened, so people kind of need to understand the idea that this server is hosting a website to manage the media, which is another layer for someone to get lost in. And now, I go to plex.tv, login there, and it loads the server running off my NAS, which will be even more confusing for people, especially if/when something goes wrong or isn’t working. They also need to keep up with the changes, not of just the UI they use, but the architecture of the backend, to some degree. It’s changed a lot over the years I’ve been using it.

As for subtitles. I typically trash them and don’t care, as 99.9% of the time I don’t want subtitles. But the 1 time I tried to download the subtitles and use them, it didn’t work and I gave up. I watched on a streaming service instead.

I'd like to compare yours to all streaming sites I've used, which are riddled with ads and deceptive clicks.

I would be curious to know what percentage of pirated movies are actually watched. I think a lot of people download things because they are available and might look interesting, but then never watch it. Does the steeling happen when the content is acquired or consumed? If someone isn’t going to watch it, even when it was free, did they steal anything?

With a chocolate bar there is a physical good that could have been sold to someone else, but instead a new one needs to be produced to sell to someone else. This isn’t the case with digital files.