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Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

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Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#251

Post by angoragoats »

ESTheComposer wrote: post #237
angoragoats wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with your characterization of my comment as an instance of false equivalence, primarily because you had to change/add more premises to your argument as part of your explanation. So in fact you're committing some fallacies in your reply, also. :) Regardless, obviously my comment was tongue-in-cheek, and I do in fact grant a license to Hacker News to display my content for all to see per the terms of use. Bu…

> primarily because you had to change/add more premises to your argument as part of your explanation. I did no such thing, I was putting the argument into logical form[1]. When you do that you express the original argument in specifically semantic terms. I've been saying the same thing since the beginning, piracy is stealing, and by stealing I mean experiencing their work without paying. Putting it into specific term…

> I did no such thing, I was putting the argument into logical form[1]. When you do that you express the original argument in specifically semantic terms. I've been saying the same thing since the beginning, piracy is stealing, and by stealing I mean experiencing their work without paying. Putting it into specific terms is not changing my meaning.

I understand logical fallacies, and my point is that your original argument as stated way up the thread is materially different from the one you put into logical form. So you don't get to accuse me of a logical fallacy when you're referring to an argument that you haven't articulated yet.

> In regards to your webpage example, websites have a common expectation of loading to the home page for viewing for free. If you have a website that was not explicit about the requirement for payment before the user went on it, then no it's not the same thing, and in fact there's not even a contract with going to a website so there's no legal basis for your example either.

I'm not sure if you have specific legal experience in this area but all of these claims are questionable to me; my understanding is that most of these things have little if any legal precedent and are a grey area at best. I'd be interested to see sources for these claims, since as I said, I don't know too much about this.

Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#252

Post by hedora »

galahad_ wrote: post #232
philipov wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The money's not on the table if people can and will leave. That's the point of competition. Piracy is entirely in the spirit of free market capitalism: the equilibrium price of a good with infinite supply is 0.

The problem ist that a production of f.e. a movie costs money. If the people that make movies don't earn money, they will not make any movies. So they have to earn that money somehow. If the price of their good is 0 why should they bother with filming?

They could earn their money by not actively pissing off their customers. The streaming industry proved that consumers prefer paying for convenient streaming over messing around with privacy.

For some reason, they feel they need to burn their own industry down in order to prove that people prefer piracy (or not watching) over inconvenient streaming setups. Is anyone really surprised by the current outcome?

Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#253

Post by xethos »

jwie wrote: post #238

It's amusing watching streaming turn into cable, but somehow worse. At least we got some public access programming out of cable. Piracy is a service problem. Valve proved digital piracy can be beaten by commercial solutions. The problem is the media cartels being intransigent with digital delivery, not piracy.

Gabe's stance was established over a decade ago; I think it's been long enough that we can add Music streaming to bolster that argument, because so many people don't really consider piracy there either. The price isn't outrageous, all the content is there when you search for it, and ads are non-existant. Piracy has been left for the truly frugal (sharing accounts, public trackers) or the die-hards (private trackers or similar).

Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#254

Post by ESTheComposer »

angoragoats wrote: post #244
ESTheComposer wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you use any ad blocker at all? No With your second question: Tracking - Tracking isn't stealing, that's a privacy question. Building a Profile - I mean not stealing but also vague so not sure what's the point of trying to argue this one? Like if you keep going with this line of thinking you end up with "you looked at me funny which made me feel weird so you're stealing by stealing my joy". (Absurd example but tr…

> Serving malware is a criminal act and you can block it, but you're also not usually going to CNN.com and expecting them to download a crypto miner on your hardware. You are, however, expecting advertisements, hence why you're using an adblocker. I absolutely expect CNN, Google, and any other website to serve me malware. You can find many historical examples of the largest ad networks serving up malware on just abou…

> I absolutely expect CNN, Google, and any other website to serve me malware. You can find many historical examples of the largest ad networks serving up malware on just about any site in existence.

I would love to see a source of a large company like CNN knowingly serving malware in the guise of ads. I've never heard of that but I'm all ears; I feel like it would be big news if CNN knowingly put a crypto miner on your device.

> How should I legally/ethically block this malware without using a broad ad blocker?

I don't know but also now you're committing a fallacy known as "Irrelevant conclusion". Yes, there's a genuine question on how you can block malware without depriving website owners of their ad revenue, however it's irrelevant to the original argument of whether blocking ads is stealing (which we've somehow come to from a piracy argument but whatever). The argument becomes "Is blocking ads stealing when some of them give me malware", but that's separate from "Is blocking ads stealing".

Alternatively you might be trying to argue "but I block ads because some of them give me malware" which can be an appeal to pity[2], but I don't think you're trying to go that far.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrelevant_conclusion [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_pity

Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#257

Post by hedora »

prepend wrote: post #224
Geisterde wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which could be rapidly eclipsed, my synology nas is capable of following RSS feeds for new content, torrenting that content, and serving that content through my plex with audio options, subtitles, descriptions, cover art, ratings, age restrictions etc. (All behind a vpn of course) If I invested a weekend (4 days, maybe 2-3 weekends...) I could probably figure it out, and never ever ever again deal with the BS streami…

You need to invest about 10 minutes. It’s not complicated at all and makes a much better experience.

Setting it up properly probably takes a day or so.

Which HDDs should you put in the synology (or are there SSDs that make more sense; need to check $/GB…)? Which VPN service makes the most sense? Which RSS thingy is as good as Prime, Netflix, HBO, etc, etc, combined?

Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#259

Post by philipov »

hedora wrote: post #252
galahad_ wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem ist that a production of f.e. a movie costs money. If the people that make movies don't earn money, they will not make any movies. So they have to earn that money somehow. If the price of their good is 0 why should they bother with filming?

They could earn their money by not actively pissing off their customers. The streaming industry proved that consumers prefer paying for convenient streaming over messing around with privacy. For some reason, they feel they need to burn their own industry down in order to prove that people prefer piracy (or not watching) over inconvenient streaming setups. Is anyone really surprised by the current outcome?

Yes, distribution is a service, and providing good service adds value that people are willing to pay for.

Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#260

Post by data-ottawa »

al_borland wrote: post #77
eastbound wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that means companies must sell for the marginal price of their website’s ergonomics, not for the marginal price of producing movies. (Which is not a big loss, because I can’t imagine producing the Netflix knockoffs be a hundredth the price of a 007).

It’s not about an individual website, it’s about the industry. It’s not that Netflix, or any other service, is hard to use on its own. It’s the fragmentation of the content that makes it hard to use. This was solved for with music where pretty much every service has pretty much every song. People don’t need multiple music services, they just pick the one that best fits their style and needs. This is what the movie an…

I had Prime Video, and when searching for content I would get told to subscribe to some channel within Prime. Now Crave (in Canada) does the same thing. Netflix doesn't bother integrating with Apple TV's search or aggregation features to try and drive you into the app.

The end result is searching for legitimate content is a terrible experience. If it's a result from Prime, I just pass. If it's from Crave, I pass. If it's on Netflix, I don't see anything at all.

At least a decade ago streaming boxes had one search box and it would return results from all the sources, and if it appeared you knew you could watch it.

What the streamers provide today is a significantly worse experience than piracy, and I don't know how they haven't realized this.

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