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Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

torrentfreak.com

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

#331

Streaming became popular because it was easier than piracy and better than TV (watch anywhere, on demand, pickup where you left off etc). Streaming is no longer easier than piracy, why pay for 8 different services and have to waste your time figuring out whats on what when you can just have one service for free, even if its illegal, and have it all under one roof. The services have taken the piss and now they'll get…

> Streaming became popular because it was easier than piracy We never stole (cute word pirated) anything. We became cordcutters (OTA and streaming) because we felt we weren't using but maybe $20 of the $180 monthly we were paying to cable. We became cordcutters in 2013. We never stole (cute word pirated) anything.

"Stole" isn't the right word either. Pirating does not deprive any legal entity of ownership. It's merely copyright infringement. It also likely circumvented access controls, thereby running afoul of DMCA. But it is not theft.

I'm speaking as someone who also never pirates. I'd rather not watch something and spend my time doing something else.

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

#332
post #235
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but if you always have to spend a lot of time finding something to watch, then that shows up in their analytics as increased engagement. Allowing you to remove garbage would make you spend less time in their app.

If you're actually watching content (a whole movie, a series, etc), the total actual usage of the service easily eclipses any time spent bouncing around the UI?

That may be true, but inconveniently, it wouldn’t allow the parent poster to rage fantasize about how stupid the product team at Netflix must be

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

#333
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, H265 encoded 1080p is hitting the sweet spot between quality and file size. About 500-ish MB per hour of content for decent quality. Its sort of like when VBR encoded MP3s became the standard in the privacy scene in the early 00s. The quality is good enough for most folks plus the reduced file size means that it downloads really fast on average connections and isn't prohibitively expensive to store so you can c…

If we're looking at the storage cost, I'd say the 10x decrease in flash price is doing a lot more than the maybe-2x decrease in file size.

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

#334
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course this is 100% the correct reasoning. When I was a broke college kid I pirated all the things, and at the time wished, when I could afford it, I’d rather just pay. When I could, I did, for years. Now we’re back at the path-of-least-resistance is pirating.

I mean, stealing is always easier than paying for something.

[dead]

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

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Let’s not forget that “music solved this” ignores the fact that Spotify is not profitable, and may never be due to the record labels cut. Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music may or may not be profitable but are undoubtedly subsidized by their corporate parents. Not sure if Tidal is profitable but they aren’t popular and are much more expensive than people are generally willing to spend. It’s also potentially…

> Spotify is not profitable

Their stock value doubled in the last year

Their CEO Daniel Ek is worth 3.7 billion dollar.

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

#336

Streaming became popular because it was easier than piracy and better than TV (watch anywhere, on demand, pickup where you left off etc). Streaming is no longer easier than piracy, why pay for 8 different services and have to waste your time figuring out whats on what when you can just have one service for free, even if its illegal, and have it all under one roof. The services have taken the piss and now they'll get…

While I directionally agree, I don't know how to reconcile this with antitrust. I wouldn't want Netflix to be the one company with all the content, with no competition. I guess what would be better is if all content was available on all the streaming providers, and then they'd compete on platform quality and price.

I mean it works for music right?

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

#337

Streaming became popular because it was easier than piracy and better than TV (watch anywhere, on demand, pickup where you left off etc). Streaming is no longer easier than piracy, why pay for 8 different services and have to waste your time figuring out whats on what when you can just have one service for free, even if its illegal, and have it all under one roof. The services have taken the piss and now they'll get…

Honestly if Apple integrated Netflix and all those other services into a unified UI for Apple TV that transparently lets you go between the apps without realizing it (they do own the OS...) it would be exactly what I want to see happen to these streaming services, that or they somehow share their content to the official Apple TV app itself, and let Apple TV query across all those other streaming apps, it would be gre…

This is exactly what Apple attempted to do, but Netflix never provided API access or data, so Netflix shows never appeared in the unified interface.

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

#338

Streaming became popular because it was easier than piracy and better than TV (watch anywhere, on demand, pickup where you left off etc). Streaming is no longer easier than piracy, why pay for 8 different services and have to waste your time figuring out whats on what when you can just have one service for free, even if its illegal, and have it all under one roof. The services have taken the piss and now they'll get…

They spent their hard earned money to make shows you rip off for free. I pirate shit too. But I'm not going to say they they took a piss. And deserver the repercussions. That's backwards and illogical and lying to yourself.

We are the ones pissing and shitting on their faces. We are the wrong doers here.

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

#339

Streaming became popular because it was easier than piracy and better than TV (watch anywhere, on demand, pickup where you left off etc). Streaming is no longer easier than piracy, why pay for 8 different services and have to waste your time figuring out whats on what when you can just have one service for free, even if its illegal, and have it all under one roof. The services have taken the piss and now they'll get…

Worse yet, most of those services have extremely crappy software (e.g. to watch a series, you have to go through several levels of menu for each epusode and some won't even remember which episodes you watched), put in insane amount of ads even for paid subscription, some have no subtitles, etc. While a good pirate site with proper software - or so I heard from some friends - provide much better service for free.

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

#340
post #209

Streaming became popular because it was easier than piracy and better than TV (watch anywhere, on demand, pickup where you left off etc). Streaming is no longer easier than piracy, why pay for 8 different services and have to waste your time figuring out whats on what when you can just have one service for free, even if its illegal, and have it all under one roof. The services have taken the piss and now they'll get…

Also, H265 encoded 1080p is hitting the sweet spot between quality and file size. About 500-ish MB per hour of content for decent quality. Its sort of like when VBR encoded MP3s became the standard in the privacy scene in the early 00s. The quality is good enough for most folks plus the reduced file size means that it downloads really fast on average connections and isn't prohibitively expensive to store so you can c…

> About 500-ish MB per hour of content for decent quality.

That's still YIFY-quality video, which is a few steps below HBO/MAX, which happens to be among the lowest quality paid streams.

ATV+ is killing it with 30Mbps 4K HDR+ video (it used to be as high as 48Mbps). Disney+ is close. The Netflix 4K plan serves up high 1080p bitrates, 2x better than their 1080p plan. Worth paying for.

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