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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

#341

Post by xpl »

Piracy isn't difficult to compete against. You just need to provide a service at least as usable as piracy. I won't mind paying a couple of bucks, I just need a usable service which:

1. Doesn't restrict what content I can watch from which country and doesn't prevent me from using VPN. This is outright ridiculous and I deeply hate streaming services just for that.

2. Has all the content from multiple studios, not just from your "walled garden". Until you solve that, piracy is more usable. There are illegal Netflix-like services that stream all the content without a hassle — and some of them are even subscription-based! Hear me out — people FUCKING PAY pirates to watch content, because their services are more convenient to use than yours that are legal. So yeah, people don't mind paying. They just want a decent service.

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

#342

Post by angoragoats »

ESTheComposer wrote: post #311
angoragoats wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, aren't you the fallacy guy. Please, give me more fallacies! I should just change my username to fallaciousgoats. How about this: I didn't use the word "knowingly" anywhere in my statement, and in fact I have no earthly idea whether the countless examples [1][2][3][4] of malware being served via ad networks on major websites was done knowingly. My guess is it wasn't? So you've got the beginnings of a straw man fa…

> Wow, aren't you the fallacy guy. Please, give me more fallacies! Ad hominem

Haha good one!

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

#343

Post by ajoseps »

cgearhart wrote: post #319

The content diaspora to other services has made Netflix tremendously less appealing; just par for the course as Netflix tries their hardest to lose me as a customer. I just had a support chat with them Friday because my kid has been in the hospital for several weeks after being hit by a car. Since they haven’t been home, Netflix has decided they’re no longer part of the household and we have to manually reauthenticat…

that’s an awful situation. i hope your kid recovers soon

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

#344

Post by plastic_bag »

radley wrote: post #340
nerdix wrote: 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…

> 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.

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

You don't necessarily have to pick YIFY.

Qxr's uploads are a much better comparison. x265 encoded 1080p (with 5 - 6.5Mbps bitrate) from the highest quality sources and they look very good even on 55" 4K panels.

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

#345

Post by mr_toad »

philipov wrote: post #150
heavyset_go wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the cable TV model was a mature business model for extracting the most amount of value possible from paying viewers before they choose to leave. Every streaming service will converge to what cable TV is like: paid channels, maximum amount of ads, additional premium content, attempts at lock-in, exclusive licensing of content, etc. Not adopting the cable business model is leaving billions of dollars on the tab…

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.

It’s not an equilibrium price, because the average cost is higher than the marginal cost (which is indeed close to zero). Free markets don’t work unless the marginal cost (and the price) is higher than the average cost, for obvious reasons.

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

#346

Post by jszymborski »

radley wrote: post #340
nerdix wrote: 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…

> 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.

Note that Netflix and co. won't stream 4K at all to Linux devices, and they often don't serve 4K if they deem your internet connection to be too slow.

For many folks, pirated 1080p is par with what they'd get streaming, and pirated 2k or 4k is better.

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

#347

Post by shiroiuma »

spike021 wrote: post #125

I haven't pirated in a while. I was happy to pay for some platforms. The problem is that pretty much all of these services say you get 2 or 4 or however many screens and now they're tightening viewership to within the same household. If I'm one person I'll never need to use 4 screens at once, so why can't I share them with a few family members who live elsewhere? And on top of that, you get plans that never had ads b…

>And on top of that, you get plans that never had ads before now starting to add them

It's exactly the same thing that happened with cable TV: it started out without ads, selling itself based on that feature, and then when they had lots of subscribers, they added ads.

I predicted this exact thing would happen not that long ago here on HN and other forums and people called me crazy.

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

#348

Post by spike021 »

sersi wrote: post #329
spike021 wrote: post #125

I haven't pirated in a while. I was happy to pay for some platforms. The problem is that pretty much all of these services say you get 2 or 4 or however many screens and now they're tightening viewership to within the same household. If I'm one person I'll never need to use 4 screens at once, so why can't I share them with a few family members who live elsewhere? And on top of that, you get plans that never had ads b…

At least for now, I'm still sharing netflix and amazon prime video with my parent who live in a different country 10,000 miles away. The day I get a message stopping me from doing that is the day I cancel my subscriptions.

I haven't been so lucky with Netflix. Relatives who live in other cities have gotten a message that they can't use mine unless I do the thing to add a new user for $7.99 or however much it is. Occasionally it works for them but most times it does not.

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

#349

Post by riwsky »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #309
WWLink wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I support your move, it's better than piracy. The problem with piracy is if you become a fan of a series and gossip with your friends about it, now you're marketing that company's crappy service. It's a weird way to go about things.

It's weird because TV is also culture . Game of Thrones isn't just some random piece of personal, single-player entertainment: it was, and is, an important cultural phenomenon for at least half of the planet. That's what makes the dynamics so weird: it's not just, or even primarily, about your personal entertainment - there are social aspects involved, from wanting to belong with your peer group (e.g. talk about late…

games are culture—shared, social culture—you just need better friends and coworkers.

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

#350

Post by djtango »

So I live in Singapore and wanted to watch Lord of the Rings legally, offline on my Linux machine and I have no idea how to do it. And after dedicating quite a bit of time towards trying to figure it out, I also wasn't really sure why I was so eager to give my money to an industry that is still so backwards when it comes towards sane distribution.
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