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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

#381

Post by anonzzzies »

liotier wrote: post #126
bawolff wrote: post #10

> Piracy also threatens to damage our business, as its fundamental proposition to consumers is so compelling and difficult to compete against: virtually all content for free,” Netflix writes. People emphasize the "free" part, but it really is the "all content" part that makes piracy wins. Especially if you are not in the USA, often specific content isn't available at any price. Even if it is, its split across 5 billi…

> The killer feature of piracy is thar it just works, not that it is free Especially as piracy has its own costs: VPN (French authorities do detect bittorrent), storage, some Jellyfin or Kodi host, some time to manage the whole *arr setup. The moment legal access to a whole world's worth of movies becomes cheaper and easier than that, piracy becomes unattractive. That was the way Netflix was perceived in its golden a…

> French authorities do detect bittorrent

Do they know what you are downloading though? I still use it for a lot of stuff that’s legal. How do they go after people (I guess you imply they do)?

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

#382

Post by drewzero1 »

MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #25
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #15

Piracy is a moral imperative. The internet was supposed to be free and break down barriers. Instead what we have now is a show available in the UK but not available in the US. This is not acceptable. This plus the fact that actual artists get a pittance, means the flag will fly high till companies learn. Also piracy has become much more reliable these days. There are systems which will make sure you get 4k streams ba…

No, it absolutely isn't a moral imperative, quite the reverse. I don't know where you get the idea that the internet was "supposed" to be "free" or why the fact that a global transport network for information exists implies that everything transported over it should not require any payment. The logical endpoint of your position is that you will get what you pay for: content that costs almost nothing to produce.

Note the first paragraph - it's not payment (or lack thereof) that is being called into question. It's a matter of availability. Despite the streaming companies' worldwide reach they can't (or won't bother to) get the rights to stream content to different countries.

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

#383

Post by kelnos »

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…

What a mess. They should be training their support people better, and giving them more escape hatches to properly handle situations like yours. Even if there are some assholes out there who would lie and make up a hospitalized kid to abuse it, overall the loss of goodwill here (and the loss of your subscription) sounds much worse for their bottom line.

Hope your kid is doing ok, or at least will be doing ok.

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

#384

Post by snvzz »

xpl wrote: post #341

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…

3. lets me watch 4k streams on my haiku, aros, openbsd systems.

Artificial DRM-based restrictions ultimately mean not getting the quality you pay for. Netflix specifically becomes 720p garbage.

But I can just rely on less official sources. In this case I get a DRM-free, very high quality file that plays everywhere, forever.

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

#385

Post by snvzz »

h2odragon wrote: post #3

Do they still plan to compete by making their service suck more, through higher prices, more ads, and less content? I'm so glad I ripped all my DVDs

>I'm so glad I ripped all my DVDs

For anyone interested in doing this for DVD or BD, makemkv[0] is where it's at.

0. https://www.makemkv.com/

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

#386

Post by kelnos »

hbcondo714 wrote: post #320

> there’s quite a bit of copying going on, as SEC filings from several companies include identical passages The author is a great financial forensics sleuth! Here is the passage “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth highlighted inside each conpany's 10-K on one site (shameless plug): NFLX: https://last10k.com/sec-filings/nflx#:~:text=In%20light%20of... FU…

To be fair, though, companies really need to put things like this into their SEC filings, regardless if it's actually affecting them or not. Because if it could affect them, and they don't disclose it, some group of shareholders is going to sue, claiming that the company should have anticipated whatever risk to their business ended up coming to bite them, and disclosed it ahead of time.

Granted, there's a balance to be maintained: put too much random, theoretical crap in there, and people will either think a) you're lying about all this stuff just to cover your ass, or b) the business they're in is a complete minefield and not worth investing in.

So I don't really take it as gospel that piracy is truly eating into Netflix's bottom line just because they've identified it as a business risk in their 10-K. (I do believe them in this case, though, since it's an obvious outcome of the fragmentation of desirable content across so many streaming services.)

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

#387

Post by anonzzzies »

Strom wrote: post #139
SurgeArrest wrote: post #63

Netflix has a problem that the front page is now filled with "B-rated" rather than "A-rated" content for more money than before. The amount of content that they spent money on in the past is hardly discoverable, genre search is barely exposed in the interface. You have to rely on 3rd party sites to find links to category selections, say Epic movies based on true events... good luck finding what they have in this cate…

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.

I mean, I read stories about their excellent software teams who optimise the user experience all the time and their analytics are superb etc. Then when I use Netflix (not a lot) I notice that it keeps recommending me movies and shows I just f’ing watched. I have the same thing with YouTube and Prime. Are these devs just really bad or is there some motive here I don’t understand? I am not going to watch anything again that I watched 10 minutes ago… in all of these platforms now I have to use quite elaborate search to find things I didn’t watch but do find interesting, even though there must be millions of those. In my recommended feeds I get crap I either already saw or I would never watch (I watched romantic comedies literally never, so why do I keep them as recommended?).

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

#388

Post by 6510 »

Crowd funding is easy. I envision a large form with lots of optional spices to pick from.

But then you have to make things for a specific audience (who will scream for more) in stead of the pill of generalized trash that appeals slightly to everyone that is usually cranked out by overly standardized formulas.

Shut up and take my money.

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

#389

Post by Dylan16807 »

emporas wrote: post #286
Dylan16807 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> every person on the planet will have his own personal stock and bond market I have no idea what you're talking about. > i wonder how one can differentiate betting from investing The biggest clue is how long you're going to hold ownership. If it's years, then it's almost certainly investing. > A saying i usually repeat to people, is that in the future, i.e. in a handful of years, everyone will be a billionaire for f…

Well, think about it that way: What's the purpose of copyright? It gives ownership of information, to the people who produced it, some years for a song or a movie. The presupposition is that said information, will be valuable in a year or 10 years. Along the same lines what's the purpose of investing? It captures ownership of a company, for some time, or indefinitely. The presupposition is that said company, will be…

If by "billionaire" you mean "making a hundred dollars a minute" then I think I see what you're saying, but I would word it very differently. If you were even a paper billionaire you could sell a big chunk for something that wouldn't immediately crash. But if everyone knows you're about to crash back down, then that will be priced in to your "stock" and you won't even be a paper millionaire.

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

#390

Post by kelnos »

jszymborski wrote: post #351
DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That state of affairs was created by compulsory licensing. I'm not sure that really makes sense for TV/movies, since it would also mean a fixed royalty price for everything. But it sure would be nice.

> I'm not sure that really makes sense for TV/movies, since it would also mean a fixed royalty price for everything. Any reason why you think it would be a problem to have a fixed price? I think the studios would have to swallow it if it was compulsory, no?

Because there's much more variation in what it costs to make a TV episode or movie than what it costs to make an album of music.

If there was one fixed royalty for every movie, it would presumably be too low to recoup the cost of blockbusters, so we just wouldn't get those anymore (I know some people wouldn't care, but most people would). And low-budget stuff would get "too much" (maybe less of a problem ;) ).

Then again, most successful blockbusters make back their budget and then some from theater ticket sales. But there's a lot of stuff out there that goes direct to streaming, or that doesn't find a following in the theater. Not to mention TV shows never end up in theaters, so they rely a lot more on streaming revenue to pay the bills, since selling television advertising is no longer as lucrative as it once was.

I do agree that compulsory licensing could work, but they'd have to come up with royalty tiers, or some variable pricing that depends on some objective measure that is difficult to game, if such a thing exists.

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