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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

#421

Post by walteweiss »

js2 wrote: post #315
ladzoppelin wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No its a DRM issue, its why I run a hidden 25 foot HDMI from my computer to my TV as some broadcasts require the security inside the HDMI cable itself. (I could be wrong on this one but Widevine DRM handles this process I think)

There is no security inside the HDMI cable itself. It's an HDCP negotiation between the source and the sink which occurs over an i2c serial bus along the pair of DDC pins. You may be able to get away with just an HDMI dummy plug: https://www.amazon.com/4K-HDMI-Dummy-Plug-3840x2160/dp/B07FB... I'm not sure if these dummy plugs handle HDCP. If not you can use one in combination with this splitter: https://www.amazon.co…

What is an HDMI dummy plug? I read the description, but didn’t get it. What does it do?

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

#422

Post by y7 »

jszymborski wrote: post #346
radley wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Amazon Prime Video is even worse, on Linux they only serve 480p. Any pirated file is much better quality.

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

#423

Post by mike_hock »

PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #9

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…

More importantly, the pirated content isn't DRM-encumbered, you get to keep it and it can't be pulled whenever the streaming service feels like it. So the same situation as with DVDs all over again.

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

#424

Post by jpc0 »

jdhbb wrote: post #352
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…

Other side of the equation is - Production of Content has become cheap. Distribution has become free with global reach. So we have Infinite amount of content floating about. Not even bringing generative AI into the picture. So infinite growing Supply. Finite demand.

> Other side of the equation is - Production of Content has become cheap

I spend a lot of time in both production and post production. The price for good content has certianly decreased but it most certianly hasn't become any definition of cheap. Consumers want very hogh quality content these days and that only comes with experienced staff, you can use cheaper gear.

> Distribution has become free with global reach

Every time someone says this I want to know what where they get this information. So now I am going to ask, prove it. Show me the VOD service or streaming service that is free with global reach. Even network egress from any provider costs a ton of money nevermind compute for transcoding and storage costs. Again prove it.

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

#425

Post by mike_hock »

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.

Maybe your eyesight is a lot better than mine but I can't discern pixels at sub-1080p resolution, especially in a movie where everything is kinda smudged out and individual pixel values don't matter as much.

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

#426

Post by ebb_earl_co »

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.

What is YIFY?

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

#427

Post by cgearhart »

kelnos wrote: post #383
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.

It was very, very clear that they’ve outsourced support and their reps have no authority to help. I was either chatting with a very good GPT bot or a very bot-like human with no authority or agency who will be replaced by a good-enough GPT in short order.

I think it would be easy enough for them to…I dunno, ask me for a doctors note? (That’s what everyone else who needs to confirm this situation has asked for.) But that wouldn’t “scale” .

Thanks for the well-wishes; my kid impresses me every day. Maybe less Netflix will be a silver lining. :-)

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

#428

Post by defrost »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #415
ffsm8 wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you single out 2k? The term "4k" is just as wrong and purely marketing driven as well. The resolution that's usually behind 2k, which is 1440p as you've correctly pointed out, is usually available as torrents too.

Rounding 1920 to 2k and 3840 to 4k is not too bad. And yes it's marketing to switch from height to width, but whatever. Rounding 2560 to 2k is massively confusing. Don't do it. 2.5k or don't use "k" at all. And when I go look at a couple torrent sites and scroll through movies and tv shows, I'm not seeing a single 1440p in the first couple pages. Some searches show barely anything at all.

The first site I checked has 317 pages of 50x 2160p listings per page going back seven years.

The most recent entry is:

How To Train Your Dragon The Hidden World (2019) 2160p 4K BluRay 5 1-LAMA

Format : HEVC

Width : 3 840 pixels Height : 1 634 pixels

Display aspect ratio : 2.35:1

Near the top is a recent TV episode:

True Detective S04E04 Night Country Part 4 2160p MAX WEB-DL DDP5 1 DoVi x265-NTb

Format : HEVC

Width : 3 840 pixels Height : 1 920 pixels

Display aspect ratio : 2.000

What makes things problematic is the overbearing love for letterbox like aspect ratios, even pirates have standards and they're having to bundle a slew of aspect ratios together .. this comes from the production companies.

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

#429

Post by histories »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #27

The streaming space desperately needs consolidation right now. Every rights holder having their own service has killed a lot of the convenience because you'll now need several different services to go through an entire TV show, for instance. And also because all services other than maybe Netflix have garbage software for your various devices. Because every service also has to support 8 different platforms. Video play…

Spotify has the same songs as Apple Music, Deezer or whatever.

Everything should be everywhere. Let the services compete on something other than content.

Qobuz has the same songs as everyone else, but in higher quality.

Because when you compete on content, piracy always wins

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

#430

Post by midasuni »

charcircuit wrote: post #417
vlz wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, HD, but not "Full HD". The page has "HD (720p)" as max for all linux browsers. For each of the other OSes you have at least one browser with 1080p (Chrome at least). Why this restriction?

>Why this restriction? It depends on how secure your device is able to keep the decoded contents. The better the security the higher the quality they are willing to allow.

But if I wanted to do something other than watch the film why wouldn’t I just download it from a “pirate” site?

What is the benefit to the rights holder in having a “secure device”

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