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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

#451

Post by realusername »

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.

> The Netflix 4K plan serves up high 1080p bitrates

Only if you are lucky and everything aligns well. You can't ask customers to debug their hardware to make it work.

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

#452

Post by Daz1 »

yukkuri wrote: post #285
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…

Steam really did this for games for me and somehow hasn't stopped working for me yet. Maybe Netflix should ask themselves how Steam competes with bootlegs and what they might do like it.

The only reason is that piracy locks you out of MP and updates for the most part

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

#453

Post by realusername »

somenameforme wrote: post #439
martindbp wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The services have taken the piss and now they'll get the repercussions of it. Whose fault is it really that all content is not available on a single service? It's nobody's fault, it was inevitable given how things work. How could you "fix" it? You'd need legislation saying that all content must be made available for licensing at the same price for every service. But that's not enough, because why would HBO sell the…

It'll be naturally fixed by economics. We'll reach an equilibrium point where offering an exclusive streaming service becomes less profitable than simply licensing your content to another service or services. Obstinance will probably drag out the timeline, but it won't change the outcome. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Those media conglomerates are very stubborn though, they care more about keeping their rights than money itself.

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

#454

Post by 10729287 »

nerdix wrote: post #209
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…

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…

Sorry to focus on such a detail but VBR nevern been the standard in the Piracy scene. Back in the days it was 192kbps

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

#455

Post by galahad_ »

runevault wrote: post #409
hedora wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Everyone else saw Netflix making a lot of money and decided just making a healthy amount of money renting the rights to them they had to try and make more money releasing their own service. Gotta love modern capitalistic greed. I wish streaming services was like movie theaters where production companies are not allowed to own theaters (aka the distribution network).

Owning theaters was forbidden for movie studios, but afaik making movies was always allowed for theaters.

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

#456

Post by Dylan16807 »

defrost wrote: post #428
Dylan16807 wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :…

I think you agree with me?

You overwhelmingly see 1280x720, 1920x1080, and 3840x2160, sometimes with a truncated height because of aspect ratio but usually advertised with the full height for consistency reasons.

There's barely any 2560x1440. Anyone going above 1080p goes directly to 4k.

Youtube is pretty much the only place I've ever seen 1440p encodes, and that's because they're super version-happy and make 20 different variants of a video.

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

#457

Post by SirMaster »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #278
SirMaster wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but why is it that way? How did they manage to consolidate all music into 1 service and why can't or won't that work for video?

Music downloads became viable a lot earlier, and so the companies are a decade+ ahead on the dealing with sharing angle.

This is why I asked the question.

So if the case is simply that music downloads and streaming were earlier then there is hope for video downloads and streaming to eventually catch up?

It feels like right now though that video access is becoming more fragmented still, rather than more consolidated.

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

#458

Post by vonjuice »

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?

1. That IF is untested, it's hypothetical corporate propaganda.

2. That's a problem for them to solve, it's not a problem for me to solve by going like "alright Sony, I'll do you this solid and pay and inconvenience myself instead of pirating just because I like you and I know you're struggling" wink wink

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

#459

Post by realusername »

patrickaljord wrote: post #67
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…

I was paying for Netflix 10 years ago in France for a short while, wanted some English subtitles for my wife for some US shows but there were only subtitles in French so had to download the same show elsewhere if you know what I'm saying... with English subtitles readily available. I also remember watching some shows like the first two seasons but then only to find out the third season was licensed by another streami…

I'm also pirating everything for my wife because of the subtitles. She's not a native French speaker and the French subtitles MUST align with the voice to help her which is never the case with Netflix.

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

#460

Post by kmeisthax »

suprjami wrote: post #284
underyx wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do. There needs to be one international company who is co-owned by all these media companies. They need to "nationalise" streaming amongst themselves. That way users only have to pay one streaming service, the content is available in every country, the rightsholders are paid fairly by the content consumed instead of these never-ending monthly fees for one show and ignoring the rest of the library. If they don't do…

Nationalization is too extreme. What you want is compulsory licensing where the government sets some price by which any streaming service can pay to license the content. How that price gets selected is... complicated and easy to fuck up[0], but I can imagine some metrics that could be used to target prices. e.g. the compulsory license cost must not exceed some multiple of the average negotiated rate.

[0] Notably, radio has a compulsory licensing scheme, but the government turned up the license cost on Internet radio so high that nobody can make a profit unless they sell their soul to the RIAA ala Spotify.

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