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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

#481

Post by norman784 »

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…

Don't forget that when watching in your desktop/laptop is hard to get a good quality, like you have a 4k display, but every service want to serve you 1080p or lower quality when you already pay for the 4k content plan.

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

#482

Post by jiggawatts »

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 go on this rant regularly, and apparently Netflix staff never visit Hacker News, or just don't care.

Interestingly, it took quite a bit of dev effort to make their subtitles this bad. They had to figure out which subset of languages to show in each region, for example.

I'm sure these decisions are made by the same team that refuses to show English subtitles, and instead always uses English for the hearing impaired. Because why would any human not be able to understand English unless they're deaf, right? Also... no French people are deaf. Everyone knows that.

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

#483

Post by vonjuice »

pquki4 wrote: post #140
UtopiaPunk wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piracy also solves the opposite problem of "old" movies and TV shows disappearing from streaming services. Especially since many things are exclusive to streaming platforms with no physical release, after they're removed from a streaming service, piracy is the only way to view such stuff.

In addition, piracy ensures that the "original" version -- whether it was released on DVD, Blu-ray or streaming platform -- is "always" there (as long as someone is seeding). These days streaming services take down 50-year-old content because of racial prototypes or other politically incorrectly content given what (some) people believe in 2024, edit them or never put them on the shelve again. If all they do is to add…

I recently watched a 90s show that, because of the context and the country it was made, they used music with no regard for licensing issues. Essentially, no one would have expected or foreseen that it could run into legal issues at any point.

However, when they put it on netflix they changed the soundtrack for that reason.

Some kind soul uploaded the original versions to youtube.

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

#484

Post by Jochim »

mike_hock wrote: post #425
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.

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.

It's usually blocky compression artifacts that show up at 720p and some 1080p encodes. They're most noticeable in dark or fast moving scenes.

On Netflix, The Sandman looked abysmally bad at 720p. The complex backgrounds became a garbled mess and the dark scenes were filled with banding.

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

#485

Post by bayindirh »

josephg wrote: post #436
freddie_mercury wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

25% of all streaming globally is consumed on a mobile device. During the day (commuting to work, during lunch breaks) that number is much higher. Children's programming is also largely consumed on mobile devices (well, tablets). On small devices like that 4K HDR+ video is kind of meaningless.

It’s also kind of meaningless at regular tv viewing distances. I have a 4k tv but from my couch there’s no way I can tell 4k apart from 1080. And honestly, 480 movies (dvd resolution) still look fine to me too. They have a certain aesthetic softness to them that I quite enjoy. 30 seconds into a 480 film I stop noticing the resolution at all.

That's probably because your TV is seamlessly upscaling every signal it can receive to 4K. Newer TVs are very good at that.

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

#486

Post by iamtedd »

tzs wrote: post #300
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…

I liked cable, except for the price. Cut it by a factor of 3 and I'd probably subscribe again. For movies pretty much everything I wanted to watch would eventually show up. Typically a movie would first be in theaters, then become available for purchase on disc or digital, rental, and be included in one paid streaming service. Sometime later, maybe two years after it was in theaters, it should show up on some non-pre…

Why would you pay to be advertised at?

We can argue about how pervasive advertising is and how subtle it can be, but cable TV literally has commercial ad breaks.

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

#487

Post by Sakos »

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…

Also AV1. I got a 1080p version of a movie encoded in AV1 and it looks pretty damn good at only 1.5GB. The x264 version I have at over 2GB has a lot of obvious artifacting by comparison.

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

#488

Post by getcrunk »

miki123211 wrote: post #92

What are non-tech-savvy people actually using for piracy these days? Torrents require you to own a PC (there's no way to torrent on a phone or smart TV AFAIK), Usenet requires you to have some tech knowledge, same goes for Plex / Jellyfin. I feel like piracy nowadays is a lot harder for an average Joe than it used to be. People now expect that they can turn on their TV, open an app, enter a title in the search box an…

> no way to torrent on a phone

Laughs in android

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

#489

Post by arijun »

bartread wrote: post #467

All right, so just off the top of my head we have: - Netflix - Amazon Prime - Disney+ - HBO+ - Hulu - YouTube Premium - Apple TV - Whatever Sky's offering is called - At least a couple of others that I've forgotten - Plus some kid-specific services that aren't necessarily included in the base subscription (looking at you, Amazon) - And then I haven't even got into music streaming services like Spotify, Amazon Music,…

Videogamedunkey has an entertaining survey of the streaming landscape:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvhv7bgmz64

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

#490

Post by izacus »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #213
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…

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…

Netflix actively fights against these integrations - both on Apple TV and on Google/Android TV they refuse to integrate with the APIs that would give you this exact experience.

They also tend to refuse allowing their customers to watch on platforms they don't like - e.g. they actively blocked casting to Google smart displays and blocked Netflix app from working on Macs and Vision Pro so you can't download things.

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