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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

#491

Content fragmentation, platform fragmentation, geo-locking, DRMs, "woke" censorship and revisionism... no wonder piracy is on the rise, again. At some point I had like 3 different paying streaming services, and they still failed to provide enough content of interest. All canceled now. The dollar bin dvds at my local thrift store is a much better offer... this and piratebay.

>"woke" censorship and revisionism

you being the only comment in the whole thread giving this as a reason makes me think this might not really be a reason

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

#492

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…

Same problem with Netflix absolutely no local subtitles/dubs available.

Meanwhile one local streamer telecom has regional content + Disney for 7 Euros a month with dubs/subs.

Another local telecom streamer has regional content + HBO with subs/dubs for 6 Euros a month.

Not sure how they got HBO and Disney so cheap but these are multi-country regional streamers - half government / Scandinavian owned.

So Netflix had to go.

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

#493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 diff…

1440p isn't really available on official streaming platforms, so it is indeed a lot more rare.

It's pretty much only available on original encodes, i.e. BluRay rips, this makes it a format that very rarely seen on currently airing shows, which are mostly webrips from official streaming platforms.

You'll often see it alongside the usual resolutions for movies that have since been released on disk.

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

#494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)?

Important to know, authorities usually do not go after downloaders/consumers of piracy. But those who distribute it - but if you participate in bittorrent - you are distributing.

And it is really easy to track the IPs, as it is fundamentally part of how bittorrent works that everyone in the network has the IPs of the other participants. So a VPN is advisable.

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

#495

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…

Yeah, also pirated content has:

- 4K HDR video, not whatever the heck the buggy client delivers.

- Atmos/TrueHD audio track that actually works, not whatever the broken app delivers (I'm looking at you Sky and rest of the ilk that still deliver HBO content with stereo).

- Subtitles for ALL the languages, not just one or two. And those languages don't disappear when I go on a vacation, leaving me stuck with german audio and french subtitles.

- Properly functioning offline playback for when I'm traveling, not randomly broken and disappearing offline mode (Netflix, Spotify and YouTube all blessed me with "all your downloaded content is gone" experience on long flights).

- Works on all my devices not a random subset independent on which way greedy execs tried to extract "ecosystem" money from my playback device manufacturer. Looking at you ATV+.

- Is actually available in my region and doesn't randomly disappear from my devices just because I decided to travel to visit my parents or have some time off.

- Doesn't randomly disappear after 6 months when I started watching the series because some license expired.

As you can see, I really tried to pay to get content from these people. And all I got was bunch of frustration. F'em, they brought this upon themselves for being user hostile arseholes. Again.

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

#496
post #52
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low price and no ads were two of the main selling points to ditch cable (along with stream whenever you want). We reached the point were price is almost as high as cable was (with the standard 4-5 subscriptions), and we have ads. This is not a surprise to most though, the question has always been when would it happen.

We are no longer under zero interest rates. Things have to actually be profitable.

We are no longer under zero interest rates and I need fuel for my Jet(s) and my Yacht(s).

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

#498

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…

There was a wonderful point made by Gabe Newell a few years ago on this. He said the only thing you need to do to “beat piracy” is provide a better service than piracy offers. And that’s pretty easy, for all manner of reasons. I thought he was way too optimistic at the time - but here I am years later with hundreds of games in my steam library. I haven’t pirated a video game in years. I think Gabe’s rule is like grav…

I think media like TV/Movies might be fundamentally different than games because of how easy it is to serve pirated content. With games there's a lot of friction with getting cracks working and risks with malware while with TV/Movies you just watch them in your browser. Recently my friends showed me a pirate site that I'm in awe hasn't been taken down. Don't think I can post a link here but it has all the things I'd expect from a paid streaming service (slick and fast ui, large catalog with good discovery options, high quality streams, no lag, random ui niceties like a dimmer switch, skip op/ed and multi language subs). Being honest as long as something like this is available I don't really see what a site like netflix could offer that would convince me to pay.

Actually the more I think about it the less I understand how it hasn't been taken down.

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

#499
post #424
post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ev…

Porn is free. They are running the same services. They have proved global distribution is possible. Pretty much like Youtube and Tiktok.

Media and Entertainment sector has all kinds of bizarre economics cause it's used by the Telcos(check what AT&T and Comcast own in ME sector), the Tech firms (google/youtube, amazon, netflix, apple) to play empire defense and market capture games.

Demand is not decided by the consumer. Or marketing depts won't be getting the budgets they do for demand engineering from their tech and telco overloads. But all that free cash dries up or slows downs once the market capture phase is over which is what has happened with the end of the streaming wars. Disney, Viacom et al have realized they can't compete against tech platforms or telco subsidized shops on the distribution front.

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

#500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every episode is on Netflix in Australia, not sure what you were looking at

Possibly true today... was it true a month ago, or will it be true half a year later? I see this contend constantly coming and going thing on Spotify also, and it really annoys me. (and no, I won't pay to google even if their crap is better, i'l rather buy CD-s and rent a warehouse for them, or pirate content)

In germany, Rick and Morty on Netflix still only goes to Season 6. But Season 7 was out long ago ... (and it was worth pirating it).
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