Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly • Hacker News Board

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

#511

Post by midasuni » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 8:45 AM UTC

charcircuit wrote: post #479

midasuni wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”

>What is the benefit to the rights holder in having a “secure device” The goal is to make it expensive for it to even make it to a pirate site. We will get to the point where it will require a new hardware exploit to be found for each show that gets cracked. As the industry gets better at security the price per exploit will go up to eventually not be economical to continue doing.

Given it just needs to be done once, and a hdcp stripping device is easy to get, how does that work?

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

#512

Post by izacus » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 8:45 AM UTC

baby_souffle wrote: post #186

al_borland wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not about an individual website, it’s about the industry. It’s not that Netflix, or any other service, is hard to use on its own. It’s the fragmentation of the content that makes it hard to use. This was solved for with music where pretty much every service has pretty much every song. People don’t need multiple music services, they just pick the one that best fits their style and needs. This is what the movie an…

> It’s the fragmentation of the content that makes it hard to use. I wish somebody could get all the media execs in a room and just deliver a simple message: "You can't compete on price; your competition is free. You must compete on experience if you're to compete at all." With just a few hours worth of time and effort, it's possible to get a pretty sophisticated and automatic system set up that essentially makes get…

They did... and the execs ordered everyone from OS, hardware to software companies to add more DRM instead.

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

#513

Post by prmoustache » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 8:46 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #309

WWLink wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I support your move, it's better than piracy. The problem with piracy is if you become a fan of a series and gossip with your friends about it, now you're marketing that company's crappy service. It's a weird way to go about things.

It's weird because TV is also culture . Game of Thrones isn't just some random piece of personal, single-player entertainment: it was, and is, an important cultural phenomenon for at least half of the planet. That's what makes the dynamics so weird: it's not just, or even primarily, about your personal entertainment - there are social aspects involved, from wanting to belong with your peer group (e.g. talk about late…

> It's weird because TV is also culture. Game of Thrones isn't just some random piece of personal, single-player entertainment: it was, and is, an important cultural phenomenon for at least half of the planet. > > That's what makes the dynamics so weird: it's not just, or even primarily, about your personal entertainment - there are social aspects involved, from wanting to belong with your peer group (e.g. talk about latest GoT episode with your cow-orkers at the water cooler)

OTOH if you don't have that in common with other people, you just talk about other things. It is the same thing with soccer for example which is the #1 subject around coffee machines for men (and now increasingly women).

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

#514

Post by MattPalmer1086 » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 8:46 AM UTC

drewzero1 wrote: post #382

MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are right, I misread the point being made. I still think piracy is the wrong thing to do, and definitely not a moral imperative.

I do agree that restricted availability is one of the key drivers though.

I did once pirate a second series of a TV show when it was not possible to stream it in my country (after I exhausted every possible way to pay for it). These days I just wait to buy DVDs and stick them on Plex. Takes a bit longer but it's not that urgent, and I'm not dependent on a streaming service to access it.

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

#515

Post by izacus » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 8:47 AM UTC

secretsatan wrote: post #505

patrickaljord wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This has also bugged me, they must have access to every language, yet they just don't. I'm sure it's licensing issues. At least normally they have have the original audio versions, but just recently I saw that in Switzerland, they released Suicide squad but the german dubbed version only, why??

> "I'm sure it's licensing issues."

I find this term so funny because it kinda makes the problem sound like a physics problem given down from some deity. When it's just the content provider choosing to screw you over by writing a contract that includes regional exclusivity.

Especially when these same companies managed just fine when they put all languages on a DVD disc.

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

#516

Post by porbelm » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 8:48 AM UTC

tasuki wrote: post #443

plastic_bag wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's still YIFY-quality video, which is a few steps below HBO/MAX, which happens to be among the lowest quality paid streams. You don't necessarily have to pick YIFY. Qxr's uploads are a much better comparison. x265 encoded 1080p (with 5 - 6.5Mbps bitrate) from the highest quality sources and they look very good even on 55" 4K panels.

Are these, like, famous pirates or something?

They are well-known pirate groups, yes.

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

#517

Post by prmoustache » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 8:49 AM UTC

I think the #1 competitor to netflix is not piracy but short video platforms: youtube, tiktok and instagram really.

A lot of people I know would rather spend 2 hours scrolling short videos of these social medias than have to decide on a show to watch. People have come at a level of lazyness they don't decide what to do and would rather have apps feeding them with stuff to watch they didn't even ask for. And despite removing accounts of all social medias I still get trapped sometimes. A few days ago I was looking for some youtube videos to diy something. When I got the information I needed I ended up watching a nearly 2h video of fails on youtube instead of doing the actual thing I just learned about.

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

#518

Post by chmod775 » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 9:02 AM UTC

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.

Do they even stream 1080p to Linux devices by default now? I always had to use a browser extension to make it do that[1].

However the extension seems to be gone.[2]

[1] https://github.com/vladikoff/netflix-1080p-firefox?tab=readm...

[2] https://github.com/vladikoff/netflix-1080p-firefox/issues/28

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

#519

Post by sph » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 9:03 AM UTC

j1elo wrote: post #38

Only 6hrs ago this comment summarizes a big part of what's wrong with the streaming model today [1]: > Disney+ removed Crater ~7 weeks after it was released, purely to reduce residuals and claim losses for lower tax bills[2]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39252151 [2]: https://kotaku.com/disney-streaming-crater-tax-rort-scam-wri...

It's a bit like when I delete the movie torrent to free up some disk space.

Thankfully there are other seeds you can download from.

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

#520

Post by thisislife2 » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 9:07 AM UTC

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.

I personally think streaming services are overestimating that the 2k or 4k streams that they offer is a huge advantage they have over "pirate services". I don't think they have properly researched the consumer psychology or the network effect that is making piracy popular among a large segment of the middle-class and lower strata.

An hour long 30 Mbps 4k HDR+ video file will be roughly around 10-15+ GB with H.265 encoding.

As others have pointed out, a well encoded 720p or 1080p video offers a decent enough viewing experience quickly at far, far smaller sizes than a 2k or 4k videos (file sizes will be 10 to 20 times smaller at these resolutions). Note also that some pirates encode videos with the CPU, than using hardware encoders, and thus these videos tend to have a higher quality with better compression (hardware encoders, while blazing fast, tend to do a poorer job than CPU video encoding). Thus, these smaller sized video files don't require high-speed internet, can be downloaded fast and also encourages people to save the videos longer. This allows some to create their own personal video library. So a side effect of this is that people store and share these videos longer, and their smaller sizes now allow streaming torrents of popular content. Some torrent sites today have even started offering this through the browser itself - so non-techies now don't even have to download any torrent software and learn how to use it. That's near-Netflix like convenience, with more content, for "free" - and that's what these services are up against.

We also can't ignore that 4k videos are often only available at higher tier subscription plan. So even if Netflix, or other streaming services, think that some of these people can be enticed to subscribe to their services, with their high quality 2k or 4k videos, they will have to offer them at a lower price to beat the "free" model of piracy. (It's very hard to compete with "free" - just look at Google search engine's market share and its non-free competitors' market share to understand this).

All this is of course irrespective of the fact that 2k and 4k resolution HDR+ videos are also increasingly available now a days on torrents too.