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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

#531

Post by maccard »

martindbp wrote: post #465
josephg wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 TV and games are meaningfully different. Most people tend to watch way more number of shows in a year than buying/playing video games. Video games have more replayability, so it's something you need to "own" rather than stream. Therefore, subscriptions for games are not a big thing yet (I doubt it will ever be). As it stands now, if a game I want is not on Steam, that's OK, I can just install another game sto…

> Therefore, subscriptions for games are not a big thing yet (I doubt it will ever be)

World of warcraft has had a subscription for 20 years and is wildly successful. PSN has a monthly subscription where you get 2-3 games per month added to your account that you can play as long as you're still subscribed. Gamepass has 25+ million subscribers [0]

> I'm not OK with paying $70 a month

Honest question, why not? That's what cable TV cost 15 years ago, and $70 now has the purchasing power of ~$50 then.

[0] https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/09/15/xbox-game-pass-30-m...

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

#532

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

MichaelMug wrote: post #523
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 read this same thing a lot on Reddit and HN. It surprising to me on HN because I would assume most people on here are making good money. For my family here is the monthly spend with taxes for my area included: HBO Max $ 13.53 Hulu $ 7.21 Disney+ $ 0.18 (w/ Hulu) Paramount+ w/ Showtime $ 10.82 Apple TV+ $ 10.81 AMC+ $ 7.56 Amazon Prime $12.53 $62.64/month. Now, about 20 years ago in 2004 my parents had basic cable a…

oh no. you are trying to set up a full blown alternative. that's not how the majority of world does piracy.

here is how it goes.

you have a laptop/pc. you go to tbp, search for the top 100 for movies/tv shows and download the torrent, watch it and delete the file to save space.

what you are describing is off-limits for majority of the world.

i have rented seedboxes back in 2016 for 2 months to get those "points" to get to a private tracker. never before, never after.

i have been using the above tbp+vlc method on a daily basis since 2005-06.

only recently lookmovie and other streaming sites have made it a bit easier.

oh, also, there is an outlier.

popcorntime. it JUST WORKS. I used it on the 2nd day of its initial release, i saw the whole weeks drama with death threats and the subsequent forks that arose. i have been using that as well so i am confirming and NOT PRETENDING that piracy is easier that actually paying for stuff.

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

#533

Post by themoonisachees »

Daz1 wrote: post #452
yukkuri wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If that were the case, all games including AAA would be exclusively multiplayer. While there have been some MP-only games (because that's a good strategy to acquire users), that's not been the case. In fact, you can get MP on cracked games through steam by abusing the API.

GabeN was right, it's a service problem. Sure, when I was a teen I would crack all my games, but I had no money and was never going to be a paying costumer. Now that I have money I can spend, and since steam has acquired me as a user, if I want to buy a game I will check steam. I still crack some games because I do not have infinite money, but it's always because I checked the price and decided it was too much first.

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

#534

Post by cvalka »

Daz1 wrote: post #450
mdavidn wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Stole" isn't the right word either. Pirating does not deprive any legal entity of ownership. It's merely copyright infringement. It also likely circumvented access controls, thereby running afoul of DMCA. But it is not theft. I'm speaking as someone who also never pirates. I'd rather not watch something and spend my time doing something else.

It is absolutely theft, nobody is falling for that semantics argument - you're depriving a rights holder of revenue that they would otherwise gained.

No, it's absolutely not theft and courts agree.

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

#535

Post by finaard »

MichaelMug wrote: post #523
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 read this same thing a lot on Reddit and HN. It surprising to me on HN because I would assume most people on here are making good money. For my family here is the monthly spend with taxes for my area included: HBO Max $ 13.53 Hulu $ 7.21 Disney+ $ 0.18 (w/ Hulu) Paramount+ w/ Showtime $ 10.82 Apple TV+ $ 10.81 AMC+ $ 7.56 Amazon Prime $12.53 $62.64/month. Now, about 20 years ago in 2004 my parents had basic cable a…

> Is piracy easier? Legality aside you need a seed box, membership to specific sites, and VPN. Which can add up to more than $30/month just to download pirated content. Not to mention the time investment in figuring out how to get the movies and tv shows to your family members on all of their devices.

This part is trivial nowadays: sonarr/radarr and related handle discovery and library management, and jellyfin does the playback.

Reasons I got back into piracy included trying to watch a series with my wife, and finding it gone. Seasons missing while streaming, UI becoming worse (for the last few years of Netflix I fully relied on an external paid service to discover new things on Netflix because of that). More and more content I cared about being removed, with lots of content I don't care about getting added - while price kept going up _and_ account sharing policies being put in that'd match my non-account sharing use case.

I'm still paying for Disney+ - though based on the Netflix experience I'm adding everything I'm interested in to my local library.

Amazon Prime got kicked out after they got too expensive - and even while I had prime I never actually used the video player as the UI is so horrible, but already back then pirated all the stuff I was paying for.

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

#536

Post by fragmede »

MichaelMug wrote: post #523
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 read this same thing a lot on Reddit and HN. It surprising to me on HN because I would assume most people on here are making good money. For my family here is the monthly spend with taxes for my area included: HBO Max $ 13.53 Hulu $ 7.21 Disney+ $ 0.18 (w/ Hulu) Paramount+ w/ Showtime $ 10.82 Apple TV+ $ 10.81 AMC+ $ 7.56 Amazon Prime $12.53 $62.64/month. Now, about 20 years ago in 2004 my parents had basic cable a…

A seed box and a VPN is maybe $15 a month, and there are private torrent sites that don't charge monthly membership fees. If you've got a expansive family with lots of kids and want to fully replace Netflix with Jellyfin on a libel server it's a bunch more work, but torrenting shows onto your laptop to watch is fairly easy.

At the end of the day, for someone that's motivated to not give companies money because they see them as greedy rather than a way to compensate the creators, it becomes a labor of spite. That $500 budget NAS, downloading content in native resolution so there's no transcode box needed, spread across all the families and cousins, is easily paid for in car repair favors or what else the family has to offer the uncle or aunt running the pirate video service. $500 vs $60/month? that's just 9 months. 3 if you figure there are three households where you're saving them $60/month.

Personally, I rotate membership between one service and just limit my own tv time, but piracy really is too easy if you know what you're doing and are morally flexible.

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

#537

Post by mgoetzke »

izacus wrote: post #495
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…

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 aud…

They cannot help themselves. Just like buying and watching a DVD/bluray was much worse than a pirated copy, as the DVD/bluray made you sit through an increasing amount of unskippable content. From "do not steal this" to "not for kids" or, worst of all, "did you see this other content?".

Btw. Ads in front of streaming content I just selected, to tell me about other streaming content on the same service I did NOT select should also be on the NO list.

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

#538

Post by themoonisachees »

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,…

Competition is good, but this isn't competition, almost all of these platforms catalogs are mutually exclusive, so instead of competing to be the platform with the lowest cost/best UX/ network effect, they're just competing to get shows off of another platform and onto theirs, to the detriment of the consumer.

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

#539

Post by mgoetzke »

rekoil wrote: post #529
izacus wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aud…

I personally find that Spotifys offline content has worked reliably over the years. You just gotta remember that when you get a new device you have to go to library and click download and then leave Spotify open for a few hours. Spotify is also a great example of how to beat piracy. I haven't downloaded an mp3 file since I got a Spotify Premium account in 2007. OK that's probably a slight overstatement, but it's near…

Apple Music and Youtube Music both suffer from the issue of vanishing content.

I have playlist where a growing percentage of songs are grayed out, not available, while they do exist in the store, just as part of a different album now.

Very frustrating. Does Spotify do that ?

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

#540

Post by sgift »

It's easy to compete against Netflix. Sit down with the other providers in your space and find a way to make it clear to them that people want one streaming provider for everything and they want an ad-free option at an acceptable price point. Piracy was done for when you were at your top. You (meaning the industry) fucked this up yourselves.
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