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Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

torrentfreak.com

561–570 of 940 posts

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

#561

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…

It's not about the money, but about convenience, as is often repeated. I regularly buy games on Steam yet pirate movies.

It can take 30+ minutes and multiple account registrations to figure out whether a movie is even accessible where I live in the preferred language at a given day. I don't watch them every day, so a subscription model doesn't make much sense for me. I'd also pay for interruptions in the stream, lower resolution/quality, and in some cases ads. Why would I ever do that?

> Legality aside you need...

I don't need a NAS. Transcoding content doesn't need special separate hardware. Technical know-how is also required to troubleshoot streaming issues. Backup is always necessary. Membership to specific sites? Never had one.

If piracy was the dark art you make it seem then it would never be significant enough to make Netflix worry about it.

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

#562

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…

> the services have taken the piss? Which services do you mean? Netflix? Or do you mean the other 7 services, which didn’t exist back then. There was a brief window of time when streaming was able to compete with piracy (free) and it’s when there was just one streaming service. Netflix was able to have a robust (if not comprehensive) catalogue (because it had no competitors), and was dedicated to user experience (bec…

Aren't they raking in millions or billions now? Not enough money to pay for the deals now? What is stopping them?

Also their browser and software limitations are of their own making. Do away with those, and I might even consider a subscription. Obviously I will not, if they continue to discriminate against me.

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

#563
post #529

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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 ?

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

#564
post #305

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> 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…

Right, it's not like piracy is literally free. There are still monetary costs, software maintenance work that needs to be done, and risks involved. In that 'golden age' of Netflix, getting a Netflix subscription was a much better choice for loads of people. But now it seems to be swinging back the other way again. It's just so frustrating, because all these content owners actually had a good-enough solution to most p…

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

#566

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 think this is right.

There are like 3 animes I wanted to watch on netflix, but they only have dutch subtitles, Trigun had dutch subtitles for like 4 years until they removed it in the netherlands.

I have to play whack a mole with 4-5 streaming services to find out where the show is 'at the moment'.

The tv apps are so garbage.. each company is pushing more and more visual animations crap, it has gotten to the point that I cant even scroll the titles properly.

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

#567
post #209

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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

When I quit pirating music, I remember the standard being either LAME -V2 or --alt-preset standard which both are VBR https://opentrackers.org/scenerules.org/html/2007_MP3.html

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

#568
post #52
post #22

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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.

businesses don't need to be just profitable, they need growth and it can be achieved by increasing nr of users, or prices, or some sort of upselling. As result prices will always increase as much as possible to keep most users but grow the profit

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

#569
post #298
post #204

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There are websites you can go to and stream any tv show or movie for free in a couple of clicks. It's impossible to get cheaper and easier (ip law) than that.

Don't those have their own problems, though? Like their domain gets blocked, so you have to find it again. They video quality is just kinda ok, and if you want a copy to stream to your TV, it's either not possible, or won't look very good. Years ago my partner used to use some of these sites to watch some foreign-language shows that are just not possible to get in the US at all, and it just always seemed so sketchy a…

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

#570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

But didn’t the cable TV cost include the content delivery and hardware? You need to add the cost of your internet connection on top of that, plus whatever box you use to play to the TV etc.
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