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Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

torrentfreak.com

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

#641

Post by offices »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #397
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.

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.

So for 75%, including Youtube, it is meaningful?

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

#642

Post by offices »

10729287 wrote: post #454
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…

Sorry to focus on such a detail but VBR nevern been the standard in the Piracy scene. Back in the days it was 192kbps

My memory of old what.cd's and today's Red snatch counters disagrees with you. FLAC ~ V0 > 320

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

#643

Post by BlueTemplar »

thisislife2 wrote: post #520
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.

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 enc…

And by "today", you mean a decade ago, which is when Popcorn Time got popular.

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

#644

Post by pdimitar »

prepend wrote: post #224
Geisterde wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which could be rapidly eclipsed, my synology nas is capable of following RSS feeds for new content, torrenting that content, and serving that content through my plex with audio options, subtitles, descriptions, cover art, ratings, age restrictions etc. (All behind a vpn of course) If I invested a weekend (4 days, maybe 2-3 weekends...) I could probably figure it out, and never ever ever again deal with the BS streami…

You need to invest about 10 minutes. It’s not complicated at all and makes a much better experience.

Are there good step-by-step guides? I am on the fence but researching this seems exhausting so far.

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

#645

Post by artk42 »

bawolff wrote: post #10

> Piracy also threatens to damage our business, as its fundamental proposition to consumers is so compelling and difficult to compete against: virtually all content for free,” Netflix writes. People emphasize the "free" part, but it really is the "all content" part that makes piracy wins. Especially if you are not in the USA, often specific content isn't available at any price. Even if it is, its split across 5 billi…

How dare you to be so exactly right. Those corp data-driven pms are destroying monopolies from inside with one-fits billion features, which is a perfect illustration of evolutionary self-regulation. Protocols are the future of internet competition, not really products as knew it..

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

#646

Post by aljgz »

As someone who rarely watch movies/series, I was paying ~100$/month worth of subscriptions until I cancelled most recently. Why? Content fragmentation is mentioned by everyone, but to me, the main problem was that I could never get a proper watching experience even after finding what I wanted:

1- English subtitles only available with CC: I want subtitles because as a non-native English speaker I cannot understand some of the accents. I hate it when the subtitle says: "glooming musinca playing"

2- Quality issues: I'm watching on a 4k OLED TV. Watching the matrix reloaded for the 10th time, and seeing the actors appear in two places because of some weird compression artifact pulled the plug for me.

3- Quality issues: I used to buy Crave's 4k subscription. It limits content to 720p on my Linux machine. Let's imagine a world in which I'm OK with it, IT DOES NOT GET PROPERLY FULL SCREEN ON ANY OF MY MONITORS/TV. I paid for a 65" TV, I want to see a video fill at least one of the dimensions.

4- UX issues: Sometimes I pause because I want to check something in this scene. Do not dim the scene, I'm not interested in all the details you are spitting to the screen.

5- UX issues: I'm not OK with you showing me ads before I start watching my show

6- UX issues: Sluggish apps on some TVS/streaming devices

7- On my Chromecast, made by Google, I want my guest to use a guest session on YouTube premium, to not mess up my recommendations, ads start playing. This is the same device, I've not even signed out, just using a guest session.

8- I can keep going on

I understand that license holders play content availability, but the problems above could easily be solved if any of the streaming services cared about their customer satisfaction. I canceled because even when I found something to watch, I never enjoyed the experience. Now I'm an inch away from canceling YouTube premium, and then Spotify.

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

#647

Post by Mindwipe »

runevault wrote: post #409
hedora wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could earn their money by not actively pissing off their customers. The streaming industry proved that consumers prefer paying for convenient streaming over messing around with privacy. For some reason, they feel they need to burn their own industry down in order to prove that people prefer piracy (or not watching) over inconvenient streaming setups. Is anyone really surprised by the current outcome?

Everyone else saw Netflix making a lot of money and decided just making a healthy amount of money renting the rights to them they had to try and make more money releasing their own service. Gotta love modern capitalistic greed. I wish streaming services was like movie theaters where production companies are not allowed to own theaters (aka the distribution network).

> Everyone else saw Netflix making a lot of money

At the time Netflix was literally making a cash loss despite paying less than the cost of production for most of it's output.

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

#648

Post by dns_snek »

n42 wrote: post #332
rexf wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're actually watching content (a whole movie, a series, etc), the total actual usage of the service easily eclipses any time spent bouncing around the UI?

That may be true, but inconveniently, it wouldn’t allow the parent poster to rage fantasize about how stupid the product team at Netflix must be

Or maybe they're right and that's why piracy is growing rapidly. I share most of their complaints and it's a big part of why I quit paying for subscriptions.

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

#649

Post by prepend »

hedora wrote: post #257
prepend wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to invest about 10 minutes. It’s not complicated at all and makes a much better experience.

Setting it up properly probably takes a day or so. Which HDDs should you put in the synology (or are there SSDs that make more sense; need to check $/GB…)? Which VPN service makes the most sense? Which RSS thingy is as good as Prime, Netflix, HBO, etc, etc, combined?

Good point. I assumed the synology was already set up as a NAS.

That takes a while.

Setting up the rss is just minutes.

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

#650

Post by BlueTemplar »

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.

Depends on the movie I guess. Planet Earth 2 is a jaw-dropping experience on even an average UHD-1 tv (and it's not ALL about the HDR, I've tried turning it off). Distinctly more impressive than Planet Earth 1 (FullHD only).

It's a real shame that the same store that sold Blu-Ray players didn't have it and I had to pirate it (and also skip buying the player).

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