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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

#781

Post by rekoil »

mandmandam wrote: post #725
rekoil wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I know discs still exist for now, I'm talking about when they suddenly don't anymore. Hopefully that's far far into the future. And as for Spotify exploiting artists, I don't know how accurate this[1] is, but if it is then it seems pretty fair to me? Maybe slightly on the lower end of what I had expected, but not that far off. If you have a million monthly listeners (and today you have access to over 574M monthl…

I don't think you have any idea how much work, luck, work, talent and work it takes to get to a million monthly listens. "Zero hours of work" - I know artists get underestimated, but this is next level. Btw, taking the very top .1% of earners in a field, like movie or pop stars, and using their returns to imply that musicians and actors are fairly compensated, is a very silly thing to do. Tbh, as someone who knows a…

Totally agree with you CEOs are overcompensated. There should be a law regulating how much more a CEO can make over the lowest rung in the company, the problem is there are just so many workarounds to that (stock options, spinning off the actual workforce into a sub-entity, etc) that it would never work.

I do understand that a million monthly listeners is a large amount, sorry I was over-exaggerating a bit in my last comment. My point was that Spotify helps with discoverability through their playlist-generation, but I guess that doesn't automatically mean anything more than the odd play here and there, and not necessarily more "monthly active listeners".

I'd love if artists made more on Spotify than they do today, but isn't the big problem all the middle-men in the music industry? It's my understanding that companies like Spotify shorten this ladder at least a little bit, but thinking about it again I guess I agree that the pay is a little too low.

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

#782

Post by Liftyee »

Loughla wrote: post #738
snvzz wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3. lets me watch 4k streams on my haiku, aros, openbsd systems. Artificial DRM-based restrictions ultimately mean not getting the quality you pay for. Netflix specifically becomes 720p garbage. But I can just rely on less official sources. In this case I get a DRM-free, very high quality file that plays everywhere, forever.

>720p garbage I'm genuinely concerned there's something wrong with my eyes. 720p looks fine, I think? Is there that huge of a difference?

What size and resolution is your screen? 720p on a 4k 27" looks visibly pixelated but on a phone looks just fine...

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

#783

Post by rakoo »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #597
roenxi wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, furthermore, piracy isn't stealing. It is a major point here that the initial owner of the thing still possesses the thing. They're trying to assert some unnatural right of control over what other people do. It isn't even all that clear why this is a good idea. I can see how it makes sense for legislators because of the presumably significant kickbacks they get from lobbyists; but there is a still an open questi…

The original owner no longer possesses the commercial value of the thing. That's what you steal when you pirate. People have been buying into shared cultures for centuries. Sometimes being able to afford access to a certain culture - and excluding those who can't - is part of the culture itself. In a bottom-up cultures people are happy to pay because they feel part of the scene and they want to support it. A big part…

> The original owner no longer possesses the commercial value of the thing.

Not exactly: the original owner still has all the commercial value, as decades of piracy has shown that commercial pieces still exist.

What the owner has lost though is monopoly over distribution and thus money exchange. It is possible to get the content from other places, and maybe, maybe not give some money back. The proliferation of exclusive content on numerous platforms only confirms that.

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

#784

Post by randomdata »

galahad_ wrote: post #232
philipov wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The money's not on the table if people can and will leave. That's the point of competition. Piracy is entirely in the spirit of free market capitalism: the equilibrium price of a good with infinite supply is 0.

The problem ist that a production of f.e. a movie costs money. If the people that make movies don't earn money, they will not make any movies. So they have to earn that money somehow. If the price of their good is 0 why should they bother with filming?

If the market sees movies as being worthless (a price of 0), why would they even consider making movies? Clearly nobody wants them.

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

#785

Post by Liftyee »

Aeolun wrote: post #655

So what I do now is, I pay for all these services, use absolutely nothing, and then I pirate all my content anyway. People (presumably) get their money, and I get to watch without bullshit from the convenience of my own home.

Way to give them free money for not improving their offering...

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

#786

Post by justsomehnguy »

nerdix wrote: post #772
justsomehnguy wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the privacy scene lol > Also I think the shift to SSDs from spinning rust delayed the adoption of widespread video piracy 10-ish years ago Huh? 500GB (and more) drives became available at 2006 and by 2008 dropped below $150. Also there was no demand for extra-high-wanna-see-every-original-pixel quality, so XviD releases with atrocious quality but a fine file size were common and were fine on 40-80-250GB drives in 2…

A 500GB HDD, yes. I'm thinking of the person who had a laptop in 2010-2012 and either replaced their large capacity 2.5 inch HDD with a smaller capacity 128GB or 256GB SSD for the massive performance increase or bought one that had an SSD preinstalled. This would also be a shared drive so it isn't dedicated to media. 2010-2012 is also when most folks would have already upgraded to a HD display and so there was more d…

Nah, by 2012 newcomers didn't bought SSDs en masse yet, USB drives were extremely common (I think my USB3 Transcend 25M3 is from that time) and some still used mobile racks, slowly replaced by USB dock stations.

Most of the time people replaced HDD to SSD in the laptops only to use ODD caddy to move their HDD there.

By 2010 storage was not a problem, at all.

If anything the torrenting reached it's peak ~2008 and on a slow decline (but not in absolute numbers, because the userbase is still rising) ever since, because by 2010 almost any music could be found on YouTube (popular ofc, not something obscure what is known by 3 greybeards on the whole planet) and even a lot of movies too. For the parts of the world where broadband was still costly or capped you could always go to the store and buy 5-in-1 DVD for $2 (talk about quality, eh). After that the succesful multi year campaign by Apple to convince the user what it doesn't need to own music and what it is totally okay to stream "your" music over the cellular networks, along with %he rise of the streaming services, moved the torrenting to a niche of nerds (only lossless music!), nerds (248 variants of StarWars) or nerds (anime).

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

#787

Post by godshatter »

apwell23 wrote: post #774
mi_z wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify isn't a great example because barely anyone makes money with it. It only works because the musicians are exploited to the max. The reason this won't happen with film and TV is because of unionisation. Why not just buy discs? People keep repeating that discs are dying but so many releases are coming out there is way more than I can buy.

> Why not just buy discs? because they are bad for the environment.

Buy mp3s.

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

#788

Post by illegalsmile »

CaptainMarvel wrote: post #554
rekoil wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Spotify’s offline content was not been reliable for me. I am rarely offline, but recently I was taking a flight and my whole library was unavailable. I was so annoyed that I actually cancelled my subscription.

I was on a Grand Canyon river trip and offline content decided to offline itself giving me no music for three weeks. That was annoying and made me cancel my subscription for a couple years. I tried Apple Music but I think Spotify does a better job making recommendations for me.

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

#789

Post by johnchristopher »

mgoetzke wrote: post #537
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…

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 selec…

I worked for a while in the DVD authoring industry and we always left a secret code (always the same) to bypass mandatory clips. I don't know if it carry on to BR but I don't see why it wouldn't (until everyone got on the Internet and then clients hear of it and check for the code themselves).
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