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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

#861

Post by edmundsauto »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #321
cocoa19 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No ads used to be the main selling point of cable , decades ago, which goes to show that advertising is a cancer and will thoroughly corrupt and consume every communication medium over time.

As far back as I can remember (mid 80s) cable always had ads. The premium channels like HBO did not, but most channels did.

Did you mean premium channels, or was there a time in the early 80s when >50% of channels carried by your provider didn't have ads?

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

#862

Post by Izkata »

fragmede wrote: post #573
data-ottawa wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had Prime Video, and when searching for content I would get told to subscribe to some channel within Prime. Now Crave (in Canada) does the same thing. Netflix doesn't bother integrating with Apple TV's search or aggregation features to try and drive you into the app. The end result is searching for legitimate content is a terrible experience. If it's a result from Prime, I just pass. If it's from Crave, I pass. If…

If HBO and all the other content houses would all go to Netflix and say we'll close down our streaming service and license you all our content, and take our share of a household $60/month, everyone would all make more money, but there's negative infinity chance of that happening; on top of Netflix making their own content, so what's the way forwards? He government could step in and say that online distribution platfo…

> If HBO and all the other content houses would all go to Netflix and say we'll close down our streaming service and license you all our content, and take our share of a household $60/month, everyone would all make more money

That's how it used to work. They all started making their own platforms and pulling content off of Netflix because they thought they could get the same numbers as Netflix and keep all the payments instead of whatever slice Netflix was giving them.

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

#863

Post by snvzz »

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?

On a large enough 4K screen, 720p does not look great, relative to 4K.

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

#864

Post by Izkata »

vineyardmike wrote: post #308
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…

Let’s not forget that “music solved this” ignores the fact that Spotify is not profitable, and may never be due to the record labels cut. Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music may or may not be profitable but are undoubtedly subsidized by their corporate parents. Not sure if Tidal is profitable but they aren’t popular and are much more expensive than people are generally willing to spend. It’s also potentially…

Sounds more like they're riding the line and do sometimes make a profit:

> The company posted a third-quarter operating income of 32 million euros ($34.1 million), its first quarterly profit since 2021, helped by a higher gross margin and lower marketing and personnel costs.

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/spotifys-user...

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

#865

Post by spacebear »

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.

Are they worse than streaming? I don’t know the math, but it seems like constantly sending the same album over the network would use a lot of energy.

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

#866

Post by interestica »

goosedragons wrote: post #659
interestica wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was living in the only english-speaking country in South America. Netflix wouldn't give me French subtitles or secondary audio because apparently south america=spanish for their divisions. I don't see how subtitles would fall under the broader licensing agreements. The subs/langs were available for the same titles in Canada. (More absurd because France is a part of South America via French Guiana).

They do. Somebody had to produce the dubs/subs and it wasn't necessarily the content creator especially if it wasn't the language it was originally created in. Those French subs or dubs could have easily been created by a Canadian firm who got the Canadian rights and wanted to use it in French Canada, then that got licensed off to Netflix. It may have had little involvement with the original creator and they don't ne…

> They do.

Fair enough. But absence of french options for ALL TITLES in that region pointed to a blanket decision.

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

#867

Post by shrimp_emoji »

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…

What's even easier than torrenting? (I refuse to call it "piracy" since that's a life-threatening activity for physical goods subject to totally different economics which would never apply in the post-scarcity utopia that is cyberspace (which businessmen attempt to inflict meatspace's scarcity back onto for money).)

Selling movies and shows DRM-free, like Amazon does with music (but no other software goods for some reason).

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

#868

Post by ndriscoll »

api wrote: post #822
ta_1138 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's far less profitable than you'd think. Many of the competitors in the industry lose money. Licensing fees/production costs/royalties eat a bunch of the money, but the infrastructure to run a streaming service isn't cheap. I know at least one of the competitors that people would call the most successful is paying a 9 figure AWS bill, plus whatever the costs are for all the caching setup that makes most popular con…

9-figure cloud bills? What are they doing? Streaming from AWS? Are they mad? Even with what I'm sure is bulk negotiated bandwidth pricing there is no way this is an economical way to serve bulk content. For those prices you could build out a whole physical IT operation to rack stuff up in data centers and maintain it for a lot less and your bandwidth costs will be a minute fraction of AWS. There's also tons of CDNs t…

Netflix is estimated to be ~10% of global Internet traffic. I'm pretty sure you can't just buy that off the shelf from a CDN, or from AWS for that matter. They're their own CDN. I would guess it's command and control, encoding, and distribution to edge cache servers.

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

#869

Post by Raphael »

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,…

Subscribe to a service for one month when you're ready to start watching a season of a show. Cancel that service when you finish watching the season.

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

#870

Post by recursivecaveat »

spacebear wrote: post #865
apwell23 wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are they worse than streaming? I don’t know the math, but it seems like constantly sending the same album over the network would use a lot of energy.

I was interested so I looked up some numbers: $0.3 per kwh in California * .005Gb mp3 (3m at 128kbps) mp3 * .06 kwh/Gb for internet traffic = .00009 dollars in energy to sling 1 song to your device. Heavy margin bands there for the traffic estimate especially, but Spotify probably has a 95%+ cache hit rate so I think they would struggle to come out worse than the physical disc.
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