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Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

torrentfreak.com

921–930 of 940 posts

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

#921
post #917

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't need anything like that, including paying any attention to an opinion of an internet ignoramus about what I am or am not. You can shove your moralization where the sun does not shine until you hear it click. I pointed out the deficiencies in your rants already, so I am done, and you can keep throwing names around as much as you want, nobody really cares.

Doesn't change a thing. Convenience doesn't matter. Owning a subscription and then subsequently pirating an illegal version (which I'm positive it's not all you're doing) doesn't mean fuck all. I own it, I want you to obtain said media through one venue. That's my fucking right. Even if that venue makes you jump through 30 hoops doesn't mean shit. You don't jump through the hoops your a fucking thief. All you need to…

You seem to labor under the delusion that whatever is the current state of the caselaw is always the pinnacle of human moral development and doing anything any part of this vast (also incomprehensible and many times contradictory) array of regulations forbids, or failing to do anything it commands, is an ultimate moral sin because moral is whatever the local magistrate court says it is. I don't think it's the case, no matter how many ways of working the word "fucking" into a sentence you can demonstrate.

> They'd throw you in jail if it didn't cost so much.

They can throw me in jail for liking a tweet or wearing a wrong garment or ingesting a wrong plant. So what?

> You feel fucking guilty and you're ashamed of being an ass hole thief.

Thank you for telling me what I feel. How else would I find out? Please do tell me more about my feelings, I love it when people who know nothing about me still able to figure out everything about what I feel in each particular moment. They must be so smart and perceptive, it's a really enriching experience to interact with such people. My gratitude knows no bounds.

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

#922

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average cost ist always higher than the marginal cost for digital products, for obvious reasons. So you are literally saying free markets don't work for digital products.

That's not true. There are a number of obvious instances of it working. YouTube/TikTok/etc.: The market price is zero, the service itself and much of the content is funded through ads. Debian/Firefox/etc.: The market price is zero, the development is provided through user contributions/donations. Substack/OnlyFans/etc.: The market price is not zero and then the content is often available for free anyway, but enough p…

I'm afraid you don't really understand what you're writing about. Terms such as marginal cost and average cost are used only for goods, which are sold on a free market for a price. Your examples are services or freeware, you can't calculate marginal cost and average cost for a service or freeware.

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

#923
post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's usually blocky compression artifacts that show up at 720p and some 1080p encodes. They're most noticeable in dark or fast moving scenes. On Netflix, The Sandman looked abysmally bad at 720p. The complex backgrounds became a garbled mess and the dark scenes were filled with banding.

> blocky compression artifacts that show up at 720p It's just the shitty compression, not the mark of 720p. This is extremely evident on YouTube now, for a couple of years if the source content is 4K native, they downgrade it to 1080p (so you can stream it with a comfortable bitrate), but despite a good enough resolution (1080p! 2K!) and the need to just downgrade the resolution (yes, double re-encoding, but) the 2K…

You're right that it's not a problem inherent to 720p itself. I was using it as a proxy since the issues weren't present in Netflix's 4k encoding and it's more familiar than other measures.

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

#924
post #921

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't change a thing. Convenience doesn't matter. Owning a subscription and then subsequently pirating an illegal version (which I'm positive it's not all you're doing) doesn't mean fuck all. I own it, I want you to obtain said media through one venue. That's my fucking right. Even if that venue makes you jump through 30 hoops doesn't mean shit. You don't jump through the hoops your a fucking thief. All you need to…

You seem to labor under the delusion that whatever is the current state of the caselaw is always the pinnacle of human moral development and doing anything any part of this vast (also incomprehensible and many times contradictory) array of regulations forbids, or failing to do anything it commands, is an ultimate moral sin because moral is whatever the local magistrate court says it is. I don't think it's the case, n…

>My gratitude knows no bounds.

If I wasn't even close to being right you wouldn't even respond. It's the fact that I'm right that makes you respond. I'm right and you can't face it.

That's all.

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

#925

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are going to need to provide some proof regarding that. That's gonna be hard to come by, I left that job more than twenty years ago and short of digging an authoring tool and making one DVD I don't see how I could convince you. Provided I even remember how the damn thing even worked. Here's what I remember: - around 2004-2005 (checking movies I remember posters in the hallway it's more likely to be early 2004)…

Thanks for the clarification but it appears you and are are talking about two different aspects of the production(at least in your first section). First of all I want to take a moment to state how hilarious it is you used DVDShrink: a tool developed for copyright infringement of content. What you described is the standard authoring process that even I did back when it was fun to make home DVDs. But regarding unskippa…

> First of all I want to take a moment to state how hilarious it is you used DVDShrink: a tool developed for copyright infringement of content.

Yeah, the irony wasn't lost on any of us :].

> What you described is the standard authoring process that even I did back when it was fun to make home DVDs.

One year after I left I heard from a coworker that they were going to close shop. Director had visited a freelance guy who was doing authoring with a single consumer PC box and he saw the writing on the wall. He wouldn't have been able to keep his team in-house with all the costs associated if distributors started authoring in-house or spread the orders among freelancers and drive prices down. So that studio left the market and went back to digital picture/movie effects. At that time, being a student, I also tried out adobe encore (I think it was the name) as an alternative the much expensive authoring tool (I think it was sonic but I am pretty sure there was another, both didn't look like a toy interface and the other one had a different name) and thought "wtf, it's way easier to author with that that almost doing assembler with the professional tool" but I found out it didn't produce 100% compliant DVD. Anyway.

> But regarding unskippable content, it is difficult to prove if the code you described will be respected by all brands of players. I recall that JVC players would always go back to the main menu as soon you press STOP and it would then start the playback over when Play was presented. Pause is what would halt playback temporary. Its been a while since I used JVC players though.

Ooooh. I think I understand your point now. Yeah, if the hardware indeed decide to ignore anything happening during an UOP block then nothing would work. My memory fails me, assuming the software can register keys during an UOP block even though the UOP logo blinks maybe what we did was register keys during the UOP block and disable the flag on the fly to give back user control (but then hw players that ignore anything while a UOP block is being played would result in non skipable content obviously) or maybe the combination had to be entered before so it sets a flag that is read before the next block to check if it should disables UOP on the next block (or skip it entirely and drop the user to the main menu ?). I am sorry to say I am unable to remember more details and I didn't keep in touch with anybody there :/.

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

#926
post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that Netflix and co. won't stream 4K at all to Linux devices, and they often don't serve 4K if they deem your internet connection to be too slow. For many folks, pirated 1080p is par with what they'd get streaming, and pirated 2k or 4k is better.

Amazon Prime Video is even worse, on Linux they only serve 480p. Any pirated file is much better quality.

Exactly! As it is unwatchable it makes 0 sense to pay for the service. It is pirate or just do not watch it.

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

#927

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Honest question, why not? Value for money. Most households don't spend their lives watching 4-8h of content every day, I'd think. I'm likely to watch maximum 12h a month. So 6$ an hour? No thanks. And I'm talking maximum. Most months I spend 6h watching in total. That brings it up to $12 / hour. Pay-what-you-watch sounds better to me and many others. Show me a gradually increasing bill in the top right corner of th…

I have been thinking of something similar Pay-what-you-watch with a twist. You have to top up a minimum amount ( Say $20 ) and not charged per view on credit card. Think iTunes Credit.

The Video should also last for at least a week once you borrowed it. ( Which is similar to 5 days old DVD rental except the 2 days postal time being instant. )

I wonder if it is a business model worth exploring.

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

#928
post #361

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.

My perception (maybe incorrect) is that it's harder to play online multi-player games using cracked copies of games without getting found out and banned. Also the risk of getting some malware with your cracked copy (single- or multi-player) is very real, something you don't really have to worry about with a video file. Regardless of that, the model is just different: if I can pay Netflix $15/mo for unlimited access t…

Not saying they are the same, no, but you seem to think it is so different that it's impossible for NF to have a business model without stamping out bootlegging?

If so, they're done for, because it's not going to be possible to do that.

But I think providing a product that desirable and easy to view might work and they're just not doing it and blaming evil-doers for their own failure as a business.

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

#929
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam really works because it remained a private company. Once you go public, it's a slow descent into madness.

No, Steam works because it equally accepts both Valve and non-Valve content. If would not be a success if it only included titles made by Valve.

I think both of you have points that are important parts of its success

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

#930

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do. There needs to be one international company who is co-owned by all these media companies. They need to "nationalise" streaming amongst themselves. That way users only have to pay one streaming service, the content is available in every country, the rightsholders are paid fairly by the content consumed instead of these never-ending monthly fees for one show and ignoring the rest of the library. If they don't do…

Nationalization is too extreme. What you want is compulsory licensing where the government sets some price by which any streaming service can pay to license the content. How that price gets selected is... complicated and easy to fuck up[0], but I can imagine some metrics that could be used to target prices. e.g. the compulsory license cost must not exceed some multiple of the average negotiated rate. [0] Notably, rad…

What is "the" government?

The reason I put "nationalise" in quotes is because any such partnership needs to be a global commercial partnership between companies. It can't be actually nationalised by any country because then it would focus only on that country and that place's copyright laws (and potentially censorship or content laws).

This garbage of the same streaming service in different countries having different content also needs to stop.

People can torrent any show anywhere and they'll do that if it's not available on a reasonable streaming service. If which there are few or none anymore.

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