Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 960 posts

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#351

Post by cptnntsoobv »

ysavir wrote: post #296
at-fates-hands wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the beginning, Netflix was great. Then they became a media company and suddenly EVERYTHING they push on you is THEIR stuff. Gone are the days where you could remember a cool movie and pull it up on Netflix like Fandango or Corvette Summer. I remember going back and watching several seasons of the original Miami Vice back when nobody knew who Michael Mann was. Not its exactly as you say, you want to watch something…

My understanding is that this isn't Netflix's fault. They were king when they were the first major streaming service, and studios and networks were happy to get extra income from hosting their content on Netflix. But Netflix knew that any success it has would be mimicked by those same studios and networks, and that they would pull their own content to their own services as soon as they have them up and running, and s…

As the saying at Netflix used to go back in the day: we need to become HBO before HBO becomes Netflix

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#353

Post by jdprgm »

Netflix has gone to almost complete shit over the past few years. One of the things that really stood out as a strange choice for them considering their long term status as the "tech" innovator coming for media has been segmenting plans on resolution. I don't understand why they don't want to always put their best foot forward especially considering I assume bandwidth is always getting cheaper? And we seem upper bounded by 4k for the foreseeable future.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#354

Post by thaumasiotes »

mxfh wrote: post #288
thaumasiotes wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think pirating videos will raise your electric bill by $25 / month?

Storage isn't free. running a 50 Watt anything 24/7 costs like 10 Dollars a month in Europe already if you don't want to be an anti-social leacher or want the convenience of an netflix-like media server.

Your comment is a bizarre tangle of different concerns, of which none make even a tiny amount of sense.

- If you download without uploading much, what does that have to do with the costs of piracy?

- If you upload as well as download, how will that increase the amount you pay for 50 watts of electricity?

- In what possible sense is storage not free? You already have the storage. Putting things on it is free, unless you get to the point where you need to buy additional storage. You don't need to retain the things you pirate any more than you need to retain the things you stream.

-- Even if you decide to do that, storage is an utterly trivial cost.

- Stipulating that 50 watts a month costs $10, your network stack draws less than 25 watts. Given that storage will never add up to any amount you'd notice, it will take less than one month before piracy blows rental out of the water on costs, after which its lead will increase forever.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#355

Post by dotancohen »

exe34 wrote: post #293
macNchz wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was so surprised and bummed when I discovered this was a thing. My wife and I started watching the original Beverly Hills 90210—a sort of ridiculous snapshot of American pop culture in the early 1990s—on some streaming service, and after a few episodes I noticed the music was just...super wrong. Reading online, I learned that a lot of the original music had been licensed only for the original run of the show, so ev…

I hate that kind of destruction of what I think should ultimately be considered property of humanity. When you create something, you're free to destroy or ruin it. Once you share it with somebody else, you should need their consent to destroy it.

The social responsibility for ensuring that things could be shared falls on libraries. You might check a few libraries for old copies of vintage media.

My sore spot is the original Rust In Peace album. It was rerecorded and the rerecording is horrible. Any copy of the original is treasure to me.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#356

Post by phkahler »

dylan604 wrote: post #320
phkahler wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point I'm willing to just pay a few dollars for a movie. But even then you cant get them all in one place! And they like to charge a premium for some. Im not paying a premium for anything I've already seen a while back.

> Im not paying a premium for anything I've already seen a while back. devil's advocate. what's the point of a producer expending money to have a premium version made? it takes money to go back and rescan film to higher resolution, and the rest of the work flow involved to create that new final version. sure, it's easy to not have sympathy for hollywood producer types, but to meet modern standards for legacy content…

I don't care about that. By premium I just mean a popular movie. Sometimes all the Clint Eastwood films are free for example, but one or two big titles are $9.

Give me $2 or $3 movies with a huge catalog and I'll watch several.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#357

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

wrasee wrote: post #161
ryandrake wrote: post #153

Piracy offers: 1. Unrestricted access to an absolutely huge library of movies, music and TV shows, nearly unlimited. Certainly not limited by opaque "licensing deals" between various companies. 2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release. 3. No arbitrary device/OS limitations. 4. Can watch/listen/download from any location on earth with sufficient bandwidth. I d…

Supply and demand might argue that if there was real demand for something like this that people were actually willing to pay a lot of money for, then the market would be all too happy to provide. I think the inconvenient truth here is that when anyone has got close to doing such a thing the price has been high enough that it turns out nobody actually turns up to pay for it, not at least outside a small niche.

Supply and demand means that corporations attempt to maximise their revenue. If the cost of providing a good service eats into their profits, they will provide a bad service.

This idea that "markets will provide" is eccentric, and obviously empirically wrong.

Markets are there to extract value and reinforce power imbalances. Consumer happiness is reliably at cross purposes with that.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#358

Post by more_corn »

jrflowers wrote: post #336
socalgal2 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate the censorship. But when some groups are willing to kill if you don’t censor then I can’t blame others for not wanting to be martyrs and put their lives on the line for it

What groups are you talking about

Publish a cartoon about the prophet Mohamed and some of the groups will make themselves known to you.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#359

Post by dml2135 »

GuinansEyebrows wrote: post #268
l72 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also often time have versions of old movies and shows that have been modified due to silly things like license agreements on music expiring! I have felt gaslighted when I rewatch and old movie and some scene isn’t how I remember.

the DVD/streaming releases of Daria suffer from this. i used to have old TV rips of the show with the original contemporary MTV soundtrack but i'm not sure what happened to them. the stock music just doesn't carry the weight of the times.

google “The Daria Restoration Project”

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#360

Post by pezezin »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #281
nosioptar wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a DVD release of the theatrical versions. Usually goes for $50-75 for OG trilogy.

DVDs are 480i, the parent comment described far higher quality than DVD.

DVDs support progressive scan and most movies were encoded in 480p; the player then just sent half the picture on one field and the other half on the other field.

Your point still stand though, these modern 4k editions are far higher quality.

Post reply on HN