Just how much money is in all that?
Probably not that much, but it's money of influential people, so the rest must suffer.
Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
191–200 of 482 posts
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems like they are aiming to increase profit margins instead of increasing the supply and decreasing the price. Considering that increasing the supply is trivial in digital products, maybe they are competing in a saturated market? Spaniards attitudes can be quite different from the American ones, Americans just pay for everything for convenience, in Spain you probably need to match the price of the IPTV to stea…
> This would mean that they need sign in 20x more Spaniards to break even with the current situation. Are there 20x more Spaniards pirating the LaLiga than paying? Even in Spain I don’t think so. Is it possible the product just isn’t worth the price they want to charge? Entirely likely. On average at population scale, people are shockingly good at voting with their wallets.
I agree, maybe people who play with a ball and their managers should get a pay cut instead of trying to optimize revenue streams through draconian measures.
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#193Seems obvious at this point there needs to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions. It would at least make lobbying from those sports companies more difficult. These same companies have been pushing for banning VPNs -- consumer VPNs -- as they easily circumvent half the internet going dark because of some dumb sports event, and they're goin…
> there need to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions Why should other EU members care what websites Spain allows their citizens to access? Does the "EU" even have authority for such a thing?
Surely EU members should care if Spain blocks the access to government services offered by EU members. In Finland various government services (like Police's website) do use Cloudflare.
And Spain is not blocking access to Spain's citizens, it's blocking access people in Spain. These could be citizens of other EU members who need to access their government's website for reason or another (e.g. renewing passport) while they visit Spain or reside in Spain.
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
$100 is unheard of in Europe.
Netflix, Disney, HBO, Amazon, Apple, Movistar, DAZN. $100/mo estimate for that combo in Spain.
If watching this much videos from such large array of services is that important for a family I am sure they can easily cut down on other leisure and entertainment and come up just fine.
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m a Dutch native and if it were up to me we’d switch to English. I think it’s dumb that small country like us feels the need to maintain its own language. It is a massive disadvantage. It means that we’re always late with new stuff because the Dutch market is so small no one wants to make the effort of building Dutch versions.
I'm a native Swede and I've said the same about Swedish to, don't really care if it's Mandarin, English or Spanish, just that as many countries as possible go together and unify under one language. Obviously both for Netherlands and Sweden, English would be the way to go, but imagine if you could learn just 3 languages and speak with 90% of the world's population? I thought globalism would take us there eventually so…
Yup, there is a lot of value in having universal language and English is the only one with a chance (in Western world anyway).
Imo EU should mandate English as 2nd official language for all business dealings and bureaucracy. Having many languages and obligatory translations is a huge disadvantage we have in comparison to USA (or China).
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#196Assuming that "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" is still the prevailing wisdom, what is Spain / La Liga doing wrong that sports piracy is so prevalent as to warrant this? It seems like a no-brainer to expand stream availability and charge appropriately for it vs. scheduling daily kneecaps of other economic activity.
> Assuming that "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" is still the prevailing wisdom I don't have experience with broadcast media (in Spain, especially) but I a little experience on the software side: I could not believe the lengths some people would go to in order to avoid paying even $5-10 for useful software. Hours of work, sketchy cracks, downloading things from websites likely to compromise their…
Maybe he does not think he deserves it? The logic is as follows. If he has to pay $10 for 90 minutes of watching football then he must think he deserves that. But if he can get it for free then he does not need to think he deserves it. Similar to how fat people may feel less guilty about eating candy when it is given to them than when they have to buy it.
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
DRM is effective(ish) because of both technical and legal mechanisms. Without the legal mechanisms they'd ramp up the technical ones, which might end up even worse for legitimate users.
DRM is completely ineffective. It simply increases the cost of "piracy," as well as legitimate actions like home backup, to about $200 USD. The worse they make it for legitimate users the more likely they are to just buy the necessary device and move on. The technical battle is not some limitless option that IP owners get to use, it eventually impinges on their core interests.
DRM is somewhat effective. I'm lazy enough about entertainment that I don't even bother with piracy. If content providers don't want to make it cheap and easy for me to watch then fuck 'em, I'll watch something else. I have a zillion other options.
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a service problem. Every new service is a colossal headache to set up payment, remember to cancel payment if you only wanted to see the single event and have no need for the service the rest of the year, find what's playing on what when, deal with their bullshit when they add ads onto an ad-free plan that you bought only because it was ad-free, yadda yadda yadda. The suits could have had 10x as much money out of…
> Every new service is a colossal headache to set up payment, remember to cancel payment if you only wanted to see the single event and have no need for the service the rest of the year, find what's playing on what when I just don't find these arguments convincing after watching my friend spend cumulative hours upon hours jumping between pirate streaming services trying to find a stable feed for every game. This feel…
In my experience, people's reasons for piracy are a pretty even mix of all these issues (service problems, principles, and cost)
I'd certainly pirate less if I could afford it, but even if I could, I'd still pirate a lot of stuff because I don't want to worry about what streaming service it's on this week, or because I don't want to contribute to monopolization of some industry. And sure, I'd still pirate some things because I find they're overpriced.
> I know I'll never win this argument on Hacker News because every piracy conversation turns into an infinite game of moving goalposts, where there's always a new rationalization at every turn.
What argument are you referring to, out of curiosity? That some people pirate things 'cause they're poor and make nice-sounding rationalizations about it? Okay, that definitely happens, you win. But I don't think that really takes away from the other valid arguments for piracy?
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#199Seems obvious at this point there needs to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions. It would at least make lobbying from those sports companies more difficult. These same companies have been pushing for banning VPNs -- consumer VPNs -- as they easily circumvent half the internet going dark because of some dumb sports event, and they're goin…
As a europe federalist, I would think it is more likely EU would implement these restrictions itself instead of step against Spain.
Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" I never buy into this. If copyright law doesn't exist, pirate sites will eventually always provide better service than the official channels. One example is scanlation manga. Chinese scanlation sites have reached the theoretical ceiling of service: just serve images fast with a little nonintrusive ad. No login required. No way the official Japanese apps can provi…
It doesn't have to be significantly better. If the service is stable, cheap and hassle-free, people will pay for it.
For many users it's just not true. I run a subscription weather forecast service for pilots, with a free trial period. A significant number of users reset their device every week to avoid paying 10 euros a month. These are aircraft owners.