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Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

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Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#161
post #69
post #12

There would be less incentive toward this kind of piracy if content producers and distributors could get their collective acts together with more liberal licensing. Popcorn Time is winning because it's easier to use and find content than any pay service. Like anything, you compete by making a better product/service -- not by complaining that your competitors are unfair. Of course, they are certainly unfair here, but…

You are asking for the impossible, people are not going to pay for what they can always get at better quality for $0. Fans are happy to curate the art the like and will always do a better work , and for free. The only thing that might make sense is if they distributed an original instead of a copy, i.e. a different movie to every user, a different song etc. Copyright is just not compatible with the digital world, it…

Fans are happy to curate the art the like and will always do a better work , and for free.

LOL no. Sure there is no shortage of little YouTube videos that replace some kinds of TV content but most people don't have the creative skills required for high quality narrative content. It's precisely because this is in such short supply that popular shows are pirated in such enormous quantities. If there were so much great creativity about, where are all the great indie/ micro-budget/ fan-based/ crowd-sourced films and TV dramas? There are tons of little short films and imaginative trailers to be found on the internet that were filmed for small sums over a few days, but relatively little long-form content because that involves way more time and effort.

The Entertainment industries are largely based on building hype and celebrities, while the cost of production keeps falling thanks to digital production.

That's not true. Some parts of production get cheaper because of digital methods, eg I don't need to pay the same money for film stock, chemical development etc, I can just buy a bunch of hard disks instead, which will be quite a bit cheaper. That's great - instead of spending $100/minute on celluloid every time we run the camera, we can build a set of multi-terabyte arrays and set up a modest asset-management pipeline for a few thousand $.

But that's only one part of production. People still need to eat, lights still need to be put up and equipment moved around, locations still need to be rented, costumes still need to be made, actors need to be paid and so on. You can try and do all these things for free, but if you do it will look ugly, the camera angles will be bad, the subject matter won't be interesting, the actors will looks badly dressed and the performances will be poor. Of course big Hollywood productions are all about marketing glitz and paying huge sums to very famous people (mainly because they predictably attract audiences who want to look at them). but even small-character-driven dramas require a great deal of time and effort to manufacture. It's very very difficult to make a basic 90 min. film that meets basic consumer expectations of technical quality for less than a few hundred thousand dollars. It's possible, of course, but the vast majority of films made for substantially lower budgets are of really bad quality.

There is an oversupply of creativity which obviously should drive their profits down.

But creativity is only one input to a film. You can't solve every problem by just throwing more creative people at it, not least because the more people you throw at a problem, the more they get in each others' way and the lower productivity becomes. Screenplays can often benefit from the advice of additional creative people, but they're really better for being written by committee. Likewise, a lot of what goes on in and around the film production process is just logistics and grunt work.

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is having to be paid at all. There ought to be a system whereby people can exist at a reasonable standard of living and still do the work they want to do, i.e. Basic Income. There's enough food, shelter and medicine to accommodate everyone on the planet right now, but the top 10% hoard way more than their share. Do they deserve it because they work harder? No, they're just born into luxury, and there's no…

I'm not sure where to begin with your comment and all the strange and inaccurate things it says... but this kind of idyllic utopia (which to me seems like some horrible mind-numbing lifestyle) will never exist. Economic incentive is the cornerstone of modern effective society. Basic Income might work but it's far more complicated than you make it seem and it's not something that just lets everyone do whatever they wa…

Well yeah I mean, I'm not gonna write a dissertation on HN. I like to think the future is more Star Trek (do whatever you want, free food/shelter/awesomeness) than Star Wars (pretty much what we have now with some new toys and psychic powers).

But I disagree that "there will need to be industry and incentive to create the income in the first place". I think people largely just do stuff because either they're coerced, they need to survive, or they think it's cool. Open source is a good example of #3, and I think that's gonna be the chief motivator as the world continues to develop.

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#163
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't comment on why other people copy digital content, but I use eg: youtube-dl to save content from being banned from youtube - most likely due to dmca takedowns. That's for music. I also buy some music via bandcamp. As for streaming services, I was an early Spotify-user -- and the experience was pretty bad: it was a roulette to see how much was left of any given playlist each time I logged on. To be fair, Spotif…

I have used Spotify with success on Arch Linux. It may not be symmetrical to the Windows or OSX clients, but I have not had dealbreaking issues. There are bugs here and there, but now the Windows client has its own set of problems with new updates...

Just to clarify: I said Apple (iTunes) doesn't cater to Linux. The (not so bad anymore) issue with Spotify had/has to do with content rights.

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#164
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't comment on why other people copy digital content, but I use eg: youtube-dl to save content from being banned from youtube - most likely due to dmca takedowns. That's for music. I also buy some music via bandcamp. As for streaming services, I was an early Spotify-user -- and the experience was pretty bad: it was a roulette to see how much was left of any given playlist each time I logged on. To be fair, Spotif…

Amazon won't (legally) let you watch all content outside of the US Because in many cases they have only purchased US rights. Someone else may already have the distribution rights in other countries. As I have explained before, films are often financed by using pre-sales agreements with foreign distributors as collateral for a production loan. For example, If I am developing a film I might go a film market and say 'he…

I'm not sure there's any working DRM for movies currently. DVDs and BluRay can be copied. Streams as well. DRM for DCP "works" but no one was copying 35mm film either - and the old analog hole is still open. All the DRM makes it more complicated to master and distribute legal copies -- I'm not convinced it reduces copying.

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#165
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call bullshit. Absolute bullshit. If I gave you a credit card that gave you unlimited access to digital content you probably wouldn't be complaining. Certainly not if you live in the US or much of Europe. If you have a $69 AppleTV then iTunes is a spectacular user experience. Search for almost anything you want and hit play. If it didn't cost $5 to rent a movie it's superior to torrents. This is where someone chime…

I can't comment on why other people copy digital content, but I use eg: youtube-dl to save content from being banned from youtube - most likely due to dmca takedowns. That's for music. I also buy some music via bandcamp. As for streaming services, I was an early Spotify-user -- and the experience was pretty bad: it was a roulette to see how much was left of any given playlist each time I logged on. To be fair, Spotif…

Another point on DRM: good music, books, films, tv series become part of who we are. I want to be sure I have can show something that shaped my world-view to young kids in 20, 30 or 50 years time. If I had my music trapped by MS' zune that wouldn't work so well. If Amazon loses the right to some books, they dissappear from my Kindle. Who knows what happens if Apple buys Netflix? I do not want to rent access to my own culture. I want to buy access.

Edit: if it didn't look like nothing will ever enter the public domain again as a result of copyright expiry -- this wouldn't be as much of an issue.

Edit2: It is tragically ironic that Disney, a company founded in part on access to public domain fairytales, is at the forefront of killing the public domain. I imagine our collective digital culture would have been much richer if the terms were still 14+14 years after publication.

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#166
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people are not going to pay for what they can always get at better quality for $0 Sure, but I already pay Netflix. If I had to pay a bit more and it included everything that's on Popcorn Time, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

You'd have to pay a lot more than 8/month to make "every movie ever produced, instantly available" viable.

I'll settle for "whatever's also available on DVD".

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The saddest part is that if they wanted they could adopt a hybrid central seed/P2P model, too, and be able to offer HD content without overwhelming their servers (in fact there more would people watch a certain episode at a given time, the better it would work ).

From elsewhere i have gotten the impression that some central legal figures within the business have some kind of stuck up idea about counting copies. There was a company trying to offer cloud based DVR service, and found that the only way they could get big media legal approval was to not use deduplication of any kind. This meant that their storage costs skyrocketed.

Well yeah, counting views, or more recently copies, has been a central tenant of show business since its inception in antiquity when minstrels played on stage. No wonder the media business is resistant to changing on that point.

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#168
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here to say this, more or less. Maybe when streaming services offer what I want to watch in better than current quality I'll consider stopping. Until then I'll be using Canadian Netflix for 10% of my viewing and other methods for the other 90% that I can't pay for because I happen to not live in the US. Copyright laws are killing the industry.

This question is for you and everyone else: why don't you simply not watch something if it's not legally available? It seems like almost all pro-piracy people act and talk as if there's some unwritten and unspoken right and need to consume all media.

Copyright law is there (in part) to encourage people to pay the legitimate copyright owner so that it can continue creating content.

If there is already no way to pay the legitimate copyright owner, the law is pointless. It's still illegal, but the reason for it being illegal is invalid. At that point it's not running a busy urban intersection, it's crossing at a 4-hour red light in the middle of nowhere at 2am with no cars around for miles.

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HBO GO apps for things like Roku are also laughably bad. One of the best examples of truly not caring about UX is their default sorting of episodes. All shows sort episodes by most-recent air date, including shows that have fully aired, so if you want to get to the first episode of a show you have to scroll through a full season's worth of episodes. This is after having to scroll through all HBO shows alphabetica…

To be fair, there's good reason why a "newest first" (LIFO, I suppose) approach would make sense (namely, if it's assumed that most users have already been watching the series in question and just want to jump straight to the newly-aired episode that they haven't seen yet).

Which is a fair point, but NETFLIX KNOWS WHAT I'VE WATCHED.

They even added profile selection so different individuals using the same account get a better user experience.

Watching a show at a friend's house (and thus on their account) should be considered the degenerate case. LIFO order also has the added problem of showing screenshots for the latest episode which may contain spoilers.

Even if the service (Hulu) doesn't require users to login, cookies can still be used to track which episodes have been watched.

Re: Inside Popcorn Time, the Piracy Party Hollywood Can't Stop

#170
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true to the point where you can barely believe services release the products they do. The experience on Popcorn Time vs HBO GO isn't even comparable. HBO GO serves their content through a laggy flash player that you can't even force to play HD. Why would anyone watch non-HD content in a terrible browser player that wastes additional battery when they can open Popcorn Time in the time that it takes for the HBO…

I completely agree re: the quality of streaming service apps. The Amazon Prime Video player is a joke. HBO GO is one of the buggiest apps I've ever used on Android. Netflix has gone a long way to improving their service and is probably the most satisfactory of them. Generally speaking, though, the experience of using these apps and the predictability/accessibility of content is not going to outcompete free & easy.

> not going to outcompete free & easy.

The ease of setting up the TV in my living room to watch Netflix far outcompetes the difficulty of setting up a whole system that involves Plex and bittorrent/direct-dl, especially for someone non-technical that just wants to buy a box from Best Buy that "just works".

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