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

The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

plagiarismtoday.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 546 posts

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#131

Post by disappearance »

remir wrote: post #110

P2P forced the industry to adapt and now we have good streaming services, but the content selection is nowhere as good as what you can find on torrent sites. What the Popcorn Time devs did was simply amazing. It had a Netflix-like interface plus a huge selection of content that you could watch right away. The industry should learn from these guys. Just make your content available, easy to obtain and people will pay f…

> Just make your content available

Agree. Regional licensing restrictions (music & video) and timed availability (video) seem to be lingering issues for legal streaming services and until they're solved/ forgotten the Popcorn Times will always have a place.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#132

Post by bitwize »

Semaphor wrote: post #99
k__ wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly use streaming sites instead of BT these days. Got burned once when my flatmate downloaded family guy and we got "mail" by an attorney of 20th century fox... But yes, I got Netflix and Amazon Prime too. They simply don't have everything in every language.

> I mostly use streaming sites instead of BT these days. Why? You have to get through tons of ads, have to hope they are of decent quality, etc. With BT I download, and in about 5 minutes I have the whole thing in HD.

It's also illegal, and this isn't the 90s or early 2000s -- copyright laws are being enforced.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#133

Post by Semaphor »

microtonal wrote: post #124
Obi_Juan_Kenobi wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is German Netflix that bad? In the USA, I can choose the audio and subtitle language pretty easily; it's even supported on their Plex app and so forth. Example: I just watched "Dark" and it defaulted to English dub, but it just took a second to switch it to German with English subtitles.

We are using Netflix in Germany and it works fine. Though we primarily use it for Netflix originals now, they usually come with English and German subtitles, as well as English and German audio. (Being Dutch, I am used to having subtitles, so for some reason I prefer English subtitles over audio only. I guess that I have to concentrate less with subtitles.)

It always depends, this is what I get for Darker Than Black: https://imgur.com/a/KFF8R

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#134

Post by make3 »

khedoros1 wrote: post #126
make3 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this might be an unpopular opinion, but I think copyright is a good thing, as it allows for artists to actually get paid for their work

Problems: - Company hires a bunch of artists to make something, pays them one time, keeps gathering checks decades after the artists are dead, and even longer after they're getting any payment for the work. - Artist collects money from their work, dies, and the estate continues collecting for decades. The purpose of copyright should be to encourage artists to create works for the enrichment of society as a whole, by…

i agree that for patents, monopolising an invention forever allows innovation too much. but for art? the world will survive without getting able to copy a specific artist's work for free.. they created something out of thin air, there is very little reason for them to benefit from it, including selling it's rights or them moving on to their successors, like all other things that have value

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#136

Post by pietjepuk88 »

jedberg wrote: post #120
distances wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a major issue with streaming services. Netflix usually doesn't offer even English subtitles to an English-speaking movie if you're in a non-English speaking country! At least with DVDs you could rip it and add subtitles yourself if needed.

> Netflix usually doesn't offer even English subtitles to an English-speaking movie if you're in a non-English speaking country! Sadly, this has nothing to do with streaming and everything to do with rightsholders (aka "Hollywood"). The rights on the subtitles are held by the company that makes them, are then sold to the company that distributes the movie, which are then resold to regional distributors, separately fr…

But they always seem to offer English CC though, just not the regular ones (for many movies). And the regular ones should just be a simple transformation of the CC ones (strip all "\[.*?\]" stuff). That said, the other day I watched the movie "Easy A" which did happen to have both English CC and normal English subtitles. Still the only one I've found so far though.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#137

Post by falcor84 »

azangru wrote: post #71

The article concludes that: > The internet is now dominated by legitimate choices for video streaming. I really, really would love that to be the case, so that copyright holders stop freaking out about their presumed losses due to pirated content, and would just leave the pirates be.

I absolutely agree.

I personally really love the patron model (e.g. Patreon) where people who have the money and care about something can promote it for all of humanity.

As a (relatively) poor kid I pirated a lot because I didn't have a good alternative. But now that I'm better off, I'm really happy to pay and support content creators while allowing others who are not as lucky as me to get it for free.

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#138

Post by sdbryan »

distances wrote: post #115
lostcolony wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally. Which is why it ends with the author's death. OH WAIT. But it's totally necessary; back before it existed no one ever made any money for their creative works, so with no incentive no one ever made anything creative before copyright law. OH WAIT.

This kind of rhetoric is quite tiresome, please don't.

This rhetoric might be tiresome except for the FACT that it is so devastatingly true. A significantly different copyright legal framework might be defensible but the current system is simply laws bought by the highest bidder

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#139

Post by Semaphor »

microtonal wrote: post #130
Semaphor wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he wasn't talking about legal streaming sites as that was kinda the point of my original post. > All streaming in HD in about 5 seconds. Yeah, until it's not. I mean sure, 20 seconds of low quality is not the end of the world. But there is no reason it should be that crappy. And they are competing against easy and free, having only "moral high ground" as the competitive advantage. So at the very least, they s…

Yeah, until it's not. I mean sure, 20 seconds of low quality is not the end of the world. I literally never have 20 seconds of low quality on Netflix et al. It is sharp HD from the moment that I start streaming (UnityMedia with 200 MBit/s downstream).

200 Mbit down as well and I had 20s one time yesterday with Amazon Prime Video binging Bosch

Re: The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)

#140

Post by efdee »

dest wrote: post #79
bdz wrote: post #16

At least where I live, Hungary, torrenting was decriminalized some years ago as long as someone isn't doing it for profit. It's still illegal but they stopped going after end users. The biggest private tracker has 770k users atm with an exceptional 1452% seed to leech ratio. Basically almost everyone (ie daily internet users) is using it in the country. Also they introduced a "blank media" tax on everything (CD, DVD,…

The blank media tax is probably a compensation (i.e. not a tax) for the right to do private copies of legally acquired media. At least, this is what it is in France.

At least in Belgium, that right has existed for ages without the compensation on blank media (cassettes, VHS tapes, ...). When they introduced the tax it was quite explicitly stated that it was a compensation for illegal copying.

Why I, who never use my CD/DVDs for copying anything but homemade content, have to pay for someone else's illegal copying is not clear to me. Especially since the tax doesn't change anything for the person who is making the copy - it's still illegal.

Post reply on HN