141–150 of 960 posts
To really sum it all up in one place, check out the absurdity of the official guide on where to watch the Pokemon cartoon: https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-... And that doesn't even actually list the movies, which are even more fragmented.
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The film and music industries really shot themselves in the foot when they got a tax on recordable media introduced in Canada. OK, CD-R's and flash memory cost a bunch more now. Streaming is legal, because customers already paid the record companies for their music they downloaded and put on that media. At least, someone explained this was the current state of Canadian law ~10 years back when I first visited.
Tax on recordable media is unfair because honest people who don't pirate anything also have to pay. As with the case above, honest people get screwed the most.
I know this is pedantic but it is so annoying: downloading shows is not piracy. It is totally nuts to conflate unauthorized copying and sharing with the violent act of going on somebody’s boat and killing/threatening them until you loot their stuff. Calling it piracy was funny during the early Internet when it was all pirate and ninja memes. But really letting them conflate this very minor crime with violence was a b…
To really sum it all up in one place, check out the absurdity of the official guide on where to watch the Pokemon cartoon: https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-... And that doesn't even actually list the movies, which are even more fragmented.
What's the problem with that exactly? Legacy catalogs having some incomplete coverage? That the Pokemon Company can't make a good list if pressed? These are all not new or streaming Problems The gist is here, that the complete first four season are on YouTube for free and the 5th is being added as we speak? (200+ episodes) https://www.youtube.com/@OfficialPoke%CC%81monTV/playlists There was nether the expectation wit…
presumably any given household wants to watch more than just pokemon, though and this is where things become unstuck. suddenly, to satisfy the demand for the range of things people in the household want to watch they are forced to make subscriptions to multiple services, perhaps sometimes for one-offs.
scale this up, and you have a population forced to make multiple subscriptions to multiple streaming providers to satisfy their demand for content.
or people just choose a couple of them and that's that. either way it seems that there is a symbiotic relationship between the content authors and the streaming companies.
but wait, read the page carefully, multiple seasons of the same thing spread across different streamers forcing consumers to subscribe to multiple streamers .... and now we are into Phoebus cartel territory.
When billion dollar companies, which are praised and supported by governments, download pirated material and do not pay, why should ordinary people restrain themselves and pay? I cannot see how one can make moral arguments against piracy now. It makes no sense to pay if others are not paying and not punished for it. People also have a right to train their real neural network for free without paying.
So as they say, “if buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.”
https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2023-12-08...
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Yep. I swear I liked the old Netflix with DVDs better. I could rent pretty much any movie I wanted.
Netflix found that while it was a nice advertising tool to boast about the broadness of its catalogue, most customers rarely ordered the more niche stuff so it wasn't particularly profitable.
I just want to give one more example. I wanted to watch “Just Beyond” (2021 Disney), but it’s impossible to find anywhere. So what am I supposed to do?
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Pay per episode could be an ok granularity. Anything above that I'm not ok, there is too much garbage
Some Disney series are already 20mins about the show and 10mins credits/something else. Don’t give them new ideas to reduce the actual content…
You're also saving on bandwidth.
Paradoxically, I'd still want to pay per minute of viewing time, if I'm watching the show on 2x the speed.
"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" -- Gabe Newell [1] And I think he was largely correct, although the term _service_ seems like it now has to do a lot of heavy lifting as it now encompasses: - Availability by Company - Availability by Global Region - Stream Quality - Advert Policy (why does the lowest tier need to be ad supported? What am I paying for aside from being upsold?) - Qu…
I cancelled HBO after their price increase a year or two ago after being pretty happy with their service for a long time (though also the service quality had gotten worse). Too many people share my netflix for me to cancel it.