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Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

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Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#221
post #30

Assuming 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…

I am part of this crowd. I have never paid a cent for software. I have spent many hours with Ida pro and Ghidra.

That time was well spent for the knowledge I gained, even if it wasn't worth it to save a few bucks.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Some people are just like that. They'll spend several times as much effort as just earning the money honestly would take. The thrill of petty crime I guess.

It’s probably more the challenge and the puzzle. I “played” PokémonGo until they shut down the apis. I had an absolute blast making a bot for that game, letting it run all night, making sure I wouldn’t get caught.

As soon as they shut the api down I uninstalled the app. The fun bit was the challenge.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#223
post #156

I ran a sports streaming service ("pirated sports streaming service" ?). The US Government said I was making $250k MRR as a solo indie dev (I wasn't, but that's great validation). I'm pretty qualified to talk about this. The shitty part about what Spain is doing is that it punishes its own residents who have nothing to do with piracy. Sports piracy is fundamentally different than music or movie piracy. The Spotify an…

It is really €200/month? At what point is it cheaper to buy transportation and a ticket to see events in person?

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Before Netflix was a thing, I sometimes tried to have conversations with people about "gee, it's a bit annoying that my only options to watch a movie is to buy an expensive dvd that I will watch once, or to pirate it" and the most common response was complete befuddlement, they simply could not comprehend that someone might not want to pirate things if they could, they could not comprehend that besides being illegal…

> Now that you can just pay 10-20 euro for a streaming service,

The nice thing about piracy is that you can find what you want immediately. You don't have to go to an aggregator site to find out where it's available, and then log on to the streaming platform site to find that the aggregator site is lagging the real availability, or find that certain content isn't available in your country, or that the content is available but only on the special extra++ cost plan instead of the basic plan.

If you want to watch content legally, the workflow looks like this:

Search content -> go to aggregator site -> select streaming site -> enter electronic contact and payment info and physical address (for payment) -> confirm email account -> watch content -> dig around on site to find deliberately hidden unsubscribe workflow -> pass all the "are you sure you want to leave" screens -> monitor your card payment the next month to make sure you actually cancelled

The illegal workflow looks like this:

Search content -> click 1-3 sketchy sites, closing 15 pop up ads -> watch content -> forget about it

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#225
post #26

It's always hilarious to see HN users claim how the "quality of life" is so much better in the EU than the USA. When in reality most of them only ever visit a handful of EU first-tier cities for short vacations or business trips, and never have to deal with the reality of living and working under an oppressive bureaucratic state.

I'd trade "not being able to access Cloudflare-websites for some hours per week" over "My neighbors can't afford healthcare, there is no public transport for anyone nor can I walk to a cafe on the other side of town", but we all have different priorities :) Don't get me wrong, it sucks, makes no sense and I hate the responsible people for it, but in the grand scheme of things, Spain does have a higher quality of life…

I don't think Spain has such amazing quality of life if you are not already set. It's very tough for young people. It doesn't reward hard work and education. If you have your nice house in a nice place and a good government job it's a happy place but from what I see around people, especially young productive people are not in good place here.

Spain is lucky that it gets around 20% of its economy because of nice weather (tourism + foreign real estate buyers) but I don't think it's enough to sustain the quality of life if there are no reforms.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#226
post #30

Assuming 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.

> "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…

Official sites make things worse on purpose after getting any sort of traction because they can't stop chasing profits.

I don't watch sports, but my father watches soccer. He really only cares about 1 team and the national games from our home country. He was spending over $100/month to be able to watch the games, and they werent even in his native language. Now he pays $80/year for a pirate IPTV service and not only can he watch the games anywhere he wants, he also gets native language commentary for the games, national tv channels like news, etc.

When pirates can charge you money and offer a superior service, it absolutely is a service problem. You can claim that the realities of licensing and whatnot don't allow official channels to provide the best service they can, but that's not true in this case. When the same provider is splitting game broadcast from one team into different packages you know they're just trying to extract the most amount of money possible.

IDK the deal with scanlator sites nowadays, but I assume the official sites can provide more timely translations for manga since they can access the source material before anyone has seen it. I know most popular manga gets translated within hours of release, but if you're following some more niche stuff it can be several days. I also know a lot of scanlators have patreon pages so it's not like the demand from paying customers for translated media isn't there.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how stupid the world can be This isn't stupidity. It's corruption.

> This isn't stupidity. It's corruption. Those two go hands in hands.

Only if you're all playing the same game. Corruption usually happens because some players have higher priorities.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Before Netflix was a thing, I sometimes tried to have conversations with people about "gee, it's a bit annoying that my only options to watch a movie is to buy an expensive dvd that I will watch once, or to pirate it" and the most common response was complete befuddlement, they simply could not comprehend that someone might not want to pirate things if they could, they could not comprehend that besides being illegal…

> my only options to watch a movie is to buy an expensive dvd that I will watch once, or to pirate it"

There were no movie-rental businesses in your country?

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#229

This is how greed works. The players want as much money as they can get. The owners want to charge as much as they can for everything while paying the least possible amount. The networks that buy the broadcasting and other rights want to most they can charge for them. Sports have gotten way out of hand, even without the betting aspect. People criticize gambling, porn, and other less desirable forms of entertainment w…

>This is how greed works. The players want as much money as they can get. The owners want to charge as much as they can for everything while paying the least possible amount. The networks that buy the broadcasting and other rights want to most they can charge for them.

And the buyer wants to pay as little as they possibly can. That's not greed. That's called a market and it's functioning as it should.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#230
post #42

Seems 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.

In theory, we should already be protected against this via the various "Net neutrality" directives, but as the US currently is showing us, laws and regulations are only worth as much as you're willing to enforce them ultimately. But things like these are supposed to be worth at least something:

> Regulation 2015/2120 also states that access providers “shall treat all traffic equally, when providing internet access services, without discrimination, restriction or interference, and irrespective of the sender and receiver, the content accessed or distributed, the applications or services used or provided, or the terminal equipment used,” although they are permitted to apply “reasonable traffic management measures.” In any case, those measures must be “transparent, non-discriminatory and proportionate, and shall not be based on commercial considerations but on objectively different technical quality of service requirements of specific categories of traffic” (Article 3.3) - https://www.cuatrecasas.com/en/global/intellectual-property/...

Remains to be seen if something/someone will put a stop to La Liga's shenanigans, judges have seem unwilling so far, and not a big enough problem for the average person to really care about it (yet?).

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