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Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

theguardian.com

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Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#241

Post by wrasee »

wrasee wrote: post #214
franciscop wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO not really, supply here is the limiting factor since the constrain is in licensing the work. The goal of the right holders is not to maximize access to the work or those stated by OP, but to maximize profit for the company, which when at odds with those other goals still prevails. e.g. someone calculated/believes that having a big catalog from Disney at X/month is more worth more for Disney than sublicensing to…

Yes I considered the same but decided to keep the point simple. And I still can’t help but think that if there really was a large market of people willing to pay a premium for a more permissive access model then we might already see trends in this direction. My hunch is the most folk don’t really care and price remains the dominant factor. The essential point of the article was that it’s higher prices that’s pushing…

Unpopular opinion here but I wonder how much of the justification for piracy in this thread, broadly around what is perceived to be unfair business practices (“if only the terms were fairer and I would pay”), would actually stand up if the terms were actually fairer but the prices higher.

Or how much is really just the simple rational economic idea that piracy is better value for money.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#242

Post by Levitz »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #167
ryandrake wrote: post #153

Piracy offers: 1. Unrestricted access to an absolutely huge library of movies, music and TV shows, nearly unlimited. Certainly not limited by opaque "licensing deals" between various companies. 2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release. 3. No arbitrary device/OS limitations. 4. Can watch/listen/download from any location on earth with sufficient bandwidth. I d…

>I didn't even mention that it's free or that there are no ads It's free in the same way shoplifting is free, until you get caught. You are very much in violation of copyright laws if you pirate.

I can name at least one country in the European Union in which torrenting copyright content for personal use is legal, people still do very much use spotify and netflix.

Gabe Newell got it right from the very start, piracy is a service problem.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#243

Post by robertoandred »

kaliqt wrote: post #171
8fingerlouie wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I didn't even mention that it's free or that there are no ads It's free in the same way shoplifting is free, until you get caught. You are very much in violation of copyright laws if you pirate.

Only consequences, physically speaking the two are not the same at all. Copying of anything digital is not actual theft, nor will it ever be.

Do you sneak into concerts or hop turnstiles too?

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#244

Post by pluc »

ryandrake wrote: post #153

Piracy offers: 1. Unrestricted access to an absolutely huge library of movies, music and TV shows, nearly unlimited. Certainly not limited by opaque "licensing deals" between various companies. 2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release. 3. No arbitrary device/OS limitations. 4. Can watch/listen/download from any location on earth with sufficient bandwidth. I d…

What gets to me is exclusivity deals. Wanna watch this? Subscribe to that. Wanna watch that? Well itnisnt available on this so you'd have to subscibe to that. New streaming service launches with promotional exclusivity of something you like? Gotta get on that too. And don't get me started on sports!

Streaming was OK when it was fighting cable, because it was cheaper and on-demand. With the constant greed, we're back to paying more than we used to pay for cable, it doesn't make sense anymore.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#245

Post by jacobgkau »

hxtk wrote: post #210
wrasee wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supply and demand might argue that if there was real demand for something like this that people were actually willing to pay a lot of money for, then the market would be all too happy to provide. I think the inconvenient truth here is that when anyone has got close to doing such a thing the price has been high enough that it turns out nobody actually turns up to pay for it, not at least outside a small niche.

Streaming services were great back when they were separate from content producers and IP holders. Once every media company became a streaming company and started using anticompetitive licensing practices in an attempt to drive viewership to their own platforms, the market fractured too much for it to be profitable. Something smells “prisoner’s dilemma” about it: the best move for any individual streaming service is t…

> more than it increases their slice of the pie.

That's the part that might not be true, unfortunately. If each individual content producer sees more return on their own streaming service than they did sharing revenue from one of the independent services, then that's better for them, even if the total pie got smaller. If that wasn't the case, you'd think we'd see some of them shut their services down and go back to independent services once their income drops.

Sacrificing a wide audience to extract more from the most dedicated portion of the fanbase isn't an entirely new concept, and it financially makes sense short-term (until you start losing some of those dedicated fans over time and don't have the mindshare outside your bubble to attract new ones).

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#246

Post by macNchz »

l72 wrote: post #201
hbn wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget censorship-free I swore off streaming services when they started pulling episodes of comedy shows and editing out scenes because they were worried someone might be offended

They also often time have versions of old movies and shows that have been modified due to silly things like license agreements on music expiring! I have felt gaslighted when I rewatch and old movie and some scene isn’t how I remember.

I was so surprised and bummed when I discovered this was a thing. My wife and I started watching the original Beverly Hills 90210—a sort of ridiculous snapshot of American pop culture in the early 1990s—on some streaming service, and after a few episodes I noticed the music was just...super wrong.

Reading online, I learned that a lot of the original music had been licensed only for the original run of the show, so even when it went to DVD in the early 2000s they had to remove a whole bunch of the original music. It's terrible on two fronts: one, the show is an awesome snapshot of 90s music, with tons of great stuff featured both as background music and in extended live performances, but they cut whole scenes and entire episodes that had too much of it, and two, whoever managed the process of picking replacement music clearly did not care at all, and used awful generic music that sounds like it came from a file called "BeachRiff.aiff" on a $29.95 CD library of royalty-free 60 second stock music samples.

I admit to finding a source of video files patched together from various sources with the original soundtracks intact, and it's simply MUCH more enjoyable. It seems, though, that some episodes of live performances are lost to time—or at least lost to the corporate owners who'd rather sit on the tapes in a warehouse somewhere than make them available.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#247

Post by Levitz »

RajT88 wrote: post #115
codedokode wrote: post #107

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.

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.

This is basically the case right now in Spain.

We pay a tax on every piece of recordable media (don't think it's only SD cards or hard drives, it applies to phones, laptops, mp3 players, ebooks, even smartwatches). In exchange, sharing media for personal use is legal, and P2P is sharing media.

Doesn't stop corporations from trying to scare people off and complaining about piracy though of course.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#248

Post by [deleted] »

Gud wrote: post #138
mxfh wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s pretty obvious that no one wants to subscribe and look for some content on 5 different platforms. While the pirate goes to his or her favourite torrent site and downloads it all, with the added bonus of having offline, permanent access.

[deleted]

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#249

Post by thaumasiotes »

l72 wrote: post #209
franciscop wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO not really, supply here is the limiting factor since the constrain is in licensing the work. The goal of the right holders is not to maximize access to the work or those stated by OP, but to maximize profit for the company, which when at odds with those other goals still prevails. e.g. someone calculated/believes that having a big catalog from Disney at X/month is more worth more for Disney than sublicensing to…

I really wish we had laws that producers of content cannot also be distributors. That just creates perverse incentives to use content to lock people into their distribution platform. If they had to be separate, that gives content producers the ability to cross license and those licenses to be better deals. We’d actually have competition in distribution companies as distribution providers would then be competing on pr…

> I really wish we had laws that producers of content cannot also be distributors.

We have laws like that for beer and cars, and they're disasters in both cases.

Why would we want to implement an incredibly stupid idea a third time?

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#250

Post by brailsafe »

l72 wrote: post #208
wrasee wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supply and demand might argue that if there was real demand for something like this that people were actually willing to pay a lot of money for, then the market would be all too happy to provide. I think the inconvenient truth here is that when anyone has got close to doing such a thing the price has been high enough that it turns out nobody actually turns up to pay for it, not at least outside a small niche.

You have to have real options or people can’t make informed decisions. I have a background in city planning, and in the US, you’ll constantly hear about how trying to make cities more friendly to pedestrians, bicycles, or public transit is a waste because no one uses it. But the truth is, most people will end up using the system you design. If you build a system just for cars, people will use cars. If you build a cit…

Great analogy. I'm visiting a particularly car-centric city atm, and from the car driver's perspective, "nobody uses the bike lanes, I never see them, so why build them, it constrains traffic". Well ya, there's so much car traffic because it's car-first, and nobody wants to be around tons of cars, not even people in cars. It's like arguing that you never see cyclists on the freeway, therefore nobody likes biking and we should discourage it.
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