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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

#311
post #161

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…

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.

No, because the owners of content libraries make more money with silos.

They won’t license content to third parties. So market forces can’t work.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#312

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…

2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release. Arguably higher. For example, fans of Star Wars have scanned the original 1977 theatrical release with very high quality film scanners and created a 4K release complete with film grain and the original scenes intact which is not available through approved channels.

[deleted]

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#313
I remember when netflix had the dvd by mail option and you could get basically anything that way. It was amazing. Even the local blockbuster had way more available than today's streaming services. I watched way more then. Now I watch almost nothing and only have a single streaming service because the family wants one...and doesn't watch much on it. We are loosing access because of the thing that promised us instant access to everything.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#314
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ev…

Back in the 90s, people just had no concept of today's media offerings. Content was edited specifically to work with the only home media they new of at the time, and that was interlaced TV at frame rates of 29.97 or 25. There was no concept for progressive displays. The only home video format that was in wide use was VHS, and TV shows just didn't find their way there. That was something for theatrical releases. TV shows were much more concerned about trying to make it to syndication. When it came time to licensing, that's all the producers had on their radar.

What's the point? This was much less a malicious thing than it is made out to be. Once the licensing ran out, that's it. They can't just YOLO their way through it, or they'd have been sued. It's possible they tried to negotiate new terms for the music, but terms couldn't be agreed. When it came time to release on DVD, the person involved for the music might not have been available or interested in doing it again. At that point, the music would never feel right when replaced. The last point being these producers would be doing this on the cheap, so your Edit: one more thing about the music, it is a large expense for the production. the studios are usually willing to pay for it to air, because they know how much ad sales they have and build it into part of the per episode expense. negotiating for DVD release with no known amount of money to earn makes it difficult to negotiate a license for "real" music

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#315

i for I, ... quit Netflix and Prime (and deleted AirBNB and UBER) because they are US companies, and second ... all of what ryandrake said https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44906021

> i for I, ... quit Netflix and Prime (and deleted AirBNB and UBER) because they are US companies

I have some unfortunate news about this website you find yourself on, my fellow HN user.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#316
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ev…

You can no longer get Rocky&Bullwinkle episodes with the original music. The replacement music is so awful it is unwatchable.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#317
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

They just have to out-survive the competition, selling theme park tickets and merch. Oh, and putting hit movies in theaters.

The streaming service itself doesn’t need to be profitable.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#319
For our household, it's not even the cost or inconvenience of streaming services. It's that their constant A/B testing optimization seems to be leading them to actively shovel content we're less interested in at us, thus making it harder to find the little they have we are actually interested in. I'd be fine paying Netflix $20 a month to conveniently discover and watch the one or two things a month they have which I actually want to watch. But they seem convinced they must get me to watch more than a dozen things a month or I might cancel. So they use dark patterns to hide what things are and try to trick me into watching things I probably won't like very much. I guess that's why they replaced edited trailers with non-representative clips, choose misleading thumbnails and feature vague descriptions. Here are the sites I use to find which content is actually new, see an accurate description and watch a real edited trailer.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/browse/movies_at_home/

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/browse/tv_series_browse/

Note: Use the filters at the top to select the networks and streamers you have access to as well as your genre and rating prefs. They'll be stored in a cookie.

Using Netflix's own program guide, I keep watching less and less on Netflix because I can't easily get a sense of what anything is and value my time a lot more than $20/mo. And now I'm seriously thinking of canceling after being a sub since the discs-by-mail days because they're actively making it harder to identify IF I really will like something before watching it - and wasting my time is the one thing certain to make me cancel. I remember back when Netflix was running contests to optimize their recommendation algo to be as close to psychic as possible. I'd seriously pay more for a service that was that psychic about my preferences but also honest enough to occasionally say "Hey, sorry but this month we've got nothing you're really gonna like, so out of respect for your time, come back next month when we'll have two movies we're 91.5% sure you're gonna love."

Based on what Netflix is doing, I assume I have a significantly higher bar for content quality and fit to my prefs than most of their viewers, that I value my limited entertainment time more highly and I have much lower tolerance for content which isn't a fit. I'm not very price sensitive and I don't judge a streaming service's value on hours consumed but rather on the quality, suitability and convenience of finding the content I do watch. I'm also unusual in that if I'm watching media, I am 100% focused on it with no distractions and never have a second screen active - I guess that's one reason my quality bar is so high. This also makes me hate when they "stretch" content for longer running times, like padding three hours worth of tight story into eight hours of glacially slow script. I find myself increasingly 'self-editing' by skipping forward past scenes that should have been edited out. To me, just ONE really good thing which respects my time and that I didn't have to hunt for is worth far more than a dozen unknown things with a hit/miss ratio that averages to "meh".

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix and to some level spotify drowned piracy for a time. But then a lot of companies tried to rap the same "winings" splitting the ecosystem and trashing the user experience. - ¿could we watch x movie? - let me see. no, it in this other service beside the 3 we are paying.

At some point I'm willing to just pay a few dollars for a movie. But even then you cant get them all in one place! And they like to charge a premium for some. Im not paying a premium for anything I've already seen a while back.

> Im not paying a premium for anything I've already seen a while back.

devil's advocate. what's the point of a producer expending money to have a premium version made? it takes money to go back and rescan film to higher resolution, and the rest of the work flow involved to create that new final version.

sure, it's easy to not have sympathy for hollywood producer types, but to meet modern standards for legacy content takes time/effort/money. of course they are going to want to get a bit of that back.

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