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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

#361

Post by dylan604 »

phkahler wrote: post #356
dylan604 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't care about that. By premium I just mean a popular movie. Sometimes all the Clint Eastwood films are free for example, but one or two big titles are $9. Give me $2 or $3 movies with a huge catalog and I'll watch several.

> I don't care about that.

That's precisely my point.

Even for these $2-$3 dollar non-premium movies to be digitized and made available for streaming costs money. Let's just say at a minimum $50k (which is on the low end), 50,000/3 = 16,667 people willing to rent/buy that movie for that $3. Is that a guarantee? No, especially when it is not "premium". Out of curiosity, how many movies do you rent/buy through Apple/Amazon type rentals? There are many times where the math of renting from a platform is much cheaper than going to the movie to see it. It is still hard for me to do it since I'm already paying Apple/Amazon a monthly fee. That's for the "premium" content, so it would be hard to convince me that 16k people would be willing to spend for non-premium at all.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#362

Post by cadamsdotcom »

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…

And don't forget, not "remastered" with content changed and/or removed.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#363

Post by janalsncm »

cptnntsoobv wrote: post #351
ysavir wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that this isn't Netflix's fault. They were king when they were the first major streaming service, and studios and networks were happy to get extra income from hosting their content on Netflix. But Netflix knew that any success it has would be mimicked by those same studios and networks, and that they would pull their own content to their own services as soon as they have them up and running, and s…

As the saying at Netflix used to go back in the day: we need to become HBO before HBO becomes Netflix

If the production quality of Netflix was close to HBO it would be nice. HBO has some absolute classics: The Wire, The Sopranos, GoT, White Lotus, The Last of Us, Alaskan Killer Bigfoot. Almost all bangers.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#364

Post by birn559 »

prepend wrote: post #308
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…

Don’t forget that piracy allows for front ends that actually want to make the user happy and have good UX. I use Plex and it shows what I’m currently watching first. So continuing to a new episode is easy. If I sub to 50 episodes they just show up on my first line. Hulu makes me scroll down a few rows to continue watching. It also shows cast and crew and other movies with the same.

Prime Video keeps starting the wrong episode when I click on "Continue Watching". That's infuriating in particular because that often makes me watch advertising 2-3 times: When starting, when clicking into the middle of the episode to confirm I indeed have watched it already and then again when switching to the correct episode.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#365

Post by birn559 »

DHRicoF wrote: post #170
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…

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.

Netflix also often only buys the first seasons of an existing show. And of course they love to cancel shows they produce themselves which for me has significantly lowered my loyalty over the years.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#366

Post by godelski »

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…

Piracy also offers:

0. Ability to watch offline!

1. Ability to fix subtitle issues with minimal tweeks like change size or moving location.

1.2 Ability to get subtitles if they aren't offered (or offered in your language)

2. Ability to normalize audio.

3. Ability to buffer videos when on a poor connection.

4. Ability to create collections, organize, and track your movie as you wish

5. Arbitrary number of user accounts

6. Multicast streams to watch the same show across different devices regardless of if someone has an account or not (see JellyFin's SyncPlay)

7. No big organization tracking you and selling your data to the highest bidder

There's more, but honestly pirating is just a better experience. I can't tell you how many times Netflix has fucked up the subtitles so they are covering half my screen. There's tons of little issues like that that are just random and the only option is to just not watch Netflix (or pick your streaming service) that day.

Besides that, for the price of a yearly subscription you can build a NAS that can do all this for you and you get to keep the movies. Instead of having a monthly fee you can progressively add more drives and this can also be used for all your other things. Pictures, home videos, games (you can make a Steam cache), your local AI models, or whatever else you want. With $1k you can build a pretty good system, though that's 3 years of 4k Netflix, so not the cheap route in the short term.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#367

Post by godelski »

chongli wrote: post #180
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…

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.

While that's the best option, there's always AI upscaling and frame gen. These of course won't be as good as native resolution and can sometimes make more errors, but they can make a big difference on low resolutions when you got a big screen.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#368

Post by Der_Einzige »

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…

[flagged]

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#369

Post by bee_rider »

wiredpancake wrote: post #329
bee_rider wrote: post #133

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…

No one is conflating piracy with raid boats, killing people and physically stealing items. Ignoring the nuance is just ignorance and pedantic. As a matter of fact, most people likely don't even associate piracy with pirates or boats. It's almost universally used to describe obtaining digital content for free.

I think this is the more nuances understanding of the conversation. Using a word associated with violence and theft to describe something like copyright infringement is just over-the-top and ridiculous.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#370

Post by JKCalhoun »

eastbound wrote: post #122
lackoftactics wrote: post #94

It's no longer as convenient with dozens of streaming services; the streaming bitrate is also subpar, and audio is compressed to the point it feels flat. If you want to be mindful about what you are watching, it will be really hard with Netflix, Prime, and Disney compared to your own media server. When I had a streaming subscription, I was constantly shocked by what was popular in Poland and what people were watching…

The quality of shows is also subpar. And there aren’t many shows on Netflix at a given time: Probably 80 things to watch, all categories included (with 70% of overlap in content).

I feel like we've had at least two lost decades of good content. It's probably somewhere, I just haven't found it yet.
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