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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

#441

Post by simpaticoder »

galleywest200 wrote: post #159
dilDDoS wrote: post #82

I actually think pirating encourages a healthier approach to watching TV/movies. I've fully made the switch to pirating instead of subscribing to any streaming services, and it's led to me thinking more critically about what I want to spend time downloading and watching rather than just flipping mindlessly through endless amounts of readily available garbage on a streaming service. I do still have Kanopy though, whic…

Why not purchase the discs and copy them yourself? At least artists can get paid that way.

I prefer physical media. However, it can sometimes be a chore to start the movie! Each disc is different. Some discs use non-standard methods to access the home menu. Some require that you at least skip past all the previews at the beginning. The worst discs require several minutes of fiddling in addition to finding and inserting the disc before you can watch it. Compare this with double-clicking an mkv and having it just...start.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#442

Post by energy123 »

prepend wrote: post #321
nh23423fefe wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I think things are moral unless proven immoral.

Morality is self-interest. Piracy isn't immoral because they aren't staked in the impacted industries. Eating meat isn't immoral because it's in their self-interest to keep doing it. What is immoral are things that would impact them, like if I stole their property, or if I take credit for their code at work, or if I ate their dog. Morality is easy to understand when you realize everyone is a hypocrite who uses their large brains to construct post hoc justifications, not unlike LLM confabulations. You can't argue against it because you'll get yet another confabulation conveniently aligned with self-interest. We don't even realize we're doing it. It's so baked into our neurology.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#443

Post by mrheosuper »

vhanda wrote: post #6

All streaming services should have a pay per minute system as an alternative to the fixed monthly subscription. That way, I'd happily use any service to watch whatever cause it would be convenient, instead of piracy. And it would be a reason for them to really improve their recommendation systems.

Movie shows will optimize for that by making half of the episode filler.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#444

Post by abbycurtis33 »

dawnerd wrote: post #423
chongli wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People just don't realize just how garbage even 4k streams are from all the services. It's not in their interest to give you real bluray quality.

Yes! Someone came after me on here because I said there really is no 4k streaming.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#445

Post by jack1243star »

komali2 wrote: post #440
efilife wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by audio normalization? Aren't you talking about compression?

Some movies have portions that are really quiet and others that are quiet loud. Depending on your taste you may prefer to not have the experience of turning up the audio so you can hear a quiet conversation, then having your ears blown out by a loud explosion or whatever. Director's tastes be damned, I'm trying to relax over here!

In audio processing, the more precise term for it is compression (dynamically adjust gain). Normalization usually means that the gain is adjusted so that the highest volume meets a certain level. (Like what YouTube does)

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#446

Post by cindyllm »

energy123 wrote: post #442
prepend wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think things are moral unless proven immoral.

Morality is self-interest. Piracy isn't immoral because they aren't staked in the impacted industries. Eating meat isn't immoral because it's in their self-interest to keep doing it. What is immoral are things that would impact them, like if I stole their property, or if I take credit for their code at work, or if I ate their dog. Morality is easy to understand when you realize everyone is a hypocrite who uses their…

[dead]

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#447

Post by marcus_holmes »

dylan604 wrote: post #393
marcus_holmes wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is the insane bit - there is clearly a market for this. People do want to watch old stuff in new formats, and they're prepared to pay a reasonable amount for it. There is a perfectly reasonable business model in here.

How sure of that perfectly reasonable model are you? Are you willing to find a movie that you think this would be a solid bet, contact the content owner with the money to finance the necessary steps to get the content streaming platform ready? Would you put your money where your mouth is on this? Edit to add more food for thought. Let's take a non-premium feature film as an example. Let's assume that the title you've…

Well this is how the "unofficial" streaming services make money, basically.

They don't have the production costs, obviously, so there are some numbers to crunch there. And I don't have answers to any of your questions, because I am not in the industry. I suspect these are a whole bunch of trade-offs, as in most technical questions, and there is a version of these trade-offs that are economically viable.

But people are willing to pay to view stuff, and willing to take risks to view stuff. There is a market there, there's money there. We know this because there are people making money on this.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#448

Post by baby_souffle »

jacobgkau wrote: post #245
hxtk wrote: 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…

I think we will see this eventually.

Once Netflix isn't the only one that doesn't share their monthly subscriber numbers anymore, we'll know that they're beginning to at least question why they own everything instead of license their content out

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#449

Post by [deleted] »

dawnerd wrote: post #423
chongli wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People just don't realize just how garbage even 4k streams are from all the services. It's not in their interest to give you real bluray quality.

[deleted]

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#450

Post by viraptor »

john01dav wrote: post #421
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

This can happen with piracy too. For example, I'm aware of at least one case where the highest quality option for a specific show edited out the gay scenes.

Sure, someone can upload a new edited version. But the unedited one doesn't get removed. That's not really censorship.
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