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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

#481

Post by qrios »

tclancy wrote: post #427
qrios wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't care if someone knows how many times I've watched Idiocracy. I come from Germany, from East Germany. And some people there wanted to know if you had seen certain films and how often. And ‘Idiocracy’ would have been very high up on their list. Not all films were banned right from the start (‘The Legend of Paul and Paula’ [1]), but right from the beginning the Stasi found it very interesting who had watched t…

What if I have recently watched The Lives of Others? (Which everyone in the US should.)

‘The Lives of Others’ is an outstanding film. However, it is a reappraisal of East German history and was made seven years after the collapse (the director grew up in West Germany and Western Europe).

US-America has looked at the subject of surveillance of its own population and its own (possible) collapse many times and often in a timely manner.

"The Conversation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation

"Enemy of the State": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)

"The Siege": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siege

"In the Heat of the Night": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Heat_of_the_Night_(film...

"Eagle Eye": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Eye

If you ask publicly, ‘What if I've seen XYZ?’ then it's actually already too late.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#482

Post by Dwedit »

efilife wrote: post #424
godelski wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 account…

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

It's not the same thing. Normalization is scanning to see what the highest volume scale you can use without introducing clipping, then multiplying every sample by that scale.

Compression is very different. The volume scale isn't constant, and the original sound is distorted significantly. I often use a compressor to listen to video game streams because they tend to have the game audio be way too quiet. Having the compressor on causes the game audio to become louder with some minor distortion, but distorts the streamer's voice significantly.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#483

Post by throwawayxcmz »

bsimpson wrote: post #229
imglorp wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus the idea that if you pay someone to "purchase" and "own" (their terms!!) content, then it's yours forever. Unless, of course, they renegotiate something upstream and subsequently remove the content from your "library" or your device. Or perhaps they lock you out of those things altogether. This means it wasn't ownership, it was subscription. So as they say, “if buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.” http…

Stealing is when you take something from him, and he no longer has the thing you took. Piracy is when you see something for free that everyone else paid money for. You watching doesn't prevent anyone else from watching. Piracy isn't stealing: piracy only deals in intangibles. Stealing is for finite goods. There's a whole "how do we pay to make stuff if people can watch for free" problem around piracy, but it's fundam…

Do you consider fair evasion theft?

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#484

Post by Dwedit »

nosioptar wrote: post #228
greazy wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. I thought it was impossible to watch the original release of star wars. I need to hunt this down.

There's also a DVD release of the theatrical versions. Usually goes for $50-75 for OG trilogy.

Yes, there was the official DVD release that included the original versions as a bonus. But the quality can not compare to 4K77.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#485

Post by owlninja »

zamadatix wrote: post #232

This mirrors my experience as well. I used to pirate everything, it was relatively inconvenient to get the exact thing you wanted on physical media. Then streaming, Steam, and app stores came about. I pivoted 100%, it was sooo much more convenient than trying to find legitimate and quality copies of content and managing a set up to do so. Then the streaming side started to fragment a bit, but I just grabbed all of th…

I'll choose your comment to agree. I was a pirate in the 90s and early 00s, even though it took forever - it was "free"! Several years ago I was guilty of calling people out by saying that the real reason they pirated things is because they simply didn't want to pay. Fast forward to now and I can afford several services but it is just getting out of hand. My less tech-savvy family will hear about a show or movie and I have to google where the hell it is even available, and are we already subscribed to that service. Then I had a friend setup the whole AAR suite, and it has been a breath of fresh air. I'm not sure what the answer is but I am just about done having money extracted from me every month...

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#486

Post by tambourine_man »

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 a player that doesn’t suck. How many times have I hit rewind only to go back 30 min instead of 10 sec because the service lost track of where I was.

Pressing rewind is akin to Russian roulette, to the point where I’ve mostly given up, lest I risk ruining the mood while trying to scrub back to where I was.

Amazing how what was table stakes in the 90s seems like unattainable tech these days.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#487

Post by frollogaston »

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.

Piracy did kill creativity in film just like people warned. Content is never going to be priced the way it used to be. The argument for respecting licenses when training AI is the same, if you make (or buy) something then you set the terms.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#488

Post by IlikeKitties »

oulu2006 wrote: post #458

Never left bittorrent. I really wanted to embrace streaming services, prime really killed me recently, with introducing ads into a membership that I already pay for! and 90% of movies on prime I have to pay an extra 20 bucks to view ...why am i paying for membership?

> Never left bittorrent.

Yeah, I got into low level private trackers before netflix got really big and here in germany it always had a rather lackluster library anyway. The enshitification began faster than I was willing to move. In the end i'm still just pirating everything except games and music. Games because steam is more convenient on linux than dealing with cracks, wine installers and all that stuff. Not that i'm unable just that it's literally worth the convenience to pay for it and music because spotify was better than the pirated music i had available. I'm thinking about changing that and taking the RED pill, if you catch my drift.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#489

Post by GlitchRider47 »

birn559 wrote: post #364
prepend wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It blows my mind what slow momentum Amazon has for a company with such vast resources. Kindle, for example, lacks so many features to enhance the reading experience. Jailbreaking my kindle and installing KOReader was a game changer.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#490

Post by lyu07282 »

JeremyStinson wrote: post #460
lyu07282 wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The criterion collection being the one noteable exception, and they have their own standalone streaming service that is pretty good: https://www.criterionchannel.com/browse

Ironically, signing-up to Criterion isn't available in Australia: -------- Request Access Sorry. This is currently unavailable in your region. Type in your email below and tell the producers you want it in your country!

Try a VPN, I think it was easily circumvented
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