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Too Many Video Streaming Choices May Drive Users Back To Piracy

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Re: Too Many Video Streaming Choices May Drive Users Back To Piracy

#511

Post by scarface74 »

cptskippy wrote: post #38
scarface74 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Your circle” unless it includes families with small kids, isn’t Disney’s primary audience. Most normal middle class people aren’t going to go through the trouble of pirating movies and setting up a Plex server and then worry about setting up their router to get a good connection while they are away from home and even then deal with the abysmally slow upload speed of the typical home network instead of spending $8 a…

Except the adults of families today were the kids who grew up with Napster, Limewire, and TPB so piracy has a sentimental feel to it like pulling a Nintendo out of your mom's basement.

I used Napster when it first came out, I was already 26. But as soon as the iTunes music store came out for Windows, I stopped using Napster and Kazaa. They were no longer worth the hassle. I didn’t buy an iPod until around 2005. I just made CDs.

It’s the same with video now. If I plan ahead, I will still pick up movies that fall off the back of a truck and put them on my Plex server, but often, we don’t even bother. We just rent from Amazon Prime or iTunes.

That’s even considering that I can just go to http://remote.vuze.com from anywhere on my phone and start a download on my home server.

Re: Too Many Video Streaming Choices May Drive Users Back To Piracy

#512

Post by fragmede »

switch007 wrote: post #459
fragmede wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but unless you use Reddit on a regular basis, why would you even consider adding "reddit" to the search query? To be fair, just searching for "plex" does return Reddit results, though not on the first page (for me anyway, Google personalizes search results). It's no longer the Wild West of Internet, and it turns out information doesn't want to be free, it wants to live in invite-only areas who's members are vet…

Let me turn it around: who are you trying to hide it from? Anyone with a tiny bit of Internet knowledge is going to know how big a site Reddit is (#6 on Alexa for the US).

Easy: The MPAA and every other organization that views copyright infringement as an evil that must be quashed and would seek to shut it down.

To be clear, I'm willing to pay for content, and have a small library of shows and movies sprawled across Google, Amazon, and Apple's offerings that I "own", it's just far more convenient to have all my media in one place: Plex.

Re: Too Many Video Streaming Choices May Drive Users Back To Piracy

#513

Post by fragmede »

tomc1985 wrote: post #436
partialrecall wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I know this is to simplify the UI" Why is that even necessary? Youtube offers you the full list to choose from and I don't see users writhing on the ground clutching their skulls in agonizing confusion. Users can handle a list of languages just fine. This industry thinks too little of users.

And designers, kings/queens of the "you think you want this feature, but our user tests show that you actually don't"

That's the worst. For mature products, all that A/B testing does is test how close the old UI is to the new UI. Users are scared of change, to the point that when Ebay wanted to change the color of their banner, changing the color instantly was a travesty to their users so instead, Ebay transitioned the color slowly, over months, to yellow.[0]

[0] https://theuxblog.com/blog/redesigning-user-experience

Re: Too Many Video Streaming Choices May Drive Users Back To Piracy

#514

Post by DerekL »

lostgame wrote: post #237
pessimizer wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not really what it's about. You have no idea how utterly janky Plex and torrenting is. I don't know anything about Plex, but torrenting is pretty effortless compared to figuring out which streaming service what you want to watch is on, figuring out how to get that, evaluating other content it has trying to justify the price, figuring out how to get it to your tv, and figuring out how to use it. The only thin…

>> torrenting is pretty effortless compared to figuring out which streaming service what you want to watch is on, figuring out how to get that, evaluating other content it has trying to justify the price, figuring out how to use it, and figuring out how to get it to your TV Damn. You just nailed this. In fact, hearing it this way makes me confused as to why anyone would ever use a streaming service to start. I live i…

I was going to suggest RedBox, but then I found out that they shut down in Canada. In the US, they're a good replacement for Blockbuster for new releases.

Re: Too Many Video Streaming Choices May Drive Users Back To Piracy

#515

Post by eyegor »

rhodo wrote: post #285
eyegor wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why in my circle we set up the town pump plex server. Originally it was for streaming older movies (pre 1970) which you can't stream from any major service but the new era of fragmentation has drastically expanded it. We bought a retired datacenter rack and everyone contributes a few bucks a month to cover running costs. Then we have scripts scraping the top x movies/shows from torrent sites once a week and a…

what are you using to run this code-wise? I was thinking of making something similar.

Freenas + plex, deluge and openvpn for torrenting (inside a container), iris to host the web front-end, scripts are all just python. I'm sure there are more legit solutions for web scraping but I just parse the html and it hasn't broken on me so far. One set of sites to query for "top x sites", pass titles along to torrent aggregator searches when there are no magnets. Then the important practical step is a background queue to re-encode the video to a standard format and bitrate. I'd rather not open source it because of how dirty the setup is, I just hacked something together one weekend and it's been running for almost 5 years now with minimal maintenance.

Edit: I think iris was something I did more recently, I don't remember what it was using originally. I just wanted to play with go a little bit. The "front end" itself is a single page with an upload button and a box to paste a magnet link, it's not like it's doing much. Plex does all the real work here.

Re: Too Many Video Streaming Choices May Drive Users Back To Piracy

#516

Post by eyegor »

CivilianZero wrote: post #448
eyegor wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why in my circle we set up the town pump plex server. Originally it was for streaming older movies (pre 1970) which you can't stream from any major service but the new era of fragmentation has drastically expanded it. We bought a retired datacenter rack and everyone contributes a few bucks a month to cover running costs. Then we have scripts scraping the top x movies/shows from torrent sites once a week and a…

“It’s easier to setup and purchase and manage a shared server, write and manage scripts, and develop a frontend for managing the content than it is to search an app/a couple apps.” Can you just admit you don’t want to pay services out of spite? No one could possibly rationalize this as being easier.

Like I said, the original goal was to have something to stream old movies. There is no service I could reliably find things pre-1970, especially the cardboard era of special effects. I'm a huge fan of the hammer horror films and every now and again I'll want to watch Mothra or Metropolis. Good luck finding anywhere to stream them outside of the "watch x online" sites which generally have poor quality or are mislabeled.

The torrenting features were tacked on later, and honestly I don't think it was much work at all. Setting up a proxy credit card just to sign up for another subscription service is more annoying to me than playing with server gear for a weekend.

Re: Too Many Video Streaming Choices May Drive Users Back To Piracy

#517

Post by jaypeg25 »

kerkeslager wrote: post #509
sp332 wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. https://imgur.com/a/mC1TKtB

Ah. I'm not a frequent Google user, so I've never seen that before. But I'll concede that most people are frequent Google users. Still, the fact that Google has a workaround for this issue shows that it is an issue.

For what it's worth my Roku has a search feature that populates a list of all streaming services (including rentals) that a movie or tv show you search for is on.

I've seen plenty of sites that also combine all the streaming service lists and let you search for specific movies or just browse based on genre.

Could it maybe be easier? Sure. But I'd argue it's still a lot easier than pirating...

Re: Too Many Video Streaming Choices May Drive Users Back To Piracy

#518

Post by l1n3n01z »

hansthehorse wrote: post #463
kerkeslager wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have no idea how utterly janky Plex and torrenting is. Compare these experiences: 1. Search Netflix. Discover it's not there. 2. Search Amazon. Discover they have it, but it's not available for free as part of your subscription. 3. Search Hulu. Leave Hulu, because it's not there. 4. Finally go back to Amazon and rent the movie, not sure why you're paying for Prime if you still have to pay on top of that for hal…

Or just go to JustWatch and let it tell you what your stream / rent / buy options are.

My country is not listed on JustWatch.

Re: Too Many Video Streaming Choices May Drive Users Back To Piracy

#520

Post by zeruch »

sbarre wrote: post #6

"May" drive them back? This has already happened in my circles.. People who had cut the cord but all but walked away from casual piracy and signed up for Netflix and HBO (and probably Prime Video because they had Amazon Prime already) are openly talking about the fact they're definitely not signing up for more streaming services, and are seeking out torrenting again for the stuff that's being pulled from Netflix (esp…

"I feel like there's a business opportunity for a meta-service that automatically manages monthly subscriptions for you on different services. You queue up a catalog of shows you want to watch, and it creates an optimized schedule for you and helps sign up for the individual streaming service on a given month in order to watch the show you want." Basically a premium Chromecast/Roku/etc service would help seal that up I suspect......but I suspect the licensing wars are only starting to ramp up.
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