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Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

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Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#591

Post by justsomehnguy »

nerdix wrote: post #209
PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #9

Streaming became popular because it was easier than piracy and better than TV (watch anywhere, on demand, pickup where you left off etc). Streaming is no longer easier than piracy, why pay for 8 different services and have to waste your time figuring out whats on what when you can just have one service for free, even if its illegal, and have it all under one roof. The services have taken the piss and now they'll get…

Also, H265 encoded 1080p is hitting the sweet spot between quality and file size. About 500-ish MB per hour of content for decent quality. Its sort of like when VBR encoded MP3s became the standard in the privacy scene in the early 00s. The quality is good enough for most folks plus the reduced file size means that it downloads really fast on average connections and isn't prohibitively expensive to store so you can c…

> the privacy scene

lol

> Also I think the shift to SSDs from spinning rust delayed the adoption of widespread video piracy 10-ish years ago

Huh? 500GB (and more) drives became available at 2006 and by 2008 dropped below $150.

Also there was no demand for extra-high-wanna-see-every-original-pixel quality, so XviD releases with atrocious quality but a fine file size were common and were fine on 40-80-250GB drives in 2001-2005.

> you can create a large library very quickly

Music library and video library are a different things. While the most people 'store forever' the music they dloaded (well, they were back in 2000s, probably not so much today), the video library is mostly useless for the most, because it's dloaded for 1-time consumption.

Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#592

Post by kalleboo »

worthless-trash wrote: post #302
paulddraper wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"hacker" = "free information" ?? I've never heard that definition.

Not OP, but this spawned from Woz mentioning this on a video ( https://www.gettyimages.in/detail/video/at-the-first-hackers... ) in the hackers conference. You may be too young (not an insult) or in a different geography to have been seen this, however it was definitely a thing.

The irony of this being hosted on Getty Images is not lost on me

Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#593

Post by Netcob »

> “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth”

I bet they are seeing this as some sort of push by criminals to take viewers away from streaming platforms, or at least that's how they will present it. And 0% of those millions they invest in fighting piracy will go towards actually making a more compelling consumer proposition.

And I guarantee that none of them will mention how piracy has always existed and was always an option. There is no new tech that suddenly appeared like P2P in the early 2000s.

The real statement should have been "We finally got so greedy and icompetent that it's driving more and more users to piracy."

Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#594

Post by mandarax8 »

Robin_Message wrote: post #588
rrr_oh_man wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like what?

My three biggest pet peeves are: - You can't turn your queue into a playlist (and you can't see previous queue as part of the queue, only as limited history.) - Clicking a song or album sometimes clears your queue and starts playing that instead (I know there is a logic to it, but a mistake or mis-click is easy). - There is no shortcut to add to queue, just long press then find the menu item. It's possible everyone e…

> - There is no shortcut to add to queue,

There is, just swipe the song to the right.

Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#595

Post by quenix »

rekoil wrote: post #529
izacus wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, also pirated content has: - 4K HDR video, not whatever the heck the buggy client delivers. - Atmos/TrueHD audio track that actually works, not whatever the broken app delivers (I'm looking at you Sky and rest of the ilk that still deliver HBO content with stereo). - Subtitles for ALL the languages, not just one or two. And those languages don't disappear when I go on a vacation, leaving me stuck with german aud…

I personally find that Spotifys offline content has worked reliably over the years. You just gotta remember that when you get a new device you have to go to library and click download and then leave Spotify open for a few hours. Spotify is also a great example of how to beat piracy. I haven't downloaded an mp3 file since I got a Spotify Premium account in 2007. OK that's probably a slight overstatement, but it's near…

Spotify has never automatically deleted offline content for me, but it does have extremely confusing UI which makes it very easy to wipe all downloads without confirmation.

Basically, the download button is a single down-arrow at the top of your library. When you tap it—and download your music–the down-arrow turns solid green to indicate your music is available offline. It doesn't disappear. It turns green, Spotify's primary color.

The kicker is: if you accidentally (or out of curiosity) press that green arrow again, it will wipe all your downloads without confirmation (disabling "offline mode"). Did that on a flight once and lost all my music. It's absurd how that UX made it out of testing.

Here's a picture of what I'm talking about. Tapping this icon deletes your library from your device:

https://i.imgur.com/zrSid1T.jpeg

Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#596

Post by fragmede »

There's an alternate version of history, where there's a gentlemans agreement that Netflix doesn't make their own content, the content houses license their stuff to them and don't make a competing service, and everyone gets their share of a bigger pie. But HBO saw Netflix and was like, I could do that, and Netflix saw HBO and said I could do that. And instead of working together for a better outcome, they decided to fight so here we are.

Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#597

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

roenxi wrote: post #446
Dban1 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you yourself can come up with counter-examples for that.

And, furthermore, piracy isn't stealing. It is a major point here that the initial owner of the thing still possesses the thing. They're trying to assert some unnatural right of control over what other people do. It isn't even all that clear why this is a good idea. I can see how it makes sense for legislators because of the presumably significant kickbacks they get from lobbyists; but there is a still an open questi…

The original owner no longer possesses the commercial value of the thing.

That's what you steal when you pirate.

People have been buying into shared cultures for centuries. Sometimes being able to afford access to a certain culture - and excluding those who can't - is part of the culture itself.

In a bottom-up cultures people are happy to pay because they feel part of the scene and they want to support it. A big part of that is user/costumer/fan experience and a feeling of community.

Top-down cultures feel exploitative and predatory - because they are. They separate the culture into producers and consumers and enforce strict gatekeeping of the relationship between them - which usually means a one-way financial obligation that feels like extortion, and unnecessary complications and frictions in the experience.

The real issue here is the insistence by the media-cos that movies can only ever be top-down.

The predictable outcome is there's now a shared culture of piracy in which people willingly support the pirate sites instead of the official distributors, and running a pirate site can be incredibly profitable.

Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#598

Post by GoblinSlayer »

kalleboo wrote: post #567
10729287 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to focus on such a detail but VBR nevern been the standard in the Piracy scene. Back in the days it was 192kbps

When I quit pirating music, I remember the standard being either LAME -V2 or --alt-preset standard which both are VBR https://opentrackers.org/scenerules.org/html/2007_MP3.html

Maybe metadata is wrong? Somewhere around 2011 it started to report as cbr, but encoding options are -m j -V 4 -q 3 -lowpass 20.5

Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#599

Post by pdimitar »

maccard wrote: post #531
martindbp wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think TV and games are meaningfully different. Most people tend to watch way more number of shows in a year than buying/playing video games. Video games have more replayability, so it's something you need to "own" rather than stream. Therefore, subscriptions for games are not a big thing yet (I doubt it will ever be). As it stands now, if a game I want is not on Steam, that's OK, I can just install another game sto…

> Therefore, subscriptions for games are not a big thing yet (I doubt it will ever be) World of warcraft has had a subscription for 20 years and is wildly successful. PSN has a monthly subscription where you get 2-3 games per month added to your account that you can play as long as you're still subscribed. Gamepass has 25+ million subscribers [0] > I'm not OK with paying $70 a month Honest question, why not? That's w…

> Honest question, why not?

Value for money. Most households don't spend their lives watching 4-8h of content every day, I'd think.

I'm likely to watch maximum 12h a month. So 6$ an hour? No thanks. And I'm talking maximum. Most months I spend 6h watching in total. That brings it up to $12 / hour.

Pay-what-you-watch sounds better to me and many others. Show me a gradually increasing bill in the top right corner of the UI and I'll manage. Or give me only one subscription -- much less than $70 though -- and then you distribute my money to the proper rights holders. I shouldn't care who owns what, nor should I be bothered switching services.

It doesn't matter if I'm a billionaire as well. Again, value for money.

Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#600

Post by quenix »

mkl wrote: post #579
jszymborski wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that Netflix and co. won't stream 4K at all to Linux devices, and they often don't serve 4K if they deem your internet connection to be too slow. For many folks, pirated 1080p is par with what they'd get streaming, and pirated 2k or 4k is better.

1080p = 2k; both are 1920x1080p. p is rows in the vertical dimension (p for progressive, as opposed to i for interlaced; e.g. NZ terrestrial TV is 1080i). k is columns in the horizontal direction, and comes from film making and visual effects (1920 rounds up to 2k and 3840 rounds up to 4k).

Wow, I thought K stood for thousand (as in 4K=4,000)! Nice piece of trivia if true.
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