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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

#631

Post by AnthonyMouse »

godelski wrote: post #366
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 account…

This is a case study in why competitive markets are important in general.

Copyright is a government-granted monopoly but the monopoly is hard to enforce. It works because most people actually want to support the creators, not because DRM is effective or anything like that.

So you have the uncommon situation in which a monopoly (the copyright holder) is operating in parallel to a competitive black market for content distribution (pirates). And then the competitive market -- even though it has to operate underground and makes hardly any profit -- provides the better experience.

Lesson for anyone who thinks market consolidation doesn't lead to consumer harm.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#632

Post by SSLy »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #601
cess11 wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to name any names but depending on your budget and jurisdiction you can probably figure out a setup where you either torrent, possibly through a reputable VPN, from an invite based tracker, or you pay to play with one or two Usenet accounts. If you are willing to spend a bit of money you can get what's called a seedbox in a suitable jurisdiction and do rather innocous seeming tunneling between your home…

Usenet? Is the alt.binaries hierarchy really still around? how active is it?

if you have good indexer you have access to almost anything.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#633

Post by SSLy »

IlikeKitties wrote: post #488
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…

For music, you can only pirate to fill the gaps in Apple Music / Deezer / Tidal / Spotify / whatever.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#634

Post by SSLy »

dborzov wrote: post #183
platevoltage wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, although I guess this is sort of understandable. It's the "you're paying us, but here are some ads" that really gets me. Either way, 5 bucks a month to Emby, a really easy to get membership to a large private torrent site, and a 16TB hard drive solves these problems for me, and will continue to.

Thanks for the tips! Could you explain how can one get about "getting a membership to a large private torrent site"? Also, why Emby rather than, say, Jellyfin or Plex?

https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/Private_trackers

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#635

Post by dpacmittal »

I wonder if a business model where you buy movies for $x would work. You pay for each movie you want to watch, you get to download and keep the movie forever. A certain cut of the movie goes to the production studios. No ads, no device limits, no monthly subscription costs and you get access to the movie forever.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#636

Post by eleveriven »

Honestly, this feels like déjà vu. We went from Napster to Spotify, from torrents to Netflix, and now the cycle is reversing. Gabe Newell was right back in 2011: it's always been a service problem, not a pricing one. Weird how the tech just keeps getting better, but the experience keeps getting worse.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#637

Post by timsh »

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…

hey, maybe you’d never heard of https://ororo[.]tv this is exactly what you describe, at lease for movies + shows…

just in case - not an ad, not affiliated with them anyhow, just use it for years with all my friends and family.

there are subtitles is 20+ languages, direct download links, no ads, and new episodes come out pretty fast (usually <24 hours from official release).

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#638

Post by IshKebab »

Ekaros wrote: post #608
IshKebab wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unauthorized copying and sharing Which is known in English as "piracy".

No piracy is theft done on sea.

3. The unauthorized duplication of goods protected by intellectual property law.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/piracy

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#639

Post by eleveriven »

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…

The saddest part is that there's clearly demand for a service that just works across devices, countries, and catalogs
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