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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

#681

Post by benjiro »

swat535 wrote: post #322
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…

You also get many other features: 1. Automatically downloads subtitles, can pick between multiple available voice versions 2. Calendar with notifications when new series are available 3. Integration with various services like Trakt.tv, Letterboxd, etc 4. Automatic collection and organization of content 5. Metada, IMBD ratings and other movie details 6. Foreign content, Anime series (oh and of course let's not forget…

Point 6 grow a lot, with the recent UK chances requiring people to hand over their Identity to see xxx rated content. Privacy was a issue before but its getting worse and worse.

Point 7 ... see the recent EU law about chat services needing to provide access to users chats. Also links to UK recent laws etc ...

The more the governments and companies go crazy for your data / privacy, the more a personalized solution becomes a need. All the other benefits that such a platform offers, become icing on the cake.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#683

Post by alkonaut »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #671
alkonaut wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the key thing it misses though (usually) is that you usually have to go grab things. I'm not willing to go download something in order to view it. Not even spending a few minutes time grabbing a whole season of a series and then storing it somewhere, even if viewing it takes many hours. Spotify's convenience killed the mp3, and Netflix is hyper convenient compared to most piracy. No one (to a rounding error,…

RSS doesn't support such aggregation?

You just fetch all your rss'es from N sources and the client can show a merged one.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#684

Post by alkonaut »

sensanaty wrote: post #649
alkonaut wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the key thing it misses though (usually) is that you usually have to go grab things. I'm not willing to go download something in order to view it. Not even spending a few minutes time grabbing a whole season of a series and then storing it somewhere, even if viewing it takes many hours. Spotify's convenience killed the mp3, and Netflix is hyper convenient compared to most piracy. No one (to a rounding error,…

It's been super easy to stream pirated content for more than a decade (Popcorn Time) at this point, especially of late with the billions of pirate streaming sites that all pull from 20 different sources. It's funny in a sad way how much better the UX of a lot of the piracy sites are, too.

It's still hit & miss. You still get shit content interspersed with the good there. There isn't perfect curation so you can have a missing episode, a version that doesn't allow removing the spanish audio track, a duplicate of a movie or whatever. I'm not sure if that's solved yet (i.e. that you can somehow subscribe to pirated and well curated content) but at least last time I checked it sucked.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#685

Post by presentation »

wjholden wrote: post #564
presentation wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have another problem, which is that my wife is Japanese and I’m American, and if we watch a French movie then I want the English subs and she wants the Japanese subs. Making that work with streaming services is very painful.

I had never thought of this before. What is the solution? Can any video software show two subtitles at once?

For Netflix and YouTube I actually use a language learning chrome extension called Migaku, that has this feature - but if there don’t exist subs, can also sometimes pull it off with a chrome extension for dual subs - forget what it is called but I can download SRT files and load them up alongside a stream. Both are not reliable and require significant fiddling.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#686

Post by defrost »

alkonaut wrote: post #684
sensanaty wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been super easy to stream pirated content for more than a decade (Popcorn Time) at this point, especially of late with the billions of pirate streaming sites that all pull from 20 different sources. It's funny in a sad way how much better the UX of a lot of the piracy sites are, too.

It's still hit & miss. You still get shit content interspersed with the good there. There isn't perfect curation so you can have a missing episode, a version that doesn't allow removing the spanish audio track, a duplicate of a movie or whatever. I'm not sure if that's solved yet (i.e. that you can somehow subscribe to pirated and well curated content) but at least last time I checked it sucked.

Curation tends to be better with private sites and their trackers than with public trackers.

It's a point of member pride to assemble complete seasons with consistent quality, sizing, subtitles, and audio, etc.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#687

Post by JKCalhoun »

disillusioned wrote: post #590
JKCalhoun wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like we've had at least two lost decades of good content. It's probably somewhere, I just haven't found it yet.

In my humble opinion, some "good content": Netflix: * Dark * Fisk * Adolescence * Ripley * The Queen's Gambit * Ozark * Baby Reindeer * Easy Apple TV: * Black Bird * The Studio * Severance * Shrinking * Ted Lasso HBO: * The Wire * Oz * True Detective (S1 at least) * The Sopranos * Big Love * Rome * In Treatment * Succession * Deadwood * Insecure Misc: * Colin From Accounts * Black Sails * Mad Men * Breaking Bad * Bet…

I guess I wasn't thinking "series", but "films".

I know I have a lot of series to catch up on (although from the above, I found Severance disappointing, oh well).

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#688

Post by alkonaut »

defrost wrote: post #686
alkonaut wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still hit & miss. You still get shit content interspersed with the good there. There isn't perfect curation so you can have a missing episode, a version that doesn't allow removing the spanish audio track, a duplicate of a movie or whatever. I'm not sure if that's solved yet (i.e. that you can somehow subscribe to pirated and well curated content) but at least last time I checked it sucked.

Curation tends to be better with private sites and their trackers than with public trackers. It's a point of member pride to assemble complete seasons with consistent quality, sizing, subtitles, and audio, etc.

Yes but pirate site 1 does that for shows A, B, and C while pirate site 2 does it for show B, C, and D now you have rivaling versions of B and C etc, and worst case one of them did a poor job. If you just choose one source you have decent curation but not all the content. If you choose both you get duplication. I don't get how it solves the fundamental problem of getting everything curated with good content and no duplication? Perhaps this is a solved problem - but I just haven't tried recently.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#689

Post by account42 »

caconym_ wrote: post #495
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…

I'm sure somebody else has mentioned this, but if you're willing to buy physical media, it's not difficult to rip even 4K HDR blu-rays yourself and stream from a self hosted platform like Jellyfin. I'm able to find most of what I want to watch on physical media in either HD or 4K, with the exception of more obscure anime. Some TV shows can be expensive to pick up and more laborious to rip, though.

Older TV shows are often also only available on DVD which is much lower quality than what streaming services (and thus pirates) have for them.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#690

Post by account42 »

crote wrote: post #266
galleywest200 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physical media offers the first three, but not option four. I, too, would pay per show/movie to download and save DRM-free videos to my own drives.

So how come you can't (legally) watch Blue-Rays using a Linux computer, or when viewing it on an ancient CRT using an HDMI-to-analog converter? A lot of effort has gone into making physical media work only with pre-approved devices.

A lot of effort has been wasted, thanks to MakeMKV+libredrive making ripping easy.
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