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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

#831

Post by skeaker »

frollogaston wrote: post #521
sunrunner wrote: post #24

"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" -- Gabe Newell [1] And I think he was largely correct, although the term _service_ seems like it now has to do a lot of heavy lifting as it now encompasses: - Availability by Company - Availability by Global Region - Stream Quality - Advert Policy (why does the lowest tier need to be ad supported? What am I paying for aside from being upsold?) - Qu…

Gabe Newell, founder of the largest video game DRM company. Find a way for anyone to download video games for free without risking malware or compromising online play, and see how many people still pay $60 for a new game on Steam.

People can and do download games for free all the time and Steam is still there. People pay for Spotify when music has been openly free since Napster was the zeitgeist.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#832

Post by skeaker »

galleywest200 wrote: post #159
dilDDoS wrote: post #82

I actually think pirating encourages a healthier approach to watching TV/movies. I've fully made the switch to pirating instead of subscribing to any streaming services, and it's led to me thinking more critically about what I want to spend time downloading and watching rather than just flipping mindlessly through endless amounts of readily available garbage on a streaming service. I do still have Kanopy though, whic…

Why not purchase the discs and copy them yourself? At least artists can get paid that way.

Nobody said you couldn't do this too.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#833

Post by ProfessorLayton »

dawnerd wrote: post #803
abbycurtis33 wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! Someone came after me on here because I said there really is no 4k streaming.

The marketing of a resolution really won out. People will fight you if you suggest a high bitrate 1080p encode can look better than a low bitrate 4k.

Bitrate aside, the marketing stopped making sense long ago:

- 720p/1080p is counting vertical pixel resolution

- 4k/8k is counting horizontal pixel resolution

- "4k/8k" is not actually 4,000/8,000 horizontal pixels

- Suddenly the "p" becomes irrelevant (Not that most people even knew what it meant to begin with)

- 720/1080/4k/8k totally disregards aspect ratio

- Consumers already have a way to compare, and they're called "megapixels"

- 2.1MP (1080p) and 8.3MP (4k) etc. is a lot more consumer friendly since it's already used for cameras.

Marketing really won at making this a mess.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#834

Post by AnthonyMouse »

JambalayaJimbo wrote: post #730
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

The black market is only more competitive because it doesn’t bear the costs of actually creating the content.

> The black market is only more competitive because it doesn’t bear the costs of actually creating the content.

That only explains why the price is lower, not why the experience is better.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#835

Post by matheusmoreira »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #741
matheusmoreira wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Piracy" is not theft, it is copyright infringement. Calling it theft is not "honesty", it's just factually wrong. There's nothing to debate on this matter. > Like everyone is trying to somehow spin the whole situation into some story that makes their act of theft morally correct. Nobody is "spinning" anything. We're telling you what we believe and why we believe it. Actual moral justification involves the realizatio…

No. The entire games and movie industry exists because a segment of people don’t pirate. All the technology created to support those two industries mentioned above are supported by people who paid for their shit. Your view point twists reality because the financial realities don’t pan out. Who the fuck pays for a triple A video game if it’s morally right to pirate things? If you pirate you benefit off of millions of…

> Who the fuck pays for a triple A video game if it’s morally right to pirate things?

Yours truly.

I have been a proud Steam customer for over 20 years. I have licensed over 200 games on Steam alone. I own multiple video game consoles from multiple generations and have quite the collection of titles for them.

Not a single person can accuse me of not supporting creators.

> The fact of the matter is your “morality” here cannot sustain the industry.

The fact of the matter is the industry shouldn't be sustained. It is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create a product whose price trends toward zero due to infinite availability. When that obviously fails, they get upset and invoke copyright in order to distort reality until they're profitable.

The simple fact is creators need a new business model. And that business model is patronage. It's the labor of creation that's scarce and valuable, not the finished product. Therefore creators should be paid continuously for the act of creating itself, not the finished product.

Macaulay’s 1841 address is the most vigorous defense of copyright I've ever read:

https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...

And even he realized that copyright was a monopoly, tolerated only due to the fruits it bears.

He rejected alternatives such as patronage due to fear of suppression. Rich patrons would of course decline to fund works that they didn't like.

That concern no longer exists. We now have technology in the form of platforms like kickstarter and patreon which democratize funding and patronage, greatly reducing or eliminating the risk of suppression. There is no longer any need for copyright.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#836

Post by SllX »

mystifyingpoi wrote: post #626
SllX wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with Pokémon isn’t that it’s fragmented across streaming services, it’s the anime itself where by Advanced you’re getting enough of the same formulaic bullshit it can drive even a kid crazy. I was that kid. Except for some slight deviations, such as the beginning of Best Wishes (Black & White), you can put on a sequence of any 10 episodes from any season and it doesn’t matter what streaming service it’s o…

> of the same formulaic bullshit Sounds like every single mainline game until SV/PLA which tried the open world a bit. People still like it.

The games actually change though in a way the anime never really did no matter how many characters or Pokémon they cycled through.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#837

Post by adangert »

Throwing my two cents in, the problem with all of this, is that we're dealing with artificially created scarcity, for content that can be easily duplicated. Artificial scarcity is a terrible thing to exist, and if got rid of it as a whole in society, we might end up with less high production content, but at least we would own all digital content that would be created. Services where consumers are paying for or perhaps even have sway over the creation of content, not the distribution, i.e. like patreon, are much more in line with nature of digital things.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#839

Post by CafeRacer »

Its like if I want to watch Alien, all four of those older movies they want me to have two subscriptions?

And then most of streaming services actually stream stuff, so if my internet is bad im gonna sit there annoyed. I have a small samsung projector and its literally freezing all the time (something to do with wifi and qos, i have other things in my life more interesting that sysadmining a router).

Then up until last year, i could not even watch Dr. House legally.

And then the content changes over time. I remember seeing a scene, that i no longer see. Like wtf?

Its 98% (made up number) that its the service fault.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#840

Post by tstrimple »

wltr wrote: post #562
tstrimple wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With torrents you'll want a VPN. Usenet is generally safe just thanks to TLS unless you're uploading content. For that I'd use a VPN. But unlike torrent, Usenet isn't P2P so I can just download at my full internet bandwidth and don't need to hope there are enough seeders out there maintaining it or that I maintain some magic upload / download ratio.

What about torrents and Tor? Moral aspects aside. (Personally, I’d not do it, out of respect for the network.) Just curious about it theoretically, how this technology and its ‘moderation’ (let’s call it that) works.

Torrents and Tor aren't related. BitTorrent (the protocol) is about peer to peer file sharing and the metadata that enables it. Tor is a network overlay that helps prevent an actor from seeing both where a connection is coming from and where it is going to at the same time. If you're using Tor your ISP can see that you're using it, but not what sites you visit. Other agencies could see that Tor traffic is going to website XXX, but not which individual Tor users are making the connection. Just that they come from a Tor relay. It's not perfect and there are ways to compromise the safety Tor and onion routing is trying to provide.

Generally I don't associate Tor with pirating content. It's more about accessing published content or publishing content anonymously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_routing

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