It is simple really.
People stopped because the steamers made accessing media easier than piracy at a reasonable price.
Now that the reasonable price part is slipping away, people are re-assessing that decision.
One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting anti-piracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.
I reduced, but never really stopped, pirating visual media. Entirely because even when Netflix was the only streaming service, there were still tons of shows and movies that weren’t accessible digitally at all.
However I completely stopped pirating music over a decade ago, because everything I wanted was available on Spotify, and the service of discovery is well worth the price. As long as they don’t get greedy and the service cost only rises with inflation, they’ll have my approx $100 annually (2023 baseline) for the rest of my life.
Netflix, Disney, Paramount, etc can eat a bag of dicks though. They’ve each proven they’re nothing but greedy parasites, and the only way I’d stop pirating is with a single subscription that hosts everything for a reasonable price… There’s a higher probability that hell freezes over, so instead I’ll spend roughly $100 a month in computing hardware, internet services, and time, to pirate 90% of my content.
Steamers also paved the road to Cleveland
Cheers. That is the best spelling correction I have ever read.
I am leaving it as is.
Full steam ahead!
It’s not just the reasonable price part. It’s the ever increasing fragmentation of the video streaming market. When it was mainly Netflix, and it had a great variety of content, it was easy. Now every major studio has its own streaming service, and it’s all about exclusivity. But you can only get real variety by subscribing to several streaming services.
More competition… =Prices increase.
This is not the outcome I was told would happen.
Wait, what else was I told that never came correct.?
Student loans Housing Pay raises Protect and serve Self driving cars Pot/Gateway Equal opportunity Meritocracy
… I’m beginning to think all of society, in it’s entirety, is just one big grift.
No matter what they say capitalists do not actually like, or benefit, from competition.
They actively kill competition for a reason.
I mean, what is competition? The entire point of a competition is that someone wins, and someone loses. When the entire structure is a competition, then if enough time passes most participants will have lost, and only one will stand victorious. The concept of free market competition will always end in monopoly, and every anti-trust mechanism is just a way to slow this down, not an actual solution. Capitalism will never create a solution to this either, as monopoly is the logical goal of capitalism. When monopoly exists, the capitalists have the most power. Of course capitalism will benefit the capitalists. It would be weird if it didn’t.
It’s not competition if everyone has exclusivity contracts on all the content. Take Spotify vs Netflix for example. Spotify will have mostly the same base content as Apple Music, Deezer, what have you. With Netflix… You don’t get any Disney movies, no game of thrones, you have to buy all of the services to get access to even just the content you want.
I’ve never felt I was missing out on anything with Spotify, as I likely wouldn’t with YouTube music either. Maybe some have less but it’s at least a very comparable catalogue across the board.
Weird thing about music streaming in comparison to video streaming is that music streaming services are all third parties. There’s little to no exclusivity in that market because the streaming services all license from the same sources. The big music publishers haven’t gone and created their own streaming services, but are (more or less) happily working with Spotify, Apple Music etc.
That’s simply not happening in the video streaming market.
More competition == price increase
Less competition == price increase
This is the way
You’re forgetting the effect demand has on prices. Studios all pulled their content from Netflix and said “fuck you, pay us”. People paid, so here we are. Had people said “No, fuck you! Put the content back on Netflix” then we’d still have $15 for everything on one platform. There was enough demand for companies to sell their products. It’s not competition when each service has different offerings.
That possibly would’ve worked if the platforms all had an agreement to share the same content and not monopolize exclusives. If that were the case you’d choose the one with the best price and the best features.0
Is it really competition when for example Disney has a monopoly on Disney Streaming Content?
What do you mean, there are other streaming services aren’t there?
Yes there is competition for streaming but not for the specific content of the services. With music I can choose Spotify or Deezer or whatever, but for Disney content I can only use Disney+ or for Paramount Content only Paramount+, so they have a monopoly for their respective content if I want to stream it.
That’s most industries though. That’s like saying Toyota has a monopoly on Toyotas but, I can just buy a Ford that does the same exact thing. That’s not what monopoly means.
That’s not a very good analogy, but even if we run with a cars one… then it’s more like one dealership being the only one allowed to sell Toyotas. You aren’t allowed to buy any Toyota, even a used rusty one, from any other dealership. If the dealership decides it costs too much in storage to keep a certain car, like a Prius c, in stock…well they just get rid of the Prius C altogether. (HBO and Westworld being the dealership and Prius c for example)
Not really. That’s a different media and format. (But before you say that you can technically stream it on DirectTV too, that’s owned by AT&T, who also owns HBO)
But sure, I’ll accept that Westworld wasn’t a great example for my analogy since I was only considering streaming. A better example might be Final Space Season 3. The third season never got a physical media release (any you find are homemade copies) and the entire series is unstreamable (save for s2e1 on Amazon prime for purchase…for some reason).
This is going to be a growing trend. If they ever decide to pull streaming rights for Barry s2-4 or Stranger Things S3-4, they also don’t have physical media available currently.
I see what you mean, I think you’re right.
Just gonna re-post my own comment from another thread in this community, relating to a similar article, because it’s just as applicable here:
This is honestly hilarious to me. The streaming companies actually had it right to begin with. They delivered on-demand content at a much lower cost than DVD distribution, without having to negotiate with cable companies to deliver it. They had a working system that delivered value for money, and kept the profits in their own pockets.
Then they shit the bed. Classic case of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. Greedy dickheads.
I don’t think that’s what happened. Studios fought streaming tooth and nail. But they were willing to license their videos to Netflix because they were a DVD distributor. Then Netflix was really savvy and pioneered streaming, making a killing doing it. Those same anti-progress, greedy fuck studios who fought against streaming saw how much money Netflix was making with their content and spun up their own half-assed streaming services, then pulled their licensing from Netflix. Netflix didn’t kill itself, the same greedy people who tried to kill the vcr, fought streaming, and sued Napster users, killed it.
Nah - Netflix, and all the others, have absolutely shit the bed on this one.
I was happily paying for 5 or 6 streaming services a month. Then they got greedy, started price gouging, and reducing the quality and/or range of content. Netflix even wanted to charge me for password sharing, because my stepkids used our account at their dad’s house.
They all fucked themselves over.
I cancelled Netflix when they implemented that policy, but they reported that their revenue went up, so most people didn’t cancel, and a bunch of people signed up.
The sad part is they were awake, in bed, not even trusting the wrong fart, just outright splatter blasting their sheets.
I’m no economist, but it’s interesting how a free market and more competition doesn’t result in a better product for consumers. Just each company going “oh, the other guy raised their prices, let’s do the same or we’ll fall behind”
It’s crazy how consumers just keep eating the higher prices too, instead of rebelling by cutting their spending. I’ve been wondering if people are just charging everything and we’re going to hit a major recession when everyone runs out of credit. I sure hope not! I’ve already gone through too many “once in a lifetime” economic events.
Absolutely. It all disappears in the general mass of their credit card payments. It becomes disconnected from individual cost.
I can’t believe this sort of thing is even a story. Guess most folks can’t run a privateer.
In any case, I’m still looting and pillaging because damned if I trust my movies and books to an outfit that can take them away from me on a whim. I’ve got data from '98 or so, all backed to Google Drive and locally. No matter what, I can still have my media.
The idea is supposed to be that these things wax and wane. And they mostly do.
We started stealing music with Napster -> the market eventually started offering affordable alternatives
We started stealing movies with The Pirate Bay -> studios finally came onboard with streaming
We stole games -> market reacted with serviced like Steam that make it too cheap and easy to bother pirating
And now that streaming greed seems to be biting them in the ass, we’re due for another market correction.
We’ll see, but I never stopped pirating. Only thing I pay for is Spotify because it’s too damned convenient to get the music I want, anywhere I want, for $10/mo. Spotify: Test me with higher prices or stop me from making local downloads and I’ll drop back to stealing that shit too.
Be nice to the goose.
- Martin O’Donnell
Nice summary!
some of the big studios are starting to not do discs releases here in Australia as well. If I want an archive copy of a movie (for the months I dont feel like shelling out for streaming access), I can’t even fall back to disc. The high seas is already the only place to get some content, when its not on disc and no one has purchased the digital rights
That is the bed they made and now the studios must lay in it.
I don’t care if they start distributing microSD cards, there MUST be a physical distribution format that is not linked to an online subscription.
I’ve always been surprised its remained optical media for so long. I’d have bought a USB drive with a season of television on it. No doubt they’d fuck it up with another DRM scheme.
I’m resigned to the fact that if there is no offline distribution in the not too distant future, I will still build a library of the media I want from other sources.
Pretty soon it will ONLY be the pirates that have access to a lot of this content. You should think of it is a global community service.
🏴☠️
Was 20 years between sails. 56kb dialup that could hardly get an album down in a couple of days to self hosting a server that I don’t even consume the content of.
Seed. That. Shit.
Pre-emptive reminder that piracy is illegal in Australia, so please don’t share any links to pirated content or it will be removed in accordance with Rule #5
No need. There are plenty of places here in the fediverse to find out about piracy.
Just thought I’d get ahead of the curve because these kinds of posts tend to attract a wider audience from outside this instance who might not be familiar with our rules. I’m not saying I agree with copyright law - I think it’s stupid and in 100 years time we’re going to be laughed at for it. I just don’t want and I doubt anyone wants this instance to be associated with crime
Yep.
I heard there are full piracy themed instances, with guides and wikis for all that
For me, it’s the decision fatigue. The content is so fragmented across so many services and it’s constantly getting worse. The rising costs adds to the fatigue because the fragmentation is less manageable now with all the services raising prices and cracking down on password sharing. I just feel like I have to think about it too much now.
I mean, there literally are complex websites created just to help people find and filter for streaming services that serve a movie or a series under what conditions or prices and the results are so fragmented and unsatisfying. Hell, so often a simple classic movie is on none of the streaming services or just on one on which you even then have to pay even if you are paying for a subscription (looking at you, Prime). So what the f, how should I happily decide for a subscription if the next day I have to yet pay for another one just because a effin movie is on another platform? Streaming has become a damn chore.
Some people never left the seas
Jellyfin best streaming platform
Can’t wait for Christmas money to build a home server and doing (amongst other things) exactly that.
In the meantime, you might find Real Debrid useful, combined with an app like Weyd, Stremio/Torrentio, Syncler, etc. You can immediately stream torrents without having to download them, since Real Debrid caches them on their end.
For royalty-free videos only, of course. Nobody would dare use the internet to illegally acquire copyrighted material.
Of course not! Why would anyone want to download copyrighted material? Outrageous!
Thanks btw
Currently, you will run into far fewer issues and limitations if you use Plex.
Don’t even need that. I just have a fuckoff huge fileserver and a dedicated pc slaved to the tv.
Bonus is that same machine now doubles as a kicksss retroarch
Streaming services are hard to navigate. There needs to just be one place to stream everything from like music. Then I’ll never sail the seas again,
All The Web is getting too hard to navigate. If it isn’t the layers of layers of ads and trackers making it impossible to read content, or the obfuscation of permalinks, or AI plagiarism of original content, it is the 7 pages of Sponsored Links in search engines, meaning that your eyeballs are going to the highest bidder.
Meanwhile algorithmic curated lists are force-fed to consumers for the sole purpose of manipulating their political beliefs and buying habits, railroading them into making life decisions for the benefit of others.
Just yesterday, I looked for a tool to encrypt files in Dropbox.
I couldn’t remember the name, so I searched “encrypt files in drop box.”
Every single link on the first page was to the official site. I had to guess at the name of the software to find its site.
Now imagine you were a network user who just wanted to know how to configure a Write-Only network folder, or you wanted to find plans for a mailbox with a secure parcel receptacle.
Both of these concepts were historically called a Dropbox, until one commercial company hijacked the name for a Read-Write personal network folder, and corrupted the name by providing Read-Only features to their product.
In fact, I had that issue with something but I’m drawing a blank at the moment. It’s truly annoying.
Ironically the unofficial streaming sites basically have that covered now. Pretty much anything you want on release day from the major streaming companies.
The only problem is that I can’t convince my friends/roommates to embrace the media center piracy box. Literally the smallest level of extra work is too much. I’m not sure how to make it easier
Stremio ? Crazy high WAF here.
What’s WAF? Wet ass fuck?
Wife acceptance factor. This is Lemmy though so it’s probably significant other acceptance factor here.
Wife Approval Factor
What’s a media center piracy box and how to setup one?
I’d imagine it’s a more generic term for a small PC (or maybe an Android TV box) running something like Kodi (home media centre program), and Kodi would have access to a drive (usually a network drive) full of pirated MP4s or whatever. I’m sure there’s even more elegant solutions out there, but you get the gist.
Yeah if the mainstream media could shut up about piracy that would be great.
This is how takedowns happen
I have always been a sailor but did pay for Netflix for 6-7 years mainly to share the account with others. When content evaporated I dropped it. I paid HBO streaming to support Game of Thrones and then dropped it too. I always watched WEB-DL even when paying for a service because of quality
Never left baby 🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️!
GOOD.
