Not 20 years later, the technology for this is already well-established; the only thing stopping it is that the owners of the films don't want to make them available this way.
Nacchio was no saint, but it seems pretty clear that he was targeted after failing to be cooperative.
It's linked on the official/original github repo[0]. But the official official[1] repo doesn't link anything. Just that original developers are supporting .sh as official and have apparently moved to it.
There's also ...ce.ch but that's community edition as the last two chars suggest.
[0] https://github.com/popcorn-official
[1] https://github.com/popcorn-time
PS. I have put info to the best of my knowledge :)
Perhaps you're fortunate that everything you want to listen to is on your preferred music streaming service, but what they offer is far from everything in the music industry's catalogue. Ask any classical music fan what they think of streaming services and you'll hear a tirade against the woeful offerings that streaming services make available.
They are stricter than Spotify with regional licenses unfortunately. I listen to a lot of Japanese artists that are on Spotify but not on GPM in Europe (but are there in Japan), I simply imported their albums and ripped them and uploaded them on the service and now they behave exactly the same. Not ideal, but still. For like 90% of the rest of the library (anecdotal experience at least) it's the same as Spotify, which is pretty great.
DISCLAIMER: I work at Google, but I've been using GPM long before that. These are my opinions and not those of my employer, yadda yadda.
The thing is, the paid tier of GPM is really only for on-demand streaming of the music catalogue and removing ads in the radio. As an upload-only user, I really see no reason to pay money for a service that I am fully enjoying for free. If Google were to add back (and continue developing) the removed My Library features and decide to make a payment tier for use-cases like mine, I'd happily subscribe. Their focus on "your library anywhere, with extra features" is something that really stands out. I'd hate to see GPM turn into just another stream-what's-licensed service.
Actually Apple Music offers exactly this. There might be other reasons you'd prefer not to use it, which is fine, but in terms of offering they're actually quite similar.
Except Apple will actually allow you to upload more songs than Google Music, up to 100,000.
I did really like Google Play Music, and allowing the local library sync as a free draw was a really smart move. But the sour taste they left in my mouth by killing my discount plan and ruining the UX meant I looked at other options. Signed up for Apple Music day one and it has improved leaps and bounds since then.
It's very clearly a huge priority for Apple, and they aren't resting on it.
works on linux and there's also an unofficial API
https://unofficial-google-music-api.readthedocs.io/en/latest...
I make playlists almost daily for work and I use the API to manage them, dedupe, delete old ones, and what not. Super convenient.
But the web UX has gone to crap. There was an update a few months ago that really killed its performance and broke the playlist sorting. They need to eat some of their dogfood.
It's totally open source, has a relatively decent web player, allows you to stream your music anywhere, allows you to create accounts for others to have access to your music, can connect with Plex/subsonic to work with other devices/clients. I use DSub on my phone, and can sync music offline (like GPlay Music). Only downsides really is that it requires a web server and the initial import can take some time if your library is very large.
Describe yourself:
"I'll never let go of my Squeezebox and/or enjoy living in the past and/or need it to run on Windows" https://github.com/Logitech/slimserver
"I'm a sysadmin with a Roku SoundBridge" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_Media_Server is another, specifically for Roku Soundbridge and iTunes streaming protocols.
"I'm running FreeNAS and just want to use a plugin" Subsonic is another http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp . Can also do Shoutcast streaming.
"I know what RMAF stands for and/or like messing with SBCs and/or spending $10k on audio equipment" http://www.runeaudio.com
"I run Arch with a tiling wm" Lastly are the mpd family of servers and clients. These are for the hardcore nerds who love recompiling ffmpeg from source. Servers: https://www.musicpd.org // https://www.mopidy.com
Clients: https://www.musicpd.org/clients/ // https://docs.mopidy.com/en/latest/clients/mpd/ // http://www.runeaudio.com/clients/
I keep hearing about how nimble and agile Spotify is, and how their tech stack and team structure lets them add features quickly. I wonder why they haven't offered upload storage yet, and whether that's coming?
Classical is a bit special, but hopefully efforts like the internet archive can help bring at least a lot of the royalty free music to streaming.
I'd be perfectly happy with a streaming service aggregating the current top 10 services for tv/movies, and I assume 90% of customers would. It seems reasonable to make a product that caters to "most" rather the all customers, just like Spotify.
In the past, technically savvy music nerds like me had options. LPs and CDs as a distribution format offered true permanence. Vinyl when cared for properly usually outlives the owner. CDs can be ripped and archived with perfect 1:1 accuracy.
These formats don't disappear from my record shelves at the whim of an executive or a change to a silly end user license agreement. They're mine forever, for me to cherish and learn from for as long as I want.
Until the music industry offers this type of solution for the digital music ecosystem, they will not be adequately serving music's most dedicated and passionate patrons.
Bandcamp is the only service that comes close to delivering the proper solution. But they are so uncompromising in their ideals that the 'industry' will not work with them. It's too bad, because they and DistroKid are the only two online music industry services I have ever seen that are genuinely interested in furthering the lives of their users.
LPs and CDs still exist.
"so long as you keep all your discovery of new music within Spotify - because you'll never discover what isn't there."
This is exactly the reason we have arguments about the importance of net neutrality - which your underlying point is arguing directly against. Not sure if that was intentional or not - but the music industry is a really bad measuring stick of success in this area.
To contrast to Spotify - I'm sure Disney would be fine with it if everyone watched what they were hosting on their network exclusively and ignored the content on other platforms.
On a side note: Isn't this basically what Disney Life is already? Did I miss something?
I wasn't trying to make an argument either way on what's good/bad with Spotify (or any service large enough to be used as an only provider) but my feeling of missing out on something is something I try to avoid more than actually missing out on something (if that makes any sense). A kind of loss aversion I suppose. Bryter to have less and not know, than have more and see what you are missing.
Youtube is probably the most complete but (1) I don't want to waste bandwidth on downloading the video every time I try to listen to music and (2) it's missing the discovery component that dedicated music services have.
It supports downloading only the audio.
I mean, if you are ok with doing something (probably) illegal, why not get the best experience out of it?
Pandora - https://github.com/PromyLOPh/pianobar
Spotify - https://github.com/plietar/librespot
Plus, it's pretty illegal if I'm not mistaken!
Plus, sound quality on youtube isn't very good
Pity. This is a good demonstration though of the value lost to dysfunctional copyright laws.
Classical music fans are more music lovers than casual stream listeners
They use the vault the way diamond miners do- to restrict supply of extremely coveted goods so that they can charge premium prices for them. It's good business and it keeps things that are decades old in constant demand so they can charge higher prices for them.
Unfortunately for you and me that means that if we want access we have to pay more. While it may certainly be true that you don't place enough value on Disney products to pay a premium, there are lots of people who will and there are probably still going to be times that you want access to it and consider signing up. That's what they want- if they commoditized their content and you were able to get access to everything they own for $30 a month, that wouldn't serve their purposes at all. Companies like Netflix dream of having one franchise that's as successful as the countless ones that Disney has. Why on Earth would they just have a fire sale for all of their content when they can restrict supply and extract the most profit from it?
In any other industry market forces would be in effect forcing business to either compete or go under. But because copyright laws give content owners a monopoly it means the only effective competition is illegal services. And the daft thing is they're literally better in every way. Which is why I know so many people who normally follow the letter of the law and who happily pay for expensive cable / satellite / Netflix / whatever subscriptions who also have absolutely no qualms in downloading or streaming movies illegally. These are customers who want to pay for services but end up pirating because there isn't any service available to them.
It's completely bonkers. It shouldn't be like this but it is entirely the fault of the content industry. They created the void by monopolising their content and then failing to provide any practical services. And they created the demand by targeting their advertising at kids, by making it illegal to backup old formats like DVDs, and such like.
So to answer your question, sure they can try to extract the most profit from it but customers are already angry, fed up and aware of better albeit illegal services so all Disney are going to do is drive more people to piracy. If they really wanted to extract more profit then they would trying to onboard more users instead of making their content harder to get hold of. It really feels like the whole FRAND patents situation where Disney are happy to become a critical part of pre-teen culture but don't want to licence their intellectual property in any reasonable way. And while I can happily make the decision not to watch any Disney movies again (I like Marvel but I can live without it), trying to explain that to my 3 and 6 year old is going to be much harder.
In any other industry market forces would be in effect forcing business to either compete or go under.
Could you expound on this a bit? Disney owns the rights to distribute the products that it has spent billions of dollars to create and you take issue with that? What is the alternative- if you write a best-selling novel, or create a film or a song that people want, the government should force you to distribute it in such a way that guarantees that anybody who wants it can have it? We're talking about movies, not health care. I don't really see how you can make a cogent case that you have a right to access the content on your terms.
Services like Spotify are not designed to facilitate 30 minute long experimental electroacoustic violin compositions. I am much more likely to gain a dedicated fan (someone who will pay to see my concerts in their city) from a torrent site which is content-agnostic and facilitates true fandom for the less conventional music offerings out there.
Well laws are meant to be interpreted rather than followed verbatim. But that genuinely wasn't the point of my post and I'm certainly not advocating piracy. That doesn't mean I have to agree with how the movie industry is run either.
My point was that Disney should be upping their game to make their content more accessible rather than making it harder and using their monopoly via intellectual property laws to force their market position. That just seems really disingenuous with the point of intellectual property - like how Apple and Samsung went to war.
Copyright law wasn't intended to last the period of time it does. In fact copyright law was first conceived to allow publishers to make money from publishing but then the information was always intended to go into the public domain. Granted we are talking about 300ish years of history (IIRC) and times change but given the profits Disney are raking in you can hardly argue that they haven't recouped their production costs. However I'm not trying to argue against capitalism here either. My real issue with Disney is that they have been one of the biggest campaigners of extending copyright law, and also one of the biggest abusers of the public domain with a multitude of stories adapted and then trademarked (Jungle Book, Little Mermaid, Cinderella, etc). They make billions from "stealing" public domain stories and yet people like yourself complain if someone suggests pirating Disney's work as an alternative (I'm not by the way, but you assumed I had) and that seems somewhat unfair in the general sense when Disney have intentionally priced themselves out of reach for many parents. As an aside: I think the fact that Disney often targets younger audiences really helps them here as well because it makes it harder for parents to boycott their services.
This is why I say I'd rather see them working with existing providers instead of running their services in their own silo forcing people to pay for yet another subscription service just to access Disney content. You're right they have no legal nor economic obligation to do so; but I think respecting your customers wishes should count for something given that in any other industry customers could vote with their feet and easily switch services.
Let's take straight-to-DVD movies for example. Anytime a movie is released straight-to-DVD, that immediately signals to the market that it's a lower-budget, lesser-quality movie. Yet that's a far more effective way to get it the widest possible distribution than screening it in select theaters for a $14 admission fee.
This is essentially what Disney does. Disney has earned a brand that distinguishes its movies from any other movie producer out there. When Disney makes a movie, people want to see it, because Disney has a certain standard of quality. That's not to say that I think every movie Disney makes is gold, just that every movie that Disney makes is perceived as gold by the public. The reason for that is that Disney guards its IP perhaps more stringently than any company. They don't make all of their movies available to everyone and they don't have buffet-style streaming ala Netflix. Anytime a potential competitor arises, they buy them. They now own Marvel and the Star Wars franchise, as well as Pixar and probably several others that I'm forgetting.
I'd argue that if Disney did stream all of their movies online for a flat rate to any and all who will add it to their lineup for an affordable rate (YouTube TV, Directv Now, Sling, Hulu, etc.) they would instantly lose a huge part of what makes their brand so powerful.
They actually did this in the 80's- they had their own channel that you had to get a separate cable box for to stream it into your home.
There are only so many video subscription services a person is willing to pay for.
Maybe Disney have a compelling enough catalogue to convince people to switch away from an existing streaming service (which is what I think they're banking on), but I'm not so convinced that will happen at scale either.
The Pixar movies are loved by my kids and while they're still a bit young for the Marvel stuff the eldest is already a big superhero fan (particularly Spiderman) so I can see him really enjoying Disney's Marvel universe when he is older. And lets not forget how seminal Star Wars is even with the younger generation.
So I'm not so sure I'm ready to write Disney off with regards to the Netflix generation.
If a service came along that truly had the TV and films I wanted with a preference for 4K content, I’d happily pay $40-$60AUD a month for it.
Right now I subscribe to:
- Netflix
- Stan
- Apple Music
- Usenet related services
- Audible
- Plex Premium
- Getflix content unblocking services
- Pandora (cancelled as they’re leaving Aus)
- Amazon Prime video (cancelled as they have hardly any content and a terrible interface)
- Spotify (cancelled as I prefer Apple Music)
- Last.FM streaming (cancelled when the service went EOL)
- Several private trackers (avoid BT now)
A bit high level but here’s my list of pros:
- I’ve found a lot less missing tracks / albums, especially for more underground / lesser known artists I had real problems with this on Spotify.
- Significantly less bandwidth usage compared to Spotify.
- Unified interface to my music library (1.2TB~) and streaming / downloadable music on both the desktop and phone.
- The ability to have my own music uploaded as part of my library and available on all desktops/laptops and my phone.
- Apple Music data is unmetered on my mobile provider (I average around 8GB/mo of mobile music streaming on my phone)
- The Music app on my phone is /really/ good at figuring out what music/playlists/albums to sync (prefetch if you will) onto my phone, I set the data limit (to 128GB) and it just figures it out nicely, often when I go to listen to a new album from an artist I follow / like - its already there for me (note: I believe this is opt-in functionality)
What I don’t like about Apple Music / think needs to improve:
- Playlists, They’re not as nice or as fast to manage as on Spotify but at least tracks don’t go missing randomly.
- Artist/Album workflow performance, at times it still feels very ‘webframe’ (if that makes sense?) when browsing artists and their albums, the UI latency really annoys me and I liken it to the feeling that JavaScript ‘apps’ give you.
This really isn't the same thing at all. With Apple Music or Google Play Music, your own library and cloud tracks are seamlessly integrated and can be streamed and accessed from anywhere and any device.
A kludgy solution where you can use Spotify like a 90s MP3 player really doesn't cut it. If Apple, Google and Deezer can offer local library support, Spotify has no excuse. It's a huge gap, and makes Spotify unusable for many people or only supplementary.
I don't expect a streaming service to have everything in history all the time, just have as much as possible, and let me fill in the gaps.
OS integration is a big one for me, Apple Music is just so seamless. Personally I hate the Spotify UI, search is among the worst, and just like Google Music I find it has way too much Karaoke bullshit cluttering up results when it doesn't have the song you want.
That plus Spotify having no way to upload your own local files makes it a complete non-starter for me. Apple Music is getting way better on the radio & playlist front. The New Music Mix knows me surprisingly well.
I'd give it another shot if you haven't tried in the last 6 months to a year.
Also the recommended playlists (built from my likes and listen counts) seem somehow better on Apple Music than on Spotify.
I also don't much care for how 4k looks - or the bandwidth needed to transport it around.
Why's it not easy? You just do a 4k scan of the film don't you?
And again, resolution is just a small component of the final image quality. There is a major 3.2(ish)K camera on the market that has substantially better IQ than 4 and 6K alternatives. And another 6K camera that has substantially better IQ than 8K options.
As for upscaling, we're probably better off leaving that for the end user as better upscaling algos are created and deployed all the time and baking it in from the studio locks us into what will soon be old methodology.
It's worse than that. Netflix is limited to 720p in Chrome and Firefox.
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742
It is possible that doc isn't kept up to date though. :)
The same way you like your video content to be high quality and have devices that allow you to enjoy such quality, I want to do the same for music. I have a high quality sound system and I want to listen to lossless music.
And subscription services are not even an option. Neither are the popular music selling services (iTunes / Google Play Music / Amazon). Luckily, I listen to a lot of electronic music, so I can pay ~$0.5 dollars more per song to get lossless quality on Beatport[0] and Juno[1]. My free estimate is that I was able to chase down ~30% of my music collection in lossless formats[2].
(1) Warning: website stuck in the 90s, both security-wise and design-wise http://www.junodownload.com/
(2) About a third of those are pirated because I couldn't find a way to purchase lossless versions.
Not just 4K/HDR, but high bitrate as well. It's pretty ridiculous that an 1080p BluRay looks better than ANY 4k stream today (NetFlix, youtube, etc) because it's much less compressed.
BluRay's are about 40-50Mbps. I want the same quality for 1080p, and higher for 4k!
I've seen "1080p" streams that were of lower quality than a DVD release, to say nothing of the BluRay you mention, which are better than DVDs both in encoding quality and bitrate, making them actually quite a bit better than DVD.
Bitrate matters a lot more. Only once your bitrate has saturated a given resolution is it really worth moving up to the next resolution.
I actually like "4K" streams because to even pretend to be 4K, they have to bump the bitrate up. Prior to me getting a 4K TV, I played some 4K streams to my 1080P display, and they were of a visibly higher quality than the 1080P streams. You're not "supposed" to do that test; it really breaks the 4K illusion. (You can do this with youtube-dl by forcing it to grab the 4K stream and then playing it on something with enough hardware acceleration to still play it at 1080P. You can't just go to YouTube with a 1080P display because it'll feed you the 1080P version of the stream even if the video name has "4K" in it.)
(Another place you can see this is cameras, especially cell phone cameras. Take your cell phone outside into broad daylight and take a well-focused photo of pretty much anything. Take the photo in to your computer and zoom in until every pixel of the photo is three or four pixels on your monitor. Can you find sharp color changes between those pixels, or does it look like your camera snuck an impressionist Instragram filter into your picture when you weren't looking? A lot of us have high end phones that may be able to pass this test, though as the megapixel count keeps jumping even that may be dubious, but even mid-range phones can't. That said, they may still be taking very, very good photos, especially considering all the headwinds a phone camera faces optically. It's just that they're very good 4MP photos rather than 12MP photos.)
(I'd love some sort of JPEG processor that analyzes a photo for its real information/high-frequency content, and then downsizes the JPG to accurately reflect its real information content. You can get big savings on both digital camera photos and videos by doing this, integer multiples of the file size with no visible differences when examined side-by-side, but it's quite tedious by hand. Perhaps the promise of BIG SAVINGS would encourage a DropBox or some photo startup employee to have a look at this?)
Precisely. Video compression is about reducing redundancies. A perfect lossless video compressor would essentially take a bitmap format and turn it into a vector format. Vector formats have no inherent resolution.
Now real life compressors are neither lossless, nor perfect, but it's easy to see that the better they better they become, they more and more become resolution-independent, in a way.
Compression performance depends on the ratio between the information entropy of the input and output signal, which only loosely correlate with resolution.
> Another place you can see this is cameras, especially cell phone cameras.
Yeah, you can also see this with medium format camera backs. They will produce better images at a given target resolution than a full frame sensor at the same target resolution. Most people don't expect an old medium-format back that "only" has 30Mpix to be any better than a current full frame sensor of the same resolution, but blow images at 100% and the medium format simply has more detail.
I want to know what sort of cameras can consistently capture the kinds of photos I see online where everything is just refreshingly sharp and properly lit. I know user skill is a big part of that but for a while I've wondered what sort of hardware to optimize for to get shots that are not amazing but just properly well-focused.
I also want to do a similar thing to your "JPEG irreducible complexity" test: I want to, given a series of photos, find the one with the least artifacts. This is mostly for JPG as well, but for photos that can rank stuff that's gone through the Twitter/etc can opener (and been decoded and reencoded umpteen times in the process), so it's possible that doing purely codec-level analysis may or may not rank accurately.
Disney thinks I'll tack on another streaming service to watch Mulan or Captain America: Civil War - but they're wrong...
It is true for music, comics, really anything that used to take effort to find and acquire.
It is like a psychological corollary to supply and demand, and also why luxury goods lose their magic when they move down market.
[pdf] http://www.scheibehenne.de/ScheibehenneGreifenederTodd2010.p...
I feel much the same way, but I'll add one thing: I find I spend too much time passively consuming, to the point I am trying to bring back a 1 specific night a week to watch something I think will be edifying and entertaining.
How long have you been single for, if you don't mind me asking?
It's not for you dude, it's for the kids.
s/often/rarely
There are some good shows on Netflix, but they are in the minority, in my opinion. Tastes vary, of course. But a lot of their original programming is not so original, it just feels like filler content to increase the perceived value of the platform. For every good original show they make like House of Cards, there are at least 5x as many that are uneventful or boring.
But that's not unusual. Network television is the same way.
They have more feedback data and often great "production values" (i.e. they spent the extra money to make it nice). It doesn't always pay off (how stupid was _Marseille_, with Gerard Depardieu at his best acting chops in years and a political story that melts into family drama in three episodes flat?).
But having 100 Netflix shows and a random assortment of failed indie movies is not better than having 10 Netflix shows and a decent film catalog. Netflix pretty much snuck up on the less attentive of us by giving us more shows (hey, I basically stayed for Bojack Horseman) and taking away feature-length studio-produced movies.
I mean, who has the time to watch a full-length movie most days.
So I kind of feel cheated, but not enough to leave yet.
I'm really bad with my facts this week.
And the movie business. And the music business. And the book-publishing business. In any creative industry, there are hundreds or thousands of mediocre-to-terrible attempts for any hit. It's the nature of the beast. Shaving that ratio by orders of magnitude is black magic, or even just luck. This is why successful outliers are so handsomely paid - not because they do something well, but because they dramatically decrease the risk of producing stuff that won't sell enough.
The saying that goes "90% of everything is crap" emerged before Netflix was even a concept.
I never thought I'd say this, but I'm starting to miss video rental shops.
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/total-recall/id1040020260
I also completely refuse to buy physical media too, so the end result is that I basically never watch movies at home any more unless I go to the effort of torrenting it
If the content owners don't let you access their content (or they make it a burden to access it by requiring a subscription for another service) it doesn't matter if you have a device that can output an HDMI signal.
I'm lucky enough to have Ethernet in my whole flat (two drops in every room), and a gigabit internet connection. When I launch a 4K HDR video on YouTube, it literally takes less than two seconds to start playing. In comparison, the YouTube app on the TV takes 5-10 seconds to start playing. The TV is hardwired as well. Please note that the Chromecast only has a 100Mbit ethernet port, same as a RPi, or most smart TVs.
I thought the original Chromecast was great. But even if you have a great wifi setup, get the Ethernet power plug. It will change your Chromecast. You don't need the Chromecast Ultra to use the Ethernet feature, just a second generation Chromecast (the round one)
There are lots of things I would like someone to make at a reasonable price too (roll on my line of all existing Transformers with chrome finishes, car paint, clear windows and chrome tire rims!). But I have to accept that there's not enough of me that the costs of that sort of thing come down to $10, and buy a limited subset of more expensive items instead.
We need better legislation around orphaned works; those whose ownership is too complex to resolve should be treated the same as those whose ownership is completely lost. In both cases, ownership can't be reasonably determined.
Instead we have the current copyright system because a minuscule amount of old content is still profitable and large companies lobby to protect it.
Tons of tracks on online music stores for example are never streamed or only a handful of times.
(Of course the limited stuff e.g. Netflix has, is by no means not even the 10% of possible content).
If you don't want -any- of that, then why not release it for free and allow things like the internet archive to store it and deliver it for you? It's worth the money to store it -in case- you want to do something with it, but not worth the money to actually do something with it, even though that costs no more and has a return on investment?
Even more confusingly rights for IP might have been transferred and sold many times leading to questions about who actually owns a film or franchise.
Distribution rights, production rights are separate. Actors may have been promised a cut of any of the above.
So if you track down 40 years worth of contracts, you can safely add a movie to your streaming service.
Add to that 100 years of studio mergers, consolidation, etc. It is a mess.
I am sure many companies would like to stream more, but simply can't.
For myself, when I get the itch to watch an old movie and I can't immediately find it on the Netflix or Amazon prime video I don't go try to find some other streaming service or pay for a one time viewing. I'll just find something else to watch that is available. So when they could have had one more view for old content they wouldn't otherwise make money on, thereby increasing the value of their catalog, instead they get nothing at all.
Artificial scarcity is a thing I can't argue with you there, Disney has been doing it for years with drip-style "anniversary" releases of their properties on media. I would fully expect them to do the same with their streaming content.
http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comm...
Sharing a cultural artifact with others outside a small social bubble is one of the great enjoyments of going to the cinema.
I almost always hear other people talk or see them using their phones though, unless the cinema is pretty much empty.
And that's for regular movie screenings -- there are also all kinds of organized screenings, where people get to talk and discuss the movie afterwards, especially for art films and such.
But already being in an audience while the movie plays, and being aware of people's reactions etc. is a shared experience (and it had been alluded as such by tons of filmmakers).
For a truly complete platform, I would FOR SURE pay more than the 10$ a month for Applix. 20, maybe 30! But then I want it ALL. All software they have in storage.
A lot of people have commented that the music solution is not ideal in a number of ways from the 'demand' side, but I don't think anybody has mentioned how the music business is broken from the 'supply' side.
It is next to impossible to make a living from music for the vast majority of musicians and producers out there. The obvious argument is that if you cant sell, your quality isn't good enough but that's actually not true in my opinion. Distribution is severely unbalanced - and if the movie industry continued in this direction, all we will ever see is Spiderman remakes.
The competition of content is what makes the services cheap and pumps out new quality content on different platforms. At the same time it allows for the efficent satisfaction of the demand: those that care little pay little, those that care a lot pay a lot. With a single bundle, you either get all or you get nothing.
There are many arguments to believe this is more efficient. The music industry, also, its ridden with tremendous problems, I would not model my business after them if I had the choice.
Except that the music business continues to shrink each year.
The only reason there was a slight pause in this is because suddenly vinyl sales, of all things, took off.
Somehow I don't think you are going to find many takers in the video industry for following any music model.
What do you base this on? I googled a bit "music industry revenue" and only the opposite came up.
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/global-record-industr...
Almost a straight line from 1999 with 26.6 billion to 14.97 billion in 2014.
Quoting your source:
> Total revenues for 2016 were US$15.7 billion.
Quoting here: http://www.ifpi.org/facts-and-stats.php
> This growth, however, should be viewed in the context of the industry losing nearly 40% of its revenues in the preceding 15 years.
Which is what?
The movie studios likely don't see it this way. Tickets and merchandising are still the two main pillars of the industry. Home viewing is still the bottom end of the market [1]. The embrace of streaming represents a loss of revenue, not a gain of consumer good will [6].
Physical media (DVD/BluRay) are much more lucrative. Studios have an incentive to keep selling a pennies-worth of plastic for $20. Streaming represents a major loss of revenue and the studios will stall and delay until consumer demand forces them to change.
People still buy millions of BluRay movies each year [2]. Now the studios are trying to compete directly with Netflix, rather than embrace the changing consumer landscape. This is largely a continuation of Blockbuster's long, slow demise [3].
In order to feed the lucrative parts of the distribution chain (movie tickets, merch, physical media), Hollywood is increasingly churning out "big" movies. This has spawned a new phenomenon called "super hero fatigue" [5]. Many are predicting the demise of blockbusters altogether in the near future [4].
But don't expect studios to change until it's proven that they can't make money the old way.
[1] http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/093015/how-ex...
[2] http://www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/blu-ray/263154/falling-dv...
[3] https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/11/06/3-bonehead...
[4] http://www.cracked.com/blog/why-blockbuster-movie-bubble-wil...
[5] http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/10-signs-that-you-ha...
[6] http://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-home-vide...
and not have unskippable adverts or lectures on piracy
for a lot of things, stealing is both easier and better
Instead of buying ad space on torrent sites (let's say), they lecture people who have actually bought the DVD. And, those who download the movie illegally can skip that, only those who actually have the DVD watch it.
Absolutely retarded.
The other day, I pirated a disney movie that I already own on DVD, because who the hell has the time to sit through 20 unskippable previews, and then an excessively animated DVD menu, and then go through a badly paginated list of scenes to try and find where you left off- but the streaming pirate site just let me click to the exact point I left off, within seconds.
So the thought process is: "I want this" "I am not allowed this" "I should be allowed this" "I will take it anyway"
This is seductive, easy, and the wrong way to go for most things.
I understand the frustration. I have felt the same way many, many times. I suspect that if people who illegally downloaded movies posted money to the studios who created the content directly, then this problem would disappear pretty much overnight.
So if you cannot get something legally easily, you should support that practice and suddenly you'll get it more easily in future? This in a post about an article where Disney is making it more difficult to get content legally? Really?
Perhaps that's why people don't think that for other things, but constrain that argument to digital distribution.
Note that the other way (accept whatever meagre or exorbitant distribution deals the content owner wants or stay without content) also has big issues, especially if one believes movies, music, books, etc are essential to culture.
It needs to be easy as possible to let this person buy things
Maybe you have some insight
Frankenstein is the maker, not the monster
Linux is just the kernel
Etc
- calling pirates thieves is a leap that will undermine your argument by assuming harm that's not shown - have any serious discussion about Frankenstein's morality while confusing him with his monster and no one will understand you - I write this from a Linux device, but because it is an Android/Linux device is has a completely different experience than a GNU/Linux system, and you can have that experience on GNU/kFreeBSD or GNU/NT just as well.
Semantics matter. Words make a difference. Please don't miscommunicate just because misunderstanding helps your side in an argument.
It's a shorthand which I'm sure everyone else understood. Sorry if you were confused.
If everything that was harmful to others would be seen as wrong we would live in a completely different world. Interestingly, people only make this connection for very few topics.
Anyway, it seems I hit a nerve. I used to be one of those piracy is not stealing people, back when I pirated content. Now that I pay for content I can look back at that person and understand that cognitive dissonance between my notion of myself as a good person and the fact that I was pirating content led me to consider piracy a good thing, or at the least not a bad thing.
Because really, what is being said with the semantics argument "piracy != stealing"? It is about how harmful piracy is, whether it really is as bad as stealing, and fundamentally whether or not we should have copyright at all. If we should have copyright, then we must have legal tools to enforce it, and piracy must be illegal and wrong. If we shouldn't have copyright, then piracy is a form of freedom fighting and should be encouraged.
My opinion on the matter is that we should have copyright, but that it should be more limited in duration, with stronger fair use exceptions (like the right to decrypt for the purpose of backup and archival). I don't care for the semantics argument. Call it piracy or call it stealing, it does not change what is being done: taking things without permission.
P.S. when i was young and poor i used to wear an eye patch, these days i'm paying for stuff.
So? Words get revised when society/technology/etc changes.
Besides copyright existed before digital content too.
In this case, society adopted the word "piracy" to represent the new semantic, whereas the recording industry chose "stealing" so as to conflate the issue. The word war is not a neutral process.
> copyright existed before digital content too
And it's application in modern times is increasingly contrived and outdated. Since when was it decided that mandatory "remastering" was a reasonable condition to repay for a media all over again? Why would I have to pay additional fees just to use a different medium (mobile phone vs laptop, for example).
No, but it's also not as clearcut as "society uses piracy / recording industry chose stealing". If anything, the recording industry refers to piracy all the time.
>And it's application in modern times is increasingly contrived and outdated.
From a consumer standpoint? Because it's meant to protect creators, not consumers.
>Why would I have to pay additional fees just to use a different medium (mobile phone vs laptop, for example).
Because the seller sets the price. People can pay it or not use the product. It happens with everything else.
> Because the seller sets the price
But I already paid. The seller is also asking to control the medium. That does not happen with everything else. In fact, there has been a creep toward control in the hands of distributers (e.g. Amazon deleting recalled ebooks off the devices they sold to you).
This isn't just a case "seller has product, seller sets price". The landscape of available products is being purposefully manipulated to expand the number of different products that exist e.g I'd consider a digital movie file to be one 'product', independent to whatever medium I choose to play it on; But the movie industry might advocate for a separate 'product' per medium.
At that point it's not even related to the original "artist"/creator or their compensation - I'm now dealing with middlemen actively lobbying to create new forms of compensation, and restricting the ways in which I can access certain services without them. In the example I gave above, "remastering" is an excuse to charge for the same product on a different medium. There might be compensatory charges on top of DVDs that go to offset piracy, but there will never be compensation for consumers who already bought a film on a different format (VHS, for example) - the advantage only ever goes one way, so I don't care what narratives industry lawyers care to craft - piracy provides a necessary pressure to prevent consumers being taken advantage of even more.
The sellers set what is being sold too.
They can set it to be e.g. "I sell the ability to see just 1 minute of my 10 hour movie, only in black and white, with mono sound for $1000, only once" if they so wish.
>I'd consider a digital movie file to be one 'product', independent to whatever medium I choose to play it on; But the movie industry might advocate for a separate 'product' per medium.
So, isn't that to their discretion?
The question is rather: why are buyers so desperate for those things in the first place.
They could have boycotted the whole thing.
But buy buying and/or pirating them despite such terms (e.g. only in DVD), they show there's value to what the sellers are trying to sell.
(Note: not entirely my personal preferences on the subject, playing the devil's advocate)
Who decides? Politicians romanced by industry lobbyists? Why should the government/public bear the costs for legislating such things?
> So, isn't that to their discretion?
Now you are switching from "what is right" to "what is legal". The law is dictated by society, based on common morality.
> they show there's value to what the sellers are trying to sell.
And that value exists under a mandatory layer of DRM. And sometimes enforced by industry-sponsored legislation. Your assumption of value (or the power to boycott) ignore the monopolisation of media formats - When all computers contain a "DRM-chip" then "all I have to do" is boycott it? And what if they are mandatory by law - just oppose it? The general public is susceptible to targeted divide-and-conquer tactics, which doesn't result in a true representation or expression of public opinion at the mercy of industry motives.
> They could have boycotted the whole thing.
They did - they pirated. They didn't just boycott the technology, but the law as well - that shows that the public do not value those laws, and the laws were erected in contradiction to the will of the people. No?
No, I keep using both moral/legal.
It's their thing, so they get to set their rules for giving access to it.
What's immoral about "I created Star Wars 555 but only allow you to see it if you pay $10,000. Oh, and you only get to see it once for the price while I play the kazoo".
That's their proposition. The buyer can simply decline.
>* They didn't just boycott the technology, but the law as well - that shows that the public do not value those laws, and the laws were erected in contradiction to the will of the people. No?*
Only as much as DIU shows that the people don't value driving laws.
We can still say that pirating doesn't show that they don't value those laws, as much as that they found an easy way to bypass them and not get caught.
The government isn't "their thing". They need to negotiate with the rest of society if they want anyone else to enforce those rules.
> What's immoral about "I created Star Wars
You are ignoring a lot of what I wrote about monopolising middle-men, or the role/interest of government in actively enforcing these "propositions".
Do you also not believe in "resale" laws?
> Only as much as DIU shows
Yes, I don't believe this either, I think these kinds of argument are specious. And people acting under under DUIs are a) under the influence, not at their full rational capacity b) a minority, most people support DUI laws.
If I pirate your film, you may or may not have lost out on a sale. Probably I wasn't willing to pay for your awful SpywareDataHarvesting as a Service content platform so it's debatable whether or not you truly lost anything.
Do you also sneak into live shows without paying the cover charge? After all a live band doesn't lose money when you sneak into the theater either. And you can argue that you might have never opted to pay the ticket in the first place if you couldn't sneak. So, as long as there's enough room for other people and you're not causing them lost tickets, it's ok too?
What if I watch it for free at my friend's house? Do I need your permission?
What if Google or Apple or Microsoft, for whatever reason, decide to pull the plus on their service?
Now you paid for nothing and don't own whichever movie you "bought" anymore.
Torrents are more convenient, and better quality.
You mean DRM free video MP4 files like the DRM free audio MP3 files on Amazon.com, iTunes and elsewhere? Yes, that would be a starting point.
For a truly complete platform, I would FOR SURE pay more than the 10$ a month for Netflix. 20, maybe 30! But then I want it ALL. All films they have in storage.
I mean, it is 2017 and there are a lot of films I can't find on Netflix, Amazon Prime or, when I am in spending mood, on Apple TV. Why? I mean how silly would you want to be as studios? There is no big DVD business anymore, BlueRay never totally took off. People have a net connection and multiple streaming devices at home, thats it. Thats the big asset they could build on! Instead they let their libraries die the death of the unseen film.
Still, many keep shuffeling around harddrives with terabytes of pirated films. And why shouldn't they, as long as there is no substantial offer?
So I decided for me (and the cloud guy I am), that with my 3 services I have, I am ok. If a film is not there, I don't care. I surely won't order a DVD of some old film somewhere and I surely will not subscribe to another service. If Disneys pulls their films from Netflix: thanks Netflix for their growing self produced content that often has a quality not seen before.