[0] https://www.escapistmagazine.com/Valves-Gabe-Newell-Says-Pir...
It's tempting to look at Netflix and say, "oh they're stupid, why would they stop being like they were in 2012". The reality is that 2012 Netflix streaming was never going to last. They were dramatically underpricing their subscription because nobody in the TV industry understood streaming[0] and thus underpriced their TV shows. When TV companies realized, "oh no, people are actually cancelling cable to subscribe to Netflix", they started to charge Netflix higher rates... because it turns out the TV business sort of just requires that $100 + ad revenue come out of your pocket every month no matter if the bill collector is called Comcast or Netflix.
Sports are like this but worse. Out of that $100+ads that cable costs, the ad revenue pays for the entertainment, and the $100 pays for the sports, because pretty much every sport is far more extravagantly expensive to run than you'd think, and never pays its way for anything[1]. This is also why sports will often have extremely customer-hostile business practices and weird blackout policies - because the audience itself has been sold to other companies who can then force them to pay more money.
[0] Remember how there was a writers' strike about a decade and a half ago, over, among other things, streaming royalties? TV execs genuinely thought that Netflix was never really going to take off and replace cable. Just like how the music execs thought downloads were never really going to take off and replace CDs.
[1] If you really want to get angry, look up how much money your city is paying in tax credits to your local sports teams.
>because the audience itself has been sold to other companies who can then force them to pay more money
Again, don't care. The point is that I, as the consumer, can't pay to watch NHL games in a reasonable way, but the pirate's product is better and free. So! Is it immoral to "steal" from ESPN/NHL in this way? Maybe, but it strikes me as kinda like Mr. Burns setting up a sunshade so as to be able to force everyone to use nuclear power for their lights -- it's a way to try to make money, and aw-shucks things are expensive [0] so they've gotta make money, but it's not going to work terribly well because of the realities of the medium and the consumer's experience.
>It's tempting to look at Netflix and say, "oh they're stupid, why would they stop being like they were in 2012"
Your straw-reasoner doesn't seem to get that Netflix isn't the owner of the content they're trying to get you to pay money for. Understanding that 2012-Netflix is streaming things they've licensed at rates reasonable to them is key to understanding why modern-Netflix stopped being like they were in 2012 -- the rates are no longer reasonable, so the content gets dropped. In contrast, the NHL is the owner of the content they're trying to get you to pay money for.
The NHL could unwind itself from predatory audience-eyeball-deals, just as I, as the consumer, could jump through flaming hoops to get a low-quality legal stream, but neither party wants to do that. So!
[0] I'm well aware of the horrifying practice of municipal (and even higher levels of government!) spending on private sports arenas, but I was under the impression that sports teams printed money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professional_sports_le... suggests I'm not wrong...
The problem is that, as it stands, sports fans aren't going to do that. Remember, these are the same kinds of people who shout at city governments to keep subsidizing sports arenas so they don't lose "their team". The NHL has a massive money spigot and they're going to keep it flowing for as long as they can.
In San Diego, we had a stadium which had hosted 3 Super Bowls. The NFL team owner arranged for multiple referendums on the question of city subsidies for an improved stadium in a San Diego location he preferred. These votes failed. Then the owner moved the team to Los Angeles.
American fans: You can loose the bonds of subsidy to teams that believe they can get anything and be paid to take it.
Because Netflix was a better service than cable, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that. The change came from TV companies wanting their own streaming service too, basically bringing back the cable model to the internet.
If they don't want to depend on Netflix, why don't they cooperate to build a unified and neutral streaming service where they can share the revenue? Every Internet user would want to subscribe to that.
Part of the whole premise of how the Internet was supposed to disrupt the publishing business was disintermediation - i.e. cutting out the middleman. Instead of everyone selling their works through a distributor, they'd sell them direct to the public. And that's basically what every streaming service turned into - including modern Netflix.
Cable companies used to be good, too. The shenanigans they resorted to with "packages" and price discrimination were the result of the same pricing pressure from the TV networks that killed 2012 Netflix. When Netflix refused to play that game, the TV networks decided to disrupt Netflix, because they own the content and Netflix owns nothing.
Sometimes innovation sucks.
A true neutral streaming service would be like a pirate streaming site: available globally, no geofencing, and one price for everything. 2012 Netflix showed that it can work.
With streaming, the middle man is cut out (versus cable) which makes a huge difference. Rather than buying a package of 100 channels from the cable company, I can instead subscribe to individual packages of content direct from much smaller packages of channels. Although I am paying more for the content I want, I save money because I'm not forced to subscribe to dozens of channels I will never watch.
That’s exactly what Hulu was meant to be. It’s a fair thought that well-positioned people shared, but it turns out it’s not so simple.
Disney/HBO content is worth a lot more - they both have multiple billion dollar franchises - than Netflix.
I think it’s kinda the reverse - e.g. the AHL is able to pay its players, televise its games, and make do with an order of magnitude less revenue than the NHL. After adjusting contracts, etc. the NHL could presumably do the same.
The NHL is 100% the cause of NHL piracy. I have the money, give me an option that isn't retarded.
Similarly frustrating is trying to follow tennis in Canada. There is no comprehensive tennis streaming option, the ATP and WTA use separate apps that each have a $20/month subscription, and do not have rights to show any major tournaments. So for four months out of the year, you’re actually paying $20 for two weeks of tennis coverage, and you also need to pay for TSN streaming if you want to watch the biggest tournaments. All this adds up to $60+tax/month to follow _one_ sport!
Last US Open ESPN would play the same Home Depot commercial over and over and the first part of the commercial is someone using a circular saw. I have a massive phobia to saws and I couldn't change the stream fast enough to not see it in the commercial so I inevitably gave up. I'm a massive tennis fan, but I rarely watch the grand slams. .
The worst part of all this though is that there is a TennisTV App for the men's and a TennisChannel App for the women's. It's unbearable. Tennis coverage is broken. mdm_ you are not alone on this one.
And the teams want it this way -- both the Leafs and Canadiens are tied into telco/cableco ownership, who has a vested interest in getting you to pay more for games.
I got it for the playoffs, it was easy, and I was ok with the pricing.
Haven't seen a game since and now I spend my weekends watching F1 cars drive around in circles. They seem happy to have me as a fan so that's where my money goes these days.
("в Украине" does not really have negative connotations, and sounds about as correct in Russian as "on Ukraine" sounds in Russian. Still, some Ukrainians are offended by this form and believe it to be a denigrating towards their independent country. Needless to say that after Crimea annexation such demands increased tenfold and, after the war started, a further tenfold)
There are other Slavic languages like Czech and Polish, which have exactly same spelling "na Ukraine", but Ukrainians somehow give them a pass. Coming to our issue, some Ukrainians also insist that Ukraine should be called THE Ukraine in English. I sometimes comply with this request.
This is all the justification that is required.
Respect them or don't. There is no try.
or asking somebody in Colombia to please help stop all that cocaine (or dunno)
there's something deeply flawed in the assumptions of how the world works when pleading to a random person in a country to please please influence the actions of the international institutions controlling the country.
(I personally think that EU should have stopped buying energy resources from Russia in 2014 after Crimea annexation. Instead, EU countries increased energy dependence on Russia and continued to fuel Putin's oppression and war machines)
As for my personal efforts, well, I don't think that there is a realistic way of doing something significant. I have protested Putin's regime for more than 10 years, was detained once, cops threatened to plant drugs on me, and do nasty things to my family. I don't think unarmed protests have any prospects in stopping Putin's regime anyway: Ukraine has an army with heavy weapons, Javelins and Baryaktars, and help from the West, and they still have difficulty stopping Putin's orcs. And whatever he has thrown on Ukraine he has at home - so good luck fighting that barehanded. By now I think everybody understands that if the protesters will gather enough strength so riot police would not be able to disperse them, he'll just order to mow the protesters down with machine guns and flamethrowers.
So, a few years ago I moved most of my business offshore to EU, and pay ~zero taxes to Putin's regime, but now this virtue signalling campaign by western businesses cancelling everything russian actually creates great difficulties to simply function. Russians were discriminated even before by EU and US institutions and banks, and now this discrimination is turned up to eleven. The sad irony is that most of these discriminating measures actually help Putin, like idiotic ban of Visa / Mastercard payments - now Russian people have great difficulty paying for foreign VPS services, for example, and can only visit websites that perpetuate existing state propaganda.
Yes, it’s killing lots of Ukrainians, causing an energy crisis, and enhancing China’s relative position. Those are the horrifying consequences of Russia’s invasion, not of the fight against it. There’s no world in which you get to invade another country and then shame them for fighting back, at least without the derision of the rest of to world. What did you think would happen? “Ah, Russians think they ‘need’ to do this, better lay down and die”,
Of course the US is funding and arming Ukraine. It would be foolish not to. But what game are Ukrainians a pawn in? The fight for their own survival? If Russia doesn’t want to be “depleted” it need merely leave. The decision has always been in Putin’a hands.
Russia has the same degree of agency as any other country, but you are acting like it’s the pawn in its own foolish war. Perhaps Russia is a nation of children who think they are merely blown about by the wind, unable to take responsibility for even their most explicit actions?
Putin repeatedly kicked a massive tiger and then acted hurt, full of righteous indignation, when the tiger’s claws came out. No amount of mental gymnastics is going to change that.
Pawns are the players not making choices.
I don’t think that; I think instead that Russia is being foolish and contemptible in prosecuting an unjust and insane war, and is surprised to find out the world isn’t playing along. They are adults and they are responsible for their actions. And obviously the war is their action.
If so, that's a stupid strategy. Russia can easily defeat the US's strategy by leaving Ukraine.
It's a Biden strategy.. so classifying it as stupid makes sense. The thought is to prolong the war so Russia becomes weak and wastes resources and go bankrupt. Meanwhile it benefits China..
If I were winning, the demagogueries we call democracies would be extinguished from existence, and new nations would be forming in their place.
And as far as Russia goes; it would have never gotten this far if 'I' were winning.
The Cabal is winning, and they have been for years now. Russia vs Ukraine is just their latest plaything.
Nothing we do or say will end this bullshit until the rest of you do what is right for once in your lives, and not just whatever is most convenient to you.
Have a nice day. Might be your last. Who knows? Nobody.
Why won't they sell me a tier in their app where I can see all the games? I don't mind paying more.
The only reason why the MLB has a good app is because they can capture the thin slice of revenue teams miss out on from out-of-market fans with that app; there's generally not enough of those fans to drive a per-team standalone subscription service (although the MLB does offer one, it's not price-competitive with the full league option), so the league does it as a whole.
Are you willing to pay $300/year+ for MLBtv?
Given how many people I know who pay $80+ a month for cable only for sports, I guarantee you'd get a lot of takers for a "stream any game, any time, anywhere, $350/yr" plan for any of several major sports, including baseball.
For every game? Absolutely. Sign me up.
For me to get my local teams and the games on ESPN I have to subscribe to a mid-level cable package which costs something like $1000 / year. To get the Peacock games, it's another $5 / month.
When I was in Hawaii I couldn't watch any of the west coast teams - Mariners, Angels, Giants, Dodgers, A's, or Padres because they were the local teams.
And don't even get me started on the "it's easier to be a fan of a team far away than your local one" that is so common now because of all the restrictions.
"Piracy" is the full realization of the potential of our computer and internet technologies. They will never, ever be able to compete it with it without legal backing.
This team is in the Pac-12, which has its own media company https://pac-12.com/
My choice is literally just: 1) Subscribe to Satellite, or XFinity(comcast), or sling and make sure I pick a tier that has the Pac12 Network, ABC and FOX (local affiliates that carry some home games) and ESPN, and between them get many of the games live.
I would much, much rather just give my money directly to the pac12 network, and be able to live-stream all of the football games for my teams I like (and basketball, etc)as they happen, but apparently, that isn't a thing.
Piracy is so much easier, because of the business descisions that have been made by media companies to offer 'exclusive' content.
And before the typical “I don’t like Marvel drek” response, a bunch of HN posters don’t matter. Disney has multiple billion+ franchises
This year, because the NHL have done a deal with ESPN, I have to do a convoluted deal with a third party to get access to ESPN, and my experience is terrible. ESPN's Android app is terrible, the Google TV app flat out doesn't work, and casting from my phone to my TV craps out during period breaks and long ad breaks.
Piracy would be easier, better and cheaper than paying for things. It's the same reason Netflix reduced piracy, and now it's tanking. They created something that was easier, cheaper and better than piracy. Now with their increasing prices, declining quality, and fragmentation of their library, piracy is going to increase again.