So on vacation I tried to airplay mission impossible from amazon rental to the TV, and the screen just went black for copy-protection. So I refunded my rental and torrented it instead.

I don't usually torrent, but sometimes the ecosystems put it squarely in my self interest.

(Also, for whatever it's worth I have netflix active about 1 month a year because I find their recent content so unimpressive, but perhaps I'm not the target audience)

The situation is still ridiculous though. Streaming is no longer easier than piracy.

You may be able to get away with just an HDMI dummy plug:

https://www.amazon.com/4K-HDMI-Dummy-Plug-3840x2160/dp/B07FB...

I'm not sure if these dummy plugs handle HDCP. If not you can use one in combination with this splitter:

https://www.amazon.com/Splitter-l-b-y-Vision-Atmos-Scaler/dp...

I own this splitter and know for a fact that it handles the HDCP negotiation. But I think it needs a display attached.

Or, you can just pirate it and not have to put up with any of this BS.

Re-reading what ladzoppelin wrote, I made an assumption that was probably incorrect. I thought they were saying that having an HDCP-compliant TV attached allowed them to watch DRM-protected content on their non-HDCP-compliant primary display. But in retrospect, probably they are watching the DRM content on the TV.

In that case they don't need an HDMI dummy plug at all. They could instead use the splitter I linked between their computer and the non-HDCP compliant display (assuming it's connected over HDMI and not DisplayPort) to fool their computer into thinking the display is HDCP-compliant. Then they can play the DRM content on either their primary display or the TV.

AFAIK, DRM video playback over AirPlay only works from within iOS apps that explicitly support AirPlay[1], not via generic iOS/macOS screen mirroring.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204289#iOS

The UX of DRM-laden services breaks. You don’t have that problem with Jellyfin.

Every streaming service will converge to what cable TV is like: paid channels, maximum amount of ads, additional premium content, attempts at lock-in, exclusive licensing of content, etc.

Not adopting the cable business model is leaving billions of dollars on the table, so it will happen.

There is a second set of the population that will never pay for media, or at least not more than very trivial amounts. Either because of lack of ability to pay, not thinking it's worth it, or not believing there is anything wrong with piracy.

Then the is the third group that will happily pay for content when it is reasonably priced and, perhaps most importantly, easy and convenient. If it's too expensive or too difficult/annoying, they will pirate.

The size of this third group dictates where the equilibrium is. If it's very small, then media will always converge in the cable style maximum extraction. But if that second group is large, then the cable model might lose more money than it gains by pushing consumers towards piracy.

This just shows that the availability of piracy is NOT the problem. It shouldn't matter to HBO whether I've pirated it or not: I could be a paying customer if their prices matched their catalog's value, but it doesn't, so they get nothing, piracy or no.

I’m in group 4. I’ll pay for streaming services to avoid ads, but never linear TV. TV is largely superior content - it’s professionally made and generally high quality. But if I get sick of jumping through hoops, I have plenty of other things to do.

The problem with piracy is if you become a fan of a series and gossip with your friends about it, now you're marketing that company's crappy service. It's a weird way to go about things.

That's what makes the dynamics so weird: it's not just, or even primarily, about your personal entertainment - there are social aspects involved, from wanting to belong with your peer group (e.g. talk about latest GoT episode with your cow-orkers at the water cooler), to all kinds of rituals (e.g. watching romantic comedies with a date/spouse).

Same applies to books and musics, to a lesser degree to magazines/news media. For some reason, it mostly doesn't apply to videogames; I used to think it was because they're a new thing, but these days, I think it's rather because the experience is much more individualized and requires much more effort (and time), making it a poor social object.

It absolutely does, but apparently not for your peer group.

OTOH if you don't have that in common with other people, you just talk about other things. It is the same thing with soccer for example which is the #1 subject around coffee machines for men (and now increasingly women).

What, you mean like babies and mortgages and bills and restaurants and health problems and gossip? I mean I can enjoy talking about those as well to an extent, but at times I like to change it up a bit.

For a lot of people I know, that's all I really have in common with them, besides geek shit. There was like a solid 45 minutes of me sitting quietly at a New Year's Eve party recently, because everyone else started going into all the Marvel and Star Wars TV shows they watched, of which I've mostly skipped (except Loki and a couple seasons of Mandalorian).

For the people who don't even have interests in geek shit, it seems like they're often very limited to the other topics above (or the other topics plus sports if they're into those). At least the people I've encountered.

It's not like I don't have other interests. I have a lot of creative interests, like making games, and writing, and (very amateur) photography, and music. But a lot of adults don't bother with that stuff (or don't bother anymore, at least), and mostly just consume the creative output of others.

Next step is not paying for anything altogether. A middle finger is the only thing those kinds of companies are getting from me in the future, and honestly I'd rather see their demise.

If streaming ever becomes like this, I'm also going back to piracy.

Distribution has become free with global reach.

So we have Infinite amount of content floating about. Not even bringing generative AI into the picture.

So infinite growing Supply. Finite demand.

I spend a lot of time in both production and post production. The price for good content has certianly decreased but it most certianly hasn't become any definition of cheap. Consumers want very hogh quality content these days and that only comes with experienced staff, you can use cheaper gear.

> Distribution has become free with global reach

Every time someone says this I want to know what where they get this information. So now I am going to ask, prove it. Show me the VOD service or streaming service that is free with global reach. Even network egress from any provider costs a ton of money nevermind compute for transcoding and storage costs. Again prove it.

Media and Entertainment sector has all kinds of bizarre economics cause it's used by the Telcos(check what AT&T and Comcast own in ME sector), the Tech firms (google/youtube, amazon, netflix, apple) to play empire defense and market capture games.

Demand is not decided by the consumer. Or marketing depts won't be getting the budgets they do for demand engineering from their tech and telco overloads. But all that free cash dries up or slows downs once the market capture phase is over which is what has happened with the end of the streaming wars. Disney, Viacom et al have realized they can't compete against tech platforms or telco subsidized shops on the distribution front.

Open an incognito tab, open <insert popular porn site> what is the very first thing on the page after the age disclaimer.

Let me give you a hint, "Meet sexy single in your area" isn't a meme for nothing. Porn is far from free, it is paid for by advertising, and from my recollection they are the ones that revolutionised the ad industry by bringing in pre-roll ads.

Regardless, if video distribution is free at a global scale, then go do it. Create a video hosting service with global scale with any video, not even ones people want to watch, create one that serves 40 views a month. Then come back with an income statement that proves your point.

That is the point I'm trying to make, you claim it's free purely because you don't know what the actual cost is.

I'm not saying the current providers are doing the correct thing. I end up sailing the 7 seas far more than I like purely because I don't even know which one of the 40 services even have the series I want to watch. You know what does? <Insert streaming site with dubious legality>

Ps:

The majority of porn content is user submitted, you knoe we already have a free video service that does the same thing as porn, it's called YouTube.

Big-budget entertainment certainly remains extremely relevant for things like star wars and marvel movies, I agree. Not to mention sports!

But the rise of Youtube and Twitch and suchlike have shown there is a great appetite for cheaply produced niche content.

Linear TV would never have considered it economical to air 30 minutes of chess coverage every day. But it turns out there's a market for 30+ minutes of chess-themed entertainment per day, paying in the low seven figures annually. And the viewers really don't mind if the mic is in shot or the guy flubs his lines, they'll do the whole thing in one take.

And sure it's not literally one guy, I know that low-seven-figures has to pay for video editing and community chat moderation and enough of a creative team to keep things fresh and so on - but compared to the production standards of linear TV, even way back in the 1990s, this stuff is very cheaply produced.

We can do phenomenal things for cheao these days. But cheap still isn't that cheap. Just a few 0s disappeared from the end.

Let me put it this way, it's unlikely even a large YouTube channel is creating The Mandalorian or The Witcher or The Boys anytime soon with a budget that only advertising will be covering.

YouTube is an amazing niche and is the only subscription I will happily pay for monthly. But when I want to see creativity who are truly inspiring it's unlikely YouTube is funding it and I will need to have one of the big providers do that.

For movies pretty much everything I wanted to watch would eventually show up. Typically a movie would first be in theaters, then become available for purchase on disc or digital, rental, and be included in one paid streaming service. Sometime later, maybe two years after it was in theaters, it should show up on some non-premium cable channel.

The only time I couldn't wait for things to show up on non-premium cable was when "Avengers: Endgame" was coming soon. I knew that one would be hard to avoid major spoilers for once it was released in theaters so decided seeing it in theaters was a must. That meant I had to get get a month of Netflix, which had the Marvel movies then, to get caught up enough for "Endgame".

I also liked cable for rewatching TV series. I'm not sure why, but when some channel is showing "The Simpsons" or "South Park" reruns on a regular schedule I like watching much more than I do when I watch an episode on an on-demand streaming service (or on DVD).

I think it has something to do with the latter being more deliberate. I picked that episode, which somehow makes it so I feel like I need to take it more seriously. When it is just "This channel shows a couple episodes every night" then it seems a lot more casual, like listening to music on the radio. It is easier to just sit back and relax and watch.

We can argue about how pervasive advertising is and how subtle it can be, but cable TV literally has commercial ad breaks.

For series the episodes are written with commercial breaks in mind. For example a typical "The Simpsons" episode is written as 3 acts and the commercials come between the acts.

Movies aren't written with ads in mind, but usually the cable channel running the movie takes into account what is going on in the movie when they decide where to place their ad breaks.

This makes that ads a lot less intrusive than ads on YouTube or most other ad supported streaming services.

With the ads not actually interrupting the story, they actually often provide a convenient break to get up and get a snack, or clean up after the last snack, or visit the restroom. And I can always pick up my iPad or Kindle or a book to pass the time during the ad break if I don't need to do any of those other things.

I am more than willing to pay for content subscription assuming they have everything under one roof and no ads. Pay for cable like service - fuck it. I'd rather watch the paint dry.

YouTube/TikTok/etc.: The market price is zero, the service itself and much of the content is funded through ads.

Debian/Firefox/etc.: The market price is zero, the development is provided through user contributions/donations.

Substack/OnlyFans/etc.: The market price is not zero and then the content is often available for free anyway, but enough patrons choose to pay to fund its creation nevertheless, either because they don't know how to pirate or choose not to. Maybe this is the same as the donation model in all but the eyes of the law, but in any event there are objectively people making a living from it.

For some reason, they feel they need to burn their own industry down in order to prove that people prefer piracy (or not watching) over inconvenient streaming setups. Is anyone really surprised by the current outcome?

But I'm willing to shell out some money for having someone cooking for me and doing the dishes.

Yet, only if the price is right.

A good legal bargain kills illegal ones. But then capitalism greed comes, with that enshitification, and as that lowers the legal bargain value, illegal comes back.

At the time Netflix was literally making a cash loss despite paying less than the cost of production for most of it's output.

2. That's a problem for them to solve, it's not a problem for me to solve by going like "alright Sony, I'll do you this solid and pay and inconvenience myself instead of pirating just because I like you and I know you're struggling" wink wink

I pay to see movies in the cinema. A few weeks / months later I could pirate them if I want to watch them again.

I have paid once. I am not paying again. It really is that simple but they will rather die than do honest business.

There is still a cohort of elderly people like my mother who is just happy I pay her a cable TV (through IPTV) service but they are a diminishing group.

To be fair, this is describing oligopolic capitalism in general; streaming services is just where it's most visibly on display for the general public. But the same modus operandi is pervasive throughout the economy: attract customers with good deals initially while maximizing lock-in by all means at your disposal, then start fleecing them. There's simply no economic incentive not to do this, and ethics don't even enter into the equation at the scale those companies operate.

In a more diverse market, competition provides some, albeit limited, check on all this, but very aggressive anti-monopoly regulation is required to keep the market diverse enough for that. I don't just mean breaking up actual monopolies, but even any semblance of market dominance must be mercilessly crushed to maintain competitiveness. Any form of "laissez faire" in the presence of private property inevitably leads to oligopolies.

When I was a broke college kid I pirated all the things, and at the time wished, when I could afford it, I’d rather just pay. When I could, I did, for years. Now we’re back at the path-of-least-resistance is pirating.

(Which is not a big loss, because I can’t imagine producing the Netflix knockoffs be a hundredth the price of a 007).

This was solved for with music where pretty much every service has pretty much every song. People don’t need multiple music services, they just pick the one that best fits their style and needs. This is what the movie and TV industry needs to do if they want to beat piracy. This is what they should have done 15 years ago. Their greed is hurting them more than it’s helping.

Music is literally a textbook example of why it doesn't work.

And they likely lose subscribers to they literally get poorer.

Spotify knows it's only way out is exclusive content, hence the Rogan deal et al.

Then Spotify would have to charge whatever they need to charge to remain profitable without exclusive content. And the labels would have to charge Spotify whatever they need to charge for Spotify to exist, because otherwise they wouldn't have anywhere to sell their content.

I wish somebody could get all the media execs in a room and just deliver a simple message: "You can't compete on price; your competition is free. You must compete on experience if you're to compete at all."

With just a few hours worth of time and effort, it's possible to get a pretty sophisticated and automatic system set up that essentially makes getting a copy of a movie a literal one-click operation. You won't be able to watch it _right then_ as the find, download, process, import ... etc pipe takes time to run but at the end you'll have a high quality copy that will work on any device anywhere in the world.

Other than the immediacy, piracy is cheaper and less burdensome.

Unfortunately, there is the House of the Mouse, aka. Disney Legal Military Industrial Complex, and they don't let individuals or governments tell them what they can or can't compete on.

Not having to care about which platform something is on is so nice.

The end result is searching for legitimate content is a terrible experience. If it's a result from Prime, I just pass. If it's from Crave, I pass. If it's on Netflix, I don't see anything at all.

At least a decade ago streaming boxes had one search box and it would return results from all the sources, and if it appeared you knew you could watch it.

What the streamers provide today is a significantly worse experience than piracy, and I don't know how they haven't realized this.

Yum! Brands (KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, etc.) is slightly larger than Restaurant Brands International (Burger King). McDonald's is larger than both of them put together. Or if you want brands rather than corporations, there are a zillion burger chains.

> CVS vs Walgreens

Rite Aid and Walmart, among others.

> AT&T vs Verizon

The US wireless carrier with the largest market cap is T-Mobile, with only slightly fewer users than Verizon. There are also many smaller ones.

> Democrats vs Republicans

This isn't a result of consumer preferences, it's a result of the first past the post voting system creating a powerful incentive for the most similar parties to merge until there are only two left. (Score voting fixes this.)

> Apple vs Google

This is the only real market duopoly here, and it's the one they have to worry about.

Either they can license their content to multiple services so it's convenient for customers to subscribe to one service and get everything, or those two companies will eventually figure out a way to get the same effect and most likely end up sucking in 30% of their industry's revenue in the process.

That's how it used to work. They all started making their own platforms and pulling content off of Netflix because they thought they could get the same numbers as Netflix and keep all the payments instead of whatever slice Netflix was giving them.

Not sure if Tidal is profitable but they aren’t popular and are much more expensive than people are generally willing to spend. It’s also potentially subsidized by a corporate parent.

There’s also a trail of unprofitable or tiny businesses like SoundCloud and Bandcamp that may or may not survive quarter to quarter.

It’s not a solved problem.

Their stock value doubled in the last year

Their CEO Daniel Ek is worth 3.7 billion dollar.

But, in fairness, this is an industry that is adjacent to Hollywood. It is conceivable that they have some sort of weird profit-laundering scheme going to make sure not too much of the money goes back to the artists or something.

> The company posted a third-quarter operating income of 32 million euros ($34.1 million), its first quarterly profit since 2021, helped by a higher gross margin and lower marketing and personnel costs.

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/spotifys-user...

The problem feels a lot like the situation MoviePass worked themselves into where they priced it unsustainably low but cheap money allowed that to run long enough to train a generation of customers that their content was only worth that much. I imagine Netflix would dearly love to say that your subscription includes a certain number of movies but you can add on more, or that there’s a premium tier, etc. but there isn’t an easy way to try something like that now that everyone is used to the current model.

The other side of the problem is that studios really don’t want market pricing. Subscriptions are banking on the idea that you’ll still pay $12/month and find something else to watch even if the big series/movie they’re promoting isn’t very good, and they’re keeping the prices for rentals really high which makes means people are often looking at 1-2 months of streaming charges for a single movie rental.

The combination of the two seems likely to make a lot of people pirating for years to come. Most people do not want to juggle multiple services and if they’ve learned how to pirate anything once it’s always going to be there the next time someone jacks up prices or plays games with availability. I think that’s going to last until someone has the courage to let services like YouTube or AppleTV offer rentals of everything at reasonable prices.

If I invested a weekend (4 days, maybe 2-3 weekends...) I could probably figure it out, and never ever ever again deal with the BS streaming services. It takes one person pissed off that they missed Ozark and that will be 1 click install, game on, open source tech only ever moves forward, its antifragile, unlike any individual business.

Which HDDs should you put in the synology (or are there SSDs that make more sense; need to check $/GB…)? Which VPN service makes the most sense? Which RSS thingy is as good as Prime, Netflix, HBO, etc, etc, combined?

That takes a while.

Setting up the rss is just minutes.

But that means companies must also realize the tech industry is a really bad business for 99% of companies in it.

Anyway, it's not my problem. It's their problem.

For myself, when I think of the hacker ethos I think of Stallman and the GPL, which is explicitly designed around the idea that information can be ethically sold as long as you're actually selling it [0]. It's free as in freedom, not free as in beer, and under that philosophy being able to pay for services that respect your rights as a free human (which most current streaming services don't) is a desirable end state, not something to be condemned.

> Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.

> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

The lesson here is that attrition and shrinkage will always be with us, it's only the rate that varies in market accordance with the enshittification of product.

The 'better' the product, the lower the shrinkage.

As supported by a majority of thread comments "I used to pirate when I was poor, then I didn't - now I do again as the commercial offering sucks".

[attribution] https://thebillionscompanion.net/all/tag/Tibetan+Book+of+the...

In any case, hacking as a concept predates Stallman and FSF - indeed, they're the product of that mindset, not its originators. And the original hackers didn't care about copyright - just look at the early history of Unix.

I sincerely reject your entire premise.

The problem is: how does one make something "free as in libre" without affecting the "not free as in beer".

Including your personal information, browsing habits, purchase history, genome, genetic disorders, medical history, sexual partners, kinks, embarrassing photos and videos, moments of social faux pas, biggest fears, darkest secrets, cheating, illegal behaviors, personal psychiatrist notes, privileged lawyer information, passwords, private keys, bitcoin keys, financial statements, tax records, debts, etc. ?

The notion of "information wants to be free" should be taken as an observation about the nature of things and the folly of corporations trying to have it both ways—information made broadly available yet on their exact terms—not as a value statement on any inherent goodness behind freeing information.

??

I've never heard that definition.

You may be too young (not an insult) or in a different geography to have been seen this, however it was definitely a thing.

“On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other.”

I find this to be a much more intelligent formulation of the concept, as it recognizes the reasons and the tension.

We simply can’t get much of the media I like for free (gratis). That being said, it is maddening to have so much great content locked up. It feels insanely inefficient and that we produce far too much content unnecessarily.

There are probably ways to balance this better- separation of content ownership, production, and distribution; more limits on copyright length; mandatory content licensing; simplification of older content license rules…

That doesn’t mean it’s morally wrong to pay for content or put restrictions on distribution, just that optimum probably isn’t where we are.

They're trying to assert some unnatural right of control over what other people do. It isn't even all that clear why this is a good idea. I can see how it makes sense for legislators because of the presumably significant kickbacks they get from lobbyists; but there is a still an open question of whether this is a good system. It looks like it has had a big negative impact on our ability to sustain a shared culture. If people have to buy in to a culture, a bunch of people won't.

People still can't freely distribute Lord of the Rings for example. That isn't helping to get people reading it. J.R.R Tolkien has been dead for a while. Anything less famous than that has little chance to stick.

That's what you steal when you pirate.

People have been buying into shared cultures for centuries. Sometimes being able to afford access to a certain culture - and excluding those who can't - is part of the culture itself.

In a bottom-up cultures people are happy to pay because they feel part of the scene and they want to support it. A big part of that is user/costumer/fan experience and a feeling of community.

Top-down cultures feel exploitative and predatory - because they are. They separate the culture into producers and consumers and enforce strict gatekeeping of the relationship between them - which usually means a one-way financial obligation that feels like extortion, and unnecessary complications and frictions in the experience.

The real issue here is the insistence by the media-cos that movies can only ever be top-down.

The predictable outcome is there's now a shared culture of piracy in which people willingly support the pirate sites instead of the official distributors, and running a pirate site can be incredibly profitable.

The pirate hasn't gained any commercial value though. I'm pretty sure that "stealing" involves a valuable thing getting transferred from one person to another. Operative word being transfer. Everything the copyright holder had to start with is either retained by them or not possessed by the infringer. So it can't be (and isn't) theft.

Not exactly: the original owner still has all the commercial value, as decades of piracy has shown that commercial pieces still exist.

What the owner has lost though is monopoly over distribution and thus money exchange. It is possible to get the content from other places, and maybe, maybe not give some money back. The proliferation of exclusive content on numerous platforms only confirms that.

Granted charging $1 per song is a little egregious as well

(More absurd because France is a part of South America via French Guiana).

It's worse than when we bought everything on DVD. Region 2 discs (Europe) would have many soundtracks and many subtitles languages on the disc.

What's more absurd is when you can't get CC for the same language as the show.

Fair enough. But absence of french options for ALL TITLES in that region pointed to a blanket decision.

I mostly pirate everything and I have Amazon prime for the shipping so I don't really care but I would really be pissed if I'd paid top dollar.

Interestingly, it took quite a bit of dev effort to make their subtitles this bad. They had to figure out which subset of languages to show in each region, for example.

I'm sure these decisions are made by the same team that refuses to show English subtitles, and instead always uses English for the hearing impaired. Because why would any human not be able to understand English unless they're deaf, right? Also... no French people are deaf. Everyone knows that.

I see this effect regularly at $dayjob where the senior decision makers are too busy to waste time in forums like this… so they don’t get to find out what the entire industry seems to know.

E.g.: they keep choosing Angular for “cold blooded” apps, the type the government develops under a tender that then sits there unmaintained for a decade. Meanwhile Angular has one of the highest rates of churn of any large codebase and takes continuous sustained maintenance to keep up with.

Meanwhile one local streamer telecom has regional content + Disney for 7 Euros a month with dubs/subs.

Another local telecom streamer has regional content + HBO with subs/dubs for 6 Euros a month.

Not sure how they got HBO and Disney so cheap but these are multi-country regional streamers - half government / Scandinavian owned.

So Netflix had to go.

At least normally they have have the original audio versions, but just recently I saw that in Switzerland, they released Suicide squad but the german dubbed version only, why??

I find this term so funny because it kinda makes the problem sound like a physics problem given down from some deity. When it's just the content provider choosing to screw you over by writing a contract that includes regional exclusivity.

Especially when these same companies managed just fine when they put all languages on a DVD disc.

Fun!

https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...

We reached the point were price is almost as high as cable was (with the standard 4-5 subscriptions), and we have ads. This is not a surprise to most though, the question has always been when would it happen.

Licensing fees/production costs/royalties eat a bunch of the money, but the infrastructure to run a streaming service isn't cheap. I know at least one of the competitors that people would call the most successful is paying a 9 figure AWS bill, plus whatever the costs are for all the caching setup that makes most popular content live in ISPs. Add the typical army of developers building apps for the mobile devices, the billing team, people doing recommendation engines, fraud detection/security team, tagging all content, and translating every blurb in a bunch of languages, possibly pay for creating subtitles for all of those languages... it's not cheap.

What is so frustrating about this is that so many of the costs would go down with consolidation. Every company has to handle the fact that age verification and privacy legislation in South Korea has to work in a just-so way, but every streaming service has to duplicate the logic. While the Netflix recommendation system probably can use some tweaks to take on all of D+'s content, I bet it'd be easier to tweak their system than to have every company have their own ML team handling recommendations. A lot of relatively low quality content wouldn't have to be made if we didn't need to make 'filler' to keep people spending sufficient time on a given streaming service while the next top quality release comes out.

In a happy world, competition brings more better content at a cheaper price for consumers, but when I look at the state of streaming, what we have is many competitors that aren't breaking even, in exchange for a streaming experience that keeps getting worse. And there's little chance it's going to get better until at least half of the worst competitors give up and go back to licensing their content to whatever the big 3 end up being.

And yes, we'd all be better off if we moved to the music model, where any subscription has 90% of the content, but do you really see, say, Apple, Netflix and Disney doing worldwide, full catalog cross-licensing deals?

(1) Netflix?

(2) "9 figure". Just say 1B or 5B? There is a big difference.

Even with what I'm sure is bulk negotiated bandwidth pricing there is no way this is an economical way to serve bulk content. For those prices you could build out a whole physical IT operation to rack stuff up in data centers and maintain it for a lot less and your bandwidth costs will be a minute fraction of AWS. There's also tons of CDNs that specialize in blasting out bandwidth.

Putting command and control, accounting, signup / signin, etc. on AWS may make a lot of sense. Those are both more complex to run and lower bandwidth work loads.

Did you mean premium channels, or was there a time in the early 80s when >50% of channels carried by your provider didn't have ads?

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...

I wonder if entertainment brand loyalty is going to be affected by the diversification of streaming services. I only have Netflix and Amazon Prime (only because I already pay for Prime) and I have no desire to add another streaming service for another show or franchise. I'm happy to just consume what I can find on those two services and call it good. At what point does the desire to watch a specific TV series or movie franchise stop being worth the cost of yet another service?

But then I'm an atypical customer since I only watch maybe 4 hours of content a week on average, at most.

If i wanted to watch the other productions, i'd be watching the other production. I can see what is available on the 'trending now' list on the exact screen just before starting this video.

there are shows for which I cannot even purchase them, which I would be willing to do. You want to lock me into a subscription? jokes on you.

Also the quality of the streams is laughable. Only Apple bring something which deserves the mention 4k (and Apple are part of the problem).

And a piracy setup is very easy. I will get fiber soon. I have a VPN with a container to run BitTorrent on. I have Usenet servers. I have a couple of lifetime ???znab accounts. All cheap.

I wrote this post angrily in less than 10 min, I probably forgot to mention other reasons on top of this all. Yeah, the fuzzy feelings I got for not pirating. I admit, I will miss those.

P2P download of files did fall a lot in the last decade, i think a second wave is coming.

Stake had been handing out huge contracts to major streamers to show themselves having fun gambling on Stake, particularly xQc and TrainwreksTV. These streamers would act as if they were betting with their own money, including getting into six figure bets, without being clear they were on a contract that basically made it all upside to them even if they lost millions. The audience for these streamers slants young, and that didn't sit well with Twitch advertisers, hence the change in policy.

Train et all didn't want their golden goose to end, so they worked with Stake to create Kick, with Train as one of the cofounders, and xQc and others pulling their audience over.

One of Kick's selling points to streamers has been to be a wild west as far as copyright and content goes. They quickly took in all the streamers too toxic for other platforms, including people who'd done things like film themselves committing sexual assaults on Twitch. They've encouraged people to restream copyright content like marvel movies, and even porn.

I don't know what the laws are like in Greece, but considering this free for all approach it's not surprising they'd run afowl of regulations somehow. Frankly it's amazing Kick hasn't gotten nailed by some sort of major anti piracy action, but I suppose being based out of the Seychelles complicates that for copyright holders.

In any case, the point is Kick is an aberration. It's way too toxic for mainstream advertisers, so the only thing sustaining it financially is Stake paying people to stream gambling on Stake.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

> i wonder how one can differentiate betting from investing

The biggest clue is how long you're going to hold ownership. If it's years, then it's almost certainly investing.

> A saying i usually repeat to people, is that in the future, i.e. in a handful of years, everyone will be a billionaire for fifteen minutes.

Wha? Wouldn't most people cash out? Then most people are billionaires permanently? How does this work?

Along the same lines what's the purpose of investing? It captures ownership of a company, for some time, or indefinitely. The presupposition is that said company, will be valuable in a year or 10 years.

Well as technology advances, everything becomes easier to produce, including movies, songs even car companies. The saying means that everyone will be able to produce something, which will gain big traction for a small amount of time. At that point he will be a billionaire, but someone else will produce something very similar, in fifteen minutes, and his ownership will go to nothing very quickly.

Not only better and better technology gives us more opportunities to compete with one another, but we become better at competing with one another regardless of technology. The edge one holds in anything such as making movies, making cars or what have you, gets smaller and smaller in duration. The timeline of the first mover advantage to capitalize on any gains gets shorter and shorter. In such a situation, copyrights, patents, IP, end up almost irrelevant.

Of the top 10 in Apple’s current Top Movies Chart in the TV app, 3 cost $5.99 to rent while the other 7 are $19.99 to rent.

If a family, or even just a couple, was going to go to the movies, buying popcorn and drinks, it’s not cheap. $19.99 is still usually cheaper than going out.

I remember when they started doing this. I think it was a response to theaters being closed during the pandemic, but could be misremembering slightly. Beyond that, I think the general idea was that people have nice big screens and home and don’t feel the need to go to movie theaters anymore, so this gives people an option to see new releases in the comfort of their home. The extra cost is for the early home access.

Just give me a giant catalogue of every show, movie, and album known to man and let me buy or rent a-la-carte for a fair price.

At the moment I’ve dropped all streaming platforms and am back to Apple. If I want to watch something I just buy it and don’t have to worry about subscribing to yet another service.

1. My time isn’t valuable so who cares if it takes 6 minutes to figure out where to watch Magnum PI.

2. I know I shouldn’t do illegal things so I don’t do them.

uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh sir?

> If people’s time was truly valuable then no one should be ______ anyway.

If turds are the highest value resources that you have, and you have some scale on which you can value them, then yes, it does mean that particular one is valuable. 'Value' is largely subjective. Maybe you want to make some fertiliser?

Hopefully it's obvious that the contents of your septic tank are not your highest value resource. However if you do feel that way, perhaps you could benefit from speaking to someone about it who can help you to improve your life and your outlook? Things are difficult in the world right now and it's easy to feel down about life.

Lol then why were you trying to correct my largely subjective view of whether my time is valuable.

My life is fine. I’m realistic about it and don’t need to pretend.

I think you overestimate how "easy" piracy is for the average user. Netflix revenue keeps growing (and subscribers), despite the "crackdown" on password sharing that many predicted would cause massive cancellations.

According to TFA piracy is also growing rapidly, so it's apparently easy enough.

You may be thinking of usenet, torrenting, seedboxes etc. when it comes to piracy, but there are also (ad supported) public web sites where you can watch almost any content, or IPTV providers where you can pay a yearly fee and watch most things streaming providers offer once set up.

You overestimate your view of piracy. The average person isn't curating libraries of lossless music collections and carefully re-encoding Anime dubs to match their sound system.

People are Googling for the hundreds of sites that will stream a feed of a DirecTV box somewhere showing an NFL game, or show grandma how to connect to the Plex server their cousin runs.

They're completely inept at technology.

It's very easy these days.

Couple that with malware getting more subtle [0], and Windows Defender getting better, and most people will assume they're virus free and have been for years (even if they're not).

[0] think cryptominers in the background and data exfiltration vs so many browser toolbars you get 3" of any given webpage at a time, and pop-ups on pop-ups

Its sort of like when VBR encoded MP3s became the standard in the privacy scene in the early 00s. The quality is good enough for most folks plus the reduced file size means that it downloads really fast on average connections and isn't prohibitively expensive to store so you can create a large library very quickly. Also I think the shift to SSDs from spinning rust delayed the adoption of widespread video piracy 10-ish years ago because the cost per GB was just too expensive and most people weren't going to buy a NAS. But now we are starting to move past the inflection point. SSDs are bigger, H265 reduces file sizes, hardware accelerated H265 encoding is easier (meaning more H265 content), and devices that can decode H265 are becoming cheap and ubiquitous. You can install Plex on your laptop, load up on content, and have a better UX than Netflix.

That's still YIFY-quality video, which is a few steps below HBO/MAX, which happens to be among the lowest quality paid streams.

ATV+ is killing it with 30Mbps 4K HDR+ video (it used to be as high as 48Mbps). Disney+ is close. The Netflix 4K plan serves up high 1080p bitrates, 2x better than their 1080p plan. Worth paying for.

For many folks, pirated 1080p is par with what they'd get streaming, and pirated 2k or 4k is better.

The resolution that's usually behind 2k, which is 1440p as you've correctly pointed out, is usually available as torrents too.

Rounding 2560 to 2k is massively confusing. Don't do it. 2.5k or don't use "k" at all.

And when I go look at a couple torrent sites and scroll through movies and tv shows, I'm not seeing a single 1440p in the first couple pages. Some searches show barely anything at all.

Define: k = multiple of 1920x1080 pixel count

1920x1080 ~= 2M pixels = 1k 2560x1440 ~= 4M pixels = 2k 3840x2160 ~= 8M pixels = 4k

So now 1440p = 2k, and k becomes meaningful. Problem solved!

It also gives a solution for ultrawides like 7680 x 2160p, which are 8k.

More interestingly, “8K” TVs now become 16k TVs, which marketers should like. We’ve come full circle! Now the k nomenclature also gives you an idea of how difficult that 16k display will be to drive with a video card relative to your existing monitor.

And how do you propose getting your definition out in front of more people than the combined marketers of all the legit sources of movie, TV and other streaming content in the world?

lol

Pick the battles you have a whelk's chance in a supernova of winning.

Not to mention that 3840x2160 already has a (mostly) separate term : UHD-1.

There's also UHD-2 which is 4 times bigger, but I expect it to be renamed to something else soon enough.

But if you want to go down that path, instead of trying to redefine k just use megapixels.

The most recent entry is:

How To Train Your Dragon The Hidden World (2019) 2160p 4K BluRay 5 1-LAMA

Format : HEVC

Width : 3 840 pixels Height : 1 634 pixels

Display aspect ratio : 2.35:1

Near the top is a recent TV episode:

True Detective S04E04 Night Country Part 4 2160p MAX WEB-DL DDP5 1 DoVi x265-NTb

Format : HEVC

Width : 3 840 pixels Height : 1 920 pixels

Display aspect ratio : 2.000

What makes things problematic is the overbearing love for letterbox like aspect ratios, even pirates have standards and they're having to bundle a slew of aspect ratios together .. this comes from the production companies.

You overwhelmingly see 1280x720, 1920x1080, and 3840x2160, sometimes with a truncated height because of aspect ratio but usually advertised with the full height for consistency reasons.

There's barely any 2560x1440. Anyone going above 1080p goes directly to 4k.

Youtube is pretty much the only place I've ever seen 1440p encodes, and that's because they're super version-happy and make 20 different variants of a video.

If it's about finding 1440p that'd mainly be because it's not a common broadcast format to the best of my knowledge - I just don't see it about much.

Articles such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution

don't mention it as a broadcast format, and articles that are specific to 1440p: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1440p

have it as :

    As a graphics display resolution between 1080p and 4K, Quad HD is regularly used in smartphone displays, and for computer and console gaming.

It's pretty much only available on original encodes, i.e. BluRay rips, this makes it a format that very rarely seen on currently airing shows, which are mostly webrips from official streaming platforms.

You'll often see it alongside the usual resolutions for movies that have since been released on disk.

Read the second clause!

However the extension seems to be gone.

[1] https://github.com/vladikoff/netflix-1080p-firefox?tab=readm...

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/16yf3wi/why_do...

I could do so with DVD and blu-ray. You don't want to let me do so via the internet? Okay, I'll do it anyways.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution#2160p_resolution

> 1k = 1920x1080

> 2k = 2560x1440

> 4k = 3840x2160

[even though it's not usually referred to as 1k, but rather 1080p directly]

You don't necessarily have to pick YIFY.

Qxr's uploads are a much better comparison. x265 encoded 1080p (with 5 - 6.5Mbps bitrate) from the highest quality sources and they look very good even on 55" 4K panels.

I still have an old 1080p 32" LG from 10 years ago and it looks fine. In fact I find the motion upscaling weird, it gives this creepy uncanny effect.

I still download H264 too because not all of my devices support H265 yet.

I was thinking about something new but they're just too expensive.

About the subject of this thread, too many paid streaming services are maybe too inconvenient. If they are, the market will fix that. That is: some of them won't make enough money and close, or sell to a competitor, or just create content and license it to streaming services.

My preference would be not to pay per month but per view. There are months when I don't watch any series and months when there is something I like. About movies, maybe no movie at all for a year or two, then a few of interesting ones, including old ones that I never watched and I feel like to watch. The last one was Gilda, 1948.

On small devices like that 4K HDR+ video is kind of meaningless.

Just do what works for you. But with lets say 'cinema experience' distance:size ratio you definitely can see the difference. I could clearly see it on Netflix 4k on tiny 55" 4k screen from maybe 2-2.5m.

But of course after 1-2 minutes it becomes meaningless difference and your brain blends it, what you should focus is not seeing big banding pixels due to low bad compression in very dynamic scenes.

On Netflix, The Sandman looked abysmally bad at 720p. The complex backgrounds became a garbled mess and the dark scenes were filled with banding.

It's just the shitty compression, not the mark of 720p.

This is extremely evident on YouTube now, for a couple of years if the source content is 4K native, they downgrade it to 1080p (so you can stream it with a comfortable bitrate), but despite a good enough resolution (1080p! 2K!) and the need to just downgrade the resolution (yes, double re-encoding, but) the 2K version looks abysmal. Especially evident on live videos with a contrast lights.

It's a real shame that the same store that sold Blu-Ray players didn't have it and I had to pirate it (and also skip buying the player).

as someone that grew up with VHS and VGA; 2-3mbps h264 720p is fine and few practical gains above 5mbps 1080p.

Only if you are lucky and everything aligns well. You can't ask customers to debug their hardware to make it work.

as much as it pains a certain set of nerds, using a dedicated stream device is still the best way to bypass the arbitrary hurdles that streamers throw at you. To build a general pc that gets Dolby vision and atmos working right requires at best some very specific hardware/software choices and at worst sometimes just don’t work at all on pc (unless you are willing to do things like hackintosh).

The audiovisual space has just always been intensely proprietary, even something as basic as divx was something you paid for or pirated back in the v3.x or v4.x days. Same story as HEVC: Fraunhofer and Dolby have been grubbing for licensing fees for decades now, and you either pay it or spend some time working around it. And if you’re a corporation then you just don’t ship that feature in your product.

Apple also does a really good job implementing those features at the margins, Apple TV is a nice device. But even if you buy (eg) something like a shield tv it’s gonna be easier than tilting at getting Netflix to send you a 4k stream on windows 10 or Linux. At some level it is platform discrimination plain and simple - they just won't send full-quality video to "open" platforms and you can either deal with it or go full pirate. Sometimes they won't stream it even if you have widevine set up properly etc - and it's all completely arbitrary and they could break it tomorrow. Or you just buy an apple tv/shield tv.

Plex, Infuse, and VLC also let you interact with plex/jellyfin on the apple tv, and there really is no question about what it can decode, the answer is "basically everything you'd interact with as a consumer", short of weird stuff (idk about something like 4:2:2 or ProRes). Ironically the A17 also might be my fastest processor (in single-thread) at the moment, lol - definitely faster than my laptop, might be faster than my gaming desktop.

Sucks but that's how it is - to this day, AMD doesn't have working HDMI 2.1 support on linux, because HDMI Forum won't do an open license. You either have closed-source blobs or firmware that implement it, or you don't get the feature. These are hard problems, and people expect to be paid to stare at them. And once you spend the time getting all the software and hardware vendors and studios onto the same page and then implement it etc you're going to want to be paid for that too.

It is one of the real problems for the linux kernel imo - not everything can be GPL licensed all, and (for obvious reasons) there is no escape valve for "ok but this vendor is really proprietary and the feature is really important...". When the unstoppable force meets the immovable object what you get is both vendors shrugging their shoulders. You want to fuck with NVIDIA over whatever GPL symbols? Then I guess you won't have HDMI 2.1 on your platform at all, then - because AMD's not gonna win that battle on licensing. The bulli approach worked with ZFS because ultimately there's diversity in filesystems, but if your hardware works best with HDMI 2.1 then you really don't have a choice in the matter. The very popular RDNA2 cards only have DP1.4, for example, so if you don't get HDMI 2.1 then you lose half the bitrate the card can support.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417

Anyway you can tilt at that, or... pay $125 for a refurb ATV4K ethernet 3rd-gen and go watch a movie. It sucks but that's kinda the reality of the space - it's only troublesome if you aren't willing to grease some palms to make the system work as designed. Do you want to consoom or not?

An hour long 30 Mbps 4k HDR+ video file will be roughly around 10-15+ GB with H.265 encoding.

As others have pointed out, a well encoded 720p or 1080p video offers a decent enough viewing experience quickly at far, far smaller sizes than a 2k or 4k videos (file sizes will be 10 to 20 times smaller at these resolutions). Note also that some pirates encode videos with the CPU, than using hardware encoders, and thus these videos tend to have a higher quality with better compression (hardware encoders, while blazing fast, tend to do a poorer job than CPU video encoding). Thus, these smaller sized video files don't require high-speed internet, can be downloaded fast and also encourages people to save the videos longer. This allows some to create their own personal video library. So a side effect of this is that people store and share these videos longer, and their smaller sizes now allow streaming torrents of popular content. Some torrent sites today have even started offering this through the browser itself - so non-techies now don't even have to download any torrent software and learn how to use it. That's near-Netflix like convenience, with more content, for "free" - and that's what these services are up against.

We also can't ignore that 4k videos are often only available at higher tier subscription plan. So even if Netflix, or other streaming services, think that some of these people can be enticed to subscribe to their services, with their high quality 2k or 4k videos, they will have to offer them at a lower price to beat the "free" model of piracy. (It's very hard to compete with "free" - just look at Google search engine's market share and its non-free competitors' market share to understand this).

All this is of course irrespective of the fact that 2k and 4k resolution HDR+ videos are also increasingly available now a days on torrents too.

Popcorn Time seems to have (already?) been based on browser techniques : JavaScript & NodeJS ? (Or is that only for today's version ?)

Also, I'm not exactly impressed because PeerTube has used WebTorrent for quite some years now (before recently abandoning it for something even better ?).

But yeah, you shouldn't expect that website to last long - but then this kind of game of whack a mole has been played by PirateBay-likes and illegal streaming sites for years now.

X265 1080p movies for both rippers are roughly 1.5-2GB per average movie, which is on average 1.5-2h long. You won't find better quality in this size range, in same way 7-10GB seems a sweet spot for 4k (especially with AV1 instead of HEVC). Not sure who & why downloads those 80GB full bluray releases.

Why? Because I want the highest-quality possible copy. Same reason I download lossless versions of albums. It’s less about being able to perceive the quality increase, and moreso about archival. Then my Plex server can transcode to appropriate streaming bitrates on the fly without having to re-encode an already heavily compressed video stream.

And building and properly maintaining some not-so-small array of massive HDDs for those capacities... I just don't see the point when I can get all I need (and ie in sound much much more), without caring more than buying a single hdd and be done for next 5 years.

Its not the bandwidth, 1gbps is easy to get here, stuff I saw in those sizes was well seeded too, but just overall all added extra work.

You don’t need a massive HDD array, I have my whole collection of 10+ years of Blu-ray remuxes on a single Seagate Exos drive in my NAS.

Even with 1080p and 2-3 downloaded modern video games per month (which are all greater than 100GB now), I tend to get up to my 1TB bandwidth cap each month. I start paying extra after that.

But I remember a period of time where basically every rip was VBR. 192kbps then took over when bandwidth and disk space were no long were no longer concerns.

Too bad even devices that claim av1 support … even some from the makers of said codec .. ahem chromecast w/gtv .. still stutter or fail.

lol

> Also I think the shift to SSDs from spinning rust delayed the adoption of widespread video piracy 10-ish years ago

Huh? 500GB (and more) drives became available at 2006 and by 2008 dropped below $150.

Also there was no demand for extra-high-wanna-see-every-original-pixel quality, so XviD releases with atrocious quality but a fine file size were common and were fine on 40-80-250GB drives in 2001-2005.

> you can create a large library very quickly

Music library and video library are a different things. While the most people 'store forever' the music they dloaded (well, they were back in 2000s, probably not so much today), the video library is mostly useless for the most, because it's dloaded for 1-time consumption.

2010-2012 is also when most folks would have already upgraded to a HD display and so there was more demand for HD content.

Most of the time people replaced HDD to SSD in the laptops only to use ODD caddy to move their HDD there.

By 2010 storage was not a problem, at all.

If anything the torrenting reached it's peak ~2008 and on a slow decline (but not in absolute numbers, because the userbase is still rising) ever since, because by 2010 almost any music could be found on YouTube (popular ofc, not something obscure what is known by 3 greybeards on the whole planet) and even a lot of movies too. For the parts of the world where broadband was still costly or capped you could always go to the store and buy 5-in-1 DVD for $2 (talk about quality, eh). After that the succesful multi year campaign by Apple to convince the user what it doesn't need to own music and what it is totally okay to stream "your" music over the cellular networks, along with %he rise of the streaming services, moved the torrenting to a niche of nerds (only lossless music!), nerds (248 variants of StarWars) or nerds (anime).

This seems like a PR piece to promote and justify Netflix's change in mind and business model.

I think there's room for improvement on the smart TV OS' to better integrate these services into one pluggable app.

Prime is the worst offender of this, but having Crave and Bell TV app installed on an AppleTV means any search returns a result, but you can't watch any of them without buying another subscription to a "channel" they offer.

They also tend to refuse allowing their customers to watch on platforms they don't like - e.g. they actively blocked casting to Google smart displays and blocked Netflix app from working on Macs and Vision Pro so you can't download things.

That way users only have to pay one streaming service, the content is available in every country, the rightsholders are paid fairly by the content consumed instead of these never-ending monthly fees for one show and ignoring the rest of the library.

If they don't do this, piracy again becomes the best option and media companies will only ever get stupid disengaged customers and that's a bad business model because those people eventually leave.

The time of predatory streaming service bullshit is over. Provide a service which puts customers first or they'll all go back to piracy. They already are.

[0] Notably, radio has a compulsory licensing scheme, but the government turned up the license cost on Internet radio so high that nobody can make a profit unless they sell their soul to the RIAA ala Spotify.

The reason I put "nationalise" in quotes is because any such partnership needs to be a global commercial partnership between companies. It can't be actually nationalised by any country because then it would focus only on that country and that place's copyright laws (and potentially censorship or content laws).

This garbage of the same streaming service in different countries having different content also needs to stop.

People can torrent any show anywhere and they'll do that if it's not available on a reasonable streaming service. If which there are few or none anymore.

There will definitely be some difficulties (Netflix estimated 4M views but you are expected to bring in 6M views so clearly you need to pay $$$$$, or you are only going to bring in 2M views but you still need to pay $$$) but I think they can be overcome.

Streaming is still easy, just more expensive.

There's all the petty "ecosystem" bullshit. Stuff like how Apple used to only let siri control Apple Music instead of spotify or tidal or whatever.

And platform updates. And then the software stops supporting your device because it was made more than 3 years ago or whatever. Or they blocked taking screenshots (hello Crunchyroll, fuck you for making it harder to share random meme moments with my discord buddies!).

We never stole (cute word pirated) anything. We became cordcutters (OTA and streaming) because we felt we weren't using but maybe $20 of the $180 monthly we were paying to cable. We became cordcutters in 2013. We never stole (cute word pirated) anything.

I'm speaking as someone who also never pirates. I'd rather not watch something and spend my time doing something else.

Do you know where I could stash all this revenue big corpo would otherwise have gained? Or perhaps I could give it to you? Would you be interested in giving me something in exchange for all this revenue big daddy corpo would otherwise have gained?

Implying that music companies would have been richer than all the nations + other companies in the world combined, if it wasn't for music piracy. It's not hard to see how that's bull.

There's never been a single proof of a loss of revenue during research.

So no, while it's usually a talking point on the anti-piracy ads, it's an urban legend.

I'm stealing just as much as I would be stealing if I took code from a developer without paying what we agreed to. The entire stealing/not stealing discussion is just useless semantics.

[1] The act of making a backup is not in and of itself (as it's considered a fair use/exception in most [not all!] jurisdictions, even outside of US), but it often involves circumventing DRM, and that part is piracy.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-jame...

Piracy all the way.

Both my streaming boxes (Amazon Fire Stick and Xfinity Flex) handle that for me. I press the mic button on the remote, say what I'm looking for, and they tell me my options. Typically that means they tell me which paid services it is on (Netflix, Max, Peacock, etc) and offer to launch the app for that service, which free with ads services it is on (such as Pluto or Freevee), and show my options to buy or rent it.

We are the ones pissing and shitting on their faces. We are the wrong doers here.

I pirate again too. The fragmentation is just crazy now.

I cancelled my subscriptions when I noticed that I'm not using them anymore. Years ago, I remember me and my friends were eagerly awaiting every new episode of Agents of Shield or The Expanse. But when I was browsing the IMDB top movies and top TV series recently, I just didn't find anything I wanted to watch (and that hadn't been in cinema half a year ago, thus old). The result is that recently, me and my friends all watched a lot less movies and instead played more video games.

TLDR: Netflix's low-effort content is losing against video games.

When companies fail to uphold their side of the bargain, I don't feel a need to uphold mine.

> 12 years old, and as perfect as the day it came out of GabeN’s mouth.

I have not pirated a game in more than a decade, I bought a bunch on sale over Christmas though I likely won’t have the time (or hardware, HL:Alyx was cheap) to play them any time soon. Though it’s a bit of a minor chore I regularly purchase music I find via streaming (I like albums, offline use, and knowing it won’t go away). I’ve never felt the need to pirate a book.

I don’t pirate tv/movies much, mostly because I don’t watch them much due to all the other entertainment available. I did pirate Taskmaster, until they started publishing the episodes on YT.

Which services do you mean?

Netflix? Or do you mean the other 7 services, which didn’t exist back then.

There was a brief window of time when streaming was able to compete with piracy (free) and it’s when there was just one streaming service. Netflix was able to have a robust (if not comprehensive) catalogue (because it had no competitors), and was dedicated to user experience (becaues it was willing to burn money to grow its customerbase), and had just secured multi-year licensing deals for content from all the major film and television distributors at bargain basement prices (because no one else had yet realized how valuable those streaming rights were).

Also their browser and software limitations are of their own making. Do away with those, and I might even consider a subscription. Obviously I will not, if they continue to discriminate against me.

HBO Boss to Netflix: You’ll Never Get Our Shows (2011)

Money can't buy everything.

though apparently 2023 called to say that's no longer true. HBO is exploring licensing their content to Netflix.

https://www.vulture.com/2023/07/hbo-tv-shows-netflix-wbd-lic...

> Which services do you mean?

As a pioneer of entitlement-based streaming video who believed in the tech, I pay for every streaming service that remains ad free and is available a la carte as an add-on "channel" to TV+, Hulu, or Prime.

I'm down from most all of them, to just a handful.

Our consulting to content and distribution firms in the 2000s told them they had to do five things to compete:

- eliminate anxiety of appointment viewing

- eliminate anxiety of acquiring media (costs)

- eliminate anxiety of ownership (durability)

- eliminate anxiety of compatibility (devices)

- eliminate anxiety of availability (when, where)

Netflix is undoing several of these. They're adding cost of viewing ads, removing promise of working on all devices, and more aggressively removing deep content.

Whose fault is it really that all content is not available on a single service? It's nobody's fault, it was inevitable given how things work.

How could you "fix" it? You'd need legislation saying that all content must be made available for licensing at the same price for every service. But that's not enough, because why would HBO sell their content to Netflix and vice versa? No, you'd have to force them to make it available. But that's not enough either, as they could just set the price extremely high. And at this point what would be the point in having multiple streaming services at all? Perhaps we need legislation that enforces separation of content producers and distribution, like the Glass-Steagall Act but for TV, or Net Neutrality?

I think Gabe’s rule is like gravity. It’s inconvenient for space travel, but what are you gonna do? You don’t get to space by complaining about it.

It’s the same in streaming. All the streaming platforms need to do is provide a service that’s better than piracy. And I really do feel for the streaming platforms here. That seems like a hard ask for them. Netflix rarely has content I want to watch any more. Shows I do want to watch are often on a different competing service. And they often remove shows and movies from the platform that I might have otherwise enjoyed. Im not subscribing to multiple streaming platforms at once - that’s ridiculous. I’m not surprised they’re complaining about piracy - they’re rapidly becoming a worse service than piracy and gabe’s law is kicking in for them.

But at the end of the day, like space companies, complain if you want but it’s not my problem to fix. And there are plenty of fixes - make it easy to have a grab bag of streaming services which swaps streaming provider every month. Or give me access to every platform for my $10 and distribute the money based on what I actually watched.

I dunno. Figure it out. Or don’t, and watch piracy eat your lunch. Your call, Netflix.

Actually the more I think about it the less I understand how it hasn't been taken down.

Most people are honest, and will do the the legal thing when faced with two equal options. If the choice is between that UI but it's illegal, and a reskin of that UI but it's £30/mo, I'd pay.

But it's not, as the other comments here said. It's a choice between that for free and a limited catalog of region restricted, ever changing, poor video quality streams spread of multiple services, and given the choice between paying 4 providers for a poor service and getting a good service from one location, people will pick the latter.

The way licensing and streaming costs work is super arbitrary and wacky. There’s nothing fixed and eternal about it. If the fee structure isn’t working (and it’s not) then it should be changed.

The movie industry can get a reasonable amount of my money or none of my money. Their choice.

World of warcraft has had a subscription for 20 years and is wildly successful. PSN has a monthly subscription where you get 2-3 games per month added to your account that you can play as long as you're still subscribed. Gamepass has 25+ million subscribers [0]

> I'm not OK with paying $70 a month

Honest question, why not? That's what cable TV cost 15 years ago, and $70 now has the purchasing power of ~$50 then.

[0] https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/09/15/xbox-game-pass-30-m...

The hardware was often subsidised (although I recall at one point having to pay an extra €99 for a sky box), but assuming a set top box cost €100, that's 1.5 months of payments to pay for the box, the rest is the subscription cost.

> You need to add the cost of your internet connection on top of that, plus whatever box you use to play to the TV etc.

Only if you exclusively use the internet for this content. And the vast, vast majority of TV's come with apps for Netflix, Prime etc these days. Those that don't, a streaming stick is ~£35.

Value for money. Most households don't spend their lives watching 4-8h of content every day, I'd think.

I'm likely to watch maximum 12h a month. So 6$ an hour? No thanks. And I'm talking maximum. Most months I spend 6h watching in total. That brings it up to $12 / hour.

Pay-what-you-watch sounds better to me and many others. Show me a gradually increasing bill in the top right corner of the UI and I'll manage. Or give me only one subscription -- much less than $70 though -- and then you distribute my money to the proper rights holders. I shouldn't care who owns what, nor should I be bothered switching services.

It doesn't matter if I'm a billionaire as well. Again, value for money.

The Video should also last for at least a week once you borrowed it. ( Which is similar to 5 days old DVD rental except the 2 days postal time being instant. )

I wonder if it is a business model worth exploring.

> That's a fair wack cash.

I never said it wasn't, but (I would wager) it's most households primary form of entertainment. It being ~2% of the median household's income it's good value.

I don't want to have a dozen different apps with different (but equally crappy) UX, and I don't want to track which megacorp owns the license to my favorite movie to know what subscription I need this month to have access to it. I want to go to a single marketplace (like e.g. Steam), pick the titles I actually care about, and have access to it. I don't want to care who gets that money, and the platform and the rights owners can and should figure this out between themselves. If prices for that particular piece of content change next months because it changed owners, let me know and approve the exact amount by which my combined subscription will change next month.

Note that this doesn't imply that there should be just one marketplace. Let there be many indepedent ones, all participating in the same system that routes the money from consumers to rights owners, and providing the same catalog and pricing, but different UX etc.

But that would kill lock-in. And lock-in is how they can squeeze the most out of us. So it won't happen, and piracy it is.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

If compulsory licensing for tv and movies also implied the service was picking the episodes, you'd have potential for competition if service A just played all of the episodes in order and service B only played the good episodes. Etc.

Then the video stream vendors must find a different way to make things work. If their goal is to be user-friendly, which I highly doubt. Only in marketing-speak (err, marketing lies) they claim "The experience of our user is our utmost goal". But it really isn't.

It's like every technology: if this is how things work, and they are suboptimal, the optimal solution will be applied. If we say "oh to bad, it's how it's established", then people will go against the establishment if that means better capabilities.

> How could you "fix" it?

Take a look at the music industry, they have solved it pretty well. I can stream everything on Spotify paying very little, I get everything that I want and I don't have to pirate it anymore. So maybe fostering independent creation? Forbidding "exclusivity" clauses? Fostering independent studio creation?

> They could set the price really high.

Prices are elastic: bigger price, less demand, same benefit. So that doesn't cut it either.

Is it because labels have ownership in Spotify? I don't think the HBOs and Disneys will give up their streaming platform unless forced to do it.

You might be right on HBO and Disney not giving up their service, until customers don’t want to pay for it anymore, and they’ll seek other ways. That’s capitalism after all…

And so many things are platform-exclusive these days.

The same could theoretically happen for entertainment content, in one way or another. A popular scenario present in a lot of sci-fi is that people subscribe to "channels" or data streams or whatchacallit, and the point of access is actually working as an aggregator and single point of payment. I can see no valid reason why big outfits like Sony or Samsung couldn't do that, effectively defragmenting the subscription craziness and easily dealing with backoffice negotiations on licensing and whatnot (Sony could probably do that without leaving the building).

Again, it doesn't HAVE to be the end-user device manufacturer to present such a single-point service, but I think they are best positioned to be first movers for such a paradigm. And not saying it would be easy, because they are subject to the same brain-dead enshittification attempts in their "smart" devices as anyone else, and that is a habit that is hard to quit.

The larger a company is the more it falls back to "let the market decide." In this case the market is starting to decide (again) to bypass the poor user experience the big players offer and just steal the content. This is the point where it's time for the market to adapt (again) if they want to keep revenue.

I could maybe stretch to four but then the market needs to meet me there and do two things: 1. Make an effort in consolidating media rights and services to these four and 2. Work to lower the price to roughly $10 per service for at least high quality 1080p with no ads in high quality apps across the board. Bonus: Also work to standardize a media protocol so that you can see what you have access to in a common media library regardless what you use, or even in third party apps, as well as stream with whatever as long as you're a subscriber to the respective services.

Do all these things and I actually think they have a good chance against piracy. It's all about what they're willing to do. They can absolutely make some good money on movies and TV shows in a piracy world. I'm convinced of this. Piracy is not the problem; piracy is just the other weight of the scale showing just how anti-consumerist they can become.

- 4K HDR video, not whatever the heck the buggy client delivers.

- Atmos/TrueHD audio track that actually works, not whatever the broken app delivers (I'm looking at you Sky and rest of the ilk that still deliver HBO content with stereo).

- Subtitles for ALL the languages, not just one or two. And those languages don't disappear when I go on a vacation, leaving me stuck with german audio and french subtitles.

- Properly functioning offline playback for when I'm traveling, not randomly broken and disappearing offline mode (Netflix, Spotify and YouTube all blessed me with "all your downloaded content is gone" experience on long flights).

- Works on all my devices not a random subset independent on which way greedy execs tried to extract "ecosystem" money from my playback device manufacturer. Looking at you ATV+.

- Is actually available in my region and doesn't randomly disappear from my devices just because I decided to travel to visit my parents or have some time off.

- Doesn't randomly disappear after 6 months when I started watching the series because some license expired.

As you can see, I really tried to pay to get content from these people. And all I got was bunch of frustration. F'em, they brought this upon themselves for being user hostile arseholes. Again.

Btw. Ads in front of streaming content I just selected, to tell me about other streaming content on the same service I did NOT select should also be on the NO list.

What nonsense is that. That makes no sense at all.

So before you even get to the launch menu for this specific movie you selected, you're subjected to a trailer for a 20 year old movie with a 24% on rotten tomatoes. And an advertisement for a pizza restaurant. And a threat that the film company is going to take all their movies and put them in a vault for 10 years so you really need to go buy more DVDs from them.

For example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/nx3o1/since_when_di...

But at the minimum, the piracy notices are 20 seconds long now. For an item you paid for instead of pirating.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/05/10/2238258/dvds-blu-ray...

you bought the thing, you should be able to use it however you want

and putting ads into a bluray you already bought for a probably not so small price is ridiculous

And if you skip some epilepsy warning then that is your responsibility, same with when you pirated it and get caught.

Also why force me to see anti-piracy propaganda (and that's what it is, nothing else, sometime also legally misinforming) when I already DIDN'T pirate it or a logo I already know from the packaging of the bluray (because if I did pirate it I already would have skipped it).

it's just a ridiculous dictation of behavior in context of a bought physical product

My favorite videos for all the problems with DVD and BR: AVGN's You Know Whats BS series: (warning a lot of cussing in the following videos)

[1: DVD]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsdzaEVeFEE

[2: BR]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tetXKdi9U3c

My favorites quote at the end when he was comparing DVDs to VCRs: "Its like we are going forward in technology but only making our lives bullshittier"

If you mean the unskippable content then no, it's not DVD player independent.

A set top unit typically respects the blocks put in place by the DVD author (some rare models have a hidden menu provided by the manufacturer that can bypass things like region coding and this).

Most software players(VLC for example) totally ignore any rules placed on the dvd and allow the user to do whatever they want.

That's gonna be hard to come by, I left that job more than twenty years ago and short of digging an authoring tool and making one DVD I don't see how I could convince you. Provided I even remember how the damn thing even worked.

Here's what I remember:

- around 2004-2005 (checking movies I remember posters in the hallway it's more likely to be early 2004) ?

- the studio had three authoring computers, two macos8 and one windows machine

- couldn't upgrade to macos8 because authoring software wasn't supported on macos9

- authoring consisted in linking b-frame and a-frame as entry and exit points for chunks of video

- programming was a mix of drawing video blocks, mapping some keys to them, building some loops into a kind of finite-state machine

- we used dvdshrink a lot internally to move the movie between authoring guys and color/effects/editing guys

- video blocks were overlayed with TIFF pictures to create menus effect

- subtitles were rendered as TIFF at some points in the process, explained the rough edges (I remember I was surprised it wasn't a txt file or something but DVD players hadn't the processing power to render the overlay of arbitrary text so TIFF files were generated and it could overlay them over the video)

- I remember the distributor representatives coming to check out the final master of the DVD: they would sit in a corner of the room in front of the TV and plays the menu to see if everything was right. We made fun of them because they claimed to check the DVD for quality but the TV was too crappy to actually display colours and play sounds right. Now that I think about it I believe they were more likely to check if subtitles and languages options were in accordance with the distributor's rights. They usually watched the whole movie ^^.

Concerning UOP:

- I don't remember if you could input the combination while the unskippable content was playing, I think it was something you had to do before that to disable UOP on the next block

- But it definitely was like something described in that article https://lifehacker.com/hit-stop-stop-play-and-other-tricks-t...

> These tricks may not work every time and with every DVD, but thank god for the times they do. Got a trick of your own that does the trick?

The fact it doesn't always work is because the authoring didn't always put them in.

First of all I want to take a moment to state how hilarious it is you used DVDShrink: a tool developed for copyright infringement of content.

What you described is the standard authoring process that even I did back when it was fun to make home DVDs.

But regarding unskippable content, it is difficult to prove if the code you described will be respected by all brands of players. I recall that JVC players would always go back to the main menu as soon you press STOP and it would then start the playback over when Play was presented. Pause is what would halt playback temporary. Its been a while since I used JVC players though.

Yeah, the irony wasn't lost on any of us :].

> What you described is the standard authoring process that even I did back when it was fun to make home DVDs.

One year after I left I heard from a coworker that they were going to close shop. Director had visited a freelance guy who was doing authoring with a single consumer PC box and he saw the writing on the wall. He wouldn't have been able to keep his team in-house with all the costs associated if distributors started authoring in-house or spread the orders among freelancers and drive prices down. So that studio left the market and went back to digital picture/movie effects. At that time, being a student, I also tried out adobe encore (I think it was the name) as an alternative the much expensive authoring tool (I think it was sonic but I am pretty sure there was another, both didn't look like a toy interface and the other one had a different name) and thought "wtf, it's way easier to author with that that almost doing assembler with the professional tool" but I found out it didn't produce 100% compliant DVD. Anyway.

> But regarding unskippable content, it is difficult to prove if the code you described will be respected by all brands of players. I recall that JVC players would always go back to the main menu as soon you press STOP and it would then start the playback over when Play was presented. Pause is what would halt playback temporary. Its been a while since I used JVC players though.

Ooooh. I think I understand your point now. Yeah, if the hardware indeed decide to ignore anything happening during an UOP block then nothing would work. My memory fails me, assuming the software can register keys during an UOP block even though the UOP logo blinks maybe what we did was register keys during the UOP block and disable the flag on the fly to give back user control (but then hw players that ignore anything while a UOP block is being played would result in non skipable content obviously) or maybe the combination had to be entered before so it sets a flag that is read before the next block to check if it should disables UOP on the next block (or skip it entirely and drop the user to the main menu ?). I am sorry to say I am unable to remember more details and I didn't keep in touch with anybody there :/.

I'm looking at you, Apple TV+.

Spotify is also a great example of how to beat piracy. I haven't downloaded an mp3 file since I got a Spotify Premium account in 2007. OK that's probably a slight overstatement, but it's near enough to the truth for this argument. They made it so simple and convenient to pay for access to music that I've had zero reasons to even consider piracy. They have everything (well, enough that I've never felt something was missing anyway), they have clients for everything, the pricing is reasonable, and they have great value-add in the form of playlist generation.

As for the rest, full agreement, the low bitrate of streaming services is the big one for me as I'm a film enthusiast with great gear that definitely doesn't reach its potential using any streaming services. Now that it looks like physical media is going the way of the Dodo I'm wondering where I'm gonna get actually high bitrate content from in the future.

I have playlist where a growing percentage of songs are grayed out, not available, while they do exist in the store, just as part of a different album now.

Very frustrating. Does Spotify do that ?

However, it really doesn't happen that often. I probably have a few thousand songs save on Spotify and perhaps a dozen have been taken off after many years of using the platform.

And I had, but they removed them since, listing nothing in their place.

As for replacements, my understanding is that they are often due to the better royalties on original artist re-recordings. I always try to switch back to the originals, and AM, my current service, only sometimes still them. Frustrating to build a collection on shifting sand.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I was so annoyed that I actually cancelled my subscription.

(Suppose I should think of dialing back my Spotify hate a little now that apparently in the renewal they're no longer keeping Rogan as Spotify-exclusive)

BTW, I agree about the Spotify UI. I never liked it and was a GPM user until they destroyed it by pushing me to YTM. Now I use AM, since if I'm going to tolerate a poor UI it might as well work well with all my devices.

I’ve also tried on my Mac, slightly more presses (four, to be exact) as I had to press ‘podcasts & shows’ to refine the search slightly more.

I don’t see how that’s hard to use. Each to their own though I guess, I’ve not seen how difficult it is your side so can’t really comment.

For podcasts, I think people who are big into podcasts are also particular about their player. I know I am. For me, there's space for a music app and a podcast app. They are both audio, but otherwise very different.

Its amazing how so many apps really struggle at the edges. For a company as big as Spotify they should do better. Its probably a side effect of their company's culture.

Music is usually considered art and you are a boring downer of you complain about artists political or personal controversies. That is another thing. And the artist always have the benefit of doubt of the protagonist in the song not being the artist himself.

My point was more the GP wanted to see Spotify go out of business because they bought a podcast. I just thought it was a bit of a wild statement to make.

- You can't turn your queue into a playlist (and you can't see previous queue as part of the queue, only as limited history.)

- Clicking a song or album sometimes clears your queue and starts playing that instead (I know there is a logic to it, but a mistake or mis-click is easy).

- There is no shortcut to add to queue, just long press then find the menu item.

It's possible everyone else is only listening to albums or curating playlists then playing them, but I like to pick things as I go like a jukebox and it sucks at it.

There is, just swipe the song to the right.

meaning that, if you have a bad internet connection and tap on eg an album, it'll open the view for that album and you just have to look at the progress indicator for in some cases up to 20+ seconds, even if you have downloaded that album and all the info is there in the local cache.

this happens annoyingly often, e.g. when leaving an area where you're connected to wifi and your phone hasn't yet switched over to celluar data.

But imagine my surprise when I checked Spotify a couple of years later and the situation was still the same. Ok, I thought, they must have had different internal priorities, but once they get those, they will make UI at least semi-usable.

A few years passed, but the answer was still no. Once again I didn't write because clearly they must have had thousands of actual users writing and demanding the essentials and those things MUST be on their way, no way they weren't!

Several years later and the situation was still the same... This is when I stopped making excuses for the developers. They must be technically incompetent, be dim product-management wise (not understanding features, people, customers, lacking a vision, not to know how to collect, analyze and work on feedback) or stupid/unmotivated. But probably everything of the above.

I only criticize the technical aspects, not the business side. And I don't even criticize a much more challenging podcast/video side of things. I am merely talking about the lack of essentials in the basic music player. They couldn't even do that! I can bet money that the podcast implementation is on no better level. Other people's comments support that assumption. I am not surprised in the least.

Basically, the download button is a single down-arrow at the top of your library. When you tap it—and download your music–the down-arrow turns solid green to indicate your music is available offline. It doesn't disappear. It turns green, Spotify's primary color.

The kicker is: if you accidentally (or out of curiosity) press that green arrow again, it will wipe all your downloads without confirmation (disabling "offline mode"). Did that on a flight once and lost all my music. It's absurd how that UX made it out of testing.

Here's a picture of what I'm talking about. Tapping this icon deletes your library from your device:

https://i.imgur.com/zrSid1T.jpeg

There really should be at least a modal to confirm if the result will mean deleting more than say an album.

If you're offline or on roaming mobile data (not sure if they can reliably determine this though, at least not on iOS) when invoking it then they should make you answer a somewhat complex question to confirm that you indeed wanted to delete the songs.

Sometimes the changes get A/B tested, sometimes they don't. Sometimes the A/B test is gamed, sometimes it gets gamed by accident, and sometimes the tests get ignored when they are clearly wrong.

Finally, sometimes the directive is "get people to stop using this feature because it's unpopular with management".

Or that one time when they removed the "set as current playlist" feature, which they still haven't restored. That feature was the only way to change playlist without breaking in the middle of a song, besides literally waiting until a song is over and doing it then, wasting time.

I like Spotify, but they do some infuriating things sometimes.

Don't get me started on their beef with Apple which has resulted in my HomePods still not being able to take music requests via Siri almost 3 years after I got the first one.

When updating them, Spotify will first delete all old songs and then try to download the new ones. If a lot has changed and you're on a spotty Wifi connection this effectively deletes everything. Happened to me several times while on vacation.

There is the solution of enabling offline-mode before leaving for vacation, but as you mention it's very easy to accidentally disable it and once it's disabled all your playlists are toast.

By being able to compete with it on the price they pay artists. It's a uniquely powerful negotiating position for the publishers that a) won't last b) won't extend to TV/video

That’s the issue I think. I listened to music from ~1000 albums last year. At $10 a pop that’s $10k which is just not possible. Spotify is really the only way that listening like that is enabled.

And as for Spotify exploiting artists, I don't know how accurate this[1] is, but if it is then it seems pretty fair to me? Maybe slightly on the lower end of what I had expected, but not that far off.

If you have a million monthly listeners (and today you have access to over 574M monthly active users[2] via Spotify) then you're making $5,000/month in static income, meaning you have zero hours of work and still have enough to live on (depending on the size of the band I guess).

The notion that artists (or movie stars for that matter) should be making 10x that or more is a little ridiculous if you ask me.

1: https://purecalculators.com/spotify-money-calculator

2: https://www.statista.com/statistics/367739/spotify-global-ma...

"Zero hours of work" - I know artists get underestimated, but this is next level.

Btw, taking the very top .1% of earners in a field, like movie or pop stars, and using their returns to imply that musicians and actors are fairly compensated, is a very silly thing to do. Tbh, as someone who knows a lot of talented and struggling artists (and teachers and janitors and nurses etc), it's revolting.

If you want to give out about overcompensated people why not look at CEO's, like Daniel Ek (Spotify CEO) and his $3.8 BILLION net worth. That's about as clear a signal that there's exploitation happening that you could ever ask for.

2) Talent and success in music have never been tightly correlated. Marketing is what sells music, not just talent. Marketing requires a lot of money (And payola).

If anything Spotify levels this playing field a bit.

How exactly does the fact that artists have been exploited before mean that Spotify isn't making things worse?

> 2) Talent and success in music have never been tightly correlated.

That's not remotely true. And even pop stars lip syncing songs other people wrote are working very hard, and often exploited.

> Marketing is what sells music, not just talent.

Sure; like nearly everything else. And guess what - most of the artists on Spotify are doing their own marketing.

> If anything Spotify levels this playing field a bit.

"Artists can be paid as little as 13% of the income generated, receiving as little as £0.002 to about £0.0038 per stream on Spotify" [0]. That's not leveling the playing field, that's exploitation; and if you want to defend it I think you need to start bringing actual evidence instead of just spouting your own (deeply unpopular) opinion as fact.

0 - https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/apr/10/music-streamin...

I do understand that a million monthly listeners is a large amount, sorry I was over-exaggerating a bit in my last comment. My point was that Spotify helps with discoverability through their playlist-generation, but I guess that doesn't automatically mean anything more than the odd play here and there, and not necessarily more "monthly active listeners".

I'd love if artists made more on Spotify than they do today, but isn't the big problem all the middle-men in the music industry? It's my understanding that companies like Spotify shorten this ladder at least a little bit, but thinking about it again I guess I agree that the pay is a little too low.

because they are bad for the environment.

Took them like 6 months to fix that.

I have a friend who’s indeed paying Spotify - but for connecting his account with some “illegal” software, from which he can then download MP3s (or FLACs) to share with his friends.

> - Is actually available in my region and doesn't randomly disappear from my devices just because I decided to travel to visit my parents or have some time off.

This was the dealbreaker for me.

I've definitely had Netflix region-lock most of my content when I made the mistake of briefly switching on wifi to find my connecting gate at some airport. Apparently even though the content was available at my starting point and at my destination that didn't apply to the connecting country.

Have yet to hit that with Youtube, and I really hate Spotify so avoid using it.

> - Doesn't randomly disappear after 6 months when I started watching the series because some license expired.

A few days back Prime lost both of the two series that I was in the middle of watching at the start of February. Super-annoying!

Same for music for me, radios where I live are just tons of talk I don't care about and little (weird) music, so my rock & metal collection from usb key is enough.

If I ever want that randomness that comes with say radio I just let it on or use ad-infested youtube, and probably soon turn it off in disgust from adverts. With small kids, not much time for that anyway which is a good thing.

And all gained legally. I am not losing sleep for poor artists (those I listen/watch are fine, guys in their 40s-60s living in castles or big mansions), I am not type of person what bought 100s of CDs of DVDs before (just to feel like a complete idiot now).

Your point still stands that it presents a service problem. Given the connectedness of the world now, regions should have been abolished a long time ago.

You know that indie filmmaker who spent his lifesaving filming a movie I now get to watch on his dime? Well guess what.

No 4k video and no international subtitles makes that guy deserve not seeing any money come back from his hard work.

I'm not a thief. The indie filmmaker is a thief. He stole my subtitles and 4k video.

In all seriousness, I pirate shit too. But am I going to walk around like a idiot justifying what I do? No. I don't lie to myself. I don't need to twist reality in order to explain human evil which is an intrinsic aspect of all of us.

I'm a bit like a psychopath because one other intrinsic aspect of humanity is that we lie to ourselves in order to justify our sins. I don't need to do that. I can pirate shit, and recognize the sin, and then continue pirating and screwing over that indie filmmaker. An ass hole never recognizes himself as the ass hole.

Like seriously the delusions are through the roof. The guy is literally pirating shit, and then calling the party he pirates shit from an "ass hole". If he just didn't buy their content he'd have justification, but he instead pirates the content and still calls them the "arse hole". Wake up. I hate corporations but we are the ones commiting the crime here.

We are the ass holes.

> The guy is literally pirating shit,

No, he is literally not pirating anything, unless he's in Somalia and attacking a cargo ship right now. And yes, he has the full right to call the parties who produced the situation where torrenting is the most convenient way to consume content an asshole - because they are assholes. I remember the time where doing that was not necessary - to the point that I almost forgot how to do it at all - but then the assholes came and now you have to pay for 15 different services, with crappy apps and unskippable ads, so yes, it's assholery. And it has nothing to do with indie anything.

You're a thief. Plain and simple. You just need to justify your delusion because you can't face reality.

All you need to look at is the law. They'd throw you in jail if it didn't cost so much.

You're wrong about nobody caring. You care. That's why you got angry enough to reply. You feel fucking guilty and you're ashamed of being an ass hole thief. Deep down you know it and your getting angry at me because I'm deconstructing your delicately made fantasy world.

I'm the one who truly doesn't give a shit. How else can I criticize myself? I pirate without guilt. I recognize my crime but someone like you has to make up some fantasy in order to live with himself.

What gets me is when that fantasy not only validates your actions, but condemns the party you fucking stole from. That's a freaking joke. That's the epitome of delusional.

> They'd throw you in jail if it didn't cost so much.

They can throw me in jail for liking a tweet or wearing a wrong garment or ingesting a wrong plant. So what?

> You feel fucking guilty and you're ashamed of being an ass hole thief.

Thank you for telling me what I feel. How else would I find out? Please do tell me more about my feelings, I love it when people who know nothing about me still able to figure out everything about what I feel in each particular moment. They must be so smart and perceptive, it's a really enriching experience to interact with such people. My gratitude knows no bounds.

If I wasn't even close to being right you wouldn't even respond. It's the fact that I'm right that makes you respond. I'm right and you can't face it.

That's all.

Says who?

There's no natural right to copyright. It's explicitly an artificial monopoly on content.

Channel 4 (in the UK) is probably the worst offender, as they preserve the aspect ratio, but have it fill the full width of the screen. This results in the top and bottom of the video being cutting off for most TV shows, including the subtitles. They've gone to some effort to make their player run on different aspect ratios, but somehow implemented it entirely the wrong way.

Webrips do suffer from this same issue, but with either FFMpeg or VLC, it can be cropped to the correct ratio without reencoding.

Then perhaps s.o. would argue that these all are much harder to get done with free tools or by oneself, but I can definitely argue that having a nice personal cloud which allows video streaming is more than enough for most occasions.

Not actually different from using the streaming services, who sell info on you as a side gig.

Selling movies and shows DRM-free, like Amazon does with music (but no other software goods for some reason).

They have tons of ads and pop ups so blocker is needed.

Most of the time piracy isn't even free. You got a server running for downloads which is an investment and uses power (24-7 sometimes), hard disks for storage aren't free. Indexers and newsgroups are paid (good ones at least). Comparing that to a monthly subscription of what used to be €10,- to Netflix and which had it all, makes it nonsense to pirate.

For my family here is the monthly spend with taxes for my area included:

HBO Max $ 13.53

Hulu $ 7.21

Disney+ $ 0.18 (w/ Hulu)

Paramount+ w/ Showtime $ 10.82

Apple TV+ $ 10.81

AMC+ $ 7.56

Amazon Prime $12.53

$62.64/month. Now, about 20 years ago in 2004 my parents had basic cable and they paid $60/month. An my parents combined made no where near what I make today in my salary alone. And with inflation the cost of entertainment has gone down significantly.

As for figuring out what is on what- Apple TV has made this easy.

Is piracy easier? Legality aside you need a seed box, membership to specific sites, and VPN. Which can add up to more than $30/month just to download pirated content. Not to mention the time investment in figuring out how to get the movies and tv shows to your family members on all of their devices. A budget NAS with 20 TB is going to cost $500. A small PC to transcode also $500. Also all the technical know how required. Backing up 20 TB to the Backblaze is going to cost $13/mo. So lets not pretend piracy is easier.

At the end of the day, for someone that's motivated to not give companies money because they see them as greedy rather than a way to compensate the creators, it becomes a labor of spite. That $500 budget NAS, downloading content in native resolution so there's no transcode box needed, spread across all the families and cousins, is easily paid for in car repair favors or what else the family has to offer the uncle or aunt running the pirate video service. $500 vs $60/month? that's just 9 months. 3 if you figure there are three households where you're saving them $60/month.

Personally, I rotate membership between one service and just limit my own tv time, but piracy really is too easy if you know what you're doing and are morally flexible.

This part is trivial nowadays: sonarr/radarr and related handle discovery and library management, and jellyfin does the playback.

Reasons I got back into piracy included trying to watch a series with my wife, and finding it gone. Seasons missing while streaming, UI becoming worse (for the last few years of Netflix I fully relied on an external paid service to discover new things on Netflix because of that). More and more content I cared about being removed, with lots of content I don't care about getting added - while price kept going up _and_ account sharing policies being put in that'd match my non-account sharing use case.

I'm still paying for Disney+ - though based on the Netflix experience I'm adding everything I'm interested in to my local library.

Amazon Prime got kicked out after they got too expensive - and even while I had prime I never actually used the video player as the UI is so horrible, but already back then pirated all the stuff I was paying for.

here is how it goes.

you have a laptop/pc. you go to tbp, search for the top 100 for movies/tv shows and download the torrent, watch it and delete the file to save space.

what you are describing is off-limits for majority of the world.

i have rented seedboxes back in 2016 for 2 months to get those "points" to get to a private tracker. never before, never after.

i have been using the above tbp+vlc method on a daily basis since 2005-06.

only recently lookmovie and other streaming sites have made it a bit easier.

oh, also, there is an outlier.

popcorntime. it JUST WORKS. I used it on the 2nd day of its initial release, i saw the whole weeks drama with death threats and the subsequent forks that arose. i have been using that as well so i am confirming and NOT PRETENDING that piracy is easier that actually paying for stuff.

A lot of people are students, or just don't like paying money for a frustrating experience even if they can afford it.

> $62.64/month.

But then you haven't got access to the things which are currently on Netflix or Peacock or YoutubeTV or whatever it is this time, and feel anxious or resentful that you're paying a monthly fee for whichever one you're not currently watching, or else have to spend time canceling or re-signing up for them all the time.

> Legality aside you need a seed box, membership to specific sites, and VPN. Which can add up to more than $30/month just to download pirated content.

That's how the people who have the money do it, but they're not doing it for the money.

> Not to mention the time investment in figuring out how to get the movies and tv shows to your family members on all of their devices.

Why would that take a long time to figure out?

> A budget NAS with 20 TB is going to cost $500. A small PC to transcode also $500.

Used PCs are ~free and anyone can get 20TB of storage to put in it for <$160:

https://www.amazon.com/HGST-Ultrastar-HC510-7200RPM-Drive/dp...

Also, people often have these things already.

> Backing up 20 TB to the Backblaze is going to cost $13/mo.

Why would someone pay money to back up to the internet what they downloaded from the internet to begin with?

most of your points lack insight/pragmatism but this one made ma laugh

It can take 30+ minutes and multiple account registrations to figure out whether a movie is even accessible where I live in the preferred language at a given day. I don't watch them every day, so a subscription model doesn't make much sense for me. I'd also pay for interruptions in the stream, lower resolution/quality, and in some cases ads. Why would I ever do that?

> Legality aside you need...

I don't need a NAS. Transcoding content doesn't need special separate hardware. Technical know-how is also required to troubleshoot streaming issues. Backup is always necessary. Membership to specific sites? Never had one.

If piracy was the dark art you make it seem then it would never be significant enough to make Netflix worry about it.

Probably need a 100 TB SSD to pirate a single movie. And definitely gigabit. 16 GB VRAM should do it.

Yeah, no thanks. I'll just VPN+torrent the ad-free version and watch that, thanks. On any device of my choosing as well.

And why should I pay £8.99 or whatever to one streaming service, for one programme, that was previously "free to air" for the other series? Paramount taking back Star Trek from Netflix for example.

I'm not sure how many multi-million dollar, unseen cancelled-after-one-season dramas with 50,000 viewers these studios need to create before they realise 'we need viewers to 'build a franchise' and make a profit'.

Just imagine if these series or dramas were only seen by a few thousand people at most: Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Band of Brothers, Shogun, Dallas, Cheers and so on. Even How I Met Your Mother and Big Bang Theory were pretty much pre-streaming when they started, but syndicated to world-wide terrestrial channels.

There are like 3 animes I wanted to watch on netflix, but they only have dutch subtitles, Trigun had dutch subtitles for like 4 years until they removed it in the netherlands.

I have to play whack a mole with 4-5 streaming services to find out where the show is 'at the moment'.

The tv apps are so garbage.. each company is pushing more and more visual animations crap, it has gotten to the point that I cant even scroll the titles properly.

Direct download (DDL) + a download manager or debride service.

Usenet is actually still a thing and is supposedly ridiculously fast and hassle free, once you have it set up.

IRC still exists but you need connections or something to trade.

There are IPTV services that also provide on demand streaming, i.e. pay for Plex.

[1]: https://wiki.servarr.com/

[2]: https://fleet.linuxserver.io/

Then I just search on various torrent sites. Thepiratebay.org and rutracker.org (use google). But movies and TV shows are easy to find. There are many sites which specialise in it.

Private torrent trackers are great as well, if you can keep up a good ratio. Might be good to use a VPN there.

I actually don't think that Piracy was difficult to compete against. Actually there was a time when video streaming platforms competed against it --- and very successful. For normal people, it was cheap enough to make a contract, and much simpler than going the piracy route. No one talked anymore about pirating.

But then things went wrong:

* you paid a monthly fee and STILL suddenly got advertisements force-feds (you couldn't even skip them)

* you wanted to watch some series, but it was taken out of the program (never heard of a public library that removes some author after some months)

* many movies made it only into one specific video stream vendor, so they forced people to make 2 or 3 or even more subscriptions.

And once the inconvenience from video stream vendors reached some threshold, piracy was re-birthed. As soon as it become more convenient again.

Just require anything older than 25-30 years to be made available for a nominal fee to any platform that wants it, with no exclusivity agreements allowed. Suddenly, you have a ton of quality content on multiple platforms. And the platforms are incentivized to compete on quality new content.

Also, it shouldn't be allowed for the Film/Music industry want to have it both ways. First use "Hollywood accounting" [1] to avoid paying taxes and contributors because the film "had a loss". And then milk it off perpetually. If you declare a loss on something, it should be enforced to go on public domain in a much shorter timeframe (say 10 years vs. 25-30 for profitable productions).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

Maybe a system where multiple different services offer the exact same content library or something similar, but a good solution will require some thought I think.

The solution is easy technically speaking and has been solved for decades. It’s called interoperability.

Now, the issue is businesses don’t like it. Even though the customer value is huge. Why? Because there’s something they want more than to sell content: to control access. Your player, your recommendations, promotions for more of their content. Heck, why not triple dip and throw in some ads and data harvesting too? The end goal of platform control is to become the only one. Dominance, like Spotify. Then: relax, lean back, raise prices, and watch the stock ticker.

So they only like interoperability when they are small and growing, and then do a 180 when they get bigger. Their end goal is incompatible with yours, the consumer. Back in the day, governments or similar neutral-ground organizations enforced/supported interop (telephone, radio, tv, etc) not perfectly, but enough to break the prisoners dilemma of monopoly-seeking competing businesses. Of course, that’s gone now, in the US. Standards support (the carrot) is only for rudimentary tech, like encryption, and anti-trust (the whip) is back in some other century going after hypothetical cartoon villains.

So… either one of them wins, or a duopoly, whatever is acceptable to the average consumer. Or, more likely, it remains like this: a fragmented shit cocktail and losses to piracy. This works as intended – piracy is an extremely good pressure valve and canary litmus for market failure.

- unavailability of the product in the right form in the market they live in (e.g. no OV and terrible translation, no good quality video/audio, not available at all, etc.)

- moon prices (e.g. Anime DVDs at least 10+ years ago where I lived), or being thigh on money (e.g. as a 16 year old)

- it being easier to pirate then to buy ...

- buying the product (in a reasonable convenient way) forces other unwanted things onto you, like automatic self-extending subscriptions or tracking to a point where I can't understand anymore how it's not classified as espionage

All of this except being tight on money hint to a mismatch between products provided and what consumers want/find acceptable. If the movie industry I think it would auto self correct, but it isn't and you could say piracy (on larger scale) is natural marked effect caused by the absence of a proper free market.

But what is I think most important to realize is that outside of the situation of piracy being more convenient then buying in all other cases the actual losses piracy creates is quite limited to a point where it's quite questionable how reasonable the drawbacks users have to suffer because of piracy prevention mechanism/laws are.

Natural if piracy would be fully unconstrained it likely would then cause huge monetary losses. A free market is still a marked so a product produced with some investment (e.g. creating the movie) still should be sold for some value.

All these antipiracy measures only invite us to pirate.

Pirating allows us to choose a media player of our children, possibly with 4K upscaling, better compression standards and the ability to download our content.

I remember when I first hit this and was shocked. I was going to send a funny still to my friend and tell them that they should watch the show. But Netflix apparently doesn't want free advertising.

DRM really does seem to harm the customers and the content owners far more than any pirate.

Funnily enough their UI is much better and more intuitive as well, in addition to having all the content together. They also offer imdb ratings etc.

I would pay $50 - $100 for a server like fmovies, bflix. So it wouldn't be a complete headache to understand what you can and can't watch in your region.

Everytime I want to watch Netflix nowadays, unless I happened to hear from somebody, that there's something awesome there, then I just browse it, and nothing of interest is popping up, so I just go somewhere else.

I don't pirate because I don't have money to pay or that I don't want to pay. I pirate because using the real services is so impossibly frustrating and disappointing.

It's fine to have multiple services, it's good for the competition, but there needs to be a system to make it so that each service can stream all things. Even if it costs within that service, so be it. Even where you pay per stream or view is good. If you have your own original content then you just ask other streaming services to pay for it while your own end-users can watch it for free, the other service's end users will have to pay.

RIP Boxee.

I discovered after 2 years of paying for netflix premium whatever its called the most expensive that i was only getting 1080p on most of my devices because of the app i was using or browser i was using or god knows what other reason.