I happily pay for games on Steam, and for music on Apple Music. Those are easy and reasonably-priced one-stop-shops for all my gaming and music wants. I don't have to waste time with crack executables and tagging MP3 files like I did back when I sailed the high seas.

It'd be great if there were something similar for TV and movies. The streaming landscape is too damn fragmented these days with confusing exclusivity deals, libraries shrinking, and prices rising.

I still buy movies and TV shows on Apple TV (and sometimes Amazon Video) all the time. That seems like the closest analogy to Steam. It works very nicely.

Streaming is a different kettle of fish. With streaming services I always expect my favourite content to disappear at random with no warning.

Of course, before fragmented streaming plenty of people complained about all-or-nothing cable bundles. I certainly pay less than I did when I had cable TV--at the cost of not having live TV.

Most people I know went from dealing with live TV, high prices, and having to pirate what wasn't airing to paying for one or two streaming services to get everything they want. Then half of them kept getting new services and pay more than they did for cable in the first place, and the other half rotate services, pay less than they did for cable, and still have to wait to watch what they want and pirate some things.

It's better than cable was, no argument, but it's like we passed right through the bright future, ripe with possibilities, and landed at marginal improvement.

I guess in my case, there's just very little that I feel I have to watch. So a few streaming services is fine and every now and then I'll buy/rent something a la carte either digital or physical. And once in a great while I wish I had live TV but not enough to pay for it. (I can't get anything over the air.) So, overall, it feels like a vast improvement and much cheaper.

I feel the same way, but people I know like their TV and I don't judge them for that. I have my own idle happinesses. If my favorite things to do were available on the same terms as modern television, I'd probably be pretty unhappy about it.

Fair enough. Certainly, many people watch sports and/or like to have the TV on as background. And then they end up, as you say, either adding on a lot of services so they have access to "everything." (Or they have to spend effort managing their subscriptions.)

When we started TheBox it was down to pressure from the rest of the world wanting to see British TV shows and not having a legal way to see 95% of them: https://torrentfreak.com/major-tv-torrent-site-thebox-bz-cal...

It took a minute, but the BBC themselves finally came through: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BritBox

No channel 4 content still sucks. I have no legal avenue to even pay to watch the Stand Up to Cancer Bake Off episodes, unless I move to the UK.

I'm pirating something that I would gladly pay for if they'd just let me. I'm not going to do a VPN; that would be more work than piracy in the first place (and besides, Channel 4 demands a UK address and even a UK credit card). It's downright ridiculous.

Damn. And Channel 4 always seemed like they were the smarter guys in the room, too.

Look at rideshare apps. They made hired cars cheap and easy to access but fell foul of existing taxi companies and regulations.

Whether he is in the right or not is decided in a court of law. However Disney et al have deeper pocketed lobbyists than municipal taxi companies.

There will always be a type of entrepreneur who flouts laws they don’t agree with, whether it’s copyright law or taxi regulations or whatever. The enforcement of those laws ultimately determines what the market looks like after the fact.

> Whether he is in the right or not is decided in a court of law.

Legally, sure.

Disney is an awful company and anything people do that hurts their bottom line is morally right though.

Copyright law is BS and Disney is solely responsible for the BS. It's all a complete farce and Disney can take their all their propaganda, brainwashing, and whining about copyright and shove it. Nobody should be feeling sorry for this company at all.

That's not a very different argument from saying people will steal merchandise and sell it on the corner because consumers prefer to pay less and not walk the aisles.

Its more like the store being a literal hedge maze, with an entrance fee, and once you get to the actual products, they are outrageously priced junk.

And the store is price fixing with nearby stores.

I think theres a difference between opportunistic crime, and reasonably upstanding people being utterly frustrated with a market status quo.

If course there is a ton of piracy that is just straight up theft from perfectly convenient platforms, but the unacceptable, anticompetitive commercial platforms are the core that keeps the community going, I think.

I do think this hits on the fundamental problem - you can't really have real competition when selling intellectual property.

With physical goods, if the store is utterly terrible, at the very worst someone can buy and resell the product at a nicer store. Intellectual property you are not allowed to do that. Everything is a vertically integrated monopoly.

It is different though because theft removes the original item, while piracy is sharing a copy of it.

On the other, other hand, TV streaming is a luxury good. It's not really possible to be "morally justified" in stealing it.

> TV streaming is a luxury good

I don't agree. For many people, it's the only way to access TV. Wide access to broadcast media is a basic right, not a luxury. Some would say (me, for example) that it's neccesary for the proper functioning of civic society.

Meanwhile I note that free-to-air TV has been in decline for over a decade, at least in the UK. Cable and satellite services have been stealing the broadcasters' lunch. BBC News has an ever-shrinking circle of reporters (which they nowadays refer to as "editors").

I have no use for a streaming "package"; I don't watch sports and athletics, vintage sitcoms or new-release movies. I have a Sky dish and DVR, with the basic package. I gather Sky want to move me over to streaming, which would mean I'd have to upgrade my internet service.

The public-sector situation is even more stark in the UK, with the existence of the licence fee. Broadcast TV has always been an "optional extra".

If anything I'm half-expecting the UK to start taxing individual creators who livestream on Twitch or YouTube (or perhaps to tax the platforms, or require the viewers to have a TV licence). That would indeed be egregious.

We'll have to agree to disagree. It's hard for me to see having access to the nightly news (which I do not personally have) is necessary for the proper functioning of civic society--especially given many people have access to this over the air.

> I do not need this specific thing, so no one else does either

The parent made the comment that broadcast media is necessary for the proper functioning of civic society.

Which seems like a very strong claim.

Yeah, you're wrong and not nearly imaginative enough. Imagine a fascist group secured monopoly rights on TV streaming. It would be morally justified to steal it. Disney is just a lessor version of that.

Probably better to just... not watch their content, in that case?

Nope, still better to consume their resources without paying

Watching doesn't consume their resources, but does spread their "ideology" and create further demand (discussing a show with others, etc)

But like stealing from people just because you don't like them doesn't really change the moral calculus. I'd imagine most people that steal anything don't like the victim very much. Do what you want (or what you can get away with) but the "moral" thing would be abstain from consuming the products entirely or buy them according the terms of the seller.

Piracy is not stealing, it's counterfeiting. If you steal a car, the car company might lose money, but can make up the losses. With counterfeiting, it devalues the original, which has the possibility of destroying the entire product/business.

> With counterfeiting, it devalues the original, which has the possibility of destroying the entire product/business.

The evidence says that piracy actually increases the value of the original as pirates spend more money on the media than they would without the piracy option

I don’t think a definition of counterfeiting that includes unlicensed stock photography is an especially salient one.

It is neither stealing or counterfeiting, it is copyright infringement.

> That's not a very different argument from saying people will steal merchandise and sell it on the corner because consumers prefer to pay less and not walk the aisles.

Do you not think that's true? Why do people steal merchandise and sell it on the corner?

You see an almost identical argument all the time wrt cigarette taxes - even though cigarette buyers have inelastic demand, there's a limit to how high you can raise the taxes, because eventually everyone will be buying smuggled cigarettes.