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Comment by bonesmoses | Hacker News Reader

Indeed it is. Legit avenues like Netflix and iTunes are showing people are willing to pay for content, so long as it's available. There's dwindling tolerance for manufactured scarcity.

Make it available, and we'll buy it. Don't, and it'll be pirated. That's just how things work.

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And if I need Netflix for some tv, HBO for some, Hulu for some, iPlayer for some, Canal+ for some and torrent sites to access Korean thrillers....

I'm going to go 100% torrent sites.

There is that point too. I think it can be summarized into the "consumers are only willing to jump through so many hoops" tenet.

Unfortunately we'll never see this solved - there are too many parties with conflicting interests to make everybody happy.

The fact that "We need to get in on the streaming thing" is probably said in the boardroom of every media company is exactly what's going to kill it.

I am willing to pay for exactly one streaming service. The idea that streaming services will become the "pay only for the channels you watch" is second to the fact that all but a few streaming sites will wind up being complete shit.

So far only YouTube and Netflix have passable interfaces, cross platform support, and a half-decent discovery algorithm.

I have Netflix, Amazon Prime, and one of the most expensive DirecTV packages. Yet I still torrent most of my television. Yes the very same television I can get from satellite I download via internet. For some reason I just find the (watching) experience so much cleaner and easier.

Rewinding/fast forwarding is easier; so are subtitles. It works on the subway, and on airplanes. It works when my neighbors are saturating the local bandwidth.

It's because it's so damn convenient. No dicking about with ads, settings, codes, authentication, drm, whatever. Just look, download, and go. Usually higher res too.

I've got UK Netflix and have found myself torrenting some movies because the Netflix version was not HD due to some stupid licensing arrangement.

This has happened on maybe 6 or 7 movies in the last year and I'm starting to get annoyed enough to consider cancelling my subscription.

The pickings are not very good anymore and new stuff seems so sparse and infrequent.

I'm spending money each month on something i use maybe one or two nights a month.

When your legal avenues of getting content become fragmented enough, and you're paying for so much extraneous and/or overlapping content, torrenting becomes the most attractive option. (If you can look past the legal/ethical issues)

So unless they give you everything you want for 8 bucks you are just going to pirate?

Why even pretend you are willing to pay, you clearly aren't.

Who said anything about the money? Having multiple services is a pain in the ass, even if they're free. Non-overlapping device support, DRM, having to waste time searching for a particular work on each one, etc.

Just yesterday, I overheard a conversation in my very own living room that went something like this:

  SPOUSE: We have this movie on DVD.
  SPOUSE: You could watch it without commercials.
  KID: Okay.  Where is it?
  SPOUSE: Somewhere in the DVD cabinet.
  KID: Ummmm.... that's okay.
  KID: I'll just watch it on TV.

These are the same people that trampled all over my "genre, then alphabetical by title" filing system every time they retrieved a disc, until I finally gave up and stopped doing it. Before, I could say "second shelf, third row, on the left," and now I say, "find it yourself, you bogosorting heathens."

The lack of searchable indexes is a huge obstacle in every form of media. Imagine if you went to the library, and rather than a central index, you had to check each floor in the stacks separately to see if a book was available.

I am not big into videos, but muscially I really miss being able to choose cd, stick it in a player and play. Now I have to boot the computer up , open up the music player, find the tracks, and play. 10 seconds versus a few minutes.

Likewise I used to grab a cd or tape for my walkman before leaving the house. Now it takes at least 5 minutes (probably more) to transfer files to an mp3 player though admitedly they can hold way more.

The only place I see this as a win is with the kindle where book sizes are so small, I can store way more than I am likely to read.

I struggle to get the bogosorting heathens to even put the correct DVD in the correct box.

Also I simply cannot get them to watch a movie on a DVD somehow 'missing out' on what is on TV.

Because Amazon Video and Itunes have a huge selection and people won't want to pay 3 dollars a movie or 2 dollars a show.

In fact I recently had to use Amazon video instead of torrent because amazon had what I was looking for and torrents didn't.

If the parents position is that he literally needs everything in one or he'll never leave, it's an unreasonable demand. No business or service will ever have 100%. Not even torrents.

Amazon Video exists in only five countries in the world; most of us don't have access to it. And iTunes only has TV shows in a dozen countries as well.

Look, I don't care about your moral/ethical feelings toward piracy, but one would be completely irrational to not pirate content because $1/$2 a show is a completely ridiculous price and doesn't not in any way reflect it's true value.

Let's assume that we're talking about a show which is an hour long. Which means we're paying $2 per hour.

Netflix charges $8/month with the average usage of 2.4 hours a day in the US which comes out to $0.11/hour. More aggressive users looking to completely replace TV can average 4/5 hours a day knocking the price down $0.05/hour. And a household of three with different preferences can effectively triple that getting us down to $0.04/hour if they're casual users or $0.02/hour if they're aggressive.

Torrenting costs more in time than $0.05/hour so it's no surprise that people are willing to pay for it.

If torrenting is to be defeated it will require cooperation and a realistic view of what content is actually worth to people.

Speak for yourself. I'll use whatever service is better. The money itself is not enough to really notice for things like this, but services you don't have to pay for consequently don't require any account management, so it's a tough advantage to overcome.

And of course there are many people for whom the money does matter, which makes the gap even wider.

Is account management really a burden, or an excuse? For many typical usages, it's a one time setup on a dedicated device or two. For people who bounce devices a lot, there are password managers.

I understand many people prefer to torrent, but a lot of the rationalization doesn't make much sense to me.

Password managers work well for one person using one account. When multiple people are in the picture, everyone has different sets of passwords that are sometimes appropriate to share and sometimes not. Account information for a netflix-like (for lack of a better descriptor) service is something you would want to share. It is consequently a huge nightmare that non-account-tied systems like popcorn time completely bypasses.

Sorry, but I don't see the huge nightmare here. I share my Netflix account with multiple people. We all know the password, and you only have to type it once into every device you own. If someone forgets or gets a new computer, they could message me and have the password immediately. Netflix even has features to support multiple people using the same account.

Sure, if you don't care about security you can do all kinds of things. You could even make the password your name or give everyone keys to your house so they can look at the piece of paper with the password written on it. I don't want to do any of those, and I shouldn't have to.

Then again, there are people who prefer a legal solution when it's available and offers sufficient quality and ease of access.

I am subscribed to several services, but often, usually for the newest and coolest, it is simply not possible for me to stream a movie legally. If they would only focus on solving that instead of raging against their customers, they could maybe _then_ start to complain about piracy.

As you yourself agree, the laws here are asinine. So unless you're actually going to get into legal trouble over it (spoiler alert: you're not) why does it matter whether your preferred solution follows them?

Because I'm an adult, now. With morals and a conscience.

Seriously, I would like to support the creation of the content I like to consume. If nobody supports it, nothing will be made.

I, too, understand that we're still far from such a situation, but I would rather not get there before someone make changes to this idiocy.

If people stopped paying for broken services, they'd be forced to reevaluate and adapt.

Paying customers, not pirates, are the problem.

Morals and laws are totally separate issues, and supporting content creation does not require supporting broken distribution methods.

So then, when you torrent movies, do you send money to the content creators? Otherwise your distinction, while true, isn't very relevant.

I don't torrent movies. So I guess the answer is vacuously yes.

>> "If nobody supports it, nothing will be made."

This is often mentioned, but it's just not true. Humans produced creative work long before there was copyright or even money, and they will continue doing so long after our civilization has crumbled. People are hard-wired to create. The social status associated with creative output is the main incentive - money is just icing on the cake.

You might argue that if we don't pay theater admission for bad Tom Cruise thrillers and fifth-installment summer blockbuster sequels, then those specific genres might not be produced, and would be replaced by lower-budget plot/character driven cinema. But that's at least arguably a feature, not a bug.

Sure, you might argue that, but some people don't want to take the risk.

It could also be argued that bad Tom Cruise thrillers and fifth-installment summer blockbuster sequels are necessary for the industry to have enough money, experience, talent and infrastructure to be able to produce the occasional good movie.

Some creation will happen, but how much? How much stuff would never get created because there was no way to pay for it?

Isn't there already more than enough media to consume for several lifetimes?

Most of us haven't even read the world's top 100 books or watched the top 100 movies. If production were to completely cease, how long would we have until we run out of high quality media?

"If nobody supports it, nothing will be made."

Did you miss the whole open source software movement? Music other content was made well before copyright was invented.

Yet support takes many forms, not only monetary, and not only from the audience (propaganda comes to mind...).

But I'm willing to moderate my statement to "no AAA blockbusters will be made" or "no really high budget movies will be made", or something like that. It will have an impact on the budget of movies. Some may argue that is a good thing, but I enjoy my Matrix, LoTR, Hobbit, Cloud Atlas, Marvels, etc. and don't really want that to go away.

Netflix haven't renewed one of their contracts, I think it mostly affects content from Lionsgate. I wonder how much can disappear before consumers get sick of it.

They actually lost access to a lot of movies, with the expiration of their Epix deal.[0] Between that and Starz, I don't know how anyone can actually rely on Netflix for movies anymore. They've bet the company on their original programming and the ability to binge-watch back catalog shows.

[0] http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/netflix-epix-deal-expir...

Interesting question. I for example use netflix mainly to view series that have not been available in my country before (or only packed with lots of useless stuff in some expensive cable subscription) or for their own content (House of Cards, Orange is the new black etc).

I vaguely recall having heard that movies are actually not the main interest of their viewers but that might have been some PR ;)

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