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Comment by dmarlow | Hacker News Reader

What's after piracy?

More piracy except with VR.

Honestly, Netflix had a chance to really damage piracy by costing the product at the market rate not the "We can get away with this because we own government" lobbiest rate (It's called the Mickey Mouse Act for a reason after all).

The incumbents decided they didn't want that, so instead they'll split into a whole bunch of services that combined cost more than netflix would have done for the same amount of content and the people who would have paid a fair price but not an unfair price will just go back to torrenting or whatever Blockchain(TM) DarkNet(TM) thing replaces it.

If I was running the government (perish the thought), I'd actually be wary about cracking down too hard on copyright infringement (on the consumer side at least) because it will push users towards solutions that are genuinely anonymous (porn and movies will do that, expressing their democratic rights..probably not) and frankly as the sole voting member of Noirlord-topia that'd scare the shit out of me a lot more than Disney been pissed they made slightly less.

I don't watch much TV tbh (I'm in the UK and I don't have a TV license, haven't had for years) and I still have a Netflix subscription because occasionally I'll watch the odd movie, it's worth 7.99 a month to watch the odd film once or twice a month plus the occasional TV show, it's not worth 4.99 * 6 services.

I think I'd actually prefer a "£0.5 per episode, valid for 60 days" model to that.

Think is I can go watch a movie for £4.99 at the local cinema that has some absurd 8K screen, 27 speaker surround and comfy seats, why would I pay so much more to watch the odd movie.

I simply wouldn't.

I don't know if it's really fair to blame Netflix for this one. There's no obligation to charge the minimal price for your product, just the minimal competitive price. As for content, Netflix was able to dominate streaming early on because nobody had realized how big the market was going to be yet. It's a lot harder to dominate the market with other people's content now because everyone is realize how valuable their contracts with Netflix were and are starting to pull the rights to stream their content in favor of hosting their own platforms which forces Netflix into the content creation business if they want to stay relevant. None of that is really Netflix's fault in isolation.

Hmm, I wasn't intending to blame Netflix, Netflix had an interesting model, the incumbents just choked them off when they saw how popular it was going to become (and in fairness to Netflix they saw it coming and hedge their bets with their first forays into original content which gave them both some ability to weather the storm and engage in cross-licensing deals with existing networks - the massive expansion was worth it imo but it's a race against time for them, can they get enough original content to justify the subscription as they lose content to license deals expiring and keep the users they have and grow enough to justify the costs, if they can they'll win, if they can't they'll blow a lot of cash and crater).

It's kinda a tragedy of the commons, they all want to be Netflix without realising that Netflix only works with a large back catalogue of content from multiple places.

Pirate streaming but that's already a thing. I think the interesting thing about piracy, ignoring the entire cost/no-cost and legality debates, is that pirates have the potential to always focus entirely on the end-consumer's experience because they don't care about the red tape that constricts the services provided by legitimate businesses.

Not only is it a thing, it's (from a UX pov) a better thing.

Some of the least techiest people I know have Kodi/Exodus boxes.

I don't even have a Kodi box and I have a fast linux PC connected to the living room TV.

Lawyers whacking at digital hydras.

Streaming

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