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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

My only fear: soon there will be no BitTorrent seeders left.

On the other hand, as long as the current streaming services' back catalog of available movies and TV shows is so ridiculously meagre, BitTorrent will do pretty well, I suspect.

I wonder who's going to supply that back catalog. Both Apple and Amazon have a fairly lackluster collection. For the real good stuff, there's FilmStruck (which has a small but revolving portion of the Criterion Collection), MUBI and Fandor. But it's pretty ridiculous that you have to subscribe to a combination of these to get access to quality media.

Meanwhile, companies like MGM and Warner Bros. are sitting on huge, underused back catalogs from their entire company history that's not available to watch, not even on DVD.

This right here is extremely frustrating to me. There is approximately zero marginal cost to distribute that back-catalog, but they just keep it locked away. I think Amazon does the best job of the legal sources I have seen, though I find it hard to stomach paying $4 to watch a movie made before my parents were born.

If you don’t want to pay a few dollars to watch a movie and the parent comment finds ridiculous to subscribe to yet another provider, what incentive do they have to make their catalogs available?

Making a shitton of money, because when your expenses are virtually zero, every $ you make will be profit

It's really a boom and bust. As Netflix's 3rd party library continue to be siphoned off more people will turn to piracy because they're not going to subscribe to n different services.

It's possible, but they're still cheaper than HBO Now, Showtime Now, etc. I found myself spending more time in Netflix watching their exclusively produced content than from their 3rd party library over the last year. As long as they can keep producing quality content to add to their library, I think they're in good shape.

N different services still come out cheaper than cable. I pay for Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime (which comes with Video) so let's say ~ $30 a month. Compared to Cox Cable, it's not even close -- $30 is Cox' entry level cable offering (and I can't share it with my family, nor watch shows at my own leisure).

My bet is that there's plenty of cash still left. Until cable companies wise up (which is probably never), Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Video will continue printing money.

Edit: almost forgot that with cable you still get ads lol.

> N different services still come out cheaper than cable.

For the US which is used to pay triple digit sums a month for basic TV yes, but for Europeans? No way. For Germans, for example, it's the (mandatory) public-broadcast fee of 18€/month/household and maybe 20-30€ if you really really want pay TV (add another 30-40€ for the premium sports but these can be streamed all over the net). So basically the delta between public TV only (which covers private channels, too! Lots of stations here are OTA) and pay-TV is Netflix+Spotify+maaaybe one additional service, that's it.

Always found that interesting in Europe. In Brazil, you don't pay for "public-broadcast" (as we call here, open TV). But could you tell me more about private channels on public TV?

In Germany you have to get a TV License for every household that owns a TV. That money is used to fund public broadcasters like ARD, WDR, etc. Now, you can watch the privately funded TV stations from the same TV ofc, but they don't receive money from the Govt. Instead they are funded by ads, etc.

This is outdated. It doesnt matter if you have a TV at all, every household has to pay

> In Brazil, you don't pay for "public-broadcast" […]

Are you sure the public broadcasters (e.g., EBC) aren't financed by tax-payer money? In the Netherlands there is no separate fee for public broadcasting, but we all pay for our public, free-to-air television and radio via taxes.

There is a mandatory fee that you will pay for being connected to cable (which most people are, even if they don't necessarily use the TV). This pays for the "free" channels that everyone gets.

That’s n different services just to get a decent coverage of recent releases. As for the back catalogue, I haven’t seen anything that is even close to decent.

I supplement the big ones with FilmStruck (has a subset of the Criterion Collection), MUBI and Fandor. Together they have a decent collection of "older" (pre-2010s) films.

I don't know for the other twos but Mubi doesn't have much of a collection. They have a rolling 30 titles chosen by them. It's interesting if you want to discover new movies (though heavily dependent on their taste being aligned to yours), but not so much if you pull the filmography of Gene Hackman on imdb and want to watch the movies you haven't seen already.

[edit] actually none of the other two you mentioned is available in the UK...

Right, MUBI is more like an online movie theater. FilmStruck and Fandor are traditional streaming services. They're small, though. I think FilmStruck's catalog numbers much less than a thousand.

Are you including the cable company's data cap tax of $50-$200+ per month?

These evil megacorps are running people into into the data cap (as streaming quantity/quality increases) and will adjust rates until they're sheering the sheep closer than ever before.

Expect to continue paying more for internet access despite cable company costs plummeting. You can thank the corrupt US gov officials that enable them.

until each of these services hike up their prices and more of them spawn up.

> Until cable companies wise up (which is probably never), Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Video will continue printing money.

Hulu lost over $600 million last year, so they must have a conveyor belt from the printer directly to the toilet. We'll see what happens once Disney takes majority control, but I bet this time next year Hulu's going to be very different.

> with cable you still get ads lol

Amazon Prime shows you short ads of other Amazon shows, at the start of episodes. Not in the middle, though.

I’m in Germany. My internet and phone bill is 27€/month. I – as many Germans – watch via satellite, so I pay 0€/month for private TV. The public broadcasting fee is 18€/month per household, no matter how many people live in one.

Netflix is definitely not going to be cheaper, and adding Amazon Prime and the other services on top even less. And I still wouldn’t get all the same content.

That's entry level cable, with ads (as you mentioned), and that's before you pay all of the BS fees and rentals for the boxes and HD surcharges and recording surcharges and whatever else they come up with this year.

BitTorrent is not going away anytime soon. If anything, it's going to get stronger while every content creator and distributor has their own streaming service.

When streaming video started and became bigger, Netflix was seen as a single source for most content. Now, and in the future, this reality isn't going to hold good. It's already painful to figure out where one can watch a certain movie or show (apps like the TV app on Apple TV can help, but only if the streaming apps support it). Content keeps appearing and disappearing on different services and seems like a game of whack-a-mole!

BitTorrent's main draw is that it will always remain a single source (at least for relatively recent content) than any other streaming content provider can ever dream of! If at all torrent sites look like they're shutting down and don't have much activity, it's probably because all the activity with private trackers thriving is invisible. Yes, private trackers also get busted once in a while, but there are many that sprout up in the wake of one's demise. Whoever used the term "hydra" for this phenomenon was right.

Bottom line, as long as "big content" wants to haggle between themselves and focuses on making it inconvenient for customers to access content, BitTorrent will continue to thrive.

There will be seeders long as Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, Youtube, Apple, etc. all pay for exclusive content. No way I'm buying all N providers.

I don't think these services will affect Torrents in a significant way. I know people who have Amazon prime,yet torrent some shows because they are censored heavily in my country.

Also, nflx doesn't offer some movies I want In my country, so I use torrents and haven't had any noticeable problem regarding seeds.

In France Netflix acts as a limited 1-season preview to tease me into torrenting the full series. House of Cards only had season 1 when the 4th was out in the USA.

Could it be that it's because Netflix arrived late in France and by that time it had already sold the rights to broadcast House of Cards in France to some pay TV network? In Australia we had similar issues. If that's the case, the situation should "normalise" in a couple of years, since the rights are usually time-constrained.

That’s when Netflix was starting out, no? Do you get both seasons of Stranger Things for example? Initially they selling rights to shows much more than I think they do now.

It is very hard to gather statistics on this, but my intuition (casual observance) is that torrent seeding has been declining for the last 10 years, and I suspect streaming services play a non-trival role in the decline.

Anecdotally, it's illegal free streaming services that I see people using as much as legitimate ones like netflix.

I agree. Kodi boxes and transient streaming sites seem to be the way most people pirate now. It makes sense that people pirate in ways that match global trends. When BitTorrent started piracy and legal consumption both meant actually downloading files, possibly over days. Now people are used to it all just being there, right when they want it.

Plus most popular games are multiplayer, so piracy is unlikely or niche. A lot of software is on mobile devices, or licensed as a SaaS. A lot of the underlying machinery of media distribution has changed, and so has piracy.

Hey, I'm doing my part.

Private trackers have not slowed down at all.

I feel ya.

I'm watching a 2013 TV Series, it's not on Netflix, and I can't find any seeds for it.

Your local library may carry DVDs of it, for free to checkout.

Not saying you should rip them. Or seed those rips.

Alternately, Netflix's DVD service is still around and still has a much better selection than Netflix.

Unfortunately they've been letting their back catalog rot away but I still find a minimal DVD subscription to be a good way to watch both brand new and older films.

I'm not sure if it's just me or have there been zero new releases in the DVD section in 2018? Also sometimes I found DVD's on their top 100 list before they show up in the new releases section - like they don't want to have a bunch of people ask to rent a disc if they think it's going to be popular.

Funnily enough I was just looking at that. Admittedly I've seen a number of the releases coming out about now on planes and the like but there was essentially nothing in the New Releases that I was interested in.

Not only the catalog is rotting, but The physical discs have as well. We resubscribed to disc service last year, but have had a surprising number of cracked or heavily scratched discs compared to years ago.

I expect they're symptoms of the same thing. They keep discs until someone returns them as not readable. Then they chuck them and don't replace them.

I can't say I've had a particular problem with bad discs recently but I also have a minimal plan so my sample size is relatively small.

Netflix's mail services offers less 1080p material then SD, and (last time I checked) no 2160p material.

There's always usenet, with retention rates increasing every day.

Is that still going on? Last time I looked (a while ago) forums where flooded with junk and eveything else was DMCA-ed.

I've been using a private tracker for the past couple years, and I know some of the larger public trackers have been shutdown.

On the private trackers I haven't found trouble finding mostly anything.

Any advice on getting into one? I'd be willing to put in the work but it seems like you need to know the right people and I tend to keep to myself.

What show? I will find you torrent with seeders.

There'll be plenty of seeders for HBO and Disney stuff.

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