Comment by fpgaminer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fpgaminer | Hacker News Reader

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Modern streaming have changed the pirating landscape, no doubt. This is especially true of music, where there is a plethora of good selection.

However this isn't as much the case with movies/TV. Streaming in that realm is fractured, expensive, and most of the offerings are poor. With music you subscribe to service X and get access to 90% or more of what you'd want. With movies or TV, you have to subscribe to a handful of services all at once just to get access to maybe half of the content you'd want to watch. $10/mo for music, okay. Netflix+Hulu+HBO+Amazon+etc; adds up fast.

Outside of Netflix, every other provider has some combination of terrible app/UI, streaming problems, or ads.

Even if you look past all that, how do you play all these subscriptions? The device landscape fragments everything further. And god help you if you want global search on all your subscriptions, or want access to an Apple library.

Contrasted with pirating + Plex? Yeah...

And the problem is only getting worse as all the big players in market continue to wage war. See, for example, Disney pulling out and forming their own subscription.

Don't get me wrong. I think the world is better today than it was when all we had was cable. All of these content companies getting direct access to subscription money is incentivizing productions that could never have existed under the older ad-driven models. But in terms of overcoming piracy? They are leagues away.

I think music streaming has taken out the bulk of music piracy but there is still a lively power user music piracy scene. The motivations for these users seem to be about having access to really obscure content that isn't available on many services and only in low quality on YouTube. Another motervation is being able to preserve your collection. If you spend decades building playlists and collections you don't want all of that wiped out if your account gets banned or the company goes out of business. Another value add from these music sharing sites is discovery via community recommendations rather than an algorithm telling you what to listen to.

I don't think music piracy will ever die without lowering prices. This month I spent $70 on music and I torrented about $1000 worth. If I stopped torrenting there would be no extra money going to content owners because I already spend as much as I can afford on music.

Another motivation is not being tied to Internet. It's pretty ridiculous, if you think of it, to require an Internet connection to play a piece of music. Yes, some services do offer "offline mode", but when you store the data locally anyway, then why not get it as a file you can actually own, edit, and move between devices yourself?

(The same argument applies to movies, books and video games, but all of all these, a piece music is most likely to be re-listened to many, many times.)

Another motivation is data formats. Streaming services don't exactly offer highest quality, and while a normal person may not even hear a difference (especially with cheap sound equipment), audiophiles care about this.

Music pirates will never dispersal as long as music creators pirate music, which seems about as common as the troop of a bands with no money, playing live for almost nothing, and people dreaming of creating that one hit song.

Outside of Netflix? Netflix is absolutely included in having those problems. They are actually the worst in some ways.

Their UI is pretty awful and only ever gets worse. They even have plenty of ads - granted just for their own content, but still. It's ads. And extremely intrusive ones - big autoplay videos that default to sound on (it does at least remember when you mute them) and other large banners inserted right into the middle of the selection page.

Netflix is even "amazing" in a way that they'll block playback of the movies you've LEGALLY DOWNLOADED to your device IN THEIR APP when you go on a vacation. Seriously.

And in the end the lesson is:

People are lazy. They will use the easiest process, even if they have to pay it.

Of course! But that's a double-edged sword.

As a user, I'm lazy. I want to watch a movie, not deal with billing bullshit of some company. For them it may be the most important part, for me it's just an incidental task, a speedbump on the road to my goal. As a user with some disposable income, I'm actually willing to pay extra to make this problem less inconvenient.

Having to worry which platform to pay this month in advance, who streams what at which point, and whether or not the movie isn't already gone from all of them because of $reasons, is making things more inconvenient. Very quickly, torrenting looks more attractive again - it offers better UX, and you get to keep a file in the end, DRM-free.

(And if you're afraid of torrenting while living in a country where only uploading is illegal, there's plenty of bootleg streaming services that offer worse movie quality and throw in occasional cryptominer with their ads, but are still less of a hassle than juggling multiple "legit" streaming services, and give you movies & series that are no longer available on any "legit" one, again because $reasons.)

Billing inconvenience? Remembering who to pay in advance? You sound like the black and white intro of an infomercial where the actors fumble around with a perfectly good pair of scissors or demonstrate how putting on shoes is so hard.

You give your credit card information one time (mine autofills from my password manager.) And then they autobill you each month. Never causes me any hassle.

If I want to watch a particular movie or TV series, it's nontrivial to find which service (if any!) offers it and is willing to stream it to your country - your example would apply only if it was possible to subscribe to a single service offered all or most content in the world, but it doesn't work that way for legal services for all kinds of licensing reasons. Even the fact that it was available there last year doesn't imply that it will be available there now, licensing deals change all the time.

Maybe so.

For me, the criterion is whether I can download it, without any DRM. So I can access whenever I like. Without fear of inactivation. And without having usage tracked.

This is a big one. If bandcamp shuts down my library is safe. if steam shuts down or bans me I have lost everything.

Here at HN you are probably not alone, but for the majority of the users, they don't even know what DRM is.

They may not, but most are aware, and annoyed, when they can't play their iTunes music on a different device or when things they bought go away when that streaming service changes things

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