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Comment by Causality1 | Hacker News Reader

For me it's a simple equation that has as much to do with time and hassle as it has to do with money. I'm not going to juggle five different monthly subscriptions. I'll pay Netflix for their decent original content and all my old favorites like Star Trek. I'll buy a month of Hbo every couple years to catch up with them. I'm not going to pay $200 for a cable subscription and I'm not going to pay for Netflix and YouTube Red and Disney+ and Hulu and CBS All Access and whatever other service all at the same time. It's already a pain in the ass to figure out if Movie X is available on the services I already pay for. I'll just go back to piracy like I did before Netflix existed.

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I'm also happy paying for content but equally happy to immediately switch to pirating if it gets too complicated. Probably easier now than it was before - internet is a lot faster, anonymity is a lot better, hardware is a lot cheaper and things like Plex make it pretty damn straight forward to get it up and going.

Almost everyone in Australia pirated Game of Thrones -- the only streaming service provider was also the only major cable TV operator and not many people took the bait and signed up.

Piracy is getting more attractive, too. Since works get taken out of streaming, you might find things aren't available next month. So even when I have a subscription, I'll still pirate things (the same things!), to create a permanent library and make switching easer, now that streaming libraries per service are shrinking drastically.

Since works get taken out of streaming, you might find things aren't available next month

Either that or Netflix only has rights to the first couple of seasons (or in some cases the middle few seasons) so if you actually end up liking the show you're screwed since you won't be able to watch the whole thing.

Another annoying problem is that in some cases and in some countries Netflix only has the dubbed version of a movie or show and so you're again screwed if you want to watch the original version.

Another weird corner case is when you want to watch a foreign language film, but because I happen to be in a country where I don't speak any of the local languages I also can't use subtitles (they don't provide English subtitles universally). This is probably an incredibly rare thing for most people though I admit.

Not rare if you are an english speaker living in Europe..

Funny enough my experience was in fact in Switzerland, providing only German and French subtitles (not even Italian), so perhaps this is less of a corner case than I thought.

That's exactly the thing. I have never paid for a subscription because I'm a good person. I've just always gone the path of least resistance. The $15/month is just cheaper than piracy for me.

Game of Thrones and HBO is a great example. Until this year it was completely impossible to see Game of Thrones legally in Canada without a traditional cable/satellite subscription. And yet they'd send me a Notice and Notice email every single time someone on my IP address pirated an episode telling me about how HBO is now online and it's never been easier to watch legally... except you must have Bell/Rogers/Whatever subscription first.

We're finally seeing the old guard corporate decision makers with their obsolete understanding of their industry being dragged kicking and screaming into this millennium.

Part of the "original" appeal of Netfix was that it was a one-stop-shop, and that effectively killed piracy for a large number of people. The legal solution was easier than the illegal one!

Segregation will just revert many back to piracy as you say, until some future round of consolidation.

Exactly. Same thing was with Steam from Valve. But now both streaming and gaming platforms get a split, thus creating many complications for users. I bet that will increase piracy in both worlds.

At least with video games, having access to multiple online stores is free. Steam and the epic store work side by side just fine - unlike video there's no subscription fee to have access to both catalogues.

Well, and for those of us who had the GOG and/or Uplay launchers anyway, or already had our achievements fractured between PC and one or more console ecosystems, having to install the Epic Games one just wasn't that big a deal. Especially with the bait of free games, exclusives, and the crazy $10 off summer sale promotion.

I got it for the Hades early access and to play Transistor and Rime for free.

Used to be more lax about it, but now i limit where i have my digital goods at. I have steam and gog accounts.

I had/have whole bunch of games both on other sites, but after having my cc info stolen several times when buying stuff from random sites, I limit my exposure.

I do have uplay, and ea store on my computer, but i did not buy any games on them (and they don't have my cc info), they were requirements for playing games i bought on steam.

I might eventually also get epic store, if it lives for couple of years, and doesn't get any breaches, and has games I am interested in (don't really care about shooters)

Does it finally allow for offline execution of games? Epic just had some good deals for market dominance. Makes sense, since they now have the capital. There are some interesting exclusives, but I resisted in creating an account because I would regret it later.

There might be better deals for developers in there, but that will undoubtedly change if the goal of market dominance is reached. It is an overall really bad choice for consumers on nearly every level. I don't really see them as serious competition to steam and GOG.

Can you expand more on the "overall really bad choice for consumers"? Obviously it's missing a bunch of stuff that Steam has, like forums, ratings, cloud saves, offline play, shopping cart, wishlist, etc. But none of those are essential requirements, they're just features and can be built up over time.

They're doing a better revenue split than Steam, and they're subsidizing many purchases to offer more attractive prices. And they're offering some previous PS4 exclusives on PC for the first time, like Journey/Flow/Flower and the Quantic Dream games.

How is this worse for either consumers or publishers than a total Steam hegemony? I'm not trying to be combative, but I don't understand the mindset.

You can play offline; it's been possible since February: https://epicgames.com/store/en-US/news/launcher-offline-mode

I should note that Epic store is mostly viable because of Valve believing they can get things as locked down as Apple and Google and thus can charge the same 30 % tax.

"Alternate App Store for iOS" is never going to work, at least if someone doesn't break Apple monopoly.

But that's not the case for PC games. So alternate store that charges less is obvious optimization.

Netflix streaming has never been a one stop shop for movies. It has usually had a relatively weak line up. They had deals with STARZ early on and later Epix that helped.

It's never been a one stop shop for movie streaming. Let's not forget they started as a Blockbuster competitor that mailed you DVDs, and they had (have?) a pretty big catalog of those.

Yeah they still have a little over 3 million DVD by mail customers. But, I’m not overly price sensitive. I’ll just rent a movie most of the time. It got to the point where I’m too lazy to use But torrent even thousands though I do have a Plex server running.

I bought a Chromecast because it worked with Netflix and stupid cheap. It is convenient! Then comes Amazon Prime and says I need to buy another dongle to watch them. I am so not interested. Grow up, work together with Google, I can't care less whatever petty competition you are playing, your problem not mine. I will just pirate the things I wanted from Prime.

“This is inconvenient and expensive which gives me the unilateral right to steal your intellectual property”.

It’s an interesting take, that you get to steal anything you like if it isn’t priced and sold how you want.

its more likely that they already have a piracy workflow and the inconvenience isn't enough to disrupt that workflow, unlike their experience with Netflix / Plex with the Chromecast.

How is that different from the comment you're replying to?

"...and sold how you want"

I'm just saying that for people who have no issues with piracy, the provider has an even more difficult time winning their business. For companies like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc, it should be in their best interest to be available on all platforms like Chromecast, etc.

We're not debating the views of piracy from the parent -- that was already established.

While I get the moral argument here, I'm going to go with the market signaling. Hollywood can get its shit together and make something that's convenient, or it can die. Either choice is fine by me, and I'll figure out how to integrate piracy in my moral framework later.

The future I want looks like what GoG is for games, or Bandcamp is for music.

I would rather it dies, then all the sexual harassement scandals it created can go away with it. Dinosaurs are dead. It's called evolution.

It's definitely interesting in that this is a great example of the "when elephant's fight it's the grass that gets trampled".

Amazon trying to battle Google results in chx's purchased hardware not being supported by Amazon's service despite the fact it's a very standard streaming device.

It by no means gives any rights to breaching intellectual property laws, but Amazon are making a commercial decision to leave out Chromecast support because they believe it'll make them more money overall, with the express knowledge that it could drive some potential customers to alternative methods, which includes breach of intellectual property laws ("piracy"). It's not like "piracy" isn't known to be a potential option when the likes of Amazon and Google and all the others make business decisions.

No, it's not a justification of illegality, but it's an understandable position to take as an offset.

Definitely interesting on both sides.

It also drives people away and reduces the viewers making it less attractive as a platform without piracy. That increases the cost as stars prefer a larger platform money being equal.

This is the same old out of touch attitude that led to the “you wouldn’t steal a car would you” commercials.

Nobody has to watch the content but they want to. You have fly-by-nights and unethical operations abounding that make everything only a google search away, sometimes with a single click. I agree that people should not be entitled to the intellectual property of others. However, like the war on drugs and sex education sometime the best answer is to recognize the reality and stop pushing teetotalism.

Content providers had a good thing going with Netflix and Hulu. Those two services had a recognized impact on content piracy. Yet here we are, repeating the mistakes of the past while the customer takes the path of least resistance. Right now if I pull up “Doctor Who” on my Apple TV I can watch all the episodes. I just have to switch between 3 different services, sometimes in the middle of a season, to do it. Yes I pay for those services, one included with my cable subscription.

But all of this is pretty silly to argue about to be honest. We’re absolutely spoiled with so much entertainment and media at our fingertips. The “us” of 20 years ago would wonder WTF were arguing about and pay out the nose for these capabilities.

> You have fly-by-nights and unethical operations abounding that make everything only a google search away, sometimes with a single click.

Somebody uploaded the entire The Queen's Corgi on YouTube in pristine 720p quality (they must have had access to a BluRay to get this quality) and it's not even out in the USA yet (I am not even sure it'll even be released at all). No tricks, no visual artefacts to hide it, nothing. It's been up since May 28 and apparently noone cares.

> The “us” of 20 years ago would wonder WTF were arguing about and pay out the nose for these capabilities.

Maybe 20 years ago but not for long. In 2001 we had the xvid codec and boy, did movie piracy take off with xvid compressing DVDs to CDs. A slower burner already was under 100 USD and you needed a CD player anyways http://ixbtlabs.com/articles/news01m08/index.html also some combined DVD - CD-RW units were below 180 USD: https://books.google.ca/books?id=3uyMhR-uNRwC&pg=PA179&lpg=P.... Blank disks were cheap -- 30 cents wholesale. Pirated movies and TV collections were not only on CD-R disks but hard disks as well, in 2002 we had 200GB disks https://www.storagereview.com/articles/200210/20021018WD2000...

Online P2P networking also skyrocketed at this time. In 2001 we had eDonkey2000 with ShareReactor and DC++ for the Direct Connect network. In 2003, Demonoid and Pirate Bay launches.

The heydays, I’d like to add Suprnova!

>The Queen's Corgi

Interesting rabbit hole, that one. Seems to be a movie to cash in on "The Secret Life of Pets" which itself was probably a movie made to cash in on whatever Pixar had at the time. Release dates are wonky - it's been out in Belgium for months, which is probably how it appeared online.

I hadn't heard about the movie before - but because someone pirated it maybe I'll watch it now.

Oh and I forgot: even 20 years ago the infamous DivX ;-) codec was already out. It wasn't xvid, it was DivX that started the digital movie piracy big time.

You reminded me of "the scene" back in the old days where movie groups like Centropy and many others were releasing latest films on FTP servers which were typically running on 100Mbps dedicated connections, gigabit lines were quite rare back then and mostly reserved for the most elite groups like FLT (PC Games). Releases were usually "pre'd" on affiliated topsites before getting spread to other lower tier sites via FXP transferring method by individuals called "couriers" in exchange for download credits (usually at 1:3 ratios), and it would eventually reach other p2p outlets such as DC++. Most of those release groups had their own private channels on IRC where members were like family, and they were really just a bunch of geeks. Fun time!

You tell me... I was helping one of the admins of one of the largest second tier FTP sites in Central Europe because his English was not so great... so yeah, I remember this scene too quite well.

If you have time and are so inclined, would you mind sharing more of your experiences running that site? I may not be the only one interested in a little behind-the-scenes peak at how such an interesting part of internet history.

It won't help you quite yet, but Google and Amazon resolved their issues around this in April[0] and their press release says you'll be able to watch Prime Video on your Chromecast later in the year.

[0] - https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-det...

>I'll just go back to piracy like I did before Netflix existed.

It amazes me they seem to be completely oblivious that this will be the the result. A percentage of someone else's revenue is still a bigger number than a percentage of nothing...

I suspect they're gambling that once people have sampled the "don't get off the couch" convenience of streaming, piracy won't be an appetizing alternative. I did always think that piracy was more about convenience than price for people who aren't broke college students.

> I did always think that piracy was more about convenience than price for people who aren't broke college students.

True, I would pay 1 or 2 streaming services (as I do the right now) - but more? No thank you, this becomes cluttered, confusing and inconvenient.

Today, I still torrent stuff even if it's available on a streaming service I already pay for (which I don't see as piracy), for 2 main reasons: guaranteed quality and ease of use.

My Plex server is the go-to place for most of the better quality shows we follow, and Netflix is for a lot of the 'meh' content you browse when you're not sure what to see, or what I call 'throw away' content we would never watch a second time. I do want to encourage them to keep making good content however, so I don't mind paying for it.

So far, Netflix has been rather consumer-focused and as a company has - afaik - done nothing to damage my trust, but that's not something I can say about all those companies having or planning to offer streaming services.

I would gladly pay for an HBO subscription if it were available here, since they produce some serious quality content - but it isn't. I would however most likely still torrent their shows.

The majority of people either have a moral issue with 100% piracy or cannot easily figure out how to do it.

Public torrents lead to getting piracy emails from your isp. Private torrents are annoying and difficult. In general you have to deal with shady organizations and without experience it’s hard to know what’s a scam and what isn’t.

And I suspect the vast majority of pirates never stopped. And wouldn’t stop unless the price was well below fair value. Winning over pirates is shitty business strategy.

Also Netflix’s 12 bucks a month isn’t enough to fund all the media that’s created. Netflix would have to charge a lot more (indistinguishable from multiple services that charge less) or less tv/movies would get made. Netflix’s larger catalog of old was subsidized by network and cable companies. They sold rights for pennies on the dollar. But Netflix is killing those networks. The business method isn’t viable.

We roll the same way. But I have Amazon Prime as well.

My current working rule is no more than two video services. Amazon Prime may be hard to dislodge because my whole family uses my account. So when we turn HBO on in a few weeks to close out GOT, we will shutdown Netflix for awhile at least.

Unless I can find 7 day free trial of HBO somehow

They offer a 4 week free trial actually.

If money is really no object, then almost all content is available for individual digital purchase on iTunes or Amazon still. But I'd also understand if that cost is a completely different ballgame than streaming.

Am I the only one who doesn’t threaten piracy when I don’t get exactly what I want for the price I want? Is it really that unusual to not take things that you shouldn’t? I mean if Hulu doesn’t have a movie I want to watch I’ll just watch something else, I won’t go take it because I feel entitled.

I will find movies that fall off the back of a truck onto my Plex server. But often, it’s not worth the hassle and I’ll just rent it from iTunes. For TV shows, I’ll pay For a month to stream a few shows I care about.

That being said, we do have Netflix free through T-mobile, Hulu mostly for my sons, Amazon Prime, and DC Universe for the few originals and the comics.

We also have DirecTVNow mostly for my wife.

No, you are not the only one.

But I'll admit sometimes they try really hard to make a pirate out of us by brilliant moves like making 2 out of three LOTR movies available on Netflix or sending all except one single episode of a season of Deadliest Catch on my cable subscription.

Maybe one day I'll start downloading too thought, but usually I don't care and don't have time for movies anyway.

> I mean if Hulu doesn’t have a movie I want to watch I’ll just watch something else

Would anyone loose anything if instead of something else you ended up pirating the movie that you wanted to watch?

Yeah, I’d lose respect for myself. I don’t take things that aren’t mine.

I appreciate where you are coming from. Many people understand that, physically, 'pirating' is more akin to copying than taking though. ..And then there is an argument that increasing the availability of content increases the revenue of the producer in the long run. Some game developers and many musicians are even releasing official torrents of their content, assuring quality control. I'm curious how this would work out if bigger studios dabbled with it.

The owner of the content you didn't stream would lose out on the (presumably tiny) fee from Hulu.

Whoever would have gotten the royalties from watching that something else on Hula would not get that if instead he pirated the movie he originally wanted to watch.

This aspect is often overlooked when people analyze the impact of piracy. People just look at the sales of the seller of the pirated item, and so if it costs $X and $X is more than I am willing to spend, my pirating won't cost them a sale because there was no scenario in which I was going to buy, and so no harm was done to that seller.

But in the case of entertainment products, if piracy is not available I'm probably not going to simply forego entertainment. I'll instead look for something that is within my budget and entertain myself with that instead.

It's not a threat, because I don't consider media piracy to be morally any different than "pirating" a recipe by printing it out, "pirating" a joke by retelling it, or "pirating" a book by lending it to a friend. It's not "taken" from anyone, it is replicated by someone who already has it and then given freely to me.

Whatever works for you I guess, lol.

> Whatever works for you I guess, lol.

Do you consider libraries to be facilitating piracy? If not, how do Causality1's examples differ?

In the UK, at least, public libraries pay a tiny fee to the author each time the book is borrowed. We are talking pennies a year but, in terms of intent at least, it is not the same.

Interesting, as an American I'd never realized that this payment existed. Here's more info about the "Public Lending Right" in some of the countries that use it: https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2018/03/article_0007.h...

I would if my local library uploaded torrents to Pirate Bay.

But instead they check out the copies they’ve paid for OR are in some kind of paid arrangement with a streaming service.

Have you ever created anything that you charge money for?

> Is it really that unusual to not take things that you shouldn’t?

In our age, these are values you cannot really find anywhere.

I would consider private data intellectual property and it is taken on every opportunity.

Not saying it is the right thing to do, but here we are.

Eh, it's one industry where consumers have a trump card. It's not like people haven't been creating free media content since the beginning of media anyway.

What you call entitlement, I call a vice. You don't build a business model upon a framework of addictive & memetic psychology and then blame your customers when they feel entitled to it. That entitlement is the whole point. Most of us would be better off watching less TV, and we realize that, which makes it hard to justify spending more money on it.

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