By contrast the music industry manages to cooperate and get their content available across the various streaming services and consequently I haven't pirated music for a long long time.
- Netflix-like UI with integrated IMDB ratings, cast, description, cover, etc
- support for many devices and TV players/dongles
- unlimited concurrent stream count and full control over the streaming bitrate (as long as you have the bandwidth)
- remote access from any location/country
> Since 2000, the number of full-time songwriters in Nashville has fallen by 80 percent, according to the Nashville Songwriters Association International
https://www.tennessean.com/story/entertainment/music/2015/01...
> According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 39,260 people in the United States classified as “Musicians and Singers.” This is down 27% from 53,940 in 2002.
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/07/16/if-you-think-pir...
> At the same time, consumers spent less money on recorded music (both physically and digitally distributed) than they had in the 1990s.[13] Total "music-business" revenues in the U.S. dropped by half, from a high of $14.6 billion in 1999 to $6.3 billion in 2009, according to Forrester Research.[14]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry
> For many musicians, the income derived from sound recordings is a small part of their overall revenue pie, and it’s decreasing. In aggregate, 88% of survey respondents derived between 0% and 10% of their music-related income from sound recordings in the past 12 months. Respondents who identified themselves as composers and/or recording artists were making a bit more, as were rock and hip hop musicians, but even when examined through various lenses like role or genre, income from sound recordings hovered under 15% of music-related income. Though differences exist by role and/or genre, the survey data suggests that income from sound recordings is a modest slice of most musicians’ income pies – a sentiment also expressed by a number of interviewees.
http://money.futureofmusic.org/sound-recording-income/9/
also relevant for the TV industry:
> According to the Writers Guild Association – West, screenwriters’ earnings were down nearly 25 percent in 2013 from 2009.
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/07/16/if-you-think-pir...
Film isn't there yet. A solo director can't produce a Marvel movie on their own. But it's becoming easier every day.
Are there people living middle class lives in the music industry? Sure. Probably more today than ever before, and streaming (and possibly piracy) has a lot to do with that. Musicians don't make money from album sales, they make money from live shows. The middle class musician tours constantly because that's their full time job. It's not a 9-5, and you're not home with your family at night. I'm absolutely positive that this is the reason more people don't live middle class musician lifestyles.
Vanished? Nah. Never existed, at least not in any significant way. It's only now due to the Internet that small time niche musicians can make any money and get any sales without major labels. And major labels aren't in the business of making middle class musicians, as Jaron Lanier pointed out.
I'm also going to detour to your source... Jaron Lanier is famous for writing the story "Piracy is your friend", and a few years later writing "Pay me for my content". I would take Jaron Lanier's music industry opinions with a grain of salt.
It's a net good for culture in the grand scheme of things. I'm hoping most professions eventually vanish along with musicians, including my own.
But I'm still really glad it exists and don't really feel I have much right to complain about a free (for me) product.
(Edit: okay, to give credit where it's due, I just remembered they did actually fix my biggest annoyance with the iOS app -- previously when you deleted a downloaded video it didn't actually delete it from disk -- there was no way to recover the storage, other than deleting the app itself. So I'd have to reinstall the app every time I took a flight more or less. But they fixed that, you can actually delete things now.)
update - Kodi has an iOS application if you have a jailbroken an iPhone with iOS 8.
Sadly, the UI seems designed to force you watch Netflix content, and hide the fact the catalog is small (is it? I can't tell).
It's the number one reason I'm going to drop netflix, when I get too fed up.
It sounds like you're saying that if there's any video you'd like to see that's not available on Netflix, you have no alternative to pirating it.
What would be the fallout if you didn't pirate those videos?
A streaming service is attractive when the monthly cost is less than what you would pay for the seperate content you actually watch, and if all the content you want is offered on that service. Needing to subscribe to multiple services can quickly balloon the cost and inconvencience to the point where it's easier and cheaper to just seek out individual content - either legally or illegally, the result is the same for Netflix.
TL;DR: I'm curious if there's a way to make effective ethical arguments when people have fundamentally different world views, including whether or not morals have any solid grounding.
If nobody pirated anything then we would still be buying music for 99 cents a track (or more) and music streaming would have been quashed by the labels.
On the other hand if everybody pirated everything then the music industry would have collapsed.
I conclude that the world needs all sorts of people.
I canceled Netflix because it got to having nothing I wanted to watch, and my public library network has a much better catalog of movies and TV series on Blu-ray and DVD.
Netflix back-doored and and muscled its way in, but it never had even close to a full catalog, so it had to compete with its own content. The other big difference is that we associate TV shows with their distributors (GoT was on HBO, House of Cards Netflix, Seinfeld NBC, etc.) Artists and labels? Unless you're looking at something indie like Fat Wreck Chords, nope, most people couldn't tell you who artists are signed to.
(typing this while rocking my Fat Wreck jacket and playing Direct Hit!)
Selling third party commodity digital content is a feature not a product. Apple always said that they use to basically just break even on iTunes music.
Your example is the world record at the box office... they don't all gain as much.
Plenty of movies and TV shows depends on the cash they make from streaming service. Hell it's not even yours to decide whether they made enough profit. Why not make your own movie if that so profitable? You know damn well it's not that profitable and most struggle.
Blockbuster didn't only stock Paramount pictures -- and people wouldn't have had much patience for rental groups that worked that way when there were alternatives that didn't -- piracy being the alternative here.
Keep in mind the this was only because of some monopoly busting decades earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....
With Disney owning so much of the production and now entering the distribution/retail side there might be some more anti-trust cases coming.
Netflix can only stream what they are allowed to. If you want the convenience of the Blockbuster model there are always rentals from Amazon, Apple, Google Play etc. Yes I realize that some movies aren’t available for rent.
they used to (and still do AFAIK) have a pretty good selection of DVDs to have mailed though. I think people hoped that eventually the streaming offerings would come to be as broad as the mail-order selection, which doesn't seem unreasonable from the perspective of 2009 but obviously isn't happening today. there's also the fact that music streaming services have mostly succeeded at offering a very wide selection of music to their customers (even free accounts!).
frankly I don't know enough about the music, tv, and movie industries to tell you why it turned out this way, but to the layman it does seem like a perplexing "shut up and take my money" situation. if a service launched with a really good catalog that could at least match the convenience and quality of torrents, I would be willing to pay quite a hefty monthly fee. I have very little interest in paying for five different streaming services that will still inevitably exclude a couple of my favorite shows and movies.
You can get pretty much any TV shows or movies on iTunes or Google Play.
For sure you won't be able to access every TV shows or movies for 15$ a month... that's just absurd.
I honestly don't see how you came to this conclusion yesterday instead of several years ago and consciously chose to not share an account or ignore netflix completely