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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

So in other words people pay for the convenience of streaming services and most people don’t want to carry around hard drives, use torrents, etc.

Just like I said....

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Yes, and I keep telling you that mainstream movie piracy nowadays isn't torrents but streaming websites operated by pirates, that look and work similarly to YouTube or Netflix, except all the videos are pirated.

Is this what you call “working similarly”?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21005204

No. What I call "working similarly" is the following:

- I type "fili.cc" in my Firefox on Android

- I don't like anything currently in suggestions, so I tap on the search box, type in "Avengers", and press Search

- I tap the first result, as it is the movie I'm looking for

- On the move page, I tap on one of the players listed

- A video box loads, I press its Play button, then Full Screen button, and watch the movie

It's literally one tap more than Netflix; since this is a site curating pirated streaming sources, I have to pick one of the "players" (each representing a movie source with a bundled JS player).

fili.cc is one of many of such sites; different people I know have their own favorites.

And I get a blank screen on ios -- you know the platform that close to half the US mobile phone population in the US use and way more than half of middle and upper income households use.

So do none of the "people you know" use iOS devices?

Perhaps one or two of the people I know personally have an iPhone; I'm in Europe, and here Android is the dominant hardware. I do sometimes see people with iPhones as I take the bus, recently increasingly often, but it's still far from dominant platform here. As I said, there are many similar sites - this one is primarily targeted to Polish audience, where Android is dominant. Maybe a different site works better on Safari. Maybe US equivalents care about iOS users more.

According to the stats -- iOS has a 25% market share in Europe. (https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/europe). If it is the same trend as in the US, iOS is more heavily represented by the more affluent population.

More affluent population is more likely to just pay for half dozen streaming services, forgetting they're even subscribed to some of them. But all the remaining majority of the population is both price-sensitive and more likely to use Android.

Anyway, I'm not sure what's your point here.

That the people who are willing to jump through hoops to save $8.99 a month are not Disney’s or any other services target demographics. You can make quite a bit of money ignoring poor people and staying out of the race to the bottom. See Apple.

Or more relevant see Disney. Disney makes a killing with its resorts where the price per ticket is $100+ per day and most people pay for more than one day, but souvenirs, and stay at one of their hotels.

>And I get a blank screen on ios -- you know the platform that close to half the US mobile phone population in the US use and way more than half of middle and upper income households use.

The US is like 4% of the planet. The world is much bigger than New York, North Platte, Dallas, and Des Moines combined, and there are many countries where what the parent said is common place...

To put it in perspective, Netflix has something like 151 subscribers worldwide. The other 7.3 billion people use something else, and it's not Hulu or Disney...

That’s s very simplistic way of looking at the market. That’s like saying the total market for people who may buy tampons is 7.3 billion.

Do you really think the total addressable market for people who might buy a streaming service is 7.3 billion?

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