I was happy to and still do pay for Netflix. But occasionally something comes along and I’m sure as hell not subscribing to 5 extra streaming services. One or two? Maybe even three? But now you have Amazon, YouTube, Netflix, Apple TV along with the other regional streaming services if you want to get content legally. And there’s more services to come.
For music it is one of my expectations. I have strange and sometimes old devices for playback. Not really interested in locked down content here.
EA (Origin) and Activision/Blizzard (Battle.net) have their own launchers and don't publish on Steam. But while those are some of the biggest brands it's a tiny portion of the overall industry: maybe 4-10 dozen exclusive games in Origin + Battle.net + Uplay + Epic Store, but a few thousand on gog and a few tens of thousand on Steam
Discord is/was a games launcher too and they just shuttered their subscription service as nearly no-one was playing the games that came with it.
Huh? I thought saying you can't sell on Steam is kind of what an exclusivity contract with Epic does.
- If you put up a Steam Store page, you can’t release the game earlier on another platform. - Any patches/updates must be released for Steam at the same time as they are on other platforms. - Games can be released on other platforms, but you can’t put up a Steam store page until 30 days before the Steam release or the game’s original release, depending on which of the two is earlier.
Which means what they should be doing is reserving the latest season to themselves but making it so that everything else is available everywhere (assuming reciprocity). Then when season one drops on Netflix and Netflix subscribers like it, well, season two is out but only on Disney for the next year. And the customer might actually be willing to drop Netflix for Disney this year if they both have the same back catalog, when it wouldn't be worth it if you have to subscribe to both at once for that.
The result would be that a customer could get all content by subscribing to only one service and no piracy, but only if they're willing to be a year out of date for most of it, which still allows them to get multiple subscriptions from the subset of people with more disposable income. And it's not as if they don't make any money from licensing the old seasons to the other providers -- or make any money when the other providers license their old seasons to them and allow them to get more subscribers.
Their problem is they're overvaluing exclusivity for old content.
Those probably drive new users and retain current ones.
It would be nice if media companies could stop trying to own the World and instead be content offering a good service for good compensation. When they get to that point they seem to go "well if we can force people to consume something else that they don't like as much then we can get even more customers". Bleurgh.
NBC already owns the production rights to the Office. Under agreements with the various Hollywood talent guilds, they are required to pay market value for distribution rights such as exclusive online streaming, because that money gets paid to profit participants like producers, actors, writers, etc.
However, NBC is considering rebooting or spinning off the Office with some of the original cast.
I couldn't give two hoots about most of their original stuff which has been laughably mediocre and designed by committee at best, and I have no problem watching it in 5 years time off it's any good.
I just want a media delivery service where I look for something and then it plays, and so far that doesn't exist...
If you (think you) know what people want to watch it becomes easy to cheaply produce new content guaranteed to sell.
This is almost certainly the nexus for much of the original content coming out of Netflix.
If you offer a show for X per view then you have to offer it to all aggregators for that cost.
Tell me the massive holes in that?
As I see it that satisfies the copyright deal, rewards creators and makes works available. Add a 20 year copyright term and I might even be happy!
> tragedy of the commons is a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users, acting independently according to their own self-interest, behave contrary to the common good of all users, by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action
The shared resource is the amount of money spent by consumers to watch content.
The individual users are content producers and aggregators.
It is in their self interest to own the last mile of content distribution, as they get more money this way than by licensing to others.
This action, collectively, spoils the shared resource by reducing the amount of money that consumers are willing to spend on watching content. They don't want to maintain multiple subscriptions to watch just one or two shows, or different series of the same show, and so maintain less subscriptions than if there was just one or two services with all the content.
The classic case illustrated in Garret Hardin's 1968 essay is a common field, with a fixed carrying capacity, at that carrying capacity, in which one herdsman chooses to run yet more cattle. The total yield goes down, but the defector's yield increases. Since the gain is private and the loss is shared, the net incentive is to overgraze.
Calling the subscription spending market a commons seems a stretch. That's never a shared resource, it's always one which accrues to specific provider(s). Though the tendency is for it to accrue to a winner-takes-all provider.
And more crucially, there's no socialised loss here that I can see. There is a race-to-the-bottom dynamic possible with excessive competition, so long as offerings of one providers catalogue cannot be shared with others.
The problem instead seems to be simply one of falling marginal costs, such that the largest provider has the greatest efficiencies, and that with a sufficiently subdivided market (multiple subscription services), no one provider has a sufficient catalogue to sufficiently interest any one viewer, but the monetary and other costs (choice, selection, management) of multiple services is too high for any one subscriber to choose more than a small subset of services.
That's not a tragedy of the commons, it's a natural (network effects) monopoly situation.
(I'm aware you're not the original poster. I'd hoped they might respond.)
If your favorite show goes from service A to service B, you might switch, you might maintain both subscriptions, or you might decide neither is individually worth it, and either stop watching or start pirating.
Even if service A does not lose shows, its no longer getting shows at the same rate, so the quality of that service goes down, with nothing of similar quality to replace it. So again some customers will stop paying and the commons shrinks.
Yes, there's a shared, limited, resource pool. But that's true of any constrained economic resource.
The element of privatised gain / socialised loss is what's missing. Any given entrant has an all-or-nothing proposition. But gains precisely match others losses, assuming a fixed pie.
The marginal/average cost dynamic is a red herring here, so far as ToTC goes.
The socialised loss is that fragmentation of distribution makes people less likely to pay for any service. By trying to take a bigger slice of the pie, they make the pie smaller.
Don't forget Usenet automation like CouchPotato, now that is convenient ...or so I've heard. You can set it all up to automatically fetch files, and organize them in such a way for Kodi to consume them, and then Kodi gets art for all your shows and movies. There's articles online about it. Downside is Usenet costs a certain amount, course when you start piling on $14.99 for 4k from half a dozen online streaming services, $14.99 once and for all doesn't sound so bad. I don't condone piracy, but I may or may not have done that in my younger years. It was glorious.
Or, so I've heard.
The other thing is you can define the quality you want to download, it will find the best thing closest to that quality and download it, say it's 480p but you want 1080p, but only 480 is available at the time. An hour later 1080p is published, but you already have 480 and maybe you're watching it, no way for it to know, so what the software does is, download the 1080p version, and don't delete it till it's done downloading. You'll know it's downloading cause you can setup all sorts of alerts and notifications. Then you have Kodi setup to auto parse those directories and fetch previews and descriptions.
At one point I had a plugin for Kodi that takes all the content you have and makes "Channels" from the content, so you can feel like you're watching regular TV and browsing through channels.
People love Kodi for the streaming plugins, but Kodi + Usenet was amazing. Nowadays I just pay for Netflix and Hulu, but like I said, at this rate it's tempting to think about Usenet again.
I'm told these are better than torrent primarily for speed and accessibility. Accessibility is key for older content as these massive data centers that belong to the usenet provider will typically hold all data for at least 7-8 years. So if you are within the 7-8 window you won't have any speed or "seed" issues. The issue now for Usenet seems to be DMCA takedowns which applies to new, popular content. Although, if one were to use software like SickBeard or SABnzbd, I've heard they automate the locating and downloading of recurring/episodic television and would replace NZBGet. You set your preferences for a show (quality, language, etc.) and it does the rest because it knows when the show airs so you literally just find new commercial and add free TV downloaded and ready to go.
Combine this with Plex and you're golden. And that's a $30 one time fee and $15 monthly recurring in total, as the rest is all free software. Unless you want the premium Plex which you would only need if you want to stream from your home to your mobile device or something else while in transit. But if you just want to use this to watch at home, then Plex is also free, fantastic software...or so I've been told.
EDIT:
One additional note on legal protection - using Usenet is preferred as you are communicating directly with your service provider (i.e. newshosting.com) for them serving you files. This means there's no one monitoring the swarm and trying to see if you are seeding or serving/distributing the data. So there isn't going to be anyone serving you violation notices or suing you for illegal distribution. Another benefit is those Usenet providers are typically on major internet backbones and typically max your line speed even for extended usage. You can easily pull down several hundred mbps constant for most Usenet providers.
I can't say I know a ton about the subject, as it's very intentionally not a hobby for me. One might find it important to simply get everything set up and then go on with their lives. About an hour or so googling around and checking the usenet subreddit(s) and the favorite tools and services tend to bubble to the top. Then it's a matter of signing up for a couple indexers and usenet services and blocks, installing the tools, and let it run. The ones I mentioned above are quite stable and self-updating.
Torrents seem to be easier to get started and along with a VPN are probably the way to go if you download something once a month, but annoying in the long term. On the other hand, usenet can be annoying to learn about and get set up at first and then simply stable and easy otherwise.
One could easily get used to the client interfaces and Plex (or Kodi if preferred) and simply forget that they have a system in place to automatically download these series and movies as they're released and as better quality versions are made available.
It'll also do cool stuff like keep track of which episodes it has seen (so it won't re-downloaded old eps) and watch for propers. From there (in your torrent client) you can post-download hook to auto-extract your new show and put it in the right folder so Kodi can see it. Kodi does all the Kodi things like keep track of watched episodes, get your artwork/subs/ratings/whatever, keep your library sorted.
It's a bit of a Rube Goldberg machine but: End result is I get home and the GoT episode that dropped an hour ago is sitting there on Kodi, ready to be played. It's so convenient it's ridiculous.
To provide a culture access to everyone and not only those with enough money, to bypass censorship and virtual frontiers.
But also to avoid financing distribution companies, that P2P made obsolete. Companies that finance themselves before the tiny subset of compliant artists working for them. The very same companies that make you thing that "sharing is wrong"... Seriously, put this out of context and feel the absurdity of it.
Still though, financing culture still an open problem. For now the only ethical way seems to be the donate buttons and bitcoins.
Right but then you don't fall within the 90% that OP estimates would have bought the product. In OP's points, you either would buy it if you could (1, 2), or are planning to buy after limited evaluation (3). Item 4 is a bit of an odd one (though it applies to me: I only pay for Audible $10/month because you can still do .aa exports and turn them into mp3s and play anywhere, any time; otherwise I'd pirate the books or find a competitor), but your 5th is squarely a lost sale.
The text below your point doesn't really match your point, that sounds more like can't afford or just doesn't want to pay. Leaving in the middle whether it's reasonable to have to go to five "stores" to get everything you want, you either can afford it and are the (proposed) 10% or it falls under item 2.
Example: lots of people I know torrented Game of Thrones because paid services were actually worse. Things like HBO Go stuttered depending on internet connection -- and in one of the season premieres, the service was unavailable -- while torrents offered Full HD quality with no surprises.
Another consideration is when you're paying for Netflix but it doesn't have all the seasons of a series yet. So people torrent the episodes even when they are already paying for a streaming service: torrents are more convenient. They get all the content when they want it, and with high quality too.
Their app is worse than a folder where files show up and disappear when watched. That’s their competition and they failed.
But for whatever reason, the release schedule for new episodes on season 2 is all messed up in my Amazon region. Sometimes there will be 6 days between them, then 9 days, right now the last episode it offers is the fifth one, released there on September the 9th, that was 10 days ago.
It ended with a massive cliffhanger, and I'm sitting over here looking for something to watch, but Amazon Germany simply doesn't want to deliver. So earlier I looked up the scene release, which was back on the 15th, and pirated that episode.
The pirated version also has the added benefit of not throwing double the amount of subtitles (German and English) at me for any foreign language scene. One would think such localization subtitles should be easily disabled, yet Amazon Germany doesn't offer an option for it and still displays them even when English dub and subs are selected.
Some people enjoy "crazy good" less than 1Mb/s internet conexion: no way you're streaming anything. So yeah, torrent it is.
Every time it did it, I was like, man I should have just pre-downloaded this, and then it would be issue-free.
I think only YouTube works properly on Linux without the DRM EME botnet plugins.
There's a problem here, though. If there was only a single distribution channel, that would be a monopoly with corresponding prices.
So this means that there will never be a distribution channel which is satisfactory. Unless perhaps a non-profit organization runs it.
If each service had access to the same content as every other service then market forces would not only satisfy the price argument but also the quality of the services itself (lets be honest, some of the pirating services run circles around the legitimate ones).
Unfortunately though, the movie, TV and music industry have been allowed to operate monopolies - even push for extensions to copyright law and against reforms - for so long that I can't see it ever changing.
Whatever license they want to give, they should be required to offer the same terms to whoever comes along, if they want public assistance in protecting their work. If they think they can keep it locked down on their own then they are free to offer discriminatory license arrangements. If they want help from society protecting their works, whatever is offered to Amazon ought to be available to Netflix, or anybody else, including you and me when we start our own alternative.
Edit: to deal with rights holders that don't want anyone else to offer their content, they are free to make non-discriminatory royalty arrangements with extremely high royalties. However, they must pay those royalties to the government as a tax (again for access to the courts).
Part of copyright is maintaining a degree of artistic control - for instance a band not allowing a certain political party to use their song at rallies.
This is a bad deal for society. Renegotiating it won't stop artists from producing art. If you don't want that political party playing your song, make sure they never hear it: play it only for people you trust.
mpv 'anyoldurl'
I miss watching videos outside the service-branded players. I get that the floor is lower, but the ceiling is at the floor. None of them are special beyond making the DRM work, their UIs are at best rebranding of the good ideas they steal from the youtube player.
Sometimes I just want the flexibility to watch their video with a feature I know a different player has. Or without uninterrupted access to high-throughput internet connectivity. Like, in the car, the wilderness, or anywhere that the home network is administrated by a normie.
The Pirate Bay is still up, even if they do have to keep changing URLs; one can Google on "pirate bay proxy" to get a list of whatever the latest hostnames are, then go to those sites.
This is a slight hassle, and the time it takes is not really significant compared to watching a 2-hour movie. I suspect it is less hassle than trying to buy a DRM-crippled movie and playing it on my Linux box.
You can intersect here "trackers" that are "public":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BitTorrent_sites
I love Star Trek, haven't seen any of the new series. I'm not singing up for a new streaming service for one thing, and there's so much media available I can always find something else... so I just don't watch.