Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Sharers
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I am 100% in for paying for the films/shows. Just give me a convenient cross-platform option to do so without any BS
At least nowadays we can still get most content on DVD. It just feels like a waste with the physical media.
You might claim I could still do this legally, by renting the other films I want to watch at $3-4 a pop on the same apps (e.g. Amazon video). But no, that won't work either. IMDB tells me that less than half of the movies I want to watch are available to rent from Amazon at all, even if I could afford the thousands of dollars it would cost to rent them all. And since catalogue overlap for rentals is nearly 100%, I have little hope that I'll be able to find any significant portion of the remainder somewhere else.
Even if e.g. Netflix somehow magically had every film I want to watch, it would still be a miserable experience, because since they don't like my browser / OS / hardware combination, I'm limited to 720p streams at 3000 kbps. That's noticeably bad compared to a Bluray.
Not everyone's film interests can be satisfied with the top five Disney films from each of the last 10 years. What piracy means is the ability to watch anything you want near-instantly for free in the highest quality it was ever released in, if not higher (pirates not-infrequently correct mistakes made on commercially mastered Blurays). And even some popular stuff (like the original non-special-edition Star Wars trilogy) isn't available at all, you'd have to pirate it.
I have a feeling this isn't true. I'm sure if they released DRM free movies you would simply balk at the cost and then use that as justification for not purchasing it.
I think blaming the distributors is misplacing the blame. The problem is that the distributors don't have the legal right to do that without contractual buy-in from content owners who fear that their golden goose will dry up if content is offered without DRM or if digital content can be kept and used in perpetuity by consumers.
With digital content this is just not the case. The original file still exists. You not paying for a movie you download does not deprive the license-holder of an opportunity to offer that download to somebody else. Only the opportunity to sell it to you, one they wouldn't have had in the first place because of [your stance on draconian DRM, high prices for streaming, needing multiple different services instead of a single stop, etc]. What did they lose?
There’s a widely accepted claim that Netflix entering a market correlated with piracy going down because many people are looking for something to watch at a reasonable price. The person who is looking for, say, the latest release or determined not to support certain large media companies is probably still going to hoist the Jolly Roger but that’s far from everyone.
If it's on the internet and you can access it, yes you do.
It's like arguing that if you watch a concert through the fence, rather than paying to get in, you're stealing from the musicians.
This "theft" argument is old.
It's more like you're saying you get to use any logos you want because you can download the images for them on their website.
The only reason you can listen to a concert outside of the venue is because there's no way to stop you that's also in any way proportionate to the crime.
Edit: I'm rate limited so here's a clarification.
My point is that just because it's available doesn't mean you ought to have access to it. You do, no arguments there, but should you? No. You are not entitled to that media by virtue of the fact that it is available to you, much like you are not entitled to the contents of someone's home just because their door is unlocked.
You're not satan if you download a TV show, but I hate it when people try to rationalize that behavior with a moral argument.
As is stopping people from pirating. Where there is will, there is a way. The promise of Netflix was that virtually all content (or at least a very large percentage of it) would be there, under one subscription, at optimal quality. And convenience.
As years have gone by, that promise is nothing but a husk (not necessarily by Netflix' wrong doing).
Just something to keep in mind as we talk about this; you can actually find the people who did it, and there's actual (digital) evidence, if the government ever decides to change its mind on the issue.
Let me be clear; I don't give a shit if someone pirates digital media. But I do think it's a personal failing of mine that I don't care.
I do, in principle, believe in the concept of intellectual property, and I do, in principle, believe someone who owns an idea can decide to only give it to people who have paid. However, on a purely practical level, I cast no judgement towards anyone who violates that belief, even though I do understand that it does cause real, tangible harm.
And yes, you're completely correct about the reason you can listen to a concert from outside, and that is also true of online copyright infringement. Remember the whole "suing grandmothers because their grandkids used Napster" thing? It wasn't even remotely proportionate, and it didn't go over well.
It's perfectly possible to have an ability to do something and not be justified in doing it.
Personally, I believe that if I am walking down the street and someone is playing The Avengers on a screen, I'm very much entitled to stick around and watch the movie. The internet, to me, is the same thing as walking down that street - public space. Feel free to disagree though - the CCP does. Not to get into politics, but it's fundamentally similar.
If I torrented a movie and then went to resell it in the public market, feel free to pursue legal charges.
If I click a link and the movie downloads onto my computer, look for the person who uploaded it if you want someone to charge. Don't come at me for using the internet.
The internet is a free market, or at least ought to be, if we're discussing what ought to be.
If the movie is showing in the park for free, you can stick around and stand to watch it, but if there was a better service at a reasonable cost, you could go home and watch it there more comfortably.
Nothing, to me, makes the Internet any different from that. There are a set of immutable properties of the Internet, akin to its "laws of physics" (ultimately they still are the laws of physics but I digress), and in that sense yes, the Internet is a truly free space, just like physical reality is. However, just like reality, we've also laid on top of those rules a second set of rules that are enforced, ultimately, by big burly people with guns.
Not to say that laws are a perfect mirror of morality, but why would a rule (moral or legal) that exists in physical reality not also exist on the internet? If you believe in intellectual property in physical space, why wouldn't that belief hold over onto the Internet?
If you believe in intellectual property, piracy is amoral. It's not pure evil incarnate, but harms more than it helps.
And yeah, of course I would download that laptop. Doesn't mean I should!
> Sorry, I'm not
Indeed you are. Even US law disagrees with you, and that is some of the most ridiculous.
That's not the same scenario. The content was taken from a private place (bootleg, studio leak, paywall/subscription, etc) and put into a public place.
Our society is based on the idea that the public in fact does have an entitlement to all IP except trademarks. The Constitution is pretty clear that it's a limited monopoly that was originally 14 years for copyright. When that's been perverted so that "forever minus a day" is a limited copyright, then I don't feel the need to respect their property.
You need a citation to demonstrate that you aren't entitled, legally, to all IP? That's sad.
None of this is really in question.
Are you from the moon?
It is not, see copyright laws.
No one is talking about downloading media outside of copyright and you know that, but insist on derailing the conversation by continuing to talk about it anyway.
Your “watching a concert through the fence” analogy doesn’t hold up because the experience of illegally copied content is identical to the paid experience.
Also, I very much like the idea of trespassing being more analogous to IP infringement than theft.
https://i.imgur.com/FPoJnH3.png
;-) Arr matey
BTW—I never thought that I would still find use of these things from early 2000s. Going into the 2010s, it looked so promising. But they couldn't have a good thing going.
That being said, the point here isn't to argue that file sharing is ok, the point is that making something harder to consume legally than illegally is a recipe for failure. Media companies try to maintain maximum control over their content and are surprised when people innovate ways to distribute it more simply?
I just want to have a file (preferably legal) on my computer that I can watch whenever I want with whatever software that I want. I would probably cancel my Netflix subscription and spend more total buying content if that purchase option was available. I would rent far more movies and TV shows if they were more reasonably priced ($1-2 per movie, $0.50 per TV episode or something), probably spending more in total if they were available DRM-free (as in, just an MP4 stream from some CDN). I don't want to steal stuff, I just want to consume media in a convenient, DRM-free way.
I don't want to steal stuff, but I absolutely don't want to be locked in to a content provider.
The shareholders demand constant growth.
This can be seen with music today. Rampant sharing made it so you can't really sell albums anymore. If you want to make a living, you almost have to go with a big label.
It's also why most software companies have now have SAAS and we now are renting software by the month instead of being able to buy a copy.
All of those people I remember a decade ago who claimed they were sharing music to help the indy artist are nowhere to be found and their actions have only hurt any chances of an Indy artist to make a living.
I remember one video game ceo saying. We don't want you to pirate oir game but if you do choose to pirate we hope you choose our game over the other guy. Makes sense if everyone is playing WoW and talking about it you are more likely to buy said game.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy...
If you are going to infringe on someone's copyright, at least be honest about its effects.
Hollywood should take a page from the iTunes/Steam world. Make purchases easy and you don't need DRM. Yes, Steam games use DRM, but it's much less invasive than movie DRM and also is usually optional (I can run most games without starting Steam directly on my Linux box without internet access).
I've actually reduced how many movies I watch and increased how many games I buy because the experience is so much better.
btw, I upvoted you as a small counter to the inappropriate downvotes you are receiving.
>This can be seen with music today. Rampant sharing made it so you can't really sell albums anymore. If you want to make a living, you almost have to go with a big label.
This didn't happen due to piracy. Music piracy is dramatically down compared to the lofty heights of the late 00's. The culprit is music streaming platforms, who used their official licenses from the music labels to dramatically dilute the perceived value of music.
Music piracy was popular, yes, but everyone knew it was illegal. That combined with the relative lack of convenience (compared to streaming) meant that it never had the effect of dilution that streaming has caused.
Now that consumers can get a near-complete music collection for $10 a month, and the entire thing is legal and endorsed by record labels, there is a general perception that music has no value.
As always, the big companies cause the damage, take the profits, and pass off the blame on the little guys. It's a story as old as time, and people keep falling for it. Compare this to 'jaywalking' or 'litterbug's.
>It's also why most software companies have now have SAAS and we now are renting software by the month instead of being able to buy a copy.
How on earth you connect SAAS to piracy, I'll never know. In reality, that's being caused by companies realising that they can make a hell of a lot more money, and more consistent money, by moving to the SAAS model.
>All of those people I remember a decade ago who claimed they were sharing music to help the indy artist are nowhere to be found and their actions have only hurt any chances of an Indy artist to make a living.
Except numerous indie artists did make their break though internet piracy. A number would even put their own music on the pirate bay as a marketing ploy.
This isn't really a thing now, because gasp music piracy is dying, and now the Spotify's and Apple Music's of the world are the sole gatekeepers to music - for most people, at least.
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In general, when major harm is happening in the world, it is always being caused by those with major power - and that means corporations and governments. Those with power will always try to misdirect the anger of those wronged upon each other - look at the way the 'debate' over immigration in US politics has overtaken real issues like healthcare, taxing the rich/corporations, or tackling climate change.
Immigration is being pushed as a social issue by corporate media and politicians as a wedge issue which doesn't matter to the average person, but gets them really riled up so they don't get too upset about anything which actually matters.
Try not to fall into that trap.
Yes sure a few made it. But for the vast majority of small artists there's just no venue to sell their music anymore because no one buys music anymore. Streaming definitely helped accelerate this process but to believe that piracy only helps creators and did not already erode the market for anyone but those with big names and marketing budgets is really just self-delusion.
Streaming services are only popular and accepted by big companies now because piracy reduced CD/album sales so much, they had no choice.
A sliver of the Indy artists got popular and signed with a big label after getting pirated so much (which was my point about requiring a label).
The rest make nothing on streaming sales (fractions of pennies) and forget about trying to sell an album. I suppose begging for donations on patreon might work, but it's not a very good way to make a living.
The culture acceptance of music piracy pushed all music in the hands of big corporations. To not admit this is not accepting the truth about your actions. It seems you want to justify your own piracy and ignore all of the negative effects it had on companies...which most likely led to the loss of many jobs.
I connect SAAS to software piracy because I've been in countless meetings over the past 5 years with business owners of software companies saying exactly what I told you.
If software can be turned into a service, it will be..because companies don't want to deal with lost sales, people that somehow think they can get free support with a pirated copy, and the spreading of misinformation when a pirated copy filled with viruses and malware is attributed to them.
Not to mention organic google keywords that lead to the pirated copies rather than the original..causing confusion, more lost sales, and harm to the company reputation.
As for the Immigration issue, blame the Democrats. When you have politicians pushing for open borders, it's difficult not to pay attention.
"Downloading copyrighted music is murder."
Ok, then downloading copyrighted music should be punished like murder.
Oh, it isn't Murder?
Well, it also isn't theft. So it shouldn't be punished like it is theft or treated like it is theft in conversation. It should be punished like and treated as copyright infringement, which it is.
The proper economic arrangement for those who wish to make a living with creative works is patronage. Someone asks you to make something, you make it for them, then you get paid. You then don't get paid until you make another work.
Thus content creators shouldn't have an automatic entitlement to get paid each time someone reads/listens to/watches a work.
If you work once, it's only fair for you to get paid once. The idea of royalties that pay beyond the initial act of creation is unfair because you should not get paid to do nothing.
Copyright is meant to be temporary scheme to encourage creative works. It is not meant to establish ownership over non-physical goods like music, art, etc. though it is definitely currently abused to be that way.
I guess at some point in history we needed copyright to encourage more creativity, but honestly look around you - we are saturated with so much intellectual property. So many movies, software UIs, rehashes of rehashes. Does society really need/benefit from the incentive of copyright/royalty any longer? It seems only entrenched legacies are significantly benefiting currently.
The idea of reproduction of artistic works from all over the world and from any time in the past? It makes everything too complicated to analyze in terms of what's fair!
You mean like paying a monthly subscription fee to access content on demand? That's still patronage.
We have this in the 21st century, it's called paying for content. If you pay Netflix, you're their patron.
If those are the conditions for which the work was created, then they absolutely do. Regardless, downloading a work and distributing it, that’s theft. If the creator/financer made it available, then that’s their prerogative. At some point in the chain, that content left someone’s server under a license agreement that then was broken when the downloader shared it.
The breaking of the license agreement is the issue here. People don’t have a right to break a valid contract unless a court says they do. Regardless if your feelings, it’s still theft.
And yes, we do benefit from copyright. It protects your work from thieves who played no part in the financing or creation of the work.
If I create a piece of art that many people can enjoy, why shouldn't I get compensated for adding that value to their lives?
Same is true for software.
It’s fair you get paid an amount commensurate with the quality of the work you produced. The quality is determined by the number of people who view it, so while in effect it’s payment per view, it’s not practically different than having an oracle who can perfectly assess quality of work pay the artist once up front.
According to whom? If region enforcement is in place, it's because of legal obligations. So yes, there's ethical harm involved when you do something like this because you're intentionally circumventing a business's legal obligations to their partners.
If everybody pirated their videos, maybe media companies would get a clue and make a better product. Nobody pirates music anymore—it is much easier to just pay a small amount to Spotify and the like and get access to almost any song you’d want on basically all your devices.
If anything, perhaps it is more ethical to hard pirate video than it is to let media companies shoot them selves in the foot...
People would stop producing content because there's no money in it. So yeah, it's harmful.
The demand for the fundamental content would remain and if some suppliers are unwilling to provide for the demand, other suppliers would arise.
Music piracy was a huge problem in the 90s, and from what I can tell, that's essentially disappeared with iTunes and Spotify. It should be easy to buy exactly what you want for a reasonable price.
From what I can tell, movie and TV show piracy went way down in areas where Netflix was available, so what does Hollywood do? They lock down their content even more and reduce the content available at any given service.
That's backwards. They have a winning service, they should double down on it and make more content available. Maybe distribute new releases to Netflix customers that have a premium account or something, and have a payment tier with nearly complete access to old content with a single subscription. That's essentially what Spotify does, and it works.
Is all theft wrong? Is theft wrong in this case?
Legal buffer: I will not say what the content was. It may have all been non-copyrighted cat videos ;)
The service was available cross region. Stored videos in multiple resolutions for streamability in low-bandwidth situations. No DRM bs. It cost me under $400/month to run the whole service, and I could access it from any device, anywhere I had internet.
I gave access to a few friends and family and they all chipped in to help cover expenses (it was never profitable). I ran it for a few months before I started to lose interest in maintaining it - it was mostly just a proof-of-concept, and fell back to Netflix/HBO/other subs for convenience.
I applaud Netflix, HBO, etc for offering competitive solutions to monopolistic cable companies and other restrictive media outlets, but this will always remain a problem.
Once you create a piece of art and put it out for the world to see, you cannot control how/when/where it will be shown. Stop trying... Just make it more convenient for people to pay to view it.
Going after people for low-level copyright violation, like sharing a password, is childish.
It's a truly self-running system. Other than the upgrades, you're able to select whatever shows you want to follow, and that's it. They automatically get downloaded, sorted into the right directory structure, picked up by Plex, and on-demand streaming around the world is yours, with all kinds of cool features like bandwidth optimization, offline show downloads, etc. More or less feature parity with Netflix, without any of the restrictions.
Of course it's 100% illegal, though honestly I've never heard of a prosecuted case in the US.
Would take about 30 minutes to actually get everything up if you have most of an idea of what to do and a sloppily written guide.
As @diminoten mentions, legality is questionable here, so I do not recommend. If you do dabble, restrict access, and encrypt everything so that if you lose your keys, they only option is to destroy the stack and start over.
Cloud provider of your choice
Plex media server running on a high-throughput instance, with cloud storage mounted locally for reading. (Redundantly created in multiple regions depending on where the service is being accessed from)
A separate master instance responsible for downloading content from a private torrent site, with cloud storage mounted locally for writing.
Multiple on-demand background workers that are spun up when new content is available to be reformatted in various resolutions. They pull the original video from cloud storage, create various versions, and re-upload it to the cloud storage.
The largest cost is in data usage, and storage.
@diminoten Not sure what I did to "oversell" it. I used off-the-shelf tech components, and some cloud-enginuity from experience, to build a proof-of-concept competitor. I didn't build the entire interface from scratch, or write my own OS, if that's what it sounded like.
One feature I haven't seen on any commercial service is the ability to integrate with your IMDb watchlist, and automatically download "Linux ISOs" when they become available.
Total cost ~€40.50 per month. Hetzner gives you infinite ingress and a few TB egress bandwidth per month. As long as you only give access to your box to family/close friends you'll never hit that cap. And all they need is a Plex account. Then you just invite them and the setup is done, zero technical finnicking for them.
You can certainly get a similar thing working on a Raspi, but you'll likely notice buffering issues. Especially if you try to stream different content to different clients.
Your archive on bigger drives next to it. Problem solved.
If that's not enough use zfs with a nvme cache and add a few more sticks of ram I to it.
But yeah, RPi is rough because you do need legit CPU to transcode on the fly, which is what Plex does, and the more users the more transcoding power you need.
But Plex is very limited in its encoding capabilities. H265 with HDR is just not supported properly. On top of that, there is just no way to encode H265 in real time (a high quality reencode of a Bluray can take days on top of the line Xeon CPUs). One would be better off downloading a few versions of the same movie; plex supports choosing which version to play.
Do you think it would be viable using a pool of 'a few' residential connections (think fiber >500 Mbps upload) in each region, with some x86 server behind each to transcode / store?
The idea being to self-host the whole infra between users themselves, those willing to plug a desktop/server somewhere.
I figure you'd only need a basic load balancer in an actual cloud (always on) which redirects to whichever server is available enough.
Any thought about any of this?
Cat videos are far more enjoyable to watch than the dreck that Hollywood is putting out these days.
It's also really strange given how much the opposite web content is becoming. With patreon, we're starting to get some seriously fringe content, and the streaming services don't seem to be too afraid of having an opinion either.
It's not a phenomena unique to movies, or the modern international economy, it's a pattern that pops up all over the place. Look at multi-tool pocket knives: capable of doing many things, but mediocre at everything.
It does everything I need to watch my...personal home videos.
I'm sure I could use a completely FOSS setup, but plex is convenient especially paired with...other services.
Last time I looked they didn't really have much for client apps yet.
"Expecting people to pay for your service is childish."
They aren't going after people, they are just resetting passwords.
It did not end well for NinjaVideo for what it's worth so maybe it was good you lost interest.
This comes off as incredibly self-entitled and arrogant.
That piece of art? It takes years and tremendous amount of people hours to bring these films into existence your enjoyment. I grew up in Hollywood, in family of filmmakers. My friends are actors, producers, and well anybody else who is involved in the business - and we all dedicate unbelievable hours of love and labor into the “non copyrighted cat videos”
Yes. The system isn’t perfect, but ... what you’re doing is quite frankly, stealing. It’s offensive. We’re entitled to our livelihoods as much as you are.
Show some gratitude please.
Maybe? But I haven't seen any surveys.
The dude above is freely admitting to grabbing movies wholesale and distributing them in a glib manner. And I’m addressing him, because it’s wrong. I’m the guy on the other end of the economic equation.
End of the day it’s a choice to do the right thing and respect the artists behind the work you enjoy regardless what the “reality” is.
The copyright industry's propaganda about 'piracy = theft' is based on the frankly absurd concept that anyone who pirates media would have paid for it had piracy not been an option. This claim doesn't hold up to the slighted shred of scrutiny.
>End of the day it’s a choice to do the right thing and respect the artists behind the work you enjoy regardless what the “reality” is.
Except when you pay money for TV, movies or video games, your money either doesn't go to the artists behind it, or very little of it does. Rather, the money goes to the investors who funded the work, or the publisher contracted with the musician. The real people lacking respect for artists are the publishers/record labels whose entire contribution to the process is making the initial investment, paying artists the bare minimum - and moaning about internet pirates, it seems.
You don't get in trouble for copying a licensed work, you get in trouble for making it available to others without permission from the current rights holder (or more likely, their hired thugs or your ISP).
How would Fair Use and libraries work if copying alone were illegal?
They also don't pay publishers or content creators every time a material is consumed, and they don't employ DRM to ensure that people aren't violating the licences of works that are being checked out. In fact, they don't keep records of people while inside the library, so a content creator can't control how their products are being used and by whom. There are surely some DMCA violations happening at any given moment.
Copyright is an exception to natural behavior.
But just because it's easy to copy does not make it legal.
Libraries pay content owners in virtually every country in the world.
This is the reality with any industry that has lots of "losers" for every winner. What you don't see is the massive amount of money lost by these same investors on media that doesn't hit. Returns on the winners have to be high enough to justify continued investment in the space. Media isn't created for free.
It seems that you specifically do not like the deal, which is fine of course, but that doesn't excuse stealing and copying content that you didn't pay for.
iTunes has spent the last five years very aggressively moving away from that to subscription revenue because it makes no money.
You seem to have been indoctrinated by the big media companies, to believe their profit-maximising false narrative. Copyright was designed to terminate, at which point everyone is entitled to the material. Media companies have repeatedly pushed law changes that are purely in their own interest, to extend the original fairly reasonable short terms to what they are today, "forever" for most purposes.
People aren’t getting too worried about people pirating Gunsmoke or whatever.
This project was built as a fun proof-of-concept. Less than a dozen people used it, and none of them cancelled their other paid services to use it. Also, like I mentioned, it was never profitable and I never made any money off of it.
Also this is coming from a fellow content creator, of many types (music, short videos, random pieces of art). Never once have I thought that anyone owes me anything for it. Unless I'm hired to shoot a video, or design something, I can't think of a more self-entitled and arrogant state of mind to be in, than to expect someone to give me gratitude because I spent time doing something I love. Doing what you love isn't enough self-gratitude for time well spent?
The only real argument that will get people to give money for dedication to an art is the appeal to pity. It's "I am pursuing my dreams and dedicating time to building something I love, I would really appreciate financial support for it so that I can continue to do so". The second the tone switches to, "I am owed gratitude in the form of money for this masterpiece I have created", is the second I will pirate that shit into oblivion.
Imagining that people loved my content so much that some would even go to illegal means to enjoy it, is a compliment to me.
Also, this appeal, is the reason that I pay for most all of the media I consume - music, movies/TV, games, concerts, etc. It is my way of showing appreciation because I can afford to, and choose to.
Having some appreciation that people actually give enough of a shit about the art you create that they'll try to get to it illegally, that's a mindset to strive for. If they pay for it, damn... you're doing good.
That’s not cool. Simple.
The point is, it's not that hard to build Netflix, it's hard to get the rights to the content itself. I, and many others, just want an easier way to get access to the content. Streaming services are frustrating because the selection is limited and varies, buying digital copies is frustrating because you are still beholden to the company you bought it from to support whatever devices you want to use it on.
I have absolutely no problem with paying for content, I have a problem with being locked into a specific DRM-scheme, especially when the price is essentially the same as physical media that I could rip myself to do whatever I want with. Just let me buy/rent DRM-free content and I won't be tempted to pirate. The problem is that piracy is often easier than the legal method, and when that happens, people will prefer to pirate.
For example, Netflix didn't work on Linux for quite a while. When it finally did, I was locked in to using a specific binary blob on my machine, so I have no idea if it's actually secure. If I choose to use another platform (let's say I experiment with RISCV or POWER9 devices), I'm again out of luck with most streaming services.
Why can't I just buy an MP4 of a movie and use whatever software I want to watch it? If that was an option, I'd buy a lot more movies, but since it's not, I suffer through the crappy selection on Amazon Prime and Netflix, not wanting to build too much of a library on Amazon or any other digital video platform.
You are allowed to backup a movie for your records, which means you can record Netflix shows for later consumption. Those backed up shows watched later are not counted by Netflix’s algorithm, so that production company is not paid.
I’m not supporting one side or the other, I’m raising awareness that IP theft is not so simple when the production companies are still getting paid even with loopholes in the regulation
At a complete guess i would say most people (with ok paying jobs) that pirate do so because they think the charges are so high they amount to theft + the whole stealing from a thief is ok
Look at how much Tom cruise or the rock have made from movies or the upper layer of studio cucumber water,egg white omelette employee. There is a massive amount of profiteering on movies. Of course indie and a whole lot of roles are done by people getting normal wages. If the rock took a 50,000,000 pay cut and the studio cut their extravagance the steaming cost will come down, but they choose to profiteer because they can pushing up streaming costs
In past I paid for some content multiple times for instance, because one company decides to shut down their DRM servers, and then I had to buy it again from elsewhere. Yeah, just like that - I was frankly very upset.
Also, piracy is different to stealing. Both are wrong in my opinion, but still very, very different things!
>This comes off as incredibly self-entitled and arrogant.
>That ~~piece of art~~ bag of Rice? It takes years and tremendous amount of people hours to bring these ~~films~~ grains of rice into existence your enjoyment. I grew up in ~~Hollywood~~ a farm, in family of ~~filmmakers~~ farmers. My friends are ~~actors, producers~~ farmer, harvesters, and well anybody else who is involved in the business - and we all dedicate unbelievable hours of love and labor into the ~~“non copyrighted cat videos”~~ bags of rice
>Yes. The system isn’t perfect, but ... what you’re doing is quite frankly, stealing. It’s offensive. We’re entitled to our livelihoods as much as you are.
>Show some gratitude please.
Now that I have changed the object that is "being protected", do you see how unreasonable and senseless your argument is?
Those arguments you used could be used exactly as they are to argue for any monopoly whatsoever, and then we would all be worse off.
Of course you're entitled to try to make a living, but if you making a living requires the state to subsidize and enforce your business model, then maybe you should change your business model.
There have been artists, writers and inventors for millenia, and for the vast majority of time they haven't needed an intellectual monopoly l, so why do you ?
Isn't this argument completely wrong/pointless considering reproduction was close to impossible until the last ~20 years? If nobody can access/copy my product, i don't need to protect it much...
Secondly media is far more complex than the art we've had for millenia. The sheer amount of resources to create a modern movie dwarfs what artists have created in the past, its comparing apples to oranges.
The laws against theft, contract law, corporate law, tax law, equities laws, real estate law are there to allow business to be done in a secure trustable way.
Subsidies exist for all businesses like roads, electricity, farm subsidies, tariffs, protect business models, and allow businesses to transport goods for a low cost or protect them from competition.
I grew up around musicians. Musicians steal and pirate themselves all the time. Nobody will bat an eye if you pirate their music. Being poor themselves most know that affording a concert or paying for legal music can be a hassle so they don't bust people's balls.
I've pirated tons of music myself. I've also spent thousands of dollars in vinyl, potentially tens of thousands in festivals with their associated costs and merch, and have spend more money in building a sound system for parties that I have no possibility of ever recovering.
Art doesn't entitle you to a livelihood. If you don't like the level of compensation, get a day job and do it for kicks like the vast majority of people do.
That's not for you to decide. Replace "art" with {your actual job} and see if your statements still feels reasonable.
An artist that considers his music as the actual product he's selling, not t-shirts and merchandise, may very well expect listeners to pay for it. Obviously you're free not buy and lsiten to his work, but the fact that you disagree with their terms or pricing still doesn't justify stealing their content.
I have not kept up with their developments but it was created by Mormons to help families stream movies while filtering out content deemed not appropriate. IIRC at one point and possibly to this day the tech included a massive farm of physical disks being spun and streamed to end consumers with skip points programmed in.
I was interested because they had a way to rent movies for $1, which I think is a fair price for older titles (I'd actually pay $2 for older titles). I feel like their business was essentially Redbox, but with a more efficient way of transferring product from one person to another, with a layer of customizable filtering on top. That seemed completely legit to me, but apparently copyright law doesn't agree.
> "I... fell back to Netflix/HBO/other subs for convenience"
Seems like they're doing a fine job then.
Users would probably be better of, if these systems would be distributed rather then centralized. Like a plex server per household or something, where family owns all the stuff they bought and can freely watch it.
What I'm looking for is a future proof stack. DRM has failed many times to deliver that.
Came here expecting to find it, was not disappointed. In some sense, anyways.
Particularly a problem in Germany, that's why it's best to use a torrent-friendly VPN in countries like that.
If you want to pirate, fine, pirate. I just don't understand why people are so insistent on coming up with moral justifications for their actions. If it's moral or immoral fine, who cares? It's simply a sign of weak character when someone needs to come up with a justification for every little thing they do.
Put in a more relatable phrasing, they're angry that they're not being compensated for the substantial expense they put into creating that content (e.g. $8M/episode for season 2).
Not paying for something you value is a good way to reduce its quality.
And to why I think things actually are getting cheaper:
In germany you pay already mandatory 25€ for public broadcasting, which you might never watch. Pay TV back in the days was like 50€, and tons of people where willing to pay for it. You can get a lot of the new streaming services for that.
As consumers we have come to expect everything under the sun to be accessible right here, right now, according to my expectations and preferably for free. That’s honestly irrational on our (consumers) part. Internet and forums just amplify this part.
Ten different 10-15$ DRM-filled streaming services, that only allow me to watch 4K if the sun is 5 degrees above the equator and require being online always, is not that, and thus, I refuse to pay.
This feels like an idea from some idiot corporate suit who said "Well there are fingerprint readers on phones, let's use that to lock down accounts" without understanding that your app just gets as "Yes" or a "No" when you ask the phone to scan a fingerprint. The apps themselves don't get to the see the scan.
> The pay-TV industry is projected to lose $6.6 billion in revenue from password sharing and piracy this year, according to Parks Associates. By 2024, the number could grow to $9 billion, the research firm said.
BULLSHIT, we heard this SAME argument about piracy. Piracy/Account sharing DO NOT equal a 100% loss in sales. I'm willing to concede there are some people stealing who would pay but I can promise you it's nowhere near 100%.
Hell, if the situation with games is any indication there are people who will pirate the game after paying for it to get rid of always-on requirements or other intrusive DRM.
And frankly, I 100% understand where they are coming from:
1. What platform was I watching show X on?
2. Oh Platform X removed show Y? Well it's also on Platform Z but now I can't remember where I was in that show.
3. Oh, every Platform has a different UI/UX? Great...
4. Internet slow today? DDOS against Platform? Guess I'm not watching anything
5. Oh that's right, Platform X only work on Set Top Box A or B but not C... Guess I'll just watch this on my Phone since I can't get it on the TV
6. Going on a flight? Going to be without internet? Don't want to stream it on cellular? I hope Show X is on a Platform that supports offline watching.
7. Paid service != No Ads, you've got to deal with Hulu's BS and/or pre-roll or self-promotion crap
I know Apple TV is trying to address some of these issues and so is Amazon Prime Channels but it's all a Russian nesting doll of terrible.
All of this stands in rather stark comparison to using Plex/Emby/Jellyfin/etc:
1. All my content in 1 place
2. Content never removed except by owner, track show progress across all clients easily
3. Constant UI/UX even across platforms
4. If you are local there is no lag, remote will depend on your own internet
5. Apps for almost every platform (Phone, Web, TV, Tablet, Gaming Console, Roku/Chromecast/Fire stick, etc)
6. Offline sync options
7. No ads, no pre-roll (unless you set a custom one yourself)
Now, the content makers want to have their own streaming services (Disney), pushing the consumer back to that $160/month+ territory for access to media. It's kind of sad to see really.
Sure, many people complain about it, and nearly everyone wants the same thing for less money. But it's been proven that despite the complaints and cost, people are willing to pay.
Firefox tries to sandbox Widevine but this code is from a dirty company and you can bet it's trying to break out of that sandbox.
Surprise, surprise—I never have that problem with the Plex app.
E.g. Netflix: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23931
I'm talking about Hulu and Prime. Hulu, I kind of get. It's cheap. I pay $1/month using some special I bought into last year.
Prime though? Every time someone tells me how Prime is comparable to Netflix, it's not. Netflix may autoplay stupid crap while you're looking for a movie (a UX issue) but they don't show me a video ad when I turn on the app, nor do they show me an ad between episodes.
I don't know what your point is, but that would work just as well for them too.
All I have to do is login once on my friend's device then from then on even if the app asks for biometrics it will work since it will be THEIR biometrics.
Also I can add 5 different people's fingerprints to my device (if that even what the companies are trying to prevent, which it's not).
What can Netflix do with that? It's not tied to an account.
>BULLSHIT, we heard this SAME argument about piracy. Piracy/Account sharing DO NOT equal a 100% loss in sales.
The software, music, and video industries have been posting enormous "losses" in the billions like this for a few decades now. If they were really losing that much money, they would have all been out of business by now. Instead, last I checked, most of them are more profitable than ever.
They use that number to put political pressure on the DoJ, FBI, and DHS to enforce their IP ownership claims. I get that 100% of their claimed loss would never be 100% of a potential revenue, but AFAIK there is no standard alternative way to calculate those "losses". From what I know, all companies use the same method when describing losses/damages due to hack/cyberattack.
This isn't the problem at all. The problem is that they're calling them "losses", when they aren't losses at all. "Lose" is a plain English word with a very specific meaning: it means you no longer have something that you used to have. These companies never, ever "lost" anything at all due to "piracy". You can't use the word to describe "something you don't have, and never had at all, but which you should have"; it doesn't work that way.
If they used a different term, such as "unrealized revenue", then we probably wouldn't be having this discussion.
No it doesn't. It means you lost out on potential revenues because someone decided not to pay for it. That's a loss. If people are consuming your content and not paying you for it, you're losing something in the transaction.
This is ridiculous. There's a subreddit choosingbeggars that's FILLED with people asking for free art for "publicity". It's insulting to content creators to hear this silly shtick.
The cost to read this comment is $1 million. If you do not pay me, I am losing out on $1 million. AKA: $1 million in lost revenue (lolling to myself right now...)
Did you read this comment and not pay me? Who do I go after to get the money owed to me??! HackerNews, for not enforcing my price? You, for reading it? Your ISP, for allowing you to read it? Or myself, for being a moron?
Boo hoo. All these companies thinking they can split all their content up and get people to pay for every single service are in for a (totally expected) surprise.
I'll share my plex server with friends and family long before I pay for more than 1-2 services.
If the economics of a service don't make sense to you, then do not subscribe. But to turn around and steal from the engineers and artists who work to create these experiences is just indefensible. You are not entitled to television shows.
It still baffles me that people try to justify their objectively immoral theft of someone else's hard work and their right to profit on that work as they see fit with pedantry like this.
The only people who can copy a show to show it to you have "the license" to do so.
When you disregard the license put in play to govern the content, you're stealing from the people who protect their property with licenses.
Even in the open source world, respecting the terms of a license is important.
It's not theft. It's not fraud. It's not vandalism.
And yet, people in these discussion use those wrong terms to describe the activity. But the only reason they do that, is because they want to attach the greater stigma of those crimes, onto the less stigmatized crime of copyright infringement.
And that's a dishonest argument.
There is a level of assault ON the public's rights happening. They arent completely innocent content creators being robbed, having done nothing wrong.
It smells less of entitlement, and more of intentional comeuppance.
It's not just hypothetical. In our family we subscribe to 3 or 4 streaming services, but last year we still had to pay $5 to watch It's a Wonderful Life (1946), a movie that was literally in the public domain for 20 years. A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) wasn't available at any price, except with ads that stretched its 25-minute runtime to nearly an hour. We pirated that one. I don't think most people would think there was anything wrong with that.
You're probably right for everything produced since the second World War, but I doubt people think that e.g. Triumph of the Will is under copyright. I think people have a vague notion of "historical" vs. "contemporary" that starts right around the end of WWII.
My point is there's plenty of good content people want that's 30-70 years old & they don't feel bad about pirating it. My dad by his principles would never download a new movie; nevertheless he's looking up the songs from his childhood on YouTube. He feels entitled to listen to them whenever and however he wants. I think that's a pretty common attitude toward the older stuff.
It's not stealing when you already paid in full.
Sharing my Netflix password with my wife and/or child is not stealing, I paid in full for that account, and have now for many many years.
My Plex server is full of DVDs and BluRays I paid full retail price for (that's $20 to $30 USD each), it's not stealing to use it, and it's not stealing to let some friends occasionally borrow films from it.
The entitlement companies feel to micromanage the lives of their paid-in-full customers is ridiculous. If you don't want people to have your product, stop selling them the product. And if you sell someone a product, don't act all surprised that they now have the product and are free to use it accordingly.
I get the attraction of getting content for free. I used to pirate software when I was young and broke. But I'm an adult now and I do adult things, meaning I pay for what I consume.
Amazingly, people can survive without consuming other people's content. You don't have to watch a streaming service. There are other things in life to do.
Much like I think people who don't vote forfeit the right to complain about politicians, I think people who steal content don't get to complain about the quality of the available content.
Any limitation like annoying password resets, strict geofencing, or any move a company makes to tell me how to use the service I pay for and use entirely legally inconvenience me, the paying customer. It will not inconvenience Pirate Joe. Of course none of these inconveniences and limitations would ever come attached to a hefty price drop to make it worth the effort for me.
The entitlement companies feel to inconvenience paying customers for profit is never surprising. Also those "lost revenue" calculations are so massively and intentionally misleading by presuming that every non-paying viewer would turn to a paying one. If your point is based on misdirection it's not much of a point.
But you can lend those people a Blu-Ray, which only deprives you of watching it while they have it.
You're right, it's not. And Netflix is fine with this. However, should you be able to share your Netflix username and password with everyone on the block?
Presumably, your Netflix subscription has limitations on how many people can simultaneously watch it. So, yes, you should be able to share it with everyone on the block. Why not? By doing so, you're potentially preventing yourself from using it during that time, for instance if it has a maximum of 4 simultaneous streams. Why should you not be able to use the maximum number? It's no different than having 4 copies of a book or Blu-Ray and lending them out to your neighbors: if they haven't all borrowed them, you still have at least one to view, but if they're all borrowed, you're unable to view them.
I don't even know what 'paid in full' means here. It's a specific service with specific terms of use that include not sharing passwords outside one's household. You are free to reject the terms of use and not subscribe to the service. It doesn't make sense to justify breaking some terms just because you don't like them but keep the rest of the service because it's convenient. Would you sign a contract and then break specific clauses just because you didn't like those clauses? The contract is the contract. You choose to give your word to abide.
Disney for years resisted selling films on videos because they had no way of controlling how many people would be in the room watching the content. And they investigated single-use tapes (these had a latch that prevented rewinding, you'd have to send the tape back to the factory to be re-wound) and 24 hour DVDs (these would be sealed in an oxygen free case and would start oxidising on contact with air).
This short time we've had of "owning content" has been an anomaly and it's something they've wanted to stop as soon as possible.
> My Plex server is full of DVDs and BluRays I paid full retail price for (that's $20 to $30 USD each), it's not stealing to use it,
Format-shifting is not legal in all places. It's currently not legal in the UK. And if it requires circumvention of technical measures (which ripping DVDs and BluRays does) it's probably not legal because of DMCA.
If you want to change the law you're going to need a better argument than "I bought it", because you haven't bought it, you've licensed it, and they control the licences.
I did find the dvd one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexplay
> Cassettes of major movies such as The Bridge on the River Kwai, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Dr. Strangelove, High Noon, It Happened One Night, Divorce Italian Style, The Quiet Man, The Belles of St Trinian's, Two Rode Together and Brother Rat[4] were ordered via the initial 200-movie catalog at a retailer, delivered by parcel mail, and then returned to the retailer after viewing. These rental cassettes were red, approximately 7 inches (180 mm) high by 6.5 inches (170 mm) wide by 1.5 inches (38 mm) deep (however used the same videotape used today) and could not be rewound by a home Cartrivision recorder. Rather, they were rewound by a special machine upon their return to the retailer.[5] Other cassettes on sports, travel, art, and how-to topics were available for purchase. These cassettes were black, and could be rewound on a Cartrivision recorder. An optional monochrome camera manufactured for Cartrivision by Eumig could be bought to make home videos. A color camera was in the works but never materialized before CTI's demise.
Have you ever heard of books?
I am inclined to agree with HBO, Netflix, et al. that this is stealing. You are using their computing resources against the terms you agreed to.
However torrenting is good and not stealing. You are using your own bandwidth.
4.2. The Netflix service and any content viewed through
our service are for your personal and non-commercial use
only and may not be shared with individuals beyond your
household. During your Netflix membership, we grant you a
limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access
the Netflix service and view Netflix content through the
service. Except for the foregoing, no right, title or
interest shall be transferred to you. You agree not to use
the service for public performances.
And frankly this is a good thing. It would be completely ridiculous for Netflix to demand a separate account for my wife and each child. The children aren't even allowed to make accounts, they would be left high and dry.
This is one area where I have a constantly annoyance with Steam. You can create multiple accounts on Steam and share the library, but you can't play more than one game at once, even if it's not the same game. It's horrible. I can understand locking you out of a specific game because someone else is playing, but locking you out of your entire library because someone else is playing is so dumb.
IANAL
Personally, I want to financially support media creators, but every time I get a forced prereel commercial, or Hulu inserts ads in a service I pay for, I make a mental note to care a little less. Every time I’m region restricted, I make a mental note. Every time my browser widevine plugin breaks and I can’t watch something, I make a mental note.
Essentially every time I witness a dark pattern, I realize this is about control. Not fairness.
Fuck them. If they wanna play games, I’ll play games. And I’ll win, because I’m better at it than they are.
I would be happy to pay some cryptocurrency directly to an artist for the production of media. I could care less about the distributors though.
Now, it's true that it takes many individual artists working together to make a major motion picture of any kind, but that doesn't change the fact that there are so many layers of middlemen between your money and the actual artists that saying that "giving Disney your money" is giving your money to the artists is....at best a gross oversimplification, and at worst outright false.
Should software be free as well then? It seems to me it should fit the definition of culture, and the economics of e.g. a game seem similar to the economics of making a movie.
The problem is they won't do that though, they'll just pocket the extra. Bit of a tangent, but this is one of the major failings of our current economic model IMO - it is perfectly acceptable, even encouraged (because shareholders need profits), for companies to milk consumers for all they can.
- https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-of-intellectual-property-is-...
I'm actually a fan of the notion of copyright, trademarks and intellectual property in a sense but not to power it currently holds. Infringement on your sole or licensed right to copy is not as significant an issue as permanently depriving someone of something.
You might argue that someone who copies another's information is depriving them of money that would have been paid for that information. This is flawed though as you would need to be able to prove that the infringer of the copyright would have paid for the information in the first place.
That’s exactly what I’m doing. What does it matter exactly if I pirate or not? The money would not reach “engineers” and “artists” either way.
If piracy wasn’t available , you might find yourself paying for some content even if not everything you pirate.
you are probably talking about paywalls. my 2 cents is that all that pay-to-read content is somehow going against what the internet stood for: a network where information could be freely shared. this will always find some resistance.
what about having a separate network where they can take all their pay-to-read blogging platforms, newspapers & magazines, etc?
the other thing is that it's impossible to pay for all these digital services. and more and more are being created. something is wrong with that model and it won't last long.
ATT, Comcast, Disney, CBS already own almost all the historical content. Id rather pay a small licensing fee to those 4 and then be able to watch their content on any platform, rather than deal with multiple middlemen that have CBS, Comcast, Disney, ATT licensing costs built into their product price. IF I select DirecTV/ATT as my "licensing manager" then any time I sign up for Disney+, Peacock+, CBS All Access, I want a discount off one of the two ends (would make more sense to give all my subscription info to DirecTV and get a DirecTV discount. Then DirecTV can go to Disney and say "17% of our customers dont need to pay Disney licensing costs, weve adjusted our payment to you accordingly.)
Theres two models of TV. Live and On Demand. In the On Demand world its much more "am I licensed to start this stream" vs "can I tune into this broadcast in progress." Especially if the broadcast is adding any value, like tv hosts interjecting fun making of movie facts at commercial breaks.
Obviously things are different in this era then they were 30 years ago during peak cable.
What’s your point that meaningfully responds to the gp?
[0]https://redef.com/original/nine-reasons-why-disney-will-succ...
There's also a cost to the new, original content they're putting on there, like the Mandalorian.
Netflix has ~150M paying subscriptions. Let's say that $0.20 of your Netflix subscription go to Disney (you can adjust it to whatever you think it might be). That's 30M a month. At $10/m, Disney+ would need 3 million users just to break even with what they used to make from Netflix.
How many active users (or what price point) will Disney need to justify the investment?
https://redef.com/original/nine-reasons-why-disney-will-succ... Towards the end of the article it talks about the challenges they will face.
It's almost the same thing as Uber prices being VC subsidized. And now Disney is following the same playbook, sell Disney+ at or below cost for a while until they can inflate MAU enough that people just accept the subscription as a cost of life.
Theres also a bit of Rose Colored glasses going on here, Netflix catalog was pretty bad in the beginning, and people are misremembering it as better than it was. Netflix only exists at all because they could get their DVD business off the ground without paying per view licensing fees.
>charge the same for their meager library
We are also talking about a generation who is saying "I wont pay $7-$15 four times, thats too expensive" but while growing up, who's parents were paying $150/m to Comcast or DirecTV.
I remember mentioning this to a senior Netflix tech guy at the time and his response was basically that people come for the movies and stay for the TV. (This was a bit before the real explosion in premium TV content.)
No, they saw a new revenue stream, and jumped on it. Then they saw where things were heading, and they would have less control if Netflix took over, so they all pulled back and started up their own streaming services.
Yea I'm part of the group of millenials killing everything. Here's my honest to god thoughts: I don't care if piracy is killing the industry, or if these people aren't able to keep operating. Let the whole thing burn to the ground. We'll figure it out. It would be painful (the jobs! The lives disrupted! The profits!!!) and I'm aware of that. I just don't care.
The industry has opened Pandora's box. And I'm not going to feel bad when Disney or Verizon or whatever megacorp the other 5% of the industry those two don't has their business disrupted. The entertainment industry has gotten gross and stagnant and continues to progress towards a monopoly.
This current era is going to shift, and likely very fast. There's too many services, and piracy is still an easy option. You can slow roll price increases, but only so far and only if there's a very small (2-5?) number of services people feel they're getting value from.
If the entertainment industry has gotten gross and stagnant, it seems like the solution is to not consume it, not pirate it.
This just seems like a thin excuse to steal.
Again: I get it's not the best look. I strongly support artists rights and the need for creatives to make money off their labor. However, the system sucks, and doesn't actually benefit the creatives anyway. Maybe creative/artist jobs shouldn't be "jobs" anymore, and people MBI or something needs to step in. Maybe the public need to subsidize the arts through state sponsored programs.
IDK what the answer is. But I know it isn't "more streaming services with no ability to share passwords".
It's also the difference between the, what, $20/month? that Netflix subscription costs and the $80/month or whatever that the TV portion of a cable subscription costs nowadays.
* No actual numbers were harmed in the making of this post. All numbers presented are purely imaginary.
Those numbers seem pretty close. I think the cost bit is probably the big thing. Yes, it's a bit annoying when I spend 10 minutes trying to find a show on Amazon which is, in fact, on Netflix.
But the main thing is that a lot of people have cut their $80-$100/month cable cord and their new normal is maybe a couple of [possibly shared] subscriptions plus maybe Prime--not their prior $100 monthly content bill.
But people complained just as loud when cable TV "made them pay for everything even though they only watch three channels".
Now we're back to the same issue. Previously, Netflix and maybe Hulu were the options. Still sorta bundling, but at least if you like X show and Y show, they might both be on Netflix and you can stay in one subscription. Now with every company making their own subscription, and forcing shows to be exclusive, you're having to subscribe to multiple services just to watch X and Y shows. Same problem as before.
Don't make it seem like people are entitled just because they want simplicity and choice.
It is analogous (or maybe identical) to stealing something you don't need because you think the price is too high. The appropriate response is not to steal it and also not to buy it.
Personally I have 4 streaming subscriptions but I watch none of them, I pirate it all anyways. Nobody is at a great loss because I didn't walk over to my TV to watch Netflix in 4k. Netflix is actually saving money by having me torrent it to watch in 4k on my PC. There are extremely large groups of people that feel "entitled" to a usable product in this sense, whether it be on the go watching, quality on their devices, the rampant "bundling" issues getting worse with fragmentation, or other reasons.
People don't feel entitled to content for free it's just becoming harder to pay for it via streaming the same as it was after a while on cable. Either way people aren't stealing content, at worst a fraction of the people copying it aren't paying when they would have otherwise.
As you've pointed out, it's just a different form of fragmentation. Streaming services aren't like channels that you can pick and choose from (they're much bigger and more expensive than individual channels), they're effectively "packages" that include a couple channels / shows you want, and a ton you don't.
It's as if people back in the day were saying about cable packages "you can pick and choose the ones you want, it's totally up to you, there's no fragmentation!"
Good grief what a stupid quote to use as a pretext for tacitly supporting these measures.
When I was “young”, whatever that undefined number means, I swore there were lots of things I’d never pay for. Streaming music services, are a germane example. Then I got older, developed a bit of discretionary income, my time got more valuable, and the services become the best option. The once “no way ever” is now an unthought monthly cost.
But it seems the industry does not want to learn: don't make it harder to use your service for the honest users. They're worth it to keep happy!
They also didn't pull what XM/Serious do and make it nearly impossible to cancel. 4x 40m phone calls, then all I wanted to do was drop one of 3 radios when I sold a car. After the third call drop after a 40min hold time I cancelled the entire service. If I ever use them again, it will be a disposable single use cc #.
In the end, 2-3 streaming services is all I'm willing to pay for. More than that and if rather pirate just for the usability aspect, let alone the costs.
What is even the point of starting a startup that offers content of any kind if people are going to do everything in their power to rip you off, share your value everyone they know for free, and claim that they have the moral high ground while doing so?
Do those glorifying torrents here also use ad-blockers, to ensure that absolutely no revenue whatsoever reaches a content creator, no matter how much you enjoy that content? Is the goal of revenue starvation here to simply bring an end to content creation altogether?
It's hard to see what other possible outcome exists given the overlap amongst HN readers between "I torrent" and "I adblock". I've never hoped more strongly that y'all are not representative of reality than I have reading these comments today.
Most people don't think of the future, only the present.
Most people only think of themselves, not others.
People aren't trying to hurt creators or prevent new film from being made, they're just trying to watch the awesome stuff their friends are talking about for free.
Multiple studies in various countries have shown that pirates tend to spend much more on content than non-pirates. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evkmz7/study-again-shows-...
I would buy a Netflix sub for a year for someone with a gift card before I would share my credentials, because I want Netflix to continue existing, and if everyone gave away credentials instead of buying gift subs, that’s much less likely to happen.
(ps. “Sharing Netflix credentials isn’t pirating”: Incorrect. It’s not torrenting. Historical usage of “pirating” as in “pirating cable TV pay channels through splices and illegal decoders” had nothing to do with recording it and sharing recordings. I see no case made that Netflix credentials sharing is any different than buying an illegal Showtime decoder box, nor its impact on revenue.)
The reason why we accepted Netflix' DRM model is because they started off with "we encourage you to share your account!" which everyone jumped on. Now that we have all the b/s associated with digital content, they're pulling back. Which is okay... because we can pull back too.
A good example is when HBO decided to partner-up in an exclusive deal with a horrible price-gouging cable media provider, many Australians decided to pirate Game of Thrones instead. I don't know of a single person who paid for it. I know of professional suit-wearing offices that hosted watch parties for episodes that were pirated. And everyone knew... and nobody cared. I think the final numbers were that about 8% of the entire Australian population pirated the show. If only HBO had decided to not screw over an entire country then perhaps they would have made a lot more money.
The issue is that they will never have their fill. They will always be hungry, and if Netflix could charge you 10% of your annual income and get away with it, then they will. And a great example of this is with college textbooks.
I don't think I'm entitled to media, but I don't think the creators are entitled to my dollars either for digital content. I just don't care about content creators in this regard. This might come across as terrible, but I couldn't care less if it leads to their bankruptcy. If they want to produce something at a reasonable price, then great. If they won't, then it won't be paid for. That's the playing field they're choosing to enter. If they don't like it, they are free to exit.
There's no morality in it either way -- paying for content doesn't make a person any more or less immoral than someone who doesn't.
Adblocking is in a similar boat, insofar that if you think that stripping me of any privacy without my consent is okay, then you're going to be quickly disappointed with how well my pi-hole setup works.
I'd encourage you to take a step back and look at it as if you're dealing with software patents, cause that's all copyright law for digital media really is. And choosing to have a patent called "PROVIDING AN INTERNET THIRD PARTY DATA CHANNEL"[0] doesn't mean people are immoral if they don't pay. It also doesn't mean they're moral if they do.
[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-project-jengo-saga-how-cloud...
I adblock because of the cesspool digital advertising has become, and my conscience is clear in this decision.
Those who don't block ads probably would if it was easy. Ability is the barrier to entry that must be cleared in order to earn the 'reward' of a safer, less intrusive, less privacy-invading, bandwidth-wasting, and potentially harmful Internet browsing experience - which is a sad indictment on the current state of the Internet.
Ad-blocking isn't illegal; isn't intellectual property theft, which is another reason it shouldn't be mixed up with the discussion of torrenting.
Torrenting of copyrighted content is a different beast. There's, of course, the technical ability barrier to entry, but there's also the knowledge that it IS illegal and it is intellectual property infringement, and there's a specific value of the item to purchase legitimately. Where it gets all kinds of blurry is pretty much all ideological arguments that surround 'the products of creativity':
Who the money actually goes to
Availability / Geo-fencing
Restrictions of format
Restrictions of devices
Restrictions of platforms
The concept of 'ownership' versus 'licensing'
The cost vs. value of the item
The history of the Hollywood's inception
Payola
Cultural participation
Terms of copyright
Open source complications (related to devices and platforms)
It's not a black and white argument by any means whatsoever.
What I do think is interesting is that folks seem to solely place the blame on the large media distributors and seem to place no blame on the content creators. Creators have a huge influence on the industry, from the writers, to directors to the actors etc. Big names in the industry could easily choose to pressure to change things. But they don't, so they are just as much to blame as the distributors themselves.
Ah, yes, "young people" are the problem here. No one born before the 90s has ever stolen cable...
Growing up, tons of families had chipped cable boxes in my neighborhood (including cops & judges). My dad calls me once a week to ask how to stream this or that for free.
What a joke.
They should offer a lowball “add a user” price because Johnny Millenial might get his parents to tack on a few bucks but he’s not going to sign up for the $150+/mo package.
I’m also surprised they haven’t cracked down on the source IP addresses. It’d be trivial to look at the net bandwidth and see that the usage is at a totally different physical address (and not just a mobile phone).
I regularly use these services when I'm traveling. If any of them start restricting me to my home IP (which isn't static anyway) or otherwise start making it harder for me to use their service, I'll be dropping them in a hurry. There's a lot of content out there and not really any that I must have.
Hell I bet they could go a step further and identify the exact person as well! There’s so little competition that it’s likely the account holder and sharer are on the same ISP (ex: you both have Comcast). They would know the name and account on the sharer’s source IP and, more importantly, that it’s not the original account owner.
They could also do techniques like gentle shaming "Your account has been used from 46 locations in 7 states today. We might start charging for this level of account-sharing in the future"
If a steaming company has 70 million customers, how many of those customers move house in a given day? How many change ISP's? How many get new devices? How many take trips?
Suddenly your call center budget doubles and cancellations skyrocket.
Implying that EVERYONE using it 'illegally' would keep watching if they couldn't access it for free.
I have bought 10s if not 100s of DVDs and Blurays that to this day are still in plastic wrap, as well as books with uncracked spines. I don't think I'm that weird, and that "tsundoku" [0] is likely a thing with downloaders as well.
Thats the reason I put to_finish label on them in my steam catalogue xD
I have zero interest in copyright infringement for video content. I am okay with streaming and have no desire to archive what I watch. I am okay with the 10 to 15 USD per month subscription model as long as it is easy to subscribe and unsubscribe.
If my claims make it sound like video content is unimportant to me, it is true. Part of the reason why it it not significant in my life is that it is difficult to access. If I have something in particular in mind and have to figure out where it is available, they have probably lost me. If I know where something is available and have to subscribe to a service to access that singular title, they have lost me. Whenever I look for something and discover that it is not available in my region, I have even less incentive to put in the effort in the future. Whenever I look for something that I have already viewed and discover that it is no longer available, the frustration simply grows. Simply put, so much effort has been put into placing barriers to access that have lost interest in even making an attempt to use these services. Given that some people place a higher priority on video content, I can understand why they share passwords or find other means.
What is the solution? In this highly biased to the point of near disinterest opinion: make it easier to legally access content. Exclusive and time limited contracts with service providers may offer short term gains, but they encourage piracy among consumers or even turn off consumers completely.
I’m the weirdo millennial who pays for cable and Netflix and Hulu and Criterion Channel and Amazon and Disney+ and Apple TV+ (well, that’s free for the first year) and basically every video service offered, but I still share passwords with people.
Like, my cable provider (who gives me access to HBO, Showtime, Starz, cable and networks on-demand and live stuff) offers me 6 or 7 user accounts. I have one. My husband has one. And then I create logins for my friends.
Like, I firmly believe in paying for content (as evidenced by the fact that I pay hundreds of dollars a month for it), but I’m also not blind to the reality of the current world, which is that people like me are what prop the business up. Plus, I pay Netflix like $18 a month or whatever for 4K and however many simultaneous steams. Netflix shouldn’t care what cities those streams are taking place in — especially since for half the year I’m out of town in a foreign country for half the month.
But what these companies risk, whether they know it or not, is risking making paying for content such a pain in the ass that the few of us keeping this industry afloat will just bail and torrent or use newsgroups or whatever.
I pay because it’s generally easier and is convenient and b/c I want to support creative work. But if it’s hard to use what I pay for and less convenient, I have no problem putting those several hundred dollars a month into seedboxes, adding redundancy to my NAS, and in spinning up VPS’ located around the globe.
I will absolutely pay for the content but I have no shame in reformatting it into something that then makes sense for me. I happen to disagree with people who could pay for it and don't, but that's on their conscience and shoulders.
I feel like you're screwing your customers, so ain't we both content.
I want to split out my accounts too, for both the above reason, and that I don't like sending them a password so they can log in on their devices.
Why can't we have our own accounts and manage them into a family account?
But since accounts are personal, do Netflix expect me to watch 4 streams simultaneously on my 4 different devices, using my 4 eyes with my 4 brain halves?
I recognize that I'm probably not classified under "password cheat", but their still current solution feels really dirty.
Even then it's not great that you have to share the master account password which contains the billing information (maybe they need a read-only and admin password, but now we're complicating it past the "password123" crowd), but really that seems to inadvertently encourage good password discipline - if you don't trust the people using your account, they probably don't qualify as a user on your account.
Who knows who a kid, for example, is going to share the password with?
Though, as you say, requiring the password to be shared to share the account probably helps limit how casually people will give others access.
A further gripe is them not having a netflix.com/link system in place for settop boxes, so I need to enter a randomized 30+ character/multi-word phrase or whatever scheme password using a directional remote on my Nvidia Shield. Not often, but when I do it's with seething rage.
Netflix accounts are not personal. Their terms of use fully support shared use within the same household. That's why they support multiple user profiles per account.
If they bust my best friend and I for sharing an account now that we no longer live together that's fine, but I simply won't re-subscribe unless they can move my profile over.
I think this illustrates a massive flaw in the current streaming wars. The content is only half the value. Remembering which shows you liked and want to see more of, and which shows you've watched and decided you hated, etc, is a huge value in the increasingly large sea of available content. (And recommendations too, if they're good. I subscribe to Spotify almost exclusively for the recommendations it provides and discovery of new things I like.)
If they want to take an inch, I'm prepared to revert to hosting a media server for all of my friends and family with all sorts of wonderful cat videos.
The USA entertainment industry doesn't want my money.
It's funny to think back on the original MPAA ads about hooded thieves robbing poor creators of their hard-earned cash, in light of how the last decade turned out with the golden age of streaming followed by MPAA gutting it again in their never-ending greed.
"Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Co-Watchers"
"A coalition that includes Netflix Inc., HBO, cable-industry titans and Smart TV manufacturers is stepping up efforts to crack down on people sitting on a couch and watching a movie together, discussing new measures to close a loophole that could be costing companies billions of dollars in lost revenue each year."
now the idea of having to put in a number texted to me to continue watching is annoying enough to drop a service.
not sure how much room the other streaming services will have for raising fees to compensate for sharing with the pricing on D+
What I'm saying is that they allowed it on purpose, to make Netflix more prolific with consumers. If they crack down on it now, it probably won't suddenly cause a big increase in subscribers though.
Personally, I'd be much more likely to a la carte services on a month by month basis if I didn't have the subtle social pressure that 'well I'm not using this but my friends X, Y, and Z all are'. Even lacking the pressure element it seems like a small 'gift' to my family and friends who are on it and that it's not 'going to waste'. There is even the element of watching tings your friends are watching that keeps you watching. If they eliminated that I'd probably never keep more than one active at a time and likely not even that. Also once I've dropped a service for nonuse I'm much less likely to go back.
I finally gave up. I deleted all of the apps that required a cable login and signed him into my Amazon Prime Video and Netflix Account, I also installed the Roku channel (a few free movies), Crackle (free with commercials), and my Plex server. That was more than enough for him.
Paying for use doesn't scale. It did when there were 2 good TV series, 3 good movies and a dozen interesting sports events per year, but today a normal user cannot pay for access to a fraction of a fraction of what is being produced, and paying for the single event is more costly than a yearly subscription. It simply doesn't scale anymore and should be rethought differently. Make the access to media arranged as flat rate for everything in categories, that is, Sports, Movies, TV series, News, Concerts etc. at a very convenient rate, say €5 per category, all included, per year. That would scale as hell, probably increasing the user base by two orders of magnitude. Fair advertising would do the rest. Of course this scenario doesn't go well with the principle of maximizing profits no matter what, and that old say "the best seller isn't the one whose customers are the most happy, but the one whose customers although angry would continue to buy anyway".
That said, there is a maximum inconvenience I will bear. I can live without movies or tv. Honestly, I'd probably live better.
This feels a lot like 20 years ago with Napster and Limewire. I hope the content industry has learned something in the interim.
The entire scene is frustrating, perhaps it is just me. I now watch a lot less than i use to, it is pretty much just put on "Family Guy" or "Rick and Morty" in the background and do other things (i have all those on DVD's so i just set the plex player to keep playing, although now plex is going to stream to....sighhhh)
Now, and I suspect, increasingly, the "technology adoption curve" comes into effect: almost everyone knows someone that has access to a Plex server. As the adoption curve progresses, it will put pressure on price and convenience for access to media. The companies that dont piss poeple off will last the longest.
If execs actually listened to consumers then most of these problems would go away. E.g. no DRM in music. But it took Steve Jobs to convince music execs of that.
Execs are only greedily into chasing the money as they are not generally technically savvy. They also don’t understand economics as they always trot out bogus lost revenue numbers where such revenue was never possible as those people wouldn’t watch if they had to pay money.
"Hey customers, it's time to dust off your pirate hats!".
Just limit playing to one device at a time. Spotify does this and it works great, and the instant sync/control actually makes it seem like a feature rather than a limitation. Most people watch in the evening at around the same time, so problem solved real quick.
Or pay an additional fee for a family plan to allow a set number of multiple users to stream simultaneously, if Mom and Dad want to watch something in the living room and the kids want to watch something upstairs.
I do not plan on ever getting cable again. If NetFlix wants to work with them to start being anal about how I use the service too I know who's on the chopping block next.
Hahaha and what makes them so sure that people won't share the new password/ the one time code?
These execs re seriously disconnected with reality.
Based on the comments here, I doubt that'd even get people to buy their own subscription.
Require them to enter a text-code. If the person who is sharing wants the other person to have the code they would just forward the text. All one is doing is making it more difficult for everyone in the hopes of making it more difficult for one group of people.
You buy 4 streams you should get 4. Trying to determine who is watching is fruitless.
I did not share passwords, but I would also totally cancel purely out of spite and find something else to do.
I also starting to feel like they're scheming me out of my money.
Delivering content is not a valuable service. Making content is.
I don't cancel Netflix because I don't mind anymore. There have and still are a few really good shows which would have cost me much more money what Netflix costs me.
The websites for these services look very slick and "proper", so for the consumer, there's pretty good plausible deniability involved.
I'm really suppressing the urge to crack a Rick and Morty joke because this article is fear mongering. The quote from Reed Hastings even demonstrates Netflix acknowledges this issue is one they are likely not going to tackle.
i can tell right now that i won't ever have more than two subscriptions active at the same time because it's ridiculous to even have more than one, but i'm making some concessions.
Maybe we could also measure by wifi how many phones are present and refuse to play video until the # of viewers in the room has dropped to the contracted level.
Maybe we should ban book and DVD sharing. If I finished reading my book, should I be allowed to just give it to someone who didn't pay the publisher ? No, I should be thrown in jail in fact! Along with the presumptive reader!
Calm the hell down and go take a swim in your Scrooge silo.
(remember, these are paid accounts! Paid "unlimited viewing" accounts that can only be watched by X logins at a time, they're making plenty, and the sharing has a limit on it already by virtue of how many devices can be simultaneously viewing)
Yeah, they never learn, do they?
Happy I cancelled my Netflix last month. Hypothetically, Plex is a great superior alternative.