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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

The funny thing is that the MPAA are so clueless, they don’t even know popcorntime are their own worst enemies. They kept splitting out, rewriting from scratch, failing to establish a trusted way of distributing the app, then the latest releases have been so bad that people are abandoning it in droves - you can see the fallout on reddit. The ban was meant to DOS them for a few weeks, now that cinemas are shut and all eyes are on digital, but ended up being a big advertising campaign for PT. Good on the lawyers for getting paid to fail!

PT itself is a relatively banal app anyway, even if it gets nuked someone else will rewrite it. Napster begat Gnutella begat BitTorrent begat Popcorn, it will not end until the movie business gives consumers what they want: a cheap global service to watch anything anytime.

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Tonight I wanted to watch Spider-Man: Far From Home with my kids. I have subscriptions to Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Criterion, Apple TV+ and PBS. Yet, my only option was to purchase it digitally via iTunes for $15. There was no rental option. It wasn’t available in Disney+ because I assume Sony holds the rights despite the rest of Marvel belonging to Disney. It’s only available for purchase and not rental because I assume: greed.

So I downloaded it off Usenet instead.

Edit: Starz apparently has distribution rights at the moment. 7 days free then $8.99/month. So I could’ve legally watched it for free by signing up via Apple and canceling. Sigh. This is exhausting Hollywood. Get your shit together.

Dafuq is Starz, even? These days there is a new service every month, it’s hard to keep up. Absolute shambles.

Starz is an add-on paid cable channel, like HBO. It’s been around for awhile.

About ten years ago, Starz had a deal with Netflix to stream their content next day. I remember watching some of Party Down that way as it aired.

Starz is a 20+ year old premium cable channel.

Starz has been around since the mid-90s. It has some pretty good programming but it just doesn't get the attention that maybe HBO or Showtime does.

They had a really good short lived comedy series called "Party Down" that I loved. Had a great cast! https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1073507/

I think Outlander might be one of its more popular series now. Based on a book series and brought to TV by Ronald D Moore who did Battlestar Galactica (which personally I am cautious about because the last season or 2 of BSG was not my favorite)

Speaking of “dafuq” streaming services, RDM has a new series on Apple TV+ called For All Mankind which is an alternate history of the space race. It starts a little slow, but it’s worth your time.

One of the creators of Party Down was Rob Thomas, the guy behind Veronica Mars.

The lead singer of Matchbox Twenty?

No, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0859432/

A different person with the very common name Rob Thomas.

Ah, it’s US only, that’s why I never heard of them.

Counterpart is another great series by Starz. Too bad they canceled it just after two seasons. It's one of the best shows made in the last few years.

If I remember correctly, Moore had the whole thing planned out but then the studio truncated his timetable so he had to speed things up to get to the end which is why the last two seasons are not stellar.

Yes all of that and one another reason I cancelled my Netflix account for was - it just won't let me successfully hide/remove the content I disliked, didn't finish because I didn't find it good enough, didn't want to see again, and even the content I had actually finished watching! It was almost mocking me everywhere!

e.g. I explicitly disliked a show and anytime I'd open Netflix, for days/weeks, it be on top either a banner or one of the first in one or many categories. Felt almost like mocking :)

If your libraries is shallow (which anyway consisted of mostly r trite subpar content) it's your problem - don't hit me with your pathetic dark pattern. Their support kept giving robotic answers. It was outrageous.

In Canada it seems like it was possible to rent it on iTunes. That's so weird, that means that someone got some exclusive right on renting it?

JustWatch tell me that AMC on demands had it to rent for 5.99$, is it possible that you missed that? It could be them that got the exclusive right for it... that had to be expensive for sure if it's the case.

So you had an option to watch it in your home for the price of a theater ticket and instead you decided to just take it?

I regularly tell my kids no when there's a movie we have to pay full price for. They can wait a few months.

I tried to keep things legal for a year or two, but consistently ran into this problem.

I rarely watch whatever's on. I prefer to watch specific movies from a list of recommendations. This was simply impossible.

Sometimes I couldn't find the movies I wanted. Sometimes they weren't available in my country. Sometimes they weren't available in their original language, or with the right subtitles. Sometimes the streaming platform didn't like my hardware. Sometimes it didn't let me watch the movie over more than 24 hours.

Paying to watch movies felt like paying for making the experience more grating.

Piracy gives me any movie I desire in around 20 minutes. I get a file. I own this file for as long as I want. I can play that movie offline, put it on any device, share it with anyone, or transform it as I please. It's mine.

I don't think I'll be paying for streaming again. Movie tickets absolutely, but not streaming.

The thing that killed it for me was buying an Apple TV and then finding out half the content didn’t work because my TV didn’t support some particular fucked up combination of HDCP. I wasn’t about to buy a new TV just to get a copy protection upgrade so fuck ‘em. Torrents and a usb stick it is.

Technology like HDCP, which only serves to annoy legitimate users, should be illegal.

One can get HDCP bypass solutions no money at all, but the technology should never have existed in the first place.

Worse yet, despite failing so horribly, development is still going into it, with major players like Netflix pushing it as well.

I'll say there's one (and only one) good thing about HDCP: if a source/sink is HDCP compliant then it's a good indicator that it's DisplayPort or HDMI-compliant.

Ever since the mid-2000s through to today there's a load of TVs, displays, etc on the market that claimed to be DP and HDMI compatible but failed on the edge-cases (e.g. pumping 4K@60Hz down a DisplayPort 1.2 pipe). In my experience the gear that was HDCP compliant tended to perform better (but by no means perfectly cough Philips...).

Compare that to the mess of compliance and functionality with SCART connectors in the 1990s. I had a TV with a true RGB SCART input and a bunch of devices claimed to offer RGB SCART output, yet didn't actually support it (I assume because few consumers knew how to take advantage of RGB SCART, given the default was Composite-over-SCART and at SDTV it looks good enough).

That's not really a good thing about HDCP at all. Not only that, I certainly have bad devices supporting HDCP.

In reality, HDCP causes issues with DisplayPort and HDMI link by being one of the weakest links (HDCP signalling is usually the problem in long or cheap cables). Any issue makes HDCP kill the connection and renegotiate content protection, which takes time where there is no content.

We still to this day have trouble with SCART-like features. It's just now called HDMI-CEC, and is very much a hit-or-miss scenario, even within the same brand. Case-in-point: I have an older Philips Android TV, where CEC in my setup works fine. The same setup does not work at all on a slightly newer iteration of Android TVs from Philips, despite both running a similar Android Oreo build.

----

Also note: The default for SCART was composite, with optional S-Video and RGB support, and very rarely, component (which quality-wise would be somewhere around RGB). S-Video was the common "quality" setting that "just worked", which is close enough to component (and thus RGB) in quality for the material of the time.

Plus, getting suboptimal image is not as bad as getting no image at all, or missing features. HDCP and CEC is arguably a huge downgrade from SCART in that regard.

... this comment is longer than I intended ...

My mistake on putting “Component” instead of “Composite”, btw. I’ve corrected my post.

Mistakes happen. :)

> The thing that killed it for me was buying an Apple TV and then finding out half the content didn’t work because my TV didn’t support some particular fucked up combination of HDCP. I wasn’t about to buy a new TV just to get a copy protection upgrade so fuck ‘em.

There are certain adapters that do other things, but can also be used to strip HDCP.

It's often used as part of a setup to capture the HDMI output from Macs, since those sometimes have HDCP as well.

Yeah had a couple. Flakey as hell and tend to die after a few months if they even work at all.

Why do you feel so entitled to such ultimate convenience?

Of course it's way better if you steal without consequence, but this is not a scalable approach.

> Why do you feel so entitled

Why do you feel so indignant about something that doesn't effect you? If you want to pay for a dozen different streaming services, nobody is stopping you.

Affect

I am a little bit indignant because it does affect me. When a small number of people abuse the system it means the rest of us can't have nice things.

If there were not rampant piracy, I would not have to know what is DRM and all of its associated inconvenience, because it wouldn't have to be a thing.

Not that the current solution isn't broken -- I do pay for (nearly) a dozen different streaming services. But I can't help feeling that I'm subsidising your lawless, anti-social approach, and it doesn't seem exactly fair that you get the better experience.

You have to acknowledge that if everyone did like you, then the whole thing wouldn't be able to sustain itself. It only works because most people take the hit and play by the rules.

Yet if region locks and other nonsense didn't exist to begin with, piracy may never have had such a foothold. The history of commercial games and digital downloads is one of insane abusive behavior of consumers.

I still have a large list of games that I have legally bought but can't play because some manner of native drm or protection - having to practice piracy is the only way I can play those games.

Denuvo, the Sony rootkit, the finite number of installs that was a thing for a while, the list goes on.

> But I can't help feeling that I'm subsidizing your lawless, anti-social approach

yeah thanks bro

>You have to acknowledge that if everyone did like you, then the whole thing wouldn't be able to sustain itself. It only works because most people take the hit and play by the rules.

Except there's no data proving that people pirating movies/music/... are not also paying the industry.

Anecdotally, the persons I know in the habit of pirating entertainments are also some of the biggest spenders I know on the same things.

So, it's entirely possible that if everyone did like him, the whole thing would sustain itself. And if you have something tending to prove the contrary, I'm quite curious.

DRM would be a thing even if piracy weren't, and despite piracy, DRM needn't be a thing. I buy music because music is sold without DRM, despite music being easier to pirate that movies (being a fraction of the size means it can be downloaded many times faster.)

Why would DRM be a thing even if piracy weren't? Because the companies that employ it are control freaks who, among other things, would like to sell people the same product numerous times.

> I do pay for (nearly) a dozen different streaming services.

This truly is a 'You' problem. Getting upset with other people because you choose to do that is senseless. It's doubly senseless to be upset about this since dozens of streaming services would be a thing even if piracy weren't. Dozens of streaming services are a thing because these companies are control freaks that want to reinvent Netflix rather than license their content to Netflix. They want complete control over how their media is promoted and distributed, they don't like delegating any of that control to another company. Bittorrent really has jackshit to do with dozens of streaming services existing. If anybody is to blame, it's the clueless pliant consumers that reward media companies for creating netflix clones.

"Damned consumers, paying for their goods and services... Idiots!"

> But I can't help feeling that I'm subsidizing your lawless, anti-social approach

No, you're subsidizing rich CEOs and their shareholders.

I pay for Spotify, reluctantly. But it does have almost all the music I want. I also buy games on Gog, if they are not on Gog I use Steam (reluctantly).

I rarely pay for a movie bar a few cinema trips and blu-rays for something I really wanted to support . The reasons:

I want a well encoded DRM free file.

I don't want to be ripped off, or at least the "Steam Sale" model should be there so you can get it at a reasonable price a few months later.

I absolutely want the high quality download option. Steaming is fine for music. I'm confident I could find my Spotify playlists fairly easily elsewhere if I needed too (legally or otherwise). Maybe they are 500GB max.

I wouldn't be confident I could replace terabytes of my favorite movies quickly. I want those archived for myself without DRM.

I will pay when the product is better than a torrent site, it is possible when the lawyers and execs allow it to happen.

Piracy seems to have arisen mostly because the commercial options were really hard to work with -- and the subsequent forceful adoption of DRM didn't help either.

Consumers want convenience. I have convenience in the cinema so I pay for movies there quite often.

As for digital distribution, I don't feel confident in any platform. You basically pay to be severely inconvenienced. Plus what happens if you want to load up 10-20 movies on your laptop and go camping? Tough luck.

The movie industry should stop trying to sell us the same thing several times. If I paid for a cinema ticket once I should have the right to download that movie and have it stored offline forever.

Almost nobody who pirated movies (of those I spoke with) did so out of being cheap or poor. Almost everybody told me "I can't even figure out how I can download the movie I paid for" and just opted for torrenting.

Sure some people will do anything and everything to pirate. But I argue they are much less compared to those who are unhappy with the current streaming offerings.

Not parent, but as a consumer I see zero to no reason I should pay money and get service that is less convenient than an existing 'solution'. In other words, if I pay, I have expectations.

Because business always end up meeting client expectation. Sometimes they do it kicking and screaming like the music industry, but now you can pay only one streaming service and have all the music. The movie industry will have the same fate in the end.

> now you can pay only one streaming service and have all the music

Which music streaming service is that?

[Not snarky, genuinely interested.]

Both Spotify and Apple Music try to be

More or less any of them. Spotify, Deezer, Apple music, Google music, etc. They all have near identical libraries and compete in other areas.

> all the music

Not all. There are many songs I had on CD that I can't play anymore.

I think the point being made was "if a song is available on one of these services, it is probably available on the rest as well."

What do companies feel entitled to keep profiting from content they made over a decade ago? Copyright lasts way too long IMO.

>Why do you feel so entitled to such ultimate convenience?

Businesses are in the game of enticing customers. If your homeware store is so bad that double-digit percentages of the population choose to steal glasses and cutlery from local bars rather than shop at your store, you need to take a long hard look at your business and figure out what the fuck you're doing so wrong.

You can bitch and moan about how it's wrong for people to steal from the bars if you want, but that's reality denial. It will not get you more customers.

The only thing making this "difficult" are the lawyers and execs who want that bigger bonus, so I have no problem at all pirating to get DRM free content.

Any other way you look at it digital media distribution should be a couple of dollars and an http (or torrent if they want to skip the bandwidth costs) file transfer away.

The consumer wants:

* one service to pay for

* what they want to watch

* on the device they choose

* on their schedule

* at their location.

Content holders want: to restrict, distinguish, and control every one of those.

To be fair, content holders want to make as much money as possible. Their attempts to restrict/distinguish/control are only because they (wrongly IMO) believe this will end up making them more money.

The consumer frequently says they want one service, but not I'm not sure that's accurate. At the very least they want a single platform through which to organize and view content (much like cable tv was, rather than swapping between Netflix, Prime, etc), but don't necessarily want monopolistic content producers. The future is effectively cable with everything on demand.

And frankly, just having an easy accessible way to rent any motion picture if it's not on a streaming platform. There's no reason for digital copies to be so inaccessible. Some things are literally only available on dvd/blue-ray or pirated.

> The consumer frequently says they want one service, but not I'm not sure that's accurate. … And frankly, just having an easy accessible way to rent any motion picture if it's not on a streaming platform.

Wouldn't whatever this "easy accessible way" is be the one service you're skeptical people want? I don't think anyone saying "I want one service" means "I hope to be locked in to one provider", but rather "I want one easy interface, and not to have to worry about surveying and paying for lots of siloed libraries."

> I don't think anyone saying "I want one service" means "I hope to be locked in to one provider"

It's a thin line, is what I'm warning.

> I want one easy interface

Definitely this.

We have various non-standardized interfaces currently for home entertainment with machines running their own enterprise software. The playstations, xboxes, apple TV, smart tvs, etc have their own mediocre ways of cobbling things and allowing you to rent / buy / stream.

Perhaps an open-source alternative is what's needed, but that's often so late to the game.

> Perhaps an open-source alternative is what's needed, but that's often so late to the game.

The problem is that the software part of it is comparatively easy; a perfect platform from the point of view of code, robustness, and useability means nothing unless you can get the rights-holders to agree to make their content available on it.

Is this actually a hurdle considering we can access all this content right from the browser? It could just be a container pointing to the content, I don't think it's necessitated that there be native launchers such that they aren't really "on" it.

> Is this actually a hurdle considering we can access all this content right from the browser?

Right, that's sort of what I mean—accessing it isn't the point. Once you've paid for and subscribed to every different streaming service today, and checked that there aren't a few more that have sprouted up overnight, then access is a solved problem, in the browser or prettified on the desktop. The hard part, and what I think people mean when they speak of wanting one service, is not having to curate, seek out, and pay for all those different streaming services in the first place.

DRM and walled gardens are the obstacle to open source media players. See above re control.

Definitely worth a comparison to the audio streaming market...

My Spotify subscription is £9.99 and gives me access to unlimited music from all artists (within reason - it’s very unlikely I find something not on there).

I’m willing to pay more for a video subscription that gives me access to unlimited tv and movies.

But to get everything on streaming I have to buy: - Amazon Subscription - Netflix Subscription - Apple TV subscription - Disney+ Subscription - Now TV - TV licence (iPlayer)

And after I have subscribed to all of these, there are still loads of movies and TV shows not covered.

I would pay for one subscription that had the content mixed in. It would be better to have a single £25 contract and get everything rather than this crazy fragmentation where you pay for 80% of the content 4 times and have to get an additional subscription if there is one series you want to watch on a different service.

I want every distribution service to have every piece of content. Just like how Blockbuster and Hollywood Video both got all the VHS tapes so you could pretty much always find the same things at each. I don't want Netflix to have one set of content, Amazon to have another, Disney to have a third, etc, and need to pay for all the services. I want multiple competing distributors.

I pay for the digital thing (movie, music, ebook), then pirate it.

>I have subscriptions to Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Criterion, Apple TV+ and PBS

WOW. I had netflix once for a few days, I paid for netflix just to watch House MD, a week into netflix, they removed House MD from my region, I cancelled subscription and moved to PT. Never came back to netflix, I just no longer trust them, too much effort and too much legal complications. I can imagine paying for one portal, but more than two? That's more expensive and less user friendly then cable TV.

ok not trusting them seems a little much on that example, surely they didn't promise you that House MD would be on in your region in perpetuity? Although there are probably lots other reasons not to trust them.

Why wouldn't it be there?

Netflix have the data, he has the money, what's the problem?

The problem is "too much legal complications" and that problem does not exist on Popcorn Time.

Well, it does if you reside anywhere such agencies as the MPAA, GEMMA, or BREIN can send jackbooted S.W.A.T. through your front door.

Yeah, this really looks to me like someone still clinking to the long obsolete broadcast model, where you had no back channel to your customers from them to request what they want & to pay for it. And also broadcasts were regionally bound.

So you sold a license to a local broadcasting company to for a time window and number of runs for a show. Not more you can do with no back channel for customers to request individual shows and pay for them. By only granting one license per are you can enforce some scarcity and get your money & hopefully users liked it. Channels could the compete who gets the best time based licenses, who gets the new hot stuff first, etc.

Now here we are with a global network with basically any user being able to request any show and pay for it (or get a subscription for a channel carrying it) and yet the media companies still carry one like one had to win an auction to get one of the broadcast masters, drag in on top of a hill to broadcast it and then return it back to someone else to do the same thing.

If all you can trust is direct promises then you can't trust them to do anything but take money.

It does seem perfectly enough to me. I gave them my address, details, credit card details, started watching a show from episode 1, they did not warn me "hey looks like you're watching a tv show that will be removed from netflix in a week, don't waste your time here" and it didn't expiration date on it, it just disappeared.

How would you feel to rent a car, go halfway to destination, take a nap in a hotel, then you wake up , car has no wheels, because wheels you had couldn't be used on that specific road, and you weren't warned about it. Breach of trust? Waste of time? Disappointment?

I see your point, although they would have to implement that functionality of notifying people, it's probably not that high priority unfortunately. I think a reasonable thing would be to show "leaving soon" notices on shows that have less than a month to go.

They used to have that feature, they used to publicly list content expiration They stopped doing that because people would unsub, and there were groups and communities around tracking the status of shows

They [netflix] ended that about the same time they ended their Public API and starting becoming a "Media Company" instead of a tech company, this is also the point in time they became less consumer centrist.

It's all due to investor pressure. Netflix was bleeding itself dry until they started making these changes.

I agree it was investor pressure, I 100% disagree they were "bleeding themselves dry"

The short term thinking of modern business to chancing as much quarterly growth has humanly possible long term health be damned was the investor pressure they were / are under.

This will short term thinking will be (and has been) the cause of major problems not just in netflix but many companies

I don't know, I had Netflix notify me a few months ago when we were watching Spongebob, that it was going to be removed in a couple of weeks time. It's still there though.

I have a running list of shows that I watch / watched that have been added and removed from Netflix and Prime over the years I have been a subscriber.

I run a local media server for things I have on BluRay or DVD, I used to archive shows I could also get on one of those 2 platforms but it became major hassle because they would remove and add the shows my family wants access to all the time... When I started tracking it, it was amazing how much churn there was on popular titles

If you stick around long enough you’ll see it pop back up. Shows that are sufficiently in demand get renegotiated every few years and move platforms.

My current frustration is stargate. It is not available digitally in my region in any legal way because mgm is trying to negotiate a buyout by apple and doesn’t want any streaming rights to get in the way. I wanted to show it to my son and my options are limited to ordering a physical disk for a one-off viewing, or piracy.

If you're in the United States, Stargate is available free on broadcast in many cities. I run across it frequently when flipping between the various western channels.

I used netflix, I liked their content (99% of what I watch are series, so I don’t care about movies). What made me finally cancel was their UX that they seem hellbent on making worse and worse.

1. No, I don’t want to get rewatch suggestions.

2. Yes, I’d like to have always the same thumbnail for the same show.

3. Yes, I’d like to tell you "Never show me this show again".

4. No, I don’t want any automatic screen movement.

A cherry on top would be having a toggle to only show me shows with English subs.

Looks like you were more looking for a reason not to have to pay anymore. Point of netflix is to watch content, not the UX of the home page.

Looks like you prefer to incite people over contributing to any kind of intelligent discussion. But FWIW, I kinda need to use the netflix site to look for stuff to watch.

I have a Jellyfin server and access to most content I want, but I'm still paying for Netflix because:

1. The content is nicely organised;

2. There's a button for it on my TV remotes; and

3. The UX is way more accessible for the elderly members of my family.

Yeah. The Disney+ and Apple TV+ subs are via free first-year promos at the moment and I have Amazon Prime for its other benefits. PBS is included with supporting my local station. Criterion has a long tail of old movies they own both streaming and physical rights distributions to. But yeah...

If your library has it, Kanopy is free and includes a fairly large rotating set of Criterion films. Also some popular movies (Ex Machina was on there last time I checked) and a lot of documentaries. Some mostly-terrible single-camera TV learning type programs. But overall it's a damn good selection. Limited number of views per month but you can watch at least one movie a week on it—may vary library to library, not sure how the payment structure works. You won't find Marvel movies on there but if you're into cinema it's worth the time to sign up, especially if you don't pay for Criterion or any of the other, specialized streaming services along those lines.

Imagine if there was some kind of central digital rights management system, that simply kept track of which shows and movies a consumer had purchased/leased the right to see, and then they got to legally see it from wherever they pleased, including bittorrent. Forcibly (by regulation I imagine) separating the "negotiating licensing deals with rights-holders" businesses from the "delivering video to the consumers" businesses. You could stick to whatever delivery platform you preferred, maybe get a marketplace to see the cheapest options to get to view the video you wanted if it wasn't already included in any of your current subscriptions.

That sounds severely more dystopian than what we have now. I pray that this does not come to fruition. Don't give them ideas.

We could have the opposite. A system that just list in what streaming platform a specific movie/show can be found. In that way no private info will ever be leaked.

Google has this functionality in knowledge cards (if you are signed in, you can even tell it what you subscribe to), or https://justwatch.com is a non-Google service that does the same thing.

Personally as a Condition of copyright a person should be required to allow distribution of their work in a Fair and non-discriminatory way, there should not be a concept of "exclusive", a creator or publisher should put a price on the work, then anyone can distribute that work for that price

Try as I might, I cannot subscribe to cable internet without a TV package. So I'm shelling out over $100/mo to a monopoly for both. On top of that. I pay at least $50/mo for several additional streaming services. What is the monthly cost I would have to pay to get general access to all streaming content? Twice that much? Ten times as much?

I came to the same conclusion, I can "buy" a movie with Amazon Video Prime, but they're DRMed so technically I didn't own anything. Nothing is like you buy a DVD with these streaming services.

Even DVDs are DRMed, though it's easy to strip.

I usually use https://www.justwatch.com/ca/new to find what service a movie is on. US: https://www.justwatch.com/us/new and other countries are linked on their homepage at the bottom. Some minor Stylish/uBlock rules:

    .consent-banner { display: none; }
    ion-tab[tab="new"] .content-header { display: none; }
    ion-tab[tab="popular"] .content-header { display: none; }

Off topic from main thread, but how do you use those style rules in uBlock? I've tried looking but I can't find anything for rules like that.

You can create rules to hide something by right-clicking on the page and choosing 'Block an element', or by adding a rule like justwatch.com##.consent-banner in your filter parameters.

Not OP, but open the uBlock Origin Dashboard and put them in the section for rules.

uBlock Origin is not the same as uBlock. I prefer Origin.

How to open the Dashboard https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dashboard

Anyone know where such websites get their data? I'm looking for an API for Netflix that would let me list all movies that have specific subtitles available. Netflix.com/browse/subtitles only shows a limited amount of movies.

Netflix closed their API some years ago. Only a few grandfathered sites still have access.

eg. I use instantwatcher.com

They maintain scrapers/indexers undoubtedly. In the absence of an API, you can scrape the aggregators yourself.

It's even worse if you watch stuff that's not popular. Hollywood is not really my thing so I usually watch more arthouse or vintage movies. Eg. 60's French or Italian cinema, or 80's/90's Asian cinema. Not only are these simply not available on most streaming/rental platforms, torrents can be incredibly hard to find without access to a private tracker. And even if I can find a public torrent it usually doesn't have many seeds.

It's really quite saddening to me that some classic cinema is essentially dead, completely inaccessible.

I eventually found Mubi, which is a relatively cheap arthouse movie streaming/rental service. So at least I have that for now. Until they go out of business because they're not popular enough.

> Hollywood is not really my thing

I have that issue as well and i'm happy I see more and more vintage stuff (shows and movies) on Archive.

A friend of mine is their marketing manager, they are doing ok. The long tail is really long ;) and services like Mubi have a pretty good (and often wealthy) niche to get money from.

Please tell them that their homepage is shit.

At lest the German version that I get to see. I want to know how much that costs but it only offers me a 7days free subscription. Even when I go to the gift option it asks me to sign in...this is terrible.

When I click through "Try 7 days free", it then gives me some info and says "Start free trial version", when I press that button it tells me:

    maandelijks €9,99 per maand
    jaarlijks €7,99 per maand
    Afgeschreven in één betaling van €95,88

When seems sufficiently accessible to me. The next step is creating an account.

Might have to give this a try.

Yes, I get that too. I didn't see that because I didn't click that "start free trial version" button because it's not what I wanted to do and actually it's not even what you get when you click that button.

This is just bad.

I disagree. If you're interested in the product and want to give it a try because you know you get a free trial, that's exactly what you're going to do. It doesn't seem bad at all to me.

I was interested until it asked me to sign in.

I assumed that I'd have to create an account before I get to know the prices and therefore I lost interest.

60's French or Italian cinema, or 80's/90's Asian cinema

It doesn't even have to be something as niche as that. Even popular productions can be impossible to watch if the rights holders aren't interested.

Try to find 77 Sunset Strip. It was a massively popular television series that ran for years on TV. It simply doesn't exist anymore. Not on broadcast, cable, streaming, DVD, or any other platform. You can't even torrent it.

I have a relative who lives off the grid. He has this massive collection of thrift store VHS tapes that he watches. I'm so envious every time I see it. So much quality material that simply cannot be watched anymore by any means because they never made the transition to digital.

>You can't even torrent it.

You sure? Seems to be around on torrent sites these days. (At least, most of it.)

But yes, it's frustrating that there's media out there with no legal way to watch it. At least, not unless you're lucky enough to stumble upon a secondhand physical copy.

I tried last month. For even one episode it said the transfer time was 37 years.

Yup, even Evangelion was like that for many years, and so too a lot of British dramas. Even recent hits like Deutschland 83 and Utopia were missing from American market for years.

I was recently rewatching a popular show from the 00's on either Netflix or prime, I was 1/2 through the show when one day I woke up to find it completely gone from all services i am member of...

Guess what, it does not just disappear from my Plex/Emby server...

Online stream services was suppose to resolve the CableTV problem of paying for 1000 channels to watch the 5 you want.

Now Every network, every media company, every one is creating their own streaming service with all of their content "exclusive" so I would need to sign up for like 20+ services to get access to about 60% of the content that I want to watch as the other 40% is simply not on any streaming service at all it is either too new or too old

Justwatch.com has more than 85 Streaming Services in their database... that is crazy

Yeah we're basically back to Cable.

Thanks to MPAA taking out popcorn in the last couple of days, I discovered in the HN post the next big and marvellous torrent thing : https://www.stremio.com/

Its like PT on steroids with add-ons.

The only caveat is taking 5 additional minutes to install add-ons (TPB+ can be your first choice to get you going)

There is one that list IMDB TOP 250, in order, ready to stream

I have Netflix and Disney+ just to buy moral credit; but since ~1y torrent at will again. Thank you MPAA for enlightening me

It's like whack-a-mole but the moles keep coming back with armour

Read their TOS, It's really quite.... Iffy.

When you decided you don't give a damn, the Torrentio plugin is where It's at, scrapes way many public trackers.

What do you mean ?

Actually it seems like this has changed since last I checked it.

"IMPORTANT: We do not collect any history or logs of what addons/sources you use for streaming! Furthermore, if you login as a Guest User, no personal data will be collected whatsoever." - https://web.archive.org/web/20200514142904/https://www.strem... (Their own privacy page doesn't load for me)

That clause has not always been there.

> So I downloaded it off Usenet instead.

Let's reword that as:

"I couldn't get this thing for the price I wanted so I stole a copy"

Seriously? Imagine going into a box store and doing that. You would face a high probability of being arrested for theft.

But he didn't steal anything. He copied it (illegally).

Oh you got me! What a fine technically correct and utterly useless distinction you've made that only the techno-elite of HN accept as a valid defense.

Even if he was authorized to make the copy he would have still needed to pay to use the copy.

He's not authorized to make or use the copy.

> What a fine technically correct and utterly useless distinction

It's not a useless distinction though. One can argue that stealing is bad because when I steal your car, you don't have access to your car anymore. If I were to copy your car I wouldn't harm you.

That doesn't mean it's okay to illegally copy something, but comparing it to theft is unhelpful at best and misleading at worst.

Imagine going into a box store and taking a copy of a box.

It's not theft.

It's more like reading the magazines in the magazine aisle and then not buying anything

Clearly words don’t have meaning to you if you’re happy to reword what they said like that. Digital piracy is not and never has been theft. No one has been deprived of their property. It’s illegal, yes, and you can argue about the ethics surrounding it all you like - but the fact remains, stealing a CD and downloading an album rip are materially different things.

Speaking of CDs: the music industry (maybe RIAA was involved, I don’t know) seems to have figured out digital content delivery. I’ve got exactly one subscription for music: Spotify. I can get all the music I want to listen to with this, more than I could ever get when I used BitTorrent (public trackers were sometimes limited, and seeding on ADSL was hard). If they were to raise the price, I’d still use it. There are issues with how artists are remunerated for their work, but the problem of distribution is basically solved. Why can’t the film industry do this?

> No one has been deprived of their property.

You deprived someone of the revenue generated by their property. Still theft.

If you squat in an apartment, is that theft?

>You deprived someone of the revenue generated by their property

You have not; that revenue never existed.

Squatting is sometimes legal (in the UK at least) and squatters can end up owning the property if they live there long enough.

That's not a good analogy either. Apartment is a physical, limited resource, using it denies it to its owner and deteriorates its condition. Digital copy shares none of the properties with a physical resource.

Revenue from a purchase that I'm not going to make is non-existent. It can't be lost or gained.

I found this some time ago to find where I can watch something https://www.justwatch.com

Yhis is just a service that fills yet another gap from all this fragmentation, but in a way it's better than some media company having a monopoly on anything we can watch.

Unfortunately, on the Canadian JustWatch, I find the answer is frequently 'this is totally unavailable for you to legally view or purchase digitally in Canada', at which point I end up pirating it.

Funny, I was able to watch that on some streaming service not long ago. Sucks that it rotated off.

This is absolutely true and this is what Netflix and Spotify have proven. If you provide an easy to use digital platform people will subscribe.

Now Netflix has a higher market cap than most Hollywood Studios, and Spotify has a higher market cap than most if not all record companies.

But this is the classic case of not listening to your customers and innovators dilemma.

Old models of business are very slow to change and it has happened time and time again. Movies, music, newspapers, and so forth.

Netflix was great when it first came out, but as the providers fragment into their own streaming services it's killing the model. I'm not interested in paying >$100/mo cable-tv-channel-package-style, at this point I'd rather drop that cash on a VPN and seedbox and still have $80 left over.

You are an adult, with kids, who pays bills and thinks the cost of a rental justify your piracy.

All of the convenience arguments are gone now, it’s just about $15 you didn’t think you should have to pay. Super weird thing to admit!

I get doin it, but I don’t get defending it.

> [...] it will not end until the movie business gives consumers what they want: a cheap global service to watch anything anytime.

I would happily pay something like $30 or even $50 per month if I would get access to everything anytime. But then again that's probably because right now I pay around $15 per service that only give me ~5% of the total content each.

Movies and TV shows cost more to make than songs. $39 a month, sure.

Let me do a back of envelope calculation. This source [1] claims that the average production cost of a Hollywood movie has risen to $40 million. This is based on 5713 movies produced between 1999-2020, which is about 285 movies/year. Let's double that for fun and figure out what happens if you hit 500 million subscribers worldwide. 600 movies *40m/movie /500m subscribers = $48 /subscriber every year.

So presumably, only $4 dollars a month is more than enough to cover the cost of producing all Hollywood movies - ignore of course, all other sources of revenue such as cinema tickets and product placement etc.

Is marketing and distribution online really 9x the cost of producing the movie itself?

[1] https://stephenfollows.com/how-has-the-cost-of-making-a-movi...

But how else are movie executives supposed to afford cocaine?

Jokes aside, this is a very interesting calculation - it seems the issue with a system like this would be the monopoly and centralization, as the numbers themselves stack up quite ok.

But that would just be (not quite) breaking even. Major Hollywood films often make 3x or more their budget in profit.

And marketing costs are huge and for some reason not included in the film budget.

In 2020, people are consuming "movies" and "television" like they're the same thing. You have to include those in the cost.

Finally, if you're including worldwide subscribers, you have to include worldwide producers, not just Hollywood.

> Major Hollywood films often make 3x or more their budget in profit.

Other movies will balance this out though by making a loss - that's the business model. The interesting thing would be the average profit margin across all films at a studio or the industry.

The business model is assuredly not to break even, so I contest "balance this out."

There is risk involved and while some films flop the outcome has historically been significant profit.

Well yes, because they get creative with the accounting and those movies that hit $500+ million suddenly turn zero profit come time to pay taxes while some B or C film that costs a few paltry million at most to make and shovel right onto streaming services and net them $90 mil tops are what they pay taxes on, because they made a "profit".

> the outcome has historically been significant profit.

Nobody is entitled to profit. Ask candlemakers.

Nothing of the sort was suggested.

I also have another reason why I feel like download and off-line-only video is important:

Privacy.

Streaming services have increasingly terrifying and inescapable telemetry. Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Google - all of them collect extremely telling things about us due to when we pause video, for how long, which bits we rewind back to, when we consume the content during the time, where (GPS-wise), how often we play them, the collective profiling of us based on what we download in general...and many other things we don't even know about.

After listening to Shoshana Zuboff's audiobook 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism' - the most important book I have ever read on technology - I am very aware of this. The data companies don't want us to be aware of what they're doing to us.

I'm not condoning piracy, and I believe content creators should be fairly compensated for their hard work - but unless there's a convenient way to be able to consume content in my own open-source local software such as MPV, all offline, and in full privacy without being spied on, I refuse to legitimise the alternative.

I realise there's still blu-ray and DVD, but not always - many releases are web only, now. I'd even pay a premium more for such non-DRM content...your move, Hollywood.

It was never natural to have people watch and profile us when we're already paying money to watch personal entertainment, on this massive global scale.

With peer to peer file sharing you tell the whole world what you are watching.

He didn't mention p2p, did he? I can go years without touching p2p, while still pirating everything I want to watch.

You're still advertising to anyone and everyone with admin access who cares to parse their log files every server hop you make to get it.

On the other hand, all of

> when we pause video, for how long, which bits we rewind back to, when we consume the content during the time, where (GPS-wise), how often we play them

is entirely hidden. What model gives that up, but keeps the identity of the video you're watching private?

Not at all. You share with an assortment of randoms that you're downloading a particular file (that they're also downloading) at a particular time. That's all. You don't tell them when you watched it, how many times, whether and when you paused it, or whether you fast forwarded the naughty bits or went back to re-watch them. It's far less intrusive.

And most importantly, those few randoms don't have a flood of other data being scraped from your phone, social media, credit card transactions etc. to cross-correlate your viewing with. They don't see that you paused the movie when the main character put on some Nikes and went online shopping for a pair of Nikes for yourself. They don't see that you have friends over. They don't see what brand of microwave popcorn you watch with your movies. They don't care.

Anyone who wants to know who is downloading a particular file can become one of the randoms

And the rest (more important) part of his point still stands.

I don't believe he mentioned p2p anywhere in his comment.

I agree about streaming services.

Use a reputable VPN.

I have some bad news for you. None of us will ever find out what you watched on Netflix. Netflix won’t share that data with anyone, nor will anyone serve Netflix a warrant to find out what.

But any peer on the torrent you downloaded knows your IP address. Content holders often do this, they monitor the IP addresses that download their shows and send the user a letter via their ISP to cease and desist.

Enter VPN. Trivial to setup after some research.

There are other options than torrenting.

Till when ? Because now they don't have (?) model to profit from it ? All streaming platforms are grabbing all remote control presses thoroughly. That's data first approach. Ask your favorite SMART TV too.

> Netflix won’t share that data with anyone

You think I'm only talking about Netflix? What about the data giant Spotify?

https://libraryfreedom.chat/t/extraordinary-amount-of-teleme...

And as for the one company you mention, Netflix, here's some info which simply proves your claim wrong:

https://www.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/2uffl9/how_much_da...

https://help.netflix.com/legal/privacy

> I have some bad news for you. None of us will ever find out ...

Ever heard of Max Schrems? He did exactly this (use GDPR to obtain his records) for Facebook.

Not sure why you think Netflix would never go through the same hullabaloo - they operate in the EU as well.

> Netflix won’t share that data with anyone

They'll share their data with the NSA when they come knocking, just like all the other large corporations. In fact, they probably already _are_ sharing it.

Judging from the stuff in the Afghanistan Papers link posted in a thread here the other day, there's already a huge group of major US(?) companies freely sharing intel with US intelligence agencies—the implication, in context, was that they'd either opened up access to some portion of their data on users/citizens for intel agencies to dig through whenever they want, or that they're actively looking for certain kinds of info then passing that along, not just that they respond to warrants—and that's considered common-enough knowledge that its existence wasn't redacted. Dunno who's included but I doubt none of the big tech companies are.

Yeah, because to get around pesky things like needing warrants signed by a judge they simply sign contracts with these companies who provide them with tons of info for a hefty fee. See: The C.I.A. and their fat ten year contract with WaPo.

Do people actually still torrent without using a VPN? That seems... unwise.

Kids usually. I know I didn't have money to buy a VPN when I was in high school, but I wasn't going to let that stop me from watching the entire backlog of anime my friends were enjoying at the time. Luckily, that was a bit before the letter's started going out with more consistency.

I do. But I never heard about anyone going after torrent downloaders in my country. Can switch to VPN if necessary.

If you pay for a VPN, you could just as well pay for the official streaming service

Way cheaper to pay for single VPN service vs every streaming service out there (plus new ones every month)

True, much cheaper to steal than paying creators.

There's only one country in the world where copyright is enforced against end-users.

Here's the threat model. A president of the united states calls up his friend in Netflix "Hey can I get a list of all my enemies in my admin, in congress, in courts and the military". Said friend says "sure thing I'll just run some sql queries for who watched movie x, y, z and hand you the results".

Now said president discovers that a few people he considered trustworthy seem to be secretly having qualms about his increasing powergrabs. He manufactures a few roadblocks in their careers and within a year and a half they have all been cleaned out.

With them gone he is able to go ever further and more brazen. One day he proclaims himself dictator, and all branches cheer and celebrate.

Wait, you mean to tell me that all those BitTorrent peers are now aware of my VPN IP address?? I should let my VPN provider know so that they can forward the DMCA complaints to me...

You're fearmongering. I've been torrenting for the better part of 20 years and still haven't received one of these nastygrams.

Takedowns often aim at more than the case in question. By going after Popcorn Time, MPAA also sends clear message to other projects.

I can imagine that software like Popcorn changes hands every once in a while to a grey-area investor who thinks they can make money off of it.

a cheap global service to watch anything anytime

I don't know about Hollywood movies, but for TV shows that would require the makers buying a perpetual license for anything they use in the show. That would probably make it too expensive to make something anyone would actually want to watch. Shows would have to have no cultural references (eg a pop song) in them at all.

More likely, they would do what Netflix is doing when faced with the same problem (time-limited licenses): they would commission more original music from cheaper, less-known (and likely younger) artists.

Honestly, I can survive the thought of not having a Bowie song in every other production.

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