Consolidation efforts like Netflix prevented piracy, but the splintering of streaming services has encouraged it, and sports (and especially football) has become the great fulcrum. Pirating sports is huge right now, because their distribution is an anti-consumer mess. Cable is using them to cling for dear life, streaming services own fragments, and some teams even have their own dedicated networks.
Eventually I think it will break, and somebody is going to have to take a haircut. Likely cable, with a slight shot to the sports leagues who have benefitted from cables desperation and entrenched customers. Consumers may finally getting a reasonable-ish price (maybe $20 a month instead of $65).
I believe Disney is in the best place to execute this: owning ESPN, ABC, Disney+, and enough of Hulu. They've made the largest investment into the NFL of any company, but rights are all scattered between Amazon, CBS, Fox, and NBC until 2033! I could see them acquiring either the rest of Fox and/or CBS (who hold down Sunday slots), maybe work out a deal for RedZone with the NFL, and pull in noon and afternoon audiences, which might be the tipping point that gets consumers on board.
You lose a lot by not following a sport in real time, especially if such sport is part of your social environment, and likewise you lose a lot if you just see highlights.
For an example of a perfect digital play, I think the America's Cup would be it: live streaming, analysis, interviews, replays, highlights.
It competes directly with tv streaming, but it can do that because it has a much smaller following.
Is it as easy to steal as it used to be? I'm not even sure I know where to get torrents reliably atm. Last I knew pirate bay was always being disrupted.
And is it easy to rip stuff when the source is streamed? Like dvds, music, software is easy to copy and distribute when it was just a cd to copy and some authentication to work around.
Im totally out of the piracy loop, maybe im wrong and still as easy as getting on to pirate bay and find a decently reviewed torrent?
Its not the Napster era of finding any obscure stuff because torrents work on popularity, but should be good enough for 95% of your searches.
Besides, at this point, I believe Piratebay will survive forever.
Yes. The quality is better and it can be easily automated with Sonarr, Radarr et al. Torrents are not the way to go imho, but Usenet is amazing (notably it isn’t necessarily free).
There is content that isn’t available in my region or the legal options are worse in some way (resolution, app UI etc).
I pay for several streaming services (mainly to keep my conscience clear) but watch their shows via pirated means as the experience is better.
As the provider options get broader, the piracy option also gets more attractive as it’s all in one place.
I hopped back into it about 3y ago. I’ve got a NAS running on my local network with sonarr to snatch new tv shows and radarr for new movies.
In practice, if I decide I want to watch a movie I can reliably pull down something high quality within 2-10m (depending on how esoteric it is) and then be watching it on our tv.
The risk of companies that literally refuse to take money for their products is people will just get them elsewhere, but once you force people to open that door, you knock down a major barrier.
Can we avoid the conflation of piracy and stealing? Stealing under the pre-internet definition has very different consequences from the duplication of copyable resources.
If you're not a potential customer, and don't share the media, copyright holder et al have lost nothing. If you do share, they're out whatever percentage of people who you passed the data to that were potential customers.
If I own something via other distribution channels or physical media, I have no compunction against downloading, nor if I know I will never pay for it otherwise. I have on occasion tried out software I've pirated and paid for a real license after continued use, or purchased physical media despite having the album or movie from a torrent. I have to assume that I'm not an outlier, so it occurs to me that piracy may actually be a net positive influence on media companies revenue. The marketing of content is good in terms of exposure, software reviews and recommendation, and so forth.
It may actually be a social good, depending on the culture at the time, creating more free channels of distribution and communication about content products, and services that otherwise wouldn't exist or would be stifled.
It's not theft. At worst it's cheating at the game of commerce.
P2P can't be 100% leeches, so the lawyers always have plenty of people to go after.
To get to the tech savvy folks, they tear down VPNs and force the hands of ISPs.
Especially this part. Spotify in particular is bad this way, with the artists getting a nearly invisibly small slice of the money. Youtube isn't much better. Reduce the friction that prevents me from giving my money directly to the artists to support their work and I'd be a much bigger paying consumer of online media.
The search there isn't great but I find a huge % of things I'm interested in come up on a websearch for: artistname albumname bandcamp
I would watch way more baseball if it weren't for MLB.com. It's got some OK features, but overall the service is a garbage fire technically. They stuck with Flash until the bitter end. But even if they fixed the technical issues, the restrictions on access cripple the service.
I'm a musician myself but have no interest in recording or selling music.
I guess this depends on the genre, area, etc. But whenever I've talked to (low to mid level) musicians, live performances are basically the only way they make money.
The sale of music is so ridiculously low for them, particularly considering the low percentage of profit they get, that it might as well be considered an ad for the live performance.
There's a middle level out there. The genres I'm familiar with are things like folk, fiddling, some classical. Some of those people are good enough to travel a little bit, and have a supportive following. Sometimes a local organization will help arrange for a venue, and promote it. Those folks always have a briefcase full of CDs with them.