Piracy release group EVO ‘blames’ movie industry for its popularity
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
I would've had a much better experience if I'd just went to thepiratebay and sought out nine MKV files instead.
I'm pretty sure I watch HD Netflix in Safari. Surely I can't be watching 720p and be deceiving myself?
The difference between Netflix 1080 and 720p is often pretty small, so you might've really just not noticed. They're generally streaming with pretty poor bit-rates
The first time I watched a pirated episode after years of streaming from Netflix was pretty eye opening for me wrt video quality.
My point was that the pixel density is pretty hard to determine with low Bitrate streams as you get them from Netflix.
You can check for yourself, hit Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D during playback to show a bunch of stats on the stream, including the current resolution being shown.
While I'm on the subject... about a year ago I tried subscribing to the 4K plan, since I bought a 4K monitor. Netflix only played in 4K if I used an HDMI cable, not DisplayPort, and only if I completely unplugged my secondary 1440p monitor (turning it off wasn't enough).
I would maybe understand enforcing that requirement if it was effective in protecting the content, but it isn't. 4K content (from UHD blurays and various streaming services) is widely available to pirate, and VLC doesn't care what kind of cable you're using.
Speculation on my part but I wouldn’t be surprised if those kinds of requirements are mainly there to appease motion picture industry partners who Netflix is licensing content from.
Furthermore, given the long experience the people of the release groups in the piracy scene have in fine tuning video codec parameters for optimal balance between quality and file size, and choosing video codecs that can be decoded on a wide range of devices, I think it is highly probable that many of the people working on the technical side of these things at Netflix have had roles in various piracy release groups prior to having come to work for Netflix.
Not saying Netflix would actively seek out piracy release group members to hire them. In fact it’d probably count as negative to openly state any kind of involvement with the piracy scene, and especially to mention having been part of a release group. What I mean is just that the people who were members of these groups have both the skills and the technical motivation to work on these same kinds of things for Netflix.
Quite likely, but why I, the end user, would ever care about that?
it just degrades my experience.
And those partners require it not because it protects something but because they make money of it by running licensing agencies, so they profit from every compliant monitor and video card sold.
How do I check that ?
https://cd-rw.org/t/how-to-enable-netflix-full-hd-1080p-on-l... Ah, there's an extension.
edit: https://www.netflix.com/fi-en/title/80018499 Aaand I have been watching 720p... :D.
Of course forget about it on anything other than windows (maybe mac?)
Now I just torrent things and play them in VLC. Same or better quality, no buffering, custom subtitle size if I want. And 100% reliable.
Now that I think about it, the physical disks feel like real-world NFTs.
I know many people who stream music 95% of the time, but have a big collection of their favorite albums on vinyl, some of them unopened, as a way to support the artist / a piece of art / keepsake / speculative long term investment, etc.
Real-world NFT is a fun analogy.
Once acquired, I then take the disc data and strip its own DRM off of it. Now I have the content with the absolute best quality and can just sit back and play it in my preferred player. Obviously this is a hassle compared to just clicking play on Netflix/buying online but I am still enjoying the ability while it lasts. After all, with declining sales of Blu-ray and 4K UHD Blu-Ray seeming like its a bust, there are probably only a few years left until we lose this avenue of control of our media.
The MakeMKV Forums will get you started on the best drives/proper techniques.
The only trouble I see is that streaming service use those metrics to decide which shows to not cancel and that way of watching doesn’t get counted. (I have a bad record of enjoying many shows that didn’t get renewed… still grumbly about the dirk gentley)
I did. I had none of your issues.
"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem." — Gabe Newell
Initially they offered their streaming service at a very competitive price, but I think they have gotten some of the sequencing wrong after that. Initially early subscribers were hit with these up charges for new films. I think Mulan might have been the first one?
It was mid pandemic and they didn't get a chance to release it in theatres, so I think it felt like it made sense at the time and I am guessing they saw it as pretty successful. They quickly started doing it with far less interesting films, and ones that I could see at release time in the theatre.
At home streaming just isn't a "special occasion" like going to the theatre is, and while I was happy to make it a special occasion during the depths of stay-at-home lockdowns, there are a lot of competitive forces now. An extra $20 or $30 might seem to Disney like an amount people will happily pay for every new release, but I think the appetite for that will be pretty low going forward.
Disney also offered an attractive discount for a 1-year subscription initially, so it was pretty easy to do. I've been happy with it, but I notice my kids are on Netflix much much more. That really surprised me.
Now, my subscription renews in April of 2022, but Disney has already started emailing me that it is going to increase almost 50% in cost at renewal time. I don't know why they feel the need to start telling me that so far in advance, or so many times (3 emails now). All it's done is make me thing "ok, that's a lot, let's see if we really use it" and also "hmm, I've spent some $ on these new releases".
They don't seem patient or that they are thinking through this messaging/experience nearly as well as Netflix. Netflix does increase their prices but they do it rarely and they always pummel you with new content around the time they are doing it. They also packaged in lower resolution options, etc so you can keep your costs down if you really want to. Disney hasn't done any of that.
Disney+ initially available at what I considered a fair price, and now they want to hike it by something like 50% - which seems totally unreasonable.
Furthermore, it seems like so much more content now is not included in the monthly fee - they want to extract even more money from us! And I take issue with the actual pricing here too, for example Mulan was a whopping £20 - for comparison, an adult cinema ticket is around £10! So again, this feels totally unfair and unjustified.
Disney is meant to be about "fun", but I don't think we'll be renewing, because, frankly, they are taking the piss and making me hate the service.
That's not surprising. What if there's more than one person watching the stream?
> Disney is meant to be about "fun"
multiple decades ago, maybe
So what if there is?
I'm watching at home, using my TV - it is nowhere close to a "cinema experience", I'm already paying a monthly fee, and I don't believe I've ever seen any streaming rental as expensive as £20 before. So, it was certainly a surprise to me!
To replicate the cinema experience, for another €20 you could pay some kids to kick your seat and rustle chip packets, then turn the volume up to unbearable and play 35 mins of adverts before the movie.
It was a completely unsustainable predatory price aimed at making initial marketshare.
Disney+'s price target is roughly £30 per month... As is Netflix's.
I see Disney+ as an "add on" streaming service - something you might get on top off either NetFlix or Amazon Prime, and as such I'd expect to stream far less content from Disney+. Even with 2 young kids, this has indeed been the case.
Sustainable in terms of maintaining the same old catalogue indefinitely? Or sustainable enough to finance new films and series? That's the problem. The existing catalogue costs almost nothing to stream while new shows cost a ton to produce.
A live action TV show costs $3-15 million to produce. They have ~116 million subscribers. If they “invest” $2/subscriber/month into new content, that means they can make 15-77 new episodes per month (a film could be considered to take up several episode slots).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Cinematic_Universe:_Pha...
Avengers infinity war isn’t an exclusive on any of their streaming services making it’s cost to produce meaningless. Disney is all about milking content with ultra cheap sequels / derivatives and old content, that’s what’s going to be included on Disney+ not a new 100+M dollar film. Remember they have had several Cable channels for years they know how to make cheap content.
That said, they could easily pay for several big budget movies per year as Disney+ exclusives without upping it’s initial price. Instead they have zero interest in being good value for money rather than maximizing profits and minimizing risks.
To be blunt, what you felt about it wasn't really relevant. It wasn't sustainable in terms of revenue, and was a fragment of what Disney received from their previous licensing deals. It would not even cover residuals for existing content, never mind new production.
The average household spend on content is about $60pm, and that figure in real terms is surprisingly stable.
It'd be way easier to cut down on stream cycling than account sharing, too - just jack up the monthly price and make the annual price cheaper.
[0] which is particularly rich because they sell multi-stream plans that are almost practically built for it
Unless you need to watch the viral stuff as soon as they are released and people start talking, this is more than fine.
Disney literally haven't done any Premier Access titles in months now that cinemas have reopened.
Disney+ was always a service aimed at taking over the pay television market - and pay television was always roughly a year behind the theatrical release. They did a small run of (pretty cheap) extra paid releases while no cinemas were open, but that has now ended.
Maybe they hope, by informing you so early, you'll have forgotten about the price increase by the time your renewal goes through?
On people and their goverment. What is wrong with them? Well, some people value the product at that price tag. And since people can live without that product (multimedia) their government don't really care.
For me the problem of copyright mindset is locking hardware to specific Intellectual Property software. Multimedia is not a necessity, it is entertaiment.
Well, if you are thinking of not renewing and foget, it is 100% on you. If you are considering not renewing, you should unsub now so that it doesn't auto-renew.
We do not have Disney+ 'special' films here for a one-time €20-30 fee, a result of film release regulations in this country (I think). Still, considering it is about €13 an adult ticket at the cinema here, if there are a few of us watching a new release I can see how it might make sense. Sure, not the cinema experience, but comparable in price, improved comfort, the chance to pause if needed, and no babysitter to pay for.
Early Prime Video used to have a lot of shows with only the first season available with not extra cost, and you'd only realise that by the time you finished it and was going to watch Season 2, only to be slapped with a rental fee for it and all subsequent ones.
I haven't seen much of that for a while (although admittedly I rarely go on there - I wish there was a cheaper Prime tier with only the delivery advantages).
A couple weeks ago though, I started watching a show. I logged in, put on S1E1 and all was good. That is, until I tried to watch S1E2 and found out that everything from that point on was behind a rent wall. Just to clarify, I had actually had a quick look to see if the later seasons were included, and it did look like they were. Until they didn't. Utterly awful experience.
In regards to theaters being a "special occasion", I am not sure where you live but here in the US we have "monthly subscriptions" for movie theaters. For example, for ~25$ a month I can sign up for AMC Stubs A-List which allows me to see three films a week in any format I want (standard def, IMAX, Dolby Premium, 3D or whatever else they have) each week for the month. (Thats typically 12 films a month). This is unbelievable value, yet even to this day I see theaters are flat out empty with the exception of Superhero films and established franchises (eg. James Bond). I can't tell you how many films I have seen this year (since getting vaccinated) where I was literally the only one in the theater. For one film I discovered there is a regular light switch that controls the lights in the theater and so I watched the film with the lights on ha ha!
I think movies and ;possibly "old media" are just failing for peoples attention in favor of things like Youtube/Instagram/Twitch etc. After all there are 24 hours in a day and no way to expand that so everyone has to compete by taking away some time spent on existing forms of media.
We might start that up again once he’s fully vaccinated (mid-December) but otherwise we haven’t seen a movie in theaters since February 2020. I know the world has been open for most people for awhile now but for a lot of us it hasn’t been.
I’m really looking forward to taking my son to a movie in a theater for the first time in his life, maybe on Christmas day (he was too young when the pandemic started).
If my network can maintain more bandwidth than needed for 1080p/4k most of the time (which it can) then there is no reason it should ever fall back to lower quality due to a short blip because you can keep several seconds (or minutes) of buffer.
For example I never have this problem on Youtube. Only Netflix.
If they can't make it work with 1/10th of that, that is their problem, not mine.
I would more prefer it would buffer more so it doesn't need to do either.
I can't imagine why they've chosen the path they have /s
I think what they're trying to avoid is people capturing/copying the 4K stream, that's high quality enough to be considered a "master", and distributing it. IMO it's a pointless thing to do because dedicated piracy groups will quickly figure out ways to do that anyway, and it makes the average user experience worse. However, they are probably contractually obligated to do so.
And just like I don't buy that argument, I don't buy their service either. I'm not going to pay for an intentionally crippled experience.
The reason they don't support high resolution is just DRM. They will happily deliver 4k video to your underpowered Windows machine which will lag and not play it properly, as long as it uses Widevine L1 or similar.
You can argue if this makes sense or not [1], but let's not pretend they are doing this for some difficult engineering reasons.
[1] This doesn't seem to stop pirates in any way so I can't see how it does.
I've given up keeping up. The combination of Radarr + Sonarr + Plex or Jellyfin + Sabnzbd + a Usenet account @ ~$10/month is too good. I have immediate access to all new content, automatically downloaded as well as a back catalog that is more complete than I can get from any set of streaming services. The local interface is excellent, discovery is good. No ads and I can access the content from anywhere in the world from any device. Even if I was willing to pay for every subscription I needed to access the same content, I would still consume it with this stack, the experience is too good.
A subscription to each of the top 10[a] streaming services is ~$85/month (~$1020/yr!), that still includes some ads! At some point someone out of APAC is going to start selling a device with a large drive and the stack ^^^ bundled with a Usenet subscription (if there isn't one yet). That will remove the complexity and mainstream this type of piracy.
I don't know how the industry is going to solve this, I know they need to before they go the way of paid adult content.
[a] https://screenrant.com/ten-most-popular-streaming-services-r.... I chose the least expensive ad-free option for each service. For Amazon Prime Video I used 1/3 of the $12.99/month cost, $4.33.
On the other hand, Spotify also solved the industry’s problem of having to pay artists.
Spotify wasn't available in the US until almost 2.5 years after its initial launch.
TV shows and movies are very different.
https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/
I think they solved the problem of paying artists quite well, 70% of their revenue goes to the copyright holders (if those aren't the artists, that is a different problem Spotify can't really address).
It's hard to see a record store or different streaming service do better than that ratio.
Spotify 'negotiated' a deal with the record labels that maximised how much money that went to the labels and minimised the money that went to song writers and artists.
If a stream was considered a radio play the far, far more money would go to the artists.
Doesn't that still imply that the problem is really just the labels negotiating contracts that are exceedingly in their favor?
Artists are getting screwed over because they signed away their distribution rights but there's not a lot Spotify can do about that. Spotify doesn't know where the money goes when they send it to the only place that can legally sell the rights to the content, and it probably shouldn't.
Artists across the board need to stand up for themselves and make better deals. More and more big names are standing up against the industry and causing a ruckus, so we may see a revolution in that space in a few short years. Until then, the music labels will continue to profit from their artists as they always have.
They knew they would be funelling money to the labels over the artists by adopting the ludicrous notion that they were making the equivalent of a mechanical reproduction over the equivalent of a radio play when a user streamed a song.
The major labels are big share holders in Spotify. It was a complete stitch up of the artists. Spotify were not a neutral party.
Boom, instantly performers and writers get more money and the labels less.
When Spotify started whether the big labels would even licence anything to such a service was far from a given. Many digital music platforms had failed in the previous 10+ years cos the labels wouldn’t work with them.
The way I see it a Spotify subscription is about the price of a CD per month. So the spend is probably similar for most people as the amount they would have spent on music previously.
The difference now is that people listen to a much much larger number of songs in total in any month. They don’t listen to one album over and over and over again like before. So that same spend gets spread way more thinly than previously.
Lastly on the label issue the labels power is significantly undermined. You don’t need a million dollars to build a recording studio and make a record any more. There is much more scope to put out your own shit and get 100% of the streaming revenue.
New times, new reality. The labels treating streams revenue like they did CD revenue shouldn’t surprise anyone, and is not Spotify’s fault.
The labels own the rights. Yes they fleece artists, no it’s not new nor something anyone who wants to deal with them can directly influence.
Look at the the evidence nce goven to thr British Parliament on this topic.
With Spotify, I can listen to hundreds of new songs every month for $10. That would cost a fortune with CDs or buying digital downloads.
My gut feeling (that might be completely wrong) is that the total value extracted probably stays roughly the same or goes up with an increase in disposable income.
That's because Amazon, iTunes, etc. make you buy a TV season instead of renting it. The crazy thing is—when I took stock of all the TV I watched and priced it out, buying the seasons online was cheaper than my cable subscription. That's when I finally took the plunge and cut the cord…
All it took was a regulating agency to force the telecom operators to open up and allow 3rd parties to interconnect to provide their own voice service and/or act as hubs. And all of that at regulated prices per minute.
So let's say you subscribe to Voiceflix for 5$/month but want to "call" Game of Towers which has a different techprefix so you're routed outside your network at a (hopefully reasonable) cost. Initially it will be expensive (remember the prices in early '00 per minute of voice call?) but eventually it will come down to earth.
So now you have two types of entities:
- content storage: tries to get as much exclusive content but for overlapping content tries to "bid" the lowest price so it gets the traffic.
- hubs that want to take your money and stream from content storage services and don't care which one has the content as long as it is within profit margin the user can stream it.
Bonus points for having an integration with trakt.tv to keep track of what you are watching and discord for notifications.
Would that be an improvement?
A-la-carte needs to be substantially cheaper to realistically compete with buffet style streaming services.
https://www.playstation.com/en-ca/ps4/ps4-entertainment/
Unfortunately, it's hobbled by the fact that the underlying apps are not reliable enough— Netflix works great, Disney+ is trash [1], Jellyfin has to be used through the browser so the interface is wretched. Not sure about Prime, Crave, and Hulu.
[1]: https://screenrant.com/disney-plus-app-playstation-4-bufferi...
I was watching some horror films on Halloween. We subscribe to Netflix, Peacock, Sling, and once in a while Hulu. I looked up one movie I wanted to watch on Google and they say it's on Sling. Cool, start watching it and it's the censored TV version. (And not marked as such). I turn it off. Google also says it's on Amazon Prime. I happen to have Amazon Prime free trial at the moment but I've never used their streaming service. I download it to my tv, sign in, and they have it - for a $6 rental. Pointless.
I just torrented it for so much less fuss.
Or better yet, there are multiple competing streaming services that all have all shows and films, and compete based on other features (device support, parental controls, video/audio quality, speed, search interface, etc.) instead of available content.
However, $15/month for "everything-ish", or do you Patreon every content creator you watch? If you do anything around $5/month, thr budget might start hurting on the other side.
I personally find that solution unappealing, but admit to no better option than to deal with it in most cases. Some of the people producing work I like can be compensated through patreon or twitch or some other means, but not all.
If horse riders had been half as persistent as the Hollywood parasites, we'd still be riding horses bragging we got them good, these car building robbers.
Or present-day SF.
That’s generally amazon prime. You can rent/buy a pretty massive selection on it, and it certainly hits the ‘more convenient than pirating’ barrier most of the time.
If they can ever match the $40-$60 to $5-$10 price decay by waiting a year, then I think a-la-carte could make more sense, but currently for the price of buying 1 HD movie on Amazon, I get one month of Netflix for a month.
If I wanted to watch a new movie every week or so, a la carte is currently prohibitive.
It’s less than I remember rentals costing when physical rentals were a thing, and while it’s certainly less cheap than a $10/mo subscription service, it seems like a stretch to call it prohibitive to most people. A season of a show plus a half dozen movies comes out to like $40/mo (ignoring all the ‘free’ stuff).
$40/mo for a vast selection isn’t fantastic, but in my eyes, it pokes holes in the pirate’s “If it were just more convenient while affordable I’d pay, I swear.”
Renting I don't mind, but as a consumer my preference is to buy Blu-ray movies in the highest quality available, and then rip them. I am a huge screen buff, and have boxes of physical media (blu-ray, dvd, VHS, and even a couple of beta tapes in storage), but it's endlessly frustrating that a large number of classic movies are only available in "remastered" editions, that destroy the fidelity and classic feel of the original movies by updating special effects, or committing the sins that George Lucas did of adding entirely new scenes to movies that undermine the overall quality of the movies ("Jabba, you're a wonderful human being."), let alone re-cutting the movies from full-screen to pan and scan. I recognize that the recuts have broader mass market appeal, but some of the history of how classic cinematic masterpieces were made, and how film making changed over time is lost to new audiences when those changes are made.
I use a Roku, it has a search feature that searches across a bunch of streaming services, I can see where is show is available, how much it might cost, or if a subscription is required. I'd argue that you have a search problem.
The entertainment industry wants you to buy it all and pay an ever increasing price for it, while including as much advertising as possible. The all-in-one service you are looking for looks a lot like cable, where you get a giant bill and no choice to remove things you don't want to pay for.
Given the way copyright works in the US, there is no 50 years in the future where things are freely available - future generations can still cash in on things copyrighted today.
So much time and energy wasted on fake debates and scapegoating, rather than actually solving problems that most people would agree with the solution on.
Gabe Newell nailed it when he said that piracy is a service problem.
Spotify is arguably the most powerful music discovery platform on earth, but over time you will find your favorite songs arbitrarily disappearing from your playlists. If you stick with mainstream content, this is typically invisible. But, if you are on the edge following indie artists and experimental works, things are much more rough.
For me, taking favorited content out of people's playlists is unforgivable. Even if there is an unlimited amount of other acceptable content to enjoy. The feeling of loss is severe for me.
I've bought more physical CDs in the past 12 months than I ever have in my life. New content is still being stamped to plastic discs for those who are out of the loop. The new Dune soundtracks by Hans Zimmer (yes there are 2) being my most recent acquisitions.
Movies are not the same. Yes there is Amazon but the quality of the DVD copies you get from there are kind of crap (and I suspect a lot of them are actually pirated anyway).
Buying music is a joy, buying movies is not.
DVDs at amazon range from fine to terrible. It is almost always better to just torrent the movie. Quite often the DVD has no extras, terrible subtitles, wrong aspect ratio, etc. I have quite a few DVDs which I’m never going to watch again, if I want to rewatch the movie I would rather torrent it, even though the DVD is right here.
How can such a significant product be so bad?
These days I play all my music locally. I occasionally pirate, but I often just buy LOSSLESS version of albums directly on Bandcamp. I listen to a lot of electronic music (ex Carbon Based Lifeforms, Jon Hopkins) and Bandcamp has been indispensable. I've considered buying a physical CD and ripping it myself, but so far it hasn't come to that.
Edit: Just set up an account @ Bandcamp. This is looking pretty incredible. Seems like a perfect combination of direct payments to artists, discovery & ownership of purchased content. Looks like most digital downloads are very reasonably priced.
Bandcamp then goes beyond and publishes articles, blog posts and podcasts where you can discover new music. Even though this is technically advertised content, it feels more like an actual music article/radio show that you can enjoy regardless of if you intend to buy the featured music or not.
I can’t recommend Bandcamp enough.
It's pretty incredible that in about a year they'll hit $1000m of payouts to artists.
edit: I found one track that has the "more info" link in my purchases, searching for it on my collection gives no results. I guess that answers that :(
Nice, I hadn’t heard of these guys. Big Hopkins fan. What else would you recommend along these lines? A few for you to return the favour in advance:
- Rival Consoles - Daniel Avery - Lorn (on the darker side) - Ital Tek
I like Lorn! I'll check out the other artists. Thanks for the recommendation!
nthng Skee Mask vc-118A Mohlao - landforms Traumprinz/Prince of Denmark/Prime minister of doom/etc. (Same guy) Giulio Aldinucci - Shards of distant times (ambient) Wanderwelle (ambient) Quiet places (the whole label A strangely isolated place is amazing, also ambient) Bowery Electric (also Boards of Canada from the 90s) Belong - October Language Rafael Anton Irisarri
I explore a lot of new electronic music and the artists you mentioned I was obsessed with a year ago or so. Since then, I have been digging deeper and deeper, enjoy.
maybe also: Shpongle, Entheogenic, Bluetech, Younger Brother.
I'm not saying that torrented .mkv files "just work". But the point is, if there are problems, they can be diagnosed and solved. Netflix (and Amazon etc.) is literally just "computer says no", better luck next time!
(Or, what rhn_mk1 said more eloquently and briefly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29352027 .)
Now each distributor, or sufficiently large rightsholder wants to capture as much of that value as possible by both restricting catalog access and demanding ownership of the relationship with the end user, without any sort of federation across services (with a few exceptions like Apple TV that have used market dominance to assert the ability to search across content subscriptions). The end result has been a rapidly accellerating decline in the quality of the user experience for accessing streaming content. Couple that with a shift away from series releases to weekly releases (better for customer retention as customers won't subscribe for a month to binge a series when it drops, and increasing 'user engagement' on platforms for however each platform collects those metrics)
The response has been an increase in piracy, and vilification of users who are frustrated because we had an awesome era of rich content libraries, but a bunch of accountants and MBAs focused on short term profit increases have destroyed the good will that the entire industry built with the emergence of streaming.
The proliferation of streaming services is too much to manage and inconvenient, nearly to the point of customer-hostile. And with each content creator wanting its own platform (Disney, Paramount, etc.) it's getting worse.
You'd think the number of choices would be freeing, but bundling is still alive and well, with only the illusion of its demise. That is, many platforms pull you in with one or two original movies or serials of interest, dragging along with it a multitude of uninteresting content most don't consume and would rather not pay for.
Of course, the big cable/satellite services have traditionally provided the aggregation, but their extreme bundling practices are heinous. There needs to be a service that aggregates all on one platform, but also provides the ability to create your own "bundles", perhaps even a pay per view option: subscribe to only the shows or serials that interest you.
I rather like that for $14/month I get access to more video that I can watch in my remaining free time.
This article is asserting that enough people don't find that to be the case that it's become a problem. I think they're on to something.
Unpopular opinion: all entertainment does not have to be free, or approaching free. I'm able to buy access to thousands of hours of quality video entertainment for what just a few years ago was the cost of a single audio CD. It is annoying when you have to buy the whole subscription to watch a single show, though.
Torrentors aside, most people expect to pay for content.
They'd just prefer it be convenient and to pay for only the content they want, which...
>annoying when you have to buy the whole subscription to watch a single show, though.
...is pretty much what you're saying here.
No one wants 89 streaming subscription services to watch one show on each.
and yet today, this already happens, and movie budgets are bigger than ever. I have not seen a movie that i cannot find pirated - even fairly new release ones.
Unrestricted access to all movies, music and TV shows ever made. Not 90%. Not 98%. Not "all except a few we couldn't work out licensing agreements over". All.
Highest resolution/quality available at the time of release (DVD quality for 90s movies: OK. DVD quality for 2010 movies: NO)
No arbitrary device/OS limitations.
Can watch/listen/download from any location on earth with sufficient bandwidth.
No ads embedded in the middle of the content.
That's it! Piracy offers all of the above for free, but I'd be willing to pay for this. Just release this product and take my money. The best part is, technology-wise, all of the above are solved problems. You just need to get the lawyers to say yes and you have the product already.
EDIT to address now-deleted comment: I didn't mention a price I'd be willing to pay--that's up to the market to figure out. Currently nobody offers this so it's hard to come up with a comparable.
Thank you, youtube-dl devs!
But they haven't changed their motivations at all during that time. They've only come to realize that pursuing their vision of receiving full payment from every individual that experiences at least one moment of any of their works would leave them with lower revenues. So they've made some small compromises. But they won't go where the logic dictates unless the purely digital distribution platforms out-compete them on content. Ever stopped to wonder why Netflix and Amazon run their own well-funded production companies? This is why.
Count on this still being a problem in 2070.
B) content owners have the right to ask for however much they want for content if copyright lengths were reasonable
That doesn't make sense. I think most of the royalties come from the long tail of companies, and market cap is a really terrible way of determining the worth of a company
I also didn’t mean to imply right away. I meant “after 10-18 years”.
Copyrights are possible to extend indefinitely.
The owner must declare a value every year for their copyrighted material.
The owner must pay X% of the material's value per year as tax.
The owner can release the copyright at any time.
Others may bid to own the copyright. If it is higher than the owner's declared value, the owner must raise their bid to match, or else the copyright is sold to the highest bidder.
Perhaps increase tax such that even giant companies can't afford the copyright after one or two decades. Let's say start with 10% and increase by 2.5% every year. The twentieth year the copyright would cost 60% of the declared value.
Also it would mean that large corps pay for their copyright enforcement, unlike now, when a 1 man book is given the same protections as disney's stuff for the same cost, despite the fact that it costs 1000x more to protect disney.
This is an idea I came up with, so likely has many issues to be worked out, but the core of the idea seems valid. We need to find out how much people value this information. We know how to get people to bid their actual values. We put IP and copyright and open source software into a Vickrey Auction. To do this you need not ask everyone every bit of IP, you would need to work out a statistically significant sampling of the population. This would be a multiple item auction, so you might have 1000 people in the auction, but only the top 750 bidders would walk away with access. The bottom 25% would have to go the year without. But since they would get access to all OSS and IP that they did not have to sample, they would still win out. The top 75% would, like any other Vickrey Auction, pay the amount of the highest bidder that did not win.
Owners would have the option to either keep it secret, or release it into the auctions. As the societal value of the item would be much larger having it open, every IP owner would choose to open it up so that they could get their share of the pot. Once an item has a fairly stable price, you wouldn't have to get a sampling every year for it. You would then either take funds from some other tax, or just print it, and subsidize the owners based on the value that the sampling provided.
Declare somewhat-short, fixed terms (5 years?) for every bit of content. The first term is free and then subsequent terms increase in cost geometrically. The first renewal could be an almost insignificant amount…but just the fact that it’s something would mean most content that is unmonetized would enter the public domain after the initial free term. Successive terms would start to only make sense for the most profitable content.
Being able to balance a healthy public domain with the ability for content creators to put out content that costs a ton to produce seems like it should be the goal of the copyright system.
Take the True Detective series as an example. The first season is highly regarded, and took forever for it to get made. Lots of love and effort went into developing that story. Because of its success, the producer was asked to do a new "season". It was litterally pulled out of thin air with no iteratitive development time on the story, and was univerally panned and the creator admitted this. The point? Sometimes it takes time to develop a good story. Just ask JRR Martin.
I haven't seen True Detective, but maybe he could have pulled off a successful second season if he could have freely adapted someone like G.R.R. Martin's story.
Unfortunately any series trying that premise would need to wait like a century or pay Martin a ton of money, so you'll never know if it's interesting.
they already do. and content distributors and consumers all have the right to say "nah, your content isn't worth that much".
This would mean they get payed well, and that there is a healthy competition in streaming services.
Well first of all, Spotify is no panacea, artists and labels don't really like it but they have no choice because they need distribution in order to sell albums/concert tickets. Even the largest artists like Taylor Swift who has protested against low Spotify royalties only temporarily took some material off Spotify, and ended up putting it back because in the end she looks like the bad guy to her fans if they can't stream her on Spotify like everything else they listen to.
Netflix was originally hoping to corner the market in a similar way, and they had a good first step with the Starz deal in 2008. However video is different and those rightsholders had full view of what happened in the music industry, so they were not about to make the mistake of ceding all power to a middle man. By the time Starz deal expired in 2012 it was clear that Netflix could never get all content because rightsholders would not let it happen. Similarly, the industry realized they need their own distribution. So Netflix and HBO entered a race to become each other. Since then the technology has only commodified which has allowed more rightsholders to get into the game.
Is this bad for consumers? Sure, but "the industry" is not a monolithic entity, and they certainly will do everything it takes to avoid becoming dependent on a single distributor with too much power like Spotify. It doesn't matter how many angry nerds complain on the internet, these companies will continue acting in their own self-interest, and the market carrying capacity for streaming services is probably way higher than most consumers want to admit. The only thing that will turn this around is by services dying because people don't pay for them, and I don't see that happening any time soon.
Artists probably need to stop seeing royalties as a viable income stream and instead see it as publicity for their tours where they actually make money.
I remember an interview with the lead singer(?) of a hard rock/metal band where the interviewer asked when their next tour was coming up and his response was "LOL! I can go on tour and lose money or stay here, play the occasional local gig, and charge $100/hour to do tattoos. When do you think our next tour is going to be?"
These concerts were roughly 300-500 person venues. And it looks like they did a good job filling them up.
And they lost money. So, not only was their salary not $100/hr, it was, in fact, negative dollars per hour.
I'm a potential customer. I don't care about their business reasons. I'll subscribe to 1-2 streaming services and if something interesting comes up on the others i'll just torrent it. End of story.
Edit: actually that would be my point of view if modern content wouldn't be so crappy on average. These days I'm more likely to subscribe to 1-2 services and ignore both those and the ones I'm not paying for...
We're not talking about access to food or clean water. If I had no legal way to obtain food, I'd steal it in a heartbeat. If I can't find a legal way to watch the latest uninspired Star Wars spin-off, I'm just not going to watch it and do something else. I'm all for civil disobedience when warranted, but I have a hard time justifying it for watching a TV show.
I'm not entirely well-versed in this, but from what I understand pirate money comes downstream from these social criteria. This is why certain platforms like Steam and Netflix work (or used to, in Netflix's case, while they still had a good reputation). Pirates have proven to be more than willing to pay for content when they consider it appropriate to do so (money going directly to the creator, superior access, etc.)
I doubt it. How many animals have been hunted to extinction even though the hunters’ livelihood depended upon those animals? The stakes are far lower here.
I work at a video game publisher and you can see that in prices where people in Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary etc. have to pay the same price as people in Sweden, Finland, Denmark etc. You can't discriminate positively, so all the new AAA games ended up 60€. So of course in poorer countries the piracy is higher EVEN THOUGH people would be willing to buy it but regional pricing is basically outlawed for the European Union. iirc Valve/Steam also had some problems with this in the past, they used to have different prices for EU countries but they had to stop that.
We can set prices lower for CIS countries, or say Moldova, Turkey etc. but not for EU.
Also, the law prevents you from blocking or charging customers to customers accessing your service from an EU country different from the one in which you're established. So in your example, you could set the price as low as you like for Bulgarians, you just can't block Swedish people from visiting your games store online, or try to charge that Swedish person more.
On the one hand there are obvious bugs:
- Amazon Prime shows a cryptic DRM error on Windows and I have no idea how to fix it
- Apple TV interface stutters and is close to unusable on a 2015 Macbook Pro
- Disney+ is unusable on a touch screen in Edge on Windows because trying to scroll titles left and right triggers back/forward navigation
- Disney+ has a memory leak in Safari on Catalina that causes Safari to kill the tab after two hours or so
- Netflix on Windows has poor A/V sync with Bluetooth headphones and no way to adjust it
And then there's the usability issues. No streaming platform has good search or a simple list where I can look at what's available. They all just try to overwhelm you with thumbnails and hope you forgot what you searched for and just watch something else instead.
I see why people still pirate stuff.
IP ownership as it exists today is fundamentally broken from the underlying reality. We need a culture where coming up with something new is compensated fairly but at the same time recognizes that the cost of sharing info is next to nil and we're all being held back from a global optimum by pretending otherwise.
Isn't that one of the things the NFT people are working on?
“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life.
On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.
So you have these two fighting against each other.”
So yes, NFTs are absolutely one of the myriad of (stupid) ways we're trying to grapple with this conflict as a society.
I just moved to Germany and a lot of movies in streaming services are only available in the German dub, not with the original voices... Why?
I mean, I assume that for some reason the platforms just buy the rights for the dubbed version, but don't the subbed original versions also have a ton of demand (maybe more than the dubbed version)?
I know that because I am Deaf and I would like to have subtitles even using German services, but they hate subtitles so much that they even won't have optional subtitles. Probably because some Hinterwäldler accidentally turned on subtitles and bogged down support by being livid and not listening to the simple solution of turning subtitles off.
Why would it have a ton of demand? Nobody in Germany wants to watch subbed original versions for the same reason nobody in the US wants to do that. The German market is big enough so that everything gets localized and people are used to that and expect it.
Article is basically saying that, through a combination of too many streaming services, fragmented content, and premium pricing, the tv/movie industry is recreating a demand for piracy.
Also, Unbundling products/services/value is a classic business technique. It's easy to make money on providing one specific service for a small fraction of the bundled price.
These two forces happen in cycles, and streaming video is going through an unbundling phase right now.
Right now the video industry is in land-grab mode. Everyone knows there are too many subscription streaming services. In five years there will be three, maybe four winners, and everyone else will sell content to them.
They hate the idea of those people paying less.
They do? I think many people are just suckers who can't say no.
But that sounds to me like it will make it worse in the end. Fewer and larger competitors will likely wind up like ISP services, consistently and overpriced as if they were colluding, without even having to collude.
Sure, each service will have a larger selection, but like the cable companies now, we'll be paying for a lot of cruft that we don't want, and still not getting some content really important to us.
IOW, it seems like the A La Carte that we all want started to appear, and now it is going away before it ever really got established.
Amazon Prime is unusable because the vast majority of movies that they have is all dubbed and do not provide original audio nor english subtitles. I do not pay money to watch a movie get distorted by dubbed audio. No thank you.
Same goes for a lot of movies on Netflix, although they are way better than Prime.
It would be fantastic to have a Spotify type service for films. In fact I would pay proper money to just have access to all stuff over say 10 years old. I suspect it will never happen. Music has been a commodity to take home for over 100 years. Video 50 years, so just another 50 years to go.
Wanted to watch it last week in the background while I worked. $3 everywhere.
You got my money, I’ll watch it when it’s on TNT, or SyFy, or whatever on dish network.
I’m not paying $3 to rent it again.
This article is spot on. We pay for Prime (can’t peel out the movies), We get HBOMax with our cellphone package(?), can’t peel it out if we need tethering…pay for netflix and Disney+
So I’m ALREADY paying, easily $135 a month. I’m done. You want me to go back to NOT paying that much, we can do without, because it doesn’t feel like I’m getting nearly $5 a day in value out of it…
Thus it was impossible to watch it in the UK, so out comes the torrent client.
It is now available for purchase on itunes, which I assume I can play on my TV either via the apple tv app, or via airplay, so that's fine, and I paid for it, no need to torrent. At least for those of us in the UK.
In the majority of countries though it's still not available.
If your company is unwilling to sell the content, you can't complain about people getting it from other sources.
Based on the first three seasons, I believe the UK is being done a favor.
For example, perhaps the musicians who played on the Star Trek series had a contract that only covered the US and Canada and any further distribution required a separate agreement? The studio could have negotiated from the start for global rights but maybe the money wasn't there and the show wouldn't have been made otherwise?
Nevermind the lack of availability in the UK, this situation is nonsense, they're practically begging us to start pirating their stuff.
The key problem here is the lack of availability (still) in 150+ countries that could watch it before. The cost is a separate matter
Theft in my jurisdiction involves taking something with intention of permanently depriving it.
When not everything is available, online rental is now a more viable option than it once was. I wonder why it's only the tech giants like MS who offer this. Why isn't Netflix also allowing digital rentals? I'd rather not pay MS, Apple or Google to see a movie over 50 years old.
edit: according to this https://blog.playstation.com/2021/03/02/playstation-store-to... even Sony stopped (or will stop) offering digital tv/movie purchases and rentals owing to the popularity of streaming. From memory, these were expensive. I guess there's a costly overhead to the service.
FWIW, I don't think all video should be on one service. I think that would be actively bad.
Give it until next year and they'll slowly start rolling commercials and ads into paid for monthly subscriptions permanently as well. We're cows, carefully primed for "$ milking" by big industry really.
I'm also baffled that Spotify does not grant verified/accomplished contributors to the platform free accounts by default. I wouldn't be surprised if a huge percentage of their premium listeners are the very same people who publish their music to the platform.
The Internet unfortunately is quickly becoming a "scam-based economy". It's flooding out all the potential it once had. I just decided to create and focus on my own personal music label web site moving forward. If I'm going to give most of my music away for pennies, I'd rather have more meaningful and useful analytics and FAR less complication in publishing my own music. :/
A lot of artists need to emulate success and fandom in order to break into paid work, and that creates a toxic situation where they need to pay up front (for various other things like SEO, interviews, artificial promotion, awards, and even for spots in gigs to get to a success point) before any real success is achieved, or they need to spend many years in unpaid (and very defeating) obscurity before finding out whether they succeed or not.
Statistics really don't apply to everyone on a consistent basis, and a lot of numbers in the mix are totally calculated in "mysterious ways" on purpose.
I focus on licensing rather than streams, that way there is more of a (tangible) contractual negotiation involved.
Netflix is terrible for your home cinema - it means their shows will not come out on BluRay.
I wish they'd be more straight-to-the-point, and have fewer pop-ups, but on the plus side they have quite niche streaming services available and can filter availability by country, which is really nice.
Their recommendation engine is laughably awful, and you can't do searches for things like director or studio, so it's not useful for discovery at all. But if a movie or series comes up in conversation, it's the best I've found.
... And not just international viewers. US viewers with existing Paramount+ accounts started pirating Discovery in solidarity.
I can't think why nobody takes him seriously.
Streaming is new tech using old business model.
Economic theory is mistaken in presuming profit is the principle driver, power is. Profit is merely one means to power.