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Comment by raspyberr | Hacker News Reader

Piracy makes me feel like I'm living 50 years in the future. One where there's no such thing as artificial digital scarcity. Yesterday, my partner and I wanted to watch something. I started downloading it because I'm not going search on which streaming service this 3 year old show is on. As I was downloading it, she found it on netflix. I stopped my download and we watched it there. From my point of view, piracy will go down by 98% when all shows and films are accessible in one place. Until that happens, 50 years from now, I'll continue to pirate.

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I'm having similar perspectives around music.

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.

I feel like there is a difference though. You can still buy a lot of music from actual stores (including online stores like Bandcamp and Discogs). If you live in a medium to large city chances are there is a record store nearby where you can go to and buy a copy.

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.

I haven't bought a lot of movies from Amazon recently but I used to and they just seemed like normal retail discs? A lot of record stores sell movies too.

Amazon commingling inventory will probably mean that quality varies quite a lot.

Movies at record stores are kind of a novelty. You can go there to browse, but chances are that you will not find the movie you were looking for. I’ve actually had better luck at thrift stores. That being said if they happen to carry a copy of a movie that you want to see and don’t mind adding to your collection it is definitely a joy. But it is kind of a rare experience compared to music.

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.

Yes, no longer renewing my subscription this year, google play music did similar things to me. I occasionally listen to music, and not fond of my playlist greyed out because of turf wars.

YouTube music was the worst with this too. Songs were constantly disappearing or changing

Things have only gotten worse since the forced transition from Google Music to YouTube Music.

How can such a significant product be so bad?

The answer lies in your question. This is not, in fact, a significant product to Google.

This happened to me too. I'm not sure if you took advantage of uploading your own music library to GPM, but I had uploaded around ~2k songs near Google Play Music's inception. When I downloaded it about a year and a half ago, the track file names were not only often incorrect, but oftentimes they were censored or radio edit version of songs in the export when I knew for a fact the original songs I had uploaded were the original edits.

GPM was the moment for me when I finally realized I cannot count on Google services. Since then I migrated to Deezer - so far so good, but I would not be surprised if they also turn to bad. That's why my music collection is backed up in the cloud now. I am self hosting a media server, so I am all good.

A few years ago I used to be a Google Play Music subscriber (now YouTube music). I had uploaded my own music library under the impression I could redownload exactly what I had uploaded later if I wanted to (mind you some of it was pirated, though much of it I had ripped myself from CDs I owned). Well, the day came I wanted to my music back and GPM had not only completely messed up the filenames, they were also giving me censored or incomplete versions of songs in my export.

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.

Sounds like I need to check out bandcamp. Downloading flac is a lot more convenient than shipping media and manually ripping each item.

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 is amazing. You can often stream the music before you buy, so you don’t risk buying stuff you don’t like. Then you have the option of buying a physical copy or just digital. If you buy a physical copy you can still download the flac and start listening immediately while you wait for the record/CD/cassette to arrive.

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.

Just make sure that you have a copy of everything that you buy on bandcamp somewhere other than bandcamp. Stuff gets removed from there too.

I thought you could re-download removed albums from your collection page? But can't find anything on mine to check with right now.

It's pretty incredible that in about a year they'll hit $1000m of payouts to artists.

I don't think you can. If you go to see your purchases, by each purchase there should be a "download album" link. Next to one of my purchases instead there is a "more info" link and if I click it I get the following message: "Sorry, {album name} by {artist name} is no longer available. Please contact {artist name} for more information."

But is the download link also missing from your collection page?

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 :(

Qobuz is another service I've found useful, it has a lot of the more big name artists/recordings that might not be on bandcamp and you can download non-drm flac from it as well. The big downside is a lot of the downloads cost more than ripping an equivalent CD yourself, I can't figure out why that is but it's not always true so you just have to do an extra search first if you want to make sure they aren't ripping you off. But yes, bandcamp is also great, it's my preferred vendor when they have what I want.

> Carbon Based Lifeforms

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

> What else would you recommend along these lines? Aes Dana, Solar Fields, and Emancipator are all also good.

I like Lorn! I'll check out the other artists. Thanks for the recommendation!

Your music taste is similar to mine, here's some stuff you might like:

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.

OTT (ottsonic.bandcamp.com)

maybe also: Shpongle, Entheogenic, Bluetech, Younger Brother.

I buy almost all my music on Bandcamp these days, great platfotm

Exactly. Here are my product requirements:

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.

You forgot buffering and granular control over resolution. I have to manually set the resolution on each youtube video I watch because youtube insists my network is fast enough for 4k when it most definitely isn't.

Thank you, youtube-dl devs!

> From my point of view, piracy will go down by 98% when all shows and films are accessible in one place.

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.

IME Netflix keeps finding ways to fuck up. Movie not available at your location. Movie available at your location but not with English subtitles. Movie plays but the image on TV is corrupted (weird green-ish colors).

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!

I haven't had the last problem but gte first two are largely not their fault, but related to regional licensing

It might not be their fault, but as long as they operate within a framework that allows that, it's their problem.

If I purport to offer you a service, knowing that the quality of that service is subject to a mosaic of laws and regulations that I am aware will fluctuate over time, then that variable quality is arguably not my fault; but, if I do everything in my power in all my advertising and messaging to hide or deny that variability, then it seems that that is my fault. We're outraged if Amazon yanks books from our Kindles, even if it's not technically their fault—we're outraged that they're even able to do so. The same should apply here.

(Or, what rhn_mk1 said more eloquently and briefly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29352027 .)

And despite that, they're still not ashamed to extract the full price of the service even from those people to whom they can't offer 80% of the content.

It's a distributor/rights holder problem. Netflix is very good with subtitles with stuff they make and a lot of what they license. For example in North America the DVDs/Blu-rays of Anime never ever come with Japanese subtitles in my experience (sometimes you can't even disable English subtitles if watching Japanese audio), services like Crunchyroll, Funimation, Amazon Prime etc. never have them but if Netflix makes it or licenses it worldwide they do. Movie not being available in your location is the same problem, rights holders sell the streaming rights to different distributors in different territories. Or maybe they let Netflix have it because their own streaming service in country Y isn't set up yet. I'm sure Netflix wishes it could be Spotify for movies/TV with basically everything.

We know it's a distributor/rights problem, but the core of that problem is the drive to extract as much value as possible. Casual piracy of content drops off a cliff when there is an opportunity to cheaply, and easily access content. We saw this with the emergence of early streaming service with broad catalogues.

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.

I dropped cable, which had everything 'in one place', because it forced me to take everything and pay for it. What you see as a search and access problem I see as a new choice I never had before.

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.

Congress needs to be brutalized in elections until they fix copyright. It shouldn't last longer than the author's life.

such ideas are dead on arrival in US. you gotta have a revolution first before being able to override money interests like this.

While your not wrong, I think it's also because the uniparty had incentives to waste time on fake debates, like pretending be financially responsible when not in power.

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.

This is currently a problem all the streaming box developers are trying to solve. Each modern one has a sort of universal search that allows app providers to publish the list of titles they have available for streaming, and the system will surface those apps if a user goes to that search box to look for the title. We’ll probably have an overview of how good it works in 5 years or so.

From what I gather Google Chromecast w/ Google TV is a good performer in this regard. However, the issue remains that you'd have to pay almost 10€ per platform, for a total of 3 platforms, per month. That's simply not economivally viable.

Well another alternative is you pay say $5 per movie you watch or $2 per tv show episode rather than an all in price.

Would that be an improvement?

Considering I can get AAA games for $10 after waiting a year or so, I'm not sure if $5 for a decade old movie really that worth it.

A-la-carte needs to be substantially cheaper to realistically compete with buffet style streaming services.

I can't be the only one who just bought a 4K blu-ray player. The cost of a disc is cheaper than a monthly subscription and I can still trade them in making it a cracking good deal. And quality is soo much better than streaming, literally made me move my sofa a little closer to TV!

That's a heck of a lot less expensive than cable even without the premium channels.

I don't know about other devices, but the PS4 has a unified "TV and Video" portal that I think tries to do something like this:

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...

Does anyone else remember when the Covenant add-on for Kodi was thriving? It was amazing. You could search for and watch pretty much any TV show or movie ever made with a variety of language and quality options and your choice of downloadable subtitles. It made the idea of downloading torrents seem quaint. I'd pay good money for that service, if only it existed legitimately. Sadly the entertainment industry eventually got pretty good at shutting the related infrastructure down.

Gabe Newell nailed it when he said that piracy is a service problem.

Is there a place that lists what films or shows are on what streaming platform in a given country?

justwatch.com

JustWatch.com will do this.

Will it reliably do this for markets other than the US though? Not long ago it definitely didn't. I'll give it another try but I'm not getting my hopes up.

I use trakt.tv; I think it had some coverage that justwatch lacked.

It’s built into Roku, although I’m not sure how well they do but outside the USA at this

Others have mentioned justwatch.com, but reelgood.com also does it.

Similarly I still have subscriptions in netflix/prime/appletv but I can’t remember the last time I opened the apps. I have set up all the shows I watch in sonarr and it automatically downloads them a few minutes after the show airing and then offloads them to Plex which is a universal interface.

Bonus points for having an integration with trakt.tv to keep track of what you are watching and discord for notifications.

Just had this conversation (sans the pirating bit) yesterday with a friend who has YouTube TV.

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.

> 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.

I rather like that for $14/month I get access to more video that I can watch in my remaining free time.

If you find that $14/month gives you access to all of the quality content you want and denies you access to none, then you're definitely winning.

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.

> This article is asserting that enough people don't find that to be the case that it's become a problem.

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.

>Unpopular opinion: all entertainment does not have to be free, or approaching free

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_P.... applied to streaming services would have provided that, no? It's unfortunate it's been terminated.

I already felt like that 20 years ago. The distributors (copyright holders) have been dragged by their hair, kicking and screaming, into a future where content distribution is digital and less onerous than in 1995.

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.

> From my point of view, piracy will go down by 98% when all shows and films are accessible in one place.

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.

Well, with the exception of price point. Maybe it's because I've been spoiled by Steam, but $10-$15 to buy a movie that's 10+ years ago. I would've paid the same price if I bought it a month or two after release, or bought a ticket to see it in the theater.

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.

You should use the renting prices instead of the buying prices to compare against other subscription services. $2.99 to watch a movie in the evening is anything but prohibitive. Or buying TV seasons, which amounts to close enough to the same hourly cost in my experience.

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.”

Now I know Amazon is more stable that most other streaming services, but so far, my Canadian experience has been to have digital purchases of movies I have made be shuffled from one service to another as they fold, or are acquired, with differences in quality, or "expirations", etc.

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.

FWIW, you can typically Google for any movie or TV show and it'll show all the services that it's available on. I have multiple streaming services and frequently use this to avoid manually searching all of them.

Unfortunately it doesn't work so well outside of the US - especially when you live in a smaller country.

This experience sucks.

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.

After some local streaming service took over like 70% of market (largely by expanding it, because it costs $3 compared to competitors at $5-10) other companies made a deal and now you can subscribe to "Most popular streaming service + exclusives from some other service at $5/$10 etc" and stream everything on one website/app.

Nobody is going to make a $50 million movie for $12 of revenue from the first customer who then pirates it to the rest of the world. The end outcomes here are 1) Piracy remains manageable in scale 2) Production costs go down tremendously and vloggers dominate eyeballs 3) alternate business models, such as product placement or advertising.

I can buy a DRM-less lossless music file that will play as many times as I like, on any device I own, for a reasonable price, without having to deal with a crappy and/or buggy distributor-specific app, or being dependent on the distributor's infrastructure being available, the distributor still being licensed to distribute the music, or the distributor still being in business at all. If this works for music, it can work for TV and film as well.

Yes, but you can only do this because the industry has used the courts to squash things like Napster.

> make a $50 million movie for $12 of revenue from the first customer who then pirates it to the rest of the world.

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.

Yes, because the movie industry has made it pretty hard to pirate. You can certainly do it but it's not nearly as easy as it was in the Napster days. Even the entire concept of a torrent is a lot for many people to grasp.

I mean sure, just stealing something works great for you. People made the film or show. They need to be paid. Walking in CVS and stealing a candy bar would feel like 50 years in the future as well, for a while.

There is a fundamental difference (at least for now)–there is nearly zero cost involved in copying data and moving it around. There's no real scarcity of data. There is some real scarcity of candy bars.

To be fair to the argument, there is scarcity of the labor that produces the data and that must be compensated somehow.

That's true, but the labor that actually produced the data is not receiving the full value of the money that people pay to access the data. If the money went directly to the creators, I think people (and myself certainly) would feel much more amenable to paying for it.

Enters Patreon and similar type of things where you directly support contributors.

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 can’t imagine people subscribing to Disney’s patreon, or to key grip #8’s patreon. That model will never work industry-wide.

The scarcity of the labor is completely disconnected from the artificial scarcity of data.

Agreed, but therein lies the problem. The markets for our needs are still markets based on scarcity, and therefore artists need to operate within them even while producing a product that exists in a post-scarcity environment. To date no one has developed a better way to deal with this dichotomy than to impose some form of artificial scarcity in the post-scarcity space.

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.

With physical books, the cost of the pages was never that significant anyways. Same with VHS. The scarcity was never in the medium, so I fail to see why suddenly it matters.

I think you mean copying not stealing

It's just not going to work anymore. First, it's hard to steal something that can be copied infinitely (imagine if you could insta clone that candy bar, would you be bitching online about these crass hoboes trying to eat for free, really?), second, the entertainment world has to adapt, they were too well paid when they could argue scarcity, but now they have to drop quality and revenues and do something else with their life.

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.

The analogy doesn't work, because eating is a fundamental need to survive. The movie that just came out isn't.

> Walking in CVS and stealing a candy bar would feel like 50 years in the future as well

Or present-day SF.

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