Then, the great splintering happened. I currently pay for 5 services, but that doesn't cover even 1/2 of what I want to watch.
All the content owners said to themselves "we can be Netflix or Amazon Prime, too" and they pulled their content into their own services.
But the biggest problem: the user experience absolutely sucks now. It's so hard to find stuff and remember where things are, there's no universal search. I have to use justwatch.com on my phone when I want to sit down to watch something new, which might mean a trip to the computer to download it if one of the many services I already pay for don't have it.
I am not going to pay to rent stuff I used to be able to encounter for free by surfing channels...well, on top of my dish/cable bill
The $3 is for fast-forwarding Mr Video to next week.
That said, I don't know why the 48 hour limit on rentals got normalized. I've fallen asleep, gotten distracted, etc. while watching a movie and I don't like now being forced to watch it soon.
Maybe the limit could be 72 or 96 hours instead. Or you could rent it with no time limit but maybe can't ever rewind then you can make it last as long as you need but when it's done, it's done.
Now, for less money, I don't even have to get off the couch. What a world!
While I tend to agree that piracy and/or ripping isn't something everyone can do, I've filled out my Plex collection legally lately with DVD acquisitions at bargain-bin prices. Used doesn't matter if you only have to be able to read the disc once to rip it, and I'm yet to get something used off Amazon that couldn't be read once. (I haven't even had to clean it or anything, it's all just worked.)
So, my Plex install in terms of raw content isn't up to Netflix's size. However, I rather suspect there are some people reading this who have more hours of video on their Plex than Netflix even has available. And while mine isn't that large, it is much better tuned for me and my family's interests at this point. And I don't have to worry about getting halfway through a series, only for some licensor to notice it has become popular enough to pull it and run it on their own service. Netflix has the problem now that anything that becomes popular on their service will get yanked. I do not know how they overcome that. They hoped to do it with enough original content, but to my eye, that has failed, and there is now no longer enough time to fix that. While I understand the complaints that they treated it too much like "content", to be honest, I've never thought this would work out, from the moment they announced it. A single company just can't produce a sufficiently diverse set of "content" to be the everything-to-everybody they would have needed to be to justify a Netflix valuation.
Understandable, I just cut back on all the TV engorging and rotate the streaming services every quarter. IMO it's a net win. Save money on the streaming services and life is better for having not watched so much television. Not going to the grave wishing I binged Season 2 of some random show one more time.
Which means that dinosaur-industry would finally have to arrive in the 21st century. People are very much willing to pay for things they enjoy - see Twitch Subscribers and Patreons for examples. Paying for shitty catalogues where the parts that you actually enjoy are distributed across multiple services just isn't cutting it.
Good riddance to all those copyright-attorneys and other parasites leeching off of the entertainment industry.
Let's talk $1 to watch something once. That's reasonable and a price I'd pay. $4-5 to watch something in my own home is not.
Better to buy a physical media.
We live in a world where 90% of the entire catalog of movies ever filmed are available to be instantly delivered to your home in 1080p for less than the cost of a Big Mac. In the 90s it cost about the same not even taking into account inflation or gas to drive to blockbuster and rent a VHS. We are living in the future!
So if I watch it at home and remove all those costs from the cinema, surely $1 is going to be closer to what the film studio would have got if I went to the cinema?
As simple as that.
The problem, for me at least, appears where some legal rights damage technological usage.
How many times my Netflix downloads will “expire”? Is this milk or something? Why do they need to expire? Sorry, but I refuse to understand…
Yet whenever I want to watch something, I have to look up which service it's on, see if it's available in my country, sign up for a subscription, possibly download an app.... Or, go to the high seas and be watching it in 4k resolution within 2 minutes.
I'd much rather go to the movie theater and pay the even higher price for admission, because that's an actual experience. You can't replicate "going to the movies" at your house very well.
The reason music streaming defeated piracy is because a single subscription gives access to most of the music in the world, including from other countries and languages as long as you can type the search query (Indian, Japanese, Turkish, Russian etc.)
The reason video piracy is resurging is that every streaming service provides 2-3 good shows and hundreds of fillers, and to have a real selection of what is currently good one would have to pay $200-300 per month for dozens of apps. On top of that, pulling the show from one app and reappearing it on another loses watch history, which is no way in the interest of the customer. Sell what the users really want to buy, and they will pay.
The last movie I pirated was directed by a man who died almost 30 years ago. Do you suppose if I subscribed to Netflix (which doesn't even have any of his movies at all as far I can tell), they'd hire a necromancer to get a few more movies out of his corpse?
We don't hire necromancers anymore, they’ve been replaced by training models on a corpus anchored by the creator’s existing work.
- Lesser Known actors - Assistant Directors - Stunt Coordinators - 2nd Unit Directors - Stunt Performers
and I'm sure there are others. Residuals factor into our income, allow us to qualify for health insurance, empower our unions, and provide a stable income to continue working in an unstable career.
All so we can make better entertainment for you! When you pirate, you're stealing money from us.
Not that it matters though, I was trying to make use of the "common knowledge" that banks make money from your deposits, and that therefore you spending your money instead of depositing it in a negative return account is costing us potential revenue. I know that's not how banks make money, but it's the culturally accepted explanation for how banks make money.
You can accuse the pirates of limiting your potential for future earnings, but that is not the same as stealing from you.
If I can't buy something for a price that's worth it to me, I will just watch something else. It doesn't mean I'm going to pay more for it.
You get the same amount of money either way.
But extracting the value of watching something without paying the fee for that service...that's stealing.
If you weren't gonna watch it, don't watch. The argument being made is you in fact, do want to watch it, you just don't wanna pay for it. That's stealing.
> So they should invest in locking down their content, not improve their experience.
Good luck with that.
Ignoring it sends a different message.
That reminds me, what do you think about geoblocking these services? If one has a choice: buy the content, buy VPN and break the copyright by watching it in unsupported country or just break the copyright by pirating it outright, what should one do?
If you want to watch that show but you don't want to pay for subscription, let DIsney know. If the market demanded it by way of retracting their subscription dollars, they would notice.
But if you steal it because that's just how you want to do things, you're a thief.
>If the market demanded it by way of retracting their subscription dollars, they would notice.
One could say that pirating is the act of retracting the subscription dollars, but I digress. I can't retract my subscription dollars, because they won't even offer me the subscription (which I mentioned in my comment).
Could you as an knowledgeable insider actually answer the part of my previous comment you conveniently skipped, that part about what is person supposed to do if the Disney doesn't even offer the service in their country? And don't say "let Disney know", something actionable please.
>But if you steal it because that's just how you want to do things, you're a thief.
1) it's not theft, it's digital "piracy"
2) And I didn't say I pirate their stuff, the show was just an example. But I still feel discriminated on account of country I am from by them refusing to sell me their subscription service. And everyone knows that racism is worse than stealing.
If you're interested in the content, but dislike the delivery mechanism, ignoring the content entirely sends the signal: "I am not interested in the content you're producing". The companies will attempt to address that signal by changing the content, to try and find content that attracts larger audiences.
Piracy sends a different signal: "I am interested in the content, but not the price or the delivery mechanism". The companies will attempt to address that signal differently. Maybe they lower the price. Maybe the ease the friction on the delivery mechanism. Maybe the increase the friction on the delivery mechanism (by adding DRM). But the signal from piracy sends a more clear message to the content companies that ignoring the content.
Netflix did it (once upon a time. no, not the movie). I don't really care for reasons why this is hard for the industry or really anything else. As long as it doesn't economically make sense for me to give money to someone (doesn't reduce my own effort/time expenditure or provide something I can't have otherwise), I will not give money to someone. Morals be damned.
Plus, this rental will not be available in all locales, for every video, etc
It won’t work?
pay full price for the online offering (conducting the transaction in a browser) and then just download the content from BitTorrent.
I would happily defend that practice in front of a jury of my peers.
The thing they get you on with BitTorrent isn't the download part, it's the seeding part, where you're distributing the copyrighted content to other downloaders.
You could turn off seeding, but that'll get you banned from a lot of torrent sites, and it's not a technical distinction I'd want to have to explain in court to lay people.
Remember that whole Cuties debacle where Netflix sexed up a French coming-of-age about children ?
I really fail to see how a world without high-budget Marvel films will be so bad. I'd be fine watching old movies and art-house productions for the rest of my life.
How about “owning” a movie but not being able to resell it or loan it to friends. What’s that?
Please don’t use physical item terms for digital items.
Stealing something from you implied you don’t have to have it after I take it.
It’s illegal and unethical, we agree on that. But it’s not stealing.
I'm only here to pop the balloon on the consumer's perception that "it's not theft." there's a face and a name that goes along with that theft. Thousands of them.
See music streaming, the origin of video streaming, origin of steam etc