You Hated Your Cable Package. Your Streaming Services Are Bringing It Back
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I’d rather not pirate but it doesn’t feel wrong since I’m perfectly willing to pay for no-ads products if they are available.
90% of my entertainment is from YouTube Premium and I love it. The rest is HBO and Hulu with the no-ads package.
I bought Hulu Live for a show, cancelled it immediately when I realized it forced ads.
The last mile device ad interposition is going to keep pushing the boundaries until it's limited by law.
Which would be something like "hardware/software platform companies cannot own ad businesses* and must allow equal+ access to any ad bidder who wants to run an ad"
*Defined as anything more nuanced than bulk sales of ad space
+For some definition of equal
That we ever let platforms own ad businesses is the cause of so many current failures.
Then the EU steps in with another 10 chapter 99 section law “GDPR 2.0” that inflicts another banner notice that causes us to endure a cookie notice to allow cookie notices to allow cookies.
We can all meme about Jack Black together or how Chris Pratt is a weird choice.
document.querySelectorAll('video').forEach(v => v.playbackRate = 1.5)There is NO WAY that I'm going back to ad based streaming, or TV for that matter. If I forget to login to YouTube, or have to watch local TV programming with ads I get super angry, it is god damn awful. It's offensive and obnoxious.
One interesting thing I have notice, in regard to YouTube: While some channels are absolute garbage, professional YouTubes have better storylines and better editing that national broadcasters in Denmark. There's one or two good shows, but modern programming on Danish TV is terrible. There's no sense of storytelling, there are jump-cuts everywhere and camera handlings is subpar to be honest. I am amazed what some YouTubers are able to produce, it's well researched, it's filmed beautifully, storytelling right on point and the editing is just beautiful. Not saying that there isn't a lot of low budget and low quality, but when a channel like Bald and Bankrupts was able to outshine a national broadcast on all measures that matter to me, on a weekly basis, there's something wrong.
Meanwhile HBO lacks english closed captioning for most of its content. They give me subtitles for spanish sometimes even though it's not my native language. Not to mention the obnoxious censorship and inaccurate translations.
> With high quality subtitles and captions missing from the paid services.
I did pay for a League Pass. I still watched the illegal stream instead. The streamer would even play music over ads and put gifs and images over the in-game ads during free throws and the like.
That's freaking awesome. I wonder if one day we'll have some kind of machine learning video adblock software to do this automatically...
Here's my average Netflix experience: I want to watch X. I search X on Neflix, and learn that Netflix doesn't have it because they only have a few thousand movies which is abysmal. I then spend the next two hours aimlessly browsing the Netflix catalogue searching for something kind of similar to X, but nothing is and I have to give up having watched nothing.
Here's my average pirating experience: I want to watch X. I search X on TPB and find exactly what I want with a few seeds. Half an hour later I am watching X.
Here’s my average fraud experience. I send out a few thousand scam emails and money starts pouring into my bank account.
It's a crap analogy, not least because you don't actually have the experience you describe but I do have the experience I described above. You have not lived a life of crime, probably because you don't really believe it would go as well as you suppose in your analogy. Do you really believe that crime would be more profitable for you in the long run? Career criminals work harder and make less. They do this because they can't cope with some aspect of regular employment, like staying off drugs and showing up on time. They get caught eventually and their life becomes a ruin. If you really think you have what it takes to become one of the rare successful robber-barons who can steal your way to luxury, then you're probably mistaken. But I can get the movies I want to watch, but not with Netflix. Netflix doesn't have what I want, so I'm simply not going to pay for it. Throw all the insults you want, none of it will change anything.
Or I can just search on Google and usually find it either on a streaming service I subscribe to or it will give me a list of places I can rent it.
I will gladly pay three bucks not to have to deal with bit torrent
A concrete example: I want to watch Sharpe. Netflix doesn't have it, which isn't surprising because they never have anything I'm looking for. Amazon has it for $4 an episode at SD quality, and I have to watch it in my browser with their shitty webplayer because they're afraid I'm going to save it to my harddrive (lmao.)
So instead I pirated it and got 720p for free. It's now on my hard drive and I can watch it with my proper media player. Pirating being free is really just the icing on the cake, I might have paid $4 an episode if they would give me a DRM-free 720p downloads, but that simply isn't an option. Why isn't it an option? I can and do buy DRM-free albums from Amazon. Albums which are smaller and easier to share than movies or TV shows, yet are still offered DRM free. The TV/movie industry get away with offering inferior crippled products because not enough people know how to pirate movies. But I do, so I'm not their chump.
It had absolutely nothing to do with piracy
https://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_pos...
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-legal-to-leave-ads-in-library-bo...
“Have you ever considered walking?”
Also see: “I haven’t watch TV in 20 years. Do people still watch TV?”
“Have you ever considered walking?”
If the suggested alternative was stealing another Honda Accord, that would be a reasonable question.
People want the government to step in because it’s inconvenient for them to pay for the content they want.
Do you think you can still get the TV shows you love if you evade the TV industries monetization mechanisms? Or is the plan that everyone else will continue to pay and so it’ll all be okay? Something else? What’s the end game here?
FWIW I don’t watch TV. Not because I hate the industry or out of principle but because it’s just not very entertaining to me.
It’s up to content creators to create business models that work for them, but I really don’t care if they pick one that doesn’t work for me.
I also lost interest in their content, but in theory if I still had interest I would think nothing of pirating it.
What I mean when I say private property "fails" is that it is not a useful concept to us as a society in cases like this. The consumption of goods of the aforementioned type are nonrival, meaning my consumption of it does not interfere with your consumption of it. That's why it doesn't really matter.
Should libraries be allowed to purchase content and then ignore DRM? How about watching YouTube videos of video games you haven’t purchased. This stuff doesn’t have some universal answer everyone will agree with.
PS: As for pay for value, people also create value for me by living their life and paying taxes, that doesn’t somehow create an obligation for me to give them money.
Sure debate is fine. Changing laws is fine. Just deciding for yourself that you get to break laws because you want to watch a show is not fine.
> At best you can argue the right to restrict access to content the same way people used to argue in support of slavery.
Not really, because enslaving people doesn’t have the same moral implications as copyright. I don’t even begin to see how you can draw a comparison.
> that doesn’t somehow create an obligation for me to give them money.
Yes it does, through paying your own taxes that creates value for them.
In practice that’s how all laws work. What percentage of people always drive the speed limit? Hell what percentage of laws have you actually read? In practice people just don’t care about most laws.
> enslaving people doesn’t have the same moral implications as copyright.
Having different moral implications changes the debate but doesn’t mean you can skip the debate.
> Yes it does, through paying your own taxes that creates value for them.
That assumes we are in the same country. It’s easy to harm people by paying taxes where they benefit you by paying their own taxes. The world is complex with wars and pollution but also medical research etc.
Imagine if you managed to change the law and the companies decided to do whatever they wanted regardless. I’m sure you would complain about that, yes?
I declare all copyright laws are hereby abolished.
Of course laws are actually imposed on others, which is why they have zero moral weight. Laws are simply an imperfect reflection of society and all it’s issues.
PS: Do you think companies actually follow the all laws as written?
To your PS, I do believe companies break the law, and I complain just as much when they do. IMO anyone pirating content, on some perceived notion that they are acting ethically, lose all standing to complain about lawbreaking by corporations or others who may rationalize breaking the law under their own ethical framework (e.g. it’s ethical to break the law if it means more profit for myself).
That’s a mismatch between how you want the world to work and how the world actually works. If you realize companies are going to ignore the law then getting update about it is no more rational than complaining about gravity.
> In America, laws aren’t imposed, they are implemented via a democratic process
Being the outcome of a democratic process doesn’t somehow prevent them from being imposed. As to voting or running for congress, residents of DC elect a non voting member of congress which has exactly as much power as you might imagine. They then can’t create local laws without approval from the members of congress who can actually vote.
Congratulations, you are a member of the least democratic democracy in the world today. So even by your standards it’s laws have no moral weight.
Trying to dismiss arguments without backing them up just shows how hollow your argument is.
I’m actually in favor of drastically limiting copyright. But when pirates engage in such lawless behavior and rationalizations, it makes the idea almost impossible as a credible political project. Piracy does far more harm to reforming copyright than you apparently can see. You’ll never be able to build a political coalition through insolence. Because I can guarantee you, the insolence doesn’t end even if copyright was successfully reformed to meet your expectations. Pirates would still engage in piracy, because it’s never been about principles; it’s about pirates not wanting to pay money for things they want. They would still rationalize their behavior with self-serving notions like “I’m not hurting anyone”.
I don’t want to reform copyright I want to end it because the harm exists if copyright is for 70 years or 70 days the same incentives exist. Look at divorce rates for an idea of just how harmful copyright is.
As to the law being some meaningful moral guideline read up on civil asset forfeiture or slavery both of which where enshrined by the near democratic institutions you hold up as somehow an arbiter of what is just.
Why? "Fine" vs "not fine" is not 1-to-1 with "legal" vs "illegal", clearly.
There's a bizarre assumption in the wording of this sentence. If I can not pay to watch a specific thing I would like to watch without ads, I am going to pirate it, regardless of what volume of other things there are to watch.
But why? Why does your desire to want to watch something override the creator's right to distribute their content how they see fit? The fact that you have other options means you don't have to be subject to ads if you don't want to. So it seems to me the choice is watch media and not be subject to ads, or watch other media and be subject to ads. You seem to imply there is a third option, that you get to do whatever you want regardless of anyone else's rights or desires. If everyone thought that way, society wouldn't work.
Perhaps the desire exists exactly through ads :)
If the creator planted the idea into your head of watching a show, isn't it your right to consume that show as you see fit?
You conveniently left out the part where the creator effectively shoved the content in my face.
Intellectual property does not have this same set of properties to the same degrees, and it is not useful to equate the two implicitly without attempting to account for this obvious and monumentally large difference.
What is left is the realm of pure money theory, which certainly has real effects and is worth considering/debating. But it has nothing to do with "that's my property", except in the legal context, which is static at any given point in time and can not be argued (i.e. we can't argue whether it is illegal to distribute IP without permission - it's a fact).
(Copyright is after all something we as humans have made up, and thus should be up for discussion)
I offer product "A" with defined conditions attached. It may be as simple as "it's 100% yours for $X", and anything beyond that. If we both agree to the conditions, you get the product. If you disagree with my conditions, then you don't.
That's where piracy falls apart ethically, IMO. Proponents argue "well it's not technically 'stealing' by the definition", "I would buy it if [it were cheaper; it were released sooner; it didn't have DRM; it didn't have X restriction, etc.]", but in the end all those arguments fall apart for the very simple reason stated above. Namely: the creator has the right to sell it with any conditions they see fit, and if anyone disagrees with them, their resource is to not buy/enjoy the product, NOT to take it by other means.
It would be like if people tried to restrict the functionality of Star Trek matter replicators for entertainment purposes. It makes sense economically for those individuals, but it's fallacious in a "common sense" context.
> Imagine if everyone acted this way?
This is basically deontology by Immanuel Kant. Not everyone is a Kantian though, so this is why you see a clash of your personal ethics with those of non-Kantians. I don't think you're going to convince anyone through messages on HN (similarly those who are non-Kantians will not convince you, as you are seeing in your replies), just as I would not be able to convince an anti-abortionist about the opposite views.
These ethical frameworks are so basal to our belief structures that if one disagree with someone else on these grounds, it is basically irreconcilable.
I imagine paid services may improve to compete. Regardless, the actual implication is fallacious. "One should only do what would cause no harm if every human did it" is not only unrealistic, but moot as long as not everybody is actually doing it. There's no intrinsic [im]morality in it.
Family members use my subscriptions far more than I do.
Yes, providing only 1 payment option that comes with mandatory psychological manipulation is not a true payment option.
Do you wanna know if a character is not the killer/bad guy? He is not using an iPhone.
Me too, if I pay for it. If I don't...toss up.
Tubi has a ton of content and the ads don't bother me much. Short and far between.
Redbox(free) on the other hand can go straight to hell. I don't see how anyone watches that.
The other nice thing about premium is that you can background play on mobile.
I’d pay 3x for these features. I guess I shouldn’t let YT know that though.
"Buy this rare silver dollar by calling a phone number" LIMITED SUPPLY!!
Making money by any means necessary even by scamming people who don't know better. The worst thing is that Americans I asked about this thought it was perfectly fine and normal.
Same thing with other American sport events, every single thing is "brought to you by x". It permeates everything.
It's not just the commercials (I've seen a beer commercial so far) or the brand logos on the athletes, it's the fact that every single thing is "courtesy of x", which means that even between the ad breaks the commentators has to talk about sponsors.
This is different from soccer games, cycling races live Tour de France, most world championships, etc. But I recognize it from UFC and various clips I've seen from NFL and other American sports.
I guess there’s a race to the bottom when you have a lot more TV channels to fill with ads, but it’s quite jarring.
Contrast that to UK TV, which we get a lot of too. The pacing and breaks are much more in line with what you're allowed for ads in AU, so there's no weird interruptions in the middle.
I always found it a fascinating mirror to the broader cultural differences writ large.
Sure, I don't get to watch the latest trends, but it is superior than streaming for my needs. (I was using Kanopy, which is fantastic, but has a limit per month of 6!)
I think we need to return to this model because streaming services have completely effed it all up.
EDIT: Which is ironic, because I really thought streaming video would be the future, instead it is just a bunch of scammy charges for content you don't own, and hoards of crappy shows because major studios are too greedy and repetitive.
I'm glad A24 exists.
We used several video rental stores around the time the Netflix DVD service debuted. The reason we switched and never looked back was that frankly, none of our rental stores had ever been very good. The selection was always limited and spotty, and if you got unlucky it might be checked out already even if they owned a copy.
This streaming thing we've got now doesn't match Netflix in its heyday, but it's still miles better than anything we had pre-Netflix.
But addressing your second point, I think we must have different viewing habits. I figure out what I want to watch, then I subscribe to it and I watch that show. If that increases my total subscriptions beyond what I'm comfortable with, I cancel the least recently used service. At no point do I use the in-service search function, so it really doesn't matter to me what else they offer. If they have one great show and a bunch of mediocre fluff, I'll watch that one show and leave. Maybe this sounds crazy, but if I'm careful about it it's not even that much more expensive then video rentals were back in the day.
On the contrary, their incentive is to have as much content as possible, to keep as many people subscribed as possible. Quantity instead of quality, because few really good shows/movies won't keep millions of people subscribed once they've watched them, there needs to be other content remaining.
That was my experience with the one truly independent store we had in town: I guess it could have been a fine store, but I wasn't in a position to tell since they very clearly did not cater to my tastes. They're gone now along with Blockbuster, so I guess the market spoke on that one.
Lots of their DVDs are in sleeves in filing cabinets/boxes.
I had HBO Max for 3 non-contiguous months this year. Netflix for about 8, and Disney+ all of the time. Even digital streaming cable is significantly more convenient: I just picked up Sling for $25 a month, that I’ll only keep for a month, so that I can stream MLB playoffs on my phone, home computer, work computer, large screen TV, etc. with included 50hrs DVR. That’s a PITA and often not possible with for some channels with the traditional cable I cancelled. Overall I spend about 1/2 of what I was on regular cable and have no reduction in available content.
It’s also easy to start and stop these, much much easier than it ever was to add and remove cable tv options (when I cancelled cable tv it took me almost 2 hours and 4 different “retention specialists” in increasing levels of authority forcing me to listen to their reasons for staying and potential discounts)
It’s still a dynamic marketplace, and consolidation could bring back negative things for consumers. But for now the presence of individual offerings along with their discounted bundles seems like a win for consumer choice.
I visit one website that has everything I'd ever want to watch, download and start watching with one click, in 4k, with no streaming degradation, in a video player I like, with features like upscaling and which works offline.
Not because I want to use it, more to see what it is. My piracy stack is not changing any time soon.
Imagine doing all this on Netflix, it's simply not possible unless you have the physical media files, and for that reason, even if I had Netflix, I'd still pirate.
Curious to hear your stack. I assume something with Plex, Sonarr, Radarr, etc? I like looking for files manually so I haven't set those up since I'm not sure how to precisely select for the file with specific 4k/HDR support.
> You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
So too with copyright laws written by corporations.
Corporations have a right to participate in the process just like you and I. Don’t like the outcome? Then do the hard work to change it.
From what I know about pirates (and I've been a part of many communities in which pirates engage, and am friends with many pirates), piracy is more about satisfying desires without paying money than it is a matter of principle about copyright reform. Lots of pirates spend seemingly infinite time cataloging, collecting, sorting, tagging, and distributing pirated media, not to mention figuring out how to get around DRM. But you won't find so many pirates expending the same energy to affect political change. To me, that's telling about their true motives.
Until pirates can convince people like me (supporters of copyright reform but not piracy), that their lawless behavior would end after successful political reform, a coalition to enact such reform will be impossible. Based on the comments in this thread, it seems like the main concern pirates have are getting what they want, how they want, when they want, without paying, regardless of anyone else's wishes.
Back in the day when the options were DVD or Cable, piracy had more legitimacy IMO. Pirates wanted better resolution, lower prices, to play media on their devices, to have on demand access. Today with the advent of ad-free, on-demand content at a low subscription price, continued piracy looks more like selfishness than activism or civil disobedience.
The resolution of media is far beyond what it was in the 00's, but still isn't good enough. The prices are much lower but now low enough. They can stream to any device they want but it's still not enough for pirates. The dream of the 00s pirates is alive in the 20s, but the 20s pirates still act like their piracy is a form of freedom fighting. It's not. Instead it lays bare the true intention the entire time was that pirates just wanted media but didn't want to pay for it.
This is much rarer than its opposite, as I had mentioned. The number of revolutions that happened peacefully is much lower than those that happened violently, to give a political example.
> but still isn't good enough
It was good though, but now it's not anymore, that's the problem. There are two distinct groups of pirates that we should separate, because both are not the same and to discuss them as equal doesn't bring about the whole picture.
One, the serious pirates. These are the people you are talking about, who want higher quality and easy access. These are the people, like me, who download 4k rips to watch on their OLED TV and organize their Plex servers to auto-download new media that comes out. They may even have terabytes-large NAS. You will never get a cent out of these people, because, like you probably have experience with, they are not in the business of paying for media. Their act of piracy is itself what is satisfying. For example, I gain more enjoyment out of the fact that I can watch at higher qualities than paying customers can, than I do actually watching said media. I have not once in my life bought a movie or TV show (although I will go to a theater because that is an incomparable experience to watching on a TV; and I do buy software sometimes, especially if it's a creator I really like and wish to support). However, these types of pirates are extremely few compared to the second category:
Two, the casual pirates. Most pirates are not like me or others in this thread, they do not download 4k rips to watch on their OLED TV, they do not organize their Plex servers. The vast majority of pirates are those who search "{movie} watch online free" and click the first link. Their needs were well met when Netflix came onto the scene, where with one service at a low price, they could watch whatever they wanted. Same with Limewire being usurped by Spotify. Now with multiple streaming services, more people are searching "{movie} watch online free" because they don't want to sign up to yet another service. Piracy is a problem of convenience for most people.
Look at piracy statistics before Spotify and Steam, and look at them afterwards. Most casual pirates stopped pirating songs because they have an easy to use interface with 99.99% of all the songs they could want. Contrast that to Netflix 10 years ago versus today. The meme is real: https://i.redd.it/d3423w2g5ur21.jpg. With more fragmentation, don't wonder why piracy is coming back among group two.
Content creators cannot treat groups one and two as equal because one is rigid, they will never pay, so don't even try to convince them; but two is malleable, if your service is good enough, most of them will pay.
The modern corporation’s war cry in action: “Why settle for some of your customer’s money when you can get all of it?”
Still I am an adult and yes would vote with my wallet regardless.
More generally: yes, close government intervention is needed maintain a healthy market, no, free markets don't spring up spontaneously.
Also, video and audio recording and editing equipment was expensive. Now many people carry around a device capable of recording 4K video in their pocket and can get video and audio editing equipment free that producers could only dream of when those cases were adjudicated.
With the plethora of streaming services, there is no “monopoly”.
Do you also think we should apply rules to automobiles that were relevant to horses?
How is it a “monopoly” when there are more than half a dozen players. A “vertical monopoly” is another HN fiction. Are all game console makers a “monopoly”? Shouid the local TV stations not be allowed to produce news only on their channels? Should ESPN not be allowed to produce “ESPN Tonight”?
Are you saying that it should be illegal for any distributor to also produce shows?
Let’s not stop at TV. It should also be illegal for websites to pay writers to produce content and newspapers to hire reporters and editors to produce exclusive content.
You're missing the point. The proposal is to split competition in the single integrated market of content+distribution into two separate markets, one for content and a separate one for distribution.
The point is that by bundling the two of them together you're reducing competition, because just by simple mathematics there are fewer companies capable of both compared to companies that specialise in one. Content production is a hard industry, so is distribution.
> Are you saying that it should be illegal for any distributor to also produce shows?
The proposal is that distributors will have to split their business into two independent businesses. If there's a local news channel, then it gets split into a local news producer and a general distributor that also distributes other things.
The internet has already done that for the most part though, it used to be that newspapers were the exclusive distributors and thus could maintain a local monopoly on local news. The internet swept that away and now anybody could get local news from anywhere else on earth.
The linked article is lamenting that the trend is reversing, such that distributors are once again the same people as the content producers.
> Let’s not stop at TV. It should also be illegal for websites to pay writers to produce content and newspapers to hire reporters and editors to produce exclusive content.
That's a strawman. Nobody's saying it should extend past TV, please debate the idea on its own merits.
Yes, because it’s utterly stupid when you think about it and say that no content distributor should be able to fund the production of their own content. No one wants to be a commodity and that doesn’t make sense any market to not have something to differentiate your product.
Streaming content and being a pipe is the definition of “undifferentiated heavy lifting”. Both Netflix and Disney run on AWS infrastructure and now anyone with the money can throw money at a company like BAMTech to set up the infrastructure. Then you just have a monopoly on who actually carries the traffic. What’s to stop AWS, Azurs or GCP from just offering their own streaming service and undercutting the competition?
In other words, what you suggest now leads to a monopsony - where you have many sellers of content and a few buyers with more power and it would lead to consolidation.
Currently if a producer wants to create a show, he can negotiate with 9 different sellers.
Look no further than music distribution, you have basically two major players in music streaming - Spotify and Apple Music - and it’s a shitty business to be in as a standalone business
GPL can only exist because of government regulations and action when those regulations are violated.
I guess If copyright seized to exist you could take GPL code and modify it without sharing back, but the users would also not be required to pay you for using it, so…
also GPL is mostly trying to fight closed-source code which is just as possible without the current copyright system, it can still be kept private like any trade secret. GPL relies on the system to force releasing source.
If we are going to apply standards in the 40s to a completely different era, let’s apply laws that were meant to govern horses to cars.
B) upload to iTunes Connect and Apple takes their 30% cut (I think iTunes Connect is still used for all media uploaded for sell on iTunes)
C) whatever the equivalent is for (B) for other VOD providers
D) Pay for the bandwidth to host it yourself
E) create a website and take payments for physical media and ship out a thumb drive or a DVD
I hope this can be outlawed but antitrust enforcement in the US is a pale shadow of what it once was.
Combine with Doplarr to make requesting media a snap over discord.
Steam "beat" piracy because it's just a better experience. Streaming media (and sports streams especially) seem adamant in not learning that lesson.
Nowadays the industries launch DMCAs, the provider complies. Providers, to fulfill the requests tend to remove parts of the archive rather than all. If can't download rar part 22,23 you can't complete the movie. They've done their part.
The movie "The HackerNews" has 20 rar parts, usenet provider #1 has 1-18 rar parts and 19-20 rar parts are missing. usenet provider #2 has 16-20 rar parts but missing 1-15. Combine two or more backbackbone providers and you can grab all files.
PAR2 is a godsend, and usenet is a hidden cave of treasure.
A cool map of usenet providers and backbones [1]
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Usenet_P...
Usenet works with the holdng company, the backbone provider and the reseller. Where the company is based would be if an DMCA has to be complied. As backbone providers normally serve usenet servers in the NL, and the USA. USA we all know; the Netherlands, "best effort" hence deletion of rar parts.
(I remember Classic Netflix, where I could get 99% of what I wanted … or, in many cases, over 100% of what I wanted!)
Also Spotify is losing money and can never be truly profitable with 70% of everything they make contractually going back to the labels. Subscription music is a sucky business and it only makes sense as a feature for a larger platform
Fair enough if Disney etc. want to keep new stuff exclusive to them. Also, fair enough if certain big evergreen content is kept exclusive (Star Wars, classic Disney movies etc.).
But, seriously, why can't I go to one service and watch every Cary Grant movie, or every movie directed by John Ford, or every episode of Remington Steele, or every episode of Matlock or whatever.
I wrote an app that is playing them (according to a schedule I created) on a Raspberry Pi from a 5TB drive (they're ripped to drive). It's kind of fun to walk by the TV downstairs and see the original "The Fly" or whatever on. No fast-forward or pause, but no internet required either (no ads, of course).
Video was much more fragmented and a lot of older content licensing never envisioned non-broadcast availability at all.
(The numbers also probably don't work. I'm guessing a hypothetical all-you-can-eat subscription would be in the hundreds of dollars a month.
They were the ~first.
ADDED: The basic point is that there was a pretty natural path from radio to personalized radio streaming to streaming that brought a modified version of the same royalty system along with it.
Not being able to pick specific songs is a huge difference.
They still don't have have 90% of filk songs.
The irony is I was introduced to this through YouTube and Grooveshark (which was still better than Spotify is now), if it hadn't been for these pirate services I wouldn't have known about Julia Ecklar.
Even then, Spotify is far better than the TV streaming situation.
What are you saying?
2. First result opens the Amazon App on my phone with a big button that says "End Membership".
Why do you think this is hard?
I don't see anything wrong with this either. I mean, tons of times when I need to do something specific in my car, for example, I just google it and get a detailed YouTube video explaining it. Better than hunting in a manual.
I'd rather pay $80/mo. for Internet, then jump in an out of STARZ and other services for $10/mo. instead of paying $80/mo. for Internet, $100/mo. for TV+basic cable (which I don't watch and TV is free OTA), and then the movie channels on top of it.
Plus the streaming services work on my phone which is pretty neat when I'm stuck somewhere.
FYI, that’s true of most cable networks now as well. They’ve all developed apps that are hybrids of (legitimized) IPTV streaming of their live broadcast of the channels available in your package, plus VOD catalogues of seemingly-random seasons of shows (i.e. the ones they happen to currently have licensed for syndication at any given time.)
You'll have threes choices
1. FAST 2. AST 3. Ad free version with a premium tax applied to make you more likely to subscribe to AST.
For me the quality of entertainment has dropped to the point where I'll probably just drop all streaming and buy the things I like on sale.
I am highly tech-savvy, as I would assume are most people on Hacker News. I have no idea what FAST and AST are in your comment. By context of you saying “ad free” I can guess that “AS” may mean “ad-supported”, but I have no idea what the F and T are and why they’re different.
Yes, I know I can “just Google it!” But by virtue of Google being useless these days, Googling “fast acronym” is all pages about strokes.
This is how tech shoots itself in the foot (yes, this is a general rant.) Use a bunch of acronyms no one understands, and then build a search engine that makes the meanings impossible to find.
Hopefully this will be better in the future. But I am not sure it will if people continue to use acronyms so frequently.
Now, you can pay for individual channels, but each one has only 1 show worth watching. Anytime a new show becomes popular, it gets its own “channel” that you have to subscribe to.
It didn't matter to me that Buffy had been in syndication for 10+ years. I never saw it back then, so I got to enjoy it. The same with so many other shows.
When I canceled my subscription, it had less than 1/5th of the shows and cost over 50% more.
That is what people are comparing and complayning about.
it's a shame that there are so many services, but ultimately the creators/companies want to be paid. my personal strategy have been to unsubscribe from all except YouTube, note which things are good on each service, subscribe for a single month to watch all of them and unsubscribe.
it's unlikely to happen, but I'd rather pay a fixed amount and access all of these streaming services and have the money proportionally be divided on my watching patterns.
Oh please, enough of this "poor creators" narrative. These copyright monopolists are worth what, trillions of dollars? How many millions are they spending on government lobbying to rob people of their rights? Maybe it's billions?
How is it their right to push back the expiration date on their copyrights whenever they're about to expire, effectively robbing the public of its public domain rights?
How is it their right to abuse DMCA take down process to destroy the concept of fair use?
Take a cue from the open source movement, if you want free content, take the time to organize enough like minded people to create if.
It's their right because we've decided as a society that it's often useful for people to have that right. There's no physical reason that knockoff publishers couldn't have printed dirt-cheap paper copies of Harry Potter as the books came out, but I think things ended up better without them being allowed to do that.
> How is it their right to push back the expiration date on their copyrights ... [and] to abuse DMCA takedown
These are a completely separate issue, and are less so "rights" than "practices which powerful players do and sometimes get away with".
in other words nobody is losing out on anything because i pirate. the alternative (which sometimes happens when i can't find it) is they still get nothing.
i don't think people realize how much they spend on media, like lots of my friends are spending $25/mo on video streaming plus another $10 for music. like sports? add espn, another $10. like ufc? add more for pay per view. big reader? another $20/month easy. read lots of news? they all want "just" $10/month or whatever even though most people aren't reading all of one paper like they used to, just a few articles from each.
am i gonna spend $700/yr for media? hell naw.
so if i can pirate it i do, nobody loses. if i can't i just don't consume the media.
> These are a completely separate issue
No! The original social contract was we'd all pretend their stuff wasn't easily copyable for a few years so they could turn a profit and then it would enter the public domain.
Not only is it obvious that they have zero intention of keeping up their end of the bargain, they keep stretching out those few years into functional limitlessness. About 5 years is more than enough for these creators to make their money back and then some, but we're all going to be dead before the works we grew up with become part of the public domain.
So why should we recognize copyright as legitimate? It's not. It's just monopolists and rent seekers and there is absolutely no reason for us to accept any of this BS.
Also, as usual HN wannabee lawyers have no idea what a “monopoly” is. There is no “monopoly” on creating video content. You can in fact do it from your phone
How could it not be? Public domain is centuries old.
> From the beginning of VHS tapes and at home distribution, there was Macrovision.
So what...?
> When copyright was made the law, there was no method of mass consumer distribution.
Yeah, and that's the only reason why copyright even made any sense. You had to own things like printing presses in order to infringe copyright at any meaningful scale. Now everyone has globally networked computers which make copyright infringement so trivial people don't even realize they're doing it.
> Also, as usual HN wannabee lawyers have no idea what a “monopoly” is.
> There is no “monopoly” on creating video content.
You're not even replying to my actual point, you're inventing a strawman to disprove so you can call me a "wannabe lawyer". Not even once did I claim there was a monopoly on any creative process. I claimed there was a monopoly on copying. That's what copyright means, it's literally right in there in the name: creators get a time limited monopoly on the ability to make copies of their work.
So because a law is easier to break that means it’s not relevant? You really think that most people who are going to bit torrent don’t know they are breaking the law? Even if that were the case “ignorance is no excuse”.
I can walk down the street if any major city and get crack and pay a prostitute to let me smoke it on her ass. Just because it’s “easy” doesn’t mean it’s legal.
Copyright dates back to the 15th century shortly after the invention of the printing press - meaning almost since the inception of technology that allowed copying media, government thought there was a reason to protect content creators.
> Not even once did I claim there was a monopoly on any creative process. I claimed there was a monopoly on copying
That’s an even worse take on what “monopoly” means
Yes? What is the relevance of a law pretty much everybody breaks, many times without even realizing it? When people download random pictures and videos via the internet, it's copyright infringement. When my family and friends send me those pictures or post them to social media, it's copyright infringement. When people share books with each other via messaging groups it's infringement. At this point it should no longer be a crime but a custom.
What is the relevance of a law that requires literal tyranny to enforce? Because that's what copyright enforcement in the 21st century looks like. To enforce copyright you need to destroy free computing as we know it. You need to destroy everything a site like Hacker News stands for. The technology to do it will pave the way for even worse abuses such as the regulation of encryption and control of communications.
Computers are world changing technology. Why should their potential be crippled for the sake of creators and their obsolete business models?
> Copyright dates back to the 15th century shortly after the invention of the printing press - meaning almost since the inception of technology that allowed copying media, government thought there was a reason to protect content creators.
So does public domain. Even the US constitution says that these exclusive rights are "time limited". Funny how every single time it's this narrative about the creators and their protection and their profits. Everyone forgets that eventually their works are supposed to become literal public property after a set number of years. Copyright lasts so long now that the very concept of public domain might as well have been erased from public consciousness.
What a load of total BS. We're doing them a favor by granting them artificial scarcity at all. We can easily make it last 0 years if we want. We have the technology.
We have the technology to walk into a mall and kill dozens of people. Since when is “we have technology to do $x” the justification for saying a law is invalid?
Lie. People created works before copyright and they will continue to do so afterwards.
> How much free content have you created?
Pretty much every line of code I've ever written. I've also provided my services for plenty of people free of charge.
> Since when is “we have technology to do $x” the justification for saying a law is invalid?
Since these rent seekers showed up.
You also don’t seem to know rent seeking means
> Rent seeking is an economic concept that occurs when an entity seeks to gain wealth without any reciprocal contribution of productivity.
Are the people producing the media not contributing anything? It seems the people who want everything for free are the ones who aren’t making a meaningful contribution
I’m really not interested in 99% of the content on any of these platforms.
I believe there's already some indy music on there and perhaps movies as well, haven't checked recently.
Disclaimer: not working for or otherwise have any relationship with GameStop, never been to one in my life.
You're joking right?
If I'm going into criminal land either way I'm just going to pirate in the first place.
That said, it’s not great for the environment, probably still worse even when comparing with the ecological footprint of data centre infrastructure (download-and-keep would be even better than streaming actually). Not everything gets a (timely) release either.
Sometimes a quick download would be great. FWIW I’m on a 400mbit/s connection.
Obviously DRM free versions would be the cherry on top and would guarantee “portability” into the future (I’d still buy the n-th version of The Terminator in 8K in any case ;)
The thing is that there is essentially zero cost to providing channels to you that you are not watching. There are costs to sending the signals to your house but that doesn't increase based on how many channels you have access to. There also costs to producing content, but those costs are independent of the number of viewers. Add to that the fact these channels typically have advertising which is a good chunk of revenue, they aren't paid for by your cable service fees.
The result is that the costs involved don't correspond simply a cost per user per available channel. Consequently, it doesn't make sense to charge users that way.
how is it a win if I don't watch them?
But maybe you don't see it that way. Fine. Perhaps the availability of these other channels is neutral. I think they key point is that it's not a loss.
The sports channels (ESPN, etc) are the most expensive but were bundled with anything more than the most basic package. With streaming they're split out.
The Disney bundle example in the article shows you can save by going a la carte.
If you want more than one thing, and paying for both together in a package saves you money, or is a worthwhile convenience for the price, it's a win-win.
If you don't want all the things in a package, and the price is more than you'd pay for the things you want, it's not a win for the consumer.
Take an example of cars. Any user buying a new car would almost always pay for all the safety features if a “safety bundle” was available that had all the safety features. Instead they split apart all the features into different bundles along with luxury features to make you buy stuff that you don’t care about. Want blind spot detection? Great we have our pro bundle that gives you that with seat heating (driver only btw) and all weather mats. Want collision warning? Here’s our pro plus that gets you that with heated steering and seat heating for front passenger.
Cable bundles were exactly that. After spending $200/month, I still couldn’t watch all the football games from my couch and that was a travesty. But I did have 200+ Spanish channels. So it was a win win right?
I realize I can't pay $1 per channel (20 channels for $20), but I'd be willing to pay $5.
I can’t even think about all of that content I really care about. Seriously. Have two of each of these channels to provide variety:
Left wing news, right wing news, alternative news and indie documentary news, cartoons, westerns and classic TV, actions, dramas, “daytime TV”, home improvement, discovery-like, sci-fi, movies, classics movies, history and documentaries, nature channel, comedy channel, reality TV, and I think that’s it. That’s 36 channels if there’s two of each. I’d unironically pay like $100 a month if I got a DVR and ABSOLUTELY NO ADS.