Hacker News Reader

Comment by gleenn | Hacker News Reader

Honest question, what's the difference between a pricing and service problem?

"Piracy is a service problem" means that most people pirate because they don't have access (or difficult access) to the product/service they want. They would gladly pay for it, but they can't, or can't be hassled to.

I don't know if it's been backed up by real data, but services like Steam and Spotify tend to confirm this intuition.

Spotify confirms that piracy was in fact a pricing problem. With a Spotify subscription, you get way more music for a far lower price than under the previous “buy it to hear it” model a la iTunes or CDs. And artists make way less money now from recorded music than they used to.

Studios only agreed to the Spotify pricing model because the alternative was rampant file-based piracy. They figured that getting something is better than nothing.

Another thing to consider is that there is so much more music today than 20 years ago in the Napster era. There has been an explosion in content creation, as the means of production have become ever-more accessible, and it all accumulates over time, so the older stuff never goes away. The supply of music only ever increases, and naturally when the supply of something increases so dramatically, we would expect the price to go down.

What about demand? We are certainly listening to more music than ever before, and the population is growing, but not at the 10x or 100x rate that has happened to the supply of music. There’s an upper limit of 24 hours per day listening time per person. There is already more music than it is possible to listen to in a lifetime. Soon there will be more good music than it is possible to listen to in a lifetime.

I wonder if we're moving back to an older way of consuming music where many or most people have musical ability and play for themselves and family. Perhaps not quite to that degree but you're more likely to know several people who create music and share it without being or expecting to be a musician by trade.

I personally listen to less music and play more. Rather than looking for the new thing I'll examine songs in quite a lot of detail to understand them.

Sample size of one and whatnot, but I remember when I was a kid, it was pretty darn hard to find the kind of music I liked (think heavy metal that you won't hear on the radio). Sure, a CD was relatively expensive for me at the time. But mostly, it was hard to actually find.

Sure, the latest top 40 and a bit of "common niche" albums (like the usual suspects when it comes to classic music or classic rock) were easy to find. But black and death metal? Not a chance.

I wasn't even living in the middle of nowhere, mind. Just a fairly populous suburb of a major European city. But as a teenager, it was extremely unpractical to travel to the city center, and to even learn about the stores where this music would be sold.

With piracy or Spotify, that issue evaporates.

And actually, Spotify is much better. Because it's much quicker and practical to just search Spotify and click play, than it is to browse dubious trackers, not knowing if or when I might get my download. Plus, with Spotify connect, they can be sure I won't be cancelling my plan anytime soon.

For me, Spotify and similar services offer me better curated playlists. I have a lot of music on a Plex server and I still almost always use YouTube music because curation and dynamically generated, good playlist; and because the “radio to ownership” pipeline can be annoying when I’m running or whatever

Spotify absolutely fit an access problem dead on: They're subscription, unless you can tolerate ads and various limitations*. Limits like not being able to control exactly what you're listening to (no beginning to end playback of albums, only shuffle), ads every 3-5 songs, playlists that were originally capped and again, only available on shuffle.

iTunes didn't improve on the physical store model any further than "now you don't have to get out of you chair to get new music." The DRM that wrapped around most tracks was frustrating enough for most people that the cost of the album didn't matter, you were better off going to a physical store, buying the physical CD, ripping it using iTunes to unencumbered ALAC/AAC and using it with iTunes or with other devices and apps.

Sure, people still used iTunes, but more for the fact that it was HEAVILY integrated with the Hot Shit Object, the iPod.

Spotify removed the barrier at the right time to succeed in the market. If you wanted to listen to Albums, you paid. But it was there, easy, no questions. You could just pop in and listen to That Single that just came out.

Most people who wanted ad-free music are going to be willing to pay for it. The rest, who are fine with radio-ish "I want to listen to the current top40" are fine with ads. It took Apple quite a while to come to near that, and they Only have a subscription model that isn't very well liked by its users.

Not entirely - one problem I had with piracy, and I did it from the 90’s on, was finding new music. Spotify opened up catalogs with algorithms that piracy never could. Short of going to Strawberry’s and looking around… for cds to copy from friends, piracy never really had that same Spotify algo service that said “if you like this you’ll like that.”

Here's an example:

I believe in supporting those who create media, and don't mind at all paying for streaming services that provide quality content for a fair price. As such, I happily subscribe to Amazon Prime (with several "add on" channels), Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and HBO Max. Then one day I decided, "hell, I think Peacock TV has some stuff I might want to watch." So I signed up for a paid account, like any other good law-abiding citizen might.

A couple of days later I finally got around to logging in and trying to watch something, only to be met by some bizarre error message. Which led me to find out that Peacock doesn't support playback on Linux. Which sent me down a rabbit-hole of trying to find some kind of way to make it work nonetheless. After a couple of days of futzing around with everything I could think of short of running Windows in a VM (and including going as far as running Android in a VM) I gave up and cancelled my paid account.

What makes it all the more galling is how their support lines lie and say "We're always working to add support for more platforms" when the reality is, there have (from online accounts I've read) at times in the past been workarounds that let Peacock work on Linux... and they have systematically identified and blocked all of them. It would be one thing if any other major streaming service had a similar policy, or if Peacock had a position of "we don't officially support Linux, so it might work or it might not". But this is different. It's an active, hostile, intentional effort to block Linux users.

Anyway, that's what I'd call a "service problem". As far as I can tell, there is no amount of money I can pay Peacock that will let me use their service. So not a "pricing problem".

In conclusion, I will now return to using Bittorrent or other mechanisms to pirate any Peacock content I find interesting. Fuck 'em, I tried to pay the fuckers and they didn't want to play ball.

But that's the case with the others, too. I'm not familiar with HBO, Disney and Hulu, but Prime and Netflix don't allow you to watch high-def content on Linux.

Hell, even on Windows with their app, Prime won't let you watch more that HD. For UHD, you need their stick or some other device. [0]

Netflix supports UHD on computers, but only on some browsers, of which Chrome is not one [1].

But, to your point about Peacock, at least they do work on Linux, as in you'll get some sort of image.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

[1] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742

but Prime and Netflix don't allow you to watch high-def content on Linux.

I don't know (or care) about "high-def" but I can assure you that Prime and Netflix work just fine on Linux.

Netflix supports UHD on computers

That's not really relevant to me. I don't care about UHD, I just care about being able to watch. I'm not that picky.

Peacock, on the other hand, doesn't work at all.

A service problem is when the media mafia refuses to sell me files that I can keep. I'd like to open some website and pay 15 bucks for a movie (the same as I'd buy for a recent bluray in a store) where I'm then allowed to just download a .mkv that I can throw on my nas. Major streaming sites refuse to serve me content with resolution higher that 480p (I think?) because my computer obeys me and not them. Sure looks great on the big screen in my living room.

I think it's 720p but yea, it's why I will never pay for Netflix and I often pirate stuff that's available on there despite having access to my mother's account. I've not pirated games since I was a teenager, because Steam is such a good service, and I'm happy to pay for games. Meanwhile I constantly bring up how much better my media consumption experience is because I pirate high quality movies and shows instead of the drivel that online media providers offer

> I've not pirated games since I was a teenager, because Steam is such a good service, and I'm happy to pay for games.

I'm happy to pay for games too, but I've stopped buying from Steam unless they're not available elsewhere. GOG has been my go-to, as they only sell games without DRM.

If Valve someday goes belly-up, or just decides to stop running their license servers, all those games we've bought on Steam are just gone, absent (illegal, in the US, anyway) third-party tools to strip the DRM. I believe some versions of Stream DRM can be removed, but not all.

I just don't see the need to reward a company that treats me like a criminal when I can get the same games from a company that respects me and my purchase.

(Bonus: Steam-the-software even allows you to add non-Steam games to the app, which makes it easy to run non-native games I've bought from GOG under Proton, for example.)

The key point for me with valve is their ongoing efforts to make software they license to me easier for me to use. This is completely opposed to the rest of the media industry, who are working exclusively to make my experience worse. Thanks to valves efforts I can now easily run many games that would've been windows only a few years ago.

Valve also currently sells the best handheld console on the market.

Netflix and friends won’t even reliably serve me 4K, even once you’ve jumped through all the hoops (sufficient network speed, right OS, right browser/application, 4K source content, the expensive plan, a screen capable of 4K etc).

Meanwhile in pirating land:

Pick your desired resolution, want 8/10 bit HDR? You can have that too. Pick your desired format. Downloads quickly, don’t have to worry about network interruptions.

> Major streaming sites refuse to serve me content with resolution higher that 480p (I think?) because my computer obeys me and not them.

This nonsense directly lead to my permanent cancellation of Amazon Prime. It's infuriating to be treated like a second-class citizen even as a paying customer.

For me pirating "services" (torrent trackers, Usenet, etc.) simply offer better choices.

For mainstream content it's available around the globe, in all kinds of different formats / bitrates, with community sourced subtitles, usable on any device (hw performance limitations notwithstanding) and in my possession forever after downloading should I choose to keep the content.

Another service improvement on piracy is better availability of more obscure content. Live shows, foreign movies/music or anything out of the mainstream is usually accessible better when you're pirating content.

The only content class traditional media companies and online streaming offers a better service for is live broadcasting, and even then geographical restrictions f*ck you over depending on the licensing agreements.

Pricing means you pirate media because you dont want to pay for it.

Service problems means you pirate stuff because it's too inconvenient to do it legally, and easier to pirate stuff.

For many people the "free" price of piracy still will not justify the hassle of finding torrent sites, going through fake releases and warez. They would just pay some number of dollars if that process is frictionless and gets them what they want.

But when paying for it and maintaining access for what you paid becomes more complex than pirating, then you have a service problem that can't be solved by pricing.

People pirates because it's the simplest way to obtain what they want, and not because it's the cheapest.

Basically, that people aren't nudged to pirate content because they don't want to pay or the price is too high, but rather because the quality of service for trying to be legitimate is so poor.

Simple - a service problem can't be fixed with more money

e.g. a lot of times no assortment of streaming subscriptions will get you access to certain shows/films/games. sometimes they may be out of print on disc as well. there may be no actual legal way to access that content. but piratebay is right there...

A pricing problem would be where media/subscription costs are higher than people are willing/able to pay.

A service problem would be where the service or app is too complex or time consuming to use, or has a lot of friction during use (as was the case in the original post).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com