Inconvenient EU piracy study kept hidden for years (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Inconvenient EU piracy study kept hidden for years (2017)

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98 pointstanelpoder38 comments

I pirate movies because it simply provides a better user experience than streaming services.

I happily pay the €9.99 for Spotify Premium. I think I actually use it maaaybe 4 or 5 days a month, but it has virtually all the content I listen to, it has a pretty good app, and it Just Works on all my platforms. I probably wouldn't go back to downloading MP3s if you paid me to.

Meanwhile, the movie streaming experience sucks. The ecosystem is extremely fragmented (I'd probably need half a dozen subscriptions), content randomly disappears, the apps are universally awful and not even available on half my devices, and the bitrate is terrible.

Alternatively, I can enter whatever title I want - no matter how obscure - into a torrent website and get a 4K download link. It's way more convenient! I am currently building a small Raspberry Pi based NAS to offload downloads from my space-limited main machine, and that thing will probably end up costing me €400-450 altogether. I could get two to three years of Netflix for that amount of money - and I would've happily given it to them if they just... didn't suck so much.

The music industry saw a renaissance due to streaming and has never been more successful. The movie industry got greedy and delved too deep - they've got nobody to blame but themselves.

The music industry saw this renaissance, but did the musicians?

Except for the most popular artists, they seem to make very little from streaming.

Living off record sales was never an option for the vast majority of musicians either.

The record sales were the ad, money was in touring and merchandising. It's the exact same today.

This isn't so for every kind of music. Folk musicians, who mainly play small venues and even house concerts, would make $100 to $300 per show from selling CDs. The merch table at a Jazz club would mostly sell CDs and depending on the size of the club could pull in $500 or more in CD sales. Small classical groups like quartets and chamber music would play salons and again, CDs would be a big factor. This income would often double or more the artist's take from door sales (if any) and make the gigs viable at all.

There used to be space for these musicians to eke out a modest but sustainable living touring a circuit of these types of gigs and festivals, but streaming really has killed most of it off. They could record a CD for a few thousand dollars and print maybe 5,000 copies, knowing that would turn into $50,000 - $75,000 of revenue at $10 to $15 per CD that they would mostly keep.

But the crowd just don't buy CDs at anything near the rate that they used to. Now most of those musicians make most of their living by some other means and the music has become the side. It's very unfortunate.

I work in the touring industry as a tech and its often the case that a production makes enough money for all the crew salaries and hotels from merch alone. And the crew on these tours are well paid.

This fact is often repeated by the PM at 1am when they are loading box after box of merch onto the truck.

How big is the band?

I saw a band recently in a 600 capacity venue. It was probably 70-80% full. Near the end the singer said the tour was losing money so please buy something.

Of the metal bands I usually see, I assume the majority have other jobs.

Before streaming the vast majority of music artists never made a dime, and was never able to actually release content on previous media (vinyl LPs, printed CDs, etc.), most were able to record some cassette tapes and distribute around a town square, bars they had a gig, etc.

As fucked as royalties from streaming is, mostly also due to the Big-3 music labels royally fucking artists on the way and blocking streaming services to actually pay the artists more, at least now there's a way for the vast majority of artists to release their works to the world.

So in a sense the music industry hasn't changed: a few artists still make the bulk of money, but it gave a much larger avenue for upcoming artists to find an audience.

Why do you "pay" for spotify when you have innertune and blackhole apps on fdroid? They use YouTube music and works "good enough".

They follow newpipe ideology so its not even piracy

Music discovery? Ease of playing an album? Better quality? I've never tried those apps but I don't like using YouTube for music. Even when I had YouTube Music. I'd rather the song just not be there if the only version available is a 64kbit live version some guy made on his Sony Ericsson back in 2005.

youtube for music and youtube music are different i think

https://music.youtube.com/

it uses this

Half a dozen subscriptions? I’d need all of them, and they still would fall short. We’re talking hundreds/month to cover a good percent of media in existence. The marginal cost of storing and streaming a video is basically zero. There are so many shows and movies that do not exist on any services as far as I can see. Capitalists are too damn greedy for their own good in this case. If services provided everything at fair rates the arguments against piracy would hold water. Instead they create artificial scarcity that actively pushes people towards piracy. The individual actions of these gatekeepers may seem rational in the immediate context but lose all rationality when put into proper perspective. Unfortunately vast wealth and strictly hierarchical organizations have shaped these people to reject compromise and collaboration - the foundational survival adaptation of our society.

Podcasts are the same way. I have like 300 subscriptions and over 200 of those have patreons or similar with minimum donations of $5. The UX of rotating through the premium subscriptions to each is terrible. Ignoring the $1k/yr minimum, I don’t have hours every month to waste on signing up for and cancelling subs. I’d happily pay a non zero amount to support all these casters but the default easy path of paying over $1k/mo is so ludicrous I won’t materially support any that use platforms with such high minimums out of principal. Once again, these are conscious decisions made by patreon and credit card processors to actively prohibit true micro transactions. This has a deleterious effect on the industry by keeping people like from supporting podcasters. I’m sure this state of affairs is seen as a positive by the incumbents whose interests are threatened by these bootstrapped creators.

This doesn't surprise me, I pirate stuff because I am bored and want something to watch. The price tag to buy movies at $20 or so dollars is just too much.

I did have a patch of piracy free media when Netflix was had everything I wanted to watch, now Netflix cancels nearly every show I get excited about after one season. In addition to this there are like 5 or 6 providers now, paying $20 or so per provider for 4k streaming is just too costly.

Not only too costly, but seriously unfair. Median salaries differ up to five times on the same continent, bit less inside the EU, yet prices aren't adjusted for that. People often pay times as much adjusted and also get less content, simply inane.

I see significant different prices for Netflix in different countries, such as Denmark and Bulgaria.

My own reason not to subscribe is the language for subtitles etc. Netflix in Denmark often lacks English subtitles. This isn't very good, when 4% of EU citizens live in a country they weren't born in.

> A piracy study that the EU commissioned in 2013 has been kept hidden for years, likely because it did not find statistical proven evidence that piracy impacts legitimate purchases.

Not "likely". "Because".

Not "because", "likely". Don't make assumptions

No make assumptions, don’t make conclusions until they’re verified or close to it.

With streaming services increasing their prices significantly and the hunt on password sharing, I think if this study is repeated 3 years from now the results will look very different.

I canceled 2 subscriptions and switched down one tier on another subscription last month. I bet the clueless execs will blame it on piracy...

It's also a very convenient backstop. If I can't find it on netflix or prime then without high seas I'd likely simply not watch whatever I was looking for.

Unrelated - lately netflix is kicking out so many DRM errors that half the time I end up downloading it anyway even if its right there in netflix. Broken by design garbage sigh

Tangentially, newspapers sales too have been plummeting during the years, and I still have to see someone photocopying a newspaper. This also well before some of them were available online or in .pdf format that could be copied and shared. Some markets shrink over time, period. Blaming that on piracy is not only misleading but feeds incompetent or corrupt politicians with a convenient excuse to restrict online freedoms.

When the Mandalorian came out, you could watch in the US, but if you’re in Europe you had to wait 6+ months for Disney+ to be available in my country.

No, thanks.

Had the same experience with other content.

I'm ready to pay, here's my money, take it! Instead I have to wait for months and be spoiled by seeing everyone discuss it, just because of some stupid regulation.

No thanks - if you won't provide me the content legally for money, someone else will provide it to me for free, with much less hassle.

And normally they expect their money up front before you know the quality.

Want to cut game piracy? Offer up limited versions of games for free. Let the player see what they think of it before they plonk down their money. *If* you have a good product this should work. If you're selling hype or bugware it's going to fail horribly--a good thing.

I feel old because what you describe is called a demo and they used to be very common.

Single best thing a game can do to sell me on purchasing it is:

Provide a free demo - at the end of demo, if I want to keep playing, that’s means you’ve sold me, and you’ve done it about as honestly as possible. Short of making a really good demo then fumbling the rest of the paid game, a solid demo is your best shot.

Second best is gameplay footage. No commentary, no “HEY WHATS UP FAMILY SMASH THE LIKE BELL” talk radio bullshit, just let me see the game being played. If all your trailers are a montage of CG and 1 second game clips, I’m going to assume you’re trying to pull one over on me - if I can’t play it myself, show me what playing it is like, and maybe I’ll take a shot and buy it.

Third best is recommendations from people I trust. Organic / word of mouth is the lowest level of info I’ll pay attention to.

Revel and announcement trailers don’t do it for me. Hype and buzz are suspect. Ads actively turn me off games - I’m never going to play Raid Shadow Legends, I’m never ever going to even try it, because their advertising is so obnoxious.

You wouldn't download a car.

Watch me

I would totally download a real car to 3D print, lol.

those 15 year old talking points from "the more you know"-talking points financed by transnational entertainment exploiters just won't die, will they?

TLDR the EU found that privacy will maybe reduce top movies earnings by 5%.

Also, 80% of respondents find TV streaming prices too expensive in comparison to the content offered.

We can all debate the quality of Netflix or Prime but the cost is about the same as renting a VHS tape from Blockbuster once a week 20 years ago. Not even adjusting for inflation.

a big difference is that you could find vhs and dvds in public libraries, whereas the library model breaks apart for streamed media.

My library does actually have streaming movies and TV. But the comparison of what they have available to stream vs take out physically on DVD and Blu-ray just highlights how messed up it is. You will struggle to find a movie you've heard from the past 10 years, you will struggle to find a good movie from the past 30. Meanwhile the physical library has recent new releases and stuff you've actually heard of and want to watch.

Agree. I'd go to Blockbuster for block busters and the library or an independent video rental store for art house and foreign language films.

Note that in 2013 there weren't many streaming services available in the polled countries. Netflix first appeared in UK and Sweden by 2012, and was probably not available at all in the other polled countries. So it's more likely that TV show prices refer to cable TV, not streaming.

i think you meant to write piracy not privacy

Although technically, its not piracy, I cant see why anyone would want to stream a movie or subscription series to their phone and watch it. I think this study highlights some people watch any poor quality movie in order to take part in conversations with their peers.

I'd rather go without because the CGI is detracting from the experience and the story lines are all variations of others.

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