Netflix crushed the Latin American password black market
restofworld.org
restofworld.org
I'd bet total hours watched is waaay down, for eking out an additional 1% or so. Good job guys, you decreased total utility to the world for a few extra cents.
So appears that people rage quitting were outnumbered by those who got their own legitimate accounts.
One of the reasons I upgraded back in the day was for more streams so I could share it with my sister. Now she has her own account instead.
Before 47 years ago - before this marketing reinvention was introduced & subsequently took over - there was a more pro-social belief in what the corporate body was for. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/maximizing-s...
Agree about watching less Netflix, though.
Where did you possibly get this theory from? They were given personhood as a way of eliminating risk to shareholders so the cost of capital would come down and encourage business formation and capital efficiency. And the justification was “if they aren’t separate people with liability limited to share capital investment then mere investors not connected to the operations could be found liable to an unlimited extent, which is totally unjust”
What you are reciting is merely modern ideology that supports the status quo.
Forcing investors to take on liability is neither just not unjust, merely different ways of running societies, equally valid depending on your goals. After all nobody makes you invest, and in a society where you might be liable for your investment's actions you would be much more scrutinizing about your management's character before agreeing to involve yourself. Ventures would tend to be more personal and require more trust. That's the world we used to live in and that was just as valid and just.
Read history.
I have not, in any of my education, come across the notion that (as OP was responding to) corporations were allowed due to a belief they would increase the net utility of society (or specifically in this case, that decreased Netflix hours watched would be a net utility objective that would’ve been in the realm of things a corporation was initially intended to be formed for).
The reasons for corporations to spread beyond royal charter to arbitrary creation by the general public had to do with lawsuit administration and limiting liability. Prior to corporations, partnerships were the primary form of organizing and when they were sued each partner had to be included separately which was cumbersome and many partners had nothing to do with the operations or activities that gave rise to the liability.
The legislation which codified the above is credited with a massive increase in company formation and capital allocation in the 1800s. The presumption being that things that were once deemed too risky when there was unlimited liability were no longer as risky.
None of what I’ve written here is “modern ideology” unless by modern you refer to the 1800s.
Choosing to bestow that privilege to anyone for any purpose they wish is a conscious tradeoff that our society makes, nothing natural about it. The upside as you keep mentioning is it's convenient to run the enterprise this way, allowing it to reach a larger scale. The downside to society is the risk that this greater power enables the creation of organizations that rival the state in power -- which is probably why originally, charters specified a limited purpose for the company.
> The crackdown also correlates with a marked decline in black market sales of Netflix accounts, which either belong to the seller or are created using stolen credit cards.
I don't care either way I'm living in one of the richest countries in the world but consumers in Argentina or Bolivia can't pay €15 per month.
Piracy is just more convenient. Streaming was beating that in the early days, now it no longer is again. They ruined it.
I can only hope that music doesn’t go the same way as video has. Right now for most listeners, any of the major streaming services have anything they’d want. Imagine needing two or more music libraries.
Movies and TV shows though? People paid for streaming services because, like you said, it was so convenient. Now every company needs their own streaming service, and every good show is on a platform you don't subscribe to yet. I just stick with pirating these days, and I feel no shame in it. Fix your business model, or I'll still use it for free. Simple as.
Absolutely. I do think there are subtle differences and bits of strategy that are often overlooked here though.
First off, the risk of using pirated games is significantly higher than that of pirated music/films/tv. You can't put malware in a video/audio file (modulo codec bugs), but it's fairly trivial with a game binary.
Secondly though, Steam has sales, regularly. The amount I care about content exists on a spectrum. I'll pay $30 to see the new Dune film in an IMAX cinema, but the 87th episode of House MD is probably not worth $1 to me. TV/Movie companies never seemed to understand this, with things like buying on iTunes, and it was left to retailers to sometimes price down DVDs, but even then there were restrictions (e.g. Disney). Streaming sort of solved this, but is now un-solving it with so many streaming services having their own pricing setup based on their perceived value of their content.
Steam nicely side-steps this with a range of sale prices – I can buy stuff I care about soon/predictably at high price, or I can buy stuff I don't care about later/unpredictably at a low price. And I do buy across a range of price points based on how much I care about the content.
Edit: another aspect that is maybe under-valued is that Steam doesn't seem to do regional releases. I've never experienced a game not being available in a region. However with TV/movies/streaming this is regularly the case. It's so common for a hit TV series to come out in the US, for the online discourse to be in full swing, and for the studio to just have plans to maybe possibly launch it in select other countries in a year's time. How did they think most people in the world were watching Game of Thrones?
Maybe the article is not giving us the full picture?