IPTV Anti-Piracy Threats May Increase Male Motivation to Pirate by 30% | Hacker News Reader

IPTV Anti-Piracy Threats May Increase Male Motivation to Pirate by 30%

torrentfreak.com

109 pointsgslin85 comments

> Has an anti-piracy campaign targeting the public in the last 40+ years ever actually worked?

A nasty consideration: if these anti-piracy campaigns did work, the anti-piracy organizations would go out of business because the problem is then solved - this is against their incentives. Instead these organizations' incentive is to put on a big anti-piracy show to make an impression an the customers from the media industry. But this show must not be too successful to reduce piracy, since there are no subsequent contracts if the piracy "problem" disappears.

> if these anti-piracy campaigns did work, the anti-piracy organizations would go out of business

Aren’t these campaigns run by ad agencies?

Yes but the agencies are typically hired by MPAA/RIAA-adjacent groups. They purport themselves to be pro-artist but are mostly serving the interest of (and are funded by) major labels/studios. CreativeFuture, IIPA, etc.

My point is they have broader allegiances than this one campaign.

Yea this sounds like a hot conspiracy theory take, but let’s not forget we’re constantly making new members of society.

40years ago, I wasn’t around to see ads. Even if they’re successful, they have to start again for the next generation.

This article cites a single article discussing self-reported results from an online survey, published in the Journal of Business Ethics. I am not ready to call the matter settled.

> self-reported results from an online survey

Via a survey link “shared in one Croatian social media group that brings together individuals who share interests in watching movies and TV shows” [1]. Moreover, “the survey was active for one month” during which “voluntary participants…were randomly exposed to one of two scenarios” and then asked to answer questions about “their emotional appraisal and their future intentions to engage with illegal and legal streaming services.”

It’s an interesting pilot study. But the conclusion is limited to Croatian film enthusiasts who volunteer to take an online survey. It does create the case for broader research with a random sample.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074756322...!

Yep. A film enthusiast would obviously not choose a streaming service. Quality sucks/can't be ensured even if you are on a good connection and most people aren't. (And if it's a gathering and everyone watches on their own device at the same time then in addition buffering is unacceptable.)

They eliminated legal ways to watch a film without streaming (apart from new mainstream ones that nearby cinema will show) so that's what they get.

The UK is just doing it wrong.

You've got to be cool with the message for the fellow kids, dog.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI (1992)

... and that's how the US solved digital piracy and never had to worry about it again.

On the contrary, the UK is doing it right https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg

Doesn't seem unrealistic if the money was right and public outrage could be controlled. Not all governments thought it was outlandish to search peoples homes looking for a tv or a radio. Hell, we kill kids for no reason.

It was so effective they even made a sequel: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hUCyvw4w_yk

The Matrix changed everything. DP had to upgrade.

One reason I archive everything I can is that soon, it will be impossible to get it.

Another reason I archive is because soon, it will all fit in a phone-like-device powered by its environment and impervious to damage.

What size drives is reasonable to get started something like this?

Personally anime uses around 30TB for me. For the best quality (mostly 1080p + bluray) of everything released in the last year (~250 shows / movies), but also including older releases for the same franchise (eg past seasons / related spin offs).

For western media it'll really depend on how much quality you're willing to forgo (4k? hdr? blu-ray rips?) but 20GB for a 1080p season pack (~10 eps) and 5GB for a movie is pretty normal. And a cursory glance at certain sites suggests 250 seasons and 850 movies were released in 2023, so ~15TB seems like a good estimate for a years worth. Releases for asian stuff should be pretty similar in size, except less hdr / bluray options.

Storage wise I just have a raid 1 (zfs) setup with a bunch of 14tb drives (at 8~10usd per TB [1]). I did need to buy a hba doodad to convert a pcie slot to more sata slots though.

[1] https://diskprices.com/

> 5GB for a movie is pretty normal.

So 200 movies per TB. So 6 000 movies on a 30 TB.

I know someone who has tens of thousands of movies and series. He's got 200 TB (with redundancy).

Wouldn't mind knowing total number of hours / audio / video codec / resolutions for that 30TB collection. Immediate thought is ridiculously overspecced codec configuration or signs of an addiction. Are they stored as lossless 10-bit or something?

1920x1080x24bpp@30fps = 187MB/s or 1500Mbps, 11.2GB/min, 670GB/hr. 30TB / 670GB/hr = 44.7hrs raw. Shows and episodes wise, 30TB / 250 shows is 120GB/show, if by show GP meant a season, (120 GB) / (24 * 60 min) = 11.1 Mbps for a standard TV series, or (120 GB) / (12 * 30 min) = 44.4 Mbps for a standard 3-month anime seasons. Most 2K TV standards as well as streaming such as Netflix 4K are at 20-30Mbps bitrates, coming in already encoded in MPEG(-2/-4), so that's likely what GP is hoar-, collecting.

Sorry I should clarify, the 250 shows + movies estimate comes from number of shows / movies listed on MAL for this season times 4.

But since I also auto-download "related" releases for each thing airing (like seasons / movies from previous years), this comes out to ~24000 video files on disk (mp4 / mkv, excluding the million bluray raw segments). This tally is probably inflated by the bluray extras / op / ed files and a tiny bit by dupes (tracker is poorly organized)

I'll dump the actual stats in a few minutes but point is the 30TB has a lot more than the year's worth I mentioned ("250 seasons / movies"), because myself and the people I share the library with like to catch up on stuff before watching the newest release.

But yeah looks like ~15TB are from bluray remuxes which is definitely overkill (40~100 GiB per season).

Bleh, took like 2 hours to scan every file. Anyways, overall stats are here

https://gist.github.com/anon962/26bedc907e1f85123ae92df194de...

Even a simple 4TB HDD is better than nothing. Though beware, this can easily turn into a hobby/passion/obsession that becomes more expensive than years or decades of underlying subscription costs.

Before you know it, you start building your first dedicated NAS with a fancy file system that few people use (ZFS), configured with data striping and a distributed parity bit in RAIDZ (RAIDZ1), with UPS systems for high power availability. You'll become the go-to expert on hard drives among your friend group, and find yourself correctly answering questions like "What's the difference between CMR and SMR?". Backblaze's quarterly drive stats reports will start to become something you look forward to the release of, like a new episode coming out on your favorite TV show. You'll get acquainted with Kodi, Plex, Emby, Jellyfin, and more. You'll figure out the allure of mpv over VLC. You'll become the guy who reminds people that the cheapest hard drives are often the most expensive. You'll learn what private bittorrent trackers are, and pine after membership in the most exclusive ones. You will become intimately familiar with commercial VPNs, SSH, VPS offerings, and more.

Be cautious, friend - once you decide to start taking this hobby seriously, you will dicover this is no mere hobby, but a lifestyle.

> You'll figure out the allure of mpv over VLC

Can you explain what mpv offers over vlc ?

> cheapest hard drives are often the most expensive

What hard drives do you buy / recommend?

Looking it up, MPV supports the LUA scripting language.

The advantage there is cropping video, from what I’m reading.

If cropping is possible with VLC, I’m not aware of it, and I’m a VLC fan.

18TB Exos Renewed have over 24 of them and none have failed in over a year now

for clarification the drives #25 and #26 are spares that haven't any use

> Can you explain what mpv offers over vlc ?

People have complained about VLC's decoding quality in the past (no specific source but lots of google results). I'm sure there's valid bugs that have been patched over and some still there, but I'd take it with a grain of salt since VLC is super popular and therefore more noise when it drops the ball.

That said, I personally prefer MPV since I can display multiple subtitles at once (for learning foreign languages) and also drop in upscaling / sharpening filters like [1]. Oh and VLC is kinda buggy on my android 14 pixel when streaming from ftp / samba sources (video freezes when seeking too often).

[1] https://github.com/bloc97/Anime4K

VLC is my daily driver, but I get a few audio buffering issues that do not appear to be present in mpv. mpv also handles incomplete/partially broken files significantly better.

(For me) mpv is faster. I had videos that vlc could not play without stutter (on my CPU) but mpv had no issues. Just layman's observation.

Can confirm. I don't watch tv or movies unless people visit and I have over 200TB now.

I know you're being silly, but you'd have to be pretty obsessive to have it cost more than streaming. Internet says Netflix movies are about 5 GB at 1080p and 15 GB at 4k. At $10/TB, that's $0.05 or $0.15 per movie for equal quality. At $15.50/month for 1080p Netflix, that's 310 movies/month, or 10/day, which no one person can watch. At $23/month for 4k Netflix, that's 153 movies/month, or 5/day, which you'd have to be unemployed and have no life to watch.

Even with Blu-ray rips of 30 GB and 70 GB respectively, you're looking at 52 and 33 movies per month, which is more than 1/day (assuming no rewatches), which is still an awful lot of movie watching.

You could add something like 1:5 parity without changing the story much. Or get a friend to buy the hardware for a system that you maintain, and use them as a backup instead of parity. Even at $8/month to be on someone else's account, that's still 53 4k Netflix quality movies/month, so still makes economic sense for them.

This is course all assumes you never delete something after you've watched it.

So you'd really have to just be downloading everything you can find without even wanting to watch it to have the cost work out higher.

I think your point is valid and it’s not way more expensive to host your own, but $10/tb all-in as hosted space is way low of an estimate. If you are getting a NAS that’s big enough to have 1:5 parity it’s gonna be a 6 or 8 bay so maybe $1k, and you’ve gotta amortize that across 10 years which is $8.3 a month. You’ve also gotta pay a lot more electricity to run the NAS. At 50w/hr it works out to 36kw/mo which is $7.2 at 20c/kwh which is a reasonable rate for electricity factoring in fees and such. Then you have to also use up part of your bandwidth and keep some machine running 24/7 to torrent or you have to pay for a seedbox, which is another $5/mo at least. You also might need networking hardware to hardwire this thing in, but let’s leave that off. We’re already at $20/mo of additional costs just for one NAS to keep it running, independent of drive costs.

Granted if you go this route you can host media from multiple different streaming services if you so choose, which changes the calculus some.

You don't need to spend $1k on a NAS. Go on eBay and buy an old motherboard with 6 SATA ports and an m.2 slot for the OS. I see one with a CPU for $88 incl. shipping right now. You might be able to do better. Throw it in any case. If you don't have one, buy any ATX tower on eBay for $30. You might even be able to combine the previous two steps. If you don't have enough bays, just leave the tower on its side with the disks floating somewhere. I did that for years when I was a teenager and it's fine. Then you just need a PSU and disks.

Or if you're into nerd stuff like this you might have an old computer that you can reuse and you just need disks.

You also don't need to leave it on 24/7. Around me the bottom tier download for Comcast is 75 Mb/s, which is 5-10x the bit rate of streaming, so after an initial period to get you started and build up a buffer, you should be able to build your collection faster than you can watch it on average while only keeping it on while you watch.

I got a 4 SATA bay chassis for 75 on Amazon. PSU was 50, board, CPU and RAM was 130.

The drives were another 500...

You can get project cost down by using refurb drives for OS/scratch. Or just picking drives more based on price per TB than a target storage amount

I just used my old PC when I got a new one, use that as my NAS/torrent box with vpn, and kept buying HDDs for it. I'm up to 45TB but it never really "hurt", as I just buy a new drive when things feel tight. At this point I'm going to keep purchasing 18TB drives instead of smaller ones, it seems like the sweet spot of capacity to price right now.

I have favorited this comment, thank you for making Hacker News a good place to spend time in.

You're welcome :)

I have a 10 TB mirrored NAS setup for stuff like this.

I have to curate what I put on it as eventually I will be out of space and I do not want to make a lifestyle out of it ;)

My criteria is:

Will I want to watch it again?

Will it go away forever? (Or is at risk of it)

Can it just not be streamed or purchased in my region? (Yes there are some things)

Optimal price per GB is somewhere in the 14-20TB range these days.

Yes, this. Price/GB is probably the most important metric to consider, since the other metrics are either impossible to know (e.g. new drive reliability), hardly differ between products (e.g. power usage), or aren't particularly relevant for long-term archiving (e.g. read/write throughput, random seek latency).

Though for archiving purposes, I would steer clear of SSD's. While the overall (claimed) reliability of SSD's is similar or better than HDD's, the failure mode is completely different: where HDD's tend to develop read errors over time which gives you enough warning to plan a replacement of the disk, the SSD's I've had just brick themselves after X time, which means the data loss is sudden and total, rather than gradual.

I've also had SSDs become unreadable through normal means in as little as 3 months without power. Spinning disk is still the way to go for offline consumer archival.

> Price/GB is probably the most important metric to consider,

Sooner or later you will start hitting the physical space limit of the computer case. So if one wants to stick to "single PC" setup, it might be worth just picking the largest disks available, event if slightly more expensive per GB.

Yes, but if you check out what's available to a consumer right now, you have 18TB and 20TB drives, which are about $10 per terabyte, then 22TB jumps to $13+ per terabyte. If you insist on 24TB, you're looking at $23+, so more than double the price per terabyte. My beat up full sized ATX computer case I got on Craigslist can hold 10 HDD, so I'd go from 200TB to 240TB? 20% increase in capacity for an extra $3500 doesn't seem worth it for storing Gilmore Girls episodes because my wife swears she's gonna rewatch it!

Even a basic NAS can hold enough drives to store enough content for you and your family to enjoy for multiple lifetimes. My media PC is literally some 10 year old case I had lying in the closet and it can hold around 8-10 drives depending on form factor.

I think you forgot the "Price" part of "Price per GB"

I don't understand? If you're asking about prices, those vary by country, so use a site like PCPartPicker to find current prices.

You started to say what the optimal Price per GB is, but then only gave a GB. I don't understand what you're trying to say.

They're saying the best price/GB is found in drives of size 14-20TB.

16TB Seagate Exos are hard to beat on value so long as you have a spare room to put the NAS in (those babies are loud!)

You usually want to start comparing the largest drives sizes for mass production consumer drives. In Q1 2024 that is around 20 TB. But size does not matter, price per GB (including price for the connection hardware to your workplace) matters most.

I first check prices at [1] and decide if used or state of the art speeds are best. I then check prices at this Dutch comparison site [2] for internal drives or [3] for external drives. The advantage of [2] and [3] is that these prices are doublechecked by consumers and include all costs including shipping, while Amazon [1] are not always true.

When I find the lowest price, I go check [4] to see if the brand and type drives have low error rates.

I will then design and build an aggregate of drives, usually a few NAS (Network Attached Storage) servers based on USB 3.0 (slow and cheap), Thunderbolt (40 Gbps with a maximum of 240 Gbps), Ethernet (1-800 Gbps) or a network of FPGA's (10 Gbps to 25 Tbps). The overhead to aggregate and connect a bunch of drives ranges from $3 to $92 per drive, depending on your minimum and maximum speed requirements.

For a small fee I will buy and build your storage array for you [5]. This is always cheaper for you than DIY or buying online because I pass on the lower bulk buy disk prices to you.

[1] https://diskprices.com

[2] https://tweakers.net/externe-harde-schijven/vergelijken/#fil...

[3] https://tweakers.net/externe-harde-schijven/vergelijken/#fil...

[4] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q2-...

[5] Please contact me at morphle at ziggo dot nl for price quotes of custom build drive arrays. Q1 2024 I build midrange 100Gbps storage NAS for around $0,009 per GB excl. VAT. Maximum speed storage is a few terabytes per second. 10GB/s around $0,009 per GB, 100GB/s around $0,011 per GB.

It's going to depend entirely on the quality you are looking for. You don't have to go nuts like these people are talking about, you can store tons of movies in 4-10 TBs.

Used 12tb drives are < $100. Unraid is a nice UI to have a contiguous storage array with data protection via parity.

Once I started down that road I couldn’t go back. Self hosting is fun and the ecosystem is pretty nice what with docker and all.

Just get a new drive when the previous one is full.

Why do you say it will be impossible to get it in the future?

I assume they're referring to streaming-only releases that never make it to home media, aren't popular enough to be seeded indefinitely, or that get removed quickly for a tax break -- e.g.: Disney+ removed Crater ~7 weeks after it was released, purely to reduce residuals and claim losses for lower tax bills[1].

1.A.: https://kotaku.com/disney-streaming-crater-tax-rort-scam-wri...

1.B.: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/...

It never makes sense to deliberately not sell a film you've made to save on taxes.

However, it can make sense to stop selling a film because you think that the public will buy one of your other films instead where you earn more profits per copy.

That’s not true. A film’s tax write off value decreases with time. As long as the present tax write off value exceeds the present value of all future film revenue, then it makes sense to deliberately not sell it and leverage the tax credit.

IANAA, but if the depreciated book value of a movie or show exceeds projected future revenue, shouldn't they be writing down the difference rather than writing off the asset?

Put another way, unless they physically destroy all copies of the movie or show or, for some other reason, are no longer able to distribute, license, or sell it, how can they plausibly argue that the fair market value of streaming rights to a reasonably popular movie or show is zero?

One of the cartoon series I was watching got cancelled regardless of good reviews and considerable audience. It was just for a tax write off because merger between WarnerMedia and Discovery was happening at the time. The story is even more ridiculous because the original creator fought for 2 years to at least get to release a separate graphical novel to tie down the plot from a massive cliffhanger it was left with. He's covering that out of his own pocket, can't sell nor even advertise outside of the platform he owns (literally a wordpress.com website) and a bunch of other pretty insane requirements because of how tax write off works for media producers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Space#:~:text=The%20seri....

That is a bonkers story. Thanks for sharing, it is an incredible data point.

In addition to what the other commenter said, about Disney, I like to download Concerts and live tracks off Youtube, especially when they are early in the career of an artist I like, because you never know when the record company will try to memory hole that stuff and it becomes difficult/impossible to find.

Even with me and other like me, someone int he future has to happen upon someone who saved it, and is willing to share it, if you go looking.

> a phone-like-device powered by its environment and impervious to damage.

I hear that an iPhone fell out of the airplane that lost a door mid-flight, and was recovered undamaged.

People have fallen out of planes and survived. It happens, with a bit of luck.

But why? Increased awareness that piracy is an option? Feeling that the punishment risk disincentive substitutes the moral guilt disincentive? Or just the power of contrarianism and risk-seeking?

Men responding to aggression with aggression is a tale as old as humanity.

My guess is that the threats are perceived as exaggerated and untruthful, which by extension makes the organization running the ads appear unethical.

It’s easier to justify stealing from an unethical company.

Yeah, the jump from "illegal streaming" to "they will all install malware your pc and steal all your money, trust us" is just too big. A large amount of people you're reaching with these ads have pirated at least something in the past with no such side effects. It just makes them look like corporate liars desperately trying to scare gullible people.

More so when the DRM itself is almost as invasive as the mallware

Personally, I don't like it when corporations tell me what I can and can't do (especially if it involves threats), and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Because if I'm getting threatening messages telling me not steal at the start of a movie that I have paid for I am going to be pissed off, and I will react by not paying media in the future. Especially since experience has told me that there's zero repercussions for pirating, and it's usually far easier to pirate than to pay.

Note that, rationally, I should take note of the distribution company and react by not paying for their media in the future. But I don't have time for that, so I'm more likely to react by not paying for any media of a similar type (movies and TV) in the future.

Reminds me of anti smoking ads. Every time I see one of those I feel the urge to go to the corner store to buy a pack. Something about those preachy ads annoys the living hell out of me.

Edit: should preface I’m a former smoker and I loved smoking. Problem is, smoking didn’t love me and I had to quit if I wanted to continue with my gym hobby xD

I've seen argued that this is deliberate when the tobacco industry is funding the anti-smoking ads, but I don't think that's the case here.

There are studies that show piracy can only increase sales. Piracy is never a lost sale, because if someone were to pirate something, they were never a potential customer in the first place, so at worst, piracy is free marketing.

> piracy is free marketing.

Windows and Adobe Products are clear examples of this IMO.

For productivity software, piracy might as well be "free trial for at-home use". Companies will (usually) fork over the cash for the software their employees use, regardless of how easy it would be to pirate.

I don't accept that premise. I've certainly downloaded things that I also considered buying, but just didn't because of some small hurdle.

I think it is truer to say that a pirate will pirate stuff they wouldn't buy, because free is free. But they'll still pirate stuff they would buy too.

When Metallica came to Serbia first time in 2004, James Hetfield (frontman) asked the public who has "Kill em all" album. Entire public chanted yeeaaah while 95% or probably even more of people there had only pirated version. Serbia just went through very tough decade with international isolation and there weren't any original CDs to buy even if you had the money. But guess what, 30-40k people paid the ticket for that concert. Who would be there if we didn't listened to pirated albums?

But I'm not sure pirating music is the same as for movies or software as there's no tour at the end to reap the effects of "free" advertising.

This is similar to the strategy adopted by Adobe and Microsoft for a long time upto mid/late 2000s. They acted oblivious to the widespread piracy of their popular software like Windows, Office, Photoshop etc., knowing well that they can capitalize on the userbase in other ways.

You're saying media industry groups finance anti-piracy ads in an attempt to counter-intuitively increase piracy and also counter-intuitively indirectly increase sales?

I dunno, it's certainly worked with Denuvo for me. If a single player game comes out and I really want it, I'll check torrent sites, then buy it if it isn't on there. Without Denuvo the stuff shows up like, 20 minutes after it gets released.

I'm the opposite. It has taught me a good life lesson: it's made me a lot less susceptible to hype. I've played quite some games after denuvo was removed, and came to the conclusion that once the hype died down most games are not worth €60+ to me. Some games do live up to the hype and end up a lot cheaper anyways, so I bought them.

Q: There are few companies that have done more to enable the spread of IPTV in the uk than Amazon and their easily modable firestick. That has opened up IPTV to a non-tech audience, via the dodgy guy in the pub selling something that just works.

Is this in part a predatory attack on media companies, a la BSkyB/NDS on ITV Digital[1]?

[1] - https://www.thejc.com/news/panorama-claims-nds-hacking-broug...

testosterone doesn't like to be told what to do

If I don't own a piece of software after purchase, I'm not spending a dime on it

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