Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
Streaming is no longer easier than piracy, why pay for 8 different services and have to waste your time figuring out whats on what when you can just have one service for free, even if its illegal, and have it all under one roof.
The services have taken the piss and now they'll get the repercussions of it.
- 4K HDR video, not whatever the heck the buggy client delivers.
- Atmos/TrueHD audio track that actually works, not whatever the broken app delivers (I'm looking at you Sky and rest of the ilk that still deliver HBO content with stereo).
- Subtitles for ALL the languages, not just one or two. And those languages don't disappear when I go on a vacation, leaving me stuck with german audio and french subtitles.
- Properly functioning offline playback for when I'm traveling, not randomly broken and disappearing offline mode (Netflix, Spotify and YouTube all blessed me with "all your downloaded content is gone" experience on long flights).
- Works on all my devices not a random subset independent on which way greedy execs tried to extract "ecosystem" money from my playback device manufacturer. Looking at you ATV+.
- Is actually available in my region and doesn't randomly disappear from my devices just because I decided to travel to visit my parents or have some time off.
- Doesn't randomly disappear after 6 months when I started watching the series because some license expired.
As you can see, I really tried to pay to get content from these people. And all I got was bunch of frustration. F'em, they brought this upon themselves for being user hostile arseholes. Again.
Its sort of like when VBR encoded MP3s became the standard in the privacy scene in the early 00s. The quality is good enough for most folks plus the reduced file size means that it downloads really fast on average connections and isn't prohibitively expensive to store so you can create a large library very quickly. Also I think the shift to SSDs from spinning rust delayed the adoption of widespread video piracy 10-ish years ago because the cost per GB was just too expensive and most people weren't going to buy a NAS. But now we are starting to move past the inflection point. SSDs are bigger, H265 reduces file sizes, hardware accelerated H265 encoding is easier (meaning more H265 content), and devices that can decode H265 are becoming cheap and ubiquitous. You can install Plex on your laptop, load up on content, and have a better UX than Netflix.
So on vacation I tried to airplay mission impossible from amazon rental to the TV, and the screen just went black for copy-protection. So I refunded my rental and torrented it instead.
I don't usually torrent, but sometimes the ecosystems put it squarely in my self interest.
(Also, for whatever it's worth I have netflix active about 1 month a year because I find their recent content so unimpressive, but perhaps I'm not the target audience)
Every streaming service will converge to what cable TV is like: paid channels, maximum amount of ads, additional premium content, attempts at lock-in, exclusive licensing of content, etc.
Not adopting the cable business model is leaving billions of dollars on the table, so it will happen.
Whose fault is it really that all content is not available on a single service? It's nobody's fault, it was inevitable given how things work.
How could you "fix" it? You'd need legislation saying that all content must be made available for licensing at the same price for every service. But that's not enough, because why would HBO sell their content to Netflix and vice versa? No, you'd have to force them to make it available. But that's not enough either, as they could just set the price extremely high. And at this point what would be the point in having multiple streaming services at all? Perhaps we need legislation that enforces separation of content producers and distribution, like the Glass-Steagall Act but for TV, or Net Neutrality?
When I was a broke college kid I pirated all the things, and at the time wished, when I could afford it, I’d rather just pay. When I could, I did, for years. Now we’re back at the path-of-least-resistance is pirating.
I actually don't think that Piracy was difficult to compete against. Actually there was a time when video streaming platforms competed against it --- and very successful. For normal people, it was cheap enough to make a contract, and much simpler than going the piracy route. No one talked anymore about pirating.
But then things went wrong:
* you paid a monthly fee and STILL suddenly got advertisements force-feds (you couldn't even skip them)
* you wanted to watch some series, but it was taken out of the program (never heard of a public library that removes some author after some months)
* many movies made it only into one specific video stream vendor, so they forced people to make 2 or 3 or even more subscriptions.
And once the inconvenience from video stream vendors reached some threshold, piracy was re-birthed. As soon as it become more convenient again.
Which services do you mean?
Netflix? Or do you mean the other 7 services, which didn’t exist back then.
There was a brief window of time when streaming was able to compete with piracy (free) and it’s when there was just one streaming service. Netflix was able to have a robust (if not comprehensive) catalogue (because it had no competitors), and was dedicated to user experience (becaues it was willing to burn money to grow its customerbase), and had just secured multi-year licensing deals for content from all the major film and television distributors at bargain basement prices (because no one else had yet realized how valuable those streaming rights were).
This seems like a PR piece to promote and justify Netflix's change in mind and business model.
For my family here is the monthly spend with taxes for my area included:
HBO Max $ 13.53
Hulu $ 7.21
Disney+ $ 0.18 (w/ Hulu)
Paramount+ w/ Showtime $ 10.82
Apple TV+ $ 10.81
AMC+ $ 7.56
Amazon Prime $12.53
$62.64/month. Now, about 20 years ago in 2004 my parents had basic cable and they paid $60/month. An my parents combined made no where near what I make today in my salary alone. And with inflation the cost of entertainment has gone down significantly.
As for figuring out what is on what- Apple TV has made this easy.
Is piracy easier? Legality aside you need a seed box, membership to specific sites, and VPN. Which can add up to more than $30/month just to download pirated content. Not to mention the time investment in figuring out how to get the movies and tv shows to your family members on all of their devices. A budget NAS with 20 TB is going to cost $500. A small PC to transcode also $500. Also all the technical know how required. Backing up 20 TB to the Backblaze is going to cost $13/mo. So lets not pretend piracy is easier.
Also the quality of the streams is laughable. Only Apple bring something which deserves the mention 4k (and Apple are part of the problem).
And a piracy setup is very easy. I will get fiber soon. I have a VPN with a container to run BitTorrent on. I have Usenet servers. I have a couple of lifetime ???znab accounts. All cheap.
I wrote this post angrily in less than 10 min, I probably forgot to mention other reasons on top of this all. Yeah, the fuzzy feelings I got for not pirating. I admit, I will miss those.
there are shows for which I cannot even purchase them, which I would be willing to do. You want to lock me into a subscription? jokes on you.
> 12 years old, and as perfect as the day it came out of GabeN’s mouth.
I have not pirated a game in more than a decade, I bought a bunch on sale over Christmas though I likely won’t have the time (or hardware, HL:Alyx was cheap) to play them any time soon. Though it’s a bit of a minor chore I regularly purchase music I find via streaming (I like albums, offline use, and knowing it won’t go away). I’ve never felt the need to pirate a book.
I don’t pirate tv/movies much, mostly because I don’t watch them much due to all the other entertainment available. I did pirate Taskmaster, until they started publishing the episodes on YT.
Yeah, no thanks. I'll just VPN+torrent the ad-free version and watch that, thanks. On any device of my choosing as well.
And why should I pay £8.99 or whatever to one streaming service, for one programme, that was previously "free to air" for the other series? Paramount taking back Star Trek from Netflix for example.
I'm not sure how many multi-million dollar, unseen cancelled-after-one-season dramas with 50,000 viewers these studios need to create before they realise 'we need viewers to 'build a franchise' and make a profit'.
Just imagine if these series or dramas were only seen by a few thousand people at most: Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Band of Brothers, Shogun, Dallas, Cheers and so on. Even How I Met Your Mother and Big Bang Theory were pretty much pre-streaming when they started, but syndicated to world-wide terrestrial channels.
I think you overestimate how "easy" piracy is for the average user. Netflix revenue keeps growing (and subscribers), despite the "crackdown" on password sharing that many predicted would cause massive cancellations.
I pirate again too. The fragmentation is just crazy now.
All these antipiracy measures only invite us to pirate.
Pirating allows us to choose a media player of our children, possibly with 4K upscaling, better compression standards and the ability to download our content.
I could maybe stretch to four but then the market needs to meet me there and do two things: 1. Make an effort in consolidating media rights and services to these four and 2. Work to lower the price to roughly $10 per service for at least high quality 1080p with no ads in high quality apps across the board. Bonus: Also work to standardize a media protocol so that you can see what you have access to in a common media library regardless what you use, or even in third party apps, as well as stream with whatever as long as you're a subscriber to the respective services.
Do all these things and I actually think they have a good chance against piracy. It's all about what they're willing to do. They can absolutely make some good money on movies and TV shows in a piracy world. I'm convinced of this. Piracy is not the problem; piracy is just the other weight of the scale showing just how anti-consumerist they can become.
Funnily enough their UI is much better and more intuitive as well, in addition to having all the content together. They also offer imdb ratings etc.
I would pay $50 - $100 for a server like fmovies, bflix. So it wouldn't be a complete headache to understand what you can and can't watch in your region.
Everytime I want to watch Netflix nowadays, unless I happened to hear from somebody, that there's something awesome there, then I just browse it, and nothing of interest is popping up, so I just go somewhere else.
I don't pirate because I don't have money to pay or that I don't want to pay. I pirate because using the real services is so impossibly frustrating and disappointing.
It's fine to have multiple services, it's good for the competition, but there needs to be a system to make it so that each service can stream all things. Even if it costs within that service, so be it. Even where you pay per stream or view is good. If you have your own original content then you just ask other streaming services to pay for it while your own end-users can watch it for free, the other service's end users will have to pay.
- unavailability of the product in the right form in the market they live in (e.g. no OV and terrible translation, no good quality video/audio, not available at all, etc.)
- moon prices (e.g. Anime DVDs at least 10+ years ago where I lived), or being thigh on money (e.g. as a 16 year old)
- it being easier to pirate then to buy ...
- buying the product (in a reasonable convenient way) forces other unwanted things onto you, like automatic self-extending subscriptions or tracking to a point where I can't understand anymore how it's not classified as espionage
All of this except being tight on money hint to a mismatch between products provided and what consumers want/find acceptable. If the movie industry I think it would auto self correct, but it isn't and you could say piracy (on larger scale) is natural marked effect caused by the absence of a proper free market.
But what is I think most important to realize is that outside of the situation of piracy being more convenient then buying in all other cases the actual losses piracy creates is quite limited to a point where it's quite questionable how reasonable the drawbacks users have to suffer because of piracy prevention mechanism/laws are.
Natural if piracy would be fully unconstrained it likely would then cause huge monetary losses. A free market is still a marked so a product produced with some investment (e.g. creating the movie) still should be sold for some value.
There are like 3 animes I wanted to watch on netflix, but they only have dutch subtitles, Trigun had dutch subtitles for like 4 years until they removed it in the netherlands.
I have to play whack a mole with 4-5 streaming services to find out where the show is 'at the moment'.
The tv apps are so garbage.. each company is pushing more and more visual animations crap, it has gotten to the point that I cant even scroll the titles properly.
I think there's room for improvement on the smart TV OS' to better integrate these services into one pluggable app.
P2P download of files did fall a lot in the last decade, i think a second wave is coming.
There's all the petty "ecosystem" bullshit. Stuff like how Apple used to only let siri control Apple Music instead of spotify or tidal or whatever.
And platform updates. And then the software stops supporting your device because it was made more than 3 years ago or whatever. Or they blocked taking screenshots (hello Crunchyroll, fuck you for making it harder to share random meme moments with my discord buddies!).
Both my streaming boxes (Amazon Fire Stick and Xfinity Flex) handle that for me. I press the mic button on the remote, say what I'm looking for, and they tell me my options. Typically that means they tell me which paid services it is on (Netflix, Max, Peacock, etc) and offer to launch the app for that service, which free with ads services it is on (such as Pluto or Freevee), and show my options to buy or rent it.
I discovered after 2 years of paying for netflix premium whatever its called the most expensive that i was only getting 1080p on most of my devices because of the app i was using or browser i was using or god knows what other reason.
Maybe a system where multiple different services offer the exact same content library or something similar, but a good solution will require some thought I think.
Streaming is still easy, just more expensive.
I cancelled my subscriptions when I noticed that I'm not using them anymore. Years ago, I remember me and my friends were eagerly awaiting every new episode of Agents of Shield or The Expanse. But when I was browsing the IMDB top movies and top TV series recently, I just didn't find anything I wanted to watch (and that hadn't been in cinema half a year ago, thus old). The result is that recently, me and my friends all watched a lot less movies and instead played more video games.
TLDR: Netflix's low-effort content is losing against video games.
Piracy all the way.
When companies fail to uphold their side of the bargain, I don't feel a need to uphold mine.
Most of the time piracy isn't even free. You got a server running for downloads which is an investment and uses power (24-7 sometimes), hard disks for storage aren't free. Indexers and newsgroups are paid (good ones at least). Comparing that to a monthly subscription of what used to be €10,- to Netflix and which had it all, makes it nonsense to pirate.
RIP Boxee.
We are the ones pissing and shitting on their faces. We are the wrong doers here.
We never stole (cute word pirated) anything. We became cordcutters (OTA and streaming) because we felt we weren't using but maybe $20 of the $180 monthly we were paying to cable. We became cordcutters in 2013. We never stole (cute word pirated) anything.
1. My time isn’t valuable so who cares if it takes 6 minutes to figure out where to watch Magnum PI.
2. I know I shouldn’t do illegal things so I don’t do them.
People emphasize the "free" part, but it really is the "all content" part that makes piracy wins.
Especially if you are not in the USA, often specific content isn't available at any price. Even if it is, its split across 5 billion different confusing services.
The killer feature of piracy is thar it just works, not that it is free.
Content being fragmented and constantly coming and going is a massive problem for users. Netflix used to be the go-to to find just about any given show or film, but has become a mystery box where the contents change on a near-daily basis. Piracy is reliable and simple instead, and works like Netflix used to: Just search up what you want to watch and you're golden. It has been and always will be a service problem.
A six month delay for example will completely miss the bulk of the show’s online relevance and even a week is enough to seriously dampen enthusiasm in the region. This isn’t the 90s or prior decades where viewers are entirely reliant on local licensees to know what’s available.
Studios, distributors, and streaming services are seriously shooting themselves in the foot by not pulling all stops to make sure all shows are simultaneously available worldwide.
There's an episode that's not shown on D+ at all where the dad pretends to be pregnant with the younger daughter and then enlists the help of their neighbor (who is only ever referred to as [neighbor child character]'s Dad") in delivering the "baby". Great episode. Gotta pirate it if you're in America though.
Also lots of weird dumb censorship in smaller ways. There's a roundabout discussion of a vasectomy happening in the "background" (it's the foreground but- look mate don't make me explain it) and Disney replaced what would've been a nice advertisement for the benefits of male contraceptive that many men are hesitant about with whats instead a barely coherent conversation about something trite.
And they censor a horse (an actual animal horse, no I don't know why the dogs are sentient while the horses are just animals) pooping at a state fair while the girls were just remarking how beautiful the horse is (and they run away giggling). Has Disney ever been to a state fair?
Especially as piracy has its own costs: VPN (French authorities do detect bittorrent), storage, some Jellyfin or Kodi host, some time to manage the whole *arr setup.
The moment legal access to a whole world's worth of movies becomes cheaper and easier than that, piracy becomes unattractive. That was the way Netflix was perceived in its golden age... No longer.
It's like the app vs browser thing for videos too, where you are restricted by the app's player vs using players like vlc that are just awesome!
the problem is all the other rights holders, who seem to not want to let people watch their content in exchange for money.
Compared to that, it's the streaming that just works. Except when it doesn't.
So if you start looking outside of their interface - why then not just finish and get the movie elsewhere?
Finally, pricing is not flexible, what if I want infrequent 4k UHD streaming on a single device - why do I pay for 4 streams as if I'm streaming 24/7? At this point, I'm better off with Netflix Pay Per View (if this was offered). I keep paying for this service just because I can and just because I might watch something - but I find it more and more frustrating to watch something...
They are a content creation company/studio now. Their price to earnings (PE) ratio is 45 for some reason and they are part of the FAANG acronym for some reason. I can’t even find anything I want to watch on there and we cancelled it until Stranger Things comes out again. Then we will cancel again. The PE for Universal Studios is 12. Paramount is -7.
Netflix is designed to suggest that they have more content than they actually have and that the reason you haven't found anything worth watching just yet isn't that they don't have it but that it's behind the next page of filler content. That's why they have the horizontal scrolling and the endless generic groups of the same content that you've already seen. It's all circular. It doesn't matter how you navigate, it's always the same stuff that surfaces.
I cancelled my subscription last year. I'm planning to re-enable it in one month bursts only if/when I know they have something new I actually would like to see. I'm not paying anyone to watch ads.
(Granted not everyone will be using those 4 simultaneous streams all at once, and some people won't even use the extra streams at all, but I'm sure enough will that it won't be free for Netflix to provide it.)
Which one here is not like the other?
Seriously, check out their website. It's basically a landing page which says "give us your money". The prices aren't even displayed.
There is no list of shows, save for a few measly screenshots of featured/well-known titles. There is a search box which lets you search for titles, but nothing like a catalogue of offerings, which is the absolute bare minimum I'd expect to see before purchasing a service.
I really cannot fathom why anyone would willingly give their hard-earned money to a company which doesn't even tell you what you're getting in exchange.
If you visit that page as a subscriber, it doesn't say they don't have it. It just has the metadata and a "Remind me" button. If you visit in incognito, you get a 'not found' error. Maybe they have it for another locale. Maybe they used to have it. Maybe they will have it in the future. But you're left to guess.
One day, it just...disappeared. One of Netflix's own shows (we were, by that time, watching the episodes they had produced).
Every source I could find said that Netflix carried it. But when I searched for it on Netflix, I couldn't find it.
A few months later, it reappeared, as mysteriously as it had vanished. Of course, by that time I'd simply downloaded the remainder of the series and we'd watched it through Plex.
I live in America.
Just like with Netflix you can't browse the entire lists of content. All you have a is a search bar and some curated lists which give an illusion of content breadth. Not a fan of these dark patterns to say the least.
They rotate their content, and presumable the studios pull their content off. If they have movie X today, there's no assurance that it'll be there next week.
It's a subscription to a service, not to specific content. I don't see how it could be any other way.
Netflix could definitely make it easier to see what is on now, though. Amazon has a much larger catalog and you can browse it before signing up.
That's also why I think piracy will always win, the studios are just too greedy to make it work.
When you do a rug pull on a show just even once, you lost some legal customers forever instantly, those people will have a tainted view of the platform.
These days... not so much.
> Disney+ removed Crater ~7 weeks after it was released, purely to reduce residuals and claim losses for lower tax bills[2].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39252151
[2]: https://kotaku.com/disney-streaming-crater-tax-rort-scam-wri...
Thankfully there are other seeds you can download from.
The most frustrating part is that there's no accountability by company leadership towards paying customers. To which I'm sure someone would reply "they only have to be accountable to shareholders", which is utterly insane.
Hope your kid is doing ok, or at least will be doing ok.
The author is a great financial forensics sleuth! Here is the passage “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth highlighted inside each conpany's 10-K on one site (shameless plug):
NFLX: https://last10k.com/sec-filings/nflx#:~:text=In%20light%20of...
FUBO: https://last10k.com/sec-filings/fubo#:~:text=in%20light%20of...
RDBX: https://last10k.com/sec-filings/rdbx#:~:text=in%20light%20of...
CURI: https://last10k.com/sec-filings/curi#:~:text=in%20light%20of...
Granted, there's a balance to be maintained: put too much random, theoretical crap in there, and people will either think a) you're lying about all this stuff just to cover your ass, or b) the business they're in is a complete minefield and not worth investing in.
So I don't really take it as gospel that piracy is truly eating into Netflix's bottom line just because they've identified it as a business risk in their 10-K. (I do believe them in this case, though, since it's an obvious outcome of the fragmentation of desirable content across so many streaming services.)
I stopped pirating TV shows and movies when for a small monthly fee I could watch most of what I wanted to watch on Netflix. I wouldn't say it was more convenient or better quality on all counts, but it was good enough.
Now I need 10 different streaming subscriptions that keep increasing in price, often only available in dubbed German because I live in Germany, often in worse video/audio quality than it could be, originals getting randomly axed after a cliffhanger, horrible apps, ads being forced on you, no more entire seasons published at once because you can still cancel subscriptions monthly, and don't get me started about offline viewing which never worked properly in the first place.
The limitations are all artificial and it's clear that it's publicly traded companies scraping the bottom of the barrel for infinite growth again.
Companies made their beds, now they can lie on them.
1- English subtitles only available with CC: I want subtitles because as a non-native English speaker I cannot understand some of the accents. I hate it when the subtitle says: "glooming musinca playing"
2- Quality issues: I'm watching on a 4k OLED TV. Watching the matrix reloaded for the 10th time, and seeing the actors appear in two places because of some weird compression artifact pulled the plug for me.
3- Quality issues: I used to buy Crave's 4k subscription. It limits content to 720p on my Linux machine. Let's imagine a world in which I'm OK with it, IT DOES NOT GET PROPERLY FULL SCREEN ON ANY OF MY MONITORS/TV. I paid for a 65" TV, I want to see a video fill at least one of the dimensions.
4- UX issues: Sometimes I pause because I want to check something in this scene. Do not dim the scene, I'm not interested in all the details you are spitting to the screen.
5- UX issues: I'm not OK with you showing me ads before I start watching my show
6- UX issues: Sluggish apps on some TVS/streaming devices
7- On my Chromecast, made by Google, I want my guest to use a guest session on YouTube premium, to not mess up my recommendations, ads start playing. This is the same device, I've not even signed out, just using a guest session.
8- I can keep going on
I understand that license holders play content availability, but the problems above could easily be solved if any of the streaming services cared about their customer satisfaction. I canceled because even when I found something to watch, I never enjoyed the experience. Now I'm an inch away from canceling YouTube premium, and then Spotify.
Different strokes for different folks. As another non-native speaker, I personally like those descriptions, because they help me label a kind of music, or an emotional outburst.
It's like knowing how to describe a pain you have. You can't just say "it hurts" to a doctor, you need to be more specific ("it's a throbbing sensation with occasional sharp piercing pain")
The worst part of the subs for the hard of hearing is that the contain so many spoilers. They'll write "JOHN:" an hour before our protagonist learns who exactly this mysterious character is, completely ruining any surprise.
Nope, it's not a compression artifact, those white braid guys are actually twins!
(jk)
You deserve everything you get
Every rights holder having their own service has killed a lot of the convenience because you'll now need several different services to go through an entire TV show, for instance. And also because all services other than maybe Netflix have garbage software for your various devices. Because every service also has to support 8 different platforms. Video playback and scrubbing is buggy and laggy, the GUI for finding stuff is sluggish. On one service(I don't even remember which, they all blur together in my head), I tried to watch some House MD and half the episodes were missing the English audio track.
Somehow any radio station can play any song they want (or seemingly any), for a standardized set of fees. And there is plenty of competition among radio stations. Couldn't we get the same setup for on-demand streaming of music and video?
Everything should be everywhere. Let the services compete on something other than content.
Qobuz has the same songs as everyone else, but in higher quality.
Because when you compete on content, piracy always wins
- price (do I have to pay or do you offer free with ads?)
- content quality (do you have 4k movies?)
- organization (can I filter by director? Do you have a collection of all the Oscar-nominated movies from this year?)
- advanced controls (can I make a playlist of tv episodes? Maybe I want to watch a series in a different order than it was broadcasted)
- accessibility (do you have subtitles in this language?)
- extras (does this have a commentary? a trailer? the cut scenes?)
- more extras (can I pause and get the name of the actor that's on screen or the name of the song that's playing?)
1. Doesn't restrict what content I can watch from which country and doesn't prevent me from using VPN. This is outright ridiculous and I deeply hate streaming services just for that.
2. Has all the content from multiple studios, not just from your "walled garden". Until you solve that, piracy is more usable. There are illegal Netflix-like services that stream all the content without a hassle — and some of them are even subscription-based! Hear me out — people FUCKING PAY pirates to watch content, because their services are more convenient to use than yours that are legal. So yeah, people don't mind paying. They just want a decent service.
Artificial DRM-based restrictions ultimately mean not getting the quality you pay for. Netflix specifically becomes 720p garbage.
But I can just rely on less official sources. In this case I get a DRM-free, very high quality file that plays everywhere, forever.
I'm genuinely concerned there's something wrong with my eyes. 720p looks fine, I think? Is there that huge of a difference?
- Netflix
- Amazon Prime
- Disney+
- HBO+
- Hulu
- YouTube Premium
- Apple TV
- Whatever Sky's offering is called
- At least a couple of others that I've forgotten
- Plus some kid-specific services that aren't necessarily included in the base subscription (looking at you, Amazon)
- And then I haven't even got into music streaming services like Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, etc.
You know, competition is a good thing, but overall I'm not that sympathetic.
It's just too damn hard, and unsustainably expensive, to be able to watch what I want to watch when I want to watch it.
Then there's content duplication, content exclusives, and on top of that just this endless churn of huge quantities of content being thrown out that, frankly, isn't necessarily that great and feels like kind of a waste of time to watch.
This isn't really working for me. Let me say it again, I want to watch what I want to watch when I want to watch it and with reasonable pricing. I'm happy to pay. I'm not happy to be bilked. And I'm not interested in the arguments about rights. I just want to watch what I want to watch when I want to watch it.
Music streaming services have very few exclusive content. Which is why they tried to sign exclusive deals with e.g. podcasters.
Should they go in the same direction as video streaming, we will see an increase in music pirating again as well.
Hasn't stopped Spotify and co from increasing prices anyway of course.
I will build a torrent streaming site where the torrent file costs some reasonable amount of $$ per download, for fully licensed content, with zero DMA protections.
If you have IP that you are willing to share on this torrent site, I will take 10% of revenue after subtracting costs, you get the remaining.
My email is on my HN profile. If you own IP and are interested in licensing it this way - shoot me a mail. I need a minimum amount of interest from IP holders before I put in any real work building this.
Your move, Hollywood.
FWIW Netflix should go back to providing physical content rental (DVD, blueray) with full catalog. Or someone should do WHAT Allofmp3 did in the 2000s with Audio and THE ROMS licensing.
Previously you weren't getting any revenue from torrents. Now you're monetizing a fraction of the population that likes to torrent but wants to not feel guilty about doing so.
The problem is that pretty much all of these services say you get 2 or 4 or however many screens and now they're tightening viewership to within the same household. If I'm one person I'll never need to use 4 screens at once, so why can't I share them with a few family members who live elsewhere?
And on top of that, you get plans that never had ads before now starting to add them (i.e. Amazon Prime Video). So I'm paying the same or more (as prices continue to be increased) for the same base level of content with additional annoying cruft.
With all the extra complexity like this, it's easier to just pirate and maybe set up a server I can just give relatives access to.
It's exactly the same thing that happened with cable TV: it started out without ads, selling itself based on that feature, and then when they had lots of subscribers, they added ads.
I predicted this exact thing would happen not that long ago here on HN and other forums and people called me crazy.
The day I get a message stopping me from doing that is the day I cancel my subscriptions.
The downside is that level subscription is restricted to a maximum resolution of 720p, which doesn't bother me a great deal in terms of picture quality, it bothers me in that it's a technical limitation - maybe it's justified in terms of their costs to deliver 720p versus 1080p, but I feel like 1080p should be a baseline in 2024.
It might not be there when this was first introduced happened, but FYI this is possible today.
Netflix has a content problem. They lost their licenses for most of the third-party content worth watching, and their own productions are now trash.
Netflix Original was a stamp of quality at one point, but I think they probably saw in the data that cheap content like true crime and docuseries were getting the bulk of their playtime and focussed in on that. However, for many people, that sort of content is not something they'd pay for, it's just background TV to watch while half doing something else, similar to podcasts and YouTube - which are both free.
Their competitors have shows and films that people actually want to watch.
^0:
> Apparently, there’s quite a bit of copying going on, as SEC filings from several companies include identical passages.
> Netflix: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth”
> Triller Corp: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth”
> FuboTV: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth” > Redbox Entertainment: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth”
> IMAQ: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth” CuriosityStream: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth”
> We don’t know where these references originate. Netflix has mentioned it for a while, that’s for sure, and apparently, the use of this language is widespread and subject to rapid global growth."
If Netflix didn't raise their prices at more than double the inflation rate, and didn't crack down on password sharing, and didn't deactivate devices of deployed military members, and didn't keep cancelling and censoring content, maybe they wouldn't have this problem.
Search for that phrase. It has a rather large number of hits, in filings from multiple streaming services. Wonder where that phrase was pirated from? And whether this indicates a degree of coordination which suggests the need for antitrust action.
Mainland China has good movies now. There's been progress since "Sky Hunter" (2017), produced by the film unit of the People's Liberation Army Air Force. (You can watch that for free. It's heavy-handed propaganda.) If you like period costume dramas, there are many from China, because the political levels don't care about those. The writers thus have more freedom. "Princess Agents" is probably the best of that genre.
Stuff set in the present day will have clear signs of being forced to follow the party line. There are lots of cop shows. They're about as good, or bad, as American cop shows. There's a good version of "The Three Body Problem", but it's rather slow-paced, following the books closely. There's also a genre we don't see much in the US - business drama.
The US film industry has been eaten by superhero sequels. Just not much worth watching. There's a Hunger Games prequel out, if anybody cares. If you're willing to look outside the heavily promoted stuff, there's plenty to watch.
At some point I had like 3 different paying streaming services, and they still failed to provide enough content of interest. All canceled now. The dollar bin dvds at my local thrift store is a much better offer... this and piratebay.
you being the only comment in the whole thread giving this as a reason makes me think this might not really be a reason
But… Netflix doesn’t make these kinds of shows. They give small orders of episodes to niche shows and cancel them quickly before they have time to gain an audience.
Obviously they know which shows people watch, but why doesn’t that translate into them making those shows at presumably less cost?
I'm so glad I ripped all my DVDs
For anyone interested in doing this for DVD or BD, makemkv[0] is where it's at.
A lot of people I know would rather spend 2 hours scrolling short videos of these social medias than have to decide on a show to watch. People have come at a level of lazyness they don't decide what to do and would rather have apps feeding them with stuff to watch they didn't even ask for. And despite removing accounts of all social medias I still get trapped sometimes. A few days ago I was looking for some youtube videos to diy something. When I got the information I needed I ended up watching a nearly 2h video of fails on youtube instead of doing the actual thing I just learned about.
While there’s no disagreement that “piracy” occurs, I’d love to see refreshed numbers around “potential paying customers” vs “because it’s there but wouldn’t otherwise buy” metrics.
Also, that c&p is lazy and raises an eyebrow.
This puts the power back into your own hands; Blu-Rays are likely to work for a very long time and your discs won't magically disappear from your personal catalogue. You lock-in on the price at purchase, and it never increases over time. And, in my own subjective opinion, the image quality of Blu-Ray video often exceeds whatever streaming-optimized encoding format is used by the online services.
Finally, 90% of the time I check only eBay instead of shopping multiple platforms. The remaining 10% I go to Amazon and if I don't find the right price there than I just shrug: there's plenty of other cinema to watch and there's rarely any single film that I simply can't do without.
But the financiers, producers, and distributors have too much power and influence over the culture economy, to an extent where it's not unfair to ask whether they operate like a cartel, with heavy-handed nepotism, blacklisting, and politics.
So yeah, I don't have sympathy for the streaming services.
There's no simple "mark watched"/"mark unwatched"? I can't have multiple playlists, just one "My List" that gets randomly reshuffled? Who knows where my "Continue Watching" row is going to be on the main page, because it sure isn't at the top! etc...
I’ve actually been surprised the more subtle product placement isn’t more common. There are always prop bags of chips, boxes of cereal, etc. you’d think it would cost basically nothing to swap it out for a similar soundless bag with a Lays label on it and get some money. Everyone knows what Lets chips are really trying to be. Maybe syndication presents issues. Does the company pay every time the episode runs, in perpetuity, or just once to get the episode made? With a one time payment, getting a spot in a show like The Office would be like winning the advertising lottery. If they have to pay for each viewing, it could turn into a real problem.
The issue is that the service users don't exist in a cohesive and aligned bloc, whereas rights owners, rights licensers and streaming service providers sort of do.
Anyone that attempts to change licensing laws will experience way more friction than those who advocate for using the existing infrastructure of law enforcement to reduce pirating.
Things will only get better if streaming companies lobby for changing the way licensing works to support delivery to end users and/or government departments advocate for end user experience.
Anyway, it feels like music piracy isn't close to what it was at its peak and that they figured out how to make it work.
Is there a reason that video is so much different?
There is no live version of a film.
Don’t fight with pirates. Treat them as your free, word of mouth marketing channel.
...and now also the playback in Music.app occasionally stutters, on an M1 Mac, with an otherwise idle system. So let's raise the subscription prices.
In my opinions, all of these companies got waaay too comfortable taking our subscription money.
Don't worry, I'll figure out a different way to get these €16.99/mo into the starving artists' hands, plenty of buskers around here.
Then Netflix and T-Mobile pushed me to "sign up for Netflix via T-Mobile" and I thought, well, I guess since you both said it'd be amazing. That cancels your old (grandfathered) plan, by the way.
Then they decided that T-mobile would only pay for basic with ads.
Now I cancelled Netflix via t-mobile since the one show I was making my way through (House of Cards) is no longer available on this plan that Netflix and t-mobile thought I should be on.
This comes after cancelling Prime because it doesn't work where I live, and Prime Video wasn't all that compelling plus they managed to make the worst video player I've used in my life. Though the x-ray feature was super helpful.
Netflix invgestment in UX has lead to theUX being valued around piracy, rather than just downloading files from some website.
I smell a coordinated initiative to buy some "democracy".
It seems like this says more about the future of so-called "intellectual property" than it does about these particular companies or these particular practices.
Piracy is a service problem. Valve proved digital piracy can be beaten by commercial solutions. The problem is the media cartels being intransigent with digital delivery, not piracy.
Airbnb turned into hotels, buts worse.
This is "disruption."
Anyway, I think the article hits it on the nose why this is becoming a problem again:
> Netflix amassed hundreds of millions of subscribers, some of whom left their piracy habits behind. However, as the ‘streaming wars’ turned legal and convenient streaming platforms into isolated and pricey content silos, momentum started to shift.
I've been frustrated with this, too. When I first subscribed to Netflix, I was happy and satisfied, and rarely (if ever) need to turn to less-savory sources. Their app and website were both polished, snappy, and worked well. I picked up Hulu and HBO subscriptions too (apps not as good, but decent enough), and I considered those three to be a reasonable amount to pay to watch what I wanted to watch. And I was also pleased that, when watching TV shows, I'd be counted as a viewer for the purposes of allowing the studios to decide if a show I like is popular enough to get renewed.
But now... to watch all the shows I want to watch, I have to subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, Max, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Paramount+, and Apple TV+. That's a lot! Not to mention all these services are considerably more expensive than they were during the period of streaming when I was happy with the services. At this point I might as well just get a cable subscription again, which would probably be cheaper (ok, not remotely serious about that, but...). On top of all that, the streaming quality seems to be worse than it used to be; I expect the illegal sources are of better quality.
As much as I'm generally against corporate consolidation, I think this is a case where that might actually be better for consumers (and for the content owners too). Or perhaps a regime of compulsory licensing under RAND terms would allow all the various streaming services to compete on price, quality of experience, recommendations, etc. Ultimately that sort of thing might result in consolidation too, but at least that would be more fair, maybe.
Beyond all that, seems like most of the streaming services have turned their base tier into an ad-supported tier, and have aggressively bumped up the cost of the ad-free tiers. I refuse to subject myself to gross psychological manipulation whenever it's possible to avoid it, so add that to the cost. And for people who are more cost-conscious, their experience gets much worse.
Jurassic Park is a cinema classic with ~6 films.
It is simply not possible to do this in any legal way. besides expensive, it is hard to understand if the film is available in each platform. I ended up paying for an extra streaming service and after login & pay, it said "this film is not available in your region".
please grow Netflix. Stop complaining about the "competition" and start working to provide a good service.
That would be a win-win-win situation for everyone.
Torrents require you to own a PC (there's no way to torrent on a phone or smart TV AFAIK), Usenet requires you to have some tech knowledge, same goes for Plex / Jellyfin.
I feel like piracy nowadays is a lot harder for an average Joe than it used to be. People now expect that they can turn on their TV, open an app, enter a title in the search box and start watching, and P2P just doesn't work that way.
Often they have better ui than legal streams. Auto play/next, auto intro and extro skips, better recommendations, full search engine features, subtitles, etc. Without ad block they can be a banner ad mess, but with adblock there is none.
I have no idea for "smart tv", but at least for Android phones, F-Droid has plural torrent clients listed:
https://search.f-droid.org/?q=torrent&lang=en
Now, actually 'torrenting' on a phone also sounds like a recipe for rapid battery drain unless the phone is also plugged in to a charger, but that is independent of the "ability" to do so.
I haven’t used them, but I think there are pirate sites that work just like steaming services. I don’t know a lot of details, but I think it’s still BT on the backend, and relies on a fast download and maybe it can prioritize chunks to get the start of the movie first? Not totally sure. But it seems a VPN would be important for that. I would say using a VPN requires some degree of savvy, but at the same time, it seems every other YouTuber out there is pushing a VPN app.
Where I live, they search for "watch blabla online 1080p free". Way less time consuming than actually using streaming services or torrenting.
Also, you can easily torrent on Android.
There are some piracy subreddits you can look at to get some idea, but there seems to be easier ways than that.
Laughs in android
I don't sail and I don't care enough to find an alternative. Today we drown in quality (if you know how to look) entertainment, why should I chase movies and shows that the runners clearly don't care for me to see? I imagine apathy is a bigger competitor to Netflix than even piracy.
Meanwhile also Netflix: you cannot take a screenshot for meme purposes due to security reasons
Is this being done somewhere? If not, I suspect it is coming.
The break even point with the cost of streaming these days is really not that long.
And you don’t have to pirate anything - buy the dvds used on EBay or something. Streaming is no longer cheap for some bs reason.
Every time I have to login using a code, not only am I annoyed that I once again after to re-enter my uid/pwd despite being a paying customer, I'm also reminded I'm paying yet another monthly fee for a service.
Streaming companies: you're asking for it. Begging for it.
But then you have to make things for a specific audience (who will scream for more) in stead of the pill of generalized trash that appeals slightly to everyone that is usually cranked out by overly standardized formulas.
Shut up and take my money.
I bet they are seeing this as some sort of push by criminals to take viewers away from streaming platforms, or at least that's how they will present it. And 0% of those millions they invest in fighting piracy will go towards actually making a more compelling consumer proposition.
And I guarantee that none of them will mention how piracy has always existed and was always an option. There is no new tech that suddenly appeared like P2P in the early 2000s.
The real statement should have been "We finally got so greedy and icompetent that it's driving more and more users to piracy."
I also personally believe as tech makes it easier for indy type groups & average individuals to make longer form content, Netflix may just become irrelevant to companies like YouTube who have better distribution channels.
It's a big fail if a billion dollars company can't keep up with with a few geeks in a garage. That's litterally the oldest silicon valley triope.
Their UI sucks, they don’t want to integrate with the Apple TV app on my phone (search, Up Next, immediate access) because of competitive reasons, and they rarely have any decent movies anymore because they turned their entire business model to original serials, where “original” can mean they just bought the international distribution rights.
Of all the players netflix should be best placed to understand this given that this effect basically made them.
My example; a certain popcorn-related torrent site provides an archive of 315,669 movies.
Total torrents: 916,518
Webrips, full Blu-ray rips, remuxes, 2160p, 1080p, 720p, 480p; h.265/h.264, x.265/x.264, you also have DVDs and even VHS.
Some movies also offer 3D in various formats, some are director's cut, some are theatrical, some are uncut. I can go on, but just one movie is offered in a myriad of formats and options.
Places like these are equivalent to the library of Alexandria. They must not fall because they hold valuable media that is not even available elsewhere.
I remember Stallman mentioning a universal fee for internet access and all media, wishful thinking but for a subset of internet users this has been a reality for at least a decade.
With self-hosting services, VPNs like WireGuard and nice apps like Infuse on the Apple TV that can connect to any server and play anything you throw at it there's no going back for me personally.
At this point I find it morally imperative to keep seeding in order to keep media alive that would otherwise be lost to time because no-one else cares.
The big companies are all about profits, it's up to the little man to save the ideals of the early internet.
Even on What CD there used to be a few actual artists that would directly share their albums.
even if you magically remove it one day, you lose yourself a bunch of free hype-advertisers and conversations with your title in it.
there's always somehow people who think its a net negative on them, that there's a zero-sum game involved with their product, that end up on the board of some important company and want to get rid of a good thing that they have no real perspective on.
Make legal video streaming easy and reasonably priced and I'll give you more money than Comcast or Hulu ever got from me. Ideally, some all in one service that all the content producers use where I can very easily buy and download an episode, season, series, or movie. Or maybe subscribe to a show or channel. Also, no commercials. And no disappearing content, or country filtering. Don't do this bullshit where I'm paying you money to get abused because I won't. Also a video player that doesn't fight me because it seems like some of them do.
It'll never happen. These companies will never cater to the consumers paying them as long as they can abuse their customers and get rich instead.
Netflix may be slightly better in some areas than some of the other streaming services but they have almost no content I find interesting so I won't even bother.
If piracy kills Netflix and other OTT what happens to films ?
People return to Cinemas or movies start streaming for Peanuts on YouTube ?
Also, artists make virtually no money with Spotify, so it "works" for the consumer, but does it work for the artists?
Where can I go to watch classics? Sopranos, The West Wing, The Wire… even AMC shows aren’t on Netflix anymore. Yet they want to charge more, and I can’t watch Netflix when I travel for work from a hotel room anymore. It’s terrible service. Then they complain about piracy like it’s not their fault for making it harder and more expensive for people.
It feels like such a mental gimmick.
1) finding and downloading torrents requires know-how
2) finding and downloading subtitles that match the audio is often a chore and requires know-how, often time consuming
3) using a decent player on most devices and finding the files on the filesystem requires know-how, especially on mobile devices
While I understand that users on HackerNews are more tech savvy and don't find any of those particularly troublesome, to compare it to the ease of launching Netflix is just mental gymnastics. Average users won't find any of this convenient and will require to acquire know how in search engines and setting up players.
It requires a bit of up-front setup (no more than 30 minutes if you're tech savvy and pick one of the less friendly options), but it really is easier than Netflix on a daily basis.
The copyright industry is hugely stubborn and they will keep escalating things -- likely there will again be a few arrests of torrent users in an attempt of scaremongering -- until people start leaving in droves.
Many people act like not watching shows or movies every other day is difficult. Nope, it's just fine, and many other people discover that every day.
I'd like to see the copyright lobby outlaw, you know, your right to just NOT subscribe to anything at all. Like, please incarcerate me for wanting to walk through the park and not sit in front of your streaming service! I'd like to see you try.
Fun times ahead, supposedly, and I take pleasure in watching them bleed.
"In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth
lol
And quit the crap about one subscription -> one household. I pay extra for two simultaneous streams, I'd better get my two simultaneous streams.
I've given up. I'm just not doing it anymore. I own hundreds of movies on VHS (hah), DVD, and Bluray. I own hundreds of movies on digital platforms, like iTunes, Prime, and Google Play (or whatever they call it now, if they haven't simply deleted my library). At one point I was paying for at least five monthly-subscription streaming services. I've spent many thousands of dollars on movies.
I've gotten screwed by them all. DVDs and Blurays with DRM that prevented me from copying them (first at all, then just legally). Fried a Bluray drive trying to flash the firmware simply so I could backup and format-shift movies that I paid for. iTunes movies that I couldn't play on my TV. iTunes movies that wouldn't stream at full resolution on some platforms. Limitations on how many devices I could authorize to watch movies that I paid for. iTunes still limits you to five authorized devices. I've got two TVs, four computers, two tablets, and a phone.
Streaming sites that I pay for introducing ads. Movies and shows constantly disappearing from streaming platforms to increasingly isolated silos that double their prices and halve their content offerings. Netflix locking my account because I'm traveling and accessing it from a different place every night. Netflix not working because I'm out of the country. Prices keep going up, content and usability keeps going down.
Despite all this nonsense, I still held the line and wanted to legally purchase all my media. So I built a $3000 media PC, bought a bunch of Bluray movies, bought a Bluray drive to rip them, and got ready to "really own" movies I wanted to watch, pleased that I was no longer going to be the sap who spent $20 on a barely-usable iTunes movie that I didn't actually own, but still feeling like I was doing the right thing.
Well, I couldn't rip most of the movies, because of DRM, which hurts pirates not at all, but strips honest people of their right to backup and format-shift. So I researched Bluray drives, found one that was supposed to work, flashed the firmware to use [some ripping software I can't remember], and it fried the drive.
That's it. I've had enough. Fuck every content producer on the planet. I've got a media PC with 32TB of storage and I'm going to fill that up with everything I can steal and then buy more HDs.
They had their chance. I hope they all go bankrupt. Assholes.
Content doesn't stick around reliably. I glanced at my "watch it again" list on one of the several streaming services we subscribe to in my household the other day and well over half of the items on it were now tagged as paid options. Those movies and shows were no longer available on the service where I had watched them sometimes only weeks ago.
Content isn't even added reliably to begin with. I've seen the first and third movies in a franchise on the same service but not the second. I've seen TV shows that are part of the same world and occasionally do crossover episodes and a streaming service that has one show but not the other so you can't watch the whole story.
Then there are the ever-increasing ads and the "premium" tiers being introduced to remove them again as if they're doing us a favour. Spare me. And then tell me why I should sign up to the "premium" service when there's no guarantee about the content it will make available or the level of advertising it will also include in the future.
And finally there is a personal irritation that won't affect many people but really upsets me. Some services still insist on crippling the quality of the streams away from big name platforms like Windows and the main phone apps. Some people suggest this is because of DRM junk in their contracts with rightsholders but that doesn't really hold up when other streaming services seem to have no such problem or when the movie/show was an "original" from the same service. It's particularly irritating that the current worst offender seems to be Amazon Prime Video crippling playback on Linux. You know - the same Amazon who have made obscene amounts of money via AWS largely thanks to Linux.
One possible way to overcome these problems is to go "old school" and buy favourite movies and shows on disc. I still do that plenty. There are some that I do expect to rewatch later or lend out to a friend occasionally. But also discs work fairly reliably as long as you don't get caught by region locking or other similar junk - and usually if you do it's obvious immediately and you can send the product back as defective. (Amazon are once again a recurring villain in this story having sent several products that were in fact for different regions than the one ordered and in some cases literally had "Not licensed for distribution outside {somewhere I don't live}" printed on the box.) But this strategy is becoming harder with many distributors only making discs available for a relatively short time after a movie/show is released or only making them available in some countries/regions and not others. And again sometimes they change their mind between a movie and its sequel or from one season to the next of a TV show.
It's really hard to have much sympathy for an industry that offers such a bad experience to its paying customers. Particularly so when a lot of these problems are completely avoidable and avoiding them is realistically in the best interests of the big players when there is an ever-present "free" alternative that obviously a lot of people will be willing to choose even if some of us still prefer not to.
This plus the fact that actual artists get a pittance, means the flag will fly high till companies learn.
Also piracy has become much more reliable these days. There are systems which will make sure you get 4k streams based on any genre you enjoy. New shows from around the world. No need to wait for Netflix to add it to your countries playlist that to hidden behind garbage UX.
At the end of the day it is about availability, user control, artist benefits and showing the middle finger to large corporations.
That is the hacker mindset. That is what I grew up with in the early 2000s and it is substantially better than what we are "supposed" to do now. Hope that makes sense.
I don't know where you get the idea that the internet was "supposed" to be "free" or why the fact that a global transport network for information exists implies that everything transported over it should not require any payment.
The logical endpoint of your position is that you will get what you pay for: content that costs almost nothing to produce.