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.
(Which is not a big loss, because I can’t imagine producing the Netflix knockoffs be a hundredth the price of a 007).
This was solved for with music where pretty much every service has pretty much every song. People don’t need multiple music services, they just pick the one that best fits their style and needs. This is what the movie and TV industry needs to do if they want to beat piracy. This is what they should have done 15 years ago. Their greed is hurting them more than it’s helping.
The end result is searching for legitimate content is a terrible experience. If it's a result from Prime, I just pass. If it's from Crave, I pass. If it's on Netflix, I don't see anything at all.
At least a decade ago streaming boxes had one search box and it would return results from all the sources, and if it appeared you knew you could watch it.
What the streamers provide today is a significantly worse experience than piracy, and I don't know how they haven't realized this.
Yum! Brands (KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, etc.) is slightly larger than Restaurant Brands International (Burger King). McDonald's is larger than both of them put together. Or if you want brands rather than corporations, there are a zillion burger chains.
> CVS vs Walgreens
Rite Aid and Walmart, among others.
> AT&T vs Verizon
The US wireless carrier with the largest market cap is T-Mobile, with only slightly fewer users than Verizon. There are also many smaller ones.
> Democrats vs Republicans
This isn't a result of consumer preferences, it's a result of the first past the post voting system creating a powerful incentive for the most similar parties to merge until there are only two left. (Score voting fixes this.)
> Apple vs Google
This is the only real market duopoly here, and it's the one they have to worry about.
Either they can license their content to multiple services so it's convenient for customers to subscribe to one service and get everything, or those two companies will eventually figure out a way to get the same effect and most likely end up sucking in 30% of their industry's revenue in the process.
That's how it used to work. They all started making their own platforms and pulling content off of Netflix because they thought they could get the same numbers as Netflix and keep all the payments instead of whatever slice Netflix was giving them.
Music is literally a textbook example of why it doesn't work.
And they likely lose subscribers to they literally get poorer.
Spotify knows it's only way out is exclusive content, hence the Rogan deal et al.
Then Spotify would have to charge whatever they need to charge to remain profitable without exclusive content. And the labels would have to charge Spotify whatever they need to charge for Spotify to exist, because otherwise they wouldn't have anywhere to sell their content.
Not sure if Tidal is profitable but they aren’t popular and are much more expensive than people are generally willing to spend. It’s also potentially subsidized by a corporate parent.
There’s also a trail of unprofitable or tiny businesses like SoundCloud and Bandcamp that may or may not survive quarter to quarter.
It’s not a solved problem.
> The company posted a third-quarter operating income of 32 million euros ($34.1 million), its first quarterly profit since 2021, helped by a higher gross margin and lower marketing and personnel costs.
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/spotifys-user...
Their stock value doubled in the last year
Their CEO Daniel Ek is worth 3.7 billion dollar.
But, in fairness, this is an industry that is adjacent to Hollywood. It is conceivable that they have some sort of weird profit-laundering scheme going to make sure not too much of the money goes back to the artists or something.
I wish somebody could get all the media execs in a room and just deliver a simple message: "You can't compete on price; your competition is free. You must compete on experience if you're to compete at all."
With just a few hours worth of time and effort, it's possible to get a pretty sophisticated and automatic system set up that essentially makes getting a copy of a movie a literal one-click operation. You won't be able to watch it _right then_ as the find, download, process, import ... etc pipe takes time to run but at the end you'll have a high quality copy that will work on any device anywhere in the world.
Other than the immediacy, piracy is cheaper and less burdensome.
Unfortunately, there is the House of the Mouse, aka. Disney Legal Military Industrial Complex, and they don't let individuals or governments tell them what they can or can't compete on.
Not having to care about which platform something is on is so nice.
The problem feels a lot like the situation MoviePass worked themselves into where they priced it unsustainably low but cheap money allowed that to run long enough to train a generation of customers that their content was only worth that much. I imagine Netflix would dearly love to say that your subscription includes a certain number of movies but you can add on more, or that there’s a premium tier, etc. but there isn’t an easy way to try something like that now that everyone is used to the current model.
The other side of the problem is that studios really don’t want market pricing. Subscriptions are banking on the idea that you’ll still pay $12/month and find something else to watch even if the big series/movie they’re promoting isn’t very good, and they’re keeping the prices for rentals really high which makes means people are often looking at 1-2 months of streaming charges for a single movie rental.
The combination of the two seems likely to make a lot of people pirating for years to come. Most people do not want to juggle multiple services and if they’ve learned how to pirate anything once it’s always going to be there the next time someone jacks up prices or plays games with availability. I think that’s going to last until someone has the courage to let services like YouTube or AppleTV offer rentals of everything at reasonable prices.
If I invested a weekend (4 days, maybe 2-3 weekends...) I could probably figure it out, and never ever ever again deal with the BS streaming services. It takes one person pissed off that they missed Ozark and that will be 1 click install, game on, open source tech only ever moves forward, its antifragile, unlike any individual business.
Which HDDs should you put in the synology (or are there SSDs that make more sense; need to check $/GB…)? Which VPN service makes the most sense? Which RSS thingy is as good as Prime, Netflix, HBO, etc, etc, combined?
That takes a while.
Setting up the rss is just minutes.
Anyway, it's not my problem. It's their problem.
But that means companies must also realize the tech industry is a really bad business for 99% of companies in it.
They're trying to assert some unnatural right of control over what other people do. It isn't even all that clear why this is a good idea. I can see how it makes sense for legislators because of the presumably significant kickbacks they get from lobbyists; but there is a still an open question of whether this is a good system. It looks like it has had a big negative impact on our ability to sustain a shared culture. If people have to buy in to a culture, a bunch of people won't.
People still can't freely distribute Lord of the Rings for example. That isn't helping to get people reading it. J.R.R Tolkien has been dead for a while. Anything less famous than that has little chance to stick.
That's what you steal when you pirate.
People have been buying into shared cultures for centuries. Sometimes being able to afford access to a certain culture - and excluding those who can't - is part of the culture itself.
In a bottom-up cultures people are happy to pay because they feel part of the scene and they want to support it. A big part of that is user/costumer/fan experience and a feeling of community.
Top-down cultures feel exploitative and predatory - because they are. They separate the culture into producers and consumers and enforce strict gatekeeping of the relationship between them - which usually means a one-way financial obligation that feels like extortion, and unnecessary complications and frictions in the experience.
The real issue here is the insistence by the media-cos that movies can only ever be top-down.
The predictable outcome is there's now a shared culture of piracy in which people willingly support the pirate sites instead of the official distributors, and running a pirate site can be incredibly profitable.
The pirate hasn't gained any commercial value though. I'm pretty sure that "stealing" involves a valuable thing getting transferred from one person to another. Operative word being transfer. Everything the copyright holder had to start with is either retained by them or not possessed by the infringer. So it can't be (and isn't) theft.
Not exactly: the original owner still has all the commercial value, as decades of piracy has shown that commercial pieces still exist.
What the owner has lost though is monopoly over distribution and thus money exchange. It is possible to get the content from other places, and maybe, maybe not give some money back. The proliferation of exclusive content on numerous platforms only confirms that.
Granted charging $1 per song is a little egregious as well
For myself, when I think of the hacker ethos I think of Stallman and the GPL, which is explicitly designed around the idea that information can be ethically sold as long as you're actually selling it [0]. It's free as in freedom, not free as in beer, and under that philosophy being able to pay for services that respect your rights as a free human (which most current streaming services don't) is a desirable end state, not something to be condemned.
> Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.
> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.
In any case, hacking as a concept predates Stallman and FSF - indeed, they're the product of that mindset, not its originators. And the original hackers didn't care about copyright - just look at the early history of Unix.
The lesson here is that attrition and shrinkage will always be with us, it's only the rate that varies in market accordance with the enshittification of product.
The 'better' the product, the lower the shrinkage.
As supported by a majority of thread comments "I used to pirate when I was poor, then I didn't - now I do again as the commercial offering sucks".
[attribution] https://thebillionscompanion.net/all/tag/Tibetan+Book+of+the...
“On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other.”
I find this to be a much more intelligent formulation of the concept, as it recognizes the reasons and the tension.
We simply can’t get much of the media I like for free (gratis). That being said, it is maddening to have so much great content locked up. It feels insanely inefficient and that we produce far too much content unnecessarily.
There are probably ways to balance this better- separation of content ownership, production, and distribution; more limits on copyright length; mandatory content licensing; simplification of older content license rules…
That doesn’t mean it’s morally wrong to pay for content or put restrictions on distribution, just that optimum probably isn’t where we are.
Including your personal information, browsing habits, purchase history, genome, genetic disorders, medical history, sexual partners, kinks, embarrassing photos and videos, moments of social faux pas, biggest fears, darkest secrets, cheating, illegal behaviors, personal psychiatrist notes, privileged lawyer information, passwords, private keys, bitcoin keys, financial statements, tax records, debts, etc. ?
The notion of "information wants to be free" should be taken as an observation about the nature of things and the folly of corporations trying to have it both ways—information made broadly available yet on their exact terms—not as a value statement on any inherent goodness behind freeing information.
The problem is: how does one make something "free as in libre" without affecting the "not free as in beer".
I sincerely reject your entire premise.
??
I've never heard that definition.
You may be too young (not an insult) or in a different geography to have been seen this, however it was definitely a thing.