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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>I still kinda wish that the subscriptions would just allow you to use the tokens however you wish. I get that they rely on people not using all of their quota. But e.g. with open code it doesn't really matter if I use antigravity or gemini-cli the usage should be about the same.

This is almost as realistic as "I wish netflix or youtube allowed me to use VLC to watch their content".

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Haha maybe that would reduce piracy.

The easiest way to watch a movie in the player of my choice - even if i have legal access to it because it's in my netflix subscription - is to download it off piratebay.

Add to that Netflix's shitty discovery system, I'm pretty sure I watched some downloaded movies in spite of actually having legal access to them.

Oh, remember when PC games used to come on disks? For the Netflix example I can only guess, but I'm 100% sure I downloaded isos for games I had actually bought and had the physical disc... somewhere.

i don't believe this is a significant driver of piracy tbh, normal people don't care about that kinda thing :P

especially considering most modern movie/tv piracy is free streaming websites - shitty quality and awkward player controls, definitely no choice of player here

This is almost as realistic as "I wish OpenAI supports using OpenCode with ChatGPT subscription account."

Oh, except they do[0].

[0]: https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2009742187484065881

Yea, there are the last to the party (have they even arrived?), so they are going to have to make some concessions. I wonder if they at rollout will have a third-party subscription token service in addition to their first-party one.

> there are the last to the party

Anecdotally, I'm having a very hard time imagining there are more Gemini Cli users than Codex users.

There are a lot of people who have access to Gemini for “free” through Google workspace.

That said, I am unimpressed by Gemini CLI overall and even though I have 2 workspace accounts with access, I use neither.

> This is almost as realistic as "I wish netflix or youtube allowed me to use VLC to watch their content".

This is exactly what should be happening. There's no reason to limit the client apps for things like _paid_ Netflix or Youtube Premium.

Except you can't prevent people stealing the videos then. And as much as I don't like how things work right now, I think people have a right to get paid for stuff they make and Netflix is one way of doing that.

"Stealing videos"?!? Are we back in 2005 again?

All the videos are _already_ available anyway, several minutes after they're available on Netflix. And on Youtube they are _literally_ free, with ads. People sign up for Netflix subscriptions to not bother with torrents and pirate forums, and for Youtube Premium to avoid ads.

That's why it makes no freaking sense to _not_ make your content available for paid subscribers using APIs.

Why is that unrealistic?

Think of it like the digital right-to-repair.

I pay for it, I get to use it with any client I want. Simple.

Except that is a false equivalent, when you clicked "agree" you did so for their ToS to get a discount or bulk deal with strings attached. It's pretty easy these days to have a LLM extract the unique parts into a summary.

I do wish that though. I have given up on streaming services, I am not paying for this bullshit experience. We used to have all the content unlimited on one service for like $10/mo. I can accept prices increasing with inflation but society should not accept such a backslide in service quality.

I would take things somewhat further: I'd be happy to pay the equivalent of $20 2015 dollars for this service if it were comprehensive. Unfortunately, that might allow for a consumer surplus to occur in the viewing experience and the motion picture industry ties with maybe nVidia for peak pathological hostility to retail consumer surplus.

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