Netflix CEO says torrent piracy in Canada down 50 per cent since Netflix

Unfortunately, that means that piracy is still by far the easiest way to get content, for arbitrary content.

International copyright agreements make things easier in Brazil: we have only a subset of the first step and then the last one.

This is spot on. If you make it easy to legitimately acquire, I will legitimately acquire it. I don't "watch TV" in the sense that I allocate time for TV-viewing and then find the best thing available. If I want to watch something, I will find it in the most convenient way possible. If you have a pay service that is super convenient, guess what? It's an easy choice to pay $2.99 and watch it _now_ rather than to search torrent sites, wait some time to download it, hope that I got a legitimate copy, hope that I don't get harassed by my ISP, etc. If it takes an hour to download a movie, well... I'd give $3 for that hour, any day.

I can tell you aren't Canadian. The process here is "is it on Netflix? Oh, no of course not. Pirate bay.

My process is sorta similar:

  1. Netflix? 
  2. Hulu?
  3. Amz-Inst
  4. Shady streaming site.

And since the vast majority of what I watch is anime these days that hasn't been officially brought to USA yet, I pretty much go straight to #4, animehere.com or animecenter.tv or similar. I even have scripts that scrapes the page for the direct video-file URL and fetches it. I run it every Saturday night to get the newest Attack on Titan & Hunter-x-Hunter-2011. Here[1] is a bash script I put together to download all of the One Piece video files from watchop.com . Of course, now that I've posted the script it'll probably stop working in the not-too-distant future.

1. http://pastie.org/pastes/8353546/text

All the sources except piracy, for movies and TV (and books too), are missing features you can use with other software if you have DRM free media. For example, I have amazon video already paid for and never ever use it because of this -- missing features that VLC has.

IMO they should try achieving feature parity -- or better, actually innovate -- to cut down piracy further. (Yes the paid stuff is arguably ahead on certain features like convenience. But not others.)

I have the same process... but stop at Netflix; all the other (legal) solutions are either too complex or too expensive (not to mention, I'm not in the US, so subscribing to US-based Amazon Prime would be of little value).

> Is it available anywhere online for purchase? Cool. Buy it and watch it.

A week later. And I would have to get an archaic optical drive. It also creates useless waste and is usually way too expensive for an hour of entertainment.

For me, none of the options before that is available so I can either don't watch it or pirate it with "I'll pay for it later" attitude. It worked well enough for games and software in general (pirated everything since maybe three or four years back).

Like most people outside of North America, I just skip these steps by default since the answer has been "no" for a decade, and in most cases still is.

Also "purchase" should be "non-DRM or single-platform format crippled purchase".

Oh, we now have Netflix in the Netherlands, since a few weeks. The actual selection is a joke. Yes, I understand it's the copyright mafia's doing, but don't ask me to pay the same price as Americans for a fraction of the product.

Will the title ever be available in my country through any service, media or format? No. Then, Pirate Bay.

Will it come to theaters someday and coincide with my wife's good mood? Yes. Ok, it's worth the wait.

For any other scenario, Netflix.

It would be so much easier if people could get the content in whatever way they see fit and pay the content creator directly.

As a GNU/Linux OS user I have a similar process:

Is it on Netflix? Doesn't matter, can't use Netflix.

Is it on Amazon Prime? Doesn't matter, can't use Amazon Prime.

Is it on Amazon Instant Video for rent or purchase? Doesn't matter, can't use it.

Do I actually want to own a copy permanently and is it available anywhere online for purchase for a reasonable price, in high quality, and DRM free?

No? Pirate Bay.

>Canadian content (abbreviated CanCon, cancon or can-con) refers to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) requirements, derived from the Broadcasting Act of Canada, that radio and television broadcasters (including cable and satellite specialty channels) must air a certain percentage of content that was at least partly written, produced, presented, or otherwise contributed to by persons from Canada. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content

CanCon stands for Canadian Content. High level, in order to maintain a broadcast licence in Canada, you need to have a certain percentage of your content be defined as "Canadian". The way you get a piece of content certified as Canadian is via point system - Canadian director, +1 point, Canadian lead actor, +1 point, etc... more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content

One really odd thing about Canada is we don't "naturally" produce enough content for broadcasters to meet their Canadian content requirements (let alone content people actually want to consume), therefore there are HUGE subsidies in place for the production of Canadian content - like billions of dollars a year huge. These subsidies enable broadcasters to pick up Canadian shows cheaply in order to meet their quotas. Most Canadians don't realize how much money is given to media creators because the money is distributed in many different forms from different institutions, at both the provincial and federal level, i.e. those which invest in media (http://telefilm.ca/) distribute tax credits (i.e. http://www.omdc.on.ca/ ), and so fourth. This is ignoring the CBC by the way, the government financed broadcast organization.

The subsidies haven't followed changes in Canadian media consumption patterns though, meaning we over-subsidize mediums which are consumed less and under-subsidize those that are consumed more. It will be interesting to see if / how things change moving forward.

As others have said, CanCon is a quota for "Canadian" content on TV and the radio, which mostly means our radio stations play a lot more Nickelback than anyone wants to listen to.

We do have a Canadian version of the BBC; it's called the CBC. I hear that their radio stations are pretty good, but their TV channel really makes me wish that we just spent our government dollars on making the BBC iPlayer available in Canada.

Literally nobody I know has cable, just isn't worth it. Anything worth watching has a way to download it online easily and hassle free and if you don't feel like paying there's a million ways to download it regardless.

CanCon is generally pretty bad and shouldn't be compared to the BBC, though recently I've read some Canadian production companies have had a fair amount of success in selling their shows to US cable companies.

Someone from Quebec should chime in because from my understanding their locally made product is of higher quality than that of English Canada.

I would bet that the majority of young consumers that do have cable subscriptions do it solely for ESPN and the other sports channels.

Even Netflix, Kindle, iTunes have significant accessibility issues - as a Canadian I find US friends online have access to a much greater library than the Canadian equivalent. I can only assume this is license related (as opposed to concerns around the incremental cost of distribution of online streams!).

A good example actually comes from BBC - QI (Quite Interesting) uses some media whose licensing/copywrite is prohibitively expensive in the US relative to UK that the program cannot be broadcast by BBC America / BBC Canada.

Every single Netflix subscriber I know also uses a US VPN service. Netflix Canada just isn't worth the money.

As a Canadian, that's what I've heard too. Netflix Canada = sucks.

Not that I personally like streaming anyway... but the piracy problem is a tough one because it's so quick and easy, but is not always reliable nor safe (and obviously screws the creator in terms of $$). However, piracy can also go beyond the original creation, like how Warcraft 2 was ported to work on modern operating systems. Will be interesting to see in 10 years where things go.

The piracy confrontations are not about the money or revenue maximizing. They are about gatekeeping and distribution control.

Is there anything else which has happened recently in the Canadian media space which could have led to the decrease? I understand that we should be careful with correlation/causation, but it seems like a fairly reasonable connection.

I've always regarded these piracy statistics with great suspicion, regardless of the point the person pushing them is trying to make (even then, usually any comments made about piracy statistics are by media industry types banging on about how they're close to bankruptcy or similar).

I assume they're doing something like connecting to a random swarm and counting IPs, problem is that makes a number of faulty assumptions:

  * 1 IP = 1 person
  * Person on the swarm is necessarily there to download
  * Person on the swarm is necessarily downloading something they don't have a license for
  * Person on the swarm is necessarily consuming the media they're downloading (some people just like to collect)
  * Public trackers are the only means of pirating via torrent
  * Other mediums are completely ignored (IRC/Usenet/HTTP sites/EDonkey/DC++/etc etc etc etc)