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Comment by MichaelTieso | Hacker News Reader

Big fan of Soulseek here as well. As someone else mentioned, the community is fantastic and the rare track and mixes they have is great.

I find it amazing that the early 2000's boom of Napster, Kazaa, Audiogalaxy, etc are now all gone. I don't know a single person that downloads music illegally but ten years ago that's what everyone did. The rise of iTunes, Songza, Pandora, Last.fm, and so many others is proof of the industry adapting to itself and doing it fantastically well. If only Hollywood would adapt and see it the same way.

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They're getting there in some places. Netflix is a tad popular in the US, here and there.

Hollywood has two major issues that's aren't faced by the music industry. The first is the theatrical release window: they're tied in to a business model in pretty much every country worldwide where a significant chunk of their revenue comes from a system that relies on limited availability via a single method. This is changing, slowly. The window is shrinking and iTunes is being used to push out online releases prior to the DVD hitting retail. But it's slow and will not go away unless there is some seismic change.

The second issue is international releases. Unlike music, films needs to be dubbed / subbed for releasing in many countries. This means staggered availability for most films worldwide (less so for the massive blockbusters which have resources thrown at them to ensure simultaneous release as much as possible to maximise the return from publicity), staggered retail windows, etc etc. It makes catch-all online release services more difficult to produce.

On top of all that? There are three (verging on two) major record labels worldwide (plus a bunch of indies who often operate quite well together). There are six major film studios in the US, seven if you count Lionsgate, multiple major studios in many individual countries, and persuading all of those to do the same thing at the same time and throw all of their films onto a Netflix-style service in every country worldwide....? I'd rather fight a hundred transformer sized ducks.

By the way, I think they should really stop dubbing films. Subtitles are much better as they don't require unnatural sentences for syncing with the video and also the authenticity is preserved.

A lot of people prefer dubs. I can't deal with them at all but you go with what people want...

Netflix is horrible even if you disregard all the content and licensing issues.

It's so sad it's almost funny, but I actually subscribed to Netflix purely to watch House of Cards Season 2 - and had to download the pirate rips since Netflix was way too resource intensive and dropping frames like crazy with the HD quality stream.

My laptop, a 2011 Macbook Air, isn't exactly the fastest computer out there, but it can watch 20Mbps+ 1080p x264 files in VLC and MPlayerX without any issues at all. However, Netflix, due to their stupid Silverlight solution couldn't even play 720P quality without stuttering a lot and losing audio/video sync within a few seconds.

It's pretty sad that Popcorn Time, a torrent streaming desktop app built with Node.js(!), with just a couple of weeks of unpaid open source development has become a solution that is both prettier, faster and higher quality than what Netflix has been able to do on the PC with years of development.

Supposedly Netflix is anxious to dump Silverlight on OS X as soon as they get an "HTML5" alternative that supports DRM.

Are you sure that wasn't a bandwidth issue?

Yup. I've got 100/100 Mbps and the hidden stats were confirming that the network wasn't the problem. I even tried pausing it and letting it buffer for a long time, but it just started dropping frames and going out of sync as soon as it switched to HD.

It would also have paused the video and displayed "buffering" if that were the problem.

Of the people I know of who do get music, they treat it more like they treat films. They get albums wholesale through torrents rather than the more haphazard getting of singles that Napster etc involved.

> Big fan of Soulseek here as well. As someone else mentioned, the community is fantastic and the rare track and mixes they have is great.

> I don't know a single person that downloads music illegally but ten years ago that's what everyone did.

Soulseek is all legal music now?

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