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It's a combination pricing, service, and product problem. Pirates get the same content, but far better - it plays on all of their devices, has no ads, plays on their favorite player (VLC, MPV, XBMC, whatever), and they can watch it whenever they want. The streaming versus downloading argument has also been won by the downloaders many times - local video is a better experience than streamed video [1]. It's an even bigger problem in the anime community, where illegal fansubs provide a much, much better option than the others.

[1] https://mediacru.sh/cpUO31TIqLpo (abrasive language, but good points)

I enjoyed that link immensely. Such a welcome change of pace.

Pirating isn't all roses either. There's a lots of ads to support some of the services. Many services are dubious and try to make you install software that compromises your system integrity. It's not always easy to find the content in good quality. Some jargon needs to be learned. To know how to navigate these waters it means that time has been invested by the consumer.

I suspect there is a ratio between the available price and the perceived value of time from the consumer.

LOL. And then if you're Hulu, start cramming ads back into paying users' faces. I miss the days when people threw sledghammers into giant TV screens to free us from this hell. Or was that a movie?

What people fail to understand or see or ack is that there is enough to do all the things...

It's not like Apple has ads in their video service today, for their part :)

Oh god, Archer.

Since FX took over in S4, their iTunes versions have between sandwiched with ads for other FX programs. ADS IN FULL-PRICED iTUNES DOWNLOADS.

Filled me with such rage.

The best part? Those ads exist in pirated versions on the newsgroups as well!

This will sound like I'm playing devil's advocate, but it's a serious question. Hulu Plus theoretically works an awful lot like a DVR from your cable/satellite company (we'll come back to the "theoretically" in a moment): watch new shows the day after they aired, as many as you want. Plus a lot of back catalog stuff, plus weird independent stuff that they bring in. Not for cable or satellite prices of $100+ a month (and that's not counting "premium" channels like HBO), not even for the promotional special prices of ~$30 a month, but for $7.99 a month, and with about half as many ads, given that Hulu's breaks are 60-90 seconds instead of 2-4 minutes.

I don't know. On the surface, isn't that kind of an amazing improvement?

Coming back to the "theoretically," the problems I see with Hulu are certainly driven by stupid contractual obligations: they usually only have the last five episodes of any given series, so if you want to start watching something halfway through the season you're out of luck; they sometimes don't have rights to stream things on Hulu Plus that they do on normal Hulu, which is banana crazypants; and of course, there are shows and even whole networks they don't carry. But out of all the issues with Hulu, I'm not sure their failure to give us everything commercial free is actually that outrageous.

Hulu's breaks are steadily increasing in length. First it was 30s, then 45-60s, now it's typically 120-145s. I avoid Hulu now if there's any other way to watch a show.

Is it still the same ad played over and over during the same break? Just 8 times now instead of 4?

No, they're up to three different ads. It's just that it's the same three ads every break. :)

Hey, it's an improvement. Last time I used Hulu (admittedly a while ago) it was "T-MOBILE T-MOBILE T-MOBILE T-MOBILE T-MOBILE T-MOBILE. It goes fast like this pink motorcycle! T-MOBILE."

I don't know about the timelines in the US, but I do know that here in Australia, cable TV initially had one major thing going for it: you didn't get ads during a show. You'd get ads between shows to round out the minutes, and usually not for commercial products, but not during the show.

It didn't take long for them to stop that practice, which perplexed me - what was the point in getting a basic cable TV package then? You directly pay them and they still cram just as many ads into the timeslots?

> what was the point in getting a basic cable TV package then?

Because people would still pay for it.

Sure, for the business. But I meant as a consumer - why pay for a basic package when the experience is the same as free-to-air?

I actually asked some engineers at Hulu about this during a job interview, specifically about the fact that the same commercial often plays three or more times during a single show. They understood the problem but apparently companies pay for spots on certain shows. Thats why you only see the jack links commercial on tosh's animated show (no one else wants to advertise on it).

Not sure if you're being sarcastic with that reference, but that was actually an ad. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R706isyDrqI

It is a pricing problem, but also a distribution and licensing problem. Netflix for example is not available in most countries of the world, and nor it nor anything like it has all the latest shows and movies on time, some being available many years later.

The future is definitely being able to stream all the shows and movies immediately after release anywhere on the web. The problem is it could take 20 years before we get anything close to that at the pace Hollywood is moving. Something like Popcorn Time could've pushed the move to happen within 5 years or less.

> The future is definitely being able to stream all the shows and movies immediately after release anywhere on the web.

I agree, I wonder though if future Hollywood will be more or less profitable.

Imagine a future where all movies/tv shows were given away for free/stolen, how would they profit?

I think the answer is advertising inside the movie/show. I recently saw this done pretty tastefully in an episode of 'Workaholics' where the group wove some product placement into the story pretty naturally. I was day dreaming about how far they could take this and imagined them freezing the scene and the three of them breaking character/fourth wall to pitch a product and then unfreezing the scene and going back to acting. You could imagine this getting so popular that it eventually becomes annoying and then eventually edited out of any shows/movies.

What I think is even more interesting is the fact that advertising, such a wildly inefficient method, right now props up so many industries.

Imagine if Google released a product tomorrow that was 100% efficient at replacing advertising.. Some sort of beam that just got people to understand/like your product immediately. What would all of these major industries do for revenue?

> What I think is even more interesting is the fact that advertising, such a wildly inefficient method, right now props up so many industries.

What makes you think advertising is inefficient? For specific parties it's extremely efficient. It gives the advertiser the power to change the viewer's preference between Brand X and Brand Y. Allowing himself to be convinced to buy Brand X in exchange for content allows the viewer to pay for the content with money out of Brand Y's pocket instead of his own. In many cases this brings more profit to the content provider than that customer would be willing to pay directly out of pocket. The detriment goes almost entirely to the competing brand who loses a sale to the advertiser.

Which is really the trouble for advertisers. Advertising is an arms race. Brand X buys advertising and takes market share from Brand Y, so Brand Y buys advertising to take it back. Repeat until advertising expenses consume a significant portion of the margins for every brand, in all industries across the entire world economy. Kind of a nice business to be in, isn't it? Start an economic war and force all sides to bid against each other to buy your weapons.

> Imagine if Google released a product tomorrow that was 100% efficient at replacing advertising.. Some sort of beam that just got people to understand/like your product immediately. What would all of these major industries do for revenue?

Use the beam to make people like their products enough to pay money for them?

A viewer's time is worth more to the advertiser than to the viewer, and the content provider profits more from arranging that transaction than selling the content directly for money. Content providers could still sell content for money if advertising somehow disappeared, but they would be significantly less profitable because they would lose their ability to arbitrage the time-for-money transaction between the advertiser and the viewer.

That's a load of horseshit. I've been seeing ads for things I will never, ever buy forever and apparently Hulu thinks they're going to change that. The advertisers are wasting both their money and my time. I do not gamble and I do not drink. Ain't no amount of playing the same damn ad every break in Hulu that isn't going to make me not hate your company.

That's just statistics. Some percentage of customers who view an ad -- generally a very large percentage -- will never be swayed by it. But they don't have to be. You don't have to convince very many customers to buy your car instead of the next guy's car, or to switch to your brand of shampoo for the rest of their lives, and you're ahead. Even if 95% of the other people you've paid to put ads in front of never give you a penny.

> I do not gamble and I do not drink. Ain't no amount of playing the same damn ad...

so if you were chatting with a friend, and the topic of drinking or gambling came up, wouldn't this ad turn up as part of the conversation? wouldn't the image of the company/brand be on your mind, and so you'd speak about it? Even if you don't personally transact with the company, branding is hugely important to these companies that mainly produce a commodity, but differentiate using branding. Classic example is nike, or fashion labels.

If the advertisers desire me to shower their clients and products with profanity when they come up in conversation, then... touche they got me.

> I was day dreaming about how far they could take this and imagined them freezing the scene and the three of them breaking character/fourth wall to pitch a product and then unfreezing the scene and going back to acting. You could imagine this getting so popular that it eventually becomes annoying and then eventually edited out of any shows/movies.

This has been around for a while: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ProductPlacement/LiveA...

I think there's a line I'm unwilling to cross when it comes to the price. $20 seems pretty ridiculous considering it'd be less to watch it in the theater.

There's also a service problem. Why can't I find my favorite movie from the 80s on netflix? It's pretty frustrating.

> I think the industry should do what Hulu has done over the past 5 years. Give the product away virtually for free, collect an enormous user base while you starve/kill the demand for the equivalent torrents, slowly increase the price of the service until you find equilibrium, then profit.

Not going to happen. The television/media industry is addicted to the ad rates you get from traditional television, and have to put many more ads into online content to receive the same revenue (hence why so many Hulu ads). So the balance is, how painful (# of ads) do you make it before your average Joe figures out RSS + Torrent Client + RSS Feed?

None of what you made makes sense.

Why wouldn't pirates just go back to pirating when the price increases for the service? If pirating with RSS feed + torrent client is so easy, why would they move to the legit service in the first place?

> Why wouldn't pirates just go back to pirating when the price increases for the service? If pirating with RSS feed + torrent client is so easy, why would they move to the legit service in the first place?

A Hulu Queue is more convenient than pirating I would think, but once you have to spend greater than X time on ads, you'd rather deal with the hassle of pirating. Just speculation.

> Not going to happen. The television/media industry is addicted to the ad rates you get from traditional television, and have to put many more ads into online content to receive the same revenue

I know there's a reason (traditional ad rates, etc.) - but I don't understand the disparity between online and television advertising rates.

If anything online advertising would seem to be significantly more powerful since you can build customized profiles about the viewers (vs. only having a Nielsen chips in every so many households) and broad TV show audiences.

That's exactly why it's less "valuable" online. The fact that analytics tell you exactly how much value you get from it is the problem. Compare that to TV: you only have bullshit statistics that are honestly crap, but the allure and history is more important.

Compare startups with no revenue getting bought or valued for far more than startups that do. Same concept.

Amazon Instant Video is, for one, unavailable in neither my native country (italy) nor the one I leave in currently (hungary, where there isn't amazon at all). Rinse and repeat for lovefilm, netflix, hulu etc.

Also majors have decided to delay releasing movies here because they think we are the main people pirating movies.

Price counts, but service counts more, IMVHO.

Too true, Norway, despite having one of the works richest populations, are also hardcore pirates. It's not a question of money, it is exclusively one of service.

Delayed releases? Pirate. Poor quality? Pirate. Ad-riddled media? Pirate.

I subscribe to so much different stuff right now, but the second a service demands I watch ads over just paying more, it stops receiving money altogether.

Freedom.

Well, will the Amazon Instant Video be possible to archive and playable without DRM support and offline? If not it's not the same product. Is it available to me (Norway)? No, so it's not the same product.

I think pricing is a separate, but related concern. I paid ~17 USD to watch Gravity in theatres once, but I'm not sure I'd be willing to pay anything to watch "the Wolf of Wallstreet". I might watch it for free, though. So in this case, if I were to pirate WoWst -- that wouldn't be a lost sale. It'd be free marketing (if I recommend it to others), or well, nothing I guess. Not a lost sale, because buying wasn't considered.

The thing is, people have different tastes, and for someone that's a die-hard De Caprio fan, WoWst might be worth $20. I might be willing to buy some film others think is crap etc. Now, had I watched an unlicensed copy of WoWst and thought it was ok, I'd probably recommend it to someone who really liked Leo -- even if I wouldn't consider it a great movie. And if did consider it a great movie I certainly would.

I think we're seeing (and have been seeing) a disturbing shift around the ideas of laws with regards to content: anti-piracy (anti-usability ;) groups seem to argue that people want to steal, and only enforcement keeps them from stealing. This disregards the idea that laws are a form of consensus -- there's not a law enforcement department in the world that can work without citizen support. Laws that are regarded as unfair and unwarranted will be broken.

I feel that in general arguing piracy kills music and film, is like arguing libraries kills books.

You also need to factor in how much my time and effort is worth to me.

I'd much rather spend a few dollars and get a DRM free copy, than spend a few minutes on a shaddy ad/malware ridden torrent site to get a free DRM free copy.

You'll spend more time watching the locked content before the show for most DVDs than it takes to download.

Challenge accepted. Will try to find a DVD with some of that stuff tomorrow (it's 3:18am, parents would not appreciate).

Edit: Does searching a dvd count as time spent before being able to watch the movie? Since you can't, ahem, copy dvds to your NAS (they're encrypted with CSS to prevent yarr pirates y'know).

Are you implying CSS is any more secure than a wet paper bag?

Unskippable previews, menus, etc. can be more common in rental-only versions of DVDs and BDs. Try a Redbox or other major rental store (if any exist) if you want to increase your chances of finding such a disc.

Apples and oranges. I guess availability (publish time and original language), being able to really download, collect and share a movie, play it without problems (HDCP, Silverlight, smartphone support, ...), not having to get a credit card etc. is way more important to people than you think. Also a flatrate for a specific catalogue is different than buying films, be it positive or negative. Don't forget the people who don't even have the Internet speed to stream high quality, but might download.

I live in a central european country, there's not one service available to me (other then an overpriced ISP with IP TV option) where I could legally watch movies and series on demand.

On the other hand I also play PC games occasionally, I just buy them on Steam, GOG, Humble Indie Bundle, ...

Pirate.

pi•rate (pīˈrĭt) n. One who robs at sea or plunders the land from the sea without commission from a sovereign nation. n. A ship used for this purpose. n. One who preys on others; a plunderer.

>You can either try to increase the riskOfGettingCaught or decrease the legal price.

Below $0.000001? Assuming everyone in the world buys that movie, it would only make $7000.

I think you might have misread that formula.

My initial reaction was also "you've priced your risk at less than 1 in a trillion", but then I realized this is risk per movie pirated not per person.

I still think it is way too low an estimate, but it might be closer if we assume that people who pirate movies tend to do so with thousands of movies.

But yeah, your chance of "getting caught" is way way higher than the number implied here.

Yea its way too low an estimate, a cost between $0.01 - $1.00 per movie is probably more accurate.

They should version based on quality and extras. Movie for $6 as a base, $12 for HD, $18 for a premium package of some sort and so on. That would help capture the bottom end but still allow them to profit from whales to some extent.

I think Steam has shown that it is not a pricing problem.

Steam typically has 25-50 percent the price of console games.

I'm not sure about that figure. The price of a console-available, AAA game on Steam seems to keep pace with the prices of the big-box stores and specialty retailers for the first 6-12 months. The major differences seem to be the availability of the game years after release and the ability to provide front-page notifications of deeply discounted older (or critically panned) games.

The Laffer curve might apply to more than taxes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

To quote Captain Renault "I'm shocked..."

> Right now 'The Wolf of Wall Street' is available from Amazon Instant Video at $20.

As an aside, that movie is one of the worst I've seen in a long time. I wouldn't consider it worth my time to watch it again if I was given $20.