When you look at how easy this content is to access now compared with 10 or 15 years ago when you had to have a video store membership, hope no one else had rented the copy, pay crazy prices, and remember to bring it back when you were done, I find it hard to believe people's biggest problem (and main reason for pirating) is ease of access. It's price plain a simple. People have the option of not paying so a lot of them won't. I've done it in the past and it was almost never about ease of access. It was about money.
But a lot of them will. They will pay for ease of access, legal access, and a good user experience.
If the industry had focused its energy on those willing to pay instead of those not willing to pay, maybe the UX Popcorn Time provides today would have been available as a legal subscription based service.
Just look at Spotify. Yes, a lot of people still don't pay for the music they consume, but a lot of people do. Pirating of music has certainly seen a decline, even if we may never get rid of it completely.
That goes for videos, games, and music.
What the fuck.
They lost over €150m last year and their losses have been growing. Content creators seem to dislike them and want an alternative. Just because you can do something and some people will pay doesn't mean it makes business sense.
I think what's needed is something like Steam or GOG, but for Movies. Preferably with un-DRM downloads because fuck if I'm watching movies in Flash. (Same goes for Silverlight - mplayer or fuck you. Torrents let me watch with mplayer. On finicky graphics drivers who occasionally fail at vsync, choice of player matters.)
Why is it that in 2015, I can't go to a site, give them money, and get a high-quality mkv download - but I can go to a site, not give anyone money, and get that download anyways? Movie industry, why do you not want my money? Hell, set up an "indemnity service"! Select a movie, pay them, and they promise to not sue you. Zero distribution infrastructure required.
Because it's costly and unnecessary for a business to cater to every specific need. How many people even know what an MKV file is? And if they did how many people have the bandwidth to download one?
There are so many options available to people now (theatres, DVD, Bluray, iTunes, Amazon, Netflix) that people are resorting to insanely specific demands (MKV files, availability while in theatres, all I can watch for $5 per month, the technology used to stream the content must be one I like) in order to justify their piracy.
Relying on Flash or Silverlight is similar. I use Linux, and Flash is officially unsupported on Linux. Silverlight has never been officially supported on Linux. If these are the options, then I cannot watch the movie out of the box, I have to find a flash installer (I had better hope one's in my package repositories), or I have to install wine and build Silverlight into my browser or some such.
I think it is totally reasonable that you would ask the studios to provide content in a manner that you can actually watch. Let's not even get in to the Blu-Ray encryption snafu and how that affected those of us who use non-commercial operating systems.
The current situation is that I have to watch TV shows via EME within Chrome or Flash or Silverlight (non of which I would otherwise have near my computer) or not be able to pay the content producers any money (which I like doing because I want new content created). It is as if I had to own a sony TV to tune into certain channels and a panasonic TV to watch others.
If they want to prevent piracy then simply watermark the MKV files individually, register the sales and sue the buyers who's MKVs end up being torrented.
So if I hand built my own codec I could then ask Netflix to provide videos to me using it?
Of course, that's an extreme example. But they're not obliged to cater to your every whim - they're a business that makes business decisions, like losing X% of customers because they don't want to support Y codec/platform/whatever.
So it's more like a betamax owner complaining that movies are only issued on VHS :)
All of your options fail either for (a) not working in my country and (b) are physical and non-digital.
"Digital content I can watch right away" is not a instanely specific demand.
As for (b) I don't think that's an insanely specific demand and don't believe I said it was. In fact I listed a few of the demands in my comment. However it's also not a good justification for piracy imo. The content is still available to you with (for most people) very little effort.
Steam games have Steam DRM, it's just not as annoying as other DRM options. Agreed, GOG is great however (0 DRM).
For some it's about money yes, but for lots of people it's about the user experience or simply about availability in the first place.
PC game piracy proves this. Games on steam get pirated in large numbers even when the pirate copy is harder to download, install and use. And often it has reduced functionality.
It's quite simple: give me spotify premium or give me itunes, but for video content. I want to have everything ever made, as soon as it is made (none of that "it's in the theatre so you have to wait" B.S.), either for a fixed reasonable monthly rental fee, or for a fixed reasonable purchasing price. I want that content on every device I have, on-demand, in the best possible quality. I'm ok with DRM for rental as long as it does not prevent access on the devices I own (ipad, windows tablet, laptop, apple tv, etc...). I'm not ok with DRM for purchasing, because when I buy something I want to own it forever. Give me that and I'll gladly pay for it, but the movie and TV industry simply doesn't want my money it seems. I pay for netflix, because that's basically the best I can get, but it's not even close to what I want.
The music industry eventually figured this stuff out and I don't pirate any music at all anymore. I still hold out hope that eventually the movie and TV industry will stop refusing to take my money.
You can't get a good copy of a movie until DVDs and brs are released. Cams and TSs are terrible.
If something like popcorn time went mainstream they would just stop releasing disc media and downloads until well after the theatre stopped playing.
TV is the industry that should be worried. If popcorn time goes mainstream we'll never see high budget cable content ever again. Just 100% low budget sitcoms, soap operas and reality TV. But not with constant in show advertising that scenesters can't edit out.
*: random country in the EU
It is unclear how anyone in the UK can benefit from TV programmes removed from this service, or WHY any content for which the BBC doesn't have permanent distribution rights (via iPlayer) should ever be funded or produced by the BBC.
It's not impossible to get around but getting a CC from another country and the like quickly leads to pretty shady websites.