Piracy Is Surging Again Because Streaming Execs Ignored The Lessons Of The Past (techdirt.com) 259
Karl Bode, reporting for TechDirt: Back in 2019 we noted how the streaming sector risked driving consumers back to piracy if they didn't heed the lessons of the past. We explored how the rush to raise rates, nickel-and-dime users, implement arbitrary restrictions, and force users toward hunting and pecking their way through a confusing platter of exclusives and availability windows risked driving befuddled users back to piracy. And lo and behold, that's exactly what's happening.
After several decades of kicking and screaming, studio and music execs somewhere around 2010 finally realized they needed to offer users affordable access to easy-to-use online content resources. They finally realized they needed to compete with piracy and focus on consumer satisfaction whether they liked the concept or not. And unsurprisingly, once they learned that lesson piracy began to dramatically decrease. That was until 2021, when piracy rates began to climb slowly upward again in the U.S. and EU. As the Daily Beast notes, users have grown increasingly frustrated at having to hunt and peck through a universe of different, often terrible streaming services just to find a single film or television program.
As every last broadcaster, cable company, broadband provider, and tech company got into streaming they began to lock down "must watch" content behind an ever-shifting number of exclusivity silos, across an ocean of sometimes substandard "me too" services. Initially competition worked, but as the market saturated and the most powerful companies started to silo content, those benefits have been muted. Now users have to hunt and peck between Disney+, Netflix, Starz, Max, Apple+, Acorn, Paramount+, Hulu, Peacock, Amazon Prime, and countless other services in the hopes that a service has the rights to a particular film or program. When you already pay for five different services, you're not keen to sign up to fucking Starz just to watch a single 90s film. And availability is constantly shifting, confusing things further.
After several decades of kicking and screaming, studio and music execs somewhere around 2010 finally realized they needed to offer users affordable access to easy-to-use online content resources. They finally realized they needed to compete with piracy and focus on consumer satisfaction whether they liked the concept or not. And unsurprisingly, once they learned that lesson piracy began to dramatically decrease. That was until 2021, when piracy rates began to climb slowly upward again in the U.S. and EU. As the Daily Beast notes, users have grown increasingly frustrated at having to hunt and peck through a universe of different, often terrible streaming services just to find a single film or television program.
As every last broadcaster, cable company, broadband provider, and tech company got into streaming they began to lock down "must watch" content behind an ever-shifting number of exclusivity silos, across an ocean of sometimes substandard "me too" services. Initially competition worked, but as the market saturated and the most powerful companies started to silo content, those benefits have been muted. Now users have to hunt and peck between Disney+, Netflix, Starz, Max, Apple+, Acorn, Paramount+, Hulu, Peacock, Amazon Prime, and countless other services in the hopes that a service has the rights to a particular film or program. When you already pay for five different services, you're not keen to sign up to fucking Starz just to watch a single 90s film. And availability is constantly shifting, confusing things further.
Better nickel and diming (Score:5, Interesting)
I would even accept better nickel-and-diming. Want to have your hot new show exclusive to your platform? Fine. Let me pay $0.99 to watch an episode to see if I like it. That's cheaper than a free trial for people who will forget to cancel.
And why is Roku the only one implementing a Universal Search algorithm? Can't the platforms get together and do this outside of a single vendor's device? I just want to go to the web and type in the name of a movie or show and see what platform it is even on - because nobody remembers.
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Roku has to come up with a new feature to differentiate themselves since they started showing home screen ads like everyone else.
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Meanwhile, I search on the app with my phone and then hit a button and it directly opens the correct app. No home screen needed. Though banner ads are so easy to ignore these days that I can't even remember they have them.
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I recently bought the rechargeable Roku remote and it's way better than swapping out batteries every week.
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Remember when Cable TV offered an ad-free television viewing experience, for a monthly subscription fee?
Then the premium channels that you had to pay extra for on top of your monthly cable bill, in order to get an ad-free television viewing experience, because "regular" cable TV started showing ads?
Oops those show ads now too.
Same shit different decade different technology.
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Yep. And if some content leaves one streaming provider for another you don't pay for ... you don't lose access.
A 2-bay NAS + VPN subscription is significantly cheaper than a year of the major streaming services combined.
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So the interface is terrible, and the remote sucks down alkaline batteries like they're going out of style, but you can give them more money in order to reduce user toil marginally?
Sounds like an awesome product that I should immediately run out and purchase. /s
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Their interface is so trash you use another product. Trying to salvage it by using an app is not thinking clearly.
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Yep. I was gonna buy a Roku and then they started showing ads like everyone else so I just got a Google TV. If I'm gonna see ads I might as well have a reasonable selection of apps available.
Re:Better nickel and diming (Score:5, Informative)
The best part: you may not have to see the ads on Google TV. It's android, so you may be able to enable developer mode and push a new launcher onto it over the wireless network and get rid of the ads. I use FLauncher.
Even if you can't use ADB, you might still be able to get it done with nothing but the Google Play Store:
1. install "FLauncher" from the Google Play Store
2. install "Launch on Boot" from the Google Play Store
3. in "Launch on Boot" set FLauncher to open on boot and wake from sleep
4. install "Button Mapper" from the Google Play Store
5. use "Button Mapper" to change the home button on the remote to launch FLauncher
Oh, and you can use SponsorBlock to get an ad-free YouTube experience.
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Typing with a TV remote is trash so I use a device with an on-screen keyboard. It's not that complicated. Not a huge number of streaming boxes that run every service's apps that give you something similar.
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You ever try typing a search query on a TV remote? I don't need to use arrow keys to type in 2024.
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Yeah, that took about 2 minutes to fix on my Nvidia Shield TV by replacing the Google launcher with FLauncher, with the added bonus that the UI is about 2x as fast now to select the app I want, and not have half the screen wasted on Android TV's advertisements or useless content aggregation tabs, one of which doesn't even seem to work (Live TV) with Google's own TV streaming (YouTube TV).
Now I can continue to use that 4-year old set top box for another couple years, since nobody has released anything better
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Amazon often makes the first episode free. I also like I can just buy whole seasons. Cheaper than a monthly fee.
Re:Better nickel and diming (Score:5, Insightful)
We have Amazon too. If I'm going to buy an entire season of a program, I want physical media.
Also, the nickel and diming of users and forceing ads unless additional fees are paid is really what drives people away. I should never be forced to watch ads when I am paying for something. I understand why people want to pirate shows, but I'm taking it one step further. If companies are going to shovel a crap product at me and expect me to pay for it, they're in for a rude shock. I'm simply cancelling the subscriptions. My hard-earned money is too valuable to spend on crap products.
Of course I'm just one person, and streaming companies will wring their hands and their well paid lobbyists will lament to congress that piracy is the reason for their woes and not having an unsustainable sales stream.
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I never rewatch things. To me paying $15- 30 for a season of a show I like is cheaper than paying $14 a month while it slow rolls out. I'm at an age though where I don't watch enough TV to matter. Most days the TV is on OTA and is just background noise.
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I just don't watch shit that is doing a 1-episode-per-week roll. I'll wait until the whole season is there, and then watch it.
I don't get into "did you see the new episode of ${SHOW}" conversations with people for the most part, so waiting a couple months to not get squeezed for multiple months of subscription for 8-10 hours of video isn't a big deal.
Re:Better nickel and diming (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally I find that the one-a-week schedule allows you to actually spend some time between episodes thinking about the show instead of watching it all in one day and then ... well, on to the next one, I guess.
Some shows aren't really worthy of that kind of thinking, admittedly. But often they're not really worth watching, either.
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And Amazon just announced that Prime subscribers are going to be seeing ads unless they pay more per month.
Don't know if they're doing that for paid content or monthly subscribers to Prime Video. But it's kind of a shitty thing to do.
Re:Better nickel and diming (Score:5, Informative)
I just want to go to the web and type in the name of a movie or show and see what platform it is even on - because nobody remembers.
I use https://www.justwatch.com/ [justwatch.com] - works fine.Not sure if it has all the possible services though.
How to use JustWatch (Score:2)
- no search option (that I can find, anyway)
It's the search box at the top. Type "frasier", then click Kelsey Grammer's smiling face.
- I guess it finds content on 7 streaming providers? but then... I would still need to subscribe to each of these in order to "justwatch", wouldn't I? what's the benefit here?
The benefit is you see which service has the content you want to watch. It helpfully shows you where it's available for pay, for free, or for free with ads. It provides direct links to the content for each option.
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You could do that if the site was working. It currently works fine on mobile, but on desktop, it's super broken. The buttons don't do anything, if you hotlink to a country page there's no search box, and only the first five posters load on any given page.
It's not a good first impression for anybody who might try to check it out.
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It's broken on desktop when not logged in, but if take a minute to setup a free account suddenly it all starts working properly once it sees there's an account logged in. Yeah it's kinda shitty that you can't really use the site on desktop without an account anymore, I have to wonder how many people they've lost because their first and only experience of the site was that mess and so just didn't know there's an actually functional version hidden away behind a login.
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No search bar at the top for me. Maybe the French version is just that broken? I can't find any option to switch the randomly selected language, either.
It's a marginally useful idea, I guess, but anyway, whatever streaming service I might be able to find has about a 50/50 change of actually working here in Luxembourg. I'll just stick with the free and simple option.
Re:Better nickel and diming (Score:5, Informative)
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Apple has a universal search system. The problem is not everyone plays ball (eg it searches Apple and Amazon and then kinda stops.)
I think what's going to happen is we're going to see the entertainment companies whine and complain about piracy again, when it's again a thing they've done to themselves.
- Remove geographical restrictions
- Get your content on all platforms (Even if you want an exclusivity window, that should be days, not years)
- Simultaneously broadcast it in all regions in all languages. (Reso
The House at Pooh Corner; Peter Pan (Score:5, Interesting)
- Remove geographical restrictions
I don't see how that'll work for a couple reasons.
One is censorship. Several countries, such as countries in the Middle East and the People's Republic of China, are known for completely banning works that offend their leaders' religious or political sensibilities. China is the kind of country that would ban The House at Pooh Corner over visual comparisons of its characters to Chairman Xi and other officials. Other countries, such as Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, require that a home video work be separately age-rated for that specific country before distribution to the public, and the distributor of a smaller-budget work is less likely to have the money to cover age rating in before work has amassed viewership in its country of origin.
Another is that different countries still have different copyright terms. An adaptation of a work in the public domain may be streamed only in those countries where the underlying work has entered the public domain. It may not be streamed in those countries where copyright in the underlying work has not yet expired. For example, A. A. Milne's text and E. H. Shepard's illustrations in the 1928 book The House at Pooh Corner entered the public domain in the United States a week ago, and the illustrations are still copyrighted in countries that apply a life plus 70 year term to older works. Streaming an adaptation of the book would infringe copyright in those countries. It gets worse: though J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan has entered the public domain in almost all countries as of a week ago, the copyright law of Britain provides for a perpetual royalty payable to GOSH, a charity affiliated with an NHS hospital.
- Get your content on all platforms
That depends on whether a particular is willing to offer a particular work, or works from a particular distributor. How does an independent film producer go about getting their film picked up for distribution on the major platforms?
- Simultaneously broadcast it in all regions in all languages. (Resort to AI translation if needed.)
With the risk that the translation infringes copyright in every work on which the translation's model was trained, and outspoken opponents of generative AI pull their movies from your platform.
- 4K everywhere at the same time.
Provided that the movie was even produced in 4K.
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I just want to go to the web and type in the name of a movie or show and see what platform it is even on - because nobody remembers.
There are web pages that do this. I haven't used one in a while, but from what I remember the last one I used even included regional limitations per platform the title was available on.
I use Plex as a media center, and it has a "watch from these locations" section and includes the ability for me to define which services I actually subscribe to. It has been accurate the few times I've tested it.
I reached a point a long time ago when I just gave up. Not only is content now spread across so many services, but
Re:Better nickel and diming (Score:5, Informative)
Besides the Roku Search function, I've had luck using IMDB's Streaming tab.
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And why is Roku the only one implementing a Universal Search algorithm? Can't the platforms get together and do this outside of a single vendor's device?
Because you haven't looked? This is also a feature of Plex. When I fire up the Plex app on the TV the search works for all shows I have on my NAS + all my subscribed streaming services.
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And why is Roku the only one implementing a Universal Search algorithm? Can't the platforms get together and do this outside of a single vendor's device? I just want to go to the web and type in the name of a movie or show and see what platform it is even on - because nobody remembers.
The only problem is that it doesn't include Netflix in the search results, due to some spat they had a few years ago
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It definitely does. You're thinking of Netflix on Apple TV.
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you can. its called Google.
You're kidding, right? Google is so fucking useless at search that I never bother even using it anymore.
Re: Better nickel and diming (Score:2)
Re: Better nickel and diming (Score:2)
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I was willing to pay a couple bucks to borrow a VHS tape. Streaming rentals aren't any more onerous. Generally more convenient than piracy.
why is the Peacock exclusive NFL games not on sate (Score:2)
why is the Peacock exclusive NFL games not on satellite tv for commercial locations? like how they are for all of the other streaming only sports games?
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This is why I'm probably done with sports. College football is the worst at it too. It's a shame, but I guess they don't want a 40 year old man watching sports anymore. It's for the kids with all their fancy streaming services.
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College football stands on it's own as far as media fuckery goes, because the NCAA and their conferences are completely captured by ESPN / Disney and Fox Sports. And both The Mouse and Fox aren't afraid to flex their muscles - that is ultimately why the Pac-12 will not really exist any more in 5 months.
The writing is on the wall for any university that want's to continue getting millions per year for their athletic department budgets: don't buck the media networks, or they'll tear your conference apart and
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how did Joe Hand Promotions & EverPass not get (Score:2)
how did Joe Hand Promotions & EverPass not get directv setup to be able show the games commercial establishments??
why are commercial establishments forced to buy upshow + peacock just to show 1-2 NFL games?
I think that some commercial establishments are going to just buy an home account for that one or 2 games and cheat the system?
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Same thing for the Apple TV MLB games. Watched it at a buddy's house. Aside from the whole "Apple TV" thing, they had substandard announcers and camera work.
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But for a single game? How NBC got them to agree to this is beyond me...
With the NFL, money talks. If you wanted to have an exclusive private screening of a game, they'd do it if you paid them enough for the broadcast rights.
Oo-aarrr! Jim lad! (Score:2)
I'm not saying that I pirate content (wink!), but the whole raft of services available at huge extra cost just isn't worth the time digging through to find what's wanted, let alone the cost.
Instead (anecdotally, of course) I understand that it is actually faster to head over to one of the torrent aggregators, pop in a quick search and then wait for the required content to download.
Then a copy is available to be rewatched at any time.
Gouge me and I'll gouge you right back! And then I'll help all my friends
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The foolproof method is just get a vpn, a few bucks a month, and use said vpn when you are torrenting.
But this is still somewhat of a hassle. Its not a big hassle when getting movies but it can be quite tiresome for television / episodics.
So I found fmoviesz. I now use it almost exclusively, but when I like a movie I hit the torrent sites to get a high quality copy for the archive of good stuff.
Why can I not get original english? (Score:5, Interesting)
I tried to get "The Orville" Season 3 in English legally. Not possible. The only version I can get is German dubbed and that is just not acceptable. And do not tell me I am mistaken. I paid money, subscribed, talked to support. There is no offer for my location besides German dubbed from any of the sites offering it. Needless to say I am now not subscribed again to any of these services again.
So, yes, the greedy assholes do not manage to get reasonable offers together. But, worse, for some things they do not manage to get offers together at all. IMO, they should lose copyright in that situation for any geolocation where they do not offer at all.
Re: Why can I not get original english? (Score:2)
Re:Why can I not get original english? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup,
same is in Scandinavia.
I loved the U.S. version of Shameless, but right in the season 4 - every other season came in the U.K version (which I thought had inferior actors with an accent I could barely understand), that made me so mad I quit Netflix for good.
And if you VPN'ed to U.S. locations, you could get full seasons of Mythbusters, but only a couple of really old seasons if you went back to your original country area.
All of this "nickel and diming" us users, is only gonna lead one way - directly down.
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The only version I can get is German dubbed and that is just not acceptable.
There is a joke in there somewhere . . . :P
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One of the great things about PCs with DVD players (Score:2)
Unlike DVD players designed for TVs, DVD players for PCs were typically "region-free" out of the box, at least in some countries. They let you switch regions a handful of times before "locking in," at which point you had to buy a new DVD player if you wanted to switch regions again.
If you had a collection of international DVDs, you might need a different DVD player for every region, but at least you could play them.
Next escalation (Score:3, Insightful)
I suppose the next thing will be to remove physical media and just go with streaming-only to better protect the DRM keys.
Honestly though, it's still a lot better today than it was at any point in the past. We are currently free to easily subscribe and cancel at will so we can pay for as much or as little as we want.
I fully expect that to change at some point though. It is already happening in some instances if you aren't careful how you subscribe to a service. For example, I have subscribed to services via Amazon in the past and found it extremely difficult to find out where to unsubscribe in their mess of a user interface.
Anecdotally speaking... (Score:2)
Having tried many of the products off the shelf. All I can say is, "Huh, how about that?"
Even the base execution is garbage (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Even the base execution is garbage (Score:5, Informative)
When was the last time someone actually opened the Amazon Prime app? It's unusable. Cluttered beyond belief, with ads and basically more subtle versions of ads. I have a hard time understanding the driving factors behind making the landing page (and all aspects of the UI) so terrible, considering I'm already paying for the service! What's with the clutter? Trying to further improve engagement? On top of that, I may know someone who pirates all their Amazon Prime content despite paying for it, because the Prime Video app (both on Android and on Roku) is really that terrible, and not just in terms of navigation, but playback as well. Don't even bother trying to open it on a Fire TV of all things - it's somehow even worse.
This, this, 100% this.
I'm paying for Amazon Prime. And yet, it's less useable and more ad-ridden than any dubious para-legal file-sharing site. What a pile of horse manure!
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Same here - I have AP for shipping/returns. Stopped using it for Video and Music all together.
one bill / one device per tv / one set of rules is (Score:2)
one bill / one device per tv / one set of rules for stuff like multi device / multi steaming is nice to have. Vs having to deal with 3-5 differnt ones.
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This is called cable television. Remember that?
Providers are getting too greedy. Which is why I can't get ABC on my cable anymore. I guess you add up all the streaming service fees and you get what cable service will cost in the future... *sigh*
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Because negotiations for broadcast rights are tied to their money cow ESPN.
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Nevermind that, the picture quality is vastly superior on an antenna connection vs. recompressed on cable. Spectrum is the worst - even their streaming TV option looks like terrible 80s analog cable.
Never an option. (Score:2)
Streaming was never an option for me because they can decide at any time to prevent me from watching my favorite movie or show.
It's like having all your personal data in the cloud without a physical backup under your own control.
The only way to make sure I can enjoy the childhood memories of shows that I watched, movies I watched, is to download them. This is no longer possible with most computer games, due to their dependency on locked-down proprietary servers. Heck, I wouldn't even trust a physical play
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Re:Never an option. (Score:5, Interesting)
'The right content' is the problem phrase. I am not attacking you in anyway don't read it that way.
There is a lot of stuff like "Friends" I watched back when TV was something you got with an antenna or maybe via pay-cable. In anycase you had something between 3 and perhaps 25 channels that were not shopping/cspan-and-similar-things-for-state-local/weather/public-access/etc. You either watched what was on or took special effort to plan and record things.
"The right content" was what was airing, or you could get in the car and drive to the video store and still face a relatively limited array of stuff on the shelves.
The thing is i probably would not watch "Friends" today. There is something more target to my current taste and mood, that *can* be had. The time is more valuable than dollars, I'd rather spend my TV time on something else. This is the real heart of the problem. The issue is SUPPLY SIDE, we are over supplied with film/television entertainment product. The industry is spending to much to make content that not enough people actually watch, because they have to many choices, the only way they can make the dollars and cents work is by bundling and charging you for things you don't watch effectively.
This was already true in the cable-tv era, which is why you had those packages in the first place, so your love of sci-fi could subsidize the underwater basket weaving channel. What the industry needs to do if they want to make the share holders happy is actually skinny-down. Rather than trying to increase revenue with different pricing games and splitting up streaming services, etc, they just get better about the analysis as far as what is actually 'selling' and stop making so many other things, thereby reducing costs. What entertainment needs is mass layoffs!
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Streaming chokes when trying to rewind.
The only technological solution is to have a local copy.
Intent of Copyright (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's not the entire intent of copyright. Google (for example) don't make all their software available to others, but copyright in the source code exists and provides (some) legal protection. That's part of the "intent" of copyright - to prevent others using your stuff without your permission...
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For a limited time. you ignore the fact that part of copyright is turning your work over to the public domain after that time has expired.
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If content is not available at all, then it should not have copyright protection.
For a long time, this is how it worked in the Netherlands. It was technically illegal to pirate content that wasn't available otherwise, but the publicly communicated government policy was to not prosecute such cases. Sadly they were (more or less forcibly) brought in line with international treaties like ACTA.
Re:Intent of Copyright (Score:5, Informative)
No. The ENTIRE purpose of copyright (as permitted by the Constitution is:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
That is all.
Yeah right (Score:2)
The 10th amendment is equally explicit - all powers not given to the Feds are reserved downwards. It has never been successfully used to stop another Federal encroachment into the people's rights.
The fun bit is to consider whether pornography is 'useful arts'.
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And the entire reason for that is to promote more works. Protecting the author from his works being used in ways he doesn't want is a side effect, not a purpose.
Since NOT making a work available retards the progress of science and useful arts, copyright should cease once that happens. There's no need for the author and/or publisher to make sure it's in print forever, they can feel free to allow the copyright to lapse at any point where they decide it makes financial sense to do so.
As a side note, since copy
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The point of the OP is the work must be available FOREVER to him in the medium he wants or the creator should lose their rights.
So? Eventually the rights expire anyway and it becomes public domain, so available to OP. Or under the proposal, the author and publisher refuse to sell a copy so they lose their rights (on the grounds that they are retarding progress in science and the useful arts) and so available to OP. Format is a bit fuzzier issue, but even the over-reaching DMCA acknowledges inter-operability as a valid concern.
Yes, there are books out there that are out of print. No shit Sherlock! They should lapse into the public do
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That is shortsighted as I can assure you that many, many books are out of print because printing books is not a zero effort endeavor. By your logic, every author and publisher must make sure that their books are printed forever. Talk about killing trees for no reason.
The irony of this statement, combined with your username is just too much to not comment on.
Have you heard of PDF and highly-available storage? Oh look, now it's preserved forever without a single tree being killed.
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Is PDF around now?
When something is released to public domain, can it then be published and shared in any format possible?
Does PDF's existence now mean that making things public domain doesn't mean killing trees to do so?
Does a 'yes' answer to these questions make your observation about killing trees in the 21st century ridiculous? Also a yes.
History is cyclical (Score:5, Insightful)
As Gabe Newell said about piracy a decade ago: "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."
Re:History is cyclical (Score:5, Interesting)
This is certainly true. It goes beyond that as well.
Very occasionally I end up watching a DVD in someone else's house (increasingly rarely). This is not something I've done for myself since, well, ever. MPlayer 4 lyfe. Oh my fucking god the shit people have to put up with to watch something they didn't pirate. Between fucking with unlock codes to watch something they brought on holiday, unskippable shit berating you for pirating (ironic really), ads and just so much bullshit.
And then there's the streaming services. Many of them have adopted the MPlayer conventions of arrow keys to skip forwards/back by 10 seconds (effing finally), but not all. Some of them don't allow easy skipping. Because, presumably, fuck you that's why. And then there's the random browser based jankyness where sometimes the OSD won't vanish.
I gave up on NowTV after Game of Thrones, and that was a piece of shit. Sit down to watch some TV and find that their bullshit program needs a 1000GB mandatory upgrade right the fuck now. I definitely want to randomly have to spend half an hour watching a progress bar instead of some TV.
None of those things are problems with pirated stuff.
So, not only does piracy for TV offer a better service, it also offers a better product in many cases.
And then of course there's the press a million buttons to unsubscribe. Lol you missed one! That's why you just paid for 3 months more when you thought you'd quit! Lololol.
For music now, who would pirate that? Go to Amazon, pick an MP3, download it and now you have a file. Just no bullshit. You can stick it anywhere. No apps, no janky players, no fuckery.
Re:History is cyclical (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup. I've been, for years, pointing out that music piracy is all-but-dead; killed not by the RIAA/Metallica, but by Apple Music and Spotify. They've just made finding and listening to pretty much any music I want so fast and painless that it's been so long since I've "pirated" music that I'm not even sure where and how music piracy is done these days... I guess Limewire is probably still a thing?
And can you imaging the clusterfuck we'd have if every music label there is tried to roll their own streaming service where their content was available only on their service so you had to subscribe to a dozen of them? They'd still be playing whack-a-mole with Napster clones if they were (or actually, had stayed) that stupid.
Even back when it was just Hulu popping up out of nowhere with exclusive deals taking content off Netflix; I was like: "This is stupid. If something's been removed from Netflix, people aren't going to scour a half-dozen others to hunt down their shows. They're just going to pop over to The Pirate Bay." Looks like I was right, but just off by a few years. Hell, I've "pirated" movies that I actually own on DVD or Blu-Ray before because I'd not ripped that one to my media server for some reason (Probably because that studio did not honor their digital download code. Those should not be allowed to expire, especially when they're advertised on the box as a feature included in the purchase price.), and TPB was faster and more convenient than going down to the basement and rummaging through boxes to find the disc!
The MPAA, and its television equivalent, need to stop being so stuck on stupid and learn the lesson that the RIAA finally did. Just put everything back on Netflix. And give Netflix competition by putting it all on AppleTV as well. And that will be that. Movie piracy will become as vanishingly rare as music piracy has. The Pirate Bay will join Napster, Kazaa, AudioGalaxy, Morpheus, Megaupload, and Suprnova on that Wikipedia page of defunct sharing sites and services. And they won't even need to pay their lawyers to make it happen.
You cannot truly own DRM content (Score:2)
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Seen this before... we know what comes next... (Score:2)
Every time this cycle goes around, where decisions made by businesses make stuff not easily affordable, and the economy is bad, the first thing that happens is that the companies run to Congress, demand more laws be passed to curb piracy which are obviously unconstitional. After that, then the lawsuits against individuals begin starting with john doe lawsuits, unmasking the user via IP, then suing that user for millions of dollars. Does that deter piracy? Nope. All it does is make a new generation of VP
The industry played the long game with DRM and won (Score:2)
Streaming was great when it was like a utility. (Score:2)
Meanwhile they've gone as far as monetizing individual scenes within episodes, and based on that calculation arbitrarily re-
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you seem to have forgotten: "Act now before it returns to the Disney vault "
This isnt new, it really isnt even more in your face. Its just more frequent.
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As bad as that was (and as blatantly as it defied the intent of copyright), at least if you did "act now", it remained available for you to play any time you wanted even after they puled it from the market.
Avast ye land lubbers! (Score:5, Funny)
No surprise... (Score:4, Informative)
Victim of Own Success (Score:5, Insightful)
The exclusivity silos are at least partially a problem relating to the success of streaming. In the early days of streaming (say 2000-2015ish), providers like Netflix could get streaming rights to major titles relatively cheaply. This is because streaming users made up a small part of the overall home viewing base and studios still depended on broadcast licensing and/or movie theater revenues to monetize their titles. Studios thought of the streaming licenses as just gravy on top of their normal revenue streams.
As streaming begin to become ever more dominant, the studios began to (correctly) see that it would become their dominant revenue stream, and started to sharply ratchet up licensing rights. Streaming providers like Netflix decided that they could not make a profit and pay what content producers were asking so instead bet heavily on producing their own content and filling the rest of the catalog with fewer A-list titles. That was the beginning of the silo problem. With Netflix unwilling to pay them enough to make up for declining broadcast/theater earnings, the studios had to start their own streaming services. If you have your own service, you have to convince people to sign up. The best way to do that is to offer content people want that nobody else has, which leads to today's situation of silos.
Things get made worse with international licensing deals that may cause different rights in different countries and certain shows to be shown for one season and then abruptly cut off in another, or delayed for an extensive period of time. For example, Babylon Berlin (a German series) showed several seasons reliably on Netflix and built up a fanbase. The latest season came out over a year ago in Germany, but the licensing deal has meant that Netflix never got it. Since no U.S. streaming service offers it, the only way to see it for a U.S. fan is piracy. That's not a problem that's necessarily easy to solve even if the studio wants to.
Another thing that needs to change is U.S. tax laws that allow studios to write off the cost of a less successful production once it's taken off a streaming service. A bunch of movies/shows have been abruptly pulled simply because the content producer wants to take the tax loss. That means nobody gets to see the content. Sometimes these are actually very good movies/shows that just have a niche audience that the studio decided it wasn't worth catering to.
I'm back to static content (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm not sure why entertainment needs to be static. That's what this is, it's not a copy of John Wick, it's 2hours of entertainment. The second time watching / reading the same thing is no where near as entertaining as the first. I see little value in ownership of this as entertainment can be typically achieved by whatever is available at any given time.
TheOatmeal had it right (Score:5, Interesting)
Employee's priority to one job is to keep execs bu (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously, else they come up with these bright and genius ideas that will change the world and make huge amounts of money... in their minds.
Keep em busy! Throw problems at them. Tip: you need to sell it. Go to them with a problem you have no idea on how to solve. (You do probably, but keep your mouth shut). Just lead them into the solution with tactical question. They will feel good. Probably take charge of solving it. Keep their pipeline full. They really are idiots*
*A lot of them, percentages may vary in different regions.
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What do you do for CEOs of large companies? The only problem they have is "how do I make my stock go up", which can be broken down into "how do I increase revenue" and "how do I reduce costs". When they think of "increase revenue" they think "oh shit let's retake the content I licensed to Netflix and cut down the middleman!" without realizing the long-term impact, or the difficulty of doing so. When they think of "reduce costs", it just leads
Pirate until fair copyright privilege (Score:2)
Until copyright is fair, SURGE ON!
Here's the thing about "Must Watch!" content (Score:2)
There is so much MWC that I haven't seen that it isn't funny. I didn't see Forrest Gump back in the day. I tried watching the (now) first reboot of Battlestar Galactica, but missed a couple of episodes and couldn't make sense of it - didn't have a Tivo at the time. And you know what? I'm still alive. Series finale of Friends? Missed it. Then again, I never saw a single episode of it. Frasier? Ditto. I watch what I want to watch, and if you increase the friction of wha
And this time, content could suffer as a result... (Score:2)
If piracy gets too far out of hand then we approach a tipping point where its no longer viable to produce content.
Whilst this was problematic way before streaming, we're now in a different space.
It has become vanishingly easy to pirate direct from streaming services.
Given that many movies release to streaming very shortly after theatres, it's going to become a race to the bottom for streaming services.
They will be just as blind as they've always been, desperately trying to keep profit by wringing every last
All Know System is Broken, but Fear of Being Out (Score:3)
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Consumer culture sucks. People believe they have a RIGHT to watch whatever movie they wish whenever they wish to watch .. or hear. That's pervo-class arrogance from entitled Pussyville pouterz . Lots of other stuff than priced-media is available. Go for a walk in the woods or park. Sketch a forest pond. Fish a river. Chat-up a gal at the local beanery or tavern. Take in live music ... Paganini and Molly Tuttle are worth your time, but you can think of one-or-two others ....
ChatGPT meets Anthony Bourdain...
21 to enter (Score:2)
Chat-up a gal at the local beanery or tavern.
Mothers Against Drunk Driving killed that in my country by not only lobbying for raising the drinking age to 21 but also lobbying for changing regulations from 21 to drink to 21 to even enter the establishment.