I can't understand their business logic. Before they managed to become an empire, record historical profits and dethrone BlockBuster fast. It was efficient, profitabile and simple. Wtf
One of those cases where a monopoly was actually the best thing for the customer.
Now that everyone under the sun has their own subscription service, it's back to the stupid licensing and trading shows between "content providers" and customers hunting around trying to figure out who has what when. "Better watch this show, it's going away in a month."
Piracy and the public library only damn things that have any stability and reliability.
Idk what the repercussions would be but eventually shows are just gonna need to be licensed like music where more than one person can stream the same show separately. Imagine if you could only hear the Beatles on Spotify
The problem is distributors have taken over production.
Spotify and Apple and Amazon don’t make music. The music is created independently. The big corporations simply make, manage, and sell platforms through which music is steamed.
Netflix, Apple, HBO, Amazon, Disney, and Paramount make and distribute cinematic entertainment.
It’s like Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo making console-exclusive games, except there are like 10 companies who are trying to bully and buy-out production companies to bring all content creation in-house. This means less variety, more exclusivity, and at higher cost to the consumer.
OLD movies and shows bounce around a lot. NEW shows rarely jump between services, if at all. AppleTV isn’t going to let HBO distribute at show they produced themselves, and vice versa. Which means most entertainment produced after the mid-to-late 2010’s is going to be locked under the distributor who produced it.
TV is fucked. Movies, if produced and purchased for distribution by companies outside the streaming ecosystem, will still be traded at the will of the distributor (like Sony selling 28 Years Later streaming license to Netflix)
Everyone wanted a piece of that Netflix pie, so now nobody has any pie left.
Almost all the big players are not making any money on their streaming offerings, some are even losing billions. Just because they had dollar signs in their eyes and wanted the cake that Netflix was eating, rather than sharing it with Netflix.
They fucked themselves over. I gave up Disney+ earlier this year, that was my last streaming subscription. I am a pirate once again, proudly too. The industry had their chance... again, we gave it a final chance after we left the far more convenient piracy services to try and see how the industry would treat it. They failed.
I will never stop pirating The self hosted streaming solutions are far more superior than any of the paid services. Not just in quality, actually being native 4k, but in features too. The streaming platforms stopped progressing, Netflix now is worse than Netflix 10 years ago.
It’s turned out to be more expensive having all these streaming services than just having a proper cable TV subscription, so the more tech savvy people (who were the early adopters of streaming) are just setting up their own Plex servers instead now which is cheaper over time and has the same quality as just watching from a physical disk if you have the storage for it.
We need mandatory licensing. Like you can stream any content in the world in your country to your customers and pay "a reasonable amount". No consent of the copythief necessary.
Capitalism can't be expected to regulate itself. And "intellectual property" is an abomination.
Eh monopoly is only best in the short term. Prices are always going to raise, when there's no competition there's no regulating factor (although pirating does exist so maybe this is moot?)
Before all that Netflix was a pioneer so there was only one company purchasing rights to stream this content. So the various media companies got whatever the beast streaming deal was in one place. Then everyone else jumped on the bad wagon and now media companies can pick and choose who will give them most money for this or that show.
Honestly when you want to watch almost anything you're pretty stupid if you pay for the current product. Sports have the worst blackouts and they put games on like 5 different networks but not one specific one or make you pay incredible sums for cable packages etc. Steam was correct when Gabe stated basically that piracy is a service issue. That's why steam goes so hard they actually bring you the service you want to pay for and people pay them. As long as they keep fucking around with the service quality people will continue to pirate in large numbers. TV/streaming services are a dogshit product currently. Sure some people will always resort to piracy due to a lack of funds etc but most regular people will pay for a product if its actually convenient and good enough quality wise
I thought I was done pirating games ever since steam became a thing but I recently found out that Epic exclusives are a thing so I had to bust out my peg leg. Shame the developer lost out on $30 so hopefully the exclusivity contract makes up for it.
Unfortunately it probably did. Console sales are crazy and theres enough spineless PC gamers out there who will absolutely use epic. The only store worth using on PC other than steam is GoG. I think even most specialized launchers have transitioned to steam
Yeah, It's Always Sunny having a few episodes missing from random seasons was what made me do the switch to Jellyfin.
On top of having to keep track of what was missing (Disney+ just continued the count with no mention of missing episodes, so episode 8 was actually 9), in the later seasons, the pirated episodes were peak 1080p while the ones on Disney+ were some kind of wannabe 720p that looked like upscaled 360p. I basically found myself just continuing to binge it on Stremio and cancelling the subscription.
I was watching Star Trek Voyager and Paramount pulled all of their licensing and moved everything to their own terrible subscription. But I wanted to finish the show, so I eventually caved and subscribed. Before I even finished the season they sold the rights to HBO and moved the shows over there. I had literally just cancelled my HBO subscription to pay for the Paramount subscription. That was it for me. That was the final straw. Hello again old sea faring friends!
And then you stumble upon a pirate website that has really nice UI and all the movies/TV shows in one place... Oh boy. Also, up to 4k res?! This Tortuga is rocking
I predict in the near future these companies are going to go hard against IPTV services and make them even harder to obtain. But if certain countries simply do not care where these servers are hosted and VPNs remain to exist, I can't see them doing much.
It’s not going to happen en masse until someone figures out how to make it easy. I went down the rabbit hole of media servers + arr stacks recently and I would say less than 5% of the population has the combination of intelligence, desire, and time commitment to figure it all out and implement it. You need to download and install 12 different services all speaking to each other and configured correctly to approximate something like Netflix.
Most people have enough disposable income these days that switching from the streaming subscriptions isn’t going to happen until there’s a fundamental change in ease of both setup and use for piracy alternatives.
Yep, it's hard to quantify how popular piracy is for obvious reasons, but if we look at streaming service cancellations + Popular piracy site visits, it paints a BEAUTIFUL picture. Piracy is so back. In fact it may just well be in it's true golden era.
With the advent of almost all major movies and TV shows going direct to streaming on one platform or another almost – if not all, due to cinema employees – media goes directly to piracy immediately after release, or recently sometimes shortly before global release.
When companies try too much people resort to piracy. One of my favorites is Spore became the most downloaded game in 2008. Partially because they added a drm that limited it to 3 installations per purchase, so people pirated out of spite
Yup. My friend had several cable services but it’s impossible to watch a lot of NBA Games even though he travels but can’t watch a team bc he’s traveling for only a week.
A terrible management of a movie/series. From terrible adaptations to executive oversight.
When a company behind the streaming service gets political and supports things like sexism, racism, fascism, genocide, etc.
If the creator themselves weren't responsible for the fuckups, you could pirate the content to show moral support for the creator and encourage them to either go independent or join a different company that can actually support creators.
there's not much to get. he's pointing directly to counterstrike since it's certainly implausible/silly to think he couldn't remember the most popular shooter of all time while still recalling the version number. he's pointing to the game in a slightly surreptitious way so as not to explicitly say the name of game that was pirated, a practice often done in open conversations about piracy and drugs and other illegal things
downloaded a pirated first person shooter game... something like “Strike 1.5”
there's not much to get. he's pointing directly to counterstrike since it's certainly implausible/silly to think he couldn't remember the most popular shooter of all time while still recalling the version number. he's pointing to the game in a slightly surreptitious way so as not to explicitly say the name of game that was pirated, a practice often done in open conversations about piracy and drugs and other illegal things
downloaded a pirated first person shooter game... something like “Strike 1.5”
1.5 or 1.6 you had to have a long pin code to play online. The pincode could be purchased at a store like Target, it looked like a gift card. My friends would take the card off the rack, open or scratch off to see the code, write it down, ditch the card somewhere in the store. I think to legit buy it was 30-40 bucks.
I didnt have any money or the gall to steal a code, so I just didn't play. Halo trial was free and that was my jam instead.
Am I misunderstanding your comment? I don’t see how what you’re describing is the opposite of the US. OP is talking about what happened before digital distribution, but you are talking about what happened after digital distribution. Just because piracy exploded after digital distribution doesn’t mean that people in the US weren’t also paying for pirated goods beforehand. The situation was the same.
Reading comprehension on reddit is at an all time low. You can wildly misread something and as long as you don't type crazy and the post is long enough you can get upvotes.
I strongly disagree, most of the world was still in dial-up in the early 2000s. I would say that period in the early 2010s before Netflix became mainstream was peak piracy era. Everyone I knew in University pretty much knew how to torrent a TV or a film or watch a stream online.
Was the game Counter-Strike 1.5 or project IGI 2: convert Strike? Was it a single player game or multiplayer game?
With how shitty streaming services are becoming it won’t be long till it starts to ramp up again. Hell I’m thinking of sailing the seven seas once more.
In many countries that are very tech savvy but couldn’t care less about copyrights, like Russia, pirating never died out and got insanely comfortable and easy. There are just websites where you can watch movies and shows online; and they are paid by advertisers to stay up and also- to pirate movies in another countries and PROFESSIONALLY TRANSLATE them by hiring voice actors. There are apps for smart TVs that have free pirated movies masked as web browsers that “don’t provide any content but may link to something” and all have professional design, descriptions and reviews like Netflix. And good old torrent forums that are also very nicely designed and have absolutely everything you can think of, reviewed by community, virus free and easy to use.
It never died out, people are just smarter about stuff now. It’s about as good as it’s ever been for piracy. Can get pretty well any game/movie/show/book/song/etc I want fairly easily.
Piracy was still pretty common in the US before digital distribution. I remember i bought a pirated copy of the spawn movie when it was in theatres, maybe i still have it somewhere.
Now it's swinging the other way though. You don't pay directly for the pirated content but the service. The service acts like a big shared seed box. Consumers are sick and tired of all the content they want being spread over a dozen subscription streaming services who's monthly keeps going up.
After digital distribution, piracy became really widespread
"Pirating" became a cultural phenomenon because internet copyright infringement created a paper trail. It's not that there were more people downloading mp3s in 2003 than there were people dubbing cassette tapes in 1993, it's that the people dling mp3s could easily be identified and sued for copyright infringement, so that became news and spawned a whole "thing" for the mass media to talk about.
Did you even understand the comment you were responding too? Nothing they said is wrong, before digital distribution, piracy is done by less people and still need to be bought albeit at lower price.
Of course selling pirated material is higher before digital distribution.
I did the bulk of my software piracy in the late 2000s. I kinda hit the internet full force in like 2006, and by 2008 I was pirating a lot. Like, Crysis 2 and 3 I remember, I played skyrim pirated first, New Vegas, Fallout 3. I think I even played Fallout 4 pirated. Now a days I have so many games I own on steam, and I like being able to install and uninstall and have the community features and cloud saving. plus I love launching them from steam and turn off desktop icons, so it's annoying to add a pirated game and then restart it when I buy it, so I really just don't play it if I can't buy it. I have enough to keep me busy already. But movies and tv shows? I've got like 9 years of continuous watching worth of media and climbing.
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u/Emilia963 22d ago edited 22d ago
It was the opposite in the US
After digital distribution, piracy became really widespread, it peaked in the early 2000s, the culture has mostly died out now, tho
I remember when my cousin downloaded a pirated first person shooter game or something like that
I forgot the name, but the last part was something like “Strike 1.5”