piracy is legit the one example where the free market truly balances itself out.
However, since it is technically illegal, this means we should legalize revenue losing practices against large corporations similar to piracy, such that we can simply fix capitalism once and for all.
Anon got it backwards, networks noticed how profitable Netflix was and bumped the price for Netflix to stream their stuff. Netflix responded by producing their own content rather than leasing others’ at exorbitant rates. Then Netflix later got greedy and bumped their prices, lowered their quality, and cancelled all of their good shows.
I think it's a bit of both. Netflix knew that companies choosing to pull their content would be a threat, so they prematurely started producing content (famously starting with House of Cards and Orange is the New Black). Whether because they saw this as a threat or because of the perceived greater profitability of their own platforms (probably a bit of both), other studios started pulling their content from Netflix and setting up their own streaming sites.
And naturally, other companies pulling their content accelerated Netflix's desire to produce their own content to ensure they weren't left in the lurch.
Yall are overcomplicating things. Let me simplify.
Capitalist corporations + infinite greed = cannibalism
It's remarkable how people can see right past what was actually happening and only see what they want to see. Netflix was never trying to be the good guy. Netflix didn't offer low prices out of the goodness of it's hearts. It doesn't have a heart, it has a ledger. The reason why Netflix offered a lot of content for a low price is because the company was trying to disrupt traditional cable. It was always the plan to increase prices, Netflix didn't become greedy, it always was. It's just that for a time the companies greed aligned with the publics greed. Once that relationship was no longer beneficial to Netflix it raised the prices, that was the plan all along.
Yes, Netflix famously said they need to be HBO before HBO could become Netflix.
It doesn't really matter, though. The only cause of companies pulling their content is Netflix's success. There was no way Netflix could have prevented it.
Yeah I consulted for the cable industry around the time that everyone was just starting to try to build their own services to compete with Netflix. It wasn't a secret that production companies would be pulling their content. There were licensing agreements signed that had expiration dates.
So it was more like a race on both ends. Production companies were like "we get exclusive streaming rights to our movies back in X months, so we need to have our own platform up and running." And Netflix was like "we lose streaming rights to these movies in X months, we need to make some content to replace it with."
Except people aren’t necessarily going back to piracy en masse
Torrent sites are dwindling, even the big ones have sad membership numbers compared to 10yrs ago
A large amount of internet users access the internet via devices that are openly hostile to or outright disallow anything that would enable piracy. The devices are then connected to an internet that is further hostile and aims to steer you away from anything deemed unsavory
Phones and tablets are cumbersome and unintuitive to navigate. In the case of apple torrent clients are not allowed to be listed on their app store and sideloading is involved and kind of a pain. Chromebooks and windows 11 are better obviously but less utilized then you’d think
But that leads to the second point, which is kind of angry old man yells at cloud, but people are just less tech inclined now. It makes sense because modern tech is designed to oppress the user whereas tech in the late 90s and early 2000s was more to empower them. They don’t bother to figure out how to install applications, use the file explorer, change settings, etc. the very basic steps needed to pirate shit (you obviously don’t need to be a super hacker). They don’t need to. The command prompt or a terminal is something that makes them think you’re hacking shit
They download applications like steam and then their browser auto opens the installer, then steam handles installing games and mods from that point on. They are safeguarded against having to deal with the icky filesystem and their hand is held every step of the way. Or they just download stuff from the official MS app store and even more hand holding. It’s okay because they’re only gonna install 5 streaming apps anyway and then use the browser to visit the 6 approved websites that google or bing search sends you to for basically any query.
And that’s only if they actually have a proper computer. If they have a tablet or phone they either are pushed extremely heavily towards the above scenario, or in the case of apple they simply have no other option
10 years from now the internet will just be 2-3 social media sites, a few shopping conglomerates, wikis, and streaming sites. The devices used to access will no longer let you access the filesystem directly, apps will be unable to be installed if they aren’t code signed by apple or google or ms or whoever, sealed in epoxy, and draconian drm everywhere. 40 years from now your grandchildren will think you’re weird for complaining about how you used to have autonomy and authority over your devices once you owned them and they’ll remind you it’s time to pay another $400 bezobucks to rent the google chrome ar internet hub for another month because you’re not allowed to own it and it’s a federal crime to take it apart
Direct download piracy and streaming is surprisingly popular.
With a bit of effort you can stream any movie directly to your TV for a few moneys a month (or free, but paying for the essential bits removes the jankiness)
Basically you select the movie, a system finds the torrent or DDL, a service downloads it (or has it cached) and you stream it to your device.
With a bit of effort you can stream any movie directly to your TV for a few moneys a month (or free, but paying for the essential bits removes the jankiness)
Something I learned back in the day: "Never pay for warez". Pirate all you want, the moment you are paying, pay the creator of the product you're interested in, not someone who pirated it and wants to profit from distributing it without a licence.
While I agree with the trend for the average person, I think in pure numbers there are always going to be more tech savvy people in the foreseeable future.
Sure, 80% of people online in the 2000s and 90s were all tech savvy hobbyists, but their numbers was low (let’s say a million).
Now only 0.5% might be tech savvy, but that is 0.5% of a billion people, which would be 5 mil compared to 800k above.
I obviously picked convenient numbers but the point still stands, there are lots of tech savvy places today and it’s growing, just not as fast as the non tech savvy crowd unfortunately.
I think the end is where some people are moving but I think its a bit too pessimistic. While kids are becoming more tech illiterate there is always gonna be a certain amount of people that know a bit more than the masses and they are not gonna let themselves be pushed around.
What are they going to do? Manufacture their own silicon? The ability to make a computing device of reasonable power is fairly prohibitive and as things move forward manufacturers seem intent on doing things that are more and more hostile to consumers. You say people won’t let themselves be pushed around and that sounds nice but people have consistently done exactly that to date.
Our power as individuals is minimal here; we can vote politically and financially. These companies do amazing financially so voting with our wallets doesn’t work. Voting politically also hasn’t done in terms of enacting regulation aside from some small wins in a few states with right to repair (and big losses in many more states as well as federally). And given the fact that those wins are small and fragmented with only a very small handful of states having any policy (like less than 10) it’s likely that big tech will push back hard rather than simply comply. And we are heading into political times where regulations will likely continue to erode.
So as things worsen the people who “know a bit more” can have the choice of using cutting edge hardware that is more locked down, or being a stallman type that uses relatively ancient hardware full of compromises because it is compatible with an ideology. That is just but it also means they will be constantly hampered and the problem will only be compounded as technology becomes more advanced, which is inherent and constantly occurring
This is also not just a generational thing to be clear. People my age, younger, and older, who were into this stuff have become tech illiterate as time progressed because they’ve allowed themselves to move away from their computers and go to their phones which have become a reddit/youtube/tiktok/pintrest/amazon/twitter/instagram/etc box. The etc is whatever skinner box game they’re playing at the moment, because most of them who played actual games don’t even bother to play games anymore. They’re so caught up in the cycle of “engagement” that they don’t care about much else. they come home and doom scroll then complain about how they feel aimless and anxious all the time and never get stuff done
You’re right that there exceptions, but they seem to be dwindling
Try the 70s.
That was when VHS and cassette tapes started to hit the market and there was no copy protection on those. Following that, people copied floppy disks enough that they had to make that "dont copy that floppy" jingle.
There was a brief period with the switch to digital and CDROMs where piracy stopped, but then CD burners hit the market and it started again.
It turns out in every era, copyright is a sham. Information in its natural state is free - our legal system tries to change that.
The laws around copyright are designed to prevent citizens from doing things.
The laws around human rights are designed to preventing the government from doing things.
The later expands your agency while the former restricts it.
Copyright is a sham is my next tattoo. Maybe with Mickey doing something lewd and that's the banner underneath.
Anon: 2007
The music industry ca. 1981:
Also the book piracy that existed in universities through photocopying and sharing pages.
I feel like people are ignoring that Netflix was bleeding money during their "golden age". They only switched to being profitable a couple years back. A lot of times what people describe as enshittification is just unprofitable companies having to come up with an actual business model as venture capital dries up.
Also, merry Christmas:)
You can also argue that silicon valley has that particular business model of purposely making a product look great and cheap until enough people sign up.
It's distinct from how most companies run in the red at their inception in that those traditional businesses would gladly be in the black but are waiting for economies of scale or building a reputation among consumers.
Netflix has a market cap of 300bn. Public markets picked up right where venture capital left off no bother. The problem I think was the competitive forces as much as enshitified business model, though perhaps one cannot exist without the other. Certainly without doing their own content they could easily have become ludicrously profitable as a redistributer only, though I'm not convinced it would have stopped everyone and their dog moving in on the space.
Facebook is really the cleaner example of enshitification. They could have happily printed modest money for ever as the preeminent social network, but they took the greedy approach and morphed into a cesspool.
Merry Christmas to you!
everyone is forced to pay for media
Anon never copy vhs, cassette tape, cd, and dvd. I lived in southeast asia and pirated cd/dvd is openly sold in night market and low foot traffic part of the mall throughout the late 90s till early 2010s, only occasionally they got raid. Before that we basically record show from cable and rental then copy for each others.
But yes, as GabeN proved again and again, piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. Almost.
Also too, using cassettes to max mix tapes from the radio
Even into the 90s, I remember making cassette tapes of the local college radio shows.
One of my earliest memories as a little kid was my father putting a tape recorder in front of a record player speaker, and telling us all to be quiet because he was recording it. (Later on we got the fancier stereo with direct audio hookups.)
Kinda inverts inverted the causality of Netflix starting their own production and other companies pulling their licences. Netflix started their own production to survive the licences getting pulled, which was inevitable as soon as Netflix looked profitable.
They didn't get greedy, they probably started out greedy, ran a good service to grab market share, then had to make moves to defend against the predictable greed of the incumbents.
It's greedy turtles all the way down
Netflix didn't get greedy (well not in that way). The movie companies wanted to make their own platform, which would have left Netflix with nothing. So they had to become their own production company. They said "we have to become a production company faster than production companies become streaming companies".
2007 ? Everybody around me was pirating every single piece of media in 2000 and we were late to the party
I really wish I was a consultant for these fucking jokers.
Back when Disney+ was just "Rumor has it Disney wants to launch their own Netflix-like streaming service.", I called this shit. I said "Well that's just going to cause this whole thing to fall apart, no one's going to juggle 50 different streaming services just to be able to find something to watch."
And I was fucking right.
The only ethical streaming service is Tubi as it doesn't charge relying on ads alone, and it's a neat little bonus that Tubi has actively aided in the restoration of lost media.
If it aint on Tubi, then I'm going to yo-ho-ho with a bottle of fuck you.
just going to cause this whole thing to fall apart
Disney Plus generated $8.4 billion revenue in 2023, an 13% increase year-on-year.
lol
Yes, but they also brought back piracy, eroded faith in the brand, and while Disney+ is making money.....
Disney's newer efforts are kinda showing it's not the powerhouse it used to be. With the only thing they really have going for them are the legacy media that they're holding hostage on a platform, they arbitrarily removes things from time to time for seemingly no reason (the Willow series for example, which makes very little sense since that was original to Disney+ to begin with and for some reason Buzz Lightyear of Star Command isn't on the platform despite all the other Toy Story media being present... and there are several episodes of The Simpsons that are just straight up memory-holed; most infamously the Michael Jackson episode)
If this trend continues, Disney will be left with people pirating the legacy media that people at home have shaky access to at best (Monthly fee for content that may be removed with no notice and for no reason), especially as prices soar and wages stay the same, and interest in newer project dwindling.
Or to be blunt, one of the most classic blunders: High short term profits at the cost of being unsustainable in the long term.
Sure it's easy to think of Disney as laughing its way to the bank, but.. think of it this way.
Disney's been king of the world, especially in animation (Which has been getting sidelined in favor of live-action. I guarantee if Mufasa was animated it'd be running neck and neck with Sonic 3 instead of lagging behind). They're a luxury limousine running fast on a road that has no other cars (because Disney bought those cars), and the tank's running out of gas. You won't know it's running on fumes until it comes to a complete stop, but at the speed it's going it will take awhile...
And the second it stops, a simple fuel service isn't going to get it running again. It will get running again, too many people need it to run. So they'll call a mechanic, and it will take to the streets once more.
Is Disney cooked? of course not, but they will see a return of their darkest days. A decade or two of the Disney brand no longer being that shining seal of quality people take it for.
I see it comparable to Nintendo's Wii-U days when the company was a joke with no 3rd Party support and consumers who weren't even sure what the Wii-U was even supposed to be. (Too many passed on it, believing it to be an overpriced gimmicky tablet add-on for the Wii... The launch title being NSMBU instead of something fans hadn't already seen before I think is a big part of the blame for that.)
Nintendo didn't wind up in bankruptcy, but they'd need to reinvent the wheel via the Switch, win back 3rd Party Support, and rekindle the faith of the fans, to get back to being a power house.
You pirate because prices are too high
I pirate because I have kleptomania
We are not the same
it's only theft if they lose it when you take it
People are willing to pay at least some amount if priced appropriately. Otherwise, we're going to take it for free. Remember, companies we're reporting record PROFITS during a pandemic when most people were struggling.
https://www.vendavo.com/all/willingness-to-pay/
https://fortune.com/2022/03/31/us-companies-record-profits-2021-price-hikes-inflation/
2007? I remember watching a DivX of The Matrix back in 99. Prior to that I remember watching south park episodes in the RealPlayer.
I watched the entirety of Blair witch project the week before it came out in a real player at 300 by 200 pixels. I kept rotating between watching it thumbnail sized and watching it regular player sized. Both were equally inferiorating
Blatantly wrong. Netflix started producing their own shows because studios suddenly realized they could make more money charging for their own back catalog rather than leasing it to Netflix.
Allowing production companies to be distribution companies / streamers is inherently problematic given that copyright is based around monopolies.
Even ignoring P2P predecessors to torrenting like Kazaa or Napster, there was still piracy early on. I guess it counts as piracy adjacent, but I got started buying bootleg anime boxsets off ebay, because the actual boxsets were like $200/season, and minimum wage was under $7/hour when I started, but I could get the same season on three DVDs from Hong Kong for $30. It wasn't too long after that, I found out about fansubs and started spending far too much time on IRC, downloading anime, manga and music off XDCC bots. I wasn't allowed to use bittorrent on the family machine, because "That's like Kazaa, we'll get sued into ruin," but those bots in fansub group channels were fine, especially since it wasn't immediately apparent looking at mIRC that I had one running too.
minimum wage was under $7/hour when I started
It’s currently at $7.25 so think about how much you could afford now!
All I'm going to say is every computer I had was equipped with 2 disk drives until 2010. Elder Millennials and Gen X know why.
I want to watch Dark Matter without a million popups, malware or shady "trust me bro" programs.
FMHY (Free Media Heck Yeah) has a pretty solid guide for beginners on how to find most forms of media safely.
Stream deez nuts. Glory to the pirates
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