Want to know what I used to pirate, but don’t anymore? Video games. Steam makes tons of money off of me and everybody else and has reasonable DRM with an easy to use store.
Piracy is a delivery problem. Make content easier to get for reasonable prices and you’ll make money. Don’t do that? OK. Piracy it is.
Worse, the harder they try to stop it, the shittier the experience gets for their paying customers, but not for the pirates really. At that point, why would anyone want to pay for a crappy experience being treated like a thief when you can save your money and actually be a “thief” (at least in their eyes) while being treated like a paying customer?
I agree, but most games also have a higher ratio of value to cost. If I buy a game for 50 bucks, I’ll play it for many hours, let’s say 50. So that will be 1 per hour, pretty good. If I buy a new movie, that isn’t available for subscription streaming, that ratio is easily double. If I have a subscription and need another now, that also lowers it’s value. It also comes with lower comfort and ease of consumption, as you mentioned.
Another great example is YouTube premium. I’ll gladly pay 5 or 7 bucks for adfree content, not 14 though. I don’t need YouTube music. So I block ads where I can and donate to creators, if I can afford it. They could have had my money, but they are, simply, greedy.
I also hate it, when deals are altered without my consent. It makes me feel like a sucker, and therefore makes it less likely for me to keep investing.
I agree with your analysis, and only differ in that I do pay for YouTube Premium because I get a TON of use out of YouTube music - you really can’t beat their library of obscure and live music!
Yup, if I used Youtube a lot, I’d pay. I don’t though. I follow a dozen or so channels, and I stream maybe an hour a day from Youtube. So I use an ad blocker and donate to various channels. Youtube is worth e maybe $5/month to me, and I’d rather just nor use it than pay more than that.
I used to pirate movies I owned just because of the annoying FBI warnings and ads at the start of dvds.
My story but with anime. Japan has some really annoying laws requiring their shows to be blurred and dimmed during fast-paced scenes and it absolutely butchers the height of good animations.
The Blu-ray releases don’t have this issue, but guess what releases aren’t available for purchase/streaming for English audiences. 🫠 I want to give them money so bad, but 🤷♀️
It’s an anti-seizure measure. Which makes sense for TV where kids might come across it by accident, but it doesn’t make sense for streaming services where we could easily opt in/out of those versions.
Edit: This is what it looks like, compared to Blu-ray. They dim the whole screen and blend multiple frames together, which makes it hard to decipher what’s going on and mutes the colors. (Another):
