It is simple really.
People stopped because the steamers made accessing media easier than piracy at a reasonable price.
Now that the reasonable price part is slipping away, people are re-assessing that decision.
One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting anti-piracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.
I reduced, but never really stopped, pirating visual media. Entirely because even when Netflix was the only streaming service, there were still tons of shows and movies that weren’t accessible digitally at all.
However I completely stopped pirating music over a decade ago, because everything I wanted was available on Spotify, and the service of discovery is well worth the price. As long as they don’t get greedy and the service cost only rises with inflation, they’ll have my approx $100 annually (2023 baseline) for the rest of my life.
Netflix, Disney, Paramount, etc can eat a bag of dicks though. They’ve each proven they’re nothing but greedy parasites, and the only way I’d stop pirating is with a single subscription that hosts everything for a reasonable price… There’s a higher probability that hell freezes over, so instead I’ll spend roughly $100 a month in computing hardware, internet services, and time, to pirate 90% of my content.
Cheers. That is the best spelling correction I have ever read.
I am leaving it as is.
It’s not just the reasonable price part. It’s the ever increasing fragmentation of the video streaming market. When it was mainly Netflix, and it had a great variety of content, it was easy. Now every major studio has its own streaming service, and it’s all about exclusivity. But you can only get real variety by subscribing to several streaming services.
More competition… =Prices increase.
This is not the outcome I was told would happen.
Wait, what else was I told that never came correct.?
Student loans Housing Pay raises Protect and serve Self driving cars Pot/Gateway Equal opportunity Meritocracy
… I’m beginning to think all of society, in it’s entirety, is just one big grift.
No matter what they say capitalists do not actually like, or benefit, from competition.
I mean, what is competition? The entire point of a competition is that someone wins, and someone loses. When the entire structure is a competition, then if enough time passes most participants will have lost, and only one will stand victorious. The concept of free market competition will always end in monopoly, and every anti-trust mechanism is just a way to slow this down, not an actual solution. Capitalism will never create a solution to this either, as monopoly is the logical goal of capitalism. When monopoly exists, the capitalists have the most power. Of course capitalism will benefit the capitalists. It would be weird if it didn’t.
It’s not competition if everyone has exclusivity contracts on all the content. Take Spotify vs Netflix for example. Spotify will have mostly the same base content as Apple Music, Deezer, what have you. With Netflix… You don’t get any Disney movies, no game of thrones, you have to buy all of the services to get access to even just the content you want.
I’ve never felt I was missing out on anything with Spotify, as I likely wouldn’t with YouTube music either. Maybe some have less but it’s at least a very comparable catalogue across the board.
Weird thing about music streaming in comparison to video streaming is that music streaming services are all third parties. There’s little to no exclusivity in that market because the streaming services all license from the same sources. The big music publishers haven’t gone and created their own streaming services, but are (more or less) happily working with Spotify, Apple Music etc.
That’s simply not happening in the video streaming market.
You’re forgetting the effect demand has on prices. Studios all pulled their content from Netflix and said “fuck you, pay us”. People paid, so here we are. Had people said “No, fuck you! Put the content back on Netflix” then we’d still have $15 for everything on one platform. There was enough demand for companies to sell their products. It’s not competition when each service has different offerings.
Is it really competition when for example Disney has a monopoly on Disney Streaming Content?
Yes there is competition for streaming but not for the specific content of the services. With music I can choose Spotify or Deezer or whatever, but for Disney content I can only use Disney+ or for Paramount Content only Paramount+, so they have a monopoly for their respective content if I want to stream it.
Just gonna re-post my own comment from another thread in this community, relating to a similar article, because it’s just as applicable here:
This is honestly hilarious to me. The streaming companies actually had it right to begin with. They delivered on-demand content at a much lower cost than DVD distribution, without having to negotiate with cable companies to deliver it. They had a working system that delivered value for money, and kept the profits in their own pockets.
Then they shit the bed. Classic case of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. Greedy dickheads.
I don’t think that’s what happened. Studios fought streaming tooth and nail. But they were willing to license their videos to Netflix because they were a DVD distributor. Then Netflix was really savvy and pioneered streaming, making a killing doing it. Those same anti-progress, greedy fuck studios who fought against streaming saw how much money Netflix was making with their content and spun up their own half-assed streaming services, then pulled their licensing from Netflix. Netflix didn’t kill itself, the same greedy people who tried to kill the vcr, fought streaming, and sued Napster users, killed it.
Nah - Netflix, and all the others, have absolutely shit the bed on this one.
I was happily paying for 5 or 6 streaming services a month. Then they got greedy, started price gouging, and reducing the quality and/or range of content. Netflix even wanted to charge me for password sharing, because my stepkids used our account at their dad’s house.
They all fucked themselves over.
I’m no economist, but it’s interesting how a free market and more competition doesn’t result in a better product for consumers. Just each company going “oh, the other guy raised their prices, let’s do the same or we’ll fall behind”
It’s crazy how consumers just keep eating the higher prices too, instead of rebelling by cutting their spending. I’ve been wondering if people are just charging everything and we’re going to hit a major recession when everyone runs out of credit. I sure hope not! I’ve already gone through too many “once in a lifetime” economic events.
The idea is supposed to be that these things wax and wane. And they mostly do.
We started stealing music with Napster -> the market eventually started offering affordable alternatives
We started stealing movies with The Pirate Bay -> studios finally came onboard with streaming
We stole games -> market reacted with serviced like Steam that make it too cheap and easy to bother pirating
And now that streaming greed seems to be biting them in the ass, we’re due for another market correction.
We’ll see, but I never stopped pirating. Only thing I pay for is Spotify because it’s too damned convenient to get the music I want, anywhere I want, for $10/mo. Spotify: Test me with higher prices or stop me from making local downloads and I’ll drop back to stealing that shit too.
some of the big studios are starting to not do discs releases here in Australia as well. If I want an archive copy of a movie (for the months I dont feel like shelling out for streaming access), I can’t even fall back to disc. The high seas is already the only place to get some content, when its not on disc and no one has purchased the digital rights
That is the bed they made and now the studios must lay in it.
I don’t care if they start distributing microSD cards, there MUST be a physical distribution format that is not linked to an online subscription.
I’ve always been surprised its remained optical media for so long. I’d have bought a USB drive with a season of television on it. No doubt they’d fuck it up with another DRM scheme.
I’m resigned to the fact that if there is no offline distribution in the not too distant future, I will still build a library of the media I want from other sources.
🏴☠️
Was 20 years between sails. 56kb dialup that could hardly get an album down in a couple of days to self hosting a server that I don’t even consume the content of.
Seed. That. Shit.
