[HN Gopher] Piracy release group EVO 'blames' movie industry for...
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Piracy release group EVO 'blames' movie industry for its popularity
Author : dredmorbius
Score : 177 points
Date : 2021-11-26 15:30 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (torrentfreak.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (torrentfreak.com)
| Mindwipe wrote:
| The film industry solved unauthorised downloads? Hasn't Glyn
| Moody been claiming that it's still a huge issue due to DRM for a
| decade?
|
| I can't think why nobody takes him seriously.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Over here, contracts with telecom giants like Bell are keeping
| some media (e.g. HBO content) away from stand-alone streaming.
| They have their own pet streaming services that require a cable
| subscription. Possibly factoring among the reasons GoT and the
| like had been so rabidly pirated.
|
| When not everything is available, online rental is now a more
| viable option than it once was. I wonder why it's only the tech
| giants like MS who offer this. Why isn't Netflix also allowing
| digital rentals? I'd rather not pay MS, Apple or Google to see a
| movie over 50 years old.
|
| edit: according to this
| https://blog.playstation.com/2021/03/02/playstation-store-to...
| even Sony stopped (or will stop) offering digital tv/movie
| purchases and rentals owing to the popularity of streaming. From
| memory, these were expensive. I guess there's a costly overhead
| to the service.
| greenshackle2 wrote:
| You don't need cable (anymore?) to subscribe to Crave.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Seems that's right, however according to this -
| https://www.finder.com/ca/internet-tv/cravetv you need to pay
| $19.98/mo + tax for Crave + HBO. There is no stand-alone HBO
| package in Canada, because of the Bell contract. Admittedly
| it's not much cheaper in the U.S and also owned by a large
| conglomerate.
| greenshackle2 wrote:
| Yes, I'm subscribed and I don't have cable. They changed
| the packages recently. HBO is no longer optional. The basic
| package is now $20 and includes HBO. But they added a new
| cheaper "mobile" plan which is $10, still includes HBO, but
| you can only watch on one device at a time.
| raspyberr wrote:
| Piracy makes me feel like I'm living 50 years in the future. One
| where there's no such thing as artificial digital scarcity.
| Yesterday, my partner and I wanted to watch something. I started
| downloading it because I'm not going search on which streaming
| service this 3 year old show is on. As I was downloading it, she
| found it on netflix. I stopped my download and we watched it
| there. From my point of view, piracy will go down by 98% when all
| shows and films are accessible in one place. Until that happens,
| 50 years from now, I'll continue to pirate.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > From my point of view, piracy will go down by 98% when all
| shows and films are accessible in one place.
|
| That's generally amazon prime. You can rent/buy a pretty
| massive selection on it, and it certainly hits the 'more
| convenient than pirating' barrier most of the time.
| ygjb wrote:
| Now I know Amazon is more stable that most other streaming
| services, but so far, my Canadian experience has been to have
| digital purchases of movies I have made be shuffled from one
| service to another as they fold, or are acquired, with
| differences in quality, or "expirations", etc.
|
| Renting I don't mind, but as a consumer my preference is to
| _buy_ Blu-ray movies in the highest quality available, and
| then rip them. I am a huge screen buff, and have boxes of
| physical media (blu-ray, dvd, VHS, and even a couple of beta
| tapes in storage), but it 's endlessly frustrating that a
| large number of classic movies are only available in
| "remastered" editions, that destroy the fidelity and classic
| feel of the original movies by updating special effects, or
| committing the sins that George Lucas did of adding entirely
| new scenes to movies that undermine the overall quality of
| the movies ("Jabba, you're a wonderful human being."), let
| alone re-cutting the movies from full-screen to pan and scan.
| I recognize that the recuts have broader mass market appeal,
| but some of the history of how classic cinematic masterpieces
| were made, and how film making changed over time is lost to
| new audiences when those changes are made.
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| Well, with the exception of price point. Maybe it's because
| I've been spoiled by Steam, but $10-$15 to buy a movie that's
| 10+ years ago. I would've paid the same price if I bought it
| a month or two after release, or bought a ticket to see it in
| the theater.
|
| If they can ever match the $40-$60 to $5-$10 price decay by
| waiting a year, then I think a-la-carte could make more
| sense, but currently for the price of buying 1 HD movie on
| Amazon, I get one month of Netflix for a month.
|
| If I wanted to watch a new movie every week or so, a la carte
| is currently prohibitive.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| You should use the renting prices instead of the buying
| prices to compare against other subscription services.
| $2.99 to watch a movie in the evening is anything but
| prohibitive. Or buying TV seasons, which amounts to close
| enough to the same hourly cost in my experience.
|
| It's less than I remember rentals costing when physical
| rentals were a thing, and while it's certainly less cheap
| than a $10/mo subscription service, it seems like a stretch
| to call it prohibitive to most people. A season of a show
| plus a half dozen movies comes out to like $40/mo (ignoring
| all the 'free' stuff).
|
| $40/mo for a vast selection isn't fantastic, but in my
| eyes, it pokes holes in the pirate's "If it were just more
| convenient while affordable I'd pay, I swear."
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I dropped cable, which had everything 'in one place', because
| it forced me to take everything and pay for it. What you see as
| a search and access problem I see as a new choice I never had
| before.
|
| I use a Roku, it has a search feature that searches across a
| bunch of streaming services, I can see where is show is
| available, how much it might cost, or if a subscription is
| required. I'd argue that you have a search problem.
|
| The entertainment industry wants you to buy it all and pay an
| ever increasing price for it, while including as much
| advertising as possible. The all-in-one service you are looking
| for looks a lot like cable, where you get a giant bill and no
| choice to remove things you don't want to pay for.
|
| Given the way copyright works in the US, there is no 50 years
| in the future where things are freely available - future
| generations can still cash in on things copyrighted today.
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| Congress needs to be brutalized in elections until they fix
| copyright. It shouldn't last longer than the author's life.
| stemc43 wrote:
| such ideas are dead on arrival in US. you gotta have a
| revolution first before being able to override money
| interests like this.
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| While your not wrong, I think it's also because the
| uniparty had incentives to waste time on fake debates,
| like pretending be financially responsible when not in
| power.
|
| So much time and energy wasted on fake debates and
| scapegoating, rather than actually solving problems that
| most people would agree with the solution on.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Does anyone else remember when the Covenant add-on for Kodi was
| thriving? It was amazing. You could search for and watch pretty
| much any TV show or movie ever made with a variety of language
| and quality options and your choice of downloadable subtitles.
| It made the idea of downloading torrents seem quaint. I'd pay
| good money for that service, if only it existed legitimately.
| Sadly the entertainment industry eventually got pretty good at
| shutting the related infrastructure down.
|
| Gabe Newell nailed it when he said that piracy is a service
| problem.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I'm having similar perspectives around music.
|
| Spotify is arguably the most powerful music discovery platform
| on earth, but over time you will find your favorite songs
| arbitrarily disappearing from your playlists. If you stick with
| mainstream content, this is typically invisible. But, if you
| are on the edge following indie artists and experimental works,
| things are much more rough.
|
| For me, taking favorited content out of people's playlists is
| unforgivable. Even if there is an unlimited amount of other
| acceptable content to enjoy. The feeling of loss is severe for
| me.
|
| I've bought more physical CDs in the past 12 months than I ever
| have in my life. New content is still being stamped to plastic
| discs for those who are out of the loop. The new Dune
| soundtracks by Hans Zimmer (yes there are 2) being my most
| recent acquisitions.
| runarberg wrote:
| I feel like there is a difference though. You can still buy a
| lot of music from actual stores (including online stores like
| Bandcamp and Discogs). If you live in a medium to large city
| chances are there is a record store nearby where you can go
| to and buy a copy.
|
| Movies are not the same. Yes there is Amazon but the quality
| of the DVD copies you get from there are kind of crap (and I
| suspect a lot of them are actually pirated anyway).
|
| Buying music is a joy, buying movies is not.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| I haven't bought a lot of movies from Amazon recently but I
| used to and they just seemed like normal retail discs? A
| lot of record stores sell movies too.
| runarberg wrote:
| Movies at record stores are kind of a novelty. You can go
| there to browse, but chances are that you will not find
| the movie you were looking for. I've actually had better
| luck at thrift stores. That being said if they happen to
| carry a copy of a movie that you want to see and don't
| mind adding to your collection it is definitely a joy.
| But it is kind of a rare experience compared to music.
|
| DVDs at amazon range from fine to terrible. It is almost
| always better to just torrent the movie. Quite often the
| DVD has no extras, terrible subtitles, wrong aspect
| ratio, etc. I have quite a few DVDs which I'm never going
| to watch again, if I want to rewatch the movie I would
| rather torrent it, even though the DVD is right here.
| mh- wrote:
| Amazon commingling inventory will probably mean that
| quality varies quite a lot.
| xfer wrote:
| Yes, no longer renewing my subscription this year, google
| play music did similar things to me. I occasionally listen to
| music, and not fond of my playlist greyed out because of turf
| wars.
| arvigeus wrote:
| GPM was the moment for me when I finally realized I cannot
| count on Google services. Since then I migrated to Deezer -
| so far so good, but I would not be surprised if they also
| turn to bad. That's why my music collection is backed up in
| the cloud now. I am self hosting a media server, so I am
| all good.
| roland35 wrote:
| YouTube music was the worst with this too. Songs were
| constantly disappearing or changing
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Things have only gotten worse since the forced transition
| from Google Music to YouTube Music.
|
| How can such a significant product be so bad?
| mh- wrote:
| The answer lies in your question. This is not, in fact, a
| significant product _to Google_.
| chuckdotis wrote:
| This happened to me too. I'm not sure if you took advantage
| of uploading your own music library to GPM, but I had
| uploaded around ~2k songs near Google Play Music's
| inception. When I downloaded it about a year and a half
| ago, the track file names were not only often incorrect,
| but oftentimes they were censored or radio edit version of
| songs in the export when I knew for a fact the original
| songs I had uploaded were the original edits.
| chuckdotis wrote:
| A few years ago I used to be a Google Play Music subscriber
| (now YouTube music). I had uploaded my own music library
| under the impression I could redownload exactly what I had
| uploaded later if I wanted to (mind you some of it was
| pirated, though much of it I had ripped myself from CDs I
| owned). Well, the day came I wanted to my music back and GPM
| had not only completely messed up the filenames, they were
| also giving me censored or incomplete versions of songs in my
| export.
|
| These days I play all my music locally. I occasionally
| pirate, but I often just buy LOSSLESS version of albums
| directly on Bandcamp. I listen to a lot of electronic music
| (ex Carbon Based Lifeforms, Jon Hopkins) and Bandcamp has
| been indispensable. I've considered buying a physical CD and
| ripping it myself, but so far it hasn't come to that.
| adriand wrote:
| > Carbon Based Lifeforms
|
| Nice, I hadn't heard of these guys. Big Hopkins fan. What
| else would you recommend along these lines? A few for you
| to return the favour in advance:
|
| - Rival Consoles - Daniel Avery - Lorn (on the darker side)
| - Ital Tek
| bob1029 wrote:
| Sounds like I need to check out bandcamp. Downloading flac
| is a lot more convenient than shipping media and manually
| ripping each item.
|
| Edit: Just set up an account @ Bandcamp. This is looking
| pretty incredible. Seems like a perfect combination of
| direct payments to artists, discovery & ownership of
| purchased content. Looks like most digital downloads are
| very reasonably priced.
| Kbelicius wrote:
| Just make sure that you have a copy of everything that
| you buy on bandcamp somewhere other than bandcamp. Stuff
| gets removed from there too.
| eredengrin wrote:
| Qobuz is another service I've found useful, it has a lot
| of the more big name artists/recordings that might not be
| on bandcamp and you can download non-drm flac from it as
| well. The big downside is a lot of the downloads cost
| more than ripping an equivalent CD yourself, I can't
| figure out why that is but it's not always true so you
| just have to do an extra search first if you want to make
| sure they aren't ripping you off. But yes, bandcamp is
| also great, it's my preferred vendor when they have what
| I want.
| runarberg wrote:
| Bandcamp is amazing. You can often stream the music
| before you buy, so you don't risk buying stuff you don't
| like. Then you have the option of buying a physical copy
| or just digital. If you buy a physical copy you can still
| download the flac and start listening immediately while
| you wait for the record/CD/cassette to arrive.
|
| Bandcamp then goes beyond and publishes articles, blog
| posts and podcasts where you can discover new music. Even
| though this is technically advertised content, it feels
| more like an actual music article/radio show that you can
| enjoy regardless of if you intend to buy the featured
| music or not.
|
| I can't recommend Bandcamp enough.
| smcl wrote:
| Is there a place that lists what films or shows are on what
| streaming platform in a given country?
| JadeNB wrote:
| Others have mentioned justwatch.com, but reelgood.com also
| does it.
| notatoad wrote:
| justwatch.com
| [deleted]
| ClearAndPresent wrote:
| JustWatch.com will do this.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Will it reliably do this for markets other than the US
| though? Not long ago it definitely didn't. I'll give it
| another try but I'm not getting my hopes up.
| pronoiac wrote:
| I use trakt.tv; I think it had some coverage that justwatch
| lacked.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| It's built into Roku, although I'm not sure how well they do
| but outside the USA at this
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Similarly I still have subscriptions in netflix/prime/appletv
| but I can't remember the last time I opened the apps. I have
| set up all the shows I watch in sonarr and it automatically
| downloads them a few minutes after the show airing and then
| offloads them to Plex which is a universal interface.
|
| Bonus points for having an integration with trakt.tv to keep
| track of what you are watching and discord for notifications.
| judge2020 wrote:
| This is currently a problem all the streaming box developers
| are trying to solve. Each modern one has a sort of universal
| search that allows app providers to publish the list of titles
| they have available for streaming, and the system will surface
| those apps if a user goes to that search box to look for the
| title. We'll probably have an overview of how good it works in
| 5 years or so.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I don't know about other devices, but the PS4 has a unified
| "TV and Video" portal that I think tries to do something like
| this:
|
| https://www.playstation.com/en-ca/ps4/ps4-entertainment/
|
| Unfortunately, it's hobbled by the fact that the underlying
| apps are not reliable enough-- Netflix works great, Disney+
| is trash [1], Jellyfin has to be used through the browser so
| the interface is wretched. Not sure about Prime, Crave, and
| Hulu.
|
| [1]: https://screenrant.com/disney-plus-app-
| playstation-4-bufferi...
| aneutron wrote:
| From what I gather Google Chromecast w/ Google TV is a good
| performer in this regard. However, the issue remains that
| you'd have to pay almost 10EUR per platform, for a total of 3
| platforms, per month. That's simply not economivally viable.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| That's a heck of a lot less expensive than cable even
| without the premium channels.
| chollida1 wrote:
| Well another alternative is you pay say $5 per movie you
| watch or $2 per tv show episode rather than an all in
| price.
|
| Would that be an improvement?
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| Considering I can get AAA games for $10 after waiting a
| year or so, I'm not sure if $5 for a decade old movie
| really that worth it.
|
| A-la-carte needs to be substantially cheaper to
| realistically compete with buffet style streaming
| services.
| [deleted]
| dekoruotas wrote:
| I can't be the only one who just bought a 4K blu-ray
| player. The cost of a disc is cheaper than a monthly
| subscription and I can still trade them in making it a
| cracking good deal. And quality is soo much better than
| streaming, literally made me move my sofa a little closer
| to TV!
| vinkelhake wrote:
| FWIW, you can typically Google for any movie or TV show and
| it'll show all the services that it's available on. I have
| multiple streaming services and frequently use this to avoid
| manually searching all of them.
| astura wrote:
| This experience sucks.
|
| I was watching some horror films on Halloween. We subscribe
| to Netflix, Peacock, Sling, and once in a while Hulu. I
| looked up one movie I wanted to watch on Google and they say
| it's on Sling. Cool, start watching it and it's the censored
| TV version. (And not marked as such). I turn it off. Google
| also says it's on Amazon Prime. I happen to have Amazon Prime
| free trial at the moment but I've never used their streaming
| service. I download it to my tv, sign in, and they have it -
| for a $6 rental. Pointless.
|
| I just torrented it for so much less fuss.
| poizan42 wrote:
| Unfortunately it doesn't work so well outside of the US -
| especially when you live in a smaller country.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Nobody is going to make a $50 million movie for $12 of revenue
| from the first customer who then pirates it to the rest of the
| world. The end outcomes here are 1) Piracy remains manageable
| in scale 2) Production costs go down tremendously and vloggers
| dominate eyeballs 3) alternate business models, such as product
| placement or advertising.
| j0057 wrote:
| I can buy a DRM-less lossless music file that will play as
| many times as I like, on any device I own, for a reasonable
| price, without having to deal with a crappy and/or buggy
| distributor-specific app, or being dependent on the
| distributor's infrastructure being available, the distributor
| still being licensed to distribute the music, or the
| distributor still being in business at all. If this works for
| music, it can work for TV and film as well.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Yes, but you can only do this because the industry has used
| the courts to squash things like Napster.
| tomp wrote:
| IME Netflix keeps finding ways to fuck up. Movie not available
| at your location. Movie available at your location but not with
| English subtitles. Movie plays but the image on TV is corrupted
| (weird green-ish colors).
|
| I'm not saying that torrented .mkv files "just work". But the
| point is, if there are problems, they can be diagnosed and
| solved. Netflix (and Amazon etc.) is literally just "computer
| says no", better luck next time!
| salamandersauce wrote:
| It's a distributor/rights holder problem. Netflix is very
| good with subtitles with stuff they make and a lot of what
| they license. For example in North America the DVDs/Blu-rays
| of Anime never ever come with Japanese subtitles in my
| experience (sometimes you can't even disable English
| subtitles if watching Japanese audio), services like
| Crunchyroll, Funimation, Amazon Prime etc. never have them
| but if Netflix makes it or licenses it worldwide they do.
| Movie not being available in your location is the same
| problem, rights holders sell the streaming rights to
| different distributors in different territories. Or maybe
| they let Netflix have it because their own streaming service
| in country Y isn't set up yet. I'm sure Netflix wishes it
| could be Spotify for movies/TV with basically everything.
| ygjb wrote:
| We know it's a distributor/rights problem, but the core of
| that problem is the drive to extract as much value as
| possible. Casual piracy of content drops off a cliff when
| there is an opportunity to cheaply, and easily access
| content. We saw this with the emergence of early streaming
| service with broad catalogues.
|
| Now each distributor, or sufficiently large rightsholder
| wants to capture as much of that value as possible by both
| restricting catalog access and demanding ownership of the
| relationship with the end user, without any sort of
| federation across services (with a few exceptions like
| Apple TV that have used market dominance to assert the
| ability to search across content subscriptions). The end
| result has been a rapidly accellerating decline in the
| quality of the user experience for accessing streaming
| content. Couple that with a shift away from series releases
| to weekly releases (better for customer retention as
| customers won't subscribe for a month to binge a series
| when it drops, and increasing 'user engagement' on
| platforms for however each platform collects those metrics)
|
| The response has been an increase in piracy, and
| vilification of users who are frustrated because we had an
| awesome era of rich content libraries, but a bunch of
| accountants and MBAs focused on short term profit increases
| have destroyed the good will that the entire industry built
| with the emergence of streaming.
| rocketbop wrote:
| I haven't had the last problem but gte first two are largely
| not their fault, but related to regional licensing
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| It might not be their fault, but as long as they operate
| within a framework that allows that, it's their problem.
| JadeNB wrote:
| If I purport to offer you a service, knowing that the
| quality of that service is subject to a mosaic of laws and
| regulations that I am aware will fluctuate over time, then
| that variable quality is arguably not my fault; but, if I
| do everything in my power in all my advertising and
| messaging to hide or deny that variability, then it seems
| that that _is_ my fault. We 're outraged if Amazon yanks
| books from our Kindles, even if it's not technically their
| fault--we're outraged that they're even able to do so. The
| same should apply here.
|
| (Or, what rhn_mk1 said more eloquently and briefly:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29352027 .)
| jhgb wrote:
| And despite that, they're still not ashamed to extract the
| full price of the service even from those people to whom
| they can't offer 80% of the content.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| Just had this conversation (sans the pirating bit) yesterday
| with a friend who has YouTube TV.
|
| The proliferation of streaming services is too much to manage
| and inconvenient, nearly to the point of customer-hostile. And
| with each content creator wanting its own platform (Disney,
| Paramount, etc.) it's getting worse.
|
| You'd think the number of choices would be freeing, but
| bundling is still alive and well, with only the illusion of its
| demise. That is, many platforms pull you in with one or two
| original movies or serials of interest, dragging along with it
| a multitude of uninteresting content most don't consume and
| would rather not pay for.
|
| Of course, the big cable/satellite services have traditionally
| provided the aggregation, but their extreme bundling practices
| are heinous. There needs to be a service that aggregates all on
| one platform, but also provides the ability to create your own
| "bundles", perhaps even a pay per view option: subscribe to
| only the shows or serials that interest you.
| indymike wrote:
| > The proliferation of streaming services is too much to
| manage and inconvenient, nearly to the point of customer-
| hostile. And with each content creator wanting its own
| platform (Disney, Paramount, etc.) it's getting worse.
|
| I rather like that for $14/month I get access to more video
| that I can watch in my remaining free time.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Exactly. Here are my product requirements:
|
| Unrestricted access to all movies, music and TV shows ever
| made. Not 90%. Not 98%. Not "all except a few we couldn't work
| out licensing agreements over". All.
|
| Highest resolution/quality available at the time of release
| (DVD quality for 90s movies: OK. DVD quality for 2010 movies:
| NO)
|
| No arbitrary device/OS limitations.
|
| Can watch/listen/download from any location on earth with
| sufficient bandwidth.
|
| No ads embedded in the middle of the content.
|
| That's it! Piracy offers all of the above for free, but I'd be
| willing to pay for this. _Just release this product and take my
| money._ The best part is, technology-wise, all of the above are
| solved problems. You just need to get the lawyers to say yes
| and you have the product already.
|
| EDIT to address now-deleted comment: I didn't mention a price
| I'd be willing to pay--that's up to the market to figure out.
| Currently nobody offers this so it's hard to come up with a
| comparable.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| bradbeattie wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_P...
| . applied to streaming services would have provided that, no?
| It's unfortunate it's been terminated.
| dm33tri wrote:
| After some local streaming service took over like 70% of market
| (largely by expanding it, because it costs $3 compared to
| competitors at $5-10) other companies made a deal and now you
| can subscribe to "Most popular streaming service + exclusives
| from some other service at $5/$10 etc" and stream everything on
| one website/app.
| thayne wrote:
| > From my point of view, piracy will go down by 98% when all
| shows and films are accessible in one place.
|
| Or better yet, there are multiple competing streaming services
| that all have all shows and films, and compete based on other
| features (device support, parental controls, video/audio
| quality, speed, search interface, etc.) instead of available
| content.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| I mean sure, just stealing something works great for you.
| People made the film or show. They need to be paid. Walking in
| CVS and stealing a candy bar would feel like 50 years in the
| future as well, for a while.
| nynx wrote:
| There is a fundamental difference (at least for now)-there is
| nearly zero cost involved in copying data and moving it
| around. There's no real scarcity of data. There is some real
| scarcity of candy bars.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| To be fair to the argument, there is scarcity of the labor
| that produces the data and that must be compensated
| somehow.
| nynx wrote:
| That's true, but the labor that actually produced the
| data is not receiving the full value of the money that
| people pay to access the data. If the money went directly
| to the creators, I think people (and myself certainly)
| would feel much more amenable to paying for it.
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| Enters Patreon and similar type of things where you
| directly support contributors.
|
| However, $15/month for "everything-ish", or do you
| Patreon every content creator you watch? If you do
| anything around $5/month, thr budget might start hurting
| on the other side.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I can't imagine people subscribing to Disney's patreon,
| or to key grip #8's patreon. That model will never work
| industry-wide.
| goodpoint wrote:
| The scarcity of the labor is completely disconnected from
| the artificial scarcity of data.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Agreed, but therein lies the problem. The markets for our
| needs are still markets based on scarcity, and therefore
| artists need to operate within them even while producing
| a product that exists in a post-scarcity environment. To
| date no one has developed a better way to deal with this
| dichotomy than to impose some form of artificial scarcity
| in the post-scarcity space.
|
| I personally find that solution unappealing, but admit to
| no better option than to deal with it in most cases. Some
| of the people producing work I like can be compensated
| through patreon or twitch or some other means, but not
| all.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| With physical books, the cost of the pages was never that
| significant anyways. Same with VHS. The scarcity was never
| in the medium, so I fail to see why suddenly it matters.
| SalimoS wrote:
| I think you mean copying not stealing
| xwolfi wrote:
| It's just not going to work anymore. First, it's hard to
| steal something that can be copied infinitely (imagine if you
| could insta clone that candy bar, would you be bitching
| online about these crass hoboes trying to eat for free,
| really?), second, the entertainment world has to adapt, they
| were too well paid when they could argue scarcity, but now
| they have to drop quality and revenues and do something else
| with their life.
|
| If horse riders had been half as persistent as the Hollywood
| parasites, we'd still be riding horses bragging we got them
| good, these car building robbers.
| sosborn wrote:
| The analogy doesn't work, because eating is a fundamental
| need to survive. The movie that just came out isn't.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Walking in CVS and stealing a candy bar would feel like 50
| years in the future as well
|
| Or present-day SF.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Star Trek Discovery Season 4 was released only in the US and
| Canada, unlike the previous 3 seasons.
|
| Thus it was impossible to watch it in the UK, so out comes the
| torrent client.
|
| It is now available for purchase on itunes, which I assume I can
| play on my TV either via the apple tv app, or via airplay, so
| that's fine, and I paid for it, no need to torrent. At least for
| those of us in the UK.
|
| In the majority of countries though it's still not available.
|
| If your company is unwilling to sell the content, you can't
| complain about people getting it from other sources.
| captainbland wrote:
| Not forgetting though that Picard came out on Prime after
| Discovery and most of the rest of Star Trek being featured on
| Netflix. How many streaming services are we supposed to sign up
| for to follow one franchise?
|
| Nevermind the lack of availability in the UK, this situation is
| nonsense, they're practically begging us to start pirating
| their stuff.
| iso1631 wrote:
| I'm old enough to remember when people wanted to unbundle
| their viewing from ridiculous cable tv packages. We got that,
| and now people are complaining.
|
| The key problem here is the lack of availability (still) in
| 150+ countries that could watch it before. The cost is a
| separate matter
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > Thus it was impossible to watch it in the UK
|
| Based on the first three seasons, I believe the UK is being
| done a favor.
| criddell wrote:
| Perhaps it isn't a question of will but rather a question of
| rights.
|
| For example, perhaps the musicians who played on the Star Trek
| series had a contract that only covered the US and Canada and
| any further distribution required a separate agreement? The
| studio could have negotiated from the start for global rights
| but maybe the money wasn't there and the show wouldn't have
| been made otherwise?
| sigzero wrote:
| Yes, of course they can. It's stealing however someone tries to
| "justify" it.
| iso1631 wrote:
| What is it taking?
|
| Theft in my jurisdiction involves taking something with
| intention of permanently depriving it.
| lbriner wrote:
| The title is confusing. It reads like the film industry purposely
| decided to allow unauthorised downloads for some reason.
| thrawa163794261 wrote:
| I have no problem paying a "reasonable" amount for content, I've
| had plenty of paid accounts to multiple services.
|
| I've given up keeping up. The combination of Radarr + Sonarr +
| Plex or Jellyfin + Sabnzbd + a Usenet account @ ~$10/month is too
| good. I have immediate access to all new content, automatically
| downloaded as well as a back catalog that is more complete than I
| can get from any set of streaming services. The local interface
| is excellent, discovery is good. No ads and I can access the
| content from anywhere in the world from any device. Even if I was
| willing to pay for every subscription I needed to access the same
| content, I would still consume it with this stack, the experience
| is too good.
|
| A subscription to each of the top 10[a] streaming services is
| ~$85/month (~$1020/yr!), that still includes some ads! At some
| point someone out of APAC is going to start selling a device with
| a large drive and the stack ^^^ bundled with a Usenet
| subscription (if there isn't one yet). That will remove the
| complexity and mainstream this type of piracy.
|
| I don't know how the industry is going to solve this, I know they
| need to before they go the way of paid adult content.
|
| [a] https://screenrant.com/ten-most-popular-streaming-
| services-r.... I chose the least expensive ad-free option for
| each service. For Amazon Prime Video I used 1/3 of the
| $12.99/month cost, $4.33.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I actually find playpilot.com really useful for checking where to
| watch something.
|
| I wish they'd be more straight-to-the-point, and have fewer pop-
| ups, but on the plus side they have quite niche streaming
| services available and can filter availability by country, which
| is really nice.
|
| Their recommendation engine is laughably awful, and you can't do
| searches for things like director or studio, so it's not useful
| for discovery at all. But if a movie or series comes up in
| conversation, it's the best I've found.
| errantspark wrote:
| As some guy once said, "Info wants to be free, but it also wants
| to be expensive"
|
| IP ownership as it exists today is fundamentally broken from the
| underlying reality. We need a culture where coming up with
| something new is compensated fairly but at the same time
| recognizes that the cost of sharing info is next to nil and we're
| all being held back from a global optimum by pretending
| otherwise.
| elzbardico wrote:
| I see no reason why I should not have control upon music that I
| wrote or performed. I do it for free for friends because I am
| not that good of a musician. But what makes you get the right
| to decide about My content?
| criddell wrote:
| "Info wants to be free, but it also wants to be expensive"
|
| Isn't that one of the things the NFT people are working on?
| errantspark wrote:
| I was mostly quoting it to reference it's context. The full
| quote (by Stewart Brand) is:
|
| "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because
| it's so valuable. The right information in the right place
| just changes your life.
|
| On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the
| cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the
| time.
|
| So you have these two fighting against each other."
|
| So yes, NFTs are absolutely one of the myriad of (stupid)
| ways we're trying to grapple with this conflict as a society.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Bundling up products/services/value is a classic business
| technique. It's easy to sell customers on one low monthly price.
|
| Also, Unbundling products/services/value is a classic business
| technique. It's easy to make money on providing one specific
| service for a small fraction of the bundled price.
|
| These two forces happen in cycles, and streaming video is going
| through an unbundling phase right now.
| winternett wrote:
| The way they pay creators and actors is appalling. Spotify
| although they charge $10 for a monthly subscription, the musician
| that made the music only gets .000000000001 of a penny per
| stream. The same is being one to film makers, actors and studios.
| People also normally encounter regional restrictions on content
| that they find on the web and don't want to register a whole
| month of service (on another site they have to log into) when
| they only want to watch one single show on a platform. That's
| just a few reasons why piracy is still present.
|
| Give it until next year and they'll slowly start rolling
| commercials and ads into paid for monthly subscriptions
| permanently as well. We're cows, carefully primed for "$ milking"
| by big industry really.
| peapicker wrote:
| I get .03 to .05 of a penny per stream on Spotify for my music,
| depending on factors I don't understand. So $3 to $5 per
| thousand streams. Still not great but not as dismal as you put
| it. I have one very successful friend who gets about 1.2
| million streams a year on Spotify. He works usually with two
| collaborators so the ~$50,000 he makes per year on Spotify is
| split three ways before income taxes. Of course he also is on
| other platforms too.
| kataklasm wrote:
| That math doesn't add up. If a single stream makes
| (0.04x0.01) dollars or 4% of $0.01 on average, thats $0.004
| per stream. If your friend has 1.2M streams a year, that's
| $4800 in payout per year. Can you elaborate please?
| winternett wrote:
| Because Spotify, and the music industry in general relies
| heavily on "pyramid-based meritocracy", and because a lot
| of success is gamed by black hats, A lot of artists on the
| platform resort to paying for services and advertising,
| which also must be considered in comparison to profit.
|
| A lot of artists need to emulate success and fandom in
| order to break into paid work, and that creates a toxic
| situation where they need to pay up front (for various
| other things like SEO, interviews, artificial promotion,
| awards, and even for spots in gigs to get to a success
| point) before any real success is achieved, or they need to
| spend many years in unpaid (and very defeating) obscurity
| before finding out whether they succeed or not.
|
| Statistics really don't apply to everyone on a consistent
| basis, and a lot of numbers in the mix are totally
| calculated in "mysterious ways" on purpose.
|
| I focus on licensing rather than streams, that way there is
| more of a (tangible) contractual negotiation involved.
| winternett wrote:
| It's better to be a Spotify shareholder than to be a musician
| publishing to the platform. That's where we are now...
|
| I'm also baffled that Spotify does not grant
| verified/accomplished contributors to the platform free
| accounts by default. I wouldn't be surprised if a huge
| percentage of their premium listeners are the very same
| people who publish their music to the platform.
|
| The Internet unfortunately is quickly becoming a "scam-based
| economy". It's flooding out all the potential it once had. I
| just decided to create and focus on my own personal music
| label web site moving forward. If I'm going to give most of
| my music away for pennies, I'd rather have more meaningful
| and useful analytics and FAR less complication in publishing
| my own music. :/
| apozem wrote:
| I don't work in streaming, so take this opinion with a grain of
| salt, but my impression is this problem will solve itself in a
| few years.
|
| Right now the video industry is in land-grab mode. Everyone knows
| there are too many subscription streaming services. In five years
| there will be three, maybe four winners, and everyone else will
| sell content to them.
| goodpoint wrote:
| AKA yet another oligopoly. It's really not ending well for
| customers, both in terms of quality and price.
| emrah wrote:
| The problem isn't that there are too many, but that they are
| too expensive, especially since one needs to subscribe to
| several of them to get enough diversity/coverage of content ala
| cable.
| stevenwliao wrote:
| Why is anyone entitled to as much content as cable for a
| Netflix-like price?
| michaelt wrote:
| Well, the TV industry always knew there were people who were
| willing to spend $100/month for cable. And it had adverts.
|
| They hate the idea of those people paying less.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > They hate the idea of those people paying less.
|
| They do? I think many people are just suckers who can't say
| no.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It is the same problem with yachts.
| toss1 wrote:
| Likely true that we'll see market consolidation.
|
| But that sounds to me like it will make it worse in the end.
| Fewer and larger competitors will likely wind up like ISP
| services, consistently and overpriced as if they were
| colluding, without even having to collude.
|
| Sure, each service will have a larger selection, but like the
| cable companies now, we'll be paying for a lot of cruft that we
| don't want, and still not getting some content really important
| to us.
|
| IOW, it seems like the A La Carte that we all want started to
| appear, and now it is going away before it ever really got
| established.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| > In five years there will be three, maybe four winners, and
| everyone else will sell content to them.
|
| In a few years the content industry will own all of the
| subscription streaming services.
|
| Disney is well on its way to ensuring that.
| [deleted]
| Finnucane wrote:
| I work in publishing, and it is still hard to get management to
| understand that convenience and a reasonable price is more
| effective than drm for fighting piracy.
|
| On the other hand, Spotify also solved the industry's problem of
| having to pay artists.
| palijer wrote:
| If you are implying they "solved the problem of having to pay
| artists", that isn't true as Spotify payed artists over $23
| billion as of 2020.
|
| https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/
|
| I think they solved the problem of paying artists quite well,
| 70% of their revenue goes to the copyright holders (if those
| aren't the artists, that is a different problem Spotify can't
| really address).
|
| It's hard to see a record store or different streaming service
| do better than that ratio.
| Marazan wrote:
| How much of that went to artists and how much went to the
| record labels?
|
| Spotify 'negotiated' a deal with the record labels that
| maximised how much money that went to the labels and
| minimised the money that went to song writers and artists.
| shukantpal wrote:
| " 70% of their revenue goes to the copyright holders (if
| those aren't the artists, that is a different problem
| Spotify can't really address)"
| Marazan wrote:
| Absolute lols. It is a problem they can address. Their
| deal with the labels sends the money to the labels rather
| than the artists as a stream is counted like pressing a
| record rather than a radio play.
|
| If a stream was considered a radio play the far, far more
| money would go to the artists.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| > If a stream was considered a radio play the far, far
| more money would go to the artists.
|
| Doesn't that still imply that the problem is really just
| the labels negotiating contracts that are exceedingly in
| their favor?
|
| Artists are getting screwed over because they signed away
| their distribution rights but there's not a lot Spotify
| can do about that. Spotify doesn't know where the money
| goes when they send it to the only place that can legally
| sell the rights to the content, and it probably
| shouldn't.
|
| Artists across the board need to stand up for themselves
| and make better deals. More and more big names are
| standing up against the industry and causing a ruckus, so
| we may see a revolution in that space in a few short
| years. Until then, the music labels will continue to
| profit from their artists as they always have.
| Marazan wrote:
| Spotify absolutely knew what they where doing when they
| "negotiated" the deal.
|
| They knew they would be funelling money to the labels
| over the artists by adopting the ludicrous notion that
| they were making the equivalent of a mechanical
| reproduction over the equivalent of a radio play when a
| user streamed a song.
|
| The major labels are big share holders in Spotify. It was
| a complete stitch up of the artists. Spotify were not a
| neutral party.
| elzbardico wrote:
| The artist sold their distribution rights to the labels.
| What do you think could be done differently from Spotify
| side that was still legal?
| missedthecue wrote:
| I don't think it's Spotify that is paying them less, it's
| consumers.
|
| With Spotify, I can listen to hundreds of new songs every
| month for $10. That would cost a fortune with CDs or buying
| digital downloads.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Most people bought very few records in the past. FM radio
| and cassetes where extremely popular because of that. I
| think that there is far more today between Spotify and
| Apple Music than there was between all labels during the CD
| era
| criddell wrote:
| Their goal isn't to fight piracy, it's to make a lot of money.
| At this point I think they've mostly figured out that maximum
| profits come with some level of piracy.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| Spotify is the problem - they're owned by the industry.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Not really. Their income will soon overtake pre-widespread-
| internet peak.
|
| https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/
| akamaka wrote:
| That chart shows revenue, so I don't think it takes into
| account the higher profit margins that come with not needing
| to manufacture and distribute physical media.
| ma2rten wrote:
| I don't understand why buying music on iTunes was so popular
| in the US for a while, when in Europe everyone was already
| listening to Spotify.
| elzbardico wrote:
| More disposable income, different culture that values
| actual possession more then merely enjoying it.
| dagw wrote:
| _in Europe everyone was already listening to Spotify._
|
| Spotify wasn't available in the US until almost 2.5 years
| after its initial launch.
| ma2rten wrote:
| But weren't there other streaming services such as
| last.fm and pandora?
| slothtrop wrote:
| RIAA income != artist income
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Is that accounting for inflation?
| john_miller wrote:
| No, the peak statement is not valid if inflation is
| considered. But the page has a "Adjusted for inflation"
| checkbox on the right, so you can see for yourself. :)
| Thaxll wrote:
| Big difference with music is that 10$ a month get you
| everything, and it's the same catalog from Spotify to Google to
| Apple.
|
| TV shows and movies are very different.
| haunter wrote:
| As an EU citizen I also have to say the Digital Single Market [1]
| was a good idea but bad in execution.
|
| I work at a video game publisher and you can see that in prices
| where people in Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary etc. have to pay the
| same price as people in Sweden, Finland, Denmark etc. You can't
| discriminate positively, so all the new AAA games ended up 60EUR.
| So of course in poorer countries the piracy is higher EVEN THOUGH
| people would be willing to buy it but regional pricing is
| basically outlawed for the European Union. iirc Valve/Steam also
| had some problems with this in the past, they used to have
| different prices for EU countries but they had to stop that.
|
| We can set prices lower for CIS countries, or say Moldova, Turkey
| etc. but not for EU.
|
| 1, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Single_Market
| flipbrad wrote:
| To be absolutely clear: as I understand it, the law you're
| talking about currently doesn't apply to media content,
| including digital games. From the official FAQ to that law:
| "For online services related to non-audiovisual works protected
| by copyright (such as e-books, video games, music and
| software), the non-discrimination provision - i.e. the
| obligation to allow foreign customers to access and benefit
| from the same offers as local customers - does not apply under
| the Regulation."
|
| Also, the law prevents you from blocking or charging customers
| to customers accessing your service from an EU country
| different from the one in which you're established. So in your
| example, you could set the price as low as you like for
| Bulgarians, you just can't block Swedish people from visiting
| your games store online, or try to charge that Swedish person
| _more_.
| draw_down wrote:
| I don't think anything has fundamentally changed, piracy was a
| response to content owners shortsightedly trying to extract
| maximum dollars. There was a brief interregnum when everything
| switched to streaming, but it didn't have anything to do with
| studio execs coming to their senses.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| A) copyright should be lowered to 10 or maybe 20 years.
|
| B) content owners have the right to ask for however much they
| want for content if copyright lengths were reasonable
| tryptophan wrote:
| A model I like is as such:
|
| Copyrights are possible to extend indefinitely.
|
| The owner must declare a value every year for their copyrighted
| material.
|
| The owner must pay X% of the material's value per year as tax.
|
| The owner can release the copyright at any time.
|
| Others may bid to own the copyright. If it is higher than the
| owner's declared value, the owner must raise their bid to
| match, or else the copyright is sold to the highest bidder.
| curun1r wrote:
| I'd prefer a model where more content enters the public
| domain rather than the copyright changing hands.
|
| Declare somewhat-short, fixed terms (5 years?) for every bit
| of content. The first term is free and then subsequent terms
| increase in cost geometrically. The first renewal could be an
| almost insignificant amount...but just the fact that it's
| something would mean most content that is unmonetized would
| enter the public domain after the initial free term.
| Successive terms would start to only make sense for the most
| profitable content.
|
| Being able to balance a healthy public domain with the
| ability for content creators to put out content that costs a
| ton to produce seems like it should be the goal of the
| copyright system.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| Granting a monopoly on something with zero marginal costs
| creates massive dead-weight losses for society. Creating that
| information is a positive externality, so that positive
| externality should be subsidized. The problem we need to work
| out is how much value is a particular bit of information
| worth.
|
| This is an idea I came up with, so likely has many issues to
| be worked out, but the core of the idea seems valid. We need
| to find out how much people value this information. We know
| how to get people to bid their actual values. We put IP and
| copyright and open source software into a Vickrey Auction. To
| do this you need not ask everyone every bit of IP, you would
| need to work out a statistically significant sampling of the
| population. This would be a multiple item auction, so you
| might have 1000 people in the auction, but only the top 750
| bidders would walk away with access. The bottom 25% would
| have to go the year without. But since they would get access
| to all OSS and IP that they did not have to sample, they
| would still win out. The top 75% would, like any other
| Vickrey Auction, pay the amount of the highest bidder that
| did not win.
|
| Owners would have the option to either keep it secret, or
| release it into the auctions. As the societal value of the
| item would be much larger having it open, every IP owner
| would choose to open it up so that they could get their share
| of the pot. Once an item has a fairly stable price, you
| wouldn't have to get a sampling every year for it. You would
| then either take funds from some other tax, or just print it,
| and subsidize the owners based on the value that the sampling
| provided.
| nynx wrote:
| This is not a good idea. Giant companies could buy the
| copyrights for all intellectual property and no individuals
| would be able to own valuable intellectual property.
| _nalply wrote:
| That's true.
|
| Perhaps increase tax such that even giant companies can't
| afford the copyright after one or two decades. Let's say
| start with 10% and increase by 2.5% every year. The
| twentieth year the copyright would cost 60% of the declared
| value.
| tryptophan wrote:
| Well, artists only have to sell if they don't think their
| copyright value is worth the price, so they would be
| getting nice payouts. Don't really see how it could be a
| loss for artists, unless maybe they undervalue their own
| work.
|
| Also it would mean that large corps pay for their copyright
| enforcement, unlike now, when a 1 man book is given the
| same protections as disney's stuff for the same cost,
| despite the fact that it costs 1000x more to protect
| disney.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Unnecessary complications only add avenues for corruption.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Couldn't a large corporation just bid any competitors out of
| existence by saying their works are worth absurd amounts that
| are trivial for them to pay but impossible for a small
| copyright holder?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I'd like a law where the copyright ends as soon as the
| content is no longer sold.
| _nalply wrote:
| Then the company would find someone who buys the content
| whenever they need it.
| OgAstorga wrote:
| C) no copyright after 2 years. (would this _really_ decrease
| output?)
| dylan604 wrote:
| Ask yourself that if it was a project you spent multiple
| years working on from developing it, producing it, editing
| it, marketing it. Is 2 years worth of protection from other
| people using to your work to make money from it fair?
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Would you have created a better project in less time if you
| had access to the wealth of work done before yours?
| dylan604 wrote:
| I don't understand the premise of the question. Are you
| suggesting that a project's time to completion could be
| shortened if you are allowed to just out right use the
| script of other previously produced content, or use their
| footage? I really hope not.
|
| Take the True Detective series as an example. The first
| season is highly regarded, and took forever for it to get
| made. Lots of love and effort went into developing that
| story. Because of its success, the producer was asked to
| do a new "season". It was litterally pulled out of thin
| air with no iteratitive development time on the story,
| and was univerally panned and the creator admitted this.
| The point? Sometimes it takes time to develop a good
| story. Just ask JRR Martin.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Not necessarily using the full script or footage, but
| things like characters, settings, design elements or
| wholesale plots. Even if they reused a script, anyone
| who's worked on a play knows you can have two very
| different scenes that started with the same script.
|
| I haven't seen True Detective, but maybe he could have
| pulled off a successful second season if he could have
| freely adapted someone like G.R.R. Martin's story.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Oops, stupid typos. It might be intersting to see Jeorge
| RR Martin's characters in a buddy cop detective series.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I figured you combined Tolkien with Martin, I bet it's a
| pretty common mistake.
|
| Unfortunately any series trying that premise would need
| to wait like a century or pay Martin a ton of money, so
| you'll never know if it's interesting.
| notatoad wrote:
| >content owners have the right to ask for however much they
| want
|
| they already do. and content distributors and consumers all
| have the right to say "nah, your content isn't worth that
| much".
| tomjen3 wrote:
| They should be able to ask for as much money as they find
| reasonable, but it should be a uniform fee only and any
| discrimination should be considered an abuse of monopoly,
| resulting in immediate loss of all copyrights.
|
| This would mean they get payed well, and that there is a
| healthy competition in streaming services.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I think a hybrid model would work well where you don't get
| royalties from access by non-profits/individuals but
| corporations with a sufficiently large market cap (eg $1bn) do
| have to pay royalties to distribute such content.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I do not see any reason to add that complication.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Politics. Shrinking copyright from 90 years to 20 years for
| most uses might work if you can say that content creators
| get to still charge big corporations from charging
| royalties for the remaining 70 years.
| Something1234 wrote:
| How so?
|
| That doesn't make sense. I think most of the royalties come
| from the long tail of companies, and market cap is a really
| terrible way of determining the worth of a company
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Fine then strong man the argument and say companies > $100m
| in revenues.
|
| I also didn't mean to imply right away. I meant "after
| 10-18 years".
| beardyw wrote:
| Netflix seem to have got pretty needy. I got 18 emails begging
| for me to come back since October. So their cheery "cancel any
| time" was said through clenched teeth.
|
| It would be fantastic to have a Spotify type service for films.
| In fact I would pay proper money to just have access to all stuff
| over say 10 years old. I suspect it will never happen. Music has
| been a commodity to take home for over 100 years. Video 50 years,
| so just another 50 years to go.
| richardfey wrote:
| These streaming services will disappear. You should just buy
| directly from the distributor and pay as you go. Want 1.5h of WB
| entertainment? Here's your 0.8$ invoice.
| ok123456 wrote:
| EVO: Thank you for your service.
| Oddskar wrote:
| One facet of this that _rarely_ gets mentioned that I often
| experience since I live in the EU is subtitle and audio
| availability is _teeerrible_ for most of the streaming services.
|
| Amazon Prime is unusable because the vast majority of movies that
| they have is all dubbed and do not provide original audio nor
| english subtitles. I do not pay money to watch a movie get
| distorted by dubbed audio. No thank you.
|
| Same goes for a lot of movies on Netflix, although they are way
| better than Prime.
| dasil003 wrote:
| This article and a lot of comments here don't understand the
| business reasons why this happening. Everyone rings their hands
| and says why can't we just have everything in one place for a
| "reasonable" price like Spotify?
|
| Well first of all, Spotify is no panacea, artists and labels
| don't really like it but they have no choice because they need
| distribution in order to sell albums/concert tickets. Even the
| largest artists like Taylor Swift who has protested against low
| Spotify royalties only temporarily took some material off
| Spotify, and ended up putting it back because in the end she
| looks like the bad guy to her fans if they can't stream her on
| Spotify like everything else they listen to.
|
| Netflix was originally hoping to corner the market in a similar
| way, and they had a good first step with the Starz deal in 2008.
| However video is different and those rightsholders had full view
| of what happened in the music industry, so they were not about to
| make the mistake of ceding all power to a middle man. By the time
| Starz deal expired in 2012 it was clear that Netflix could never
| get all content because rightsholders would not let it happen.
| Similarly, the industry realized they need their own
| distribution. So Netflix and HBO entered a race to become each
| other. Since then the technology has only commodified which has
| allowed more rightsholders to get into the game.
|
| Is this bad for consumers? Sure, but "the industry" is not a
| monolithic entity, and they certainly will do everything it takes
| to avoid becoming dependent on a single distributor with too much
| power like Spotify. It doesn't matter how many angry nerds
| complain on the internet, these companies will continue acting in
| their own self-interest, and the market carrying capacity for
| streaming services is probably way higher than most consumers
| want to admit. The only thing that will turn this around is by
| services dying because people don't pay for them, and I don't see
| that happening any time soon.
| naasking wrote:
| > Even the largest artists like Taylor Swift who has protested
| against low Spotify royalties only temporarily took some
| material off Spotify, and ended up putting it back because in
| the end she looks like the bad guy to her fans if they can't
| stream her on Spotify like everything else they listen to.
|
| Artists probably need to stop seeing royalties as a viable
| income stream and instead see it as publicity for their tours
| where they actually make money.
| amne wrote:
| Voice telecom operators have this all figured out. Companies
| exist to function as interconnection hubs only and are very
| successful at it. Billing systems (mostly built on RADIUS) keep
| track behind the scenes of every second of voice call routed
| through these companies.
|
| All it took was a regulating agency to force the telecom
| operators to open up and allow 3rd parties to interconnect to
| provide their own voice service and/or act as hubs. And all of
| that at regulated prices per minute.
|
| So let's say you subscribe to Voiceflix for 5$/month but want to
| "call" Game of Towers which has a different techprefix so you're
| routed outside your network at a (hopefully reasonable) cost.
| Initially it will be expensive (remember the prices in early '00
| per minute of voice call?) but eventually it will come down to
| earth.
|
| So now you have two types of entities:
|
| - content storage: tries to get as much exclusive content but for
| overlapping content tries to "bid" the lowest price so it gets
| the traffic.
|
| - hubs that want to take your money and stream from content
| storage services and don't care which one has the content as long
| as it is within profit margin the user can stream it.
| bircherr wrote:
| Reading this triggered some good nostalgic memories of the time
| when pirating video content was a bit of a game to see who could
| amass the best (ie early release non cam) collection. Back in the
| late 90s I hosted a FTP dump site on an OC3...and it was a
| constant effort to keep up with evolving sources mIRC, CuteMX,
| Filetopia, Limewire, eDonkey, etc. Eventually I had something
| like 1000 movies but actually watched only a handful. Haha.
| Anyways, agree with the author that pirates are motivated by the
| "fun" of it - and it is a hobby for many.
| kf6nux wrote:
| Title is a little misleading.
|
| Article is basically saying that, through a combination of too
| many streaming services, fragmented content, and premium pricing,
| the tv/movie industry is recreating a demand for piracy.
| taftster wrote:
| Yes, it's a clever but unfortunately click-bait title. I was
| duped to reading the article (which is very short too, not very
| much meat). The core idea of the article is interesting, but
| very shallow coverage, somewhat even obvious.
| jmacd wrote:
| Disney is the main culprit here. They are making a few
| significant missteps with their otherwise very well executed
| streaming offering.
|
| Initially they offered their streaming service at a very
| competitive price, but I think they have gotten some of the
| sequencing wrong after that. Initially early subscribers were hit
| with these up charges for new films. I think Mulan might have
| been the first one?
|
| It was mid pandemic and they didn't get a chance to release it in
| theatres, so I think it felt like it made sense at the time and I
| am guessing they saw it as pretty successful. They quickly
| started doing it with far less interesting films, and ones that I
| could see at release time in the theatre.
|
| At home streaming just isn't a "special occasion" like going to
| the theatre is, and while I was happy to make it a special
| occasion during the depths of stay-at-home lockdowns, there are a
| lot of competitive forces now. An extra $20 or $30 might seem to
| Disney like an amount people will happily pay for every new
| release, but I think the appetite for that will be pretty low
| going forward.
|
| Disney also offered an attractive discount for a 1-year
| subscription initially, so it was pretty easy to do. I've been
| happy with it, but I notice my kids are on Netflix much much
| more. That really surprised me.
|
| Now, my subscription renews in April of 2022, but Disney has
| already started emailing me that it is going to increase almost
| 50% in cost at renewal time. I don't know why they feel the need
| to start telling me that so far in advance, or so many times (3
| emails now). All it's done is make me thing "ok, that's a lot,
| let's see if we really use it" and also "hmm, I've spent some $
| on these new releases".
|
| They don't seem patient or that they are thinking through this
| messaging/experience nearly as well as Netflix. Netflix does
| increase their prices but they do it rarely and they always
| pummel you with new content around the time they are doing it.
| They also packaged in lower resolution options, etc so you can
| keep your costs down if you really want to. Disney hasn't done
| any of that.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> I don 't know why they feel the need to start telling me
| that so far in advance, or so many times (3 emails now)._
|
| Maybe they hope, by informing you so early, you'll have
| forgotten about the price increase by the time your renewal
| goes through?
| sparrc wrote:
| This might not be a longterm strategy, because they aren't
| doing it for their latest major release (Encanto). It's
| currently in cinemas only.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Disney seems to be the main culprit in everything copyright
| related! Seriously, what is wrong with them!?
| elzbardico wrote:
| Sony. Don't forget Sony too
| [deleted]
| dylan604 wrote:
| The question would be better phrased as what is wrong with
| the copyright system. Disney just seems to be the best at
| maximizing the system to their benefit.
| yunohn wrote:
| How Disney lobbied to tweak the copyright system to their
| liking, since the 1970s:
| https://online.yu.edu/cardozo/blog/disney-influence-
| copyrigh...
| nicoburns wrote:
| Not really. Disney hasn't just made use of the existing
| copyright laws, they have had an active hand (indeed, they
| have been the primary campaigners) in campaigning for the
| vastly extended copyright terms that we currently suffer.
| effingwewt wrote:
| Yea 'Don't hate the player, hate the game' is pretty
| disingenuous when the 'player' actively changes the rules
| of the game through bribery and coercion.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| What is wrong with making money? If they are at fault, I
| don't see how you can expect otherwise.
|
| On people and their goverment. What is wrong with them? Well,
| some people value the product at that price tag. And since
| people can live without that product (multimedia) their
| government don't really care.
|
| For me the problem of copyright mindset is locking hardware
| to specific Intellectual Property software. Multimedia is not
| a necessity, it is entertaiment.
| Oddskar wrote:
| If your money making is at the detriment of society as a
| whole then there very much is something wrong with it.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Do we know if Disney+ is returning a profit or operating at a
| loss in exchange for increasing its long term user base? Seems
| like the latter.
|
| In regards to theaters being a "special occasion", I am not
| sure where you live but here in the US we have "monthly
| subscriptions" for movie theaters. For example, for ~25$ a
| month I can sign up for AMC Stubs A-List which allows me to see
| three films a week in any format I want (standard def, IMAX,
| Dolby Premium, 3D or whatever else they have) each week for the
| month. (Thats typically 12 films a month). This is unbelievable
| value, yet even to this day I see theaters are flat out empty
| with the exception of Superhero films and established
| franchises (eg. James Bond). I can't tell you how many films I
| have seen this year (since getting vaccinated) where I was
| literally the only one in the theater. For one film I
| discovered there is a regular light switch that controls the
| lights in the theater and so I watched the film with the lights
| on ha ha!
|
| I think movies and ;possibly "old media" are just failing for
| peoples attention in favor of things like
| Youtube/Instagram/Twitch etc. After all there are 24 hours in a
| day and no way to expand that so everyone has to compete by
| taking away some time spent on existing forms of media.
| wavefunction wrote:
| Disney is one of the two media companies my friend is always
| willing to pirate from due to how they constantly try to rip
| off the creative talent that is the only reason they're a
| company. He's one of those types that still pays for and
| downloads FLACs and has no problem paying for streaming
| services that are fairly priced and treat their creative
| resources better than Disney does. I guess it's kind of weird
| to associate a moral impulse with the act of media piracy but
| no one says that humans aren't complicated messes of competing
| paradoxical impulses.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Now, my subscription renews in April of 2022, but Disney has
| already started emailing me that it is going to increase almost
| 50% in cost at renewal time. I don't know why they feel the
| need to start telling me that so far in advance, or so many
| times (3 emails now). All it's done is make me thing "ok,
| that's a lot, let's see if we really use it" and also "hmm,
| I've spent some $ on these new releases".
|
| Well, if you are thinking of not renewing and foget, it is 100%
| on you. If you are considering not renewing, you should unsub
| now so that it doesn't auto-renew.
| SSLy wrote:
| My cinema is a 15 minutes brisk walk from my flat. There's no
| way I'd overpay for D+ if I can just pay 4 euros and see it on
| a bigger screen, with better audio.
| docdeek wrote:
| Disney+ in France is reasonably priced. I think the first year
| it was about EUR65 and it is now expanded with Star and costs
| EUR90 a year. That's EUR7.50 a month which is great value in a
| house with a kid mad about Star Wars, a toddler who needs
| occasional distraction, and a couple of adults who find things
| on Star to re-watch from years ago. We also get some Hulu shows
| on our Disney+ stream here, too, which can be good.
|
| We do not have Disney+ 'special' films here for a one-time
| EUR20-30 fee, a result of film release regulations in this
| country (I think). Still, considering it is about EUR13 an
| adult ticket at the cinema here, if there are a few of us
| watching a new release I can see how it might make sense. Sure,
| not the cinema experience, but comparable in price, improved
| comfort, the chance to pause if needed, and no babysitter to
| pay for.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| I don't have a Disney+ account but what you describe sounds
| bad. Not quite Prime Video bad though.
|
| Early Prime Video used to have a lot of shows with only the
| first season available with not extra cost, and you'd only
| realise that by the time you finished it and was going to watch
| Season 2, only to be slapped with a rental fee for it and all
| subsequent ones.
|
| I haven't seen much of that for a while (although admittedly I
| rarely go on there - I wish there was a cheaper Prime tier with
| only the delivery advantages).
|
| A couple weeks ago though, I started watching a show. I logged
| in, put on S1E1 and all was good. That is, until I tried to
| watch S1E2 and found out that everything from that point on was
| behind a rent wall. Just to clarify, I had actually had a quick
| look to see if the later seasons were included, and it did look
| like they were. Until they didn't. Utterly awful experience.
| GordonS wrote:
| Similar situation here in the UK.
|
| Disney+ initially available at what I considered a fair price,
| and now they want to hike it by something like 50% - which
| seems totally unreasonable.
|
| Furthermore, it seems like so much more content now is not
| included in the monthly fee - they want to extract even _more_
| money from us! And I take issue with the actual pricing here
| too, for example Mulan was a whopping _PS20_ - for comparison,
| an adult cinema ticket is around PS10! So again, this feels
| totally unfair and unjustified.
|
| Disney is meant to be about "fun", but I don't think we'll be
| renewing, because, frankly, they are taking the piss and making
| me _hate_ the service.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > Furthermore, it seems like so much more content now is not
| included in the monthly fee - they want to extract even more
| money from us! And I take issue with the actual pricing here
| too, for example Mulan was a whopping PS20 - for comparison,
| an adult cinema ticket is around PS10! So again, this feels
| totally unfair and unjustified.
|
| That's not surprising. What if there's more than one person
| watching the stream?
|
| > Disney is meant to be about "fun"
|
| multiple decades ago, maybe
| xattt wrote:
| The problem was solved decades earlier: an FBI Warning at
| the start saying the screen can only be viewed by one
| member of a household at a time.
| GordonS wrote:
| > That's not surprising. What if there's more than one
| person watching the stream?
|
| So what if there is?
|
| I'm watching at home, using my TV - it is nowhere close to
| a "cinema experience", I'm already paying a monthly fee,
| and I don't believe I've ever seen any streaming rental as
| expensive as PS20 before. So, it was certainly a surprise
| to me!
| lostlogin wrote:
| > I'm watching at home, using my TV - it is nowhere close
| to a "cinema experience"
|
| To replicate the cinema experience, for another EUR20 you
| could pay some kids to kick your seat and rustle chip
| packets, then turn the volume up to unbearable and play
| 35 mins of adverts before the movie.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| It is surprising when the price ceiling for DVDs of recent
| highly-rated films in the supermarket is PS10, and blu-ray
| is PS15.
| astura wrote:
| Yep, and you can watch the DVD or Blu-ray and sell it for
| a few pounds.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Traditionally, home video and cinema were two segregated
| markets. The reason why you paid 10 pounds for that DVD
| is because the film is a few months old. If you wanted to
| see it at release date you were paying the same price
| _per person_ , _per view_.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| > Furthermore, it seems like so much more content now is not
| included in the monthly fee
|
| Disney literally haven't done any Premier Access titles in
| months now that cinemas have reopened.
|
| Disney+ was always a service aimed at taking over the pay
| television market - and pay television was always roughly a
| year behind the theatrical release. They did a small run of
| (pretty cheap) extra paid releases while no cinemas were
| open, but that has now ended.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| > Disney+ initially available at what I considered a fair
| price
|
| It was a completely unsustainable predatory price aimed at
| making initial marketshare.
|
| Disney+'s price target is roughly PS30 per month... As is
| Netflix's.
| GordonS wrote:
| I would respectfully disagree - the pricing felt fair, yet
| sustainable to me.
|
| I see Disney+ as an "add on" streaming service - something
| you might get _on top off_ either NetFlix or Amazon Prime,
| and as such I 'd expect to stream far less content from
| Disney+. Even with 2 young kids, this has indeed been the
| case.
| chongli wrote:
| _the pricing felt fair, yet sustainable to me_
|
| Sustainable in terms of maintaining the same old
| catalogue indefinitely? Or sustainable enough to finance
| new films and series? That's the problem. The existing
| catalogue costs almost nothing to stream while new shows
| cost a ton to produce.
| extrapickles wrote:
| Creating content is somewhat expensive, but not
| unreasonably so for their subscriber counts.
|
| A live action TV show costs $3-15 million to produce.
| They have ~116 million subscribers. If they "invest"
| $2/subscriber/month into new content, that means they can
| make 15-77 new episodes per month (a film could be
| considered to take up several episode slots).
| chongli wrote:
| Shang-Chi cost $150-200 million. Avengers: Infinity War
| cost double that. That's just two of the many films
| they've produced over the past few years. Look at their
| upcoming schedule for Phase 4 [1]. It's extremely
| aggressive! And that's _just_ Marvel cinematic universe
| films. It doesn't include Star Wars or Pixar or any
| mainline Disney films, nor does it include any TV series.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Cinematic_Univer
| se:_Pha...
| nebula8804 wrote:
| I just want to comment at how sad it is that so much
| money is being wasted on movies like this. It feels like
| society has irrecoverably shifted to some different
| reality and thus the studios keep focusing on these
| films. I was extremely emotionally invested in the
| success of a recent film by my favorite director: Edgar
| Wright. The movie "Last Night in Soho" had a supposed
| production budget of ~40 million but only earned ~4
| million on Box office open. It was competing with all non
| superhero films for scraps because ~90% of the box office
| profits were taken by the superhero movies/007.
| Retric wrote:
| For perspective depending on how you count Disney+ is
| Disney's 4th streaming service. Their all about making
| people pay as much as possible at the cost of
| convenience.
|
| Avengers infinity war isn't an exclusive on any of their
| streaming services making it's cost to produce
| meaningless. Disney is all about milking content with
| ultra cheap sequels / derivatives and old content, that's
| what's going to be included on Disney+ not a new 100+M
| dollar film. Remember they have had several Cable
| channels for years they know how to make cheap content.
|
| That said, they could easily pay for several big budget
| movies per year as Disney+ exclusives without upping it's
| initial price. Instead they have zero interest in being
| good value for money rather than maximizing profits and
| minimizing risks.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| > the pricing felt fair, yet sustainable to me
|
| To be blunt, what you felt about it wasn't really
| relevant. It wasn't sustainable in terms of revenue, and
| was a fragment of what Disney received from their
| previous licensing deals. It would not even cover
| residuals for existing content, never mind new
| production.
|
| The average household spend on content is about $60pm,
| and that figure in real terms is surprisingly stable.
| lunatuna wrote:
| My approach now is to rotate. We keep Crave which has HBO and
| Showtime. We paused Disney and Netflix and will turn back on,
| watch for a few months to catch-up on Tiger Kings or
| Wandavision. You can cut a lot of your costs and not have to
| torrent. Just keeping the subscription going doesn't seem to
| be good value.
| flycaliguy wrote:
| So did we until the kids got old enough to have a say.
| Perhaps that is Disney's thinking, they've got the kids
| roped in and exhausted parents willing to spend.
| _nalply wrote:
| Wait till they make that loophole unpractical.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| A lot of the big titans in the streaming biz are already
| whinging about account sharing[0], so I wouldn't be
| surprised if they start complaining that people aren't
| "committed" enough to their streams as well, too.
|
| It'd be way easier to cut down on stream cycling than
| account sharing, too - just jack up the monthly price and
| make the annual price cheaper.
|
| [0] which is particularly rich because they sell multi-
| stream plans that are almost practically built for it
| slothtrop wrote:
| How?
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| The industry most likely shot themselfs in the money maker?
|
| Monday morning 2008, "Hay Joe-- I saw the new Hellraiser 2. It
| was great! I got it on Pirate Bay. The quality was just ok
| though, and I wish I saw it on a big screen."
|
| Two weeks later Joe is planning his friday night. I'll call
| Ingrid, and take her to that new vegetetarian restaurant, and
| maybe she will be condusive to Hellmaker 2? On the big screen?
|
| Hollywood just made money off free adverting.
|
| (Lars Ulrich is in the front row of the theater crying. His date
| is a snare drum with two drumb sticks jabbed through the skin.
| He's nervously rubbing Minoxidill into his forehead. I--should--
| have--a--date? I'm but a famous rocktwat? "But Governor--they be
| taking my money? Cry, cry,cry. I couldn't let them take me
| money?"
| bshepard wrote:
| Here, from one of the founders of Ordoliberalism, is a
| consideration that is useful to keep in mind when reflecting on
| intellectual property: "Anbieter und Nachfrager suchen stets - wo
| immer es moglich ist - Konkurrenz zu vermeiden und
| monopolistische Stellungen zu erwerben oder zu
| behaupten"....."Suppliers and buyers always seek - wherever
| possible - to avoid competition and to acquire or maintain
| monopoly positions" - Walter Eucken
| dredmorbius wrote:
| It strikes me that the goal being sought here appears to be far
| less profit maximisation and far more market dominance.
|
| Economic theory is mistaken in presuming profit is the
| principle driver, power is. Profit is merely one means to
| power.
| pinum wrote:
| I recently watched Arcane using the Netflix Win10 app. The A/V
| sync was off by enough to noticeably break lipsync, the episode
| listing was broken (only the first few were shown, but I could
| still watch the rest by allowing it to autoplay the next one),
| and the splash images shown while each steam started often served
| as spoilers for the episode that was about to play.
|
| I would've had a much better experience if I'd just went to
| thepiratebay and sought out nine MKV files instead.
| authed wrote:
| I pay for Netflix but I don't use it to watch episodes....
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| I would agree with any streaming service. My main gripe is
| that if my network connection weakens and the streaming
| quality dips then a lot of stuff isn't worth watching
| (especially in the age where everything is "visually
| stunning"). I can't let it buffer or watch it later on a lot
| of services. I just have to tolerate a lower quality
| stream... no thanks, I'll watch it elsewhere away from your
| terrible drm experience.
| progbits wrote:
| I've given up on offline Netflix access after the third time
| the content I downloaded before a plane/train/... trip refused
| to play once I left wifi. It always said it expired due to
| changed region or something silly.
|
| Now I just torrent things and play them in VLC. Same or better
| quality, no buffering, custom subtitle size if I want. And 100%
| reliable.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| For me it's how you quickly reach the download "limit".
| Especially annoying when my kids can't put all the shows he
| might want to listen to during a road trip..
| bsedlm wrote:
| It reminiscent of when I bought a blu-ray and I couldn't watch
| them because of DRM; as I had already downloaded that show I
| didn't really care, but those disks are pure waste.
|
| Now that I think about it, the physical disks feel like real-
| world NFTs.
| stelonix wrote:
| That's how I do it: download first, if it's worth it, buy it
| but never open or use it, just keep it as a token.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| and if you will be lucky, some of those (and games)
| unopened might be worth quite a bit 20-30 years down the
| line
| stelonix wrote:
| Yeah, I already got my money back from old copies of SNES
| games. Newer games, I'm waiting some 10 years or so to
| sell. They don't take much space after all.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| People have been treating vinyl records as collectibles ever
| since music became pirate-able in the cassette era.
|
| I know many people who stream music 95% of the time, but have
| a big collection of their favorite albums on vinyl, some of
| them unopened, as a way to support the artist / a piece of
| art / keepsake / speculative long term investment, etc.
|
| Real-world NFT is a fun analogy.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| I still try to acquire blu-rays not because I actually want
| to collect them but because it provides an opportunity to get
| the best quality with minimal loss of my freedoms(no
| tracking, no BS with DRM restrictions, I can toss their
| online player where it belongs: in the trash).
|
| Once acquired, I then take the disc data and strip its own
| DRM off of it. Now I have the content with the absolute best
| quality and can just sit back and play it in my preferred
| player. Obviously this is a hassle compared to just clicking
| play on Netflix/buying online but I am still enjoying the
| ability while it lasts. After all, with declining sales of
| Blu-ray and 4K UHD Blu-Ray seeming like its a bust, there are
| probably only a few years left until we lose this avenue of
| control of our media.
| ksrm wrote:
| How do you strip the DRM, is there a FOSS tool for this?
| nebula8804 wrote:
| So there are some drives that allow you to install custom
| firmware called LibreDrive on them that bypasses the
| security checks. You can then use a tool called MakeMKV
| to rip the video streams into an MKV container. What is
| beautiful about this approach is that you can take the
| whole movie, all the subtitles, audio streams, different
| angles and dump it into a single file untouched(no re-
| encoding) and then operate it like a DVD player but using
| your native software's controls which is so much better
| than relying on the DVD menus.
|
| The MakeMKV Forums will get you started on the best
| drives/proper techniques.
| bananamerica wrote:
| Why not use the website?
| hjadal wrote:
| Afaik the resolution is lower and some audio features are not
| supported in most browsers. It is only Microsoft Edge on
| Windows and Safari on Mac that supports 4k,
| https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444.
| p_l wrote:
| It's DRM requirement
| isiahl wrote:
| The website doesn't deliver 1080p video in any browser but
| Edge (and this may have changed with Edge being switched to
| Chromium)
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > The website doesn't deliver 1080p video in any browser
| but Edge
|
| I'm pretty sure I watch HD Netflix in Safari. Surely I
| can't be watching 720p and be deceiving myself?
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| Safari on Mac OS can do 4k. Chrome will top out at 720p.
|
| You can check for yourself, hit Ctrl-Alt-Shift-D during
| playback to show a bunch of stats on the stream,
| including the current resolution being shown.
| y4mi wrote:
| HD starts at 720p.
|
| The difference between Netflix 1080 and 720p is often
| pretty small, so you might've really just not noticed.
| They're generally streaming with pretty poor bit-rates
|
| The first time I watched a pirated episode after years of
| streaming from Netflix was pretty eye opening for me wrt
| video quality.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| You're definitely mistaken - you get up to 4K in the
| browser with Safari - it's highlighted in the UI even I
| think.
| y4mi wrote:
| It's great if it does, not sure how that makes me
| mistaken though. I never said anything about what was
| actually supported.
|
| My point was that the pixel density is pretty hard to
| determine with low Bitrate streams as you get them from
| Netflix.
| endless1234 wrote:
| Safari is up to 4k on macOS 11+, as per
| https://help.netflix.com/en/node/55764
| moffkalast wrote:
| Chrome works in 1080p, but has a 1 in something chance of
| crashing your graphics driver for some reason. After I had
| to force restart my pc from a black screen for the 3rd time
| I eventually moved the the desktop app which doesn't have
| those problems.
| pinum wrote:
| The last time I checked, the web version was limited to 720p.
| Although I guess that might have been better than broken
| lipsync.
|
| While I'm on the subject... about a year ago I tried
| subscribing to the 4K plan, since I bought a 4K monitor.
| Netflix only played in 4K if I used an HDMI cable, not
| DisplayPort, and only if I completely unplugged my secondary
| 1440p monitor (turning it off wasn't enough).
| c0balt wrote:
| That sounds more like your external driver (PC or some Box)
| or your monitor didn't share a supported Displayport
| Version that supported 4k60 and the HDMI interfaces did.
| Might've also been the calbe but display-standard supports
| often sucks on many devices in that regard for higher-level
| standards.
| dijit wrote:
| No, Netflix uses 720p when it can't detect DRM and HDCP
| on HDMI. It's the default case for Linux for this reason.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Which is hilarious given the pirates have been able to
| rip full 4k streams from Netflix no problem. Just another
| case of DRM hurting the end users and doing nothing to
| stop piracy.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| SO, I am watching netflix in 720p on my linux laptop ?
|
| How do I check that ?
|
| https://cd-rw.org/t/how-to-enable-netflix-full-
| hd-1080p-on-l... Ah, there's an extension.
|
| edit: https://www.netflix.com/fi-en/title/80018499 Aaand
| I have been watching 720p... :D.
| manderley wrote:
| Netflix is limited to 720p if you use anything but Edge
| or the Store App on Windows for arbitrary DRM reasons
| (PlayReady DRM).
| pinum wrote:
| It turned out my monitor supported HDCP 2.2 over HDMI but
| not DP (edit: and Netflix requires that all connected
| monitors support 2.2, not just the one you're trying to
| watch the video on.)
|
| I would maybe understand enforcing that requirement if it
| was effective in protecting the content, but it isn't. 4K
| content (from UHD blurays and various streaming services)
| is widely available to pirate, and VLC doesn't care what
| kind of cable you're using.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > I would maybe understand enforcing that requirement if
| it was effective in protecting the content, but it isn't.
| 4K content (from UHD blurays and various streaming
| services) is widely available to pirate, and VLC doesn't
| care what kind of cable you're using.
|
| Speculation on my part but I wouldn't be surprised if
| those kinds of requirements are mainly there to appease
| motion picture industry partners who Netflix is licensing
| content from.
|
| Furthermore, given the long experience the people of the
| release groups in the piracy scene have in fine tuning
| video codec parameters for optimal balance between
| quality and file size, and choosing video codecs that can
| be decoded on a wide range of devices, I think it is
| highly probable that many of the people working on the
| technical side of these things at Netflix have had roles
| in various piracy release groups prior to having come to
| work for Netflix.
|
| Not saying Netflix would actively seek out piracy release
| group members to hire them. In fact it'd probably count
| as negative to openly state any kind of involvement with
| the piracy scene, and especially to mention having been
| part of a release group. What I mean is just that the
| people who were members of these groups have both the
| skills and the technical motivation to work on these same
| kinds of things for Netflix.
| drdaeman wrote:
| > I wouldn't be surprised if those kinds of requirements
| are mainly there to appease motion picture industry
| partners
|
| And those partners require it not because it protects
| something but because they make money of it by running
| licensing agencies, so they profit from every compliant
| monitor and video card sold.
| Xelbair wrote:
| >Speculation on my part but I wouldn't be surprised if
| those kinds of requirements are mainly there to appease
| motion picture industry partners who Netflix is licensing
| content from.
|
| Quite likely, but why I, the end user, would ever care
| about that?
|
| it just degrades my experience.
| ewindal wrote:
| I shouldn't need a 4k monitor to watch at a better
| quality than 720p. The only reason I use Edge these days
| is because that idiotic (and purposeful) limitation isn't
| present there (for some reason).
| vbernat wrote:
| More likely, this is because the DP didn't support HDCP
| (which requires a dedicated license while the DP port
| does not). I suppose the HDCP license cannot be shared
| between HDMI and DP.
| p_l wrote:
| If any portion of "secure-from-user" display chain gets
| broken, including nerfing intel ME, Widevine won't
| provide higher support than IIRC "Level 1" and Netflix
| (and other streaming websites) won't provide anything
| above 720p.
|
| Of course forget about it on anything other than windows
| (maybe mac?)
| grujicd wrote:
| Netflix/HBO in browser AFAIK doesn't have 5.1 audio, just
| stereo. That's the main reason I download "unofficial"
| content while still paying for these two services for
| kids/wife to watch or for shows where surround sound doesn't
| matter. The other reason is subtitles.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's been fun watching the Trek fandom take a flying leap onto
| Pirate Bay in response to Paramount pulling the Trek content from
| Netflix internationally without offering Paramount+ in all those
| markets.
|
| ... And not just international viewers. US viewers with existing
| Paramount+ accounts started pirating Discovery in solidarity.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Title shortened from: "The film industry effectively solved the
| problem of unauthorised downloads; now it is "unsolving" it..."
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| Once they solve the terrible quality that streaming is sure. If
| you have invested into your audio/video setup (9.2 surround)
| streaming offers terrible bitrates (especially audio).
|
| Netflix is terrible for your home cinema - it means their shows
| will not come out on BluRay.
| jetrink wrote:
| In our case (two person household), it makes much more sense to
| pay $4 to rent movies individually. We watch about four movies
| per month, so this gives us access to virtually every movie ever
| at a cost equivalent to a Netflix subscription. In addition, it
| greatly cuts down on the effort that it takes to find a movie
| that we're both interested in seeing. TV is different, because
| the cost of renting a season is still insane. I think the real
| value in subscribing to streaming services right now is the TV
| shows.
| Oddskar wrote:
| And it would make even more sense to just pay for a VPN
| subscription, since they're cheaper than $4 per month.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Ye subscription streaming are no way competitive with rentals
| for most people. Unless you want to watch some series on
| Netflix, the price is just too high for what you get. It is
| like going on a buffet - you think there is value for the money
| but you don't eat enough more to justify the price.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Where do you normally rent?
| pedrocr wrote:
| Device restrictions are even worse than there being too many
| services. Netflix is still limited to 720p even when used with
| Chrome on Windows. When running Linux there's no option to get
| even 1080p let alone 4K. These companies build their backends on
| these platforms, try to drum up popular support for net
| neutrality, and then screw everyone on device neutrality. No
| wonder downloading an actual file usable everywhere becomes
| popular again.
| progbits wrote:
| They also refuse to buffer properly. Tiny latency spike or
| brief packet loss? Enjoy 480p video for the next minute or so
| because it downgraded automatically and there is no way to
| force it back.
| dylan604 wrote:
| That's the beauty of HLS/DASH. Rather than just flat out
| stopping a la RealPlayer, they allow the video to continue
| until your network gets its act together. How is it the
| provider's fault if your network takes a dump for a bit?
| progbits wrote:
| This would make sense for a live stream. But we are talking
| Netflix movies here.
|
| If my network can maintain more bandwidth than needed for
| 1080p/4k most of the time (which it can) then there is no
| reason it should ever fall back to lower quality due to a
| short blip because you can keep several seconds (or
| minutes) of buffer.
|
| For example I never have this problem on Youtube. Only
| Netflix.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| MY network is plenty fast. I have 1gb down.
|
| If they can't make it work with 1/10th of that, that is
| their problem, not mine.
| dylan604 wrote:
| We know that having bandwidth does not mean you get full
| use of that bandwidth. Even using AWS CLI to download
| large content from an S3 bucket does not saturate my
| 1Gbps line. There are all sorts of places in a network to
| prevent you from using the full bandwidth, namely your
| ISP. To that point, I would not be shocked one bit to
| find that your ISP is playing with data from Netflix.
| Hell, mobile carriers tell you they are doing it.
| the8472 wrote:
| Just another reason why people might prefer bittorrent
| then if it can saturate the line and the netflix player
| can't.
| MrStonedOne wrote:
| I would prefer it would stop rather then downgrade to
| something unwatchable.
|
| I would _more_ prefer it would buffer more so it doesn 't
| need to do either.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Supporting 4K to a limited list of known hardware like AppleTV
| 4K, Roku, etc is much easier than trying to imagine the endless
| possibilities of what ever frankenputer you've assembled
| running whatever distro you've chosen while using whatever
| excuse of a driver you've managed to install for your hardware.
| Now mutltiply that across the larger number of windows users.
|
| I can't imagine why they've chosen the path they have /s
| TheCoreh wrote:
| Limiting 4K to specific configurations is a DRM decision, not
| a video quality decision. There's nothing special about 4K
| video: it's typically encoded in the same codecs as videos in
| lower resolutions (H264, H265, VP9) and basically any modern
| device can play it without a problem. I never had any issues
| with 4K YouTube videos on Linux or Windows, regardless of
| configuration/driver.
|
| I think what they're trying to avoid is people
| capturing/copying the 4K stream, that's high quality enough
| to be considered a "master", and distributing it. IMO it's a
| pointless thing to do because dedicated piracy groups will
| quickly figure out ways to do that anyway, and it makes the
| average user experience worse. However, they are probably
| contractually obligated to do so.
| progbits wrote:
| Supporting every hardware under the sun is as simple as
| dumping an mp4/avi/... file.
|
| The reason they don't support high resolution is just DRM.
| They will happily deliver 4k video to your underpowered
| Windows machine which will lag and not play it properly, as
| long as it uses Widevine L1 or similar.
|
| You can argue if this makes sense or not [1], but let's not
| pretend they are doing this for some difficult engineering
| reasons.
|
| [1] This doesn't seem to stop pirates in any way so I can't
| see how it does.
| dbfx wrote:
| how is that significantly different from someone downloading
| several segmented 4k\1080 "clips" and running them? Youtube
| seems to be able to do it just fine.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| As I understand it, it has nothing to do with "will your
| hardware support it", it has to do with preventing people
| from saving the high quality stream to disk. Hence the reason
| they don't allow 1080p except on certain, locked down
| platforms. Pretty much every device/player in existence
| supports 1080p at this point, Netflix just won't allow it.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| That's funny because 4K Youtube works on all of my
| frankenputers! Actually the browser handles all the cross-
| platform complexity.
| Epitom3 wrote:
| r/iamverysmart
| strictfp wrote:
| Balkanization in the licensing models is the biggest problem for
| people outside of the US. There is a lot of media that I cannot
| buy digitally. Some of those I can buy in physical formats, and
| some I just straight up cannot buy. Period.
| JD557 wrote:
| One aspect of region locking that makes me very confused is
| dubbing.
|
| I just moved to Germany and a lot of movies in streaming
| services are only available in the German dub, not with the
| original voices... Why?
|
| I mean, I assume that for some reason the platforms just buy
| the rights for the dubbed version, but don't the subbed
| original versions also have a ton of demand (maybe more than
| the dubbed version)?
| _nalply wrote:
| Because Germans monumentally hate subtitles.
|
| I know that because I am Deaf and I would like to have
| subtitles even using German services, but they hate subtitles
| so much that they even won't have optional subtitles.
| Probably because some Hinterwaldler accidentally turned on
| subtitles and bogged down support by being livid and not
| listening to the simple solution of turning subtitles off.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| Another problem with streaming services is that their software is
| really bad.
|
| On the one hand there are obvious bugs:
|
| - Amazon Prime shows a cryptic DRM error on Windows and I have no
| idea how to fix it
|
| - Apple TV interface stutters and is close to unusable on a 2015
| Macbook Pro
|
| - Disney+ is unusable on a touch screen in Edge on Windows
| because trying to scroll titles left and right triggers
| back/forward navigation
|
| - Disney+ has a memory leak in Safari on Catalina that causes
| Safari to kill the tab after two hours or so
|
| - Netflix on Windows has poor A/V sync with Bluetooth headphones
| and no way to adjust it
|
| And then there's the usability issues. No streaming platform has
| good search or a simple list where I can look at what's
| available. They all just try to overwhelm you with thumbnails and
| hope you forgot what you searched for and just watch something
| else instead.
|
| I see why people still pirate stuff.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| Avatar: Bought 4 tickets in 2009, Bought DVD and BluRay version
| (that are still in my closet)
|
| Wanted to watch it last week in the background while I worked. $3
| everywhere.
|
| You got my money, I'll watch it when it's on TNT, or SyFy, or
| whatever on dish network.
|
| I'm not paying $3 to rent it again.
|
| This article is spot on. We pay for Prime (can't peel out the
| movies), We get HBOMax with our cellphone package(?), can't peel
| it out if we need tethering...pay for netflix and Disney+
|
| So I'm ALREADY paying, easily $135 a month. I'm done. You want me
| to go back to NOT paying that much, we can do without, because it
| doesn't feel like I'm getting nearly $5 a day in value out of
| it...
| btmiller wrote:
| While I'm in the doesn't-mind-paying-for-multiple-subscriptions
| camp, I do feel like we've been here already and it was super
| clear to see that once all content was natively digital that we'd
| regress back literally to what we already had with channel
| bundles over cable. Seems most likely to me that it's simply a
| newer generation of minds reencountering things the previous
| generation already experienced.
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| Url changed from https://walledculture.org/the-film-industry-
| effectively-solv..., which points to this.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I understand that in one sense, digital products can be
| infinitely reproduced, so it's not like someone is deprived of
| the product when it's pirated. What I can't reconcile is the
| entitlement that one _deserves_ to be able to view a specific
| movie or TV show. I 've often heard the argument that there's no
| harm done, because the pirate wouldn't pay to watch it anyway.
| Yet the only reason the show is there to pirate is because others
| _are_ willing to pay for the privilege of viewing it. If everyone
| took the "pirate" attitude, then there simply wouldn't be any
| shows to pirate. Now in reality that seems unlikely to actually
| transpire, so there likely is no harm done. But why does the
| pirate deserve to watch for free?
|
| We're not talking about access to food or clean water. If I had
| no legal way to obtain food, I'd steal it in a heartbeat. If I
| can't find a legal way to watch the latest uninspired Star Wars
| spin-off, I'm just not going to watch it and do something else.
| I'm all for civil disobedience when warranted, but I have a hard
| time justifying it for watching a TV show.
| howinteresting wrote:
| Culture is as much part of the human experience as food is. We
| should aspire towards the goal that all humans deserve to have
| access to our collective cultural output.
| prohobo wrote:
| They'd probably stop pirating if it caused film culture to
| collapse; whereas so far, the only agents currently destroying
| film culture are production/licensing companies like Disney.
| It's a social activity after all, and social currencies extend
| beyond money; ie. reputation, access and fairness.
|
| I'm not entirely well-versed in this, but from what I
| understand pirate money comes downstream from these social
| criteria. This is why certain platforms like Steam and Netflix
| work (or used to, in Netflix's case, while they still had a
| good reputation). Pirates have proven to be more than willing
| to pay for content when they consider it appropriate to do so
| (money going directly to the creator, superior access, etc.)
| Mindwipe wrote:
| The notion all AV content should be in one place strikes me as
| rather incongruous with the widespread opinion on HN that all
| text content trending to Facebook and Twitter rather than a
| million blogs has been a disaster.
|
| FWIW, I don't think all video should be on one service. I think
| that would be actively bad.
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