The pirates are back - Anew study from the European Union’s Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) suggest that online piracy has increased for the first time in years. In fact, piracy rates have bee…::We analyze a new study where the EUIPO suggests online piracy is on the increase within the European Union.

  • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    11 months ago

    Love how it doesn’t mention the fact that services are getting objectively worse content as they stretch thin, are increasing their prices across the board, and cracking down on password sharing which was previously touted as a benefit.

    • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org
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      11 months ago

      The anti-piracy measures drive me to piracy, personally. There’s no technical reason I shouldn’t be able to stream 4K in Firefox, but Netflix won’t let me. I have to jump through hoops just to get 1080p, even. Same with most other services. I pirate shit I’m already paying for.

      • vithigar@lemmy.ca
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        11 months ago

        Have done this several times for content on Disney+. I have an ultrawide, HDR1000 display. The movie I’m trying to watch is in 21:9 and available in HDR. Why in God’s name are you delivering it in SDR and in a letterboxed 16:9 which is in turn pillarboxed on my display?!

        • AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml
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          11 months ago

          Also none of the apps have any kind of audio equalizer or range compression, so if you don’t have an audio receiver then you’re doomed to constantly turning up the volume for spoken sections. Absolute minimum viable product garbage.

          • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org
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            11 months ago

            For sure. Why should I suffer umpteen different video interfaces designed by separate entities who aren’t really in the business of designing highly functional video interfaces? I’d much rather play everything in mpv, which I can configure exactly the way I like it. I can adjust brightness and contrast, set up specific keyboard/mouse controls, adjust subtitle font/size/color/style/location, and I can even enable motion interpolation if I want to. I can fix those stupid hardcoded letterboxes with a keystroke. I can monomize or normalize audio. That’s because mpv’s entire reason to exist is to be a highly functional video player, and it’s open and extensible.

            Fuck your proprietary bare-minimum video interfaces. Even YouTube lags like 5-10 years behind the state of the art for video players, and most other services lag years behind YouTube.

            Do one thing and do it well!

            • AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml
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              11 months ago

              Fully agree. Shit makes me so mad.

              It’s the same reason most car infotainment centers are awful. They aren’t software companies so their software sucks

        • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          11 months ago

          This so much. I’m lucky enough to be able to afford enough streaming services to cover the majority of what I want to watch (although that’s changing for the worse over time). I just want to pipe them all through Kodi or some other software into a unified interface that is media source agnostic, that can also stream the content in the best quality available for my screen.

          At that point the content is already paid for, I don’t need to use your own individual reinvention of the interface that inevitably focuses on pushing uninteresting content instead of making it as easy as possible to continue what I’ve already started watching or to find what I want.

    • Boozilla@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Exactly. There’s too many platforms, not enough quality content on any one of them, and weaponized greed. Worse, these streaming services have “inspired” every asshole executive out there to make everything under the sun a subscription model.

    • jonne@infosec.pub
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      11 months ago

      Yep, the only thing I still pay for is Spotify, and as soon as they start carving up music into different exclusivity contracts I’ll go back to piracy for that as well. I’m willing to pay $10-$20/month for one streaming service, but they want you to spend like $200 on services you don’t even end up watching.

      It’s just greed, the way the streaming executives talked during the writers strike showed that. You could easily find an equilibrium that works for content creators and consumers, but the middlemen just want too much.

      • henfredemars@infosec.pub
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        11 months ago

        This fear is why I’m careful to maintain my old man MP3 and CD collection because I can’t fully trust a business.