- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
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.
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Hmmmmm. Let’s see here.
People don’t like cable, because it’s too expensive and inconvenient
People start pirating
People like having 2-3 streaming services that show everything, without ads, for much cheaper even combined than cable. They stop pirating.
People don’t like having 20-30 streaming services that show only a little in each service, NOW WITH ADS!?!?! and that become MUCH more expensive than cable ever was.
People start pirating again…
I wonder what happened?!?!
Yeah, it’s reall not even about the prices. It’s just so inconvenient to go between all those apps, and then login forgot your password, rest, 2FA so i have to get up from my couch and grab my phone.
All these paid services could be totally free from a monetary perspective and I still wouldn’t sign back up for them. It’s a worse service than cable TV used to be at this point.
The thing that is killing me is Netflixs attempt to crack down on password sharing.
I share an account with a few family members. If I want to watch a program on Netflix, which my brother pays for, I have to call him up to get the unlock code. He has a newborn and sleeps weird hours.
I end up just pirating it myself.
“The more you tighten your grip big tech, the more users will slip through your fingers”
I believe it was Gabe Newell who said the best way to avoid piracy is by making legitimate purchasing easier and/or better.
In the early history of streaming services, you could get access to a lot of content in a straightforward way for not much money. People started doing that instead of pirating. The corporations got greedy, they made the services worse and increased the price to the point that piracy is preferable again.
And I don’t have the least amount of sympathy. Yarr matey.
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.
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.
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?!
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.
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!
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
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.
Enshittification. Every human who uses computers on a daily basis needs to understand this word.
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.
That plus actively removing older shows
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.
This fear is why I’m careful to maintain my old man MP3 and CD collection because I can’t fully trust a business.
Second, piracy is illegal
Not for me :)
It’s not illegal if you don’t get caught
what county?
Switzerland
If not, we can expect to see legal channels raising their prices again to cover the losses caused by piracy.
what a shitty take. Well, anyone who has better memory than only one month back can realize that the reason the people turned to piracy was that they raised their prices. There is no loss caused by piracy. They only missed potential gains. And the reason they raised their prices were not because they were loosing money. Was because they needed to “grow infinitely”. If the free market evangelists are right, the free market will self regulate and the prices will go down in order to attract back the lost customers lol
You’re missing the point, the article is wrong: it’s not about the prices.
enlighten me then
It’s about the service.
The shift really proves that Gabe Newell was right and that piracy is a service issue and that, for a time, the many services available were worth paying for.
I know a lot of people idolize him, and that’s probably not healthy, but he just gets it. Provide value and convenience for consumers, and consumers will stick around. Be an inconvenience while squeezing consumers for money, and we’ll leave with a parrot on our shoulders and a one-finger salute.
That’s what happens when you’re not beholden to shareholders.
Sadly most companies are focused on short term profit over long term growth, Steam is the best example of the opposite.
The article wonders why would anyone pirate, let us give him the reason:
- Ads
- Multiple streaming services costing many times more than food. With nothing to see except for re runs and rehashes of old content.
- Ads
- Rising prices for poor service and shit content.
- Ads
- Geoblocking
- Ads
- Low quality videos even if you are willing to pay just because you don’t wish to use their specified player or browser. Why can’t I stream it to VLC player without the overhead of a browser.
- Ads
- All the while the CEO and the executive of the companies raking in billions on the money they are saying charging us for the artists.
I forgot to add
- Removing content when it is not making enough money.
- Ads
- Editing exsting content with no warning or notice (for whatever reason- political correctness or losing the soundtrack license doesn’t matter why)
- Ads.
Also wanna add:
- Missing subtitles in the language you want (looking at you apple tv without English subtitles on local language movies.)
- Ads
- Only the 2 random seasons in the middle of a TV show are available. And new seasons not added.
- Ads
As a person who loves watching movies with subtitles, this is why I’m canceling Amazon Prime. The fuckers literally won’t offer me English language subtitles for some flicks because I Iive outside the US.
I don’t care if the movie itself is in English, why the hell can’t I watch with subtitles in the same language as the film itself? Holy fuck.
why the hell can’t I watch with subtitles in the same language as the film itself? Holy fuck.
Probably because the subtitles have their own copyright separate from the film itself and Amazon likely doesn’t have the license to the English subtitles outside of the USA. It wouldn’t surprise me, music lyrics have their own separate copyright from the recording after all.
The copyright system is the biggest problem here. It simply isn’t fit for purpose in the digital age, unless that purpose was to benefit a handful of legacy mega corps while harming independent content creators and stifling culture across the globe.
Is a lobotomy needed to become a lobbyist?
1.) Article claims w/o any kind of source/data, that people cannot afford subscriptions 2.) Article warns that the big services have to raise their prices soon, because of losses made by piracy, which according to 1.) is caused by people not having enough money for the subscriptions
The article doesn’t mention the shareholders, which get billions of wins by milking the subscribers stupid enough to sign up for the bullshit. … oh, but the article mentions the poor artists/working people, which loose money because of online piracy. I almost forgot about the recent strikes, because the people actually producing the content don’t get shit from the companies/shareholders.
Seriously, I’ll cancel my last subscription right now, because I am feed up giving my money to shareholders, companies and lobbies who buy politicians and laws.
Who knew that that whole time, “that” place was the internet.
The EUIPO speculates that financial pressures, like inflation, means that people have less money to spend on entertainment. This can be seen in the way that fewer people are signing up for Netflix or Amazon Prime – and some are even cancelling their subscriptions altogether.
Ah yes, that’s the only reason. Not that streaming services are offering less content and functionality for more money, that can’t be it.
I’m sure that economics is part of it. But I think the larger issue is the fact that you need 9 streaming services now just to see the shows you’d want. And then these streaming services are starting to remove the things people paid for. I set up a Plex server and just use that to watch things now.
Corporations don’t want competition, they want monopolies. If the good they are selling is in unlimited supply, like music or shows in digital formats are, they create artificial scarcity through exclusivity deals.
I’m planning to make a seedbox with AirVPN running 24/7 on a Pi. I’ve been a big leecher for a while now and I want to give back to the community. Fuck streaming services, if I can’t own the product after I bought then it’s not worth buying.
It’s worth noting that although piracy is up, the rates are still far lower than they were 20, 10 or even five years ago. Whether people continue to access content illegally remains to be seen – hopefully this is just a ‘blip’ and rates of theft begin to fall again as the economy recovers.
I can’t be bothered to pull back all the layers of naive optimism in just these two sentences.
Guess what’s also been increasing? Prices.
Guess what also has refused to go up? Wages
It’s not just streaming services that have turned to shit. Society as a whole has been enshittified because shareholders and directors are chasing the dollar.
Reddit started charging out of their butt for API access, and had killed off 95% of third party apps in the process.
YouTube is downright unusable without a Premium subscription or uBlock Origin. Every content creator meanwhile risks demonetization if their videos are too kid-friendly or too inappropriate, and now have to fill half their videos with endorsements for shitty mobile games like Raid: Shadow Legends if they want to break even.
Porn sites are now astroturfed by e-girls shilling their $20/month OnlyFans pages.
Online dating apps are now a carbon copy of one another, are owned by an oligopoly of big corporations and charge you the same price of four WoW subscriptions for basic features like unlimited swipes, seeing who liked you, etc.
Even real life sucks now. Enjoy paying 70% of your monthly income to pay off some filthy rich landlord’s mortgage while the rich continue to snap up properties, all while the wealthy continue to brainwash sheep into voting against their best interests.
It’s almost like making it nearly impossible to watch what we want and, at the same time, octupling our bills, while also increasing the cost of each would, somehow, force people into the desperation of piracy. Huh. Who woulda thunk it.
