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.
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.
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.
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?!
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.
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
I wonder how many Youtube users today ever used it when it used quicktime player, you could actually pause and buffer the entire video, it wouldn’t ever jump into an ad, it was the glory days. Aside from the fact it took a few minutes to load at times ahah.
Yeah, honestly same. There isn’t much I’m not already paying for, but being able to watch it all in one app (Stremio) is so much nicer.
The push for more money, and no more password sharing, is just making me think more about cutting those services, but that wouldn’t stop me watching.
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.
Or vanish.
Google play music merged into YouTube music.
I already had a Plex server so I just rolled.my.own music server.
And then with the emergence of plexamp… I don’t need a streaming music service now.
This fear is why I’m careful to maintain my old man MP3 and CD collection because I can’t fully trust a business.
I think streaming music will be good for awhile at least, somehow, the fucking music industry got it right with streaming (At least on the consumer side, the artist side has been in trouble for some time now (esp with Spotify)). Most big services have most things and a handful of niche services to handle the gaps for the most part.
Xbox Game Pass otoh for Games is a wildcard, who knows where that shits going to end up lmfao people should get in on it now while it’s still good lol
I mean, they’re already doing exclusivity contracts for podcasts (eg. Joe Rogan on Spotify only), it’s going to be a small leap to go to artists being exclusively on one service, and before you know the labels will all start their own streaming service, so you have to have different apps for Sony BMG artists, another app for indie artists, etc.
The enshittification is mostly pushed by wall street, who want instant bigger profits, and they’re happy to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs in the process. Spotify is not immune to those pressures.
That plus actively removing older shows
No new ones…
Star Trek prodigy
People aren’t also willing to spend as much on Oreo’s due to inflation so it’s also probably that if theres a game or movie everyone’s playing, sailing the seven seas is tried and true…and free.
Exactly. That’s when I went back to the seas. My family across 2 states uses Netflix and I already paid for the $20/month high tier. When they told my sister that it wasn’t about to be more expensive, I put my foot down and said I’m gonna setup a plex/overseer box on my on PC. It’s been working mostly alright.
Weird thing to love but you do you
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.
And that’s only talking about streaming.
Everyone wants to be Netflix now: Microsoft Office? Monthly subscription. Adobe? Monthly subscription. A simple weather app? Monthly subscription. Cloud backup? Monthly subscription.
Fair enough for cloud storage as it costs real money to keep rust spinning. The rest not so much.
Yes, kinda. But take Windows for instance - the native backup tools got deprecated and are pretty much hidden, the systems constantly wants the user to use OneDrive.
So yes, it makes sense to pay for cloud storage - but many people didn’t even need it before, and now it’s another new expense.
eh, everyone should be using some form of cloud backup, with the small exception of like people with extreme privacy needs, and even then you have to get to a fraction of a fraction before the answer isn’t encrypted cloud backups.
That said, Win11 basically turning into an ad platform is gross as hell.
I think with quite a lot of software, monthly subs are really the best way to do it, and I think if you look at the history of things software is cheaper than it’s ever been. Aside from the obvious things that just cost monthly money to operate (cloud storage, even weather apps don’t keep working without servers) the reality is that we expect software to stay up to date and keep getting better. Aside from the fact that prior to sub fees for this type of software, the “one time” purchase cost used to be several orders of magnitude higher, and you would still basically end up “subscribing.” Meaning, you didn’t just buy Office in '95 for $300-$500 and keep using it until even 2005. MS would change a file format or upgrade a thing or something, and suddenly your $400 Office suite needed an upgrade, so you paid another $400 in '97.
People have never liked paying for software, but I think this is the most equitable, true model of the actual cost. I like it less with the bigger companies, but especially with smaller devs, the software I rely on I’m happy to pay a monthly sub on because I know that’s a much more stable model and will encourage the dev to keep the software up to date and releasing new features.
I think perpetual fallback licenses hit a decent middle ground. Pay a subscription to stay up to date, but have the option of stopping and retaining the current version. Of course, FOSS is better, but we have to take what we can get.
This is a good point.
I like how my music DAW (bitwig) does it. You buy your lifetime license with one year of updates. After the year is up you keep the latest version you have and it keeps working “forever”. If you decide you want another year of updates you get a discount. I usually don’t need new functions so I let it lapse, I bought the updates once because there was a function I wanted.
we expect software to stay up to date and keep getting better.
Well, we’ve been conditioned to expect that… Just because that’s how it’s been doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. It made sense in the past, applications were limited by the hardware’s technical capabilities, which kept improving over time - but we’ve reached a point where for the most part, the hardware is good enough to meet the needs of the software. That’s not saying it won’t continue to improve, but it’s not the limiting factor it once was. At some point, at least in theory, a product should be able to be “finished”, as in it has all the features it needs, possible exploits have been found and patched. Compare to buying tools - you don’t need to buy a new hammer every two years, well, maybe you do if you abuse the shit out of it and break it, but you don’t need to because of ongoing development in the techniques of building hammers.
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.
As someone that went initially got back into piracy for the “no you just raised your prices for this one service I only use for this one show anyway, I’ll download it instead” reason. I have significantly increased my piracy because it’s honestly a much better user experience. For me to easily set sonarr/radarr to grab what I want and have a beautiful and customizable UI/UX like jellyfin to consume that content, which works on all my devices. Fucking Hulu, Disney, Amazon, peacock, max all suck in comparison from a pure UX perspective
Netflix has +9 million users in the past quarter
That’s not enough growth. It’s never enough. It literally can’t ever be enough.
So they raise prices and pay for astroturfed articles blaming everything but the executives charged with infinite growth forever.
First thing that came to mind. I want to see back to back to back quarters of falling subscribers
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.
Yep. Stop making shit deals and 100 different services to subscribe to and people will go back to paying for things. Gaben is the only smart one.
Until this month I paid more than $100 for multiple streaming services. I finally got pissed off when something I wanted to watch was no longer available. Instead I went and torrented it and canceled 90% of the services. It’s time to go back to self streaming everything.
Welcome back
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.
Let’s not forget random pulling of content so that you can never tell if what you want is actually on any given service at any given time. This was the final straw that led me to rebuilding my own media collection.
I 100% believe this. The video streamers are getting too greedy and pushing out too much subpar content. When it was affordable and easy to find what you want streaming was great. Now it’s expensive and stuff in on 12 different platforms.
Also most of what I watch is older so everyone on the creative and production side has been paid the only ones making money at this point are the studio fat cats.
Ads. It’s all because of ads. There is a low tolerance by way more people now, and piracy is more convenient than putting up with platforms that can’t build a UX to save their lives, and then put in ads. Fuck em, let them die.
I disagree in that I don’t necessarily think all of the content is subpar. But making everything on a different service and each service continues to jack up its prices makes it very difficult to justify subscribing to any one of them. Like, I’m never gonna subscribe to peacock even though it has a few things I’d watch on it, that’s ridiculous.
Everything doesn’t have to be a different service, studios are just being extraordinarily greedy.
There’s a bizarre parallel to picking a hospital in America while you’re unconscious in a merc ambulance.
Imagine country where whereever ambulance brings you everything will be 100% covered by national insurance.
Wow that wording, trying to make pirating sound like an evil crime lol. I feel no moral negativity pirating. In fact, my conscience is clean and I feel morally obligated to, considering how expensive they are making services.
I think reading between the lines is the real story: when they get greedy, pirating puts them I check and causes pricing to become affordable and people stop pirating. Once people are not pirating, greed increases and pirates have to return to put them in place again.
In conclusion… we need pirates to balance things out, this pirating is a necessity in our modern age…
You are welcome everyone, I am doing my part for myself and I am doing my part for you.
Another reason why piracy is needed is to prevent pieces of culture from being erased from history to satisfy some perverse corporate accounting requirements.
Fucking rights
They call “refusing to be exploited” piracy. Generally industries where there are huge monopolies like media, groceries, and other such thing are most sensitive to this because they lack the ability to deal with outside pressures any more.
Vilifying people fighting back is the cheapest way to manage this.
I’m kinda looking forward to seeing what replaces things like Netflix and Spotify
Yeah it should be interesting. I’m also looking forward to see what new trackers come into relevance as the userbase increases.
Redacted as the only viable music tracker is a real shame. Just like everything else, we need more options not less.
My 🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️ brother
Companies are stealing from you every single day of your life from the second you’re born to the moment you die.
No harm in returning the favor.
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.
And Steam is a show of success
It’s funny because I pirate everything… except PC games. Because it’s so cheap and convenient on steam to just buy them, I like the tracked achievements thing and comparing to friends, and I can play the games on any PC or my steam deck with a quick login and install. I can easily download and install PC games from my private trackers but steam is just so easy and cheap. If movies and TV were as convenient and affordable as steam I wouldn’t pirate any of it. But as it stands, I’d have to pay over $200 a month just to have access to all the streaming services that have shows that I like. Fuck that noise. Someone needs to make a version of Steam for media. Kind of like Vudu but less crappy. Just let me pay a few bucks to own a series or a movie, have lots of good sales and deals, let me access the content on all platforms easily, and I would definitely start building a library over time like I’ve done with steam.
edit: I still do pirate games on PC sometimes just to try them, but usually end up buying on steam because it works better and it can be played on multiple devices easily.
And now that I switched to Linux, Steam releases Proton, like If I needed another reason to only get my games from them.
deleted by creator
Almost all games these days have a requirement to be online to play them, even in single player, and are absolutely ridden with DRM, sometimes even to the extent that it installs rootkits like in the case of Uplay and Valorant. By not voting with your wallet and pirating it yourself, you’re doing yourself and the community at large a disservice. ^♪
edit because they deleted:
“Poopkins” wrote
Almost all games these days have a requirement to be online to play them, even in single player, and are absolutely ridden with DRM, sometimes even to the extent that it installs rootkits like in the case of Uplay and Valorant. By not voting with your wallet and pirating it yourself, you’re doing yourself and the community at large a disservice. ^
And I replied
Okay then. I guess you didn’t even fucking read what I wrote.
deleted by creator
Nothing of what you wrote related to my comment, which wasn’t deleted—after all, you replied to it. I guess you didn’t read what I wrote.
With the advent of self hosted streaming services and the arr services the option is even easier now. If 1 in 20 ppl are motivated/tech savvy that’s 20 streaming products not being paid for.
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.
I’m not disagreeing with you—the conclusion these services have taken are indeed not logical ones based on historical trends—but I’m curious how you know these services didn’t need to raise the fees? Why have you assumed that it’s to “grow infinitely”?
From my understanding, almost all streaming video providers except Netflix have been operating on a loss. That can only be sustained for so long before the parent company will need to see it begin to generate a positive revenue stream. The most straightforward way to do that is to increase subscription fees. Furthermore, the number of subscribers of Paramount+, MGM+ or even Disney+ is certainly not trending towards “infinite growth.”
I’m not justifying anything, because with five monthly services that have been hiking prices I’m looking at what to slash myself, but I was eager to encourage a bit more discourse on this topic.
That can only be sustained for so long before the parent company will need to see it begin to generate a positive revenue stream. The most straightforward way to do that is to increase subscription fees. Furthermore, the number of subscribers of Paramount+, MGM+ or even Disney+ is certainly not trending towards “infinite growth.”
then their model is flawed. They sell something at loss in order to attract customers because they know that if they sell it at higher profit margins customers will not come. Customers are willing to buy it as long as it is in a price that they are willing to compromise at. So, when they raise their prices, customers realize that now it is above the price they are willing to pay and step out. Their model is based on hoping that the customers will forget or be bored to cancel a subscription that they cannot afford anymore. However it is a subscription that they wouldn’t had been willing to buy in this price in the first place.
So, their initial market share and adoption rate was what it was because of the price of the subscription and the rate of price/value-of-product. Customers are not willing to pay double price and they wouldn’t had paid it in the first place. They are not loosing customers. They are not loosing potential profit. They are basing their numbers in a faked artificial audience that opted in only because it was a good deal in the initial price.
And while the free market evangelists would argue that the market would self regulate, you know what will they in reality do? Ask the government for stricter enforcement of anti-piracy laws because huge loss . Loss based on nothing but their imagination of imaginative potential profit based on “if everyone was continuing buying our product with the same adoption rate we would had X billions. So since we don’t have X billions, this is a loss”. Great math skills and applying of logic.
There are certainly consumers out there with this kind of mentality, but it’s a common sales strategy to lure new customers with a reduced subscription fee for the first months only. It evidently works, because businesses have been doing this long before SVOD services, or even the internet for that matter, existed.
I expect that indeed, a significant number of customers cannot be bothered to cancel a subscription once they begin to use it, or, put another way, perceive the value of it to be justified against the increased price. I don’t think it’s fair to call this a fake audience, because these are real users of which a certain percentage will be retained.
Another factor that probably weighs into this is the competitive race to the bottom among the many SVOD offerings that are available today. Users like you and me perceive a certain dollar amount as the maximum that we are willing to pay, but where does that figure come from? If you are a new player in this space, you are effectively capped to the current market price for subscription fees, whether or not that covers your costs.
The free market effect will gradually resolve this as services that are all currently operating at a loss will correct their price models, which is what I believe is currently happening.
There are certainly consumers out there with this kind of mentality, but it’s a common sales strategy to lure new customers with a reduced subscription fee for the first months only. It evidently works, because businesses have been doing this long before SVOD services, or even the internet for that matter, existed.
Your claim that this is a tactic happening since for ever doesn’t take into account the differences between subscription model and traditional businesses. In traditional businesses, yes, a business may decrease the prices in order to lure customers, but this was never their business model. This was limited time “get to know us”. I don’t think there was for example any supermarket operating at loss for 5 years before they decide to “ok, lets put the real prices on the shelves now”.
I don’t think it’s fair to call this a fake audience, because these are real users of which a certain percentage will be retained.
of course it is a fake audience. The fact that some users will be retained doesn’t make the 100% of the audience real. And also by fake audience it doesn’t necessarily mean that the whole 100% of the audience is fake. However, when they present their numbers, and they claim that “because of piracy we lost 5 million subscribers” this is based on the 5 million subscribers who potentially would never be subscribers if they had their “real” price upfront, instead of a price in which they operate at loss.
However, when people are charged for piracy, they are charged based on imaginative loses who are based on a potential profit which would had been achieved if their 100% of customer base had been continuing paying a subscription which they would had never agreed paying if the price was not faked in order to attract them.
The free market effect will gradually resolve this as services that are all currently operating at a loss will correct their price models, which is what I believe is currently happening.
the free market will turn to the government to cover their losses and they will push for stricter anti piracy law enforcement. The free market evangelists just want a free to control market. I don’t think they will be “ok, customers are leaving after our latest increase in price, then let’s just decrease the price to get them back on board”
With regards to discounts to lure new customers, I was thinking about conventional subscription based services like newspapers or cable providers. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me that in a sector with heavy competition, such services might be offered at an initial loss if data suggests that retained memberships can recoup it.
I misunderstood what you were referring to with a definition of “fake audience.” I wasn’t giving any merit to their claims about how it all ties to piracy, clearly that’s nonsense. I’m not completely following your train of thought with a “fake price,” though.
It’s possible this might result in a harsher stance on piracy again, that’s true. Realistically, though, I think it’s more likely that three things will happen: we as consumers will gradually recalibrate our cost expectations for streaming services, production corporations will cut costs with more reality type content, and smaller companies will either be bought up or go out of business as users settle on a deliberate few services to subscribe to.
I’m not completely following your train of thought with a “fake price,” though.
you said that they now needed to correct to the “real price” in terms that it is a price that will allow them not to operate at a loss. So the previous one was a “faked” (artificial) price, that they knew was below cost, however they chose to go with it in order to lure customers.
I’m not implying that they tried to scam anyone with “fake prices” if this is what you understood.
I see. Whether or not the price covers costs, businesses will often invest into attracting new customers, for instance through marketing campaigns or incentives to switch from a competitor. In such cases, the cost isn’t visibly calculated through to the consumer.
However, since the cost is a main factor for purchase decisions, companies might similarly invest in growing their customer base by offering a pricing tier below cost. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the service as a whole is operating at a loss, because there might be higher cost tiers that offer premium content or family plans. Different plans might also have degrees of underutilization that reduces service costs. Finally, cohorts of service tiers might change based on external factors like economic recession or competitive offerings.
All this is to say that pricing models are complicated, and breaking even with a SVOD service is extremely difficult in an industry with extremely high production costs, aging licensable content that viewers are losing interest in all while being overrun with complex, regional licensing agreements that affect both. Especially when this is further compounded with macroeconomic factors including inflation and interest rates that affect both corporations operating at a loss and consumers looking to tighten their belts or user decline due to subscription fatigue, an argument could be made that some middle ground needs to be found to simply remain in business.
Nuanced post. Than you!
Why is this being downvoted? I thought Lemmy was a place for discourse? How does this not contribute to an open discussion?
Pretty common take that people feel like they’ve seen and argued in a lot of other places. In the future, ask YOURSELF why you got downvoted, not the thread. Works way better.
I have genuinely asked myself this, and can’t help but find it strange that the only comments in this thread and other almost identical threads are effectively complaining about corporate greed, and never go into any kind of depth about underlying causes and contributing factors.
Why instead is the same old empty rhetoric repeated and upvoted time and time again? This platform seems to be an echo chamber for ignorance.
and never go into any kind of depth about underlying causes and contributing factors.
sure, if you don’t agree with what is being replied to you, then these are shallow comments. Your replies here were the deep analysis. Good job
Whether or not the insights are deep or shallow, Lemmy would be an inclusive place where discourse is welcomed and civil interactions are commonplace.
Instead, any comment that invites conversation to go more in depth is downvoted with ad hominem attacks, further adding toxicity to the cesspool that is the comment section behind effectively any post on this community.
downvotes is just a way to show that you disagree with something. It is not there to punish you. People choose some topics to engage actively by participating in the comments while in some other topics they prefer to express their opinion just by agree/disagree (upvote/downvote). Now you call a whole community toxic just because not everyone agrees with you…
You misunderstand me. Your posts are the old empty rhetoric, your ideas are not new, and you come off like a parrot. After your long-winded explanation, I get the idea that you’re just young, which personally makes me want to interact with you less.
I did not find any post here on Lemmy that discussed any of the reasons why subscription services are struggling (at least not the past 60 days that I browsed submissions and comments), which is why I chimed in to the conversation with context. If you did not find that insightful, that’s fine.
At least we can agree that we don’t enjoy interacting with one another, no less because you are being a jerk.
I have subscriptions (and shared subscriptions) to… seven services that I can think of in 20 seconds.
Yet, time and time again, I try to figure out if what I want to watch is covered by one of them (not trivial to figure out), and end up falling back on piracy probably around 50% of the time.
Now that every fucking content owner has its own subscription plan, it makes subscriptions pointless because it’s spread so damn thin.
try to figure out if what I want to watch is covered by one of them
Justwatch.com, my dude.
Doesn’t always work. I’m not in the US. So shows that it says are on a service, aren’t in my country, or if it’s on a service, it doesn’t know because it’s on that service in my country and not the us. For me, Justwatch.com, has been more miss than hit. Sometimes, asking google works, but some services that are available in my country won’t integrate with Google in my country, but if use a VPN for the us on my Android TV it loads all the US features and the integration starts working and everything is correct. So yeah, unless you’re in the US, the experience of figuring out where it is what you want to watch is more miss than hit.
Justwatch has localised results for me in Australia. If your browser is anonymized it may default to US listings. You can change it in the URL path using your country code, e.g. instead of justwatch.com/us/ I go to justwatch.com/au/ and it’s been totally accurate
I use the mobile and tv app.
Cancel all those subs man. They are eating your money without return. It’s better to download the specific show you want to watch.
I just cancelled my Netflix that I had for like 10 years. Total shit nothing to watch.
Now there’s a million services, everything is plus. Paramount+, Disney+, Nutsack+
Even if I wanted to pay for all that shit, everyone has their own shitty app I have to install and configure and have a login and fuck you.
It’s just easier for me to torrent what I want.
Thing is, I’m not averse to paying for good content, I like to support the creators. But
When every show is on a different app and they’re all $15 a month…buying a couple hard drives and saving every show just makes more financial sense and I don’t need 15 different login credentials so fuck off yarrr
Nutsack+ 🤣🤣
I pay for them still. But still download and watch on Plex. Oh shit I meant a friend of mine does this.
Now there’s a million services, everything is plus. Paramount+, Disney+, Nutsack+
I think the + is to streaming services what the i prefix was to electronic junk.
hopefully this is just a ‘blip’ and rates of theft begin to fall again as the economy recovers.
If not, we can expect to see legal channels raising their prices again to cover the losses caused by piracy.
This is a crazy thing to write. Every streaming service already has their prices set at whatever they think will maximize profit. If they raise prices in response to piracy, they’ll push even more people away.
If anything, piracy will serve as competition, and it will cause the streaming services to lower prices.
piracy will serve as competition
for shows sold exclusively to one streaming service then piracy is indeed the only competition
Wow they’re just straight up calling it theft now. They can’t even pretend to understand the difference.
That’s nothing new. “You wouldn’t steal a car” was in the 90s…
Piracy doesn’t compete on price. Maintaining a server, Internet, and VPN access has a cost beyond the technical knowledge needed to set it all up.
Piracy competes on service. Sick of ads? Sick of your favorite shows disappearing from your services? Tired of the Disney vault (they have the content but won’t let you stream it any more) problem? Can’t find the thing on any service? Like obscure and rare content? Like fan edits? Like to curate collections and playlists? Like HD on any and every device you own? Like easy offline content syncning for when you’re traveling to a spot with spotty Internet? Like sharing your library with friends and family? Tired managing multiple streaming subscriptions and navigating the content to find what you really want to watch? Your friendly neighborhood pirate community has a solution for you. Lower prices aren’t even in the top ten reasons lots of people pirate.
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.
I don’t think sex workers being paid better is comparable to what megacorporations have been doing to the internet for the past 10 years.
Porn sites offer the best free user service on the Internet with the exception of Wikipedia. I don’t know what you mean with that point, honestly.
Xnxx has 1 uhm… YouTube would call it shelf… with egirl ads on the first page of your search and that’s it. If you proceed directly to page 2, you will never see it. I don’t even block that element, it’s easy to ignore.
Guess what’s also been increasing? Prices.
Guess what also has refused to go up? Wages
Guess what also been increasing? The number of streaming platforms trying to out bid their competitors. You know what else is increasing? The number of streaming platforms going after account sharing and they wonder why people are going back to piracy. Piracy is king and no one will be able to stop it.
That’s what I’m worried about….billionaires will convince governments (who haven’t banned them yet) a “think of the children act” which will ban VPNs
Way too many businesses rely on VPNs to ban them.
Oh you sweet child. They only need to ban them for citizens, not for business / shareholders.
Well….how does China and Russia and other authoritarian shitholes that have banned them operate?
I don’t know about China, but Russia has not banned VPNs. They banned specific VPN services. I’m guessing it’s similar in China. And there are plenty of grey and black market VPN services for people in those countries to use. And they use them.
VPN is basically just a encrypted channel between 2 systems, while one of them forward traffic to the internet and unless they block/filter every encrypted connection, there is no way to block it at mass…
It can’t be impossible because certain countries have been trying. Hasn’t China already been fining people for using VPNs?
Yeah, it’s scary. France and the UK are already well on their way to heading down that path.
It’s tot BUY SOME SHIT! ally nothi BUY SOME SHIT! ng to do BUY SOME SHIT! with th BUY SOME SHIT! ere be BUY SOME SHIT! ing way to BUY SOME SHIT! o many a BUY SOME SHIT! ds to ma BUY SOME SHIT! ke stuff wa BUY SOME SHIT! tc BUY SOME SHIT! ha BUY SOME SHIT! bl BUY SOME SHIT! e.
I wish I could up AND downvote this, as it gets the point across well, but MAN do I hate that point. Also, the fact that EVERYTHING has its own streaming service now… No, I’m not paying you a subscription to watch 1 show. If you dont want to give the main streaming players a cut, just sell each season as a oje time purchase
Pirate’s all predicted this. It was inevitable that streaming services would turn into Cable TV. The only plus side aside from prime is lack of advertising. Yet here we are again. “I am inevitable.”
Yeah. It was nice having a period of time where obtaining things legitimately wasnt a pain or felt like you were being milked for all you were worth though… Oh well, yo ho it is!
Man was this very hard for me to read. Still up voting it, though
what a ride
