When Netflix had (seemingly) everything I was totally cool and the gang with paying for that service.
Now I have:
Netflix
Amazon Prime
Apple TV
Disney+
NowTv
fuck knows what else
and I still can’t find the content I want to watch. I had an urge to watch The Good, The Bad And The Ugly the other day. Could I find it on any services I pay a combined £50+ a month for? Could I fuck. Why would they be surprised they’re pushing people to ‘alternative’ sources? Sure, I can rent or buy Barbie and Oppenheimer if I want, but I don’t want. What I want is access to the tens of thousands of old, excellent, films that have been made.
For A Few Dollars More is so-so (but I’d still watch it again), but The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly is epic.
And if you enjoy them, then take a crack at High Plains Drifter or Pale Rider which are both excellent though share an underlying theme. The Outlaw Josey Wales is also well worth a watch, as is the magnificent (and best picture Oscar winner) Unforgiven starring and directed by an older, wiser, and grittier Clint Eastwood.
That’s honestly one of the biggest wtf things to me. Movies like that are old as fuck. How many people are still buying the DVD? Or paying to rent it? Not talking down on the movie itself. There’s a reason it’s still talked about. But honestly, it’s not making much, if anything.
Why not have it throw up on a streaming service? At that point, if I had the rights, and Netflix said they would pay me like $200 a week, I would probably still do it. That’s probably $200 more than what it’s currently making a week. Netflix gets to have it for cheap. And then the people who want to watch it get to.
There are a lot of times where my privacy set up, which isn’t anything fancy, precludes me from watching something. That coupled with the fact that prices have been consistently rising in our late stage shit system, you have to realize at some point that the same system that drives companies to scrape every possible iota of a profit out of users is the same system that makes people equally not want to be gutted financially and have every data point about themselves be out on an open market. Complacency doesn’t change anything.
I think you missed the OP’s point about the ongoing enshitification of paid services. From the words of Gabe Newell, "The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
The reason why so many people are pirating even when they can afford it is because companies continue to make their services worse for their paying customers. Simply “paying for your content” will encourage these companies to continue their predatory, behavior.
Edit: I think I should add this isn’t really true if you can buy physical copies of the content, but that’s becoming less and less of an option as large streaming services make sure the only way to watch their content legally is buying their shitty subscriptions
Piracy has changed so much. Back when people were making the transition from p2p to torrents there was very little if any streaming sites.
Nowadays if you sneeze hard enough you’re bound to spray down some big name streaming service.
Now there are even whole front ends that allow you to stream whatever you want anytime you want even on a little, but very powerful handheld computer.
I would say that 12% is more on the low end. If you were to factor in ad blocking and the various front ends I mentioned earlier I could see that number going up much higher.
No it’s just borrowing, it’s temporary anyway, I recently looked at some movies on a very old harddisk and it was like DVD quality or worse. Threw the entire disk out.
I don’t know if it’s even borrowing, really. If you borrow my drill, I can’t use it. If you torrent a movie… Like… You’re seeding, and more people can use it!
It’s almost like our economics models with supply and demand barely work for physical products and are even worse at modelling easily reproducible digital goods
Paying up to 23$ a month (not including other streaming services) to watch maybe 5% of the shows and movies I’m interested in just didn’t seem like a good deal after a while.
I know a lot of people who are sailing the Seas until the streaming Market crashes. There’s way too many businesses trying to do the same exact thing which has limited the media selection available without paying multiple $12 a month subscriptions. Eventually they will either fold or merge together again
Some things are literally not available anymore by legal means. Piracy is an important tool in preserving content for future generations. Future historian will be proud of pirates.
Absolutely true, I was actually looking for this flash game mike shadow and the vending machine and it’s partly lock cause reasons, pirates where you at
I really want to show my friend the original Fullmetal Alchemist series, but Funimation has completely replaced it with the newer Brotherhood series everywhere. It’s such bullshit. I would be happy to pay them to watch it, but literally the only option is piracy.
I’d happily pay for anything I consume if it were convenient, private, and no ads. Since I can’t get that anymore, well, it’s the high seas for me. I pay as much for high seas related services as I would for the official streamers, but the experience is 10x better.
This is the number one reason I won’t ever pay for a netflix subscription (or others) again. Pay for 4K but you dont get 4K if you want to watch on your laptop or android streaming box that they don’t approve of. Like how much fucking greedier could you be? Fuck them I hope they all go the way of blockbuster soon.
I stuck around with streaming for as long as I could but with the price increases, the restrictions, the lack of content as they revert back into cable bullshit has driven me back to getting the bulk of my stuff via torrents again.
Honestly, I’m pretty shocked that streaming remained decent for as long as it did but we all knew this was inevitable because we all know how this song and dance with greedy corporations go.
Disney plus is the absolute worst there’s nothing on that platform for like 9 months of the year. Then they’ll have an interesting program (usually Star wars related) you can binge and then nothing for another 9 months.
Then just subscribe for that month and then cancel. We switch around from all of them; one month netflix, next month HBO, apple the next, etc… Don’t understand why people keep the subscriptions when they dont use the service…
I can easily say that the amount of my friends and family that have become interested in my Emby setup has expontentially consistently increased every round that these streaming providers have increased their rates.
The experience of launching 7 different streaming apps to find something, content constantly vanishing or moving platforms, and just an overall poor user experience coupled with doubling/tripling of each platforms costs…
The companies have almost successfully re-introduced the very problem that streaming originally solved.
It’s like this dipshits don’t want our money. I’ve always been firm that any content removed from streaming services is a message from that content company that they don’t want the money of the customers subscribed to said service and thus are okay with those people pirating it instead.
If they cared about the money, they’d had left the content there.
But realistically even if pump and dump schemes like this make the customers hate them, it might still make more as a total sum - and if so as a cooperation they’d almost have to take the shitty route (or be surpassed by someone who will).
Lol, you think greed won’t exist under socialism? Greed is why communism fails every time. People are inherently greedy in a world where scarcity exists.
Wrong, there’s a distinct scarcity of logic in your arguments.
“Scarcity is so fundamental to economics that scarce goods are also known as economic goods. In economics, scarce goods are those for which demand would exceed supply at a price of zero.” www.investopedia.com/terms/s/scarcity.asp
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