It was a good deal a few years back, so piracy decreased a lot, and streaming company profits grew a lot. Everyone was happy.
But then they altered the deal. It’s no longer worth the money, and any movie or TV show they have can disappear at any time. They also decided to start flirting with ads, so they burned a lot of trust by doing that.
It’s hard finding something worth watching. Once you have seen the few good shows at one streaming company, the rest is so awful nobody wants to touch it. So the subscriber is supposed to sign up to many streaming companies… Costing them tons of money.
If streaming companies were smart, they would work together and create one streaming service with all existing movies and TV shows, and set a fair price, and depending on what movies or TV shows people choose to watch, the profits go to whatever company makes the best content.
But working together is not what you do in capitalism…
There’s this Indian ISP called Jio. They have internet plans that bundle 14 or 15 Streaming services. These are mostly streaming that are only avaialble to that region. At least that way people don’t have to go through the hassle of managing every single subscription.
I’m personally happy with sailing the seas, not that I have time to watch all this content anyway.
What’s sad is we HAD that in original Netflix. Then the studios got greedyaf and now we are back to, basically, cable. I’m not saying Netflix isn’t at a huge fault here (that 720p during covid was some real bs) but the beginning of this disaster is squarely on the shoulders of all the studios wanting their share of the pie plus more.
Pirates have known this for decades. Buy DRMed media means you can lose access to it at any time. And these subscription services that limit access for paid services e.g as soon as you travel, access to certain stuff is lost, sometimes the access to the entire service is lost. Additionally, for some reason, pirated stuff often has better quality than paid stuff - it’s something I cannot fathom.
It was possible to get pirated 4k stuff as soon as it was released years ago, but most paid services couldn’t provide that. The biggest reason being you couldn’t buffer it. It only buffers a few seconds and then stops. Pirated stuff can be downloaded ahead of time and watched without buffering on a shit connection.
Fuck Netflix. What I hated most about them was they decided during the pandemic that too many people were watching stuff at 1080p, so they dropped the quality of streams to 720p. Lol. A great way to get people to pirate.
Additionally, for some reason, pirated stuff often has better quality than paid stuff - it’s something I cannot fathom.
Right!? This is the most baffling part to me. Random people with camcorders at theatres have better video quality than Netflix’s garbage-tier 720p that we saw in this video.
Just one point of view: I’m too poor to even buy food, but pirating books keeps me informed about current affairs and shit. It also enables me to stay alive because I still have access to my favourite authors, which makes me so happy and try to stay alive for one more release date.
Full disclosure: I’ve gone from a very good job to debilitating disability over 10 years in Europe. Also, before this, I bought hardback books of everything I liked. I’ll do this again as soon as I can afford it. I’ll always support authors as much as I can.
Yes, besides living in a rural area with a shitty library that has only books online I read in middle school, I have agorophobia. So making the trek there isn’t that simple.
Even the biggest university library’s online books are not up to date. They take years to get translated, so instead of waiting for that (since I’m not sure whether I’ll even be alive by then) I just read books in their original language as soon as they come out.
I’m an avid reader. Books from authors I like here tend to take months to years to get translated and into a library. I read everything in English now because of that.
I think the problem is the idea of subscription services themselves which has caused companies to become adversaries to the customers rather than partners.
When you pay a one-time fee for an item or service, it’s in that business’s interest to make you feel valued as a customer, to bring you good so that you are likely to pay one-time fees again in the future.
With a recurring fee model, it’s in the business’s interest to make you use their service less while still paying, because if you use it too much they lose money, and if they price it according to how the power users use it then it won’t be a competitive deal.
Example: when you get flights costing $200 per domestic trip, the airline wants to make you feel not terrible for choosing them. But if instead of that you paid $1000 a month to fly domestically “as often as you want”, they will degrade the experience so that you wouldn’t even want to fly more than 5 times per month, like duct tape you to your seat if they were allowed to, or put restrictions like “only to these cities” or “only on our 3am flights” or “only on trips less than x days or longer than y days”.
No matter the industry, the whole premise of the RR model is to trick you into pretending you still have whatever original value of service, while screwing you in every possible way just short of the point that causes you to cancel. That makes them the most money.
I used to pirate because I was a broke kid. Now I have money (not as much as Rossman and no money for these subscriptions) but I too need to find value when I give this money I earned to someone who makes a thing. As Rossman said, if you’re tinkering to get the thing you paid for, at that point you might as well tinker and not pay for it.
P.S.: Rossman is aware his whole shtick is “angry man yells at cloud while sometimes petting cat”. I get many people don’t like it. Don’t watch it then. Odysee is just Rossman’s spare platform in case YouTube doesn’t like him anymore for whatever reason. Yes it’s full of loonies (and you can call Rossman one too if you want) but just don’t give them your attention.
This is why I think FUP should be a thing on unlimited offers. I have missed out on being able to utilise great services because people abuse it. I was so happy when Pixels came with unlimited photo/video backup but because people were uploading DSLR pics and pirated movies and shows, it stopped existing.
I think you’re spot on. It fits right in to the whole “enshittification” topic that Doctorow wrote about. Everyone started using streaming services like Netflix because it offered such a great user experience; now that they have the user base, unfortunately we are now at the point where Netflix has every motivation to make the platform as shitty as possible to milk as much money from their users as they can.
With a recurring fee model, it’s in the business’s interest to make you use their service less while still paying, because if you use it too much they lose money, and if they price it according to how the power users use it then it won’t be a competitive deal.
You know I never thought of streaming services this way, but you’re absolutely right. Any service running on a regular subscription model falls into the “gym business model” where the ideal customer is one who is paying but never showing up. That way, their operational costs stay constant while revenue goes up.
Except its a LOT easier to get people to not go to the gym than it is to stop them watching TV and movies.
I think this is why Netflix keeps canceling shows. People stay subscribed for new things, but since their catalog is shit they aren’t streaming much else.
Netflix’s model makes the individual business case for a specific show really complicated to make. What’s the marginal return on investment for a moderately successful show? If it’s not quite popular enough to get people to subscribe just for that show, then it’s basically a total loss (existing customers only are watching it, who were paying anyways). Looking at the financials of that one show in isolation, all they’ve got are costs with no revenue gain.
There is the broader argument to be made about how a show contributes to the overall catalog quality and how that ultimately drives subscriber growth, but this is a far more roundabout way of talking about value.
The dynamic applies to anything where you are expected to make regular payments.
Renting an apartment? Landlord wants to see you and fix your shit as little as possible.
Renting a car? They want you to drive it as little as possible so they can keep renting it for as long as possible. Maybe they’re charging you by the mile, too, just to cover that base completely.
Just by coincidence i’m watching a gameranx video about the 10 worst AAA games, and Falcon says the same thing about games as a service (subscriptions, micro-transactions, etc.): “it seems like they’re playing a game of chicken with the consumer to see what they can get away with”.
Precisely. And the game franchises that do this the most successfully are the ones with pre-existing brand recognition to ride off of. When you start with a forgettable story and characters, then no one (outside of a small few who like being disappointed I guess) will engage with it.
The video itself is fine, but linking odysee when it’s dominated by nazis, charlatan chiropractors pretending to be medical doctors, and all the rest that youtube won’t allow on their platform probably due to racism isn’t a good thing. A youtube alternative would be nice but not when it’s composed of nazis.
Because odysee platforms them and it shows up in recommended videos, when searching for content and on the front page, along with bigotry. If you want to defend odysee some more do a search for ‘jews’ on it and see what you get.
Not saying I don’t some times agree with the guy, but he peddles outrage. Every video is some gripe about something. I get tired of being angry some days. Just chill out man!
Definitely agree, but according to a recent video, his girlfriend is a privacy nut (said with respect) so idk if he’s gonna get any better. Next thing we know there’ll be two of them in the videos.
I usually agree with his takes, but I can’t watch more than a minute and a half of a video of his, because it’s always an unscripted rant. It’s fine though, he usually gets his point across in the first minute anyway, and then repeats himself for another ten minutes.
But that’s exactly what I LOVE about him! Well researched and thoroughly argumented rants, full of juicy insights and no restraints. I love him, he’s my spirit animal. And I love Blackberry and Clinton.
Yeah we need to start becoming aware of how our brains are being manipulated. If you’re angry, your fight or flight response is engaged and you give your attention to something (ie. click)
The comment section here is fucking stupid is what it is. People arguing over right wing… left wing… Nazi or whatever other nonsense that is not even related to the goddamn video or the topic at hand.
You either agree to what the creator has to to say in THIS video or you disagree. Stop fucking speculating about their political or religious stand. Don’t let lemmy become another shit fest that we just moved from.
Chill… people are just having a discussion about the odyssey website this video is hosted on. Some of us have never seen that site before and are discussing it. Just scroll past. Its not that big a deal honestly.
It’s not just that it hasn’t gotten better in 20 years like he says, it has actively gotten worse.
Maybe before DRM would fuck with the quality of the media or block you from using it the way your prefer (despite paying for it to do what you want), but now it’s exactly that, PLUS they’re clawing for every scrap of data from their consumer base in order to market it to third party vendors.
I’m ready to buy stock in tin foil and live in the woods off my own urine, this shit has gotten so bad. I just want them to leave me alone and let me live without being constantly servailed and targeted with ads. Is the offer really to be made miserable and unsatisfied about my life and possessions in exchange for another season of a shitty remake of a early 2000s IP?
I fucking hate the anthropocene. Let’s just pack it up and shut it down, there’s nothing left for us here.
He is spot on with how being a consumer enters you into an adversarial relationship. It’s so incredibly frustrating having to fight for what you already paid for.
Piracy. He won’t come out and actually say it which could incriminate himself. Also he just setup a Koi pond in his backyard and put a 24-7 live webcam stream of it. There is really nothing more to it.
If you go through his old videos you’ll see him doing exactly that. There’s a non-zero chance your computer’s guts are in there in excruciating detail.
Id feel weirdly awkward and embarassed seeing my computers innards posted in a YouTube video, and I don’t know why. Like if my middle school yearbook photo showed up on Facebook.
That actually happened to me recently. My grade school best friend posted a pic from a field trip like 30 years ago and I’m naming off every person in it like I just saw them yesterday…then I see one person in it and I’m like “who the fuck is that hideous looking child? Is that me??? Shit that’s me”
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