Again, it might be news for you, but it’s a huge business with many layers. There are plenty of professional rippers and crackers who earn a living one way or another. There are plenty of underground translators and streamers. Ads, hostings, seed boxes, TV boxes, different partnerships - there’s a lot of money flowing.
Just go to any public tracker and you will see ads. Download some subtitles and they often contain ads as well. And then you have partnerships like targeted attacks on software developers, etc. Then there are normies who are getting scammed into buying pirated content for full retail price by physical media vendors. All kinds of handy people who will install you a dish to receive pirated satellite TV “for free”.
Adding to the discussion, if you want to watch anything that’s not mainstream (i.e. non-western, or arthouse), you’re basically supposed to either wait for it to stream on Mubi or get a Blu-ray/DVD (that are often out of circulation if it’s more than 5 years old). So the only real option is pirating.
So Hollywood copyright lawyers will target illegal subscription services rather than individual downloaders? Fine by me.
I can understand paying for a legal streaming service where at least a tiny percentage of profits goes into producing new material. I pirate out of convenience and availability, because movies and series aren’t released immediately in my region.
Paying somebody for streaming film and TV shows that they have no hand in producing, and thus not supporting new productions — same as I can download for free myself? — that makes no sense to me.
Paying somebody for streaming film and TV shows that they have no hand in producing, and thus not supporting new productions — same as I can download for free myself? — that makes no sense to me
It makes sense for me. The one i’m using is $20 per year. I just think of it as convenience fee. It has netflix features but for all movies and tv shows.
And like I said, I get convenience/availability. I guess paying for stolen goods is one step too far for me. Like, “Dude, pass it around, but it’s not yours to sell”.
If someone makes it so I can stream all the shows and all the movies and such in one convenient place, without having to find them myself, hunt down the right versions, etc, I’m good with paying them for that.
It’d be better if it was from a legal service, but as long as exclusives are allowed that can’t happen. If the owners of the content were required to allow anyone who wants to distribute it to do so, at the same cost with no special deals for one distributor over another, then every streaming service could have everything, if they choose. They could then compete on quality of service and which content they choose to have, not on what content they can lock down for themselves alone.
The solution is so easy. Make your content available at a reasonable price, make it easy to use, don’t restrict it by geography, and let people watch it on any device that can connect to your service.
Piracy is about ease of use (it’s getting even easier), and about value. DRM has repeatedly been shown to hurt only the people who try to pay for legitimate access. Not a single time has it prevented me from getting a copy of something if I wanted to, and it’s clearly not stopping people from providing those copies or streams.
So stop wasting bathtubs of money on stopping piracy, but maybe take a few less buckets of money from consumers in exchange for your service. As long as you price it such that the cost of being legit can’t compete with the ease of use and value from piracy, some folks aren’t going to make the choice you want them to.
Some folks won’t be able to spend on your service anyway, because they just can’t afford it - but they still might buy other merchandise, they can still spread how great your show is to their friends who possibly will subscribe to your service, but regardless you aren’t going to get their dollars no matter what you do. So stop trying.
What’s a reasonable price to you? Can you apply this same value to everyone? Seems like just about anything is easy to access through various services except for maybe some niche stuff. I don’t think being “easy” is quite enough. People like getting stuff for free even if they can afford it.
Do you need all of them at once? It’s ok to rotate. I subscribe to different things at different times. I still download stuff if, either what i have access to isn’t good enough or if i just can’t find what I’m looking for through conventional means.
Dunno. Less than what things cost now? I think knocking down the geographic restrictions and letting people watch it on any device or OS that can connect are likely bigger fights than pricing, if the industry actually cared to solve the problem.
It’s not as if we don’t have examples of this. Yes, some people still pirate music. Roughly 20 years ago, almost literally everyone with the knowhow was pirating music. (And with services like kazaa, emule, etc, it took very little knowhow)
You know what didn’t solve it? Prosecuting consumers, high prices, and DRM.
What solved it was when Apple started selling legit music for 99 cents per track, and keeping album costs reasonable. (Much as I hate to give apple any credit.) Spotify, amazon, etc all got on board, and now almost no one pirates music. (I pre-apologize for whatever detail I misremembered there - that was a long time ago.)
Am I saying that exact model will apply to video streaming services? No, but what’s not going to do it is prosecuting consumers, high prices, and DRM. We have decades of proof of this.
People like getting stuff for free even if they can afford it.
Some people will pirate no matter what. You can worry about them, or you can worry about everybody else. At some point (and I suspect we’re well past it) the return on investment has got to start looking pretty bad for all the money and technology they have tried to throw at piracy.
Thanks for the reply! Valid points. I was one of the ones that downloaded a ton of music before it was available at all, back in the Napster days. It’s harder for some reason with video. With the music they can just throw everyone’s stuff on there but video for some reason can only go to maybe a couple of services which really limits what some people have access to.
I don’t worry about the ones pirating at all, lol. I’m actually looking into setting up arr apps but my setup is not conventional so it will take some fiddling.
The solution is so easy. Make your content available at a reasonable price, make it easy to use, don’t restrict it by geography, and let people watch it on any device that can connect to your service.
They had achieved this just a short time ago, and their subscriptions and profit reflected that consumers were happy with the offerings. But the studios wanted MORE, and now everything is fragmented across a dozen different services with increased subscription fees, and geo-locks so you can’t share accounts. I was paying almost $100 per month for subscriptions at one point, and then they fragmented it further and I said “fuck it, I’m out!”. I cancelled everything. They think they can endlessly exploit their consumers, and maybe there is a sub-section of them that will endure never ending fragmentation and price increases, but I’m not one of them. Bye!
This has to be stopped. Just look at what Napster did to the music industry. That’s right, there used to be a music industry and now it’s just…gone. No more music, no more money to be made in music. Don’t let these evil streaming services do the same to poor defenceless Hollywood, bastion of women’s rights!
Jokes aside, I have paid for Google’s music service since it launched (RIP Play Music), but I am a millisecond away from canceling my subscription because Google does not provide me with any way to randomize playlists. I don’t mean shuffle play. That shit is broken and always has been. It would not be a big deal if I could randomize my playlists on demand, but no.
I just spent like an hour trying several methods to install this on Android, sadly I was not successful. If anyone can inform me on how to install this on Firefox for Android (not a fork), please let me know.
The people who are stealing our movies and our television shows and operating piracy sites are not mom and pop operations,” says Charlie Rivkin, chief executive officer of the MPA, who adds that some of the operators also engage in drug trafficking, child pornography, prostitution and money laundering. “This is organized crime.”
I like how they always have to fabricate a connection to organized crime. Trying to convince the reader that is not just copyright infringement.
Hollywood was founded on IP theft of European filmmakers’ work and funded by various mobs, which then went on to lobby (bribe) politicians into changing certain regulations on gambling in AZ, et al, to pave the way for Vegas and the like.
Just stopped in to say fuck you to the greedy motherfuckers who created a market for sharing massively overpriced content and now cry all over their piles of money cause they are BIGGER piles of money.
What about the small, local services that are just trying to pay the broadcast production bills and make a little cash to become viable businesses?
Fuck those people too?
Because these piracy services also affect them. These services restream the content taking away revenue from the small streaming services. In many cases we’re talking about volumes less than 100. So these restream services pop up, illegally use trademarks and copyrighted materials to advertise, and can reduce volumes enough that they are no longer viable.
Sometimes these things affect regular people trying to make life work too. Not just billionaire assholes who legitimately deserve the criticism.
Would you really put the blame on piracy for that when there are conglomerates manipulating the entire market? I’m not doubting they exist, but can you name a small business streaming service that would be affected by pirate services? I have never heard of such a company. I’ve seen small streaming services utilizied by libraries but they are on government contracts and tax funded as far as I know.
You should definitely avoid XtremeHD IPTV (xtremehdiptv.org). For $15 a month, it’s way too cheap to offer all the live TV, movies, and series that it does. The article specifically mentions low pricing as a red flag, and I can definitely say that compared to what you’d normally pay for every live channel (including the premium ones and pay per view), series, and any just about any movie you can think of, this is most definitely a service that you should steer clear of.
I don’t use these services, but after learning a bit about them I have to say I’d rather pay an honest thief than one who lies about ownership ¯_(ツ)_/¯
You’re not allowed to buy the content anyways. You’re only allowed to pay for the illusion of ownership, until they decide they don’t want to host it anymore, and then you lose it. They’re such bullshit artists that they redefine common words like “buy” and “own” in their ToS.
I believe their justification would be that you aquiring the media is a definite loss of sale vs you not subbing/buying the media is a potential sale in the future.
Edit: Not my opinion. Just imagining how they would justify it before court should it come to it.
I gotta say I love this meme. I think about it every time a tech company does something really scummy to take away features and products that people have purchased (and not rented/leased).
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