I'm willing to pay for one, maybe two subscriptions, and ain't nobody got time to dig for which service has what show to find out season 2 is on some other service entirely.
Piracy provides a better user experience 🤷♂️
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem - Gaben
I generally agree with him, but there are a lot of people who pirate simply because they don’t want to pay. And I’m not casting moral judgment here, i just feel like it bears mentioning lol “almost always” is pretty generous
No it also means it's a service problem in the sense that it's not priced right for a geography. Pricing a game $70 where local average monthly income is $120 a month is a service problem. If you expect people from that geographic region to pay, the product should be priced within their means. And thus argument is valid only for digital goods where every new copy of the said goods costs mere few cents.
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Lets compare three options as example:
One streaming service with everything:
- monetary costs: 25 €/month
- opportunity cost: login, type name in search bar, enjoy in good quality, language and subtitles of choice
Piracy:
- monetary costs: 0-5 €/month (hardware/vpn)
- opportunity costs: keep up to date with existing aggregator sites, take protective measures against identification, be wary of malware, limited scope of languages and subtitles, varying quality
Current streaming services:
- monetary costs: 100 €/month or more, if you cover most services
- opportunity cost: login to each service, look if they have the particular series/movie, be limited by region to which languages and subtitles you can use, have only certain episodes or certain seasons of a series, get a movie as a result, but actually have to pay extra for lending it...
People choose whether to pay monetary or opportunity costs. For a broke student priacy might still be the way to go, because they have time but not money. For most people a convenient streaming service will be the way to go though, because not having to worry about everything around and just finding your movie/series in 30 seconds, after you put dinner in the plates is the preferred option.
The current situation combines high monetary costs with high opportunity costs, so that piracy becomes attractive to many people, who would be happy to pay for a streaming service, that actually covers everything.
So i think "almost always" is perfectly applicable. Also keep in mind, that the offer of pirated stuff is directly related to the demand. if the demand reduces, so will the offer, which in this case would make piracy even less convenient. Of course the pricing matters, and if the one streaming service would cost say 50 €/month, more people would pirate again. But the dominant factor first is the service quality.
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Im willing to pay for two. It used to be netflix and prime, then hulu, paramount plus, disney…
Now its down to one- Proton VPN 🏴☠️
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For the record, you can use justwatch.com and it will tell you exactly where you can watch it, and which seasons. But I'm still not paying for multiple subscriptions.
Since #1 on the list is always The Seven Seas there's no reason to proceed further.
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Hell, I even pay for a service that has all the magnet links resolved and ready to stream, no downloading involved. For 30 bucks (a year!) it's been the most convenient way of enjoying movies & shows.
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https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-service-not-price/
As Gabe Newell said: "Piracy isn't a pricing issue, its a service issue"
As my friend said: "every time a plastic video disc says " operation not permitted " a torrent is born...
As I say: "People will pay when it's easy, more reliable and more convenient." As a software product manager, I forbid my product from ever wasting developer cycles with copy protection.. It's expensive to deliver, annoying to real customers and doesn't make us any more money...
As a user of software, I salute you.
I don't disagree with anything but I feel like GabeN said that before streaming and subscriptions took over.
Photoshop is an incredibly easy to use and powerful tool for creators - I'd be happy to drop like $200 on, for example, the 2024 version. I'm not happy to spend $10 or $30+ a month for life to use it, especially when they lock you in to a year subscription and charge you a fee if you cancel early so you literally can't just sub only the month when you need it, it's the whole year, period. I'll just pirate or use photopea or whatever.
Similar for streaming. Netflix gave us the option to pay for more screens to watch on. Now suddenly it matters whose house it's in?? All while you're constantly removing value from the platform and you cancel anything decent if the production value is too high? Fuck you man I'm not paying like $30 monthly for that.
Please do keep voting with your wallet - its one of the few remaining ways to express our discontent!) That being said, I feel like both of those examples are where the service provided by adobe and then Netflix are terrible.
Adobe is making you buy a whole year and Netflix is hassling you for "letting your pensioner mum watch your account".. To me, both of those are examples of bad service (coupled with cost).
For me, a counter example for me is amazon.com: I hate what they're doing to the retail landscape but find it hard to resist, as I find them SOOO convenient, and their customer service (for now) is absolutely stunning!!! Now if their prices were too high, I'd personally probably pay for that convenience a bit. (Where there model breaks for me completely is warranty major purchases: I've had warranty denied by manufacturers for items purchased through non approved amazon resellers. So now, for me, anything over $100 and I'm looking for direct purchase from the manufacturer as a preference. )
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Maybe people would pirate less if you let them keep what they pay for.
If buying isn't owning...
You're buying... A temporary permission to access certain content.
12% over four years? Damn. Somehow I had the impression that there'd been a significant increase.
Netflix revenue is up by roughly 60% in the same four years.
Thank you for keeping things in perspective.
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Cracking down on account sharing has sent lots of people sailing as well, and market fragmentation.
Don't forget ads.
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.
Netflix turning off account sharing is what sent me to the high seas. Disney+ doing the same will push me over even more.
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Sometimes piracy is the only method of archival
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.
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Put everything on 1 or 2 platforms and take cuts depending on what people are watching.
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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.
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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.
Nope, you need more than 1 subscription, because quite often services only offer a few of the seasons of your favorite show, while the others are on different services.
Example: https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-episodes-movies
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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.
Those are rookie numbers! Let's pump it up!
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.
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1 of those 12% is just me lol /s
I get pissed at my family for being traditional hoarders but I somewhat inherited that as a data hoarder. The amount of stuff I have pirated over the years and not actually used or watched is hilarious.
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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.
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Bold of you to think that they even think of us at all.
I actually mean that seriously: we continue seeing, over and over, that no, quite often they do NOT expect people to NOT do that, they quite simply DGAF. They pirate us, we pirate them, it becomes just another "cost of doing business", until they are strong enough to eventually crack down further. See ad blocking & Chrome recently, after multiple decades of internet ads pushing the limits.
It's like a zombie nom noming your brains - after like 2 bites it'll get bored and wander off, and it literally doesn't even need to "eat", it simply is so fucking DUMB that it doesn't know what else to do with itself. It is truly horrifying b/c while your entrails may be strewn about on the floor, or in the throats of tens of zombies, they in turn... don't even have the decency to be aware that you've died!?
Lower-level managers sell ideas to higher-level managers, and "logic" has little to do with those conversations, compared to the amount of emo-stroking that goes on "oh, you will become so rich, and powerful, and handsome, and brave, and precious" (from here:-P) - and so long as enough people play along, that happens!
Our world is just so fucking STUPID.
That said, what they do is on them, while what we do is on us. Find a way to live - hopefully by finding a way to contribute, if/where you can.
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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.
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I fucking wonder why. When owning isn't owning them piracy is totally justified.
We pay for 4K, but we don’t get more than 720p unless we use some proprietary shit hardware and a
Not only that... you pay to get tv content and suddenly they remove it because of licensing or political correctness bullshit.
Not only that… you pay to get tv content and suddenly they remove it because of licensing
Preach!!
or political correctness bullshit.
Oh no
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Not gonna lie, if you asked me what I would think the increase would be and I would have assumed it be a lot higher.
But then again, that could be the part of the pirate crew that doesn't use a VPN and is easily identified upon entering the site.
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What you say is exactly what I feel.
When I pay for a service, as long as I abide by the ToS, service provider should give me their products in full.
Your protection should not violate my right.
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