>Even when someone is the first with tech and prioritization, it does not mean they succeed in the long term after the field matures. I don't have high hopes for Slack in 5-10 years. Neither do I see Dropbox or Netflix justifying current valuations in the same time period.
Since then NFLX: -40.90%, SP500: +51.14%, DBX: -10.08%
>Almost all Netflix competitors (Disney, Amazon, HBO Max, Peacock, Apple ... ) will have other sources of revenue besides streaming so they can afford to keep loosing money to gain market share. Netflix can't cut prices too much.
Netflix, at least compared to Dropbox, had the opportunity to transition to producing 1st party content which they could use to continue to generate revenue even after all the 3rd party content went proprietary. My gut instinct is that Netflix has failed to succeed on that front, but there was an attempt.
Curious where on your crystal ball you see the likes of Spotify and the music (and podcast I guess) industry in 10 years.
Unfortunately it was data-driven. This meant that if a new show didn't catch on within a season or two, it was cancelled. They've killed so many great shows chasing the lowest common denominator.
The formula they settled on was: big name star in a generic designed-by-committee (or AI) show.
I think you're spot on about this. Oddly, Netflix has seen some success by reviving shows that were discontinued on major networks. You'd think they'd know better than to cancel shows like The OA before completion.
I'm really disappointed that creators didn't catch on to this and design their shows to run for one or two seasons. Not everything needs to be a decade long odyssey, and in fact a great many TV shows that were great at first were IMO destroyed by trying to keep running for as long as possible, long past the point where they ran out of things to say.
Not OP, but I don't see why anyone would invest in Spotify - there's many other options out there for great music. Spotify doesn't have sole rights to really any music as far as I know, plus music is far easier to make than movies & series. If you cut me off from established artists, I can still get great joy in a multitude of music being developed today. Beyond that, there's always the option of just giving money to the artists I like directly. The only thing Spotify has going for it is convenience, and I still would rather use Google/Youtube music. I pay for Youtube premium and get music for free with it, as does my entire family. Furthermore, it doesn't matter to the artists where their listeners get their music, there is no extra cost to them licensing it out to 2 or 1000 Spotifys, although there's an argument to be made that just 1 legal license would benefit them, but with pirating I don't there's much to that argument.
> continue to generate revenue even after all the 3rd party content went proprietary.
They did and they do. They put all their money into the 1st party content. They produce huge number of bulk mediocre content and also some really good shows. I can't see how they could do anything different. It's not enough. They have no competitive edge in 1st party content creation except size. That edge is in danger.
The competition has either deeper pockets, more content, or other income sources.
I have no idea about music streaming. I assume its similar network externalities, economies of size business.
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edit:
As an infrequent investor, the company must do better than relevant index fund (SP500, NASDAQ composite, and so on) over the next 5-10 years to make sense to me. Netflix may establish itself as a good blue-chip company, but that's not enough a reason to buy it.
That they almost always cancel after two seasons regardless of popularity or story progression. As a result, lots of people are wary of starting to watch anything new on Netflix since it's almost guaranteed to be cancelled prematurely.
What's the realistic Dropbox competitor, with partial file sync, selective sync, share links and the like? Have tried Google Drive, Mega.nz, iCloud, OneDrive, Jottacloud and others and none has really impressed.
I agree re: Netflix and Dropbox. Salesforce acquired Slack though.
The main issue with a thesis about Slack is that for some completely unknown to me reason, nobody has even attempted to make a competitor. Discord is the closest but using both I don’t think I could use Discord for work at all. It’s just off.
IRC still exists even. I was recently told that it's basically Dischord for old people and I can't really disagree with that perspective from the eyes of a kid today.
Nothing, theyre just Attempting to price the shares correctly now.
Its $6bn in profit still at a $96bn valuation. Down from $150bn. Quite high if only looking at profit. But I definitely like the revenues under the idea they can reduce overhead
I suppose the assumption of many investors is that competition is increasing and with that profitability will decline as well.
Still the markets are crazy right now.
the moment earnings dropped, yes. by now its just people getting stopped out, cutting losses, shorts and put buyers piling on. there is that idea of a death spiral where Netflix has to spend even more on content and licensing again while raising prices for users and pissing users off more, but that model was resilient for cable - although cable does not command such revenue multiples from traders.
I can see the business being fine, definitely watching for lower prices. netflix has always been a fun casino, super leveraged rocket.
I think Netflix has taken the right strategy by diversifying into more international content (Better Than Us, Squid Games, Alice)
Expand to casual games and interactive content.
As a consumer, the company will still provide real economic value
Facebook also still makes insane profits each year. And the stocks drop like hell. There is a lot of uncertainty in the market with many smaller growth stock of the Russel 2000 being completely oversold.
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-small-cap-stocks...
What has gone wrong with our world that making a 6 billion dollar a year profit is considered a problem?
Because it is a problem.
Firstly, it's a problem because stock prices are a measure of predicted future value. The profit today is mostly irrelevant. In order to make a profit on shares the business has to be in a position to do better in the future. If it doesn't then people won't believe it'll do better even farther in to the future, so they won't bid more for the shares than they're worth today. That means investors can't make a profit. If you bought Netflix shares in the past you'll lose money. That's a problem.
Secondly, and in my opinion more importantly, Netflix (and every other tech unicorn) use their shares as a hiring incentive. If the shares are going the wrong way then good hires will refuse offers and go elsewhere. A big chunk of renumeration in tech is predicated on people getting stock instead of cash because that's worth more to the individual and cheaper for the business. If that fails then the business has to start dipping in to that $6bn profit to replace people who leave, or to acquire businesses, or just to maintain the status quo.
It isn't hard to imagine a scenario where a $6bn profit turns into a loss within a decade or less. The driving force behind people saying Netflix has a problem is that they're predicting that the future of the company isn't good.
I mean, they might be wrong and Netflix might be fine, and ultimately even if things go badly Netflix is never going to "fail" because it'll get bought long before that happens, but if you hold Netflix stock it's entirely reasonable to be worried despite the healthy profit they make.
What's supposed to happen is that profitable companies start paying dividends to their shareholders. If you're getting dividends, then you don't mind if the value of your shares is staying flat or even dropping a little. The original purpose of owning shares in a company wasn't only that the value of the shares themselves would increase, but that they'd pay dividends so shareholders can make a profit over the life of a company.
As far as I know, Netflix shares, much like shares in many other tech companies, do not pay any dividend. Perhaps it's time they begin.
> The original purpose of owning shares in a company wasn't only that the value of the shares themselves would increase, but that they'd pay dividends so shareholders can make a profit over the life of a company.
I do not want dividends if I think the business can invest the money with a higher probability of better ROI than I can. If shareholders want dividends, they can vote for them.
With a dividend, you have to pay taxes now. Without the dividend, the stock price remains higher so you sit on higher unrealized gains. But assuming you can sell it anytime (it is liquid), the ROI is still there without the dividend.
Borrowing is not free. Other owners of the company may not have the same cash flow objectives. If you have enough votes on the board to make that the objective, then it is possible, but longer term stakeholders will probably object to being saddled with debt so some can cash out now.
As of a few years ago, they paid all cash, gave you an additional 5% of your salary in options, and you could purchase more options if you want. I don't believe they allow 100% allocation any more (but they once did, feel like that ended around 2015 or so)
That's not quite true. It means investors can't plan to make a profit by selling future shares based on the price growth beating inflation.
But...investors can still make a profit from dividends. There are plenty of large companies that are much less growth focused, and much more dividend focused.
Most US publicly traded companies are valued off future growth, not off profitability. We have no shortage of profitable companies in the US, so investment gravitates towards those that have the next best thing.
Stocks got valuations into the hundreds and lower thousands times revenue. This is only sane if there is space for the business to grow a hundred times, what for those large companies is obviously not true.
Now that the US money hose decreased it's flow a little bit, the insanity of those valuations is hurting.
wow they make that much revenue? probably would buy this dip then. $30bn ARR trading at a $96bn marketcap/valuation and they’re profitable!? uhhh say less!
The entire TV/movie streaming industry is pushing the world back to a cable-like one, and that's already pushing people back to pirating. There are a lot of people who were content to pay for a couple services, but even without any sports, you can easily be paying for 3 streaming services for ~$60, just to get content that used to be on Netflix (plus whatever's been released since). Once you add one or two sports, you can be looking at prices above $100 per month.
Why not just have one streaming service at a time? Each has an absurd amount of content so just switch it up every few months. You get to watch everything and it’s super inexpensive.
This is what I do. When the "to watch" list of shows I got recommended or am otherwise interested in watching on one of the services gets a few items on it, I buy a month of subscription and immediately cancel. Then watch the stuff during the month, and some time later get another month of a different service. This has been working great for the past couple years.
> you can easily be paying for 3 streaming services for ~$60
You can easily buy and cancel what you want when you want, so that is the not cable-like development.
I do not see why people should fee they are owed all the content in the world for $x.
The important part is the creator/curator/seller of the content and the purchaser of the content are not held hostage by a monopoly/monopsony distributor.
> it is easy to see how a family of frogs is slowly boiled back into having an expensive "entertainment package" as if it were the old cable days again,
It is not easy to see for me. If you want access to all the content all at once, then pay up.
If you want access to specific content at the specific time you want, then pay then, watch, and cancel the subscription if there was one.
This latter option was not available before, and it is now. I am loving the new system which cuts out the middleman (cable/satellite tv) that was able to jerk around both me and the content seller.
The next problem needing to be solved is reducing copyright length to 10 years or so. That is what will make the price of content go down by increasing the number of content sellers.
Buy a subscription. Then get a VPN so they don't force me to watch things from the wrong country. Then dislike the political narrative forced on me? Or just click through to some streaming site and close a few popups?
If people really start doing that en-masse, then the next thing the streaming services will implement is that cancellation means you lose access immediately.
Then I will set a reminder on my phone to cancel before next renewal. Or if too troublesome, I will just pay for the specific episode or show or movie.
Or if the price is too high, I will find something better to do with my time. Same as every other entertainment option in life.
While I myself have purchased many seasons of TV, I should caution you that none of it can be "purchased outright" on these platforms. Your account can be cancelled at any time, and you then lose access with no recourse. "Purchasing outright" requires buying physical media, and even then, disc players are becoming dangerously niche.
Media companies have been using the value of "content you want to watch" to subsidize "content you don't know you want to watch" for about a century now, the back catalogs are what will keep you paying but that only retains value so long as new content can be added to it.
> I do not see why people should fee they are owed all the content in the world for $x.
Why do actors and movie studios, producers, and glorified CDNs/streaming services think they are entitled to tens of millions of dollars for producing a TV show? They create mindless entertainment for society and yet they are so highly compensated. Yeah, I don't feel like I owe them anything.
> Why do actors and movie studios, producers, and glorified CDNs/streaming services think they are entitled to tens of millions of dollars for producing a TV show?
Because that is the agreement they made for selling their labor/services/content to the buyers of the labor/services/content.
"Mindless" is a subjective term. Millions of people enjoy the entertainment you refer to, as judged by the fact that they go to the cinema and pay for admission. That's why they're so highly-compensated.
If you don't see the value in the entertainment those companies provide, you're probably not the target audience.
All these services are going for the strategy of a couple big releases and hope people forget to cancel. But now with a dozen different services consumers are being forced to learn to swap in and out.
Once they swap into a good pirate solution, it'll be very hard to get them to swap out.
> The entire TV/movie streaming industry is pushing the world back to a cable-like one, and that's already pushing people back to pirating.
Downloading video content for your own consumption is not technically pirating in many EU countries and it's perfectly legal (not so much uploading/hosting it). While in same EU countries would be already torrenting (distributing) it illegal, so you are safe only with DDL.
But yeah, fragmentation of market killed it for end consumer.
I find it interesting that so many people spend so much time watching tv in the first place. Growing up, I was one of those people but about a decade ago I lost interest in pretty much anything on television. There are certain shows that I will watch on occasion that get me hooked, but I usually struggle to find anything that is actually worth my time and end up just turning the tv off after surfing the streaming options for 10 minutes. It boggles my mind when I hear things like “golden age” of content. Sure there is a ton of content, but it’s all so vapid.
I think there's so much content that even with a very low hit rate, there's more than enough to entertain yourself to death. For example, the 18 hour Vietnam War documentary by Ken Burns is itself enough to burn a month or so of TV time.
+1 for Vietnam. And Jazz. And The West. There is something about starting a Ken Burns series that is super relaxing, and releases the pressure to find the "perfect thing" to watch for the next 10-20 hours.
Vietnam is particularly amazing. Shout out to the Trent Reznor soundtrack too.
The West is pretty depressing, though, as it's mostly about the horrific treatment of the indigenous people of North America. I've been putting off the Vietnam one for similar reasons. Not exactly what I think of as relaxing.
Jazz and Country Music are definitely more digestible, I finished both and was glad I did. Baseball is also actually pretty chill & enjoyable, even for someone who never had more than a passing interest in the sport.
I don't watch stuff unless it has ended and is reccomended by someone who watches shows I generally enjoy. Here's my pitch for the golden age of TV, though most of these are from a few years back. Most on HBO.
The Wire
The Sopranos
Generation Kill
The Deuce
Treme
Show me a Hero
Luck
The Expanse
Sillicon Valley (not actually that funny but like a documentary of our field)
So, I see this and think "ooh, BG, I'd watch that again". Then I think, how do I find it, will I need a new subscription, it's probably not even available in my geographical area ... or I could probably go to a Torrent site and be watching it in 5 minutes (the limitation being the speed of my internet connection).
As copyright is system granted by the demos I'd love to force federation by creating a 'most-favoured nation'-type deal where if you offer content to one delivery company you have to make it available to all (maybe after a 1 year exclusivity period) for the same price. Under such a regime everyone gets paid but artificial monopolies are restricted (such monopolies don't help the demos so why allow copyright to be used to create them??).
The proliferation of content provider apps is getting silly and we should mould copyright to serve the people.
I think Arcane is probably the worst scripted show I've ever watched. It makes me immediately skeptical of ratings. My only hypothesis is that everyone enjoying it has never read a book.
Deadwood. Re-watching it now after 10+ years and am (again) impressed. Given the abundance of -isms in that show, I'm doubtful it would even be made today, which makes it even more of a find.
Under all that muck, you aren't seeing the nuggets. A great example is Severance which came out just this year (Apple+) and it's a masterpiece, from cinematography to high concept to acting.
We live in a golden age because there is something for everyone, but that also means there is a lot of trash. Luckily, there are also more gems available now than ever before.
Sure there's good content, but I'm not going to commit to yet another monthly fee. If there was a way to buy a season of a particular show for a one-time fee then I might do that. Amazon offers that option for some shows.
My belief is that, like any media, there is a massive backlog of good content.
When you get through the part of the backlog you enjoy, you have to either wait for content you enjoy to come out (slow!) or explore less enjoyable (to you) content.
Back in high school, I felt "behind" in my cultural wisdom, so I spent an entire summer watching a huge list of TV shows and movies.
Now, shows I truly enjoy are few and far between, because I've seen so much of the good content in my favorite genres already.
Agreed, I never watch TV unless it's, weirdly enough, a social setting. My wife and I watch TV together all the time, we have shows that we like to enjoy together and talk about. My roommates and I would watch TV together all the time in college, and every now and then there will be a show that I'll go to my friends houses to watch (game of thrones). But now that I think about it, I don't think I've watched a TV show by myself in over 20 years.
I haven't "watched television" in over 20 years. At the same time, the internet (YouTube to a large degree) has crept in to steal away my time.
I am thankful though that YouTube sucked so bad for so long because I spent a lot of time with my kids when they were young, reading to them, biking with them, taking them on road trips. Cutting the cord was the idea when my first daughter was born - to have the kids grow up without television (we would put on over-the-air PBS kid's shows when they were young but it was pretty much only hotels stays when they would see Sponge Bob or whatever, ha ha).
I'm in the same boat, I cut the cord in 2008 and truly feel that my kids had a better experience as youths. Having cable tv in a hotel was a huge deal for them, although they didn't really understand commercials.
Strangely my reaction was the opposite. I didn't really have tv, and I LOVED commercials, I would even put on the paid programming channels if left alone.
I've never been into "flow tv", and about 2 decades ago i simply stopped watching anything but the news, and that only for 30-60 minutes per day, and shortly after that i simply read the news on the internet and completely stopped watching "normal" tv.
Since then, i've only had streaming services, and my consumption is somewhere around 3-5 45 minute episodes per week. I have watched maybe 4 normal length movies since i had kids 13 years ago, and zero "extended length" (3 hours'ish) movies.
Recently though, i find myself to be even more picky. These days i still watch 3-5 episodes per week, but my viewing is usually done late friday and saturday evening, and the rest of the week i generally prefer a good book instead.
In April alone, i've watched 5 x 45 minute episodes in total, and read 3 books of 800 pages or more, so perhaps i'm coming full circle :)
I only use Netflix and Prime, and both feel really stale to me. It's all "content" - good to very good production values designed to fill a gap and appeal to a demographic. But very repetitive and production line, with no passion projects, nothing too arty or quirky, nothing outside of the box, no surprises.
Some of it is quite watchable, but none of it is exciting or fresh. It's all some combination of stock soapy characters and themes in stock genre settings, usually with some comedy/sex/violence/horror added for stickiness.
Netflix could easily throw some money at graduate film makers and say 'Make something no one has seen before.' That might or might not help retention, but it's hard to shake the feeling Netflix are deliberately aiming for the middle of the bell curve as creative policy, and missing opportunities to lead instead of trying to play it safe.
I guess this is the cons of being such a data oriented company. It requires guts to think beyond ROI when you have so much infos about your users and their habits.
Data oriented optimization strategies tend to result in local maximums. Jumping across the solution space from a local maximum to the global maximum requires a visionary leader, and some luck.
Throwing money at graduate filmmakers and telling them to follow their passions would all but guarantee a catalogue full of $CURRENT_DAY political messaging, which would be poison for subscriber retention.
I think Netflix's big problem is I'll occasionally discover something amazing, and then look at the release date and wonder "why did it take so long to find this?"
If the experience browsing their catalog wasn't so awful, I'd be more inclined to try and use the service. Instead, after I've finished something good, I don't tend to come back to Netflix for awhile - it's easier to just watch stuff on Youtube because I know how to navigate it, the search works well, and the recommendations are actually decent.
I remember a couple weeks ago, Blade Runner 2049 was the first thing that popped up when I logged into Netflix. I was so happy to see it there, but when I went back the next night to watch it, it wasn't there (which is fine, the homepage isn't static). So I went to search for it, and "Blade Runner" returned nothing relevant (nor did "Blade Runner 2049"). I had to search "2049" to find it, and after the movie ended, Netflix recommended the first Blade Runner (which also didn't show up in any of my searches).
The search isn't always this bad (both Blade Runner movies show up in search the way I would expect them to now), but still...even when I know something great is on Netflix, it can be an utter pain to get to. It's like they're trying to get me to go with the mediocre recommendations instead of watching the good stuff that I know is on there.
It's so annoying that if I was the one paying for it, I'd cancel my subscription. And I remember things used to be a lot better, which just makes it all the more frustrating when looking for something good.
This exactly. Across a LOT of their anime, crime drama espcially (in my limited view, probably applies to other genres as well), I feel they have this minor variation on a theme, sort of algorithmically built, almost. Everytime i watch some new series i get this "wait a minute..." feeling. I occasionally find new stuff to watch that is interesting (of late, noir crime drama shows on Prime) but those also have the same ingredients. A lot of those are not prime original anyway. That original content seems rare.
I feel what you say too, that all the content feels samey. But I'll offer a suggestion that works for me: try some animation. That's where you get the passion projects that can feel different. Animated characters and settings can be far more expressive and varied and fresh, compared to the stock sameyness you get from live action.
The new She-Ra on Netflix was the best thing I've watched in quite some time. It's not a kiddie show, it works for all ages, think like Pixar movies. Other great cartoons across a variety of streaming services: Steven Universe, Gravity Falls, Owl House, Star Trek Lower Decks, also the more mainstream Bob's Burgers. If you want something fresh to watch, try animation.
I have a similar experience with respect to watching foreign produced content. It's interesting because they present different approaches to the shows and even if they're using entertainment tropes they can be different enough because they're tropes of that nation.
But once I watched a few, Netflix filled my entire recommendation catalog with almost all e.g. Turkish and Korean shows. Pretty annoying as it's like ordering an ice cream dessert, then the only thing the menu ever shows is all ice cream desserts. It makes me think part of people feeling it's all the same is that the recommendation optimization is overbearing in shoveling too much of more of the same recent history vs presenting a mix of recommendation and discovery.
During quarantine I switched to mostly movies. They require more singular focus (it's harder to watch a movie while doing other things), don't really have the binging problem (2 hour and done instead of just continually extensions of 45 minutes), and are generally higher quality. I've seen some very good (Memories, Son of the White Mare), some very bad (I went through a Bakshi phase), and overall decided I prefer this to watching yet another sitcom or graphic novel adaptation on tv.
movies can also better adapt to be a bit shorter or longer depending on whether the story calls for it.
something i notice myself thinking after i finish most tv shows i watch is: "that really could have been shorter". it might be some parts of an episode could have been trimmed down or in some cases even multiple episodes of a season.
i don't think this is exactly surprising either considering the rigid schedule of most tv shows to fit a story into 45 minutes slot and a set number of episodes per season
I'm the opposite of you. From age 20 to about age 45, I did not watch TV at all. Part of that was because I grew up in the UK, and the experience I had with the BBC (and a bit of Channel 4 and very occasionally ITV) made US TV just look stupid to me. Endless stupid ads, laugh tracks, completely unrealistic characters, dumb plots, and more endless stupid ads.
Then ... Netflix arrived. I started watching a few of the shows that people raved about from their days on network TV, and I realized that the biggest problem was ... endless stupid ads. Which Netflix did not have. I became willing to try out HBO from time to time, got in Battlestar Galactica, and of course in 2014, True Detective showed up on HBO. In 2019, I discovered Deadwood (at that point nearly a decade old), a more or less Shakespearian epic of 19th century US history. Over the past decade, I've discovered so many truly worth shows - and I haven't event started on The Wire yet!
On top of that, Netflix has given me access to several UK shows (Luther, for example, but also Grand Designs (now, thankfully, on Youtube)) that have rounded out the menu.
I understand that aesthetic choices with TV shows are very personal, but I can honestly say that I now absolutely believe that "TV" (ala the new streaming services and/or their presentation of material without ads) can be a medium for stellar story telling. I would like it if we had a few more defined "limited series" where there's a story already known, with a beginning, middle and end (True Detective and Mare of Eastttown are great examples of this (as long as they do not ruin Mare by making a sequel). And sure, there are some TV series that really would have been better as a film. Nevertheless, the ability to spend 8-16 hours with compelling characters is big positive to me.
I used to feel the same way. I also kept the cable subscription way too long and not really watching anything, but was reluctant to pay for online streaming services. Then one day we just decided to cut cable and get Netflix to try it out. I remember enjoying Jane The Virgin, The Good Place, and a few other shows they had.
Then The Algorithm decided to suggest Mr. Sunshine, a Korean drama. I have now watched 100+ kdramas on various services. Netflix has a particularly rich catalog.
I'm not saying you'll like kdramas but you might be surprised of what is available. It was a revelation to me that there are entire "worlds" (for lack of a better word) out there that are so interesting and rich and of which I knew virtually nothing, in this case the Korean culture and their movie/drama output.
> Instead of producing two mediocre shows and an algorithmically designed movie every single week
I'm actually kinda torn about that statement. While i usually prefer shows by other studios for quality, i've watched some Netflix Originals that were rather good, and especially some "foreign language" ones that i would most likely never have watched otherwise.
Most of the Netflix Originals are not huge budget productions, but especially their foreign stuff sometimes proves that less is more. They tell interesting stories in "good enough" settings for them to be enjoyable.
nothing precludes Netflix from having great content, their quantity over quality model is annoying. The "stars" or "match" of recommended content has no basing on the enjoyment by other users as it is purely algorithmic while having the visual component of looking like reviews. They try to induce fear-of-missing-out with their trending list, which I also don't trust due to the likelihood of it not involving any humans at all like their other feature. People catch on and walk away.
Algorithmically designed movies are pretty good though.
Every Pixar movie is exactly the same, and they're all great. It's a good formula. My problem with movies is that they're built for two many audiences. Pick China xor America, and the will be more enjoyable to watch
I get Netflix through my cell phone carrier, otherwise I would drop it. I don't watch a lot of content, and I find myself watching HBO Max more often when I do.
With that being said, I might still buy some $NFLX. I thought that they were dead once before with the whole Qwikster thing, but investing in the company then would have been a very smart move.
Not saying you're right or wrong, but the landscape during the Qwikster fiasco was so dramatically different, it may as well have been a different market.
I love HBOMax content but the technology is a nightmare. Constant buffering that makes shows almost unwatchable, which I cannot understand since I have no problem with Netflix, Prime, Hulu and Disney.
I'm paying for a Netflix account that's shared between 4 of my friends. If they crack down on account sharing, I certainly won't continue subscribing and I doubt my friends would either.
I mean, it is against the terms of use. With that being said, you also pay for a certain number of "screens" so it seems like the terms would enforce themselves.
Netflix is old enough now that a lot of subscribers now have children that are in college or have graduated. My daughter is in college, and she definitely uses my netflix credentials. At what point does Netflix feel it is required for her to have her own subscription?
I hate to tell you this, but anything besides their basic plan is already in that range and includes 2 to 4 "screens" (concurrent streams), depending on the plan.
It really feels like this is already a "family plan", given the number of concurrent streams permitted. I don't think that there's much fruit to be gathered by shaking this tree.
But they say all the users must be in the same “household”. I assume this means people living together, and excludes offspring off at university. But I hope I’m wrong!
That certainly looks like it’s about to tell us what a household is, but then doesn’t, except circularly.
But it does say that people can use their Netflix account while travelling, as long as they can verify that the device is “authorized”. So the bottom line seems to be that you’re a member of my household if I say you are, no matter where you are.
I see a lot of focus on the "lost 200 000 subscribers", but less acknowledgement that they kicked 700 000 Russians off the subscriber list, meaning they actually grew by 500 000 subscribers (still well short of wall streets expectation of 2.5 million.)
So in one sense it's a one-time drop, not a trend.
Does Netflix have more competition than before? sure. Is it growing as fast as before? no, especially as they reach saturation in some markets. Is this the "end of netflix"? um... no
You're right, but the article posted includes statements like:
> Two hundred thousand subscribers did not suddenly quit their subscriptions and start using their friends’ passwords.
That implies the author thought this was a natural subscription drop and not a result of losing 700k subscribers in Russia. I'm not sure I have any confidence in their predictions about the future, since they're so clueless about what's happening today.
If wall street expected 2.5 million (most likely based on past growth and stock valuation) and Netflix reports a growth of 500k (if you keep the Russians in mind), it's a really really terrible result. It's 5 times below expectations.
For me it looks like this could just be the beginning and they're losing a lot more in the following years.
What actually happened is that Netflix is one of relatively few companies who have put out honest assessments in a time of severe economic stress. Also their competition has been growing for years. That's it.
People are so used to having smoke blown up their asses that when someone tells them honestly about slightly negative news, they get confused.
Netflix always had a terrible business model dependent on transient properties of the media environment. I thought from the beginning they were not masters of their own fate (remember Redbox's hack to get around publisher restrictions? Weird streaming windows even from the streaming era's earliest days?) and once they started spending the big bucks to try and stay afloat it was clear they were doomed. They were only in "FAANG" to make the acronym funny.
I expect the entire streaming business to follow the cable TV model: 1 - start with a paid, high quality and/or increased supply without ads; 2 - bleed ads into some of the streams because the first stage was unsustainable; 3 - race to the bottom with bundles, because the individual streams are too expensive. Expect Comcast to be the big winner here through a roll up and cross-sale of carriage to their cable channels into streaming bundles (because aggregated bundle fees will provide at least some revenue without the cost of running your own streaming platform.
Youtube ought to win this battle but have to date demonstrated little competence. Comcast is the superpredator.
See “The origins of FAANG”. At some point, presumably because it is a catchy sounding acronym, people started using FAANG to mean large tech companies, or large tech companies with very high payrates.
The thing I find interesting with Netflix is how much they spend on content and what a terrible rate of return it has. Look at Apple TV+, they're absolutely TINY compared to Netflix in both library size and money spent on new production, but they have arguably more hits than Netflix. Like, since when has any drama on Netflix been as buzzy or as good as Severance on Apple TV+? When was the last time they had a comedy success like Ted Lasso?
They have a couple of things that are very good (including Russian Doll, which is better than the article gives it credit for). But it's the ratio the that's troubling: the value of [good shows] / [shows produced] is absurdly much lower for Netflix than for Apple TV+, HBO Max or Disney+. All their spending seems to result in is endless mediocre True Crime documentaries that try recapture the magic of the first season of Making a Murderer, and the occasional golden nugget you binge in a weekend.
The article makes a big deal of the binging thing, and I agree it's a terrible model compared to weekly releases. But I feel like Netflix's real problem is that they just don't make enough good stuff.
"The thing I find interesting with Netflix is how much they spend on content and what a terrible rate of return it has."
Bingo - that's the real reason for the long term (or secular ) decline we're seeing. With 0% interest rates, it didn't matter what the payoff time horizon for Netflix was. With 4% interest rates, longer horizons are gone. Couple that with Netflix being a discretionary expense, and we see the compounding effects of inflation.
Two things will happen - we'll see the real value of Netflix's library content. Do people really value that at $12 per month.
And we'll also likely see an appreciation in the value of the library content from legacy studios like Paramount/NBCU etc. - who have complained for the longest time that this is undervalued relative to Netflix.
Exactly. If I pick a random show on any of those, it's probably at least ok (depending on the kinds of shows I like). Pick a random Netflix original and it's probably terrible. And, the ones you do find that are ok end up canceled after a single season.
I was really skeptical of subscribing to Apple TV (an additional streaming service really?) but after watching some of the Apple content I'm a convert. Ted Lasso, Severance, Pachinko, and many more.
There's just so much cheap, quickly produced, B-level content that it dilutes the brand.
>The article makes a big deal of the binging thing, and I agree it's a terrible model compared to weekly releases. But I feel like Netflix's real problem is that they just don't make enough good stuff.
Personally speaking, I'd be happy if they simply completed the stuff they do make -instead of cancelling it prematurely.
I think they've over-interpreted their viewing data. Seems like they concluded that viewers spend most of their time watching garbage filler, which is probably true. But they shouldn't presume that each viewing hour is equal to the next.
I'll watch some garbage on streaming. But I'll make subscription choices based on flagship shows since everyone has garbage filler content.
Their first few originals were great, or if not great, then at least interesting.
Now, they produce so much, but most of it is just… feeling like made by AI
Like they see what is popular elsewhere and trying to produce exactly the same thing. But as with GPT generated text, after a while, you can sense something is off.
These suggestions are pretty weak. Mostly boil down to making better stuff for cheaper. Which is obvious and something everyone is trying.
IMHO, Netflix is the classic .com company where they think they can do everything better than the incumbents. That's true when there is a paradigm technology shift (internet ordering and then streaming). But it's almost never true when you're talking about core competencies.
Higher prices, lower quality content. That's the sum of my current gripes with Netflix. I'm considering pausing my subscription until there's enough for me to watch again. Netflix is sacrificing content for profit and squeezing people harder for the same reason: the completely unsurprising result: people vote with their feet. Publicly pondering adding ads to the mix is not going to improve things.
My suggestions:
- invest in licensing deals for existing content. More premium content, less generic filler content. As much as I appreciate Steven Segal, his later work is not great; to put it mildly. And it seems they unloaded a lot of that recently (at least on the German Netflix). That, and generic Korean action movies/series seems to be a thing lately. What's up with that? There are back catalogs of great content dating back decades around the world that are hardly being monetized at all currently. Probably there's an audience for that. It shouldn't be that hard to get good content. And it should be a lot cheaper than producing your own new content.
- invest in more & better in house content, that's a strategy that has worked in the past. No reason why that would no longer work. But make sure the quality is high. Especially a lot of the Netflix movies have been expensive flops.
- invest in re-acquiring lost customers (discounts, outreach, etc.). Easy because they left because they didn't like the content or the price. So, fix that and they might come back. You know what they liked and thus which of those issues it is. Customer acquisition cost for 200K users is not going to be nothing. But that's 30M/year in revenue or so.
- crack down on obvious password sharing abuse but give people a good way out in terms of cost and make sure they don't have a hard time with perfectly valid uses by families. Converting families to individual subscriptions is just not going to happen. So, avoid losing them because things get too expensive. Kids watching now on a family account may become life time users once they move out. A genius move would be to have 1 password per profile and only allow 1 device to be watching with a profile at the time. That makes it quite obvious how many people are using the account. Some people have many kids. Perfectly legit to have 6 or so profiles in some larger families. But you can track where people watch (same ip address?) and take action when the abuse is obvious. Mobile uses are even easier: simply verify the phone number. Etc.
- squeeze the competition hard by lowering prices; make sure value for money is bets with Netflix. Growth will come at the cost of the competition. Right now Netflix is losing this game.
- change the leadership, Netflix is not performing well and the current issues have been widely predicted by outsiders; which means they are not listening either. That's a double fail. And a triple fail if you consider that Netflix takes pride in being a data driven company. The content issues should be fairly obvious from the data they are gathering. The effect of the pricing changes, should not have come as a surprise either. It's not data driven if the algorithm tells you only what you want to hear. And I suspect the algorithms were fine and management just simply ignored the output of that.
> a year-long subscription at a discount — 10 months for the price of 12, for instance
That doesn't sound like very good deal to me, I'd prefer 12 months for the price of 10 or pay as you go for minutes/hours of actually watched content. Though Netflix has so much trash it's not really worth paying for. Had it for many months and hardly watched anything there.
Honestly for me I just do not know all the content Netflix has because the browsing is so bad. I wish instead of pushing shows to me best on algorithms, it would just let me browse categories and recent additions etc in a simpler way. Maybe categorised by year.
I've always preferred to use https://unogs.com/ which lets you search with a lot of advanced search parameters and the resulting pages are much easier to browse, and then just pull up specific titles on Netflix itself.
Absolutely, Netflix would be 1000 times better if they just let me sort, filter and find content based on concrete metadata. Instead, I'm forced to rely on their recommendation algorithms that purport to know what I want to watch, but for some reason keep recommending low quality content in languages I'm just not interested in. I'd be happy if I could just filter Netflix to only show me content with original audio in languages I speak. The few shows I'm interested in watching with subtitles or dubbed audio are things I can search for on a case by base basis. And don't get me started on Netflix's non-intuitive categories which seem more intent on forcing me to view ideologically motivated content than on helping me to find content in a category I'm interested in. I don't want to search for "Christian Films with Family Values" nor do I want to watch "Films With Black Female Leads". Nothing wrong with those types of films, but I'm searching by "Action", "Romance", "Comedy", "Sci-Fi" etc.
"there is too much political agenda sold even in children shows"
Yes sadly this has become much more prominent in the last couple of years. It has blatant political propaganda inserted into all of their original content that is clearly forced and hurts the quality of the programming.
It's very real. I have friends in the industry working on a Netflix series, and the amount of political correctness being forced on them from the Netflix side is insane.
I cannot give a specific example due to exposing which show this may be on, but if the stories I hear or true, the Netflix staff must do a lot of Yoga cause the stuff they force to change is a stretch.
The artists I know on the show went from being excited, to just there for a paycheck after certain fruits were deemed racist around black characters (not watermelons), and a LGBT plotline was forced into a childrens show just because.
The info you've supplied doesn't support your premise. You say "it's very real," but you admit you cannot cite a single example, and your only evidence is some vague hearsay.
Hearsay is this a courtroom? I'll cite an example : the entire front page of Netflix is an agenda. When they removed ratings I knew it was going downhill.
I didn't suggest it was "hurting" children however I do believe it hurts the overall quality of the programming.
One example that probably flirts the line with hurting children was Netflix's Cuties.
"Netflix is also the streaming service behind "Cuties," a wildly controversial French film that tells the coming-of-age story of an 11-year-old girl as she discovers her maturing self, all while looking for acceptance in her religious family and group of young dancers she hopes to befriend"
If you want examples of pardon the term but I guess "woke" programming, this list is pretty extensive on Netflix. You can do a quick google search yourself to see lots of examples here.
My personal take (as someone who is left leaning) is when these messages are bombarded into programming it often feels forced.. even perhaps propagandized. This level of inauthenticity hurts the overall artistic and entertainment value of the programming (just my two cents).
You mean about Abercrombie & Fitch? The company whose former CEO Mike Jeffries effectively spelled out his tactics in a now-infamous profile on the news site Salon, saying: "We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don't belong (in our clothes), and they can't belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely."[1]
There's a difference between targeting a segment and saying others don't belong.
There's also a difference between reaching out to disadvantaged groups -vs- targeting elites.
As an absurd example, compare a fancy restaurant to a soup kitchen. The fancy restaurant is targeting the elite, and excluding the poor. The soup kitchen is targeting the poor, and it'd be ridiculous for Elon Musk to demand food from them - but they'd probably still serve him if he showed up.
Analogously, it feels like you're trying to use the existence of soup kitchens to defend restaurants.
(To be clear, I'm not saying restaurants are evil, or that clothing brands are an act of charity. Just trying to illustrate why people are going to have different intuitions on Abercrombie -vs- clothes for black people)
Not really. I am saying there is an artificial corporate element of inserting political narratives into much of the programming. Authentic pieces where writers just create a good story typically reverberate better with audiences .. despite the writers political opinions whether they lean left or right.
The opposite is true. If a writer feels or is outwardly coerced that he/she must include certain characters, topics, behaviors.... this comes off an not genuine, propagandized, or even corporate commercially. My personal opinion is much of the Netflix original content falls into this later category.
Yes, really. A story about Christian values is going to come off as political to Hindu or Muslim viewers.
> this comes off an not genuine
I get the feeling you'd say this even about authentically written content, so it's a moot point. You've drawn a line in the sand that characters and content that don't look like you are bad, and that it's origins must be from seedy beginnings rather than decades of hard work by dismissed groups of people that are now finally getting a chance to write stories about people like them.
>Yes, really. A story about Christian values is going to come off as political to Hindu or Muslim viewers.
Not necessarily. If Netflix had 10,000 shows and some of them were stories about Christian values, some were about Hindu values, and some were about Muslim values, nobody reasonable would have a problem with it. However, if all 10,000 shows made a forced effort to somehow include Christian values, or always had to shoehorn at least one character openly wearing a cross and saying a prayer into every show, it would rub on people the wrong way. That's how it is with Netflix original programming. You can break out your "woke" bingo card for any Netflix original show, no matter what it is purportedly about, and score bingo every time. Not every show has to include a facet of the same political agenda. Even if you happen to agree with that agenda, there is something to be said about diversity (true diversity - diversity of thought, not the fake kind peddling on Netflix).
Exactly. I don't know why is it so difficult for people to understand that you aren't sexist, racist (pick your favourite -ist) for noticing this. The time you take to "educate" viewers about your preferred political agenda is time you are taking from the plot, from character development, from story cohesion... It feels forced no matter what.
Cuties isn't a children's show. It's a commentary on sexualization of minors in France. Do you have any specific examples of political agendas in childrens' shows?
Cuties isn't a children's film, it's rated MA (for mature audiences).
There is no dispute that Netflix has woke programming, or heck many other kinds of programming and no sensible person would claim otherwise. What is being asked is which programs for children/kids are you arguing is politically motivated?
The only examples anyone has been able to produce are children shows that have homosexual characters in them. I am going to assume the best of intentions here, but it's very hard not to find it appalling that many people would think that a show that has some gay characters in it is making a political statement or has a political agenda.
I've been seeing people complain about the presence of PoC in many of these programs too, even though artificial diversity has been a staple of children's programming since at least the '70s.
The fact that the inclusion of LGBT and/or PoC in a children's program is at all controversial tells me we still have a problem that needs to be addressed. If you really don't like the idea of seeing a black or gay person on TV then you are the problem.
The sad thing is that a big majority of people complaining are people who are past child-rearing age and thus not even the target market for any of these shows.
I think you are straw manning vs steel manning the argument. I don't think people mind the inclusion of LGBQT or POC people in shows. I don't think people mind even the occasional artificial inclusions - e.g. Mr. Rogers did a great job of bringing in kids with special needs and helped the audience understand that they were people too. He also showed how whites and blacks could be friends and equals in a time when this was still a bit controversial in some pockets of the country.
What bugs people, me included, is very different. It is the forced inclusion of diversity seemingly everywhere. It is the constant subtle messages of "white man evil" in shows where it doesn't add to the plot. It is stuff like the Oscars being explicit about requiring minority leads. It is the one sided diversity where blacks, browns and Muslims are protected but it is perfectly acceptable to make racist jokes about white people or say Christians. It is the subtle shaming of anything conservative.
FYI I am mixed race, liberal, and not Christian. I am also of child rearing age and don't like seeing my kids being indoctrinated at so many levels.
All anyone is asking for are examples and while everyone is happy to go on and on with long paragraphs about how white Christian men are under attack and portrayed as evil, while gays, browns and Muslims are portrayed as absolutely perfect saints, no one is yet able to produce any actual examples of children shows that are engaging in this indoctrination.
It's nice that you're a mixed race liberal Christian who has kids, but please answer the question. It really is coming across as a bunch of people who want way too much to be angry about something without knowing precisely what it is they're angry about.
They said they were not Christian, but I agree with the rest of your arguments.
Also, apparently it's annoying to "force" representation in shows but it's perfectly fine to have shows whose literal only purpose is to drive demand for various dolls and toys. As if anyone would have created Bob the Builder or whatever without a plan for selling it in Walmart.
I disagree with the parent comment that is is commonplace (I think it is rare) but I have definitely seen it. Several episodes of shows for girls under 5 have the trope "boys/grownups say girls can't do X" which the girl characters have to overcome. This is absurd material to expose to children of that age, who have never been exposed to the concept outside of children's programming! It's so far removed from the reality of young girls today it makes me doubt that the people writing this stuff even have children.
They've been doing this my whole life, and it drives me nuts. I used to complain that nearly every Disney movie on TV contrived some reason for men to be assholes and say something along the lines of "GIRLS can't play soccer!" Only of course to be thoroughly flummoxed by the end. It's endlessly tiring, and as you note, it inadvertently demonstrates to girls the bigotry it hopes to overcome.
It's not really vague, it's a very clear question. And my response is phrased as a question because it depends on your personal morality. No one can answer for you. Plus, I was very curious to hear other people's position on the importance of truth (or lack thereof), and I find that I am compelled to engage in whatever way I feel at the time of commenting.
I personally am not sure how important I think the truth is as a moral good. I feel that as time has gone on, I've seen the dissolution on a societal level, and I now value truth more than I once did.
1. direct harm - a girl might get into a fight with a man and get hurt because she believed a falsehood
2. indirect harm - the girls told falsehoods begin to distrust institutions who hold themselves out to be unconditional truthsayers, thereby dissolving social bonds and encouraging unneeded division and rancor
First of all, anyone can get into a fight and lose. And more often than not, technique is what helps people prevail in fights, not strength. Any decent martial arts training will teach you that.
If you’re talking about professional boxing, sure, it would be stupid to claim that a well-trained woman could, on average, beat an equally-well-trained man in a boxing match.
But I don’t think that’s the claim here. The claim is that women can be as strong as men, and that isn’t totally false. Maybe not the strongest men, but certainly a lot of them, and especially if they train well.
As for the claim of indirect harm, I think people in general need to be better-educated to engage in critical thinking. Treating words from authority figures with a grain of salt is at the heart of post-secondary education, and yet, it leads to better civil discourse, not worse.
Also, there seems to be a thin veil of sexism in your claim, as though women aren’t capable of thinking for themselves and therefore can’t ascertain the nuance in a general statement like “women can be stronger than men.” It’s meant to be a motivational statement, not a rigorous scientific claim.
>And more often than not, technique is what helps people prevail in fights, not strength.
Find me a credible source that claims this. After all, we certainly don't group wrestlers into weight categories because of differences in technique?
>The claim is that women can be as strong as men, and that isn’t totally false. Maybe not the strongest men, but certainly a lot of them, and especially if they train well.
That claim is simply false. The most extreme female athletes come close to achieving parity with an average untrained man. There are almost none of these - certainly not "a lot of them". The vast majority of women are much weaker than even the weakest men.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17186303/
"Less expected was the gender related distribution of hand-grip strength: 90% of females produced less force than 95% of males. Though female athletes were significantly stronger (444 N) than their untrained female counterparts, this value corresponded to only the 25th percentile of the male subjects."
"The results of female national elite athletes even indicate that the strength level attainable by extremely high training will rarely surpass the 50th percentile of untrained or not specifically trained men."
>Also, there seems to be a thin veil of sexism in your claim,
I appreciate your candor.
> as though women aren’t capable of thinking for themselves
The problem is that everyone (men and women) thinks of themselves as the special snowflake who can "beat the odds". I think that the message to women "You are very likely weaker than the weakest men you know" avoids much more harm (case 1 direct harm) than the "good" generated by: "it's extremely unlikely but with good genetics and training it's a possibility that some extreme athlete women could become nearly as strong as a below-average man".
Not OP. But I looked it up. A lot of the ones I found are ones my kids watched and I didn't even notice! Just shows how insidious and gently "slipped in" it is.
Not that it's bad for those people to believe in those things or anything. But I don't want my kids exposed and normalized to these things until they're an appropriate age to decide on their own.
I clicked that link expecting to see opinions on “Trickle down economics” or “abortion” or “ownership of the means of production” being fed to children but all I see is: “Same sex couples exist.”
“Same sex couples exist” is not a political view. It is a reality of fact that children of all ages already know. My kid’s best friend since age 5 has two moms. Trust me: she has no concept of what politics are but knows what two loving parents are.
If “gays exist” is the example of politics jammed into TV, that’s a really really weak example.
I'm not clear that your children can become old enough to decide things for themselves without exposure to the world. Hiding things from them is going to make their decisions more naive.
In one kid show "She-Ra" for example, every relationship is gay/lesbian save for one. I cannot prove harm in any meaningful way, but I think this sort of misrepresentation of reality is very confusing to kids.
Smurfs were all (but one) male. I wouldn’t read too much into She-Ra. And “same sex couples exist” is not really a political statement.
Now, when She-Ra starts having extended monologues about taxation policy or the virtues of direct democracy vs. representative government, I’ll support ya!
She-Ra is a show that takes place in a world where people _wield magical swords while riding around half-naked on giant armored tigers_. Yet your chief complaint is that a friend group having several non-heterosexual relationships is a "misrepresentation of reality"?
Gay/lesbian relationships are overrepresented relative to real life in She-Ra, but there is far more than one heterosexual relationship. Off the top of my head there is Bow and Glimmer, Queen Angela and King Micah, Mermista and Seahawk, and Entrapta and Hordak by the last episode.
Political themes in TV shows are pretty ubiquitous these days. In part this is because US politics are more interested in "culture war" issues than they are with specific political platforms. In other words, culture war issues tend to deal with moral and social values. In a previous time, political issues might be much more limited in scope: what should the government tax? Which regulations are helpful? etc.
"Culture war" issues tend to be a bit more subtle, and can usually be ignored as valid plot devices. There's not even anything explicitly wrong with adding your own cultural values to a movie, but rather it can get pretty overbearing, even if you tend to agree.
A good way to look out for these themes is to look at the characters and ask some basic questions:
- Which characters in the show are in charge? What groups (racial, sexual, etc) are they from?
- Which characters in the show are competent? What groups are they from?
- Which characters in the show are the villains? What groups are they from?
- Which characters in the show are the victims? What groups are they from?
- Which characters have "good" traits such as humility, kindness, etc?
- Which characters are shown to be bigots?
- etc.
This can get a bit more complex, too. The solutions to problems, or explanations for the ills of the world might also follow culture war lines. Who are the bad guys? Are they from a corporation? From the government? From a certain gender or ethnic group? etc.
A great example of this might be the Mulan remake vs. the original. In the remake, much of the movie is occupied with showing how Mulan is better than everyone, and then quickly cutting to show face-shots of men who are either severely intimated, cowed, afraid, or impressed. I'm not suggesting there is anything wrong with this. Rather I'm just making the point that this was added to the movie for political and cultural reasons. The original cartoon didn't really have much comeuppance in this way, because it was written during a different time.
Again, I don't think there's anything wrong with people putting their political views into shows -- really, that's inevitable at some level. But, there's also a certain level where it becomes too over the top, too sanctimonious, too pervasive, and you just want to get away from it all.
Poppycock. Political issues in media have always included cultural and social issues, it's just that they now span a larger universe that includes more than white male Christians.
I grew up in the '80s and it was there then, too. Some example episodes from "Diff'rent Strokes," a show about a white industrial magnate who adopts a couple of Black orphans:
* A social worker investigates the boys' home life and tells Mr. Drummond that she believes black children belong in black households.
* Mr. Drummond scolds Arnold for secretly recording other people's conversations. Arnold disobeys him and records Kimberly's boyfriend Roger making racist comments about Willis to his sister.
* Arnold's poor dental checkup has Drummond suspecting that the easy availability of junk food from vending machines at school is to blame. But when Drummond begins a campaign to replace the hot dogs, cookies, potato chips and soft drinks with more healthy foods, Arnold's friends try to convince him to get his father to reconsider.
* Arnold's joy of being transferred to an all-white school (and riding a bus to get there) is shaken to its very core when a racist busing opponent calls the Drummond household warning the pro-busing family patriarch not to send his black children to the new school, or else.
* When it is learned that Drummond's upcoming construction project may be located on top of an ancient Indian burial ground, he faces protest from a Native American who threatens to go on a hunger strike if the land is built on. Arnold and Willis follow suit by going on a hunger strike of their own.
--
And of course, we mustn't forget "All in the Family" from the 1970s; pretty much every episode was about politics in some way.
Except in virtually all of this woke programming white male christians are deliberately and exclusively portrayed negatively, if their characters aren't outright replace with race and gender swaps. It's petty revenge racism.
If you're saying that you cannot find a single example where a white male is portrayed non-negatively, you need to look harder. Longmire on Netflix is just one example. Jack Reacher and Bosch on Prime Video are others.
That said, there's plenty of room to make fun of white male Christians, just like there's plenty of room to make fun of everyone else. It's not like there's a shortage of hypocrisy and foibles out there.
But white Christian's negatively portraying the rest of the world for the better part of a century is not political? Dr. Fu Manchu, Breakfast at Tiffany's?
Why is it only political when another group is creating the content?
>But white Christian's negatively portraying the rest of the world for the better part of a century is not political? Dr. Fu Manchu, Breakfast at Tiffany's
This is dishonest. Minorities were also portrayed positively in legacy media, and villains were also frequently portrayed by white males.
>Why is it only political when another group is creating the content
In the past studios were creating content relevant to a predominantly (90%+) white audience. They were creating content which was largely in line with their target demographic culture.
This recent media instead is creating content to disrupt what it's owners and managers see as a "racist" culture. That's what makes it political. It's less about money and more about deliberately changing culture in a hypocritical manner - fighting alleged racism with explicit racism. Breakfast at tiffanies was not about punching down on asians, but black feminist vikings is about sending a politicized message.
> Breakfast at tiffanies was not about punching down on asians
You seem pretty sure about that for a person who wasn’t involved in its production. Even assuming, arguendo, that it wasn’t, would you contend that it would be appropriate to have such a character in a modern movie? Have you surveyed Asian people about how they feel about the Fu Manchu character?
> D&I is not discrimination against straight white men.
Well, it isn't. As a straight white man myself, I don't feel like I'm particularly suffering from discrimination. Am I picked first for everything now, like maybe before I would have? Maybe not. Does it adversely impact my life? Not really.
It's OK to let others to have the first sip from the fountain once in awhile, and you can help lift up historically-persecuted people without it necessarily being a loss for you. Attitude goes a long way in helping yourself be at peace with it.
If you're a straight white man and you're feeling seriously oppressed by D&I, I'd like to hear from you personally and understand your situation better.
Anyway, this is pretty far afield from the discussion, which is really about specifically how media is harming people and children in particular.
This isn't some debate where you can score cheap points on technicalities. Frankly comments like this lower the quality of the discussion.
If you want to know why D&I is an issue, it's because it is re-entrenching all of the stereotypes by hamhandedly trying to give everyone different handicaps, like life can be simplified to a game of golf. The reality, though, is that it doesn't matter what handicap I'm given, due to my poor golf game I'm never going to play against Tiger Woods.
The only thing the handicaps change is what we're measuring, and at some point people decide not to play the game, or lobby to change the rules. Look at the resurgence of the far right: it is D&I which gave them the resentment in people's souls to which they could place their hooks.
You’re just reading the news and jumping straight to conclusions. If you’d like to actually defend a position against D&I and how it is actually net harmful (or personally harmful to you), or specifically how it is reenforcing harmful stereotypes with examples of such, then that would be an enlightening discussion.
>If you’d like to actually defend a position against D&I and how it is actually net harmful
Because it's racist and sexist? Because it reduces people to their skin color and gender? Because it implicitly reinforces the notion that minorities are "different" and forces us to nonsensically pretend that differences can only be positive in cooperative environments? Because it suggests that minorities need special advantages to level the playing field? Because top to bottom it is not a cohesive, consistent, or rational policy and implies that all inequities are exclusively the result of discrimination on behalf of white males who have been made into a target, are having their voices silenced, their job opportunities removed, and their livelihoods threatened for self advocating?
On one hand your ideology implies that all of this is deserved because of the past and necessary for an equitable future, but then at the same time you blatantly deny that any of it's happening and shame anyone who speaks up against this discrimination by calling them bigoted. It's insanity.
> forces us to nonsensically pretend that differences can only be positive in cooperative environments
What is "forcing" you to do this? The D&I training I've been taking has been about finding positivity in differences to our mutual advantage, but never does it say that all aspects of it are 100% positive. People are always going to find areas of disagreement. Yet we find ourselves working together, and so we must find ways to collaborate as a team despite those differences, even to the point of respecting them.
> Because it suggests that minorities need special advantages to level the playing field?
The evidence on this is pretty clear, because several minorities do suffer from historical poverty (in money, in education, and quality of life) that has been very difficult to overcome. A lot of damage was done prior to the Civil Rights Act through mechanisms specifically intended to keep Black people down, and we haven't recovered from that yet. We're getting better, but I don't think we can just put our heads in the sand and conclude that the Civil Rights Act was the end of our journey to remedy the terrible legacy of slavery and racism.
> all inequities are exclusively the result of discrimination on behalf of white males who have been made into a target, are having their voices silenced, their job opportunities removed
You cannot be serious about the silence of white voices in the media. Maybe some individuals are being silenced (see below), but the sentiments certainly are not. For every 1 person who may have been silenced, it's easy to find thousands who haven't, whose opinions track roughly identically. And those people who have been "silenced" seem to have no trouble getting their voices heard through other avenues. Alex Jones still has plenty of mouthpieces, as does Donald Trump. (Both also happen to own several of those mouthpieces...)
And it is especially ironic when a person claims they are being silenced... on Twitter, and then when it is republished through various blogspam ad nauseam.
> ...their livelihoods threatened for self advocating?
I think it depends on the nature of the advocacy in question. If you're saying, "I want the opportunity to learn, to work hard, and be successful," I would be very surprised if people were to threaten your livelihood over that. On the other hand, if your advocacy consists of lies, exaggerations, and hysterics, then people might not want to associate with you.
I don't accuse anyone of being a bigot because they have genuine and good-faith concerns about whether we are remedying social inequity the wrong way. It's when they flat-out lie, deny the past, make racist remarks themselves, or make themselves out to be the victim without evidence that they deserve that moniker.
Why do you think international audiences care about whatever is the American cause du jour? I for one don't and I'm put off by the hamfisted political content.
> Which characters in the show are competent? What groups are they from?
> Which characters in the show are the villains? What groups are they from?
Genuinely curious here - is there some difference between the dominance of one group in the 50s vs 80s vs today? Or do you feel that TV has always been dominated by political themes?
It would certainly be disingenuous to say that TV shows did not have political themes in previous eras: obviously they did. I believe what's different now is simply the speed of change and extremity of political viewpoints. This debate is sort of similar to when people worry about misinformation on social media, and someone answers back "well there's always been bias and misinformation in the news." This is true, but it fails to address that the nature of the problem is different now than in previous eras.
I think what you have these days is a splintering of the mainstream, and the rise of extremist viewpoints. Both of these, in my opinion are due to social media.
In the 80s, (and before) there was a true mainstream culture. For certain, people fell outside of that culture, and if you did fall outside of the mainstream I believe the consequences were harsher than they would be nowadays. But, broadly speaking, that mainstream culture encompassed more Americans than the mainstream culture of today. In modern times, there is no real majority mainstream culture, and because of this centralized media is reflective of a smaller and smaller portion of the country. In other words, there are simply going to be a larger number of people who might not feel represented by views and positions they watch in TV or hear on the news. And to be clear, I'm not talking about "racial representation here." I explicitly do not mean that "if I don't see a person of my race or gender in a show, I don't feel represented." I mean instead that the social and political values of a given show today reflect the views of a smaller percentage of Americans than the political and social values of a show in the 50s or 80s.
I'm not even arguing that this is a bad thing in the objective sense: simply that the political views of the current "mainstream" feel narrow and extremist to me, to the extent that I just don't want to watch a lot of popular shows.
I haven’t seen She-Ra, is it only gay relationships? I’m curious if you think a show with only straight relationships is propagandistic too (ie most TV ever made)
It isn't. But in a show called "She-Ra and the Princesses of Power", you're going to have a lot of lesbian relationships if the cast ends up mostly paired. But there's a mix of relationships.
You never watched Sesame Street did you? They've been explaining social issues to kids since the 1960's. Of course Mr. Rodger's first episode was explaining the Vietnam War. Kids shows are and have always been political if they're not pure fantasy (even then...)
Exactly. A lot of new content made seems to be really poor to me.
And oh, did I mention content that keeps making frequent trips in and out of Netflix? (Movies like The Terminator franchise, Troy etc.)
So cringe I just want to cancel it after this month.
`- there is too much political agenda sold even in children shows (Kids really dont need this kind of crap)`
This is what pushing me over the edge. I have both Netflix and Amazon prime subscriptions. I have thought several times to drop one. The only reason I still have Netflix is because my wife and kids watch their shows. But I have had a hard time finding good shows because everything is political, and I hate when the trailer deceives me and they just inject pure political propaganda in the middle of the show.
Suddenly I found myself reading about Synology NAS and how to set up Plex on it. I am very close to buy a Synology NAS, and to boot I can get host my own VPN server, seems like a good idea.
I'm honestly curious too. Our kids watch chip & potato, octonauts, number blocks, and all sorts of things. None of it seems political. But maybe I'm missing something.
Hell, Netflix even has barbie cartoons, which leftists don't exactly view highly.
I ask to elevate the level of discussion here. Speaking in generalities and characterizing people's work without evidence is too facile; you can go to other popular social media sites for that. Elsewhere in this thread, my gentle prodding has led to discussion of some actual shows and scenes that people are thinking of, and it's led to much more interesting - and less heated - discussion.
That's funny, because I've never seen a question like this answered, except with handwaving about how the poster can't say more, or they don't want to get distracted with specifics, or a handful of other reasons the original claim can't be backed up.
I think it's because most of the time the "politics" that are objected to tend to be things like having an LGBT character in a show. While it's probably not true that everyone who complains about "politics" on TV these days are objecting to LGBT people, it is almost certainly true that everyone who watches TV and gets disgusted by seeing an LGBT character will code their disgust in terms of "being tired of politics" shoved down their throat, etc.
Thus it tends to be very likely that the person complaining about "politics" is simply masking a disgust of others' identities, but doesn't want to get into specifics because it would be a bad look. Therefore the question asking for specifics is interpreted as a way to pick a fight, because they know what might ensue if they actually got into specifics.
Nonsense, its simply that if writers are engaged in social signaling some of that results in much worse shows and that is seriously annoying.
Consider two shows that I watched in the same Week, Wheel of Time and Arcane. Both shows have a very clearly modern perspective, and are very much in line with what we might call 'woke' culture.
Arcane did this in a brilliant way, a great love story between female leads of the show. Genuinely showing lower class struggle, corruption and so on. Both the villains and the heroes (and in between) have a wide range perspectives, capabilities and identities. Great show, well executed.
Wheel of Time had a writer who made it a clear mission statement to transform the source material into a woke version of itself, going so far as to say 'this is how it would have been written today'. The show also has a female lead in a lesbian relationship, but one that feels forced and has little emotional core. Unlike Arcane there is a clear trend where females were powered up to a sometimes a hilarious degree, all antagonists were stereotypical boring men and all the main leading male characters were basically boring did basically nothing and their many story somehow relates to their relationship with a powerful women.
If 'Wheel of Time' was just another show, it would just be a badly written show. However that it is adoption of well known source material shows the writers bias and political message quite clearly.
Almost nobody is against LGBT characters or show that have woke politics in them. Its when it is badly done that it is annoying.
The same in the past would apply to war propaganda movies. If its a very well done and executed it can be great content. But most that produced with that goal in mind is just lame.
To suggest that the majority of people who criticizes shows for 'wokeism' are just LGBT haters is absurd. Its equally wrong as to suggest that all people who object to war propaganda movies are pacifists.
The reality is that these studies want shows with these kinds of messaging in them and that a great deal of content ponders to that political outlook. Just as in the past content providers have pondered to politics as well. It does not mean you disagree with the political outlook, it just means I don't need it to be shoved into my face at every opportunity by lazy writers.
It sounds to me like you have an issue with bad writing, not necessarily diversity of characters or the portrayal of minorities at their best. That's a fair position to hold, and one that I agree with.
It is possible for inclusivity to be executed well, and it is equally possible for it to be executed poorly. I'm not sure we should throw out the baby with the bathwater, though.
What I am saying is that if you have a dominate political culture then bad writing will reflect that and people rightly point out what those are. But that doesn't mean that its a wholesale attack on that political culture.
> Almost nobody is against LGBT characters or show that have woke politics in them.
I’m not sure why you would think this. There is a huge segment of society that is very much against everything that could possibly be considered “woke”. They use the term “woke” as an insult and as something that is obviously bad on its face and by definition. They have a huge amount of political power, and may soon have an iron grip on political power in the US. I grew up among these people and was one of them for a long time. They believe:
* Gay relationships are an abomination, and any media that indicates otherwise is offensive politics and should be banned from schools.
* Women have specific child rearing and housekeeping roles ordained by God, and any media that indicates otherwise is offensive politics
* Christianity (or their brand of it) is meant to be respected at all times, and should be a core value of government
* Racism has been over since [slavery ended|civil rights era] and it’s high time for those communities to get over it and stop bothering those poor brave police officers and smashing those storefront windows all the time. Any form of education on the topic should be banned from schools.
It has been my experience that the people I grew up with who I know believe all the above are constantly wrapping their views in generic complaints about “woke-ism”. It is been my experience with people online that if you dive deeper into specifics or look at comment history of posters who actively and constantly decry “woke politics”, you often eventually get rants about white genocide or some other conspiracies that tend to ship in the same container. I think it’s always important to talk specifics, because I guarantee you that when e.g. my dad tells you that a show’s “woke-ism” is ruining it (and he definitely will tell you that), it’s because he finds gay behavior to be deeply disgusting and immoral.
That being said, thank you for some of those specifics. I’d really like to be shown otherwise, even if it’s one person at a time.
So your WoT example intrigues me. That’s the only show I’ve seen among those, but I do want to see Arcane (it’s on my list). I still don’t see how the “woke” part does the ruining, and maybe it comes down to whether you ascribe the boringness of the relationships or the Aes Sedai partners to be inherently caused by the fact that the roles are non-traditional in terms of genders. Where you see forced woke-ism causing boringness, I’d probably see as just plain old boring (which, eh, it’s entertaining enough for me, but not the best; it’s been such a long time since I read those books and I’m not sure I’d be as into the original source material nowadays anyway). The fact that the roles are non-traditional is at the very least novel when compared to the massive amount of history and media that has and continues to be the exact opposite. I have probably sat through over 100 full shows and movies where all of the women were defined solely by their relationship with powerful men. One more “boring” show that happens to be the opposite is not something I’d take to the internets to specifically decry, and if I did, I wouldn’t blame the boringness on the fact that this time the powerful important people were women.
> The same in the past would apply to war propaganda movies. If its a very well done and executed it can be great content. But most that produced with that goal in mind is just lame.
Agreed. But this applies to every single kind of message or moral of the story that the writer is attempting to convey. However, all I hear about here on the internet these days and from this forum is that woke-ism specifically is a poison pill. For me, I’m all for seeing LGBT representation and awareness of the experience of minorities, etc. There is a moral aspect of that that I appreciate. I also appreciate good writing, pacing, storyline, cinematography, etc. I don’t think the former inherently ...
I just wanted to thank you for writing this. It's a model comment - one of the character I'd like to see more regularly around here. Even if I disagreed with you, I would still respect you for it.
> I’m not sure why you would think this. There is a huge segment of society that is very much against everything that could possibly be considered “woke”.
I agree. That was badly phrased. I was more talking about my experience in talking with people in my country and social circle.
But even then, shows like Arcane have very, very few people riled up about 'wokism' and whatever. I have not heard a single reviewer or commentator say anything negative about the lesbian relationship or the fact that the most powerful political operators are black women.
> you often eventually get rants about white genocide or some other conspiracies
That's like because people who have far more normal and common views don't engage in these discussion. I tend to stay out of them as well, but the economic angle of Netflix interested me and I got baited into responding to a comment.
:)
> I still don’t see how the “woke” part does the ruining
Just to be clear, I think the show is terrible in a whole number of ways. What we in general call "wokism" would not be in my top complaints about the show. Its something that I consider annoying not some great sin or something. But I do think that general approach did impact the overall approach they took to writing the show and it made the end product much worse.
> I have probably sat through over 100 full shows and movies where all of the women were defined solely by their relationship with powerful men. One more “boring” show that happens to be the opposite is not something I’d take to the internets to specifically decry, and if I did, I wouldn’t blame the boringness on the fact that this time the powerful important people were women.
As I said, nobody would decry such a show if it was not based on popular source material. And I am certainty not defending other bad media that have bad writing and those things have of course been criticized rightly. But the existent of the opposite doesn't mean we should stop criticizing it.
The reason I use it as an example is because it is source material that already has powerful amazing woman of different types in it. But the writers of the show felt the need to take this up to an almost absurd degree and did the opposite with the male characters.
Let me give you an example of what I am talking about, I think you interpreted my comment very narrowly. I don't care that men have non traditional roles or are defined by their relationship to a powerful woman. Such characters are often part of stories and that is fine. I am more talking about turning characters who were more then that into that.
There are many examples we could talk about. To be clear, non of those individually are all that relevant or worth complaining about. Its only in aggregate when it gets worthy of critic.
Agelmar Jagad in the books is highly respected competent leader and general, living in a culture with very high respect for woman. His sister is competent highly respected noble woman is a trusted adviser and the second most powerful person in the city. Jagad will be a off and on relevant character for the rest of the books. Sound reasonable?
Agelmar Jagad in the show is portrayed as stereotype alpha male general with no brain. They forced a sub-plot into the show where his sister literally has to wear the ancient armor of the house (that the show made up) to lead a group of woman to fix what the men are to dumb to do. Ah and the sister who was non-magical in the book of course had to be elevated from just politically powerful to a super-powerful magic user as well. She is of course vital in winning the battle at the end, Jagad will of course be killed instantly like a total bitch, certainty nobody will miss this toxic male and he will likely not be mentioned again.
So the writers felt the need to totally rewrite that part of the source material. Why? These were pretty minor characters and the show runners already excused many of their changes on only being granted 8 episodes. Yet we had to spen...
If every show I watched had ham-fisted dialogue about how great water sanitation is, how we should all happily pay more taxes to support it, how flushing chemicals down the toilet is evil, etc, I'd turn the channel off.
Even if you agree with the message, being preached to can be off-putting. If you disagree with the message and people like you are framed as cartoonish villains, it's a different matter entirely.
An example is the complete unnecessary cast of Caroline Henderson (a black woman) to the series "Vikings: Valhalla". I understand it is a fictional story, but these are Vikings for pete's sake. The only reason they cast her was evidently for diversity reasons. It is a distraction to the story, I immediately turned off. Though we know that not all vikings had blonde hair, some may be even a bit more dark skinned, but definitely not black. And it is more laughable because she's a character that yields some power in the Viking society. Laughable and a distraction to the story.
Another example of a series that, instead of focusing on its central theme, ends up injecting politically-motivated content is the series "High Score". Listen, I understand that a small portion of early video game enthusiasts care about those things, but for a series that has a purpose to tell the relevant stories about creation and development of video games in the 80s and 90s, you just can't help but to think that they felt that they needed to inject some LGBT content in it such as in episode 3 on the story about the 1st LGBT RPG game GayBlade. They end up leaving more relevant content on the table to shoehorn these themes into the series. Not everything needs to be "gay", or having a "gay angle".
> - there is too much political agenda sold even in children shows (Kids really dont need this kind of crap)
What do you mean by "political agenda"? Like open advocacy for certain policy position or political parties? Or just stuff like "gay people exist and should be treated with respect"?
Also, when I was a kid I would listen to conservative talk radio all the time. It's the only thing my dad would listen to while driving. And I don't think it was corrupting or traumatizing or anything.
Also, if you look at the content tropes constantly used, and especially used in much of the netflix library:
---
- Lots of satan/evil
- The constant CIA/NSA/FBI/Cop/Assassin Badass Porn, with the invariable singular hacker support guy on the squad that can get into any system and has a 3D blueprint with wireframe models of every building
- The hero cop constantly going against the bureaucratic system that holding back his personal justice
If you cant see the constant hero worship of rogue cops/cia agent/killer/evil etc in literally 90% of hollywood content puts a subconscious desire in the impressionable young minds of males to acquiesce to a violent society where they can see themselves as the fictitious bad-ass action person.
Etc...
The entire hollywood movie-narrative is an incestuous cess-pool-adrenochrome--eating-gay-frog-orgy. (Tongue in cheek alex jones reference, relax)
It is a fact that gay marriage is an experiment, never before tried in human history. We do not know how successful it will be in raising children to be healthy, productive human beings -- which is the chief social purpose of marriage.
Likewise the whole sexual revolution and the normalization of sex outside marriage is an experiment.
We do know that "hetero" relationships, and married ones in particular, can succeed enormously at producing children and raising them successfully. Perhaps these various new arrangements will succeed just as well, and I expect enormous political pressure on evidence and analysis to support just that conclusion, but we will see.
Until time has told, the presumption that homosexual relationships are the same as heterosexual is a matter of conjecture and, well, politics.
> Likewise the whole sexual revolution and the normalization of sex outside marriage is an experiment.
This seems extremely ahistorical. I'm pretty sure humans were having sex exclusively outside of marriage for most of the history of Homo Sapiens as a species. Marriage, and especially exclusively-monogamous marriage, is a relatively recent invention.
> We do not know how successful it will be in raising children to be healthy, productive human beings -- which is the chief social purpose of marriage.
We kind-of know though[1]:
> To date, the consensus in the social science literature is clear: in the United States, children living with two same-sex parents fare, as well as children residing with two different-sex parents. Numerous credible and methodologically sound social science studies, including many drawing on nationally representative data, form the basis of this consensus. These studies reveal that children raised in same-sex parent families fare just, as well as children raised in different-sex parent families across a wide spectrum of child well-being measures: academic performance, cognitive development, social development, psychological health, early sexual activity, and substance abuse.
Families with same-sex parents are not a new thing in 2022, there's been plenty of time to draw conclusions.
Your kitchen drawers are full of chipped flint tools, right? I mean, that's what was used for cutting and chopping for most of human history.
Marriage might be "a relatively recent invention", but it was so successful and adaptive that we really don't have much (any?) record of any other arrangement of human sexual relations.
> Marriage might be "a relatively recent invention", but it was so successful and adaptive that we really don't have much (any?) record of any other arrangement of human sexual relations.
Human history has existed for much longer with same-sex marriages than without it. It was mostly outlawed with the rise of Christianity. The impact of same-sex marriage on child rearing is well understood as same-sex couples raising children predates same-sex marriage by decades and studies can be found going back to the 1960s on the subject.
I mean almost every single one of them prior to the rise of Christianity and the influence of modern western culture. The Chinese had no qualms with gay marriage or homosexuality in general, there are records of famous Japanese Samurais who married one another, Native Americans have the concept of two-spirit marriages, numerous Roman Emperors married male husbands, and neither the Greeks or Egyptians differentiated much between homosexual or heterosexual relationships.
The decline in same-sex marriage, and same-sex relationships in general can be predominantly attributed to the changing attitudes about sex that came about with the rising influence of Christianity. Christianity did not just ban same-sex relationships, it advocated for sexual abstinence in general, forbidding any form of sex outside of marriage and even within marriage promoting sex as strictly for the purpose procreation going so far as to forbid the use of contraceptives, oral/anal sex and even masturbation. There are numerous reasons for why this change in attitude gained popularity from economic reasons to major shifts in demographics due to the outbreak of numerous wars in the 3rd century resulting in, among other things, growing discrepancies between the number of men and women.
It would take on the order of a thousand years before attitudes on sex became more liberal, with the Anglican church among the first to formally permit the use of contraceptives, and Protestant movements recognizing sexual acts between husband and wife as serving a "unitive" purpose rather than strictly procreation.
The point is to say that homosexuality was a casualty of very strict views on sexual relationships in general that came about with the rise of Christianity, but prior to that most societies didn't care to think much of it one way or another. Some people like vanilla, some people like chocolate; why would the people who like vanilla care too much about the people who enjoy chocolate?
> The decline in same-sex marriage, and same-sex relationships in general can be predominantly attributed to the changing attitudes about sex that came about with the rising influence of Christianity
Name a same-sex marriage in pre-Christian Greece or Rome.
The Greeks had no problem with homosexuality, Plato is full of jokes about it. And it wasn't that big a deal among the Romans, Julius Caesar's own legions would sign songs about his escapades. But I don't know of any evidence that it was ever the basis of a household. None of the great Greek dramaturges bothered to write a play noticing it.
> There are numerous reasons for why this change in attitude gained popularity from economic reasons to major shifts in demographics due to the outbreak of numerous wars in the 3rd century resulting in, among other things, growing discrepancies between the number of men and women.
I don't know where you're getting this stuff, I know a fair amount of history and I'm aware of nothing so remarkable as a shift in gender balance in the 3rd century.
> homosexuality was a casualty of very strict views on sexual relationships in general that came about with the rise of Christianity
I don't think Christianity/Christians have ever cared that much about it, really. They/it think it wrong and immoral, sure, but it isn't something that has ever attracted an enormous amount of attention or effort. It wasn't important enough to get much attention from Chaucer, Dante, Bocaccio, Shakespeare -- none of whom were shy about the range of human experience.
I know there are historians of gay sexuality, of which I am ignorant, but as a layman familiar with some of the core texts, my impression is that the overall view was "eh, whatever".
I'm of the opinion all marriage is bullshit, and the very notion of anyone needing to register their social standing, regarding who they live with, as a very peculiar practise...likely to mess up children more than having any two persons ensure they are loved and cared for, and just getting on with it.
"Disingenuous"? You link to a Wikipedia article based on two or three papers -- when there are centuries of scholarship on Rome -- and _I_ am "disingenuous"?
Pieces like this are the telephone game played by ideologues. Get a couple of articles published, never mind the sourcing or review, cite them as "scholarly" and voila! evidence of . . . whatever the hell it is you want evidence of.
If gay marriage were a thing in ancient Rome, or Greece, we'd know this. There would be a list of examples as long as your arm. We wouldn't have to look to a couple of obscure journal articles to establish it. And btw? Nero isn't exactly a role model of proper behavior in any one's eyes.
No one but a partisan would regard this as "evidence". Please stop with such nonsense.
> Pieces like this are the telephone game played by ideologues. Get a couple of articles published, never mind the sourcing or review, cite them as "scholarly" and voila! evidence of . . . whatever the hell it is you want evidence of.
Then why are you asking for people to cite evidence which you are recognizing wouldn't have had the literary capacity to exist? You're asking for everyone to prove something when little remains of written record, which for all intents and purposes, largely seemed like a rather irrelevant thing to highlight, as you acknowledged in your sister comment:
> The Greeks had no problem with homosexuality, Plato is full of jokes about it. And it wasn't that big a deal among the Romans, Julius Caesar's own legions would sign songs about his escapades. But I don't know of any evidence that it was ever the basis of a household. None of the great Greek dramaturges bothered to write a play noticing it.
Maybe another way of framing this: There are 170,000 same-sex married couples in the US in 2013[0] out of 59.2 million total marriages[1]. Assuming this is an extremely rough approximation of the ratio of homosexual to heterosexual relationships throughout history (which is definitely influenced by a lot of factors), can you provide us with proof for 350 Roman or Greek marriages that qualify with your record integrity?
Well we know one thing about Rome. When sexual deviations reached the peak -> Rome collapsed and imperium was divided.
Was it because of deviations ? Who knows. They also had alot of issues going on in the meantime. But you are free to have own opinion based on histories available. I for sure have my own.
Also about Ancient Grece. „Meet my Spartans”..
Either way if the show plot has nothing more to offer, its just boring.
I actually want to search for "action series with female leads" but I have no idea how to do it with Netflix nor does Netflix carry most of them. Instead, I "search" on Reddit and pirate them.
Yes! I recently went on a little trip and the AirBnB host had Netflix. This is the first time I’ve ever used Netflix. And oh my god how do people find anything with it?? I didn’t realize that you could scroll horizontally for about a day. And the categories are… useless. +1 for traditional “action” categories. And the content was mostly straight to DVD B-movies with a few “80s oldies.” I did manage to watch the new Blade Runner there so ok they did have something I could recognize.
And the TV shows were awful. Nothing I’ve never heard of. I couldn’t even find Seinfeld reruns or something normal. And after watching a random selection of them I am so glad we never wasted our money on the service. My wife picked a show (neither of us ever heard of) apparently about a narcissist woman who moves to Paris for work and it was just a low budget list of every “arrogant American visits France” trope and stereotype ever invented.
The experience was very much like visiting my devout Christian friend who has a huge bookshelf full of religious movies I’ve never heard of, and nothing “mainstream popular”. Like when you turn on Netflix you enter an alternate universe where nobody’s ever heard of The Wrath of Khan, The Godfather or Pulp Fiction.
Modern videostreaming is such a poison pill. Where the rights come and go arbitrarily. So Netflix decided they were going to do their own content because they couldn't rely on production studios. Since they don't have to pay royalties on their own content the streaming apps intentionally push the homegrown movies and obscure the slightly better 3rd party content. And it was not always like this. In their early streaming days the AAA titles (The Godfather, The Matrix, etc) were front and center. The recommendations engine was actually useful. And there were few competitors so AAA titles would stay on their platform for years.
I've been using their service since 00s when they were shipping DVDs. I barely recognize the same company even though they are wildly successful.
To be fair, I think their algorithm is way better once it gets a bead on your interests. Now, that definitely results in some shows never pop up in your 'feed,' but overall I'm in 2 modes of watching:
1. Scrolling into something that suits my interests
2. Navigating straight to something I want
If I'm in mode 1, then the feed works pretty well. If I'm in mode 2, then I can search straight away for the thing I'm looking for (and usually that search starts at the Google layer so I can be sure I'm going into the correct app in the first place!)
Back when Netflix had DVDs the recommendation algorithm worked pretty well, at least for me. It's gotten gradually worse over the years. Or perhaps they no longer have much good content, so no recommendation algorithm would work well? Either way I guess it's time to cancel my subscription.
Dvd Netflix[0] is still sending movies to your house (in USA). Many movies which are not available in any streaming service. They got worse with new releases since 2020, but for many famous movies of the past this is a decent service.
I have to agree. If I remember a show, I can search by name but I can only browse through the stuff that their algorithm shows to me. And that's just a few dozen titles.
After all major content providers dripped out of Netflix (Disney, Warner Brothers, just to name two biggest ones), Netflix can't afford to show you "all the content" because they don't really have any content.
So they are in a desperate situation to try and make you watch anything at all.
That seems plausible. Netflix has an obtuse interface in order to obscure the fact that their catalog of content isn't very big, and has shrunk considerably in recent years (due largely to other content owners realizing that it's more lucrative to start their own streaming services rather than license the content to Netflix).
I cancelled my Netflix premium subscription some years ago due to the UI.
I just want to read what the movie/show is about without it starting to play some distraction, or worse, revealing trailer/intro.
When I'm done I want to easily find relevant movies and shows on my own, not get some random suggestion on auto-play shoved in my face which I have 3 seconds to get rid of.
Since then they've lost a lot of content and produced a lot of terrible stuff, so slim chance I'll sign up again anytime soon.
Agreed. I have never used such a non-deterministic UI. Every time I load the app I have to hunt around to find the show I last watched and continue it. It feels like it’s in a different place every single time.
And actually trying to browse the catalog is painful.
I like some of their content but I really hate the Netflix apps. (Not to mention weird subtitle issues and play position sync issues).
The one thing I will say though is I cannot remember the last time I saw a single bit of buffering. Everything starts playing immediately, every time. The actual reliability of the streaming itself is superb.
Algorithms? Netflix hasn't done actual recommendation algorithms since the DVD days. These days it just relentlessly pushes its own third-rate content to viewers, presumably because it's cheaper than licensed content.
I particularly hate the way they keep pushing serial killer documentaries, and there seems to be little way to get them to stop. When it's late at night and I'm trying to find something relaxing to watch before going to bed, the last thing I want to see is a serial killer's face staring at me and then footage of them starting to play. It ruins my night. Honestly that's been the last straw for me. They're happy to force their customers to see disturbing things, as long as it boosts engagement.
I have taken to using the dislike rating on stuff I have no intention of ever watching. I don't know if it helps yet. It might be fantastic for people who like the genre, but I'm now rating for myself rather than other people. Hopefully these metrics don't feed into any meaningful ratings systems.
The recommendation system crash is coming. Name a recommendation system that shouldn't be replaced with simple rules based on obvious and transparent metrics like popularity and ratings, or by organizing things into categories.
Less fancy ML nonsense, more working hard to gather high quality simple metrics.
Netflix had a great recommendation system for their DVD catalog 15 years ago without any ML hocuspocus. The problem now is that their content is mostly mediocre and user driven ratings can't be used effectively to identify similar cohorts. That's why they got rid of the stars.
That doesn't work so well if you're trying to push a social agenda to people who aren't interested in LGBTQ+ or racial "wokeness". Imagine someone searching for all content that doesn't include some form of LGBTQ+. There wouldn't be much of a catalog to watch.
To me most of the new shows that has LGBTQ+ content, the LGBTQ+ stuff feels incredibly forced to the point of detracting from the story.
I can't help but feel they're just trying to tick a marketing checkbox as I watch it.
I have no problem with well written normal characters, either straight or LGBTQ+. Nor a bunch of LGBTQ+ characters dialed to 11 if that's a plot point.
YouTube has the best recommendation system in the world.
Of course it gets lots of complaints. But the amount of fantastic content it has consistently recommended for me, including even pretty small channels, is incredible.
A few points though:
1. I find YouTube to be good for general educational content. I don’t know if it’s as good for specific niches of entertainment.
2. It’s not just plug and play. You need to actively tell YouTube what you like and dislike, remove trash recommendations, and remove terrible videos from your watch history.
Do this, and you will be rewarded with a YouTube homepage full of hours upon hours of absolute gold. When I don’t know what to do, I open YouTube and just let it run. It’s awesome and life changing.
YouTube repeatedly tries to steer my recommendations from the content I'm watching (stuff on terrain making and miniature wargames) to decidedly alt-right content, to the point that at the moment, I mostly watch it logged out and directly searching for the channels I want to watch.
I recently did a trial for Showtime's streaming service. It's set up this way. Choose a category then get an alphabetical list of everything available. I'm not sure it's any better, but worth checking out if that matters to you.
The sorts should be partitioned. For a given category, that list they show you? Movies you have seen and rated down should be the very, very last on the list. Then movies you seen and rated up would be just before that. Then movies you haven't seen, but are older. Up front should be movies you haven't seen but are new to Netflix.
A movie should appear in no more than three categories, because they like to pack these with spam. I marked horror as my #1 category, why do I have to scroll through a ton of stuff like "Strong Female-Led Dramas" to get to it?
I'll watch a tutorial video then suddenly that's the _only_ thing my feed recommends to me. None of my subscriptions. None of my established preference. Just dozens of videos on a topic that I likely don't actually care that much about.
Just yesterday I discovered that youtube's "home" feed in the iOS app is not actually endless. I know this because I reached the bottom of it without tapping into a single video! For the past 6 months or so in particular, their recommendation engine has just been abysmally bad.
I can't agree with this more. I find it extremely difficult to find something I want to watch, because I simply can't find out how to look at their entire library.
> I just do not know all the content Netflix has because the browsing is so bad
Yeah, you can't rest your mouse anywhere, all the things pop up and autoplay even without clicking. Same thing happens on Twitter, everything reacts to clicks. If 95% of the screen space is listening for clicks and mouse-over's then you have to be really careful not to misclick on something. It's even worse if you like to run everything through TTS - just try to double-click select something without triggering the click event listeners.
I stopped using Netflix a long time ago, when the "algorithm" started ramming content through my throat;
I couldn't disable automatically playing previews on the home screen, it automatically started skipping over intro's and outro's, automatically playing the next show, etc. etc.
Everything just screams "thou shall consume more".
It's easier just to pirate than keep up with all these streaming services.
- You get the benefit of high quality (true 4k, not stream compressed "4k") and no buffering.
- Plex, Radarr, Sonarr automatically downloads and categorizes your content for you, you can just sit back and enjoy your content.
- Edit: Plex et al are not the *only* ways to download content, not sure why some replies are thinking so. I too can type in a show into a piracy site, click the magnet icon, and start immediately watching it. I personally don't even use Plex, Radarr or Sonarr myself, it was just a suggestion. In contrast, I can't just type any show into Netflix and watch it, since it might not even be on Netflix! Then I'd need to get on justwatch.com just to figure out which streaming service is playing the show. This is harder than piracy in my view.
- You can use whatever media player you want without having to go through a browser and its DRM. I use mpv and filters like Anime4k to automatically upscale my content, something that I cannot do via a browser or otherwise without the physical file on my hard drive.
- You're not geo-locked to content, just because you're not in the target country doesn't mean you wouldn't want to watch it.
- Oh, and you can share with as many of your friends as you want without a restrictive password sharing penalty like Netflix seems to want to start enforcing.
Now, what would be a good model to stop such piracy? Something like Steam or Spotify but for movies and shows:
Perhaps a paid Plex server where I get all content from every distributor for a flat fee, and the service provider can then pay out to each distributor their portion of my subscription based on number of views. I retain access to the physical files without DRM so that I can do with them what I want, such as applying mpv filters.
Hell, it's probably in the best interest of all distributors to band together because clearly everyone having their own subscription service is a race to the bottom. See Netflix here struggling to make original content because major distributors like Disney and Paramount have already left. See CNN+ that shut down one month after starting. Due to the tragedy of the commons, where each distributor thinks they can make more money via starting their own service, this hypothetical new service would have to be some sort of joint venture between them all so that no one is incentivized to start their own.
Even without a widget I can definitely see that with Netflix I am getting 720p on a 4k TV, even more frequently when watching childrens shows. I have a 200Mbps internet link, Disney+ plays 4k just fine.
It is not. It's very clearly not HD and we gigabit internet. Other services do fine. Especially rented HD movies that are streamed. So instead of using my TV for Netflix, I watch on my laptop with a browser plugin to set a proper resolution.
Having not touched this since early days of TPB, is there a decent overview to approaches in 2022 you could point me to? E.g. has torrenting moved to the cloud or are most running vpns? Asking for a friend.
A friend can recommend bytesized hosting if you want minimal hassle. They have installer scripts for all the most popular tools (like the ones in parent) and it's really easy to set up your own netflix-like experience, with Plex as the streaming UI, deluge as the torrent client and Sonarr and Radarr as automated torrent downloaders.
Latest and greatest is "plexshares" just google that. I've been sailing the high seas since 2002 and this is my last stop. No fuss, no worrying about anything. Wife and kids are very happy.
Find one in there that you like in your price range. I pay $20 and have 1080p/4k remuxes. I used to spend at least 10 hours a month managing my own Plex/Emby, the money is well spent to me.
Also, buy an nvidia shield tv pro. It plays everything directly with no transcode, and handles all subtitles effortlessly without triggering a transcode.
I tried roku, amazon cube, apple tv, everything - the shield is the best still despite it's age. It's flawless.
rarbg.to is the popular index site.
Bittorrent, the purple client. My smart TVs can access my PC's dedicated media directory - which took a bit of fiddling to get right. The big drawback is a lack of subtitles, unless they are baked in to the rip.
I still have Netflix and Prime Video (because of AMZ Prime).
I have thought about dropping Netflix more than a few times after the price hike.
I wouldn't recommend BitTorrent/μTorrent, they're now run by a Chinese cryptocurrency company and have ads.
qBittorrent is an open source alternative that also has my favorite feature, downloading a file in sequential order so as to stream it immediately rather than waiting until it all finishes downloading.
I have heard this term and briefly looked into it. My takeaway was it’s a vps with prebaked software/config offered by shady looking providers. Is that roughly correct or did I get lost in adwords?
Basically, you'll find ones with fast storage with big storage for reasonable prices and that are... explicitly sanctioning this use case. And I'd bet the competent ones specifically design their network and client settings for good performance. In professional settings getting good large storage performance is sometimes a struggle or expensive.
I've thought about using them for non-shady data storage and transfer given the price and performance. Nothing sensitive which wasn't encrypted, obviously.
... and you are not forced to use those grotesquely and absurdely massive and complex google(blink/geeko) or apple(webkit) based browsers (and their SDKs), in other words, open source drm software which is "obfuscated" via complexity and size: you can use the media player you like, and in my case my shmol media player I wrote (using ffmpeg).
This issue is actually critical as it is not really piracy as it narrows down to the right to have interoperabitily with technically reasonable and sensible software.
I don't really get why Netflix is so sour about password sharing, it's literally part of the subscription pricing, they tell you how many concurrent streams you're allowed to have.
In the 1990s some homes would have several screens of cable TV, so several people in the same home could watch different things at the same time. Parents with teenage children, for example. Because of the physical cables it only worked in one home - when the kids moved out, they had to pay for their own cable or go without.
Netflix presumably hopes to achieve the same thing: Letting kids share their parents' accounts before they leave home, but not after.
Yes, this very much bothers me. You pay for streaming. How many streams do you want? Well, pay Netflix for that number. However you like to use those streams is up to you.
Sure. It's also stealing. And doesn't provide any money for future shows that you might enjoy. Don't get me wrong, I've done it for some things that I wanted to watch, but wasn't willing to pay for. But let's not pretend that everyone torrenting is a reasonable solution.
More like I snuck onto a ride without buying a ticket. Or snuck into a theater without buying a ticket. Wouldn't you call that stealing?
Edit:
Call it digital trespass then. I don't really care what you call it. There are obviously fixed costs to creating content. Just because there aren't incremental costs incurred from piracy, doesn't mean there isn't harm. Lost revenue is harm.
In those cases, your mere presence costs the operator more (fuel cost/ wear and tear/limited number of seats) - so sure, those cases could be considered stealing, but I don't think they're in the same realm as downloading entertainment.
I have some used oil I need to get rid of. I could drive the 45 mile round trip to the county hazardous waste disposal site and get rid of it properly. Or I could wait until we get a good rain and pour it into the drainage ditch in front of my house, where it will eventually end up somewhere in Puget Sound.
The amount of oil is small enough that it would have absolutely no measurable effect whatsoever on Puget Sound.
Would you say that it is therefore OK for me to dump it in the ditch?
If the environmental impact assessment (you should already have conducted this) shows the impact of dumping your 1 ml - 1,000 l is less than the impact of your driving 45 miles, go for it!
> Would you say that it is therefore OK for me to dump it in the ditch?
I'd say no - because it's decreasing the intrinsic value of a shared resource (whether or not it can be measured). Downloading a movie, on the other hand - doesn't decrease the intrinsic value of the media being copied.
This doesn't make any sense and is an incorrect analogy. Trains don't pay residuals to the people that made the train every time someone rides it. Imagine a different world where the people who made trains make most of their money from train rider residuals. In that case, I would say yes, they are stealing.
and then the carnival workers get fired, because there isn't enough income to pay 3 people. One person has to take tickets and run the rides, which is now more dangerous for you. So they shut it down, and all the cool rides leave town and you'll tell your kids how much cooler carnivals use to be and you'll never understand it's cause you stole income out of the workers pockets.
And, to the people trying to play semantic games with "steal" and "theft", theft of services does have laws defining it as a criminal offense, e.g. https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_164.125 .
Not sure if you're being sarcastic... If not, you're just being facetious. Just because a thing is digital and therefore copiable, doesn't mean there's no reason to ever pay for it.
1: to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice
Yes, piracy is stealing according to the dictionary, especially if done habitually. That the owner is left with a copy of the work is immaterial to the act of theft.
Oh, are we doing argument by dictionary now? Here's another one then:
Take verb
1: remove (someone or something) from a particular place.
Piracy doesn't remove something from a particular place, so it is not taking, so it is not stealing. You know, "according to the dictionary"
(My point here is to show that quoting dictionary definitions to resolve technicalities is a worthless argument. I don't actually care whether or not piracy is classified as theft)
It's not taken. It's copied. Digital piracy is not theft. It's unauthorized copying.
It would be taking and theft if you deprived the owner of their content while copying it for yourself. Like stealing money with wire transfers.
This isn't just semantics, it's important to not conflate theft and piracy. They're almost completely different, except in both cases the offender obtains something they didn't originally possess.
"You wouldn't steal a car" is mafiaa newspeak intended to maintain control of rents.
it's theft of the income of the workforce required to make movies. Whole departments receive residuals based on the post box office sales and that income is required to ensure that it is a viable career. That enables talented and safe people to continue making entertainment which in turn provides a better product.
No, it's not. If I pay for a movie, but I then download it from The Pirate Bay, it's still piracy, but nobody loses anything.
I recently went over my media collection and did some conservative guesstimation of my spending over the last 20 years. I've paid over 6 figures to consume various sorts of media.
I have absolutely zero moral or ethical qualms with downloading and/or pirating content I've already paid for. I don't give a flying fuck if the copyright holder doesn't like the means by which I get the content. The studios and copyright lobby and mafiaa are not good faith operators.
Piracy is not theft. Sometimes it's ethical and justified.
I WANT to pay. I want to give a streaming service money to curate, deliver, and maintain a library of high quality content. The industry doesn't want that to be possible, because it interferes with the bad-faith rentseeking games played with royalties and residuals. I'm done playing pretend, and will happily Pirate even new content I haven't paid for.
I will pay when there's the opportunity for good faith commerce. I'll buy discs and files directly where possible.
In your example, getting a third party to provide a digital copy of a good you already own is not theft. I would argue it's a lousy way of doing things, opening you up to many more problems, but it's not theft.
Taking a good or service that you don't own is stealing. That's piracy. That's theft.
I sort of think piracy in this context is actually distributing some media, e.g. a movie, without holding the copyright or a license from the copyright holder to do so.
You will argue that this may deprive the copyright holder of some rent if the media is for sale, but that sounds qualitatively different than taking or stealing.
That's not how English works. "Stole", "steal", etc., have meanings beyond just illegally depriving someone of physical property. Here are several examples of correct usage of "steal" or "stole" that have nothing to do with illegally taking property.
• Someone says they do not like cats and have no interest in having one as a pet. A cute stray kitten shows up on their doorstep, they take pity and feed it. They fall in love with it and keep it. They might say that the kitten "stole" their heart.
• An actor playing a minor role in a play gives a performance that outshines the performance of the stars. Many would say that the actor "stole" the show.
• An employee of a rival company poses as a janitor to gain access to your lab and takes a photo of a whiteboard containing the formula for a chemical that is a trade secret in your manufacturing process. It would be common to say that the rival company "stole" your secret formula.
• When crackers gain access to a company's list of customer email addresses, passwords, or credit card numbers, it is commonly said that the data was "stolen".
• Alice is Bob's fiancé. Mallory woos Alice without Bob's knowledge. Alice elopes with Mallory. Most would find it acceptable if Bob said that Mallory "stole" his fiancé.
• A team that has been behind since the start of the game but wins on a last second improbable play is often said to have "stolen" the game.
These examples are all obviously metaphorical and irrelevant, unless you want to talk about metaphorically stealing from people, which I don't understand to be the point of this thread.
> Mallory "stole" his fiancé
Bob has been deprived of his fiancé.
> the rival company "stole" your secret formula
> crackers gain access... the data was "stolen"
These are the only two relevant examples, and they're sufficiently debatable that it's unlikely you'd be able to prosecute either for theft or larceny. In the case of the crackers breaching an email list, many laws are broken, but I doubt "theft," or anything like it, would be one of them. In the case of the corporate espionage, if this is theft, it's theft of intellectual property. And that makes it the most direct comparison to content piracy, but it doesn't advance the conversation because it's the same debate.
> They might say that the kitten "stole" their heart.
A great moral crime, no doubt...
The problem is once you expand the definition of 'steal' well beyond what is legally considered theft, the immorality of "stealing" is no longer a given. People who accusatorily use the word in reference to copyright violation are leaning on the 'illegal acts of theft' meaning of the term to add apparent moral weight to their argument. But when challenged on that, they retreat into these more diverse meanings of the word and pretend they never meant it that specific way. It's a Motte-and-Bailey tactic.
A better example is theft of services. If you sit down at a barber's chair and then walk out without payment, we all consider that stealing. But no property was actually deprived--just wasted effort.
All of these examples result in someone not having something any more (being the star of a show, trade secret, confidential data, fiance, winning of the game).
It doesn't matter how you rationalise it. Someone created content with the intention of it being consumed for a fee. You downloaded it, likely from someone who illegally copied/reproduced it.
Maybe I didn't "steal", but I contributed to criminal activity.
Sure, copyright laws can seem absurd, but if you disagree with the laws, consider the ethics.
How would you feel if you have a business, I steal from you, and then go give random people your content? This especially when it starts to drive into your revenues.
"Only digital copy" is disingenuous. If the cost of producing the digital copy is say $40mm (an amount article says some Netflix movies can cost).
They're making copies from a digital copy, and their business is to sell access to them. If their model is "we'll replicate this copy 500 million times, and charge users $0.10 a view", every 10 copies viewed elsewhere is $1 lost.
Should a service raise the fee to say $0.12 to better cover costs?
Ultimately, theft is often subsidised by paying customers.
I'm also guilty of this. I download torrents where:
* I can't buy something because it's not available due to region restrictions, and I can't buy it via VPN (looking at Disney+)
* I can't buy it anywhere altogether.
Where I used to download maybe 50 torrents a year a decade ago, I probably do it <5 times a year now. It's stealing, or consuming stolen content.
The pricing strategies of big corp is a separate accessibility issue.
I agree with everything you say here, and torrent a bit more than you and get things via newsnet a lot. I maintain a large media server.
The end result of my pirating is a media service that is easier to use, is higher quality and requires less effort than a streaming service (though initial costs and setup time were high).
I also pay for 3 streaming services that go unused, and this covers about half or maybe 3/4 of what I watch.
Streaming is in a dangerous place when piracy works better, looks better and is more convenient.
> How would you feel if you have a business, I steal from you, and then go give random people your content? This especially when it starts to drive into your revenues.
I would consider that if I am selling a product that has absolutely no scarcity, such as digital files, I have a few approaches.
- Introduce artificial scarcity with something like DRM
- Create a business model focused on the service of providing the product, rather than the product itself
I would not try to accuse my potential consumers of a crime in order to fix the flaws in my business model.
The other option, which obviously doesn't work for mega-corporate media, is independent, direct support (patreon, etc). Most of my favorite modern content is created in this way, and is entirely free to download and distribute - contribution is entirely optional.
problem is that greedy media moguls want to get paid for a piece of content forever, instead of just raising enough money to cover the labor and advertising, give stakeholders some profit, and move on, so they cannot exist this way.
It’s always hilarious to see HN of all places get nitpicky about this distinction. If some megacorporation stole your code, we’d laugh them out of the room if they said this shit. “We didn’t steal your code, it’s still right there on github! We would have used it legally if you had licensed it differently!”
The purpose is to be a signal to the distributor: "fix your payment model or we're not paying". I pirated for a long time. When Netflix became a thing, I stopped pirating (since it was easier). Now I pirate again. If a new company came along with a good model, or the industry as a whole decided this streaming debacle is stupid, I would definitely stop pirating and give my money to someone. Until then, why would I pay money for a worse service than what I can get for free?
Wouldn't the appropriate choice be to not pay for the service AND not pirate? That seems like the best way to send the message. Pirating gives the impression that you want to view their content but not pay for it. So they should invest in locking down their content, not improve their experience.
Yes, I'm interested in their content. I'm not interested in their byzantine ways of inventing 20 million new streaming services that I need to subscribe to in order to watch one single show I want.
> So they should invest in locking down their content, not improve their experience.
Then they would replace the content but not the system. If you like the content pirate it. They may add more drm like music companies or they may reduce prices or they may make streaming easier.
How do I do that? For instance imagine I would like to watch Book of Boba Fett (just an example, I saw it mentioned somewhere today). I don't think that Disney allows to purchase it individually, but I can only guess, because in the sticks where I live (EU country), Disney+ isn't even available.
That reminds me, what do you think about geoblocking these services? If one has a choice: buy the content, buy VPN and break the copyright by watching it in unsupported country or just break the copyright by pirating it outright, what should one do?
Boba fett is not provided individually. The cost value of producing that show is driving people to a subscription system. If you don't want to do that, don't sign up for it.
If you want to watch that show but you don't want to pay for subscription, let DIsney know. If the market demanded it by way of retracting their subscription dollars, they would notice.
But if you steal it because that's just how you want to do things, you're a thief.
It was your suggestion to purchase individual shows.
>If the market demanded it by way of retracting their subscription dollars, they would notice.
One could say that pirating is the act of retracting the subscription dollars, but I digress. I can't retract my subscription dollars, because they won't even offer me the subscription (which I mentioned in my comment).
Could you as an knowledgeable insider actually answer the part of my previous comment you conveniently skipped, that part about what is person supposed to do if the Disney doesn't even offer the service in their country? And don't say "let Disney know", something actionable please.
>But if you steal it because that's just how you want to do things, you're a thief.
1) it's not theft, it's digital "piracy"
2) And I didn't say I pirate their stuff, the show was just an example. But I still feel discriminated on account of country I am from by them refusing to sell me their subscription service. And everyone knows that racism is worse than stealing.
If you're interested in the content, but dislike the delivery mechanism, ignoring the content entirely sends the signal: "I am not interested in the content you're producing". The companies will attempt to address that signal by changing the content, to try and find content that attracts larger audiences.
Piracy sends a different signal: "I am interested in the content, but not the price or the delivery mechanism". The companies will attempt to address that signal differently. Maybe they lower the price. Maybe the ease the friction on the delivery mechanism. Maybe the increase the friction on the delivery mechanism (by adding DRM). But the signal from piracy sends a more clear message to the content companies that ignoring the content.
Effort of buying legally < effort of downloading illegally
Netflix did it (once upon a time. no, not the movie). I don't really care for reasons why this is hard for the industry or really anything else. As long as it doesn't economically make sense for me to give money to someone (doesn't reduce my own effort/time expenditure or provide something I can't have otherwise), I will not give money to someone. Morals be damned.
That's Amazon AFAIK, I don't know of any others. It's a step in the right direction but the price is still too high (it's usually $4-$5 in my experience). I only get to watch it once, not keep it, and I pay you double what I used to pay Blockbuster? No thanks.
Blockbuster new releases were $3 in 1990 dollars ($6.60 today). This was in a mid-sized town in the midwest, not Manhattan or LA. Blockbuster was also far less convenient.
You still have to find which service it's available on, enter payment information, download an app... And even then if you're not in the USA the selection is distributed across more apps, and lots of content isn't available easily even if you want to pay.
When I open IMDB database a drop down with links appears. If publisher decided not to provide movie for purchase - these are links to torrent files to download movie in HD, FHD and 4k with preselected language and subtitles settings.
If publisher decided to provide movie for purchase - links to buy it with comparable price to a movie ticket. But you buy Movie not an HD+English+SpanishSubs file version and you don’t have access to 4k video.
You can also buy subscription to IMDB which will include 100-200 hours worth of content per month. You don’t buy movies this way. You stream them and they don’t belong to you once your subscription ends.
Publishers get their money based on minutes of content watched by users.
> And doesn't provide any money for future shows that you might enjoy.
Which means that dinosaur-industry would finally have to arrive in the 21st century. People are very much willing to pay for things they enjoy - see Twitch Subscribers and Patreons for examples. Paying for shitty catalogues where the parts that you actually enjoy are distributed across multiple services just isn't cutting it.
Good riddance to all those copyright-attorneys and other parasites leeching off of the entertainment industry.
I don't disagree. However, you can buy/rent movies and shows on an individual basis from amazon/google/apple now. The prices are just higher. There seems to be some benefit to bundling shows together into a service. You can also just jump around from service to service, which is what I do.
Ahh, but “buying” streamed content is a fool’s purchase. If the streamer loses the rights to film you “purchased”, you lose your purchase. This happened a few years ago with Disney content on Amazon.
I wonder if this is different based on number of people in the household. On amazon, I think it’s usually $3 (fucking $2.99 penny tricks), which amounts to $1.50 each for the two of us watching. In a family of four, it’s sub-dollar each. Which as a percent of the dinner you’re probably eating while you watch is very little. But renting for yourself alone feels at least twice as expensive!
I don’t want to assume anything about your financial situation but I just don’t believe most people would find 2 hours of entertainment for $4 unreasonable. Like that’s just silly cheap.
We live in a world where 90% of the entire catalog of movies ever filmed are available to be instantly delivered to your home in 1080p for less than the cost of a Big Mac. In the 90s it cost about the same not even taking into account inflation or gas to drive to blockbuster and rent a VHS. We are living in the future!
That might seem silly cheap, but compare it to going to the cinema. The dining has a huge site to pay for, projection equipment and staff, cleaning and a million other things.
So if I watch it at home and remove all those costs from the cinema, surely $1 is going to be closer to what the film studio would have got if I went to the cinema?
Sorry, but no. That’s what I find difficult to understand - let’s say I want to watch a movie and ready to pay 5$ for it - why would I watch it in Hd or even 1080p if I have 4k TV? I understand that Google has only HD option for me, but why would I want it if I pay? In my mind if I pay - I should get every technical option possible to watch it, otherwise raw files are just few clicks away and I already paid for my broadband.
As simple as that.
The problem, for me at least, appears where some legal rights damage technological usage.
How many times my Netflix downloads will “expire”? Is this milk or something? Why do they need to expire? Sorry, but I refuse to understand…
Those are just excuses to justify your piracy. If you have a decent 4k TV and are sitting more than 5 feet away from it, the 1080p stream will upscale to "retina" quality and you won't be able to tell the difference.
> We live in a world where 90% of the entire catalog of movies ever filmed are available to be instantly delivered to your home in 1080p for less than the cost of a Big Mac
Yet whenever I want to watch something, I have to look up which service it's on, see if it's available in my country, sign up for a subscription, possibly download an app....
Or, go to the high seas and be watching it in 4k resolution within 2 minutes.
It's cheap in terms of absolute dollar value, yes. But it's also an EXCEPTIONALLY shallow form of entertainment that I can easily approximate for free by just streaming some different movie off Netflix.
I'd much rather go to the movie theater and pay the even higher price for admission, because that's an actual experience. You can't replicate "going to the movies" at your house very well.
The thing they get you on with BitTorrent isn't the download part, it's the seeding part, where you're distributing the copyrighted content to other downloaders.
You could turn off seeding, but that'll get you banned from a lot of torrent sites, and it's not a technical distinction I'd want to have to explain in court to lay people.
I'm okay with that. The business is unfair to those in it, particularly at the lower end, and also unfair to its consumers. It is not the job of consumers to fix or perpetuate that system.
I'm only here to pop the balloon on the consumer's perception that "it's not theft." there's a face and a name that goes along with that theft. Thousands of them.
Is it my responsibility to help these people continue their careers? I have worked on tools that help businesses fill out legal forms without the need of a lawyer. By the same logic, am I “stealing” from the lawyers who need this friction to continue their careers? The reality of technological progress is that some economic activities become unsustainable and some workers will be forced out of their careers.
There were a few years were I literally stopped all torrenting. Netflix and Amazon had everything I wanted. Sure, there were a few things that didn't exist, but I was too lazy to go after that minor amount of content. I was fully legal and paying for everything. I was fine with it.
Then, the great splintering happened. I currently pay for 5 services, but that doesn't cover even 1/2 of what I want to watch.
All the content owners said to themselves "we can be Netflix or Amazon Prime, too" and they pulled their content into their own services.
But the biggest problem: the user experience absolutely sucks now. It's so hard to find stuff and remember where things are, there's no universal search. I have to use justwatch.com on my phone when I want to sit down to watch something new, which might mean a trip to the computer to download it if one of the many services I already pay for don't have it.
Most results would just be buried somewhere in the middle of a four page article filled with ads and popups about cookies and newsletters and the like.
Movies are different than games (and music) however. While I have rewatched movies--multiple times in a (relatively small) number of cases, movies are mostly one and done for me--and I imagine most adults.
That said, I don't know why the 48 hour limit on rentals got normalized. I've fallen asleep, gotten distracted, etc. while watching a movie and I don't like now being forced to watch it soon.
It was normalized back when the first video rental stores opened decades ago. It remains today because there needs to be some way to differentiate between a rental and a purchase, otherwise everything would become a purchase at a significantly higher price point.
Maybe the limit could be 72 or 96 hours instead. Or you could rent it with no time limit but maybe can't ever rewind then you can make it last as long as you need but when it's done, it's done.
Back in the 90s you would have had to pay $3-5 per movie at Blockbuster. Drive to the store, hope the movie you want was in stock, drive home, watch movie, remember to rewind the movie when it's done, drive back to the store to return it before the due date.
Now, for less money, I don't even have to get off the couch. What a world!
While I tend to agree that piracy and/or ripping isn't something everyone can do, I've filled out my Plex collection legally lately with DVD acquisitions at bargain-bin prices. Used doesn't matter if you only have to be able to read the disc once to rip it, and I'm yet to get something used off Amazon that couldn't be read once. (I haven't even had to clean it or anything, it's all just worked.)
So, my Plex install in terms of raw content isn't up to Netflix's size. However, I rather suspect there are some people reading this who have more hours of video on their Plex than Netflix even has available. And while mine isn't that large, it is much better tuned for me and my family's interests at this point. And I don't have to worry about getting halfway through a series, only for some licensor to notice it has become popular enough to pull it and run it on their own service. Netflix has the problem now that anything that becomes popular on their service will get yanked. I do not know how they overcome that. They hoped to do it with enough original content, but to my eye, that has failed, and there is now no longer enough time to fix that. While I understand the complaints that they treated it too much like "content", to be honest, I've never thought this would work out, from the moment they announced it. A single company just can't produce a sufficiently diverse set of "content" to be the everything-to-everybody they would have needed to be to justify a Netflix valuation.
Do you also make backups of HD movies using this process, by any chance? Like you, I have no issue purchasing something. But I don’t like “purchasing” something stored in a walled garden online-only service that can be taken away.
Amazon and Youtube (and maybe other streaming services) also offer some of the movies for free with advertising. So the model hasn’t changed much from going to rent a movie at the store for a few bucks or watching it on cable tv, except you’re not paying for cable now.
I am fine with renting and paying. But the arbitrarily stupid rule “you have 48 hours to finish once you started” is what stops me from “renting” any lure.
I have a TCL TV (with Roku) and searching for a show using the voice remote generally gets me the result and also which app is streaming it. I use it all the time these days.
Understandable, I just cut back on all the TV engorging and rotate the streaming services every quarter. IMO it's a net win. Save money on the streaming services and life is better for having not watched so much television. Not going to the grave wishing I binged Season 2 of some random show one more time.
Why don't you just not partake in the content? You really don't need to spend all that time watching shows. If you don't like the terms under which it is offered, just find something else to do.
JustWatch is good for this, but it mostly reveals how sparse most of their catalogs are. It confirmed for me, at long last, that the reason I couldn't find anything to watch is because there wasn't anything to watch. Paramount+ at least has all the Star Treks after pulling it from every other service, but it seems like all they have other than that is 30 seasons of 5 cop shows.
It's not stealing, it's copyright infringement, and it's an act of protest. I paid for Netflix for years when the streaming catalog was good, but now the streaming video market feels like an anti-consumer predatory cash grab.
It's stealing, specifically from myself and others in my industry that you haven't heard of that. Making movies would be impossible to be without your
- Lesser Known actors
- Assistant Directors
- Stunt Coordinators
- 2nd Unit Directors
- Stunt Performers
and I'm sure there are others. Residuals factor into our income, allow us to qualify for health insurance, empower our unions, and provide a stable income to continue working in an unstable career.
All so we can make better entertainment for you! When you pirate, you're stealing money from us.
In this example, the banking provides the service of a safe place to keep my money until I spend it. That's what I pay for, in the form account fees and the banks ability to leverage my saved money for their financial gain.
100% the opposite. Bankers make their money from the flows of cash streams. Putting my cash under a mattress or setting it on fire steals it out of the hands of your banking friends.
This may be a regional difference, but we make most of our money on fees. Cashflow isn't actually worth that much in the current economy.
Not that it matters though, I was trying to make use of the "common knowledge" that banks make money from your deposits, and that therefore you spending your money instead of depositing it in a negative return account is costing us potential revenue. I know that's not how banks make money, but it's the culturally accepted explanation for how banks make money.
If you choose not to pay for their movie and watch something else, you are correct that you didn't steal from them. You did steal from someone else just like them though. If you pirate their movie, then yes you did in fact steal income from them. The act of choosing to pirate that particular movie changes it from a matter of potential income to a loss of actual income.
Right, so that isn't stealing. It is in fact what I advocate strongly. If more people did that, more content they would enjoy would be provided at a reasonable cost.
But extracting the value of watching something without paying the fee for that service...that's stealing.
ha. You are not wrong. The winds are shifting and I'm optimistic that i will be able to individually garner a better contract over time even if my union fails to help with it.
How much of your money has been taken from you? Not hypothetical money you think you might have been entitled to, but money that was actually yours. How much was taken from you?
around anywhere from 2 - 25 cents per viewing per consumer. Over the course of my career that can break down to easily 7 figures if I was to work on say the original Star Wars.
did you extract the value of the entertainment without providing the fee? That's stealing money from me.
If you weren't gonna watch it, don't watch. The argument being made is you in fact, do want to watch it, you just don't wanna pay for it. That's stealing.
Did you steal any content that was behind a paywall? If you did, you have taken money out of my industry and made it more difficult for it to be a viable career path in the future.
If I didn't pirate it, I wouldn't watch it, so you're not losing anything in my case. Additionally, if your work is actual art rather than mediocre filler content I probably bought your merch, which I definitely wouldn't do if I was getting raped by a streaming service, so if anything odds are you're coming out ahead. Beyond that, if I'm pirating, people start conversations about TV shows I don't feel compelled to hijack them by talking about how all streaming platforms are bullshit, which I totally would do if I wasn't pirating.
> And doesn't provide any money for future shows that you might enjoy.
The last movie I pirated was directed by a man who died almost 30 years ago. Do you suppose if I subscribed to Netflix (which doesn't even have any of his movies at all as far I can tell), they'd hire a necromancer to get a few more movies out of his corpse?
You're probably right, and honestly the thought of this happening just makes me feel sad. That premise is just like the character Dixie Flatline in Neuromancer. Simply tragic.
If I pay for Netflix, which offers Friends in some countries but not my own, and I want to watch Friends, am I stealing it by torrenting it? Who has less property now than before I torrented the show?
There are many lifetimes of content out there already. What if I'm fine with there being no money for future shows?
I really fail to see how a world without high-budget Marvel films will be so bad. I'd be fine watching old movies and art-house productions for the rest of my life.
Piracy is a protest. 95% of those shows are worthless fillers that would have never been watched by the viewers if the full selection was available. Most of those future "originals" shouldn't be happening in the first place.
The reason music streaming defeated piracy is because a single subscription gives access to most of the music in the world, including from other countries and languages as long as you can type the search query (Indian, Japanese, Turkish, Russian etc.)
The reason video piracy is resurging is that every streaming service provides 2-3 good shows and hundreds of fillers, and to have a real selection of what is currently good one would have to pay $200-300 per month for dozens of apps. On top of that, pulling the show from one app and reappearing it on another loses watch history, which is no way in the interest of the customer. Sell what the users really want to buy, and they will pay.
i prefer not to pay for my own exploitation and being psychologically mindfucked by propaganda. i don't want to give money to Hollywood millionaires and the expensive product advertisements that classify as movies today
As mention in a comment above, it is not the consumer's responsibility to provide income to employees of a company providing goods or services. Please stop with this fallacy.
You're conflating consumer responsibility with consumer spending. It's the company's job to provide wages - the company dictates and designs the means to acquire money to provide wages. If the company provides a widget that consumers don't want, is it the consumer's fault the company cannot pay the wages of the employees? That's just silly.
Technically stealing is depriving someone from his property which is not the case here. Also one should make a distinction between services. In the case of audiovisual content It can be consumed without changing anything in the life of the producer. I do not say that it’s a good thing but qualifying it of stealing does not seem right.
Theft, in plain english, is defined as the dishonest appropriation of property belonging to another with the intention to permanently deprive. Stealing is the act of theft.
>You get the benefit of high quality (true 4k, not stream compressed "4k")
Where do you think pirates get their source content from? Sure if it's a movie with a blu-ray release there's a 4k high bitrate source, but if it's a netflix original the "stream compressed 4k" is the only version available.
All this. Plus, if you live in a country that's not the US, half the streaming services aren't available, and on the ones that are, half the content is missing because it's 2022 and geographic region licensing is still a thing.
Maybe, but I'd pay for better content and UX. Many movies above that royalty threshold just aren't available. Also Netflix must die because they canceled Cowboy Bebop.
About time anyway. Always next version of the business they put out of business. That's the way it works, especially with the deflation threat of technology. If you're a tech business and you can't maintain a margin so you have to raise rates, then something is up, broke, stockholder greed, personal greed, etc.
> Running a large media server can actually be pretty costly on power bills these days.
Only if using server hardware, and that isn’t a good way to do it. A recent generation igpu and a low power computer is the way to go. You’ll get 10+ streams out an Intel Nuc, or similar sff pc. The expensive bit is the storage array.
There are also tons of benefits to just walking out of the grocery store without paying. No queues, no small talk with the checkout person and you save cash too.
The apples haven’t got any better lately, and they now have a DRM coating which prevents your photos working. The coating is a continual irritation to apple eaters. There is also a terms of service for apple eaters to sign.
False equivalence. 0 marginal cost of replication doesn’t mean that the item is valueless. The creators have a right to be paid for their work. Just as you’d be working your rights to charge people to look at your apple picture.
Since the rise of streaming services it have been surprisingly hard to get older and less popular content as less people are seeding. Also seems there are stringent laws present for content sharing than it was 10 years ago. I doubt that content piracy will come back in the way it was so that an ordinary citizen could say "It's easier just to pirate".
I don't know how to phrase this nicely, but this is precisely the type of Hacker News nerd-blindness that I find amazing. It's "easier"? Is it? For young children who want to watch their kids shows and don't know what 4k means? For grandparents who want to see some k-dramas and have no clue about DRM or geo-locked? Sure, Netflix has issues and it's made some bad decisions, but let's not delude ourselves here. The group of people who are comfortable pirating media and find it "easier" than Netflix is at least an order of magnitude smaller than Netflix's user base.
I'm sorry, I just find it really absurd when people claim something is easier when it's just not. Perhaps you find it to be a better trade off, but it is not easier.
Exactly. I’m a 59 year old man who knows how to pirate, but watches his content from streaming providers because it’s simpler and safer, and I don’t like to steal. I don’t think piracy is what’s killing them. It’s that there are too many streaming providers and people don’t hesitate to drop subscriptions. I tend to subscribe when there’s a deal, watch everything I want to see, then drop it and switch to another one for 6 months. And I’ll bet I’m not alone.
I'm a 60-year-old (Do I win a kewpie doll?), and have the tech chops to pirate, but I don't want to.
It's important for me to live a life of Personal Integrity. That stance gets a lot of chuckles with this crowd, but it's of critical importance, in my life.
I'm fortunate, in being able to afford streaming services, but find the profusion and variety to be a mess.
I like AppleTV Channels, and the way that the AppleTV Watch Now app aggregates the apps. Amazon has something similar, that my wife uses.
Unfortunately, it looks like these knuckleheads can't agree on common licensing models. I don't want the "You can have any color you want, as long as it's black." approach of cable bundlers, but I also don't like the myriad ways of subscribing, or, quite frankly, the ever-changing prices.
I even have Plex set up with (mostly) ripped DVD content but I still subscribe to a few streaming services and buy/rent a la carte now and then. The fragmentation is annoying but subscribing/unsubscribing is pretty low friction. Though I wouldn't be surprised to see more discounting for longer subscription terms.
Of course, what was (past tense) also annoying was paying $100/month for a cable bundle that I rarely watched.
It's also the case that I have access to a ton of video and don't consider much to be "must see."
And to the topic at hand, I may very well cancel Netflix one of these days. There's some stuff I haven't watched yet but after I get through that I may well drop it.
When it was still called popcorn time I used it. It was easy to use, but it was far from being as reliable as any other commercial streaming service. Buffering was very common and subtitles were missing or would de-sync a lot.
people forgive a lot of hiccups and quality issues when the service is "free". I see the same sentiment in the emulation scene where people will in one breath call a game "playable" despite weird graphical hitches, slowdowns, and crashes. And in the next breath berate some remaster because it dips under 60 FPS in a few moments of gameplay.
Wow, there's a "stremio" button on my TV's remote control? I can't find it. I have a feeling that the definitions of "difficult" and "literally" are unknown to you.
> Using a pirate streaming service such as stremio is literally no more difficult than Netflix.
Nope. Just tried it. Literally not. It gives me the option to play movies, but nope. Can only play trailers.
There are addons, but they seem to use Torrent. I have no interest in streaming up to other people and redistributing the data. Is that set up automatically, or does it reuse my internet connection without informing me?
Also, with Netflix, I don't have to worry about copyright issues. Does streamio make that as easy?
None of this sounds literally as easy.
And again, literally cannot play a movie I can easily play on Netflix.
I think it's true in the same way that Media companies feigned that everyone was pirating.
If it's just as fringe as you say, and i agree, then we shouldn't entertain the idea that media is (or was, in early 2000s before Netflix) losing that much money to pirating. As i'm sure now that people start migrating to less legal avenues for digital media we'll start seeing a resurgence of cries over lost profits due to piracy.
Agreed. While the *arrs are "easy" to set up once you have good knowledge of Kubernetes or at least Docker Compose, that's not exactly common. If you're using the native Windows clients, there's a pretty good chance you don't have a NAS set up (or at least not well), which means there's a decent chance you'll eventually have a hardware failure, and then be surprised when your media is suddenly gone.
ZFS pools with full backups, redundant hardware, and highly available servers is not normal.
You can run a media service for example jellyfin on the same PC as the client.
Installers are a thing on windows, on Ubuntu you can install software with apt. It wasn't packaged for my distro so I downloaded an archive unzipped and dropped it in /opt
Not sure why anyone would absolutely need to understand Kuberetes or even docker.
Plugging a PC up to a display has been a better TV for a while now.
It's not easier. I've got a BS in EE and am old enough to have downloaded episodes of the TV show 24 over 56k using early BitTorrent. I've successfully set up plex (which requires an in house server/spare pc), sonarr, radarr, usenet, etc. I'm probably the 99% percentile in ability to pirate. And its not easier than netflix.
90% of people I know probably couldn't set this up. And the other 10% would spend more time dicking around with the set up than they would using netflix or the other services.
GabeN is not correct. Piracy is a money problem. Free is very enticing.
The UX is crap; the info architecture is obscure; it doesn't work well on macOS (or at all if I use the wrong file system); it uses confusing labels for the stash of stuff I've already bought. I don't use it often enough to know if my usr/pwd is still valid (it is, fortunately). It had some slightly odd 2FA type thing the last time I logged in. It just gives me the impression that it wants to hide games from me that I've already bought and to make new ones hard to find. I'd rather have discs in boxes taking up space (tbf I also collect vinyl so maybe I'm just anachronistic?)
The only good thing going for it is that it doesn't ever email me junk.
You aren't the only one. Steam is DRM with good PR. Much of the goodwill gamers have for Steam is based on misconceptions, rumors, or delusions, particularly: "If Valve ever goes out of business, they said they'll lift all the DRM for the games I've bought" I've heard that from so many gamers it isn't even funny, it's a widespread misconception and it's obvious horse shit. Maybe Valve has or once had that intention with their own in-house games, but they wouldn't even have the legal right to do something like that for 99.99% of the Steam catalogue.
Even for the in-house games, you have to be naive to trust any sort of promise from a commercial software product that isn't in a contract. Notch supposedly once promised that Minecraft would eventually become open source; well that plan evaporated when Microsoft waved a few billion dollars in front of him. Maybe he meant it at the time he said it, but that doesn't count for anything.
Valve makes a lot of money from the steam store. They’re not going anywhere. There are competitors like gog games that sell them without DRM. You download the games anyways so I’m sure a solution will be figured out if Valve starts to have issues.
Steam provides a pretty seamless experience for gaming, and it provides useful services to developers as well. Then you have things like the steam workshop and marketplace.
And for minecraft being open source: who cares? Gamers want games that are good and fun to play. There are very few open source games that are actually fun to play.
Granted, you have to buy the game to make use of these open source engines legally. But these open source engines free you from the limitations of DRM, Windows/Wine and run better than the original engines (support modern resolutions, innumerable bug fixes, etc.)
Well, the huge dicourse in consoles atm is digital and ownership. There were several scares over the years (some that went through, some that backpedeled) on storefronts closing down and no longer being able to buy older games as a result, in a market where retro gaming is being flooded by scalpers selling stuff at 20x markups. Console players are feeling uneasy with the advent of there being "digital only" variants sneaking back in, and cloud gaming is getting bigger each year.
Maybe this is just a cacophony of old fans not getting with the times, but it seems like a signifigant enough sentiment that "so what" seems overly dismissive.
>And for minecraft being open source: who cares?
older minecraft players apparently. Granted, it hasn't really stopped their creativity and servers, so in practice it doesn't change much. But I wouldn't be surprised in some microfose move years down the line angering that playerbase.
Again, an oddly dismissive take for something that has historically happened. It's easy to say "I don't care it's convinent" until it isn't.
I agree that promises from these companies mean nothing.. but how much of a problem is this in todays gaming market though really?
many new games are free and rely on in-game transactions tied to an account outside of steam
There are no restrictions on the games I bought through steam that actually get in the way of me playing them - and there are a lot of conveniences offered like having access to my entire library on any machine with steam installed, or playing the games installed on my machine pretty much indefinitely offline. And being able to verify my game files and have them automatically fixed / updated
The games i bought a long time ago and still play have more than earned the money i spent on them anyway. if steam dies and i need to buy them again, i will and i will be happy to. if i cant find them anywhere because the games themselves died, ill make an image of my PC before upgrading it or uninstalling them and play them offline in a VM
there might be an itch here or there i cant scratch for whatever reason, but i can always buy a new game inspired by the same genre which is usually more fun than trying to recreate a nostalgic feeling anyway
I was terribly skeptical to Steam when it launched, as I am to all online/hosted services. What if they just remove a game I'm using? Does all my games stop working if they turn off their servers? Am I really going to have to be online whenever I want to play?
But I gave in after several years, and now I'm a quite happy Steam user on Linux. It works as advertised, and the only issue I have is that I haven't found a way to filter games for «Linux support» and a genre at the same time. I've used EXT4 and BTRFS as file systems while using Steam, and never had any issues with that either.
I'm inclined to agree with Gabe. I've never spent as much money on games as after I got Steam. It makes it really easy to get a new game. Without Steam, I'd probably just go without. I have lots of things to spend my time on, and sometimes I'm even a little bit bummed that wasting time on games is an option on Linux these days...
I love steam. And the revenues from steam allow valve to experiment and explore (and support my favorite esport Dota2). The Valve Index and Steam Deck would not exist were it not for revenue from Steam. Not to mention Proton. As long as they keep doing interesting things, and allow me to play the games I buy offline (which they do), I will continue to be a Steam fan.
Our use-cases must be vastly different. steam is actually one of the few applications my friends and i talk about as having good design.
I've been using steam for over a decade and have always enjoyed that it works the way i expect a computer application to work. i can right-click on things to get to their properties and other options, i can point it to games i have installed that i didnt buy through steam and they appear next to my steam games in my library seamlessly
the store UI is.. not the most intuitive thing for me, but it seems consistent. it is very rare that i am browsing steam store to begin with, though. I am usually searching for a specific game directly, which i never have trouble finding if it's in their collection. I also like that i can add any games im interested in to a wish list and they notify me when it's on sale
i used to edit my settings in a config file in counterstrike, which required "tampering" with local files but in a way that ultimately resulted in compliant files. Finding that file was an obscure path to navigate, ill give you that - but again the organization is still consistent. all files for one game can be found in one folder with the games name on it. you can manually delete that folder and effectively uninstall the game. you can even do a custom reinstall by selectively deleting files from that folder and ask steam to replace the missing items and it will. For example, to reinstall a game without losing your save files.
Not trying to invalidate your experience, but your comment caught me by surprise because your dislike seems to be well rationed and thought out - ie genuine - so i just found it interesting
>the other problems are personal preferences that aren't universal
few things in life are. But we're on the internet, so we inevitably here a lot fo "personal preferences", often exagerrated to the point where it sounds like it's the worst thing in the world.
No, you are not the only one. Fellow macOS Steam user here. Whenever a game I'm interested in comes out, I first go to the AppStore to see if it's available there, then to the developer's web site, and only as a last resort to Steam. The UX is some of the worst I have to use in a given week. It constantly shows me games that don't run on any system I've ever used (Windows exclusives, but I've never used a Windows machine since I signed up for Steam, for example). It's just awful all around.
I'm curious how old you are. I remember the days of when you had to travel to a brick-and-mortar store to purchase a physical copy of a game (if it was in stock). Then, you travel home, install it, and play it, saving your local saves on your computer, backing them up manually on an external drive so that you don't lose your progress in the event of a system failure. Oh, and writing your CD Keys in a notebook, and carrying that with you (along with your physical games) wherever you move. I don't remember how patches were managed, but I don't recall there ever being a 'day-one' patch of fixes, or being one message away from the developers.
I don't hate it, but I'll admit that the Valve worship is some of the most cultish I've seen in video games. To the point where I feel gamers work against their best interests whenever they see a "threat" to their beloved library not having every game in history under one launcher (nevermind that Steam users can add non-steam games to their virtual library). You'd think Youtube and even Spotify lately would show the dangers of lumping all your eggs in one basket.
But, I will also admit that I'm a bit biased against steam due to using PC's for a lot of Visual Novels. And their VN submissions have always been a lottery of some sorts, to the confusion of readers and developers alike. Nothing worse than having an existing product on the store and then suddenly having a sequel to the product rejected, while the first product still sits on shelves.
It’s a pretty famous quote and he’s correct. Steam has DRM aspects but is pretty seamless. It is entirely way more work to look for cracked games and download those than to just buy it on steam.
I was at a friends house, he was starting GameOfThrones. I was like "you going to cancel hbo after??" He explained he was pirating. But! He is non technical (a nurse by trade). I was very confused asked to see his setup. He walked over to small black box under his tv. I was fascinated. It was a raseberry pi enclosure with hdmi out, it was prepackaged - networking p2p software for looking up stolen items, a UI better than netflix. All he did was take it out of the box, plug in the HDMI, and start watching UNLIMITED content on any streaming service I have heard of.
Check out jellyfin it runs fine as a service on the users PC. You create different directories for TV shows and movies and drop files in and they show up shortly after.
I got a $25 Fire TV Stick and plugged it into the back of my TV. I push 1 button and everything powers on and Netflix, Hulu, or Disney+ launch automatically. Any other service is a couple button presses away. All in 4k. (Well Hulu is upscaled)
I never have to leave my sofa. I don't have to dick around with plugging and unplugging my PC. No keyboards to manage. No OS or software to keep updated.
Your solution is easier than some other options but I'll stick with mine.
I too wish I could have a laggy experience with a bad interface requiring me to pull out my phone and search for which of the several services I pay for have a particular piece of content on my phone then slowly navigate to that service then try to enter the search term character by character by moving a little cursor to each individual character with my remote.
Then have a firmware update ad some advertising to the experience.
Sure beats my experience of pulling out my 12 oz keyboard plus touchpad bluetooth keyboard connected to a real PC.
I almost exclusively pirate movies and tv series from pirate bay. I would have no problem paying $20 a month for that service as-is (TPB + torrent network), as it's better than the currently available alternatives.
GabeN is partially correct: It's a money & service problem. It's money for some, service for others, sometimes a bit of both. During college I had no money, so the issue for me was money. Once I got a job after college it was service: I didn't want to drive to music store & hope they had the CD in stock that I was looking for, not when I could definitely get it in 5 minutes online. Similar issue for videogames: I didn't want to spend $30-$60 for a game I couldn't return, when my computer might choke on it & not run or if half an hour in I realized it was crap. On top of which I might have to drive around to half a dozen stores to find a copy. That was a mixture of service & money.
These days it's faster for me to pay $1 for a song than pirate it, and I can instantly buy, download, and return a game in an hour if it either doesn't run or I hate it immediately.
Free is enticing, but so is convenience & instant gratification.
I would gladly pay for a service I am currently getting through piracy if there was a legal way to have it though. Availability of all content, no geoblocking (I live in a country where Disney+ and HBO Max is not available but I do pay for Prime and Netflix). For me if there was a way to have what I'm getting in a legal way I'd go for it but it is not an option. What I'm getting at is that its not a matter of money/pricing its also a matter of convenience, availability and not having to track 4+ subscriptions and apps when you can watch it all under a single platform.
that's where the "service problem" sentiment falls apart. All companies want to be this monopoly for you with no red tape over multiple governments. But of course, companies get the best cuts (100%) from hosting it themselves and countries (and media licensed) will never agree on what's okay.
In this case, piracy is a way around a world that hasn't quite caught up with how the internet works yet. I wonder in a few decades if governments worldwide create enough enforcement on this for it to be just as inconvinent as trying to steal a CD.
For me, it's that I want a significant portion of a piracy set-up for things that I can't get at all (4k actual original Star Wars trilogy, certain shows with the original soundtrack rather than a worse replacement, some obscure pieces of media) or for things I consider likely to disappear any time (YouTube videos) so if I'm going to have it anyway, I may as well also use it to avoid the "where the hell can I watch this?" shuffle. I do also pay for several streaming services.
I think there is some merit in piracy being a service problem. There are certainly a number of situations where I just seek out a less than legal solution because there is no legal way for me to buy some media. Be it language barriers, region locking, license expiation, censored/rejected media, etc.
However, people professing this quote everywhere should note that it's very hard to compete with "free infinite media" for those with the knowledge to pirate. So don't be surprised if instead of catering to that crowd that they instead focus on people who can't or don't want to pirate. It's a double edged sword. If I do pirate, I don't pretend I do it in some effort to make the product better. I do it accepting the risk that they may never choose to cater to me.
Not a money problem. I have a Netflix subscription, and yet end up going to pirate websites more and more often these days. I'll probably just cancel my Netflix subscription.
It's so frustrating to see that 90%of the shows I want to see are unavailable on Netflix. Video streaming is just so fragmented right now. And they try to compensate with a bunch of low quality Netflix original shows.
Why can't they just replicate what has been done in audio streaming? Spotify is what Netflix should have been. It's been years I no longer need to pirate music.
> GabeN is not correct. Piracy is a money problem. Free is very enticing.
A service problem and a money problem are almost the same thing. Time is money, and I value my free-time very high. People will pay to not have to spend time to find the free.
I have a shared folder on my home network where I download stuff from 1-click hosters with jdownloader. I get the links all on one platform.
I got that money. I paid for Netflix once but now I can't remember the last show I watched made by them. Instead I'd have to pay for at least 3 other platforms to watch those few shows I watch throughout the year. Sometimes I'd even have to use a VPN to get it in the original language.
It only is a service problem for me.
(there is a bit revenge for their inability to provide a single platform in there too)
I come from country where intellectual property was treated as a western joke.
Children younger than 10 learned how to pirate - by themselves, without knowing even English.
A lot of people still can do that, and it's quite easy to find out how.
It is extremely tired as well. Any time there is a post about Netflix, or some streaming service, I always predict there will be someone in the comments section talking about their “sweet, open source Unix based media server” and how much better it is.
It would make it quite suspicious and weird if the most obvious solution to the problems which are often the content of those posts, wouldn't have been posted by somebody in the comments.
It's amazing isn't it? Like people really think streaming services should care about mpv filters as a real use case for their customers. Incredible stuff.
The thing that all these everyman-boosters that have invaded and gentrified tech seem to forget is that people are capable of learning, and with the right motivation, they will.
“It's easier just to pirate than keep up with all these streaming services.”
Which seems false on its face. Every TV has access to all these streaming services built in. Or Roku devices, which take moments to set up. This is unrelated to whether people are capable of learning, but I am even bearish on that when it comes to the average person in the current piracy environment.
> Every TV has access to all these streaming services built in. Or Roku devices, which take moments to set up
You mean those same TVs and devices that plaster your screen with ads, arbitrarily modify the UI, suddenly make certain shows unavailable, spy on what you're watching, require unwieldy DRM, take minutes to turn on, interrupt your relaxation time to run "updates", randomly brick themselves, become obsolete in a short several years, and generally dictate your experience based on short-sighted corporate whims? Visiting someone else's house and seeing the garbage behavior they put up with from their "smart TV" is as mindblowing as seeing someone using a web browser without adblock!
"Piracy is easier" refers to the experience after you've gone through the work of setting up your own entertainment system. Setting it up certainly does require an investment of time and self-actualization, which for sure is more effort than searching "netflix" and following their "conversion" path. But after that, things just generally work without all of the corporate hassles. I don't foresee everyone choosing to make running a libre media setup one of their hobbies, but most people will know someone who has...
>"Piracy is easier" refers to the experience after you've gone through the work of setting up your own entertainment system.
and the thread here as a whole is rebuking the argument that Netflix is losing money because people are pirating. Most people don't or can't go through this work, so that likely isn't the reason why Netflix is seeing drops.
I agree that piracy likely isn't responsible for the larger immediate trend. But from the perspective of someone with a libre media setup, all these streaming/DRM/lockdown tribulations are like watching a storm from inside a warm house with a hot cup of cocoa. Especially on a technical forum where people should know better than to succumb to corporate ploys, its worth reminding everyone of that. And my comment did imply the end game for "most people" - technical friends/family running seedboxes and sharing them up.
Current market wise, I wouldn't be surprised if the Netflix situation is people canceling their membership to spend that money on a different streaming service, and then swapping between friends to get the union of shows for a similar $/month. This would explain both pushes of membership going down, plus them wanting to crack down on sharing.
>But from the perspective of someone with a libre media setup, all these streaming/DRM/lockdown tribulations are like watching a storm from inside a warm house with a hot cup of cocoa. Especially on a technical forum where people should know better than to succumb to corporate ploys, its worth reminding everyone of that.
ehh, It's more like a speedbump than a storm. There's too much money in the game for it to end up being caught in a hurricane.
I just see the other side on how piracy can also harm more niche mediums and discourage businesses from even bothering to compete, which is why I can't even say piracy is a 'meh' at worst.
The manga indusry outside of Japan has this problem in that it's 5+ years behind the already decade outdated online solution for digital comics. Several JP storefronts for phyical and digital manga, but that is almost non-existent in English. Manga is fantranslated so fast that there's no incentive to bother having official localizers outside of the already huge works. Easier to cash in pennies on anime adaptations and merch sales afterwards.
This is why we need an Airport Hub model for media consumption hubs, like Plex. (Which is what Cable TV started out to be: We provide the infrastructure to get the signal into the home. You, the media-company, pays to land your content at our hub so that our subscribers to our infrastructure can see your content.
There are lists of how much it would cost to have all the streaming services, and for a LONG time, it was illegal for cable companies to prevent you from selecting the channels you would like a-la-carte... but it did NOT prevent them from charging too much for each channel to make that an unworkable...
"You want JUST HBO? Sure, no problem, if you don't buy it in the bundle, the individual channel cost is $29 per month!"
---
That is THE failure of "regulation" ; THE GOVERNMENT WILL MANDATE THROUGH LOBBIED REGULATION THAT ONE MUST HAVE THIS [SERVICE] - HOWEVER, WE WILL NOT REGULATE HOW MUCH YU CAN BE CHARGED FOR THE SERVICE, BUT WE WILL FINE AND PUNISH YOU IF YOU DO NOT HAVE THIS SERVICE.
You mean the kids who don't buy all those streaming services? Or the grandparents who don't buy all those streaming services? We agree, not having to deal with all these streaming services is easier than having to deal with all these streaming services.
But if we're talking about the people who are buying all the streaming services, it's currently easier to pirate. I get that you haven't taken two seconds to do any amount of research on the matter and that complete lack of any experience whatsoever gives you a sense of expertise to call other people blind and absurd, but consider that maybe you just don't know what you're talking about?
Well now only a fraction of content is on Netflix so if one compares the time cost of spending 2 hours doing so once this decade vs spending $200 a month for everything from live TV to Disney.
The easy option will cost you 24000 over 10 years. If you earn 20 bucks an hour or less like near half of America this represents an additional 1200 labor hours or a full time job for 30 weeks.
I've yet to explore Tor. Are you saying there's a reason I shouldn't? I mostly just want to see how my own sites perform, and haven't gotten around to it yet.
Most of my friends have no idea what Tor is. Many don't know the Pirate Bay, and most of those who know bittorrent haven't configured it to get past their firewall.
But you know what they do know? Turning the TV on, going to Roku, searching for a movie/show, and watching it in whatever app Roku suggests.
It's not that everyone can or wants to run their own Plex setup, it's that the Plex model, once set up, is much more consumer-friendly: Get the shows you want, don't care about the distributor. It's probably naive to think that would work for a bunch of reasons (Who exactly runs this? Are they a for-profit monopoly now? Who will fund the content if there's no monopoly rent?) but I don't think it's crazy to imagine a service that works more like it. We went to all the effort of unbundling cable and now we just have a different set of bundles. It's a little better, but they've fallen back on old habits.
I can agree it isn't easier for those who don't know it. It's like saying the CLI is easier than a GUI - sure, for you.
The things this person lists are things I agree with, however. I actually have Amazon Prime Video but still enjoyed watching my friend's pirated copies on Plex, because there is no way to force-disable shitty compression levels, even if I have gigabit Internet.
Also, my friend can make sure their video library never changes or goes away, and that certain rarer content is archived forever, not subject to the changes of George Lucas or Disney editing out "problematic" content.
I have a friend who pays $15 a month for a dedicated seedbox, with 1-click install of a browser-based torrent app + plex. He set up plex to use the remote torrent folder, then anything he downloads gets immediately listed on plex, streamable anywhere, supports chromecast, etc. Pretty cool and a _little_ harder than using a proper paid streaming site, but not a different order of magnitude. Hardest part is finding the seedbox company and also tracking down the right torrent for the show (the choices can be overwhelming).
As an amusing anecdote, my parents live thousands of miles from me. The last time I saw them I set up a Raspberry Pi with XBMC (yeah, that long ago) and a flirc IR receiver for a remote, hooked it up with local network, and an external hard drive that has a battery-backed power source. I then `dd`'d over the image onto 5 SD cards and left it with them.
Since they're in a low power-security environment, there's a lot of unexpected on-off cycles. Anyway, the whole thing still worked for them until recently and as things started failing (as they inevitably do with this max jank thing I've made them) they just figured out how to work with it.
At first, they ran out of content, so they learned how to go get it on ThePirateBay and find the right mirror.
Then OpenSubtitles (which was integrated with XBMC) stopped working on it for some reason, so they would go manually get srt files and stick them on the USB drive (visible over Samba from the network).
Then as the local external drive started failing, they used the home desktop's samba mounted drive (that I'd set up earlier).
Hilariously, the gradual collapse of the system seems to have worked as a natural training regimen, and now they're fully equipped with knowledge. So now they've got one of our old desktops in the living room hooked up to the TV, a small bluetooth keyboard lying on the coffee table, and watch pirate video on the TV.
The whole thing is positively comical because I pay for all the services so this isn't necessary at all. But availability is not complete and I'm sure it tickles them to be able to do this stuff themselves.
Anyway, thought it was a funny story. They're in their late 60s but they're doctors and last I knew, not particularly tech-savvy, so I am both proud and highly entertained.
> The group of people who are comfortable pirating media and find it "easier" than Netflix is at least an order of magnitude smaller than Netflix's user base.
This view is very US-centric.
In most of the "rest of the world", netflix either doesn't exist or has a very very limited show list (even here, in a relatively developed EU country), and piracy literally is the only way to get a lot of the very popular shows.
And if you already pirate 3 of the 5 shows that you watch, why would you pay for the other 2, that are available on netflix, if you can just pirate those too?
Indeed, pirating is very much an all-or-nothing solution. Torrenting your first movie might be difficult, but the second time it's easy as pie.
In many ways, pirating is like any subscription service: signing on is a difficult decision (whether financially or technically), but once you're there and all caught up with the UI, using it again is the default move for watching your next show/movie.
In my country (slovenia) there is a very good local torrent tracker + a lot of people use the few larger general torrent sites, and even "grandpas" can use them, if their "computer-savy" kid installs them a torrent client, and shows them where to search.
In you go further down the balkans, you can find full movies even on youtube, especially local ones (because youtube doesn't remove them). Not that long ago, you could also buy or rent pirated cds/dvds literally from street vendors and "movie clubs" (think blockbuster, but smaller, more local and pirated).
I don't mean to be rude, but in the grand scheme of things the other countries don't quite matter as much, financially speaking. And those smaller parts of the world pirating isn't a big loss. Similar to the video game industry in Japan; some games may get an overseas following, but if the domestic market is slacking, that studio may not get the chance to make a sequel for those overseas fans.
So back to the US-centric sentiment: American audiences don't have the excuse 99% of the time of "this content is region blocked in my country", so the sentiment here shifts to "I don't want to manage 4 streaming services".
Sure it is a magnitude smaller but it was even smaller a few years ago and streaming pages where you don't have to download a movie first are quite common and popular within the non-technical audience and they become even more popular.
I'm sure the industry will come up with new ways to intrude on the internet again to stop this before they get together to make another platform which would allow the audience to download everything in one place.
You're stealing income, specifically from me and all of my coworkers. Perhaps you think that you're only stealing from Producers and A list actors, but there are entire departments that receive residuals on a production.
- On screen performers, stunt performers like myself and actors who grind out a comfortable living. Those residuals also go to qualifying for health insurance through earnings. You are directly stealing from my ability to provide health insurance to my family.
- Assistant Directors, who are saints dealing with every logistical problem imaginable. The best of them only work 1-2 movies a year because the workload causes severe burnout.
- The Union themselves! The more money that flows through the union, the more powerful they are. The more safer movie sets become and the better life is provided for the workforce that makes your entertainment.
- Yourself! You are reducing the value of producing quality TV and Movies by stealing them. Every time one a show is pirated, there is less incentive to spend more money on an entertainment spectacle.
For every show imagine that it's a nickel you stole from my income. WOuldn't be surprised if you took a buck or two out of mine. Now multiply that by all the on screen performers and ADs and others I mentioned. Now multiply that all the people who steal like you.
You're directly responsible for sucking the quality of life away from people who make your entertainment and reducing the desire to make things you enjoy. You're going to end up with shows that are AI generated CGI sponsored by Mt. Dew and Chevy trucks.
Is it really stealing if they wouldn’t have ever paid for it in the first place?
If it’s not easy to find and use on a subscription service that I already have, I’m just not gonna try to search for it or pay for it. What difference would it make if I pirated it and watched it anyways?
(FWIW I personally don’t pirate anything, I just really don’t see the merit to the “stealing” argument)
I'll go into your mailbox and take your paycheck. I'll provide you with a new identical copy of it. I'll leave the previous existing copy intact, but in my possession.
Finally! I agree with this. I think that physically purchased goods should be free from any sort of "DRM." and is not stealing.
The difference is one party at a time, i.e. household, library patron, etc, can enjoy the entertainment service.
When you pirate it, The original owner of the dvd retains the service value as well as providing the service to others without any value being transferred to the workforce/IP holders.
That's the difference and I personally am all in for a mythical solution that but still allows complete freedom of ownership while also stopping people from digitally reproducing assets and dispensing them exponentially.
Theft is when you take something from someone. As in, what you have materially gained, they have materially lost. Copyright infringement is not theft, and must be treated differently, because what you gain, nobody has lost; the supply is infinite.
If you accuse someone of stealing the income, but they haven't gotten any money out of it, how does that make sense? What you're describing is a missed opportunity for a sale; had someone 'stolen' nothing and simply passed the product by, you would still not have made that sale and nothing would have changed.
I generally support this argument, but to play devil's advocate, you might consider the bit stream used to transfer the content to be new bits. The file may be a bit-for-bit copy if you ask a computer, but streaming it required a series of voltage fluctuations that wouldn't have happened otherwise. You could consider that series of events to be roughly analogous to a CD-ROM containing some content. You can load the CD onto two computers and get two copies of its content, but there are two physically distinct CDs just like there are two physically distinct series of bits streaming to two locations.
An NFT is a certificate of authenticity. Copies of the associated item don't have a valid certificate. Getting satisfaction from a copy is orthogonal to the value associated with the authenticated original.
I seriously don't understand why this point keeps getting repeated. It is just semantics!
Yes, we all know copying a digital show isn't the same exact thing as stealing your car. However, you are still taking something of value! Let's say you snuck into my band's concert venue and didn't buy a ticket. Yeah you didn't physically take anything from me, but you are having access to something you shouldn't without paying.
No, I am not taking anything of value. You still have all the things of value you had before. The difference between a rivalrous good and a non-rivalrous good is not semantics.
Theft is not defined by the receiving, it is defined by the taking. The moral ill is not you being enriched, it is the person who had it rightfully, being deprived of it.
Call it stealing it or not, non rivalrous or whatever, the point is that the movie owners have intellectual property rights to their movies and can decide how it is distributed.
If you think that's a dumb deal then you don't have to take it. Pirating it is simply wrong.
"Let's say you snuck into my band's concert venue and didn't buy a ticket. Yeah you didn't physically take anything from me, but you are having access to something you shouldn't without paying."
And this is again a physical situation, where one more person takes up limited space, reducing something.
Copying does not reduce anything.
It also does not contribute anything, true, so I am not saying it is always ethical to do so.
But when a poor person in bangladesh or bolivia living under very different economic realities, where 10$ means a LOT and who could never afford to pay for western realities anyway, streams some hollywood movie from a warez site - than I see zero damage. And guess what, they all do. So do poor teenagers and students in the west and they usually start paying, once they can afford it.
Judging them all as "thefts" from a position of being born into wealth, is maybe not very ethical either.
So to repeat it again, stealing implies taking something away. Which is not the case here.
It's not stealing, it's copyright infringement. If someone steals my car I no longer have my car. If someone copies my car my car loses values because there is now one extra copy of my car floating around.
If intellectual property is indeed property, it can be stolen. Considering (in the US, at least), intellectual property is codified within the Constitution, it's pretty hard to say it isn't real.
Edit: to be clear, I agree it's not 'theft', but am pushing back on the way this distinction is sometimes used to insinuate that it is victimless (not saying the poster above is claiming that, just that it's worth pointing out)
Often when you have to qualify something (intellectual property instead of just property), it's because it's used as a metaphor instead of a subcategory. Intellectual property is a form of property as much as political science is a form of science.
You can metaphorically say it's theft, but it doesn't manifest as theft of actual property.
For example: many people (myself included) have downloaded the $1.000.000 torrent (a list of files whose value amounts to a million dollars). I found nothing of use in it so I just deleted it. Did I cause a million dollars in damages? Was the damage restored when I deleted it?
If you consider the same for actual property there's no question about it. Stealing a Bugatti does cause millions to be lost, and destroying it makes it irrecoverable.
You've posted 67 (!) comments in this thread, mostly making the same point over and over in angry ways.
I get that you have legit reasons for feeling strongly about this topic, but this is way over the top, so please don't do it on HN. We want curious conversation here.
> You want something. You don't want to pay for it. You take it without paying.
This is an age old argument... I'm not taking anything. I'm merely looking at something. The same way that I'm not "stealing from Leonardo" when I look at statue of David. I understand that the makers of the movie had some hopes of monetizing my looking but alas, they failed. Based on pure logic alone, it's clear that piracy is not theft, it's something else.
> Is it really stealing if they wouldn’t have ever paid for it in the first place?
Since when does it matter if I would've paid for it? If someone steals a Mercedes from a dealer is it not stealing if they wouldn't have bought it anyways?
Just out of curiosity, do they get deprived of the income when I download the content, or when I watch it?
Do they lose more income if I watch the content with friends?
In the early days of photography, people believed that if your photo was taken, it was stealing your soul [1].
I can understand the idea of piracy being wage theft in the same way I can understand the idea of photography being soul theft, but I think both are rather silly ideas.
We get deprived of the income when it is consumed without providing money for that service.
If you watch it with your friends, 5 people watch it for one purchase. If it's good, you all tell 3 more people. Of those 15 people, 20 percent end up purchasing a viewing and the system repeats.
When you pirate it you take all the service for zero cost. That affects real people.
You assume people are going to pay for it. If you provide a good service, they will, as shown by Steam and Spotify and, at least initially, Netflix.
If you don't, they won't, as shown by the proliferation of shitty streaming services and the gutting of content on Netflix.
It's got to suck to feel that people are stealing from you because you have no control over the content distribution mechanisms in the industry you work in, but I think you're largely engaging in fallacious argumentation here. It's pretty much the 90's version of piracy rhetoric. One pirated watch != one watch worth of income lost.
I assume that if people want to enjoy a service without paying for it, it's theft.
It's the "I don't want to pay for it, but I still want to watch it." that seems to be hang up for so many.
Let me explain it simply. That is stealing and it directly affects my ability to make a living as well the motivation for service providers to make more products you enjoy.
What are your thoughts on me and all of my friends and family getting together in my home theatre and watching the latest movie that I paid 4 bucks for on something like Amazon or Youtube?
Is everyone there except me stealing? It feels to me a little bit like the N=1 vs N=0 problem of theism - I'm simply an atheist to one more god than you are. Similarly, I simply don't think it's theft to one more person in that context than you might (of course, here I'm assuming you don't think all those people are stealing).
I am 100 percent okay with it. One entity has provided the fee for service (and afforded me 1/100th of an avocado toast, thank you very much) and is not in their ownership to do as they like.
That they want to share it is their business, not mine. If it's good, those friends will tell other friends and someone along the way will purchase it again, and I'll be even closer to my mortgage busting avocado toast
The hypothetical argument against that is "what if I get 100 friends, for 100 nights to watch it." Sure, hypothetically you could but then it'd be pretty expensive for you and added wear and tear on your home and a pretty big headache to deal with. THe only way to justify it would be to start charging, which at that point, would be stealing. So it always comes across as a thought problem, but I find it's not a real problem.
I don't mind if the town throws a movie festival once a month and plays my movie. I mind if they all get to go home with the luxory of having it on demand and the ability ot share it with everyone they know without providing the service fee requested.
It does not affect your ability to make a living if I consume a copy of your IP that I was not going to pay for in the first place. You have lost nothing you would not lose otherwise, and you have gained nothing you would not gain otherwise.
You gain the value of service without paying the requested fee. If you weren't going to watch it, you wouldn't. Watching it, without paying for it is theft and it takes money from me.
Proof by repeated assertion. The post you are replying to is an effective response to yours. Once more: It does not affect your ability to make a living if I consume a copy of your IP that I was not going to pay for in the first place. Watching it without paying for it does not take money from you, because you would still not have had that money if I had simply not watched it at all.
> If you weren't going to watch it, you wouldn't.
This is flat out false and incredibly obviously so. You can easily see it just by cranking the numbers - if a video game is fun, but costs $500, do you really think that each person who pirates it is depriving the developer of $500? If some magical DRM scheme was implemented that could not be broken and guaranteed every person who played it, bought it, would everyone who pirated it in the previous hypothetical instead buy it for $500? No, they would ignore it, nobody would buy it, and the developer would have just as little money as they had before.
Pirating a piece of IP does not translate 1:1 into a lost sale as you keep variously asserting and acting like it does. It can even turn into a gained sale, in the case of video games or software, when people would not have bought it based on the promotional material but consider it worth buying after actually using it. You have a right to exclusivity on sales - selling pirated material is criminal - but you don't have a right to actually make any sales if nobody wants to buy it.
What if 6 people watch it for one purchase? Does it become theft then?
How about a college dorm hosting a movie night? Maybe theft?
What if a million people watch it for one purchase? I know you think that's theft, but I'm not sure where you'd draw the line.
I think the reality is that 90% of the population won't pirate because it's too much effort and legally ambiguous. If your content becomes popular through piracy, you will absolutely reap the rewards of good content creation.
If a billion people pirated your content because it was that good, you'd have absolutely no problem monetizing. You'd be a household name. When Disney loses their copyright on the Mouse, they're still going to be a huge company capable of monetizing all things Mickey.
If we get back to a state where everyone is pirating because the content services suck, then you need to petition your content distributors to lower friction and provide an experience worth paying for, but we're nowhere near that.
Gabe does it with Steam. I used to almost exclusively pirate games, and now I almost exclusively buy them, because Steam has value adds (achievements, friends, online play, tournaments, workshop content, etc).
Also, you have to understand that many people who have large collections of pirate content see themselves more as archivists than viewers. I'd guess most pirated content never even gets consumed, just downloaded for a "later" that never comes.
>if you watch it with your friends, 5 people watch it for one purchase. If it's good, you all tell 3 more people. Of those 15 people, 20 percent end up purchasing a viewing and the system repeats.
or he could have not watched it at all, told no one, and you would have 0% instead of 20%.
Pirating at scale is a real problem, but an individual pirate is just an opportunist. There is a difference between taking something off the shelf vs picking it out of the trash.
There is a small volume of "piracy" that could be considered "picking through the trash". Some (a lot) of entertainment looks like trash to some (a lot) of people and the only reason those people watch it is because it they get to watch it for free. And then when they are pleasantly surprised, they tell people about it. This is the heart of the "i wasnt going to pay for it anyway" argument. Its the type of person who wouldnt pay for a donut, but if you were about to throw them out theyll take one.
Id be curious to see statistics that shows the relation of being successful in the pirate world and successful in the real world. Because that is ultimately related to the argument you are making. that the current state of piracy is hurting your industry, not helping it - since you say this specific pirate is hurting you right now.
it certainly hurts the transactions bottom line when isolated to viewing your bottom line with or without pirate sales - but thats an incomplete financial scenario (this type of thing is my job). you shouldnt assume a gain of x% sales of pirates that 'would have paid for the content if they couldnt get it for free' without also subtracting y% of sales from people 'who only bought it because pirates started the conversation that ultimately led to their purchase'.
Sometimes the marketing for a movie sucks, and not a lot of people are interested in seeing it. There is a small time frame of relevance and pirates might help overcome the shortcomings of marketing efforts and make the movie more relevant which helps it reach more people than it would have.
In all of your discussion, you seem to presume that the pirates knew about and had an interest in your film to begin with. You assumed successful marketing of your film. maybe you're right, and it probably does 'hurt' (tax?) the biggest blockbuster of the year... but 'people who only watch things online for free' is a real community of maybe significant size and i dont know if there has been any work done to try to measure the impact of what penetrating that community has on the financial success of entertainment media in general.
"all theft is bad" is a nice story, but it ultimately is not always true. sometimes companies allow theft on purpose as a form of marketing. They do that as an observational response to the fact that the cause and effect of 'influencers' exists outside of the intent of the people involved.
This leads to a hypothesis that pirating is a form of marketing for your industry. If it were to become too easy to perform or too widespread, it would likely cross a line into being actually damaging. But if the people pirating it are mostly a small group of tech savvy, relatively intelligent, movie enthusiastic people (due to the technical requirements needed to pirate) then maybe when they pirate you they might be autonomously servicing your industry as an influencer. I know it sounds asinine, but if you want to talk money - there are a lot of factors to consider.
So are they stealing? sure. Are they taking money OUT of your pocket? very debatable; unclear. They are influencing with the pool of money that ends up in your pocket, and it isnt so black and white what their actions have on the size of that pool due to the complexity of your industry.
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Sorry for the long post, and it isnt an attack on you or even a support of piracy in general (it might read that way) - i got caught up in mentally exploring the...
You are wrong. You’re focusing on the wrong thing here. It’s not whether the good can still be sold, it’s about whether the business can continue to get money.
Say you have a business idea. Perhaps something that you want to patent. I use it and start my own business, rendering your potential business moot.
It's not though. You could argue it is indirectly stolen from you by impacting your potential for future earnings, but please explain how the "direct" part of your statement works. Are funds withdrawn from your bank account when someone pirates a movie?
The workforce's income is contractually tied to the amount of post box office profit the film makes. When you steal a show you get the entertainment value without cost of your money. That is directly reflected in my income.
That's fair enough and I did not know that, and will certainly take into account when making future purchasing decisions, thank you.
But the bottom line is, it's just not worth paying for digital content for me, merely by knowing the fact that it's available for free. A file has no intrinsic value, why should I pay for it?
I'll gladly pay for an experience, or service, such as a movie theatre or a streaming platform that does the work of delivering content to me. But there is so much free stuff out there, paying to download the latest Batman movie is simply not worth it.
But what if I don't like Hollywood movies, consider them cheap crap, and don't care if more of them get made? I just want to watch them to see what everyone else is talking about.
But what if someone is not pirating instead of purchasing, they're just pirating instead of doing something else?
You need to consider that maybe the product you are producing is simply not that valuable.
I'm an artist myself. If someone took a photo of something I painted, and started making copies and selling them, yea I'd be pissed. That's what copyright law should be used to protect against.
If someone took a photo of my painting for their personal use, instead of buying one of the photos of my painting that I sell myself, I'd reconsider whether my business model of selling photos is the right one.
> But what if someone is not pirating instead of purchasing, they're just pirating instead of doing something else?
By "something else" do you mean "another activity instead of watching TV/movies/etc," or do you mean "watching TV/movies/etc, just via another method?"
If the former...who cares? That still doesn't justify it. Just because I chose another recreation activity instead of watching a movie doesn't mean that I'm entitled to the movie for free. Not choosing something doesn't have an effect on the price (at least on the micro level; on the macro level, this is of course the concept of "demand," but even if the demand is so low that the "correct" price is effectively $0, that still doesn't give you the right to steal it -- the Intellectual Property is still property of the owner, and they are the only ones who have the right to sell it or give it away, just as you or I have the right to sell or give away any of our property, be it a couch, a TV, a pair of shoes, an idea for a story, whatever. It's all property).
If the latter, what could possibly fit that criteria? You're either getting the TV/movie via official methods or piracy, there isn't any other way. It's binary. There isn't a way to get your hands on a film that is neither officially sanctioned nor piracy.
> You need to consider that maybe the product you are producing is simply not that valuable.
Not that valuable? Are you serious? We're talking about products that are considered "low budget" when they cost 1 million dollars to make and at best receive profits of hundreds of millions of dollars. The entire premise of this thread is that everyone wants to watch everything, they want access to everything (i.e. the demand is high and not going anywhere). They just don't want to pay for multiple separate services -- but only because they can compare to and prefer the brief, golden period wherein everything was accessible on Netflix and Hulu, back when they were the only two games in town and were a breath of fresh air compared to the expensive cable packages (which, might I remind you, people still paid -- economically, that means that the price is considered "fair" and commensurate to demand). Back when Netflix and Hulu were both unsustainably hemorrhaging money, I might add.
Paying for 100% of the streaming services now costs <= your typical cable package just 20 years ago, and that's not even adjusting for inflation. So things are still cheaper than they've ever been, with a not-insignificant raise in convenience and overall quality of the product to boot. Had we jumped from cable packages to the current situation, HN would be jumping with joy.
Just be honest: you want what you want, for as little as you can get it for. And that's fine! That's human nature. What's not fine is, because you can get it for $0 pretty much risk-free, you'll bend over backwards defending why doing so is okay.
(Comment too long for HN, continuing in the next one...)
you are making assumptions about the prerequisites. Talking about "income" implies that the person is viewing a show inside a form of commercial contract like going to a place where the show is displayed or buying a dvd or paying a streaming plateform etc…
Downloading a file (containing the show) from a publicly accessible server on the internet is completely outside of commercial contract so there’s no income in the first place.
Authorities can decide to make it illegal to download files from internet but it’s not "stealing"
@Stunting your perspective in this thread is very valuable, and the best thing that streaming has done, much better than old-school bundling and certainly better than piracy, is encourage a boom in interesting content, and I'm very glad you and the other workers in entertainment are getting paid.
But flogging the tired comparison between stealing physical objects and making illegal copies of content is a losing argument. Everyone instinctively knows it's not the same thing. Just because an end user gains a benefit they didn't pay for doesn't mean it's theft. The owner still has the content and can sell it to as many paying customers as they like. Once the car is gone, it's gone and unavailable to sell to someone else. Consider: what would the auto market look like if we had Star Trek-style replicators and could make copies of physical objects for pennies? Let's use bikes instead. If you had the ability to make cheap copies of a bike, would it be ethical to deny the use of a bike to a poor farmer who could use it to get goods to market and make their life better, when your marginal cost is near zero? Do the needs of the R&D people who designed the bike override that consideration?
This is just as much of a problem for all the software creators on here as for the content creators, though the rise of SAAS has changed that somewhat. Content's inherent non-scarcity is one of the best things that has ever happened to humanity, it just happens to break our pre-existing economic model and hurt the people who create it. This is a fundamental shift in our economy that's underway and we have been lurching around trying to solve it for decades now. We need to solve it, but pretending that it's the same as theft is just not going to get us to a solution.
Society being in a lurch between how we handle our physical goods and our digital goods is a very important subject that is going to get ironed out over the next few generations I'm sure.
That doesn't make it not theft, even if its' really easy to do.
Virtually every dictionary clarifies that theft requires intent to deprive the original owner from using the stolen item, which is incompatible with the act of making a copy.
As gp said, your points are valid, but you're using a word incorrectly. Just use a different word so as not to have dictionaries disagree with you. Copyright infringement.
Say A makes a film.
Situation 1 : B do not watch the film a do something else.
Situation 2 : B downloads the film from P2P network and watch it.
What is the difference for A ?
They lost a potential sale because someone didn’t have to pay for something.
This is obvious. It’s crazy how many of you are twisting yourself into logical knots to try to justify this action. It’s not murder, but it’s clearly wrong on its face.
I don't know; it seems there is a clear learned aversion to the word "stealing" but doesn't change the unethical nature of the crime is equivalent to stealing royalties deserved for the consumed work. I pirate some times sure but I do so with the understanding that what I am doing is unethical and try to avoid it.
Consuming media/entertainment is no human right and if it is too expensive/too inaccessible/whatever and you wish to be ethical, don't pirate it in the first place.
Humans have great difficulty controlling their impulses especially in connection to crimes that are undetectable and easy to perform but the honest will at least own up to what they do.
Yes, it is. But even though you didn't manage to communicate your point correctly, it still stands: the only reason streaming replaced piracy was because people could afford it and it was easier to use.
Even the ease of use has declined, and the affordability is down the toilet. And as usual, we have people at the top reaping record profits and making victims of their greed blame each other at the same time.
>Is it really stealing if they wouldn’t have ever paid for it in the first place?
>If it’s not easy to find and use on a subscription service that I already have, I’m just not gonna try to search for it or pay for it.
That is easy to say when you just take it for free regardless. I strongly suspect people saying that would actually pay for a decent amount of it if piracy wasn't an option.
And the number of pirate I know would plop down 15 bucks for a movies (since CAMs and TSs are terrible copies) but won't pay for a movie on VOD (since they can pirate it in clear 4k) confirms my suspicions.
Yes, obviously. I really don’t see how one could possibly sympathize with this argument. Say I go to a bakery and I only “sort of” want a cookie. I’m not hungry enough to pay for it, so I just take it, and claim “I’m not actually stealing because I wasn’t going to pay for it anyway“.
You could claim it’s different with digital goods, but it’s not. Money still went into making that good (whether that’s software or a movie or even just a picture) and you’re still getting the benefits of owning that good without paying for it. Put another way, how does not caring enough about something entitle you to ownership?
So you are absolutely stealing whether you would “have paid for it“ or not.
What if most of my enjoyment of a cookie is looking at all of the pretty designs and crafty details on the cookies, and I don’t actually care that much to eat them. Is it stealing to go into a bakery and look at the cookies, then leave? I’ve gotten all of my enjoyment for free, after all!
You might be satisfied, but you only consumed a component of the work that the creator explicitly offers for free while refraining from consuming the component that requires payment. Just like browsing an art gallery: I'm satisfied seeing a painting in the gallery location, which is a freebie, and I don't care about also seeing it in the location of my choice, which has a price tag.
This reminds me of the squatter issue and the claim that it's not wrong if the owner wasn't using it. This is only true if you have a vastly different idea of property (real and intellectual) rights that much of the country/economy is founded upon.
This literally how the financial system is set up. Consumers provide money to a workforce that provides good and services that society enjoys. In turn, that workforce consumes goods and services providing income to a different workforce.
When you steal cool stuff, cool stuff stops getting made.
Whatever chief executive that decided to create their own streaming platform for a price that's too high is stealing your money. They are the ones that made it more convenient to pirate.
Make "cool things" overly priced, especially in a fucked up inflationary market manipulated by corruption and influence, where for the last several years everything costs more which is tangible and required to survive, (food, shelter, transport, employment)
Then the ephemeral luxuries, such as entertainment, begin to take a more relaxed position on our moral compass when one compares paying for entertainment services, vs, using funds for food.
To you. The service I provide to society is entertainment. Perhaps in the dystopian sand planet of the future that won't hold much value but right now on Today's earth, entertainment is a service that is valued by society.
In the future, I suspect we'll still have storytellers for the same reason we do today. To Inspire, educate, and entertain. I cannot envision society with zero entertainment.
I went looking for a la carte options for all the Star Treks. They really want almost $50 per season for DS9, a show that premiered almost 30 years ago. There's just no reasonable way to justify that but greed. I can't believe people like Stunting actually see much of that ~$50, and I think they're here fighting over people not giving them their scraps when there's no guarantee people are making a choice between paying $50, paying $10 to Paramount, or downloading a copy ("pirating" IP is a made up concept no one uses outside the world of RIAA, MPAA, and similar).
I love 90's star trek. I haven't watched anything past Enterprise and the Chris Pine movies because I don't have a CBS account. I could easily afford it, but none of the new content seems worth it to me, in terms of my time let alone my money. I'm not a pirate, and yet I feel like Stunting is upset with folk like me.
I have a very hard time taking Seth MacFarlane seriously as a non-voice actor. I keep hearing all the characters he voices, and that clashes with the attempts to play serious characters.
A significant proportion of 90s trek fans who have seen the new series would agree its not worth it.
I pirate-streamed the first season of discovery due to its lack of availability on other platforms. Felt like a 10 hour movie about a dystopian future with weak shallow characters rather than an episodic serial about the great people solving problems in a better society than we have today. Tried a few episodes of Picard and just didn't get into it. Neither were entertaining enough for my full attention, ended up watching on second monitor while playing a game.
I would feel like a schmuck if I paid CBS to subsidize this content: wasn't what I want more of in the world. There is no "voting with your dollar" in modern content delivery when you can't get a refund when a show ends up being a waste of time.
How you worded that sounds reminiscent of mafia "protection". I assume that wasn't your intention, but that's how it read for me.
It seems to me like piracy of shows is tangential to whatever the root of the issue is. Folk are becoming disenchanted with streaming services. Whether they pirate or just stop watching instead, the services have clearly changed in ways that make them less valuable to consumers. Unless somebody figures that out, it's not going to improve. I doubt DRM is the answer, although a combination of higher prices and consolidated content might be. Folk would pay more for Netflix if it was still a "monopoly" with all the popular shows.
I think accusing folk of stealing money out of your pocket for downloading a video is quite hyperbolic and isn't winning you any arguments. You're trying to make it a moral issue, but it isn't really a moral issue, and nobody outside of the industry cares. You could claim that it's disrespectful to you as a participating member of society, and it probably is, but yelling at people to respect you more doesn't work, and has the opposite effect.
I think your point, though, is that it's a tragedy of the commons situation. The industry works as a whole because people are willing to pay a premium in exchange for entertainment. If people don't pay, then there's no incentive to produce. If folk value new entertainment, they need to support the industry that produces it.
If thieves are offended at having their behavior identified as stealing, they could stop stealing.
The problem, as I see it, is entertainment is being seen as a "good" and not a "service." Physical dvds and vhs has conditioned us to think that it's a physical good, so there is no harm in replicating the digital product. In fact that emotional state derived from viewing the entertainment is the service that is being paid for.
Taking the value of receiving that entertainment without providing the cash value of that service is stealing.
While I agree with your sentiment, you can also make a better product. This is an easy fix with some of the smartest minds in the industry. People showed Netflix early on they were willing to PAY for ease of use.
100 percent agree. Voting with dollars is the fastest and best way to make better products.
The big studios know how many people are watching their stuff via theft. They are going to keep producting low end crap with studio friendly sponsorships, because piracy will have taught them that is a better business model.
Pay of the things you want to see and you'll see more of them.
> Pay of the things you want to see and you'll see more of them.
Where can I pay for a streaming service with no geo-blocking, no DRM quality limitations on Linux, offline viewing and all the shows/movies I want to watch? Seems the only way to vote with my wallet is to refuse to pay, which morally isn't really different to piracy.
Refusing to pay and refusing to consume is different morally from stealing.
I don't know where to find all those requirements. Perhaps they exist. If they are that big of a dealbreaker for you, don't consume the value provided by entertainment services.
When you decide that the exact moral high point is to consume the goods and services while still maintaining integrity about not providing the cash value asked of those things, you are justifying being a thief.
For one it's piracy, not theft. They are both legally and morally distinct. You're being deprived of a potential future profit rather than having a direct loss.
> When you decide that the exact moral high point is to consume the goods and services while still maintaining integrity about not providing the cash value asked of those things, you are justifying being a [pirate].
Correct, it is justifying being a pirate. The justification being exactly what you suggested: voting with my wallet. I want to watch a certain piece of entertainment, but it's producer has made it unreasonably unobtainable thus pirating it signals that it is both desired and that a sale was lost.
I think you're being angry about the wrong thing here. Consumers don't want to pirate; they are pushed to piracy by shit service. That's not a fault of the consumers, that's a fault of the seller. If you actually want to reduce piracy you should be advocating for better service rather than telling people they're stealing from you.
Yet. I do have minor creative input depending on the production. When an audience shows they enjoy something I am able to argue more fiercly to include a similar thing into the next one.
:) I know you're not yelling, more figure of speech. (did not mean to offend) But this is on HN where we allow pay-wall bypassing for all articles (which is also theft) so you wont get sympathy there. Like I said I agree with your sentiment, its just not the way to fix it. And I dont think it's a difficult problem to solve, especially from an extremely profitable and rich company.
Well then let us pay for shit in a convenient way. Like OP said, if there’s something like steam or Spotify then I’d gladly pay for it. I still rent movies weekly on AppleTV because it’s a convenient experience. Geo gating, shitty compression and making us choose between n apps is not the way.
Also, we’re going to end up with shitty generated content regardless of my $10. If you’re making strong statements like OP is stealing from _you_, then go advocate for change. You’re in the industry.
Every single show or movie I wanted to watch over the last year has been an exclusive to some streaming service or other.
Amazon used to let me buy anything, and the Prime was there to entice me so I don't have to pay for individual catalog items, but that's not the case anymore.
Now I have a choice between:
1. paying for a crapton of streaming services so I can watch a handful of things I'd like
2. pirating
3. not watching most of the stuff I think I would like to watch
I'm not picking option 1 for what I hope are obvious reasons. I really don't want to pick option 2 because I empathize with people like you, who would be affected by that. For the moment, I'm picking option 3.
However, if you really want to "educate consumers", you might be more successful if you change your tone so it doesn't sound like aggressive victim-blaming. People like you and people like me are being screwed by a third group.
I appreciate you not pirating. You are only being screwed if you think you are entitled to the entertainment. You are not.
You have an option to pay for the service as offered, steal it, or move on.
Entertainment abounds in our society and is readily available at little to no cost all around you via local theater, open mic nights, libraries, etc.
The connivence of having that entertainment pumped directly on demand to your home is a luxury that has a certain value to it.
Currently that luxury is available via paying for the service or stealing it. The theft is relatively low risk, even by hilariously paying for a services that help hide your theft. That's the number one reason these services are being stolen.
Whether people are "entitled" to enrich their lives with art/entertainment or not is an interesting question in this context.
We're living in a society where a huge number of people has experienced a good solution to the demand for that enrichment, and that good solution has been deliberately sabotaged so that a small, rich group of people could become even richer at the expense of everyone else.
Just like you argue people are not entitled to art and entertainment, so I would argue that those who deliberately restrict access to it in completely unnecessary ways are not entitled to the additional profits they squeeze out that way.
As for the comments about luxury of pumping the entertainment to our homes instead of enjoying it at little to no cost at the venues you mention, I'm reminded of Arthur Dent being told that the plans to demolish his house were on display all the time. Suffice it to say that your vision of how the majority of people live is very distorted.
"I'd like to steal things because I morally disagree with the rules to society that I am currently opting to live in. I could choose to move, address the change at a governmental level, or simply find my entertainment elsewhere but no. It is everyone else who is the problem. Therefore I take great offense to being labeled as a thief."
The first sentence is spot on. The rest is the distortion I was talking about. You demand empathy, but are unwilling to be empathetic yourself. In the end, you're the one opting out of discourse here, not the rest of us.
It doesn't ruffle my feathers at all. I've done my share of piracy when I lived in countries where that was the only viable way to get my hands on the information, art, or entertainment that was otherwise unavailable to the vast majority of people living there. And no, I'm not ashamed of it, and it doesn't offend me if you decide to label me a thief or worse.
What I was trying to do is have a conversation with you about why people "steal" or whatever the correct word for this thing is. Just like there are reasons people steal in real life, there are reasons for this behavior, too. You can try to understand it, or you can keep throwing everyone in the same bin, slap a label on that bin, and feel morally superior.
One of those two will lead to improvement for everyone. One of those two is easy. I'll leave it an exercise for you to figure out which one is which.
If you're rich and disconnected enough to just drop everything and move over entertainment choices, I'm not sure you're in touch enough to have any kind of perspective on the people you're trying to convince.
There is an inherent classism to "piracy is stealing" arguments: by gating access to culture, it effectively says "poor people shouldn't be able to participate in culture, because they don't have enough money"
Hard lesson learned from years of trying to "educate" people on things that matter to me: you're going about it all wrong. I've seen your posts all through this thread. All you've done is beat people over the head with your perspective and berate them for not agreeing with you.
I don't think this is what you mean to do. I think you really care about this! Lay down your sword and listen. Hear what people are saying in response. Let their responses inform and refine your advocacy. You can't stroll in broadcasting an ideological, self-interested position and expect people to react well.
> Well then let us pay for shit in a convenient way.
While this may be a way explain why the masses pirate, it's a poor justification for an individual to do it. If you don't find the available payment mechanisms convenient enough, then walk away and support a product that does have mechanism convenient to you. (For the same reason that you wouldn't steal from a store that only takes Amex.)
Walking away vs pirating has exactly the same outcomes for the distributor. The only person affected in a nonzero way from the transaction is me, positively. Stealing from a store that only takes American Express would result in the store having less inventory; what I have gained, they have lost. The same is not true of copyright infringement. The only time copyright infringement converts into actual quantifiable loss for the seller is if I turn around and sell pirated copies at a lower price, which is why that's the degree of infringement that turns it from civil to criminal.
I don't pirate (out of principle), but I also basically don't stream because I'm a Linux user and your streaming platforms suck big fat ones.
If you want people to "stop stealing our shit", you should really address how crappy the distribution system is.
- Can't get it in __ country
- Can only watch it on __ closed-source devices
- Can't watch it offline
- A is only available on platform 1, B is only on platform 2, and I don't want either crappy platform
Anyway, as I said, I don't really watch movies much anymore, and haven't seen any of the ones on your IMDB page, I mostly play games or read books these days, but I'd probably watch more if the distribution system was better.
This is a valid complaint. I would tell you that on the many streaming services available for free like youtube, vimeo, etc. There is probably a small filmmaker who is making the type of show you enjoy. Finding them, providing value by first clicks and shares and eventually with income as they grow will encourage more filmmakers to make things you like.
> Every time one a show is pirated, there is less incentive to spend more money on an entertainment spectacle.
I'm fine with this. Some of the best movies ever were made in the 70s, after the Hollywood studio system collapsed and a ton of money was sucked out of the industry.
Impressive list of movies! And a very good point you make.
NB: Your website loads pretty slow for me (I'm in Europe), and the video on the homepage is unavailable, it says.
Yeah - I have to admit, I was impressed with your list of credits...
I live under a rock and haven't seen many of them, but I really enjoyed 'The Accountant' and I'm a sucker for anything Spiderman/Marvel
The Acct was heavily provided by now Action Director Sam Hargrave, and you should look through his credits. He's most well known for Extraction on Netflix, but he's been doing it for a while. If you liked Acct, you'll probably like the other stuff he did before he was well known outside of our circle.
We're on HN, so you probably know your way around websites. But let me know if I can help you with an 'internet friendly' website (quick loading, no third party code, stats without tracking, clear layout, beautiful styles, easy editing, and more).
I think your real anger should be directed at the studios that aren't fairly structuring your benefits and compensation, as well as the union that is not getting these for you.
My real and passionate anger is directed constructively at those entities. Today I am providing a face and a name to people who think "piracy isn't stealing"
Uh huh, I'll stop stealing from you when you stop stealing from me.
Advertizements everywhere stealing my attention, public space, and landscape beauty. Stealth taxes on empty hard drives and other storage media. Hardware-destroying rootkits and other malware (lost a DVD drive to DRM, will you reimburse me?). Draconian control mechanisms and lobbying stealing my control of the devices I own. Mountains upon mountains of disposable plastic promotional crap stealing my planet and ecosystem.
I'm not stealing from you. I'm extracting some small reparation for the many toxic behaviors your industry engages in. When you start offering an honest product I'll start honest buying. And I do - I pay more combined to good people producing good content via Patreon than a monthly Netflix subscription.
You, personally, are stealing from my income. All those issues you raise are valid and important issues to address. Stealing because those things make you angry makes you part of the problem.
The world is full of problems. We are looking at actual massive potentially civilization or species ending issues in the large and dealing with trying to make a living, manage illness, deal with death, parenting in the small.
If you live in a big city you probably walk by people in the street slowly dying from a drawn out form of suicide because you can't possible change all their lives on your way to the grocery store or coffee shop and people at large are choosing to do the same with your income stream. They opt to deal with problems more important and more personal than fixing the way in which culture is monetized so as to funnel slightly more money to rich folks who could do more for society as soylent green in hopes that a few extra bucks will stick to the hands of useful folks like yourself.
For myself I'm not angry nor do I have any intention of fixing the problem because nobody with any decision making power gives two shits what my opinion on anything is. I have monetarily in life about nothing and indeed will have nothing tomorrow and the next day. You feel like people are violating the social contract by not paying for multimedia. Part of your problem is that you even believe that we are part of the same society or share the same ethics.
We really aren't. I am not the benefactor of the current situation nor do I have any meaningful power to negotiate new ground rules or even enforce existing ones so rejection makes worlds more sense.
You say stop downloading and I hear enjoy poverty but with fewer books, music, movies, games. I wont actually be supporting the folks you mentioned to any greater degree but you will find such more ethically palatable. HALF of America is sharing 12% of the income. We don't have anything but you can stick a $200 PC and plug it into a $20 monitor and courtesy of a $10 internet essentials package download as many books music movies shows as you can possibly consume.
I don't feel like making my shitty life shittier in order for you to feel better. Artificial scarcity is a dumb way to run a society and its not my fault the people with all the money in this society have chosen it.
Film is competing against loads of free content and the industry is thrashing to avoid accepting the obvious fate: it is no longer economically rational to produce films with budgets in the hundreds of millions.
Jobs will be lost, just like happened with farriers and switchboard operators. Your income will disappear regardless: the demand for stunts is elastic and the supply is increasingly competitive. Blaming pirates is being unable to see the forest for the trees.
If the entire world of piracy tripled tomorrow, it still wouldn’t have the tiniest shred of impact on your income compared to the decisions of rapidly consolidating tech/studio execs who are tanking your industry and fighting your unions to chase pennies.
A lot of us would gladly pay the cast and crew directly to own a copy of your output that we could access on our own terms, but that isn’t a reality for most trade under capitalism. There’s a reason Googlers on HN aren’t trying to guilt trip everyone for personally stealing their income by using ad blockers. Maybe this is particularly to the entertainment industry, but most of us would shrug our shoulders at the equivalent of petty shoplifting from our employers.
I don't personally pirate much, but I take umbrage at you characterizing it in this way. You seem to think that the issues of accessing media without subjecting yourself to user-hostile behaviors are wholly orthogonal to the issue of accessing media without paying for it. They aren't.
Imagine a hypothetical universe where, in order to watch one of your movies, people had to a) pay you $1 and also b) let you punch them in the nose. Then, when people sensibly start pirating your content instead because they don't want to get punched, you loudly proclaim that they are stealing the $1 you are owed.
That's what's happening here. People want to watch your content, and are willing to pay for it. But they don't want to pay for it AND get punched in the nose. They pirate because your distributors, and by extension you yourself, have made it impossible to watch your content (and pay you!) in any other way.
I get that your natural rejoinder will be "if the content is not worth being punched in the nose, just don't watch it!" Which is fair. Debatable, but fair. Just don't come here pretending that all you have asked for is the reasonable sum of $1 when you are actually demanding that your customers subject themselves to the indignity of your fist.
When you work for the devil, don't be surprised to become collateral damage.
Thinking of all the stealing they've done from the public domain it makes my blood boil. Charging top dollar for artists work that have been dead for decades is a disgrace. How about "stealing" from the public and renting it out in perpetuity... Winnie the Pooh, anyone?
Most of the money goes to the top, and if you are going to throw around inaccurate/loaded terms like stealing, two can play at that game. 1%ers take a larger slice of the pie than street thugs but we are misdirected and situation quietly swept under the rug.
Our base pay is daily rate governed through SAG-Aftra CBA with the Producer's guild and scaled off the budget of the production. Then there are OT factors and bumps that go along with how difficult the particular work is.
I, and nobody I know, has pirated games or music since Steam blew up about 12-15 years ago and Spotify/RDIO and similar blew up about 10 years ago.
There was about a decade when Netflix went full in on online streaming and was offering a fantastic service for a reasonable price with a far superior experience to piracy. That is no longer the case, and the unbundling to now a dozen+ of subscriptions is driving pretty much all my techie friends back to movie/tv piracy. I personally don't really watch much TV and might watch one or two movies a year, so I'll just not watch anything. I've already cancelled my Netflix subscription about a year ago, and I prefer playing video games and reading books anyway.
Until your industry can offer a product experience that is superior to piracy, people are going to pirate. The games and music industries have largely solved this problem. When will yours?
No, it's not economic at all. You've repeatedly failed to grasp this in this entire comments section. It's about convenience. It is actually more convenient to pirate the handful of movies or TV shows people want to watch than to maintain a dozen subscriptions or activate just the one for the handful of shows or movies they want to watch at any given time.
Steam and Spotify have made it incredibly simple to just get what you want without having to juggle or manage any kind of bullshit.
The only thing I pirate is movies / tv shows ... and it's extremely simple: because it's not humanly possible to purchase them digitally.
Games: yes. Music: yes. Books: yes. Magazines: yes. What happened to tv and film? Where are you all?
Let's say I want to purchase The Fifth Element and throw it on my plex server so I can watch it on vacation out of the country? How can I do that? The answer is simple: you cannot. So I pirate it. And enjoy watching it. If the industry WOULD provide me with some way to purchase The Fifth Element, get a high quality mkv or mp4 or whatever download of it, I would do it in an instant.
Steam charges by the game and often times you can find whatever you want on iTunes or Amazon video if you're willing to "buy" the movie/tv season. Why do you limit yourself to content that comes to you from a subscription? I'm guessing because it's kind of expensive to buy a season of tv.
I don't, actually. I pay for a number of things that I feel deliver value. I've bought movies and TV off of amazon video/youtube. I pay for some podcasts. I buy audiobooks off of Audible and eBooks from kindle (despite these being even more expensive and more convenient to pirate than movies/TV). I've commissioned some graphic design stuff for personal use. Though I'm personally not into sports, a friend of mine is super into the NFL and buys their online package (though he still has to pirate certain local games because...not enough people showed up to the stadium that day???).
As I've said in the thread, for me the alternative to movies/TV isn't piracy, it's playing games or reading books, which I do pay for because the experiences of finding what I want, buying it, and consuming it is a superior experience to piracy. If that ever changes across the entire media landscape and games/books go the way of movies/TV that may change.
ah, sidenote! I watch NFL too. Generally local games are blacked out so you need to watch them on the local broadcast via antenna or a cable. I do find this annoying but I have an antenna pretty much for that reason.
Ugh. Never before have I seen a comment that I've agreed with so much but also wanted to yell at at the same time.
To put it really bluntly, pointing out how piracy is easier than paying again is not literally stealing money out of your pocket. The whole "lost sales" and "stolen income" thing doesn't always hold water, because you can't measure all the counterfactuals involved. A lot of pirates are either just data hoarders or collectors, and you aren't really in price competition with piracy as long as you are even slightly more convenient than it. Yes, that actually used to be the case for movies and TV shows, back when you could get access to everything you could ever want to watch just by subscribing to Netflix or maybe Hulu. Piracy was actually going away, right up until everyone pulled their content from Netflix to try and grab a larger slice of a smaller pie.
However, I don't want to actually trash your point too hard, because you did touch upon something worth talking about. I have noticed in HN and in other engineer-oriented spaces a certain contempt for the creative working class. I call it "kill and eat everyone below the talent line".
There's this weird meme that came about around the same time that the RIAA was indiscriminately suing casual pirates. Back then, some artists - usually ones at the start of their careers or doing it as a hobby - were distributing content over the Internet for free. In fact, some of them were even able to make money off of it through crowdfunding or advertisements without directly demanding payment to read, listen, or watch their work. So people made this assumption that this business model would be both sustainable long-term and scalable to large productions. Ergo, copyright is just an artifice of history, we can just abolish it, and the "real artists" will prosper while publishers and middlemen are out of a job.[0]
The problem is that "real artists" covers both the Toby Foxes of the world just as well as the Temmie Changs. Abolishing copyright beggars the songwriter in the name of the singer. A-list actors would actually survive and thrive in a crowdfunding-only market, because they have the name recognition to do so. But all the other people who support them would see their income shrink. And producers and publishers would just turn into the absolute worst kind of scummy for-sale pirates you could think of.[1]
The thing about piracy is that we as tinkerers and hobbyists assume it works exactly the same for everyone else as it does for us. I.e. me and my 10,000 friends all trade files around for free. Yes, a lot of pirates are data hoarders and collectors, but there's an entire world of bootlegs and knockoffs outside of the world of BitTorrent. For-profit piracy is far more pernicious than just the person with a Plex server, and it comes in a lot of forms you wouldn't even expect. For example, when Facebook launched their video service, there was an entire cottage industry of people reuploading YouTube videos and monetizing them on Facebook. This is the sort of thing that individual filesharers would not even recognize as piracy, but is absolutely immoral and wrong, and does pull nickels and dimes out of artists' pockets.
[0] The counterargument I'm making against copyright abolitionism does not apply to other things like shortening the length of copyright terms or adding more exceptions to it. Those at least still allow the existence of a creative working class.
[1] Fun fact: lousy speedsubbing jobs aren't just for modern anime pirates. Before we had international copyright, it was common for publishers to just take books published in other countries, translate themselves, and sell them before the original author could.
It is literally stealing money out of my pocket. Even if they don't watch it themselves, they will provide it free of charge or even for a personal fee I will never see to someone else.
The concept that Pirates wouldn't have paid for it anyway is valid. Part of my problem with piracy is that so much bullshit gets consumed that without stealing, those things would be much less part of pop culture and we'd have a lot better stuff to entertain us.
However for definition sakes. Taking a service that you wouldn't have consumed by paying and using it for free is stealing.
I'm super sympathetic that someone is not paying for you for the time you spent making the content (me, also a content creator) But, just a suggestion, you need to find a better way to put your message. As long as you call it theft / stealing you're going to get lots of push back because copying a movie is not the same as stealing/theft so instead of making your point you'll mostly get arguments about definitions.
There's two (relevant) kinds of consumers here: Those who want access and those who want ownership.
Netflix was on a path to successfully serve the first kind, the only remaining problems being region locking and an incomplete catalog. Demand for piracy went down. Then the industry got greedy, made one of those remaining problems much, much worse, and now the demand for piracy is on the rise again.
The industry spends a lot of resources making life worse for the second kind, in a misguided attempt to both satisfy them and fully prevent the possibility of piracy. Instead they fail at both. The result is an increased demand for piracy.
> You're directly responsible for sucking the quality of life away from people who make your entertainment and reducing the desire to make things you enjoy. You're going to end up with shows that are AI generated CGI sponsored by Mt. Dew and Chevy trucks.
So here's the problem: The only way I can spend money to encourage the production of content I want is to buy a terrible, abusive product I don't want. It only plays in 720p, it's only available through a shitty app, it may disappear from the platform it's on any time.
All of it is just a wrapper for content. Please sell me the content. Whatever file comes out at the end of the production process, sell it to me.
Instead I spend my money in other places. Streamers on Twitch want it. YouTubers want it. People on Patreon want it. Developers want it. Somehow they manage not to abuse the people willing to give them money.
Thanks for speaking up about this from a perspective not often seen here on HN. It's really pretty weird that someone needs to explain to so many people that media piracy affects actual working people.
Wow I thought 2022 nobody would still be so 90s in this regard.
Most of those who pirate, wouldn't pay and since the content is not going away because somebody pirates it, it can't be stealing.
And Jesus...please...it's not like you're starving out there. Start producing original stories. We don't even need all that fancy and expensive CGI crap. Just start writing properly and in a creative way. Pay THOSE people more IF they deliver (though I'm not sure anymore if you really understand what's missing here with all your sequels and remakes...). We're not the audience you should cry to, go to those managers who messed up that market so piracy is coming back again.
Direct your anger at your employer for not offering a product the market desires -- rather than at consumers who resort to piracy because the legal route is expensive, inconvenient, or nonexistent.
Disney, Paramount, CNN would eventually be held hostage to their platform by a Spotify or Steam ... The Music business and artists have been destroyed by Spotify
> It's easier just to pirate than keep up with all these streaming services.
It really isn't and it's only cheaper if you don't put much value on your time.
Radarr and Sonarr don't do anything automatically. Setting them up takes more time than they are worth. I tried installing them. Most would describe me as technically savvy, but I just gave up.
> It really isn't and it's only cheaper if you don't put much value on your time.
Very true.
In the hours it takes to download and curate these movies and shows I've made more than enough to cover a Netflix, Disney+, Prime and HBO subscriptions for that month or pay for a few VOD titles for that month.
My time is way more fucking valuable than the time required to do this well.
And if I do without content or entertainment even better. Not everything is worth watch every month.
I don't think I agree with this level of negativity around plex, radarr, and sonarr. Using a seedbox provider and all of these things are setup and don't need any additional tinkering. You are right that the indexer is probably the least friendly part, but set it up once and it keeps working for over 6 months at a time.
Plex is nice! I run a Server for Family and Friends, it works great, but I’m an IT GUY and it’s a Hobby.
For the most people it’s too much struggle to run this, especially when plex has the default settings of „transcode everything to 2mbit if the server is not at home“.
I have multiple subscriptions, but most players suck (I look at you Amazon Prime). Plex is a way better experience.
Maybe it's because I haven't done it in earnest since the days of Limewire but pirating sounds like such a fucking hassle these days. So I just don't do it not out of a strong sense of morality but because I'm lazy.
Lots of people are complaining about terrible content on Netflix. Years ago, Netflix was praised for its "long tail"--basically it could have content that appealed to people with diverse interests. But it seems like people now see the long tail as useless junk and would prefer a shorter tail with more concentrated quality.
Apple TV seems to do this well. Too many choices appears to be just as bad as no choices. I don’t go to Netflix because there’s just too much. It literally makes my anxiety rise just being in there.
Long tail works as long as the people in the tail can find the content relevant to them. If browsing and search is bad enough that it doesn't seem to be there, it might as well not be.
Their UI, or the service itself, is also flaky. It's fairly common for us to start watching a series and the next day Netflix will show us as having already watched all of the episodes, despite our changing to a complex password and also not enough hours passing for us to have watched them all. I wonder if they are juicing the numbers for some reason or if it's just an error.
I suppose it's possible that their auto-play feature is doing it. Most of our Netflix use is on a laptop so if the browser tab isn't closed maybe it keeps streaming the auto-play, although I haven't checked for that.
The long tail I want: movies/shows made in the 80s, your friends might recognize the name. The long tail netflix has: made last year in Romania, nobody has ever heard of it.
If Netflix would make it more obvious what is junk vs not I think it would be a more enjoyable experience. Right now I have to keep switching from their app to cast and IMDB/Google/Rotten Tomatoes to figure out if something just has a rough start or is just bad.
Netflix lost a lot of good long tail content when networks pulled their old content to form the foundations of their own streaming platforms. For example, The Office.
Netflix had a long tail, when it was a DVD rental service. Netflix streaming has never had a long tail and definitely don't now. They presently have less than 4000 movies, including all their 'originals' (which should probably be called 'derivatives'.) This is scarcely a long tail as far as I'm concerned. I cancelled my account years ago because there was nothing I wanted to watch. I realized I spent two or three times as much time browsing the catalogue as actually watching something, and half the time I was settling for something I'd already seen. Nothing I've seen or heard even remotely tempts me to come back.
I think Netflix can pull out of this current situation if they build a live-streaming, social media platform and start directly competing with Youtube and Twitch.
I blame Netflix for popularizing the stack of horizontal scrolling carousel of thumbnails. It is a terrible way to browse, and so many companies mindlessly copy it.
All that automatic zooming and whirring and auto-playing as my cursor moves around drives me batty! It's so distracting - it's harder to figure out what I might want to watch with all that chaos trying to grab my attention.
Can you point specifically to what you don't like about it?
Personally, my "least favorite feature" is that hovering (with mouse) over any video would auto-play. In other words, just by moving the mouse you would be under threat of accidentally distracting yourself. Maybe some people don't feel the same way, but for me, it was destabilizing to the point that I couldn't recall what it was I was searching for / interested in in the first place. I think they have "fixed" this in the past year, but there are still times when auto-play completely interrupts my thought/intentionality.
I have to change from the traditional 2 finger vertical scroll to get to the bottom of the page to a single touch pointer action to bypass the area of the screen so I can get past the area and continue to scroll to the bottom. It's horrible UI if you have a multigesture touchpad, like apple macbooks. Instead of scrolling from the top, it starts scrolling vertically (like it's supposed to) to suddenly scrolling horizontally as soon as you hit that area. Amazon prime does it too. Instead of speedily cruising around the interface, it's a nonstop battle for control to go where I intended. You end up fighting the interface, which leads to a very poor experience day after day after day. If I want to scroll horizontally, scrolling left-right should do that, not horizontal to get a vertical action.
A vertical list is a waste of horizontal space when it's a list of movie posters. They go with the carrousel for better or worse because it lets you quickly scroll through categories without scrolling through every item in a category. If you want a grid, its basically what they have.
If you just want more search options, I agree but the search layout is also already a grid.
I'm asking for a specific implemented app that feels better in practice, not just something you think might work better. There are subtle issues with getting this layout right. Its not as obvious as you say when you need to deal with crap remote dpads and no keyboards.
> A vertical list is a waste of horizontal space when it's a list of movie posters.
It doesn't need to be a list of movie posters.
> If you want a grid, its basically what they have.
It's not though, you have to scroll horizontally for each section. That's not the same as a grid.
> I'm asking for a specific implemented app that feels better in practice, not just something you think might work better.
That's tough to do if everyone is implementing it poorly. However, I would say that something like this feels better in practice (even if it's still not ideal): https://i.imgur.com/AU6Az7e.jpeg
That wastes more space than a horizontal scrollable grid that’ll go back and for with the mouse wheel. Even Netflix large rectangular preview boxes still fit more shows.
Because then you can only traverse in one dimension as opposed to two. You can currently scroll through categories quickly. In a single list you have to scroll through every title.
I didn't mean to abandon two scroll axes. Only make the vertical scrolling the primary method people use to scroll though videos. Or do people prefer to scroll through categories?
Netflix used to offer movies that were previously shown in theaters. You could get a DVD in the mail, and watch a movie you hadn't seen otherwise. When streaming became a thing years later, you could again watch a movie you hadn't seen otherwise.
We used to watch five to ten movies a month via Netflix. We haven't used it in two or three years now.
Since Netflix is sticking with the binge-watch release model they pioneered, I wish they would provide a 1 or 2 week-long "binge" one-time payment option. They could charge as much as for a month's subscription, but you wouldn't have to deal with canceling your subscription when you're done watching the 2 or 3 shows you actually signed up to watch. $20 for a limited time, no hassle binge is a pretty good deal; it's cheaper than buying a single movie on Prime Video and much cheaper than buying movie tickets for me and my partner.
It seems like that would hurt their business, not help it.
They don't want to to get in and get out. They need subscribers and the revenue flow they bring. I think they should stop the binge model for new, original content. That is, release new seasons one episode at a time rather than drop them all at once.
If you sign up and cancel right away, your subscription lasts for the rest of the month (and they charge you accordingly). It is a couple extra clicks but basically what you are asking for
Altered Carbon was an amazing ride before it hit the wall. Really a shame how it couldn’t maintain that magic for longer but happy to have enjoyed it however short lived.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 576 ms ] thread>Even when someone is the first with tech and prioritization, it does not mean they succeed in the long term after the field matures. I don't have high hopes for Slack in 5-10 years. Neither do I see Dropbox or Netflix justifying current valuations in the same time period.
Since then NFLX: -40.90%, SP500: +51.14%, DBX: -10.08%
* 2 years ago (Aug 4, 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24054157
>Almost all Netflix competitors (Disney, Amazon, HBO Max, Peacock, Apple ... ) will have other sources of revenue besides streaming so they can afford to keep loosing money to gain market share. Netflix can't cut prices too much.
Curious where on your crystal ball you see the likes of Spotify and the music (and podcast I guess) industry in 10 years.
Unfortunately it was data-driven. This meant that if a new show didn't catch on within a season or two, it was cancelled. They've killed so many great shows chasing the lowest common denominator.
The formula they settled on was: big name star in a generic designed-by-committee (or AI) show.
Shame.
There was an article in the Atlantic about how people are listening more to "old" music these days, which makes sense, but will have a big impact on the industry as well: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-...
They did and they do. They put all their money into the 1st party content. They produce huge number of bulk mediocre content and also some really good shows. I can't see how they could do anything different. It's not enough. They have no competitive edge in 1st party content creation except size. That edge is in danger.
The competition has either deeper pockets, more content, or other income sources.
I have no idea about music streaming. I assume its similar network externalities, economies of size business.
---
edit:
As an infrequent investor, the company must do better than relevant index fund (SP500, NASDAQ composite, and so on) over the next 5-10 years to make sense to me. Netflix may establish itself as a good blue-chip company, but that's not enough a reason to buy it.
That they almost always cancel after two seasons regardless of popularity or story progression. As a result, lots of people are wary of starting to watch anything new on Netflix since it's almost guaranteed to be cancelled prematurely.
No matter how good the company business and it's position in the market is (= future profits), it can be overvalued if the price is too high.
I think Dropbox seems like really nice product, but not at the valuation it had or has. It has no permanent competitive edge.
The main issue with a thesis about Slack is that for some completely unknown to me reason, nobody has even attempted to make a competitor. Discord is the closest but using both I don’t think I could use Discord for work at all. It’s just off.
What has gone wrong with our world that making a 6 billion dollar a year profit is considered a problem?
Its $6bn in profit still at a $96bn valuation. Down from $150bn. Quite high if only looking at profit. But I definitely like the revenues under the idea they can reduce overhead
I can see the business being fine, definitely watching for lower prices. netflix has always been a fun casino, super leveraged rocket.
As a consumer, the company will still provide real economic value
It is not considered a problem by anyone other than those who were invested in Netflix equity and expected it to be at a higher price.
Because it is a problem.
Firstly, it's a problem because stock prices are a measure of predicted future value. The profit today is mostly irrelevant. In order to make a profit on shares the business has to be in a position to do better in the future. If it doesn't then people won't believe it'll do better even farther in to the future, so they won't bid more for the shares than they're worth today. That means investors can't make a profit. If you bought Netflix shares in the past you'll lose money. That's a problem.
Secondly, and in my opinion more importantly, Netflix (and every other tech unicorn) use their shares as a hiring incentive. If the shares are going the wrong way then good hires will refuse offers and go elsewhere. A big chunk of renumeration in tech is predicated on people getting stock instead of cash because that's worth more to the individual and cheaper for the business. If that fails then the business has to start dipping in to that $6bn profit to replace people who leave, or to acquire businesses, or just to maintain the status quo.
It isn't hard to imagine a scenario where a $6bn profit turns into a loss within a decade or less. The driving force behind people saying Netflix has a problem is that they're predicting that the future of the company isn't good.
I mean, they might be wrong and Netflix might be fine, and ultimately even if things go badly Netflix is never going to "fail" because it'll get bought long before that happens, but if you hold Netflix stock it's entirely reasonable to be worried despite the healthy profit they make.
As far as I know, Netflix shares, much like shares in many other tech companies, do not pay any dividend. Perhaps it's time they begin.
I do not want dividends if I think the business can invest the money with a higher probability of better ROI than I can. If shareholders want dividends, they can vote for them.
A better ROI to whom—itself, or to you? Do you own Netflix stock to make money for yourself, or for Netflix to make money for itself?
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/07/ex_dividend....
With a dividend, you have to pay taxes now. Without the dividend, the stock price remains higher so you sit on higher unrealized gains. But assuming you can sell it anytime (it is liquid), the ROI is still there without the dividend.
That's not quite true. It means investors can't plan to make a profit by selling future shares based on the price growth beating inflation.
But...investors can still make a profit from dividends. There are plenty of large companies that are much less growth focused, and much more dividend focused.
Now that the US money hose decreased it's flow a little bit, the insanity of those valuations is hurting.
Sports are trickier of course.
You can easily buy and cancel what you want when you want, so that is the not cable-like development.
I do not see why people should fee they are owed all the content in the world for $x.
The important part is the creator/curator/seller of the content and the purchaser of the content are not held hostage by a monopoly/monopsony distributor.
It is not easy to see for me. If you want access to all the content all at once, then pay up.
If you want access to specific content at the specific time you want, then pay then, watch, and cancel the subscription if there was one.
This latter option was not available before, and it is now. I am loving the new system which cuts out the middleman (cable/satellite tv) that was able to jerk around both me and the content seller.
The next problem needing to be solved is reducing copyright length to 10 years or so. That is what will make the price of content go down by increasing the number of content sellers.
Or if the price is too high, I will find something better to do with my time. Same as every other entertainment option in life.
People just want to pay for what they want. What is so hard about that?
I don't want cable with 500 channels of no interest. I also don't want to deal with subscribe/cancel 20 services as shows come and go.
Just make it simple ffs.
It's $40/season, but it's available.
Media companies have been using the value of "content you want to watch" to subsidize "content you don't know you want to watch" for about a century now, the back catalogs are what will keep you paying but that only retains value so long as new content can be added to it.
Why do actors and movie studios, producers, and glorified CDNs/streaming services think they are entitled to tens of millions of dollars for producing a TV show? They create mindless entertainment for society and yet they are so highly compensated. Yeah, I don't feel like I owe them anything.
Because that is the agreement they made for selling their labor/services/content to the buyers of the labor/services/content.
> I don't feel like I owe them anything.
Correct, you do not owe them anything.
If you don't see the value in the entertainment those companies provide, you're probably not the target audience.
Once they swap into a good pirate solution, it'll be very hard to get them to swap out.
Where I live now there is an insane number of carwashes — and more being built. Apparently they're a "subscription service" like 24-hour gyms, etc...
Downloading video content for your own consumption is not technically pirating in many EU countries and it's perfectly legal (not so much uploading/hosting it). While in same EU countries would be already torrenting (distributing) it illegal, so you are safe only with DDL.
But yeah, fragmentation of market killed it for end consumer.
I find it interesting that so many people spend so much time watching tv in the first place. Growing up, I was one of those people but about a decade ago I lost interest in pretty much anything on television. There are certain shows that I will watch on occasion that get me hooked, but I usually struggle to find anything that is actually worth my time and end up just turning the tv off after surfing the streaming options for 10 minutes. It boggles my mind when I hear things like “golden age” of content. Sure there is a ton of content, but it’s all so vapid.
Vietnam is particularly amazing. Shout out to the Trent Reznor soundtrack too.
Jazz and Country Music are definitely more digestible, I finished both and was glad I did. Baseball is also actually pretty chill & enjoyable, even for someone who never had more than a passing interest in the sport.
The Wire
The Sopranos
Generation Kill
The Deuce
Treme
Show me a Hero
Luck
The Expanse
Sillicon Valley (not actually that funny but like a documentary of our field)
Mad Men
Breaking Bad
Narcos
Battlestar Galactica
And some weaker contenders: Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, Crash and Burn
Waiting on stranger things to end
I enjoyed Breaking Bad, Narcos, Battlestar, and some of the game of thrones seasons.
If you liked Narcos you might also like ZeroZeroZero. It's a miniseries on Amazon with really high production value.
As copyright is system granted by the demos I'd love to force federation by creating a 'most-favoured nation'-type deal where if you offer content to one delivery company you have to make it available to all (maybe after a 1 year exclusivity period) for the same price. Under such a regime everyone gets paid but artificial monopolies are restricted (such monopolies don't help the demos so why allow copyright to be used to create them??).
The proliferation of content provider apps is getting silly and we should mould copyright to serve the people.
24 (which perhaps opened my eyes to TV overtaking film in new ways) Lost Buffy
And then further still:
The X Files This Life (UK only?)
When you get through the part of the backlog you enjoy, you have to either wait for content you enjoy to come out (slow!) or explore less enjoyable (to you) content.
Back in high school, I felt "behind" in my cultural wisdom, so I spent an entire summer watching a huge list of TV shows and movies.
Now, shows I truly enjoy are few and far between, because I've seen so much of the good content in my favorite genres already.
I hear The Wire is/was a good show. We'll see....
I am thankful though that YouTube sucked so bad for so long because I spent a lot of time with my kids when they were young, reading to them, biking with them, taking them on road trips. Cutting the cord was the idea when my first daughter was born - to have the kids grow up without television (we would put on over-the-air PBS kid's shows when they were young but it was pretty much only hotels stays when they would see Sponge Bob or whatever, ha ha).
Since then, i've only had streaming services, and my consumption is somewhere around 3-5 45 minute episodes per week. I have watched maybe 4 normal length movies since i had kids 13 years ago, and zero "extended length" (3 hours'ish) movies.
Recently though, i find myself to be even more picky. These days i still watch 3-5 episodes per week, but my viewing is usually done late friday and saturday evening, and the rest of the week i generally prefer a good book instead.
In April alone, i've watched 5 x 45 minute episodes in total, and read 3 books of 800 pages or more, so perhaps i'm coming full circle :)
Some of it is quite watchable, but none of it is exciting or fresh. It's all some combination of stock soapy characters and themes in stock genre settings, usually with some comedy/sex/violence/horror added for stickiness.
Netflix could easily throw some money at graduate film makers and say 'Make something no one has seen before.' That might or might not help retention, but it's hard to shake the feeling Netflix are deliberately aiming for the middle of the bell curve as creative policy, and missing opportunities to lead instead of trying to play it safe.
Seems to me that's what they already have; which upon reflection, is indeed probably why they're currently having problems with subscriber retention.
If the experience browsing their catalog wasn't so awful, I'd be more inclined to try and use the service. Instead, after I've finished something good, I don't tend to come back to Netflix for awhile - it's easier to just watch stuff on Youtube because I know how to navigate it, the search works well, and the recommendations are actually decent.
I remember a couple weeks ago, Blade Runner 2049 was the first thing that popped up when I logged into Netflix. I was so happy to see it there, but when I went back the next night to watch it, it wasn't there (which is fine, the homepage isn't static). So I went to search for it, and "Blade Runner" returned nothing relevant (nor did "Blade Runner 2049"). I had to search "2049" to find it, and after the movie ended, Netflix recommended the first Blade Runner (which also didn't show up in any of my searches).
The search isn't always this bad (both Blade Runner movies show up in search the way I would expect them to now), but still...even when I know something great is on Netflix, it can be an utter pain to get to. It's like they're trying to get me to go with the mediocre recommendations instead of watching the good stuff that I know is on there.
It's so annoying that if I was the one paying for it, I'd cancel my subscription. And I remember things used to be a lot better, which just makes it all the more frustrating when looking for something good.
I'm getting the feeling that Apple TV+ is where it's at for this type of content. Severance was particularly good.
The new She-Ra on Netflix was the best thing I've watched in quite some time. It's not a kiddie show, it works for all ages, think like Pixar movies. Other great cartoons across a variety of streaming services: Steven Universe, Gravity Falls, Owl House, Star Trek Lower Decks, also the more mainstream Bob's Burgers. If you want something fresh to watch, try animation.
But once I watched a few, Netflix filled my entire recommendation catalog with almost all e.g. Turkish and Korean shows. Pretty annoying as it's like ordering an ice cream dessert, then the only thing the menu ever shows is all ice cream desserts. It makes me think part of people feeling it's all the same is that the recommendation optimization is overbearing in shoveling too much of more of the same recent history vs presenting a mix of recommendation and discovery.
something i notice myself thinking after i finish most tv shows i watch is: "that really could have been shorter". it might be some parts of an episode could have been trimmed down or in some cases even multiple episodes of a season.
i don't think this is exactly surprising either considering the rigid schedule of most tv shows to fit a story into 45 minutes slot and a set number of episodes per season
Then ... Netflix arrived. I started watching a few of the shows that people raved about from their days on network TV, and I realized that the biggest problem was ... endless stupid ads. Which Netflix did not have. I became willing to try out HBO from time to time, got in Battlestar Galactica, and of course in 2014, True Detective showed up on HBO. In 2019, I discovered Deadwood (at that point nearly a decade old), a more or less Shakespearian epic of 19th century US history. Over the past decade, I've discovered so many truly worth shows - and I haven't event started on The Wire yet!
On top of that, Netflix has given me access to several UK shows (Luther, for example, but also Grand Designs (now, thankfully, on Youtube)) that have rounded out the menu.
I understand that aesthetic choices with TV shows are very personal, but I can honestly say that I now absolutely believe that "TV" (ala the new streaming services and/or their presentation of material without ads) can be a medium for stellar story telling. I would like it if we had a few more defined "limited series" where there's a story already known, with a beginning, middle and end (True Detective and Mare of Eastttown are great examples of this (as long as they do not ruin Mare by making a sequel). And sure, there are some TV series that really would have been better as a film. Nevertheless, the ability to spend 8-16 hours with compelling characters is big positive to me.
Then The Algorithm decided to suggest Mr. Sunshine, a Korean drama. I have now watched 100+ kdramas on various services. Netflix has a particularly rich catalog.
I'm not saying you'll like kdramas but you might be surprised of what is available. It was a revelation to me that there are entire "worlds" (for lack of a better word) out there that are so interesting and rich and of which I knew virtually nothing, in this case the Korean culture and their movie/drama output.
Thank you. The only reason I break my Netflix embargo (and log into my profile on a friends account) is so I know what some viral meme is about.
Nobody[1] talks about or remembers shows from there two weeks later.
[1] this is hyperbole validated by 200,000 - 2,000,000 others seeing the light
I'm actually kinda torn about that statement. While i usually prefer shows by other studios for quality, i've watched some Netflix Originals that were rather good, and especially some "foreign language" ones that i would most likely never have watched otherwise.
Most of the Netflix Originals are not huge budget productions, but especially their foreign stuff sometimes proves that less is more. They tell interesting stories in "good enough" settings for them to be enjoyable.
Every Pixar movie is exactly the same, and they're all great. It's a good formula. My problem with movies is that they're built for two many audiences. Pick China xor America, and the will be more enjoyable to watch
With that being said, I might still buy some $NFLX. I thought that they were dead once before with the whole Qwikster thing, but investing in the company then would have been a very smart move.
Sorry, what does this mean?
Netflix did poach proven talent, but even then, it was people like Shonda Rimes and the guys who botched Game of Thrones.
Netflix has spent more on original content than Amazon did to buy MGM, though they apparently have spent less than Disney did on Fox.
Netflix is old enough now that a lot of subscribers now have children that are in college or have graduated. My daughter is in college, and she definitely uses my netflix credentials. At what point does Netflix feel it is required for her to have her own subscription?
It really feels like this is already a "family plan", given the number of concurrent streams permitted. I don't think that there's much fruit to be gathered by shaking this tree.
Househould is not an easy thing to quantify.
But it does say that people can use their Netflix account while travelling, as long as they can verify that the device is “authorized”. So the bottom line seems to be that you’re a member of my household if I say you are, no matter where you are.
So in one sense it's a one-time drop, not a trend.
Does Netflix have more competition than before? sure. Is it growing as fast as before? no, especially as they reach saturation in some markets. Is this the "end of netflix"? um... no
But it is a trend, they said to expect a 2 million subscriber loss in the following quarter.
> Two hundred thousand subscribers did not suddenly quit their subscriptions and start using their friends’ passwords.
That implies the author thought this was a natural subscription drop and not a result of losing 700k subscribers in Russia. I'm not sure I have any confidence in their predictions about the future, since they're so clueless about what's happening today.
If wall street expected 2.5 million (most likely based on past growth and stock valuation) and Netflix reports a growth of 500k (if you keep the Russians in mind), it's a really really terrible result. It's 5 times below expectations.
For me it looks like this could just be the beginning and they're losing a lot more in the following years.
The Netflix bump wasn't caused by covid directly, but by the lock downs.
People are so used to having smoke blown up their asses that when someone tells them honestly about slightly negative news, they get confused.
I expect the entire streaming business to follow the cable TV model: 1 - start with a paid, high quality and/or increased supply without ads; 2 - bleed ads into some of the streams because the first stage was unsustainable; 3 - race to the bottom with bundles, because the individual streams are too expensive. Expect Comcast to be the big winner here through a roll up and cross-sale of carriage to their cable channels into streaming bundles (because aggregated bundle fees will provide at least some revenue without the cost of running your own streaming platform.
Youtube ought to win this battle but have to date demonstrated little competence. Comcast is the superpredator.
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-faang
See “The origins of FAANG”. At some point, presumably because it is a catchy sounding acronym, people started using FAANG to mean large tech companies, or large tech companies with very high payrates.
GAAF is certainly better than the reverse, but it lacks the bite of FAANG.
They have a couple of things that are very good (including Russian Doll, which is better than the article gives it credit for). But it's the ratio the that's troubling: the value of [good shows] / [shows produced] is absurdly much lower for Netflix than for Apple TV+, HBO Max or Disney+. All their spending seems to result in is endless mediocre True Crime documentaries that try recapture the magic of the first season of Making a Murderer, and the occasional golden nugget you binge in a weekend.
The article makes a big deal of the binging thing, and I agree it's a terrible model compared to weekly releases. But I feel like Netflix's real problem is that they just don't make enough good stuff.
Bingo - that's the real reason for the long term (or secular ) decline we're seeing. With 0% interest rates, it didn't matter what the payoff time horizon for Netflix was. With 4% interest rates, longer horizons are gone. Couple that with Netflix being a discretionary expense, and we see the compounding effects of inflation.
Two things will happen - we'll see the real value of Netflix's library content. Do people really value that at $12 per month.
And we'll also likely see an appreciation in the value of the library content from legacy studios like Paramount/NBCU etc. - who have complained for the longest time that this is undervalued relative to Netflix.
I think bumping up past $15 has hurt them a lot too. $20 a month for a streaming service is outrageous.
Exactly. If I pick a random show on any of those, it's probably at least ok (depending on the kinds of shows I like). Pick a random Netflix original and it's probably terrible. And, the ones you do find that are ok end up canceled after a single season.
There's just so much cheap, quickly produced, B-level content that it dilutes the brand.
Personally speaking, I'd be happy if they simply completed the stuff they do make -instead of cancelling it prematurely.
I'll watch some garbage on streaming. But I'll make subscription choices based on flagship shows since everyone has garbage filler content.
Their first few originals were great, or if not great, then at least interesting.
Now, they produce so much, but most of it is just… feeling like made by AI
Like they see what is popular elsewhere and trying to produce exactly the same thing. But as with GPT generated text, after a while, you can sense something is off.
IMHO, Netflix is the classic .com company where they think they can do everything better than the incumbents. That's true when there is a paradigm technology shift (internet ordering and then streaming). But it's almost never true when you're talking about core competencies.
I wonder if they'd be better off making better quality content, but less of it.
My suggestions:
- invest in licensing deals for existing content. More premium content, less generic filler content. As much as I appreciate Steven Segal, his later work is not great; to put it mildly. And it seems they unloaded a lot of that recently (at least on the German Netflix). That, and generic Korean action movies/series seems to be a thing lately. What's up with that? There are back catalogs of great content dating back decades around the world that are hardly being monetized at all currently. Probably there's an audience for that. It shouldn't be that hard to get good content. And it should be a lot cheaper than producing your own new content.
- invest in more & better in house content, that's a strategy that has worked in the past. No reason why that would no longer work. But make sure the quality is high. Especially a lot of the Netflix movies have been expensive flops.
- invest in re-acquiring lost customers (discounts, outreach, etc.). Easy because they left because they didn't like the content or the price. So, fix that and they might come back. You know what they liked and thus which of those issues it is. Customer acquisition cost for 200K users is not going to be nothing. But that's 30M/year in revenue or so.
- crack down on obvious password sharing abuse but give people a good way out in terms of cost and make sure they don't have a hard time with perfectly valid uses by families. Converting families to individual subscriptions is just not going to happen. So, avoid losing them because things get too expensive. Kids watching now on a family account may become life time users once they move out. A genius move would be to have 1 password per profile and only allow 1 device to be watching with a profile at the time. That makes it quite obvious how many people are using the account. Some people have many kids. Perfectly legit to have 6 or so profiles in some larger families. But you can track where people watch (same ip address?) and take action when the abuse is obvious. Mobile uses are even easier: simply verify the phone number. Etc.
- squeeze the competition hard by lowering prices; make sure value for money is bets with Netflix. Growth will come at the cost of the competition. Right now Netflix is losing this game.
- change the leadership, Netflix is not performing well and the current issues have been widely predicted by outsiders; which means they are not listening either. That's a double fail. And a triple fail if you consider that Netflix takes pride in being a data driven company. The content issues should be fairly obvious from the data they are gathering. The effect of the pricing changes, should not have come as a surprise either. It's not data driven if the algorithm tells you only what you want to hear. And I suspect the algorithms were fine and management just simply ignored the output of that.
That doesn't sound like very good deal to me, I'd prefer 12 months for the price of 10 or pay as you go for minutes/hours of actually watched content. Though Netflix has so much trash it's not really worth paying for. Had it for many months and hardly watched anything there.
Offering of Netflix is extremely poor if you crop out all the duplicate shows popping on your feed.
Ive decided to drop Netflix simply because:
- new interesting shows are popping up so rarely, there is no point to pay the monthly sub
- there is too much political agenda sold even in children shows (Kids really dont need this kind of crap)
Yes sadly this has become much more prominent in the last couple of years. It has blatant political propaganda inserted into all of their original content that is clearly forced and hurts the quality of the programming.
One example that probably flirts the line with hurting children was Netflix's Cuties.
"Netflix is also the streaming service behind "Cuties," a wildly controversial French film that tells the coming-of-age story of an 11-year-old girl as she discovers her maturing self, all while looking for acceptance in her religious family and group of young dancers she hopes to befriend"
If you want examples of pardon the term but I guess "woke" programming, this list is pretty extensive on Netflix. You can do a quick google search yourself to see lots of examples here.
My personal take (as someone who is left leaning) is when these messages are bombarded into programming it often feels forced.. even perhaps propagandized. This level of inauthenticity hurts the overall artistic and entertainment value of the programming (just my two cents).
The content itself is political. That's increasingly problematic.
[1]https://edition.cnn.com/style/amp/abercrombie-fitch-exclusio...
There's also a difference between reaching out to disadvantaged groups -vs- targeting elites.
As an absurd example, compare a fancy restaurant to a soup kitchen. The fancy restaurant is targeting the elite, and excluding the poor. The soup kitchen is targeting the poor, and it'd be ridiculous for Elon Musk to demand food from them - but they'd probably still serve him if he showed up.
Analogously, it feels like you're trying to use the existence of soup kitchens to defend restaurants.
(To be clear, I'm not saying restaurants are evil, or that clothing brands are an act of charity. Just trying to illustrate why people are going to have different intuitions on Abercrombie -vs- clothes for black people)
What you're really saying is that it's not your personal politics, and is therefore bad.
The opposite is true. If a writer feels or is outwardly coerced that he/she must include certain characters, topics, behaviors.... this comes off an not genuine, propagandized, or even corporate commercially. My personal opinion is much of the Netflix original content falls into this later category.
> this comes off an not genuine
I get the feeling you'd say this even about authentically written content, so it's a moot point. You've drawn a line in the sand that characters and content that don't look like you are bad, and that it's origins must be from seedy beginnings rather than decades of hard work by dismissed groups of people that are now finally getting a chance to write stories about people like them.
Not necessarily. If Netflix had 10,000 shows and some of them were stories about Christian values, some were about Hindu values, and some were about Muslim values, nobody reasonable would have a problem with it. However, if all 10,000 shows made a forced effort to somehow include Christian values, or always had to shoehorn at least one character openly wearing a cross and saying a prayer into every show, it would rub on people the wrong way. That's how it is with Netflix original programming. You can break out your "woke" bingo card for any Netflix original show, no matter what it is purportedly about, and score bingo every time. Not every show has to include a facet of the same political agenda. Even if you happen to agree with that agenda, there is something to be said about diversity (true diversity - diversity of thought, not the fake kind peddling on Netflix).
There is no dispute that Netflix has woke programming, or heck many other kinds of programming and no sensible person would claim otherwise. What is being asked is which programs for children/kids are you arguing is politically motivated?
The only examples anyone has been able to produce are children shows that have homosexual characters in them. I am going to assume the best of intentions here, but it's very hard not to find it appalling that many people would think that a show that has some gay characters in it is making a political statement or has a political agenda.
The fact that the inclusion of LGBT and/or PoC in a children's program is at all controversial tells me we still have a problem that needs to be addressed. If you really don't like the idea of seeing a black or gay person on TV then you are the problem.
The sad thing is that a big majority of people complaining are people who are past child-rearing age and thus not even the target market for any of these shows.
What bugs people, me included, is very different. It is the forced inclusion of diversity seemingly everywhere. It is the constant subtle messages of "white man evil" in shows where it doesn't add to the plot. It is stuff like the Oscars being explicit about requiring minority leads. It is the one sided diversity where blacks, browns and Muslims are protected but it is perfectly acceptable to make racist jokes about white people or say Christians. It is the subtle shaming of anything conservative.
FYI I am mixed race, liberal, and not Christian. I am also of child rearing age and don't like seeing my kids being indoctrinated at so many levels.
It's nice that you're a mixed race liberal Christian who has kids, but please answer the question. It really is coming across as a bunch of people who want way too much to be angry about something without knowing precisely what it is they're angry about.
Also, apparently it's annoying to "force" representation in shows but it's perfectly fine to have shows whose literal only purpose is to drive demand for various dolls and toys. As if anyone would have created Bob the Builder or whatever without a plan for selling it in Walmart.
Telling girls they can be stronger than men is a lie that can lead to terrible outcomes.
I personally am not sure how important I think the truth is as a moral good. I feel that as time has gone on, I've seen the dissolution on a societal level, and I now value truth more than I once did.
2. indirect harm - the girls told falsehoods begin to distrust institutions who hold themselves out to be unconditional truthsayers, thereby dissolving social bonds and encouraging unneeded division and rancor
First of all, anyone can get into a fight and lose. And more often than not, technique is what helps people prevail in fights, not strength. Any decent martial arts training will teach you that.
If you’re talking about professional boxing, sure, it would be stupid to claim that a well-trained woman could, on average, beat an equally-well-trained man in a boxing match.
But I don’t think that’s the claim here. The claim is that women can be as strong as men, and that isn’t totally false. Maybe not the strongest men, but certainly a lot of them, and especially if they train well.
As for the claim of indirect harm, I think people in general need to be better-educated to engage in critical thinking. Treating words from authority figures with a grain of salt is at the heart of post-secondary education, and yet, it leads to better civil discourse, not worse.
Also, there seems to be a thin veil of sexism in your claim, as though women aren’t capable of thinking for themselves and therefore can’t ascertain the nuance in a general statement like “women can be stronger than men.” It’s meant to be a motivational statement, not a rigorous scientific claim.
Find me a credible source that claims this. After all, we certainly don't group wrestlers into weight categories because of differences in technique?
>The claim is that women can be as strong as men, and that isn’t totally false. Maybe not the strongest men, but certainly a lot of them, and especially if they train well.
That claim is simply false. The most extreme female athletes come close to achieving parity with an average untrained man. There are almost none of these - certainly not "a lot of them". The vast majority of women are much weaker than even the weakest men.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17186303/ "Less expected was the gender related distribution of hand-grip strength: 90% of females produced less force than 95% of males. Though female athletes were significantly stronger (444 N) than their untrained female counterparts, this value corresponded to only the 25th percentile of the male subjects."
"The results of female national elite athletes even indicate that the strength level attainable by extremely high training will rarely surpass the 50th percentile of untrained or not specifically trained men."
>Also, there seems to be a thin veil of sexism in your claim,
I appreciate your candor.
> as though women aren’t capable of thinking for themselves
The problem is that everyone (men and women) thinks of themselves as the special snowflake who can "beat the odds". I think that the message to women "You are very likely weaker than the weakest men you know" avoids much more harm (case 1 direct harm) than the "good" generated by: "it's extremely unlikely but with good genetics and training it's a possibility that some extreme athlete women could become nearly as strong as a below-average man".
https://www.romper.com/life/lgbtq-shows-kids-family
Not that it's bad for those people to believe in those things or anything. But I don't want my kids exposed and normalized to these things until they're an appropriate age to decide on their own.
“Same sex couples exist” is not a political view. It is a reality of fact that children of all ages already know. My kid’s best friend since age 5 has two moms. Trust me: she has no concept of what politics are but knows what two loving parents are.
If “gays exist” is the example of politics jammed into TV, that’s a really really weak example.
Now, when She-Ra starts having extended monologues about taxation policy or the virtues of direct democracy vs. representative government, I’ll support ya!
(I'm not joking, that's canon.)
Seriously?
"Culture war" issues tend to be a bit more subtle, and can usually be ignored as valid plot devices. There's not even anything explicitly wrong with adding your own cultural values to a movie, but rather it can get pretty overbearing, even if you tend to agree.
A good way to look out for these themes is to look at the characters and ask some basic questions:
- Which characters in the show are in charge? What groups (racial, sexual, etc) are they from?
- Which characters in the show are competent? What groups are they from?
- Which characters in the show are the villains? What groups are they from?
- Which characters in the show are the victims? What groups are they from?
- Which characters have "good" traits such as humility, kindness, etc?
- Which characters are shown to be bigots?
- etc.
This can get a bit more complex, too. The solutions to problems, or explanations for the ills of the world might also follow culture war lines. Who are the bad guys? Are they from a corporation? From the government? From a certain gender or ethnic group? etc.
A great example of this might be the Mulan remake vs. the original. In the remake, much of the movie is occupied with showing how Mulan is better than everyone, and then quickly cutting to show face-shots of men who are either severely intimated, cowed, afraid, or impressed. I'm not suggesting there is anything wrong with this. Rather I'm just making the point that this was added to the movie for political and cultural reasons. The original cartoon didn't really have much comeuppance in this way, because it was written during a different time.
Again, I don't think there's anything wrong with people putting their political views into shows -- really, that's inevitable at some level. But, there's also a certain level where it becomes too over the top, too sanctimonious, too pervasive, and you just want to get away from it all.
* A social worker investigates the boys' home life and tells Mr. Drummond that she believes black children belong in black households.
* Mr. Drummond scolds Arnold for secretly recording other people's conversations. Arnold disobeys him and records Kimberly's boyfriend Roger making racist comments about Willis to his sister.
* Arnold's poor dental checkup has Drummond suspecting that the easy availability of junk food from vending machines at school is to blame. But when Drummond begins a campaign to replace the hot dogs, cookies, potato chips and soft drinks with more healthy foods, Arnold's friends try to convince him to get his father to reconsider.
* Arnold's joy of being transferred to an all-white school (and riding a bus to get there) is shaken to its very core when a racist busing opponent calls the Drummond household warning the pro-busing family patriarch not to send his black children to the new school, or else.
* When it is learned that Drummond's upcoming construction project may be located on top of an ancient Indian burial ground, he faces protest from a Native American who threatens to go on a hunger strike if the land is built on. Arnold and Willis follow suit by going on a hunger strike of their own.
--
And of course, we mustn't forget "All in the Family" from the 1970s; pretty much every episode was about politics in some way.
That said, there's plenty of room to make fun of white male Christians, just like there's plenty of room to make fun of everyone else. It's not like there's a shortage of hypocrisy and foibles out there.
Why is it only political when another group is creating the content?
This is dishonest. Minorities were also portrayed positively in legacy media, and villains were also frequently portrayed by white males.
>Why is it only political when another group is creating the content
In the past studios were creating content relevant to a predominantly (90%+) white audience. They were creating content which was largely in line with their target demographic culture.
This recent media instead is creating content to disrupt what it's owners and managers see as a "racist" culture. That's what makes it political. It's less about money and more about deliberately changing culture in a hypocritical manner - fighting alleged racism with explicit racism. Breakfast at tiffanies was not about punching down on asians, but black feminist vikings is about sending a politicized message.
You seem pretty sure about that for a person who wasn’t involved in its production. Even assuming, arguendo, that it wasn’t, would you contend that it would be appropriate to have such a character in a modern movie? Have you surveyed Asian people about how they feel about the Fu Manchu character?
Sure, maybe a century ago in the 1920s but it's been several decades since international revenues eclipsed domestic.
> That's what makes it political.
Other people having their voices heard is what makes it political? Or that you don't like what those voices have to say?
Well, it isn't. As a straight white man myself, I don't feel like I'm particularly suffering from discrimination. Am I picked first for everything now, like maybe before I would have? Maybe not. Does it adversely impact my life? Not really.
It's OK to let others to have the first sip from the fountain once in awhile, and you can help lift up historically-persecuted people without it necessarily being a loss for you. Attitude goes a long way in helping yourself be at peace with it.
If you're a straight white man and you're feeling seriously oppressed by D&I, I'd like to hear from you personally and understand your situation better.
Anyway, this is pretty far afield from the discussion, which is really about specifically how media is harming people and children in particular.
If you want to know why D&I is an issue, it's because it is re-entrenching all of the stereotypes by hamhandedly trying to give everyone different handicaps, like life can be simplified to a game of golf. The reality, though, is that it doesn't matter what handicap I'm given, due to my poor golf game I'm never going to play against Tiger Woods.
The only thing the handicaps change is what we're measuring, and at some point people decide not to play the game, or lobby to change the rules. Look at the resurgence of the far right: it is D&I which gave them the resentment in people's souls to which they could place their hooks.
Because it's racist and sexist? Because it reduces people to their skin color and gender? Because it implicitly reinforces the notion that minorities are "different" and forces us to nonsensically pretend that differences can only be positive in cooperative environments? Because it suggests that minorities need special advantages to level the playing field? Because top to bottom it is not a cohesive, consistent, or rational policy and implies that all inequities are exclusively the result of discrimination on behalf of white males who have been made into a target, are having their voices silenced, their job opportunities removed, and their livelihoods threatened for self advocating?
On one hand your ideology implies that all of this is deserved because of the past and necessary for an equitable future, but then at the same time you blatantly deny that any of it's happening and shame anyone who speaks up against this discrimination by calling them bigoted. It's insanity.
What is "forcing" you to do this? The D&I training I've been taking has been about finding positivity in differences to our mutual advantage, but never does it say that all aspects of it are 100% positive. People are always going to find areas of disagreement. Yet we find ourselves working together, and so we must find ways to collaborate as a team despite those differences, even to the point of respecting them.
> Because it suggests that minorities need special advantages to level the playing field?
The evidence on this is pretty clear, because several minorities do suffer from historical poverty (in money, in education, and quality of life) that has been very difficult to overcome. A lot of damage was done prior to the Civil Rights Act through mechanisms specifically intended to keep Black people down, and we haven't recovered from that yet. We're getting better, but I don't think we can just put our heads in the sand and conclude that the Civil Rights Act was the end of our journey to remedy the terrible legacy of slavery and racism.
> all inequities are exclusively the result of discrimination on behalf of white males who have been made into a target, are having their voices silenced, their job opportunities removed
You cannot be serious about the silence of white voices in the media. Maybe some individuals are being silenced (see below), but the sentiments certainly are not. For every 1 person who may have been silenced, it's easy to find thousands who haven't, whose opinions track roughly identically. And those people who have been "silenced" seem to have no trouble getting their voices heard through other avenues. Alex Jones still has plenty of mouthpieces, as does Donald Trump. (Both also happen to own several of those mouthpieces...)
And it is especially ironic when a person claims they are being silenced... on Twitter, and then when it is republished through various blogspam ad nauseam.
> ...their livelihoods threatened for self advocating?
I think it depends on the nature of the advocacy in question. If you're saying, "I want the opportunity to learn, to work hard, and be successful," I would be very surprised if people were to threaten your livelihood over that. On the other hand, if your advocacy consists of lies, exaggerations, and hysterics, then people might not want to associate with you.
I don't accuse anyone of being a bigot because they have genuine and good-faith concerns about whether we are remedying social inequity the wrong way. It's when they flat-out lie, deny the past, make racist remarks themselves, or make themselves out to be the victim without evidence that they deserve that moniker.
Genuinely curious here - is there some difference between the dominance of one group in the 50s vs 80s vs today? Or do you feel that TV has always been dominated by political themes?
I think what you have these days is a splintering of the mainstream, and the rise of extremist viewpoints. Both of these, in my opinion are due to social media.
In the 80s, (and before) there was a true mainstream culture. For certain, people fell outside of that culture, and if you did fall outside of the mainstream I believe the consequences were harsher than they would be nowadays. But, broadly speaking, that mainstream culture encompassed more Americans than the mainstream culture of today. In modern times, there is no real majority mainstream culture, and because of this centralized media is reflective of a smaller and smaller portion of the country. In other words, there are simply going to be a larger number of people who might not feel represented by views and positions they watch in TV or hear on the news. And to be clear, I'm not talking about "racial representation here." I explicitly do not mean that "if I don't see a person of my race or gender in a show, I don't feel represented." I mean instead that the social and political values of a given show today reflect the views of a smaller percentage of Americans than the political and social values of a show in the 50s or 80s.
I'm not even arguing that this is a bad thing in the objective sense: simply that the political views of the current "mainstream" feel narrow and extremist to me, to the extent that I just don't want to watch a lot of popular shows.
This is what pushing me over the edge. I have both Netflix and Amazon prime subscriptions. I have thought several times to drop one. The only reason I still have Netflix is because my wife and kids watch their shows. But I have had a hard time finding good shows because everything is political, and I hate when the trailer deceives me and they just inject pure political propaganda in the middle of the show.
Suddenly I found myself reading about Synology NAS and how to set up Plex on it. I am very close to buy a Synology NAS, and to boot I can get host my own VPN server, seems like a good idea.
Hell, Netflix even has barbie cartoons, which leftists don't exactly view highly.
Thus it tends to be very likely that the person complaining about "politics" is simply masking a disgust of others' identities, but doesn't want to get into specifics because it would be a bad look. Therefore the question asking for specifics is interpreted as a way to pick a fight, because they know what might ensue if they actually got into specifics.
Consider two shows that I watched in the same Week, Wheel of Time and Arcane. Both shows have a very clearly modern perspective, and are very much in line with what we might call 'woke' culture.
Arcane did this in a brilliant way, a great love story between female leads of the show. Genuinely showing lower class struggle, corruption and so on. Both the villains and the heroes (and in between) have a wide range perspectives, capabilities and identities. Great show, well executed.
Wheel of Time had a writer who made it a clear mission statement to transform the source material into a woke version of itself, going so far as to say 'this is how it would have been written today'. The show also has a female lead in a lesbian relationship, but one that feels forced and has little emotional core. Unlike Arcane there is a clear trend where females were powered up to a sometimes a hilarious degree, all antagonists were stereotypical boring men and all the main leading male characters were basically boring did basically nothing and their many story somehow relates to their relationship with a powerful women.
If 'Wheel of Time' was just another show, it would just be a badly written show. However that it is adoption of well known source material shows the writers bias and political message quite clearly.
Almost nobody is against LGBT characters or show that have woke politics in them. Its when it is badly done that it is annoying.
The same in the past would apply to war propaganda movies. If its a very well done and executed it can be great content. But most that produced with that goal in mind is just lame.
To suggest that the majority of people who criticizes shows for 'wokeism' are just LGBT haters is absurd. Its equally wrong as to suggest that all people who object to war propaganda movies are pacifists.
The reality is that these studies want shows with these kinds of messaging in them and that a great deal of content ponders to that political outlook. Just as in the past content providers have pondered to politics as well. It does not mean you disagree with the political outlook, it just means I don't need it to be shoved into my face at every opportunity by lazy writers.
It is possible for inclusivity to be executed well, and it is equally possible for it to be executed poorly. I'm not sure we should throw out the baby with the bathwater, though.
I’m not sure why you would think this. There is a huge segment of society that is very much against everything that could possibly be considered “woke”. They use the term “woke” as an insult and as something that is obviously bad on its face and by definition. They have a huge amount of political power, and may soon have an iron grip on political power in the US. I grew up among these people and was one of them for a long time. They believe:
* Gay relationships are an abomination, and any media that indicates otherwise is offensive politics and should be banned from schools.
* Women have specific child rearing and housekeeping roles ordained by God, and any media that indicates otherwise is offensive politics
* Christianity (or their brand of it) is meant to be respected at all times, and should be a core value of government
* Racism has been over since [slavery ended|civil rights era] and it’s high time for those communities to get over it and stop bothering those poor brave police officers and smashing those storefront windows all the time. Any form of education on the topic should be banned from schools.
It has been my experience that the people I grew up with who I know believe all the above are constantly wrapping their views in generic complaints about “woke-ism”. It is been my experience with people online that if you dive deeper into specifics or look at comment history of posters who actively and constantly decry “woke politics”, you often eventually get rants about white genocide or some other conspiracies that tend to ship in the same container. I think it’s always important to talk specifics, because I guarantee you that when e.g. my dad tells you that a show’s “woke-ism” is ruining it (and he definitely will tell you that), it’s because he finds gay behavior to be deeply disgusting and immoral.
That being said, thank you for some of those specifics. I’d really like to be shown otherwise, even if it’s one person at a time.
So your WoT example intrigues me. That’s the only show I’ve seen among those, but I do want to see Arcane (it’s on my list). I still don’t see how the “woke” part does the ruining, and maybe it comes down to whether you ascribe the boringness of the relationships or the Aes Sedai partners to be inherently caused by the fact that the roles are non-traditional in terms of genders. Where you see forced woke-ism causing boringness, I’d probably see as just plain old boring (which, eh, it’s entertaining enough for me, but not the best; it’s been such a long time since I read those books and I’m not sure I’d be as into the original source material nowadays anyway). The fact that the roles are non-traditional is at the very least novel when compared to the massive amount of history and media that has and continues to be the exact opposite. I have probably sat through over 100 full shows and movies where all of the women were defined solely by their relationship with powerful men. One more “boring” show that happens to be the opposite is not something I’d take to the internets to specifically decry, and if I did, I wouldn’t blame the boringness on the fact that this time the powerful important people were women.
> The same in the past would apply to war propaganda movies. If its a very well done and executed it can be great content. But most that produced with that goal in mind is just lame.
Agreed. But this applies to every single kind of message or moral of the story that the writer is attempting to convey. However, all I hear about here on the internet these days and from this forum is that woke-ism specifically is a poison pill. For me, I’m all for seeing LGBT representation and awareness of the experience of minorities, etc. There is a moral aspect of that that I appreciate. I also appreciate good writing, pacing, storyline, cinematography, etc. I don’t think the former inherently ...
I agree. That was badly phrased. I was more talking about my experience in talking with people in my country and social circle.
But even then, shows like Arcane have very, very few people riled up about 'wokism' and whatever. I have not heard a single reviewer or commentator say anything negative about the lesbian relationship or the fact that the most powerful political operators are black women.
> you often eventually get rants about white genocide or some other conspiracies
That's like because people who have far more normal and common views don't engage in these discussion. I tend to stay out of them as well, but the economic angle of Netflix interested me and I got baited into responding to a comment.
:)
> I still don’t see how the “woke” part does the ruining
Just to be clear, I think the show is terrible in a whole number of ways. What we in general call "wokism" would not be in my top complaints about the show. Its something that I consider annoying not some great sin or something. But I do think that general approach did impact the overall approach they took to writing the show and it made the end product much worse.
> I have probably sat through over 100 full shows and movies where all of the women were defined solely by their relationship with powerful men. One more “boring” show that happens to be the opposite is not something I’d take to the internets to specifically decry, and if I did, I wouldn’t blame the boringness on the fact that this time the powerful important people were women.
As I said, nobody would decry such a show if it was not based on popular source material. And I am certainty not defending other bad media that have bad writing and those things have of course been criticized rightly. But the existent of the opposite doesn't mean we should stop criticizing it.
The reason I use it as an example is because it is source material that already has powerful amazing woman of different types in it. But the writers of the show felt the need to take this up to an almost absurd degree and did the opposite with the male characters.
Let me give you an example of what I am talking about, I think you interpreted my comment very narrowly. I don't care that men have non traditional roles or are defined by their relationship to a powerful woman. Such characters are often part of stories and that is fine. I am more talking about turning characters who were more then that into that.
There are many examples we could talk about. To be clear, non of those individually are all that relevant or worth complaining about. Its only in aggregate when it gets worthy of critic.
Agelmar Jagad in the books is highly respected competent leader and general, living in a culture with very high respect for woman. His sister is competent highly respected noble woman is a trusted adviser and the second most powerful person in the city. Jagad will be a off and on relevant character for the rest of the books. Sound reasonable?
Agelmar Jagad in the show is portrayed as stereotype alpha male general with no brain. They forced a sub-plot into the show where his sister literally has to wear the ancient armor of the house (that the show made up) to lead a group of woman to fix what the men are to dumb to do. Ah and the sister who was non-magical in the book of course had to be elevated from just politically powerful to a super-powerful magic user as well. She is of course vital in winning the battle at the end, Jagad will of course be killed instantly like a total bitch, certainty nobody will miss this toxic male and he will likely not be mentioned again.
So the writers felt the need to totally rewrite that part of the source material. Why? These were pretty minor characters and the show runners already excused many of their changes on only being granted 8 episodes. Yet we had to spen...
If every show I watched had ham-fisted dialogue about how great water sanitation is, how we should all happily pay more taxes to support it, how flushing chemicals down the toilet is evil, etc, I'd turn the channel off.
Even if you agree with the message, being preached to can be off-putting. If you disagree with the message and people like you are framed as cartoonish villains, it's a different matter entirely.
Calmly thinking through ones prejudices, even if only to defend them, is an easy way to erase them.
Another example of a series that, instead of focusing on its central theme, ends up injecting politically-motivated content is the series "High Score". Listen, I understand that a small portion of early video game enthusiasts care about those things, but for a series that has a purpose to tell the relevant stories about creation and development of video games in the 80s and 90s, you just can't help but to think that they felt that they needed to inject some LGBT content in it such as in episode 3 on the story about the 1st LGBT RPG game GayBlade. They end up leaving more relevant content on the table to shoehorn these themes into the series. Not everything needs to be "gay", or having a "gay angle".
What do you mean by "political agenda"? Like open advocacy for certain policy position or political parties? Or just stuff like "gay people exist and should be treated with respect"?
Also, when I was a kid I would listen to conservative talk radio all the time. It's the only thing my dad would listen to while driving. And I don't think it was corrupting or traumatizing or anything.
Everything you experienced in your life can and does corrupt you.
Also, if you look at the content tropes constantly used, and especially used in much of the netflix library:
---
- Lots of satan/evil
- The constant CIA/NSA/FBI/Cop/Assassin Badass Porn, with the invariable singular hacker support guy on the squad that can get into any system and has a 3D blueprint with wireframe models of every building
- The hero cop constantly going against the bureaucratic system that holding back his personal justice
If you cant see the constant hero worship of rogue cops/cia agent/killer/evil etc in literally 90% of hollywood content puts a subconscious desire in the impressionable young minds of males to acquiesce to a violent society where they can see themselves as the fictitious bad-ass action person.
Etc...
The entire hollywood movie-narrative is an incestuous cess-pool-adrenochrome--eating-gay-frog-orgy. (Tongue in cheek alex jones reference, relax)
So you agree then that hetero relationships in children's media is also a political agenda?
It is a fact that gay marriage is an experiment, never before tried in human history. We do not know how successful it will be in raising children to be healthy, productive human beings -- which is the chief social purpose of marriage.
Likewise the whole sexual revolution and the normalization of sex outside marriage is an experiment.
We do know that "hetero" relationships, and married ones in particular, can succeed enormously at producing children and raising them successfully. Perhaps these various new arrangements will succeed just as well, and I expect enormous political pressure on evidence and analysis to support just that conclusion, but we will see.
Until time has told, the presumption that homosexual relationships are the same as heterosexual is a matter of conjecture and, well, politics.
This seems extremely ahistorical. I'm pretty sure humans were having sex exclusively outside of marriage for most of the history of Homo Sapiens as a species. Marriage, and especially exclusively-monogamous marriage, is a relatively recent invention.
> We do not know how successful it will be in raising children to be healthy, productive human beings -- which is the chief social purpose of marriage.
We kind-of know though[1]:
> To date, the consensus in the social science literature is clear: in the United States, children living with two same-sex parents fare, as well as children residing with two different-sex parents. Numerous credible and methodologically sound social science studies, including many drawing on nationally representative data, form the basis of this consensus. These studies reveal that children raised in same-sex parent families fare just, as well as children raised in different-sex parent families across a wide spectrum of child well-being measures: academic performance, cognitive development, social development, psychological health, early sexual activity, and substance abuse.
Families with same-sex parents are not a new thing in 2022, there's been plenty of time to draw conclusions.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4091994/
Marriage might be "a relatively recent invention", but it was so successful and adaptive that we really don't have much (any?) record of any other arrangement of human sexual relations.
The decline in same-sex marriage, and same-sex relationships in general can be predominantly attributed to the changing attitudes about sex that came about with the rising influence of Christianity. Christianity did not just ban same-sex relationships, it advocated for sexual abstinence in general, forbidding any form of sex outside of marriage and even within marriage promoting sex as strictly for the purpose procreation going so far as to forbid the use of contraceptives, oral/anal sex and even masturbation. There are numerous reasons for why this change in attitude gained popularity from economic reasons to major shifts in demographics due to the outbreak of numerous wars in the 3rd century resulting in, among other things, growing discrepancies between the number of men and women.
It would take on the order of a thousand years before attitudes on sex became more liberal, with the Anglican church among the first to formally permit the use of contraceptives, and Protestant movements recognizing sexual acts between husband and wife as serving a "unitive" purpose rather than strictly procreation.
The point is to say that homosexuality was a casualty of very strict views on sexual relationships in general that came about with the rise of Christianity, but prior to that most societies didn't care to think much of it one way or another. Some people like vanilla, some people like chocolate; why would the people who like vanilla care too much about the people who enjoy chocolate?
Ok, name two.
> The decline in same-sex marriage, and same-sex relationships in general can be predominantly attributed to the changing attitudes about sex that came about with the rising influence of Christianity
Name a same-sex marriage in pre-Christian Greece or Rome.
The Greeks had no problem with homosexuality, Plato is full of jokes about it. And it wasn't that big a deal among the Romans, Julius Caesar's own legions would sign songs about his escapades. But I don't know of any evidence that it was ever the basis of a household. None of the great Greek dramaturges bothered to write a play noticing it.
> There are numerous reasons for why this change in attitude gained popularity from economic reasons to major shifts in demographics due to the outbreak of numerous wars in the 3rd century resulting in, among other things, growing discrepancies between the number of men and women.
I don't know where you're getting this stuff, I know a fair amount of history and I'm aware of nothing so remarkable as a shift in gender balance in the 3rd century.
> homosexuality was a casualty of very strict views on sexual relationships in general that came about with the rise of Christianity
I don't think Christianity/Christians have ever cared that much about it, really. They/it think it wrong and immoral, sure, but it isn't something that has ever attracted an enormous amount of attention or effort. It wasn't important enough to get much attention from Chaucer, Dante, Bocaccio, Shakespeare -- none of whom were shy about the range of human experience.
I know there are historians of gay sexuality, of which I am ignorant, but as a layman familiar with some of the core texts, my impression is that the overall view was "eh, whatever".
This seems rather disingenuous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_same-sex_unions
Pieces like this are the telephone game played by ideologues. Get a couple of articles published, never mind the sourcing or review, cite them as "scholarly" and voila! evidence of . . . whatever the hell it is you want evidence of.
If gay marriage were a thing in ancient Rome, or Greece, we'd know this. There would be a list of examples as long as your arm. We wouldn't have to look to a couple of obscure journal articles to establish it. And btw? Nero isn't exactly a role model of proper behavior in any one's eyes.
No one but a partisan would regard this as "evidence". Please stop with such nonsense.
> Pieces like this are the telephone game played by ideologues. Get a couple of articles published, never mind the sourcing or review, cite them as "scholarly" and voila! evidence of . . . whatever the hell it is you want evidence of.
Then why are you asking for people to cite evidence which you are recognizing wouldn't have had the literary capacity to exist? You're asking for everyone to prove something when little remains of written record, which for all intents and purposes, largely seemed like a rather irrelevant thing to highlight, as you acknowledged in your sister comment:
> The Greeks had no problem with homosexuality, Plato is full of jokes about it. And it wasn't that big a deal among the Romans, Julius Caesar's own legions would sign songs about his escapades. But I don't know of any evidence that it was ever the basis of a household. None of the great Greek dramaturges bothered to write a play noticing it.
Maybe another way of framing this: There are 170,000 same-sex married couples in the US in 2013[0] out of 59.2 million total marriages[1]. Assuming this is an extremely rough approximation of the ratio of homosexual to heterosexual relationships throughout history (which is definitely influenced by a lot of factors), can you provide us with proof for 350 Roman or Greek marriages that qualify with your record integrity?
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/24/how-many-sa... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183663/number-of-married...
Was it because of deviations ? Who knows. They also had alot of issues going on in the meantime. But you are free to have own opinion based on histories available. I for sure have my own.
Also about Ancient Grece. „Meet my Spartans”.. Either way if the show plot has nothing more to offer, its just boring.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ifyoulikeblank/comments/rdpmp9/tv_i...
And the TV shows were awful. Nothing I’ve never heard of. I couldn’t even find Seinfeld reruns or something normal. And after watching a random selection of them I am so glad we never wasted our money on the service. My wife picked a show (neither of us ever heard of) apparently about a narcissist woman who moves to Paris for work and it was just a low budget list of every “arrogant American visits France” trope and stereotype ever invented.
The experience was very much like visiting my devout Christian friend who has a huge bookshelf full of religious movies I’ve never heard of, and nothing “mainstream popular”. Like when you turn on Netflix you enter an alternate universe where nobody’s ever heard of The Wrath of Khan, The Godfather or Pulp Fiction.
Guess it depends on what you mean by "recently" and maybe it depends on region as well, but Seinfeld is on Netflix!
I've been using their service since 00s when they were shipping DVDs. I barely recognize the same company even though they are wildly successful.
1. Scrolling into something that suits my interests 2. Navigating straight to something I want
If I'm in mode 1, then the feed works pretty well. If I'm in mode 2, then I can search straight away for the thing I'm looking for (and usually that search starts at the Google layer so I can be sure I'm going into the correct app in the first place!)
"They keep the search and browse capability so crappy in order to mask the true size of the content library"
dvd.com
[0] https://dvd.netflix.com/
So they are in a desperate situation to try and make you watch anything at all.
I just want to read what the movie/show is about without it starting to play some distraction, or worse, revealing trailer/intro.
When I'm done I want to easily find relevant movies and shows on my own, not get some random suggestion on auto-play shoved in my face which I have 3 seconds to get rid of.
Since then they've lost a lot of content and produced a lot of terrible stuff, so slim chance I'll sign up again anytime soon.
And actually trying to browse the catalog is painful.
I like some of their content but I really hate the Netflix apps. (Not to mention weird subtitle issues and play position sync issues).
The one thing I will say though is I cannot remember the last time I saw a single bit of buffering. Everything starts playing immediately, every time. The actual reliability of the streaming itself is superb.
It was beautiful:
- There were no video previews.
- All selection was text-based only.
- There was no algorithmic feed: only lists based on category / genre / etc.
If Netflix offered this, I might actually pay for it. For now, I'm just using a relative's login, and I won't be paying if they boot us off.
Less fancy ML nonsense, more working hard to gather high quality simple metrics.
I can't help but feel they're just trying to tick a marketing checkbox as I watch it.
I have no problem with well written normal characters, either straight or LGBTQ+. Nor a bunch of LGBTQ+ characters dialed to 11 if that's a plot point.
Of course it gets lots of complaints. But the amount of fantastic content it has consistently recommended for me, including even pretty small channels, is incredible.
A few points though:
1. I find YouTube to be good for general educational content. I don’t know if it’s as good for specific niches of entertainment.
2. It’s not just plug and play. You need to actively tell YouTube what you like and dislike, remove trash recommendations, and remove terrible videos from your watch history.
Do this, and you will be rewarded with a YouTube homepage full of hours upon hours of absolute gold. When I don’t know what to do, I open YouTube and just let it run. It’s awesome and life changing.
You need to hit “don’t recommend this” for a while on creepy videos and it’ll get the hint pretty quickly.
The sorts should be partitioned. For a given category, that list they show you? Movies you have seen and rated down should be the very, very last on the list. Then movies you seen and rated up would be just before that. Then movies you haven't seen, but are older. Up front should be movies you haven't seen but are new to Netflix.
A movie should appear in no more than three categories, because they like to pack these with spam. I marked horror as my #1 category, why do I have to scroll through a ton of stuff like "Strong Female-Led Dramas" to get to it?
I'll watch a tutorial video then suddenly that's the _only_ thing my feed recommends to me. None of my subscriptions. None of my established preference. Just dozens of videos on a topic that I likely don't actually care that much about.
Facebook was also way more enjoyable to use when your home page was just a chronological list of all your friends wall posts.
I forgot where I got the original list of links
Yeah, you can't rest your mouse anywhere, all the things pop up and autoplay even without clicking. Same thing happens on Twitter, everything reacts to clicks. If 95% of the screen space is listening for clicks and mouse-over's then you have to be really careful not to misclick on something. It's even worse if you like to run everything through TTS - just try to double-click select something without triggering the click event listeners.
I stopped using Netflix a long time ago, when the "algorithm" started ramming content through my throat;
I couldn't disable automatically playing previews on the home screen, it automatically started skipping over intro's and outro's, automatically playing the next show, etc. etc.
Everything just screams "thou shall consume more".
- You get the benefit of high quality (true 4k, not stream compressed "4k") and no buffering.
- Plex, Radarr, Sonarr automatically downloads and categorizes your content for you, you can just sit back and enjoy your content.
- You can use whatever media player you want without having to go through a browser and its DRM. I use mpv and filters like Anime4k to automatically upscale my content, something that I cannot do via a browser or otherwise without the physical file on my hard drive.- You're not geo-locked to content, just because you're not in the target country doesn't mean you wouldn't want to watch it.
- Oh, and you can share with as many of your friends as you want without a restrictive password sharing penalty like Netflix seems to want to start enforcing.
Now, what would be a good model to stop such piracy? Something like Steam or Spotify but for movies and shows:
Perhaps a paid Plex server where I get all content from every distributor for a flat fee, and the service provider can then pay out to each distributor their portion of my subscription based on number of views. I retain access to the physical files without DRM so that I can do with them what I want, such as applying mpv filters.
Hell, it's probably in the best interest of all distributors to band together because clearly everyone having their own subscription service is a race to the bottom. See Netflix here struggling to make original content because major distributors like Disney and Paramount have already left. See CNN+ that shut down one month after starting. Due to the tragedy of the commons, where each distributor thinks they can make more money via starting their own service, this hypothetical new service would have to be some sort of joint venture between them all so that no one is incentivized to start their own.
What I’ve noticed: a Netflix 1080p is very much worse looking than the 1080p I get off Plex.
Also, buy an nvidia shield tv pro. It plays everything directly with no transcode, and handles all subtitles effortlessly without triggering a transcode.
I tried roku, amazon cube, apple tv, everything - the shield is the best still despite it's age. It's flawless.
I still have Netflix and Prime Video (because of AMZ Prime). I have thought about dropping Netflix more than a few times after the price hike.
qBittorrent is an open source alternative that also has my favorite feature, downloading a file in sequential order so as to stream it immediately rather than waiting until it all finishes downloading.
I've thought about using them for non-shady data storage and transfer given the price and performance. Nothing sensitive which wasn't encrypted, obviously.
It’s not my crowd but it’s interesting…
Netflix presumably hopes to achieve the same thing: Letting kids share their parents' accounts before they leave home, but not after.
Edit: Call it digital trespass then. I don't really care what you call it. There are obviously fixed costs to creating content. Just because there aren't incremental costs incurred from piracy, doesn't mean there isn't harm. Lost revenue is harm.
The amount of oil is small enough that it would have absolutely no measurable effect whatsoever on Puget Sound.
Would you say that it is therefore OK for me to dump it in the ditch?
I'd say no - because it's decreasing the intrinsic value of a shared resource (whether or not it can be measured). Downloading a movie, on the other hand - doesn't decrease the intrinsic value of the media being copied.
A ride requires a vehicle, a driver, fuel, etc. You can’t freely copy a vehicle, a person’s time, or the fuel required to power the vehicle.
A theater requires electricity, seating, space for seating, an audio and video system, etc. These are also things that you can’t freely copy.
Not everyone is a A-List celeb or director.
The legal term you're looking for is probably "theft of services", e.g. https://definitions.uslegal.com/t/theft-of-services/).
And, to the people trying to play semantic games with "steal" and "theft", theft of services does have laws defining it as a criminal offense, e.g. https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_164.125 .
1: to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice
Yes, piracy is stealing according to the dictionary, especially if done habitually. That the owner is left with a copy of the work is immaterial to the act of theft.
Take verb
1: remove (someone or something) from a particular place.
Piracy doesn't remove something from a particular place, so it is not taking, so it is not stealing. You know, "according to the dictionary"
(My point here is to show that quoting dictionary definitions to resolve technicalities is a worthless argument. I don't actually care whether or not piracy is classified as theft)
It would be taking and theft if you deprived the owner of their content while copying it for yourself. Like stealing money with wire transfers.
This isn't just semantics, it's important to not conflate theft and piracy. They're almost completely different, except in both cases the offender obtains something they didn't originally possess.
"You wouldn't steal a car" is mafiaa newspeak intended to maintain control of rents.
I recently went over my media collection and did some conservative guesstimation of my spending over the last 20 years. I've paid over 6 figures to consume various sorts of media.
I have absolutely zero moral or ethical qualms with downloading and/or pirating content I've already paid for. I don't give a flying fuck if the copyright holder doesn't like the means by which I get the content. The studios and copyright lobby and mafiaa are not good faith operators.
Piracy is not theft. Sometimes it's ethical and justified.
I WANT to pay. I want to give a streaming service money to curate, deliver, and maintain a library of high quality content. The industry doesn't want that to be possible, because it interferes with the bad-faith rentseeking games played with royalties and residuals. I'm done playing pretend, and will happily Pirate even new content I haven't paid for.
I will pay when there's the opportunity for good faith commerce. I'll buy discs and files directly where possible.
Taking a good or service that you don't own is stealing. That's piracy. That's theft.
You will argue that this may deprive the copyright holder of some rent if the media is for sale, but that sounds qualitatively different than taking or stealing.
• Someone says they do not like cats and have no interest in having one as a pet. A cute stray kitten shows up on their doorstep, they take pity and feed it. They fall in love with it and keep it. They might say that the kitten "stole" their heart.
• An actor playing a minor role in a play gives a performance that outshines the performance of the stars. Many would say that the actor "stole" the show.
• An employee of a rival company poses as a janitor to gain access to your lab and takes a photo of a whiteboard containing the formula for a chemical that is a trade secret in your manufacturing process. It would be common to say that the rival company "stole" your secret formula.
• When crackers gain access to a company's list of customer email addresses, passwords, or credit card numbers, it is commonly said that the data was "stolen".
• Alice is Bob's fiancé. Mallory woos Alice without Bob's knowledge. Alice elopes with Mallory. Most would find it acceptable if Bob said that Mallory "stole" his fiancé.
• A team that has been behind since the start of the game but wins on a last second improbable play is often said to have "stolen" the game.
> the actor "stole" the show
> A team has... "stolen" the game
These examples are all obviously metaphorical and irrelevant, unless you want to talk about metaphorically stealing from people, which I don't understand to be the point of this thread.
> Mallory "stole" his fiancé
Bob has been deprived of his fiancé.
> the rival company "stole" your secret formula
> crackers gain access... the data was "stolen"
These are the only two relevant examples, and they're sufficiently debatable that it's unlikely you'd be able to prosecute either for theft or larceny. In the case of the crackers breaching an email list, many laws are broken, but I doubt "theft," or anything like it, would be one of them. In the case of the corporate espionage, if this is theft, it's theft of intellectual property. And that makes it the most direct comparison to content piracy, but it doesn't advance the conversation because it's the same debate.
A great moral crime, no doubt...
The problem is once you expand the definition of 'steal' well beyond what is legally considered theft, the immorality of "stealing" is no longer a given. People who accusatorily use the word in reference to copyright violation are leaning on the 'illegal acts of theft' meaning of the term to add apparent moral weight to their argument. But when challenged on that, they retreat into these more diverse meanings of the word and pretend they never meant it that specific way. It's a Motte-and-Bailey tactic.
Piracy is not stealing.
Maybe I didn't "steal", but I contributed to criminal activity.
Sure, copyright laws can seem absurd, but if you disagree with the laws, consider the ethics.
How would you feel if you have a business, I steal from you, and then go give random people your content? This especially when it starts to drive into your revenues.
"Only digital copy" is disingenuous. If the cost of producing the digital copy is say $40mm (an amount article says some Netflix movies can cost).
They're making copies from a digital copy, and their business is to sell access to them. If their model is "we'll replicate this copy 500 million times, and charge users $0.10 a view", every 10 copies viewed elsewhere is $1 lost.
Should a service raise the fee to say $0.12 to better cover costs?
Ultimately, theft is often subsidised by paying customers.
I'm also guilty of this. I download torrents where:
* I can't buy something because it's not available due to region restrictions, and I can't buy it via VPN (looking at Disney+)
* I can't buy it anywhere altogether.
Where I used to download maybe 50 torrents a year a decade ago, I probably do it <5 times a year now. It's stealing, or consuming stolen content.
The pricing strategies of big corp is a separate accessibility issue.
The end result of my pirating is a media service that is easier to use, is higher quality and requires less effort than a streaming service (though initial costs and setup time were high).
I also pay for 3 streaming services that go unused, and this covers about half or maybe 3/4 of what I watch.
Streaming is in a dangerous place when piracy works better, looks better and is more convenient.
I would consider that if I am selling a product that has absolutely no scarcity, such as digital files, I have a few approaches.
- Introduce artificial scarcity with something like DRM
- Create a business model focused on the service of providing the product, rather than the product itself
I would not try to accuse my potential consumers of a crime in order to fix the flaws in my business model.
problem is that greedy media moguls want to get paid for a piece of content forever, instead of just raising enough money to cover the labor and advertising, give stakeholders some profit, and move on, so they cannot exist this way.
That is their problem though :)
> So they should invest in locking down their content, not improve their experience.
Good luck with that.
Ignoring it sends a different message.
That reminds me, what do you think about geoblocking these services? If one has a choice: buy the content, buy VPN and break the copyright by watching it in unsupported country or just break the copyright by pirating it outright, what should one do?
If you want to watch that show but you don't want to pay for subscription, let DIsney know. If the market demanded it by way of retracting their subscription dollars, they would notice.
But if you steal it because that's just how you want to do things, you're a thief.
>If the market demanded it by way of retracting their subscription dollars, they would notice.
One could say that pirating is the act of retracting the subscription dollars, but I digress. I can't retract my subscription dollars, because they won't even offer me the subscription (which I mentioned in my comment).
Could you as an knowledgeable insider actually answer the part of my previous comment you conveniently skipped, that part about what is person supposed to do if the Disney doesn't even offer the service in their country? And don't say "let Disney know", something actionable please.
>But if you steal it because that's just how you want to do things, you're a thief.
1) it's not theft, it's digital "piracy"
2) And I didn't say I pirate their stuff, the show was just an example. But I still feel discriminated on account of country I am from by them refusing to sell me their subscription service. And everyone knows that racism is worse than stealing.
If you're interested in the content, but dislike the delivery mechanism, ignoring the content entirely sends the signal: "I am not interested in the content you're producing". The companies will attempt to address that signal by changing the content, to try and find content that attracts larger audiences.
Piracy sends a different signal: "I am interested in the content, but not the price or the delivery mechanism". The companies will attempt to address that signal differently. Maybe they lower the price. Maybe the ease the friction on the delivery mechanism. Maybe the increase the friction on the delivery mechanism (by adding DRM). But the signal from piracy sends a more clear message to the content companies that ignoring the content.
Netflix did it (once upon a time. no, not the movie). I don't really care for reasons why this is hard for the industry or really anything else. As long as it doesn't economically make sense for me to give money to someone (doesn't reduce my own effort/time expenditure or provide something I can't have otherwise), I will not give money to someone. Morals be damned.
Plus, this rental will not be available in all locales, for every video, etc
It won’t work?
Which means that dinosaur-industry would finally have to arrive in the 21st century. People are very much willing to pay for things they enjoy - see Twitch Subscribers and Patreons for examples. Paying for shitty catalogues where the parts that you actually enjoy are distributed across multiple services just isn't cutting it.
Good riddance to all those copyright-attorneys and other parasites leeching off of the entertainment industry.
Let's talk $1 to watch something once. That's reasonable and a price I'd pay. $4-5 to watch something in my own home is not.
Better to buy a physical media.
We live in a world where 90% of the entire catalog of movies ever filmed are available to be instantly delivered to your home in 1080p for less than the cost of a Big Mac. In the 90s it cost about the same not even taking into account inflation or gas to drive to blockbuster and rent a VHS. We are living in the future!
So if I watch it at home and remove all those costs from the cinema, surely $1 is going to be closer to what the film studio would have got if I went to the cinema?
As simple as that.
The problem, for me at least, appears where some legal rights damage technological usage.
How many times my Netflix downloads will “expire”? Is this milk or something? Why do they need to expire? Sorry, but I refuse to understand…
Yet whenever I want to watch something, I have to look up which service it's on, see if it's available in my country, sign up for a subscription, possibly download an app.... Or, go to the high seas and be watching it in 4k resolution within 2 minutes.
I'd much rather go to the movie theater and pay the even higher price for admission, because that's an actual experience. You can't replicate "going to the movies" at your house very well.
pay full price for the online offering (conducting the transaction in a browser) and then just download the content from BitTorrent.
I would happily defend that practice in front of a jury of my peers.
The thing they get you on with BitTorrent isn't the download part, it's the seeding part, where you're distributing the copyrighted content to other downloaders.
You could turn off seeding, but that'll get you banned from a lot of torrent sites, and it's not a technical distinction I'd want to have to explain in court to lay people.
I'm only here to pop the balloon on the consumer's perception that "it's not theft." there's a face and a name that goes along with that theft. Thousands of them.
Remember that whole Cuties debacle where Netflix sexed up a French coming-of-age about children ?
Then, the great splintering happened. I currently pay for 5 services, but that doesn't cover even 1/2 of what I want to watch.
All the content owners said to themselves "we can be Netflix or Amazon Prime, too" and they pulled their content into their own services.
But the biggest problem: the user experience absolutely sucks now. It's so hard to find stuff and remember where things are, there's no universal search. I have to use justwatch.com on my phone when I want to sit down to watch something new, which might mean a trip to the computer to download it if one of the many services I already pay for don't have it.
I am not going to pay to rent stuff I used to be able to encounter for free by surfing channels...well, on top of my dish/cable bill
The $3 is for fast-forwarding Mr Video to next week.
That said, I don't know why the 48 hour limit on rentals got normalized. I've fallen asleep, gotten distracted, etc. while watching a movie and I don't like now being forced to watch it soon.
Maybe the limit could be 72 or 96 hours instead. Or you could rent it with no time limit but maybe can't ever rewind then you can make it last as long as you need but when it's done, it's done.
Now, for less money, I don't even have to get off the couch. What a world!
While I tend to agree that piracy and/or ripping isn't something everyone can do, I've filled out my Plex collection legally lately with DVD acquisitions at bargain-bin prices. Used doesn't matter if you only have to be able to read the disc once to rip it, and I'm yet to get something used off Amazon that couldn't be read once. (I haven't even had to clean it or anything, it's all just worked.)
So, my Plex install in terms of raw content isn't up to Netflix's size. However, I rather suspect there are some people reading this who have more hours of video on their Plex than Netflix even has available. And while mine isn't that large, it is much better tuned for me and my family's interests at this point. And I don't have to worry about getting halfway through a series, only for some licensor to notice it has become popular enough to pull it and run it on their own service. Netflix has the problem now that anything that becomes popular on their service will get yanked. I do not know how they overcome that. They hoped to do it with enough original content, but to my eye, that has failed, and there is now no longer enough time to fix that. While I understand the complaints that they treated it too much like "content", to be honest, I've never thought this would work out, from the moment they announced it. A single company just can't produce a sufficiently diverse set of "content" to be the everything-to-everybody they would have needed to be to justify a Netflix valuation.
Understandable, I just cut back on all the TV engorging and rotate the streaming services every quarter. IMO it's a net win. Save money on the streaming services and life is better for having not watched so much television. Not going to the grave wishing I binged Season 2 of some random show one more time.
- Lesser Known actors - Assistant Directors - Stunt Coordinators - 2nd Unit Directors - Stunt Performers
and I'm sure there are others. Residuals factor into our income, allow us to qualify for health insurance, empower our unions, and provide a stable income to continue working in an unstable career.
All so we can make better entertainment for you! When you pirate, you're stealing money from us.
Not that it matters though, I was trying to make use of the "common knowledge" that banks make money from your deposits, and that therefore you spending your money instead of depositing it in a negative return account is costing us potential revenue. I know that's not how banks make money, but it's the culturally accepted explanation for how banks make money.
You can accuse the pirates of limiting your potential for future earnings, but that is not the same as stealing from you.
If I can't buy something for a price that's worth it to me, I will just watch something else. It doesn't mean I'm going to pay more for it.
You get the same amount of money either way.
But extracting the value of watching something without paying the fee for that service...that's stealing.
If you weren't gonna watch it, don't watch. The argument being made is you in fact, do want to watch it, you just don't wanna pay for it. That's stealing.
See music streaming, the origin of video streaming, origin of steam etc
The last movie I pirated was directed by a man who died almost 30 years ago. Do you suppose if I subscribed to Netflix (which doesn't even have any of his movies at all as far I can tell), they'd hire a necromancer to get a few more movies out of his corpse?
We don't hire necromancers anymore, they’ve been replaced by training models on a corpus anchored by the creator’s existing work.
I really fail to see how a world without high-budget Marvel films will be so bad. I'd be fine watching old movies and art-house productions for the rest of my life.
The reason music streaming defeated piracy is because a single subscription gives access to most of the music in the world, including from other countries and languages as long as you can type the search query (Indian, Japanese, Turkish, Russian etc.)
The reason video piracy is resurging is that every streaming service provides 2-3 good shows and hundreds of fillers, and to have a real selection of what is currently good one would have to pay $200-300 per month for dozens of apps. On top of that, pulling the show from one app and reappearing it on another loses watch history, which is no way in the interest of the customer. Sell what the users really want to buy, and they will pay.
How about “owning” a movie but not being able to resell it or loan it to friends. What’s that?
Please don’t use physical item terms for digital items.
Stealing something from you implied you don’t have to have it after I take it.
It’s illegal and unethical, we agree on that. But it’s not stealing.
How else do you really think this whole thing works. You get to keep your money, but still get all the goods and services provided. That's just silly.
You can call it stealing metaphorically all you want, but it's not technically that (as candlemas claimed).
Where do you think pirates get their source content from? Sure if it's a movie with a blu-ray release there's a 4k high bitrate source, but if it's a netflix original the "stream compressed 4k" is the only version available.
About time anyway. Always next version of the business they put out of business. That's the way it works, especially with the deflation threat of technology. If you're a tech business and you can't maintain a margin so you have to raise rates, then something is up, broke, stockholder greed, personal greed, etc.
Running a large media server can actually be pretty costly on power bills these days.
Only if using server hardware, and that isn’t a good way to do it. A recent generation igpu and a low power computer is the way to go. You’ll get 10+ streams out an Intel Nuc, or similar sff pc. The expensive bit is the storage array.
You want me to buy the apple before taking a picture?
I'm sorry, I just find it really absurd when people claim something is easier when it's just not. Perhaps you find it to be a better trade off, but it is not easier.
I'm a 60-year-old (Do I win a kewpie doll?), and have the tech chops to pirate, but I don't want to.
It's important for me to live a life of Personal Integrity. That stance gets a lot of chuckles with this crowd, but it's of critical importance, in my life.
I'm fortunate, in being able to afford streaming services, but find the profusion and variety to be a mess.
I like AppleTV Channels, and the way that the AppleTV Watch Now app aggregates the apps. Amazon has something similar, that my wife uses.
Unfortunately, it looks like these knuckleheads can't agree on common licensing models. I don't want the "You can have any color you want, as long as it's black." approach of cable bundlers, but I also don't like the myriad ways of subscribing, or, quite frankly, the ever-changing prices.
They need to get their shit together.
Of course, what was (past tense) also annoying was paying $100/month for a cable bundle that I rarely watched.
It's also the case that I have access to a ton of video and don't consider much to be "must see."
And to the topic at hand, I may very well cancel Netflix one of these days. There's some stuff I haven't watched yet but after I get through that I may well drop it.
I think you underestimate how many people pirated things before netflix existed.
Nope. Just tried it. Literally not. It gives me the option to play movies, but nope. Can only play trailers.
There are addons, but they seem to use Torrent. I have no interest in streaming up to other people and redistributing the data. Is that set up automatically, or does it reuse my internet connection without informing me?
Also, with Netflix, I don't have to worry about copyright issues. Does streamio make that as easy?
None of this sounds literally as easy.
And again, literally cannot play a movie I can easily play on Netflix.
If it's just as fringe as you say, and i agree, then we shouldn't entertain the idea that media is (or was, in early 2000s before Netflix) losing that much money to pirating. As i'm sure now that people start migrating to less legal avenues for digital media we'll start seeing a resurgence of cries over lost profits due to piracy.
ZFS pools with full backups, redundant hardware, and highly available servers is not normal.
Installers are a thing on windows, on Ubuntu you can install software with apt. It wasn't packaged for my distro so I downloaded an archive unzipped and dropped it in /opt
Not sure why anyone would absolutely need to understand Kuberetes or even docker.
Plugging a PC up to a display has been a better TV for a while now.
90% of people I know probably couldn't set this up. And the other 10% would spend more time dicking around with the set up than they would using netflix or the other services.
GabeN is not correct. Piracy is a money problem. Free is very enticing.
> "Piracy is a service problem." Valve's Gabe Newell said that years ago, touting the success of Steam, his online video game distribution service.
The UX is crap; the info architecture is obscure; it doesn't work well on macOS (or at all if I use the wrong file system); it uses confusing labels for the stash of stuff I've already bought. I don't use it often enough to know if my usr/pwd is still valid (it is, fortunately). It had some slightly odd 2FA type thing the last time I logged in. It just gives me the impression that it wants to hide games from me that I've already bought and to make new ones hard to find. I'd rather have discs in boxes taking up space (tbf I also collect vinyl so maybe I'm just anachronistic?)
The only good thing going for it is that it doesn't ever email me junk.
Even for the in-house games, you have to be naive to trust any sort of promise from a commercial software product that isn't in a contract. Notch supposedly once promised that Minecraft would eventually become open source; well that plan evaporated when Microsoft waved a few billion dollars in front of him. Maybe he meant it at the time he said it, but that doesn't count for anything.
Valve makes a lot of money from the steam store. They’re not going anywhere. There are competitors like gog games that sell them without DRM. You download the games anyways so I’m sure a solution will be figured out if Valve starts to have issues.
Steam provides a pretty seamless experience for gaming, and it provides useful services to developers as well. Then you have things like the steam workshop and marketplace.
And for minecraft being open source: who cares? Gamers want games that are good and fun to play. There are very few open source games that are actually fun to play.
you found one?? please share
Granted, you have to buy the game to make use of these open source engines legally. But these open source engines free you from the limitations of DRM, Windows/Wine and run better than the original engines (support modern resolutions, innumerable bug fixes, etc.)
Other than that I can’t really think of anything other than good clones like OpenTTD or crappy clones like minetest.
Maybe Dwarf Fortress in the future if tarn or his brother open source it.
Well, the huge dicourse in consoles atm is digital and ownership. There were several scares over the years (some that went through, some that backpedeled) on storefronts closing down and no longer being able to buy older games as a result, in a market where retro gaming is being flooded by scalpers selling stuff at 20x markups. Console players are feeling uneasy with the advent of there being "digital only" variants sneaking back in, and cloud gaming is getting bigger each year.
Maybe this is just a cacophony of old fans not getting with the times, but it seems like a signifigant enough sentiment that "so what" seems overly dismissive.
>And for minecraft being open source: who cares?
older minecraft players apparently. Granted, it hasn't really stopped their creativity and servers, so in practice it doesn't change much. But I wouldn't be surprised in some microfose move years down the line angering that playerbase.
Again, an oddly dismissive take for something that has historically happened. It's easy to say "I don't care it's convinent" until it isn't.
many new games are free and rely on in-game transactions tied to an account outside of steam
There are no restrictions on the games I bought through steam that actually get in the way of me playing them - and there are a lot of conveniences offered like having access to my entire library on any machine with steam installed, or playing the games installed on my machine pretty much indefinitely offline. And being able to verify my game files and have them automatically fixed / updated
The games i bought a long time ago and still play have more than earned the money i spent on them anyway. if steam dies and i need to buy them again, i will and i will be happy to. if i cant find them anywhere because the games themselves died, ill make an image of my PC before upgrading it or uninstalling them and play them offline in a VM
there might be an itch here or there i cant scratch for whatever reason, but i can always buy a new game inspired by the same genre which is usually more fun than trying to recreate a nostalgic feeling anyway
But I gave in after several years, and now I'm a quite happy Steam user on Linux. It works as advertised, and the only issue I have is that I haven't found a way to filter games for «Linux support» and a genre at the same time. I've used EXT4 and BTRFS as file systems while using Steam, and never had any issues with that either.
I'm inclined to agree with Gabe. I've never spent as much money on games as after I got Steam. It makes it really easy to get a new game. Without Steam, I'd probably just go without. I have lots of things to spend my time on, and sometimes I'm even a little bit bummed that wasting time on games is an option on Linux these days...
Though I also buy from Humble Bundle and GOG. I prefer GOG whenever possible, if it's DRM free. Sometimes it's the most expensive option though.
I've been using steam for over a decade and have always enjoyed that it works the way i expect a computer application to work. i can right-click on things to get to their properties and other options, i can point it to games i have installed that i didnt buy through steam and they appear next to my steam games in my library seamlessly
the store UI is.. not the most intuitive thing for me, but it seems consistent. it is very rare that i am browsing steam store to begin with, though. I am usually searching for a specific game directly, which i never have trouble finding if it's in their collection. I also like that i can add any games im interested in to a wish list and they notify me when it's on sale
i used to edit my settings in a config file in counterstrike, which required "tampering" with local files but in a way that ultimately resulted in compliant files. Finding that file was an obscure path to navigate, ill give you that - but again the organization is still consistent. all files for one game can be found in one folder with the games name on it. you can manually delete that folder and effectively uninstall the game. you can even do a custom reinstall by selectively deleting files from that folder and ask steam to replace the missing items and it will. For example, to reinstall a game without losing your save files.
Not trying to invalidate your experience, but your comment caught me by surprise because your dislike seems to be well rationed and thought out - ie genuine - so i just found it interesting
the other problems are personal preferences that aren't universal
few things in life are. But we're on the internet, so we inevitably here a lot fo "personal preferences", often exagerrated to the point where it sounds like it's the worst thing in the world.
Steam provides a lot of value.
But, I will also admit that I'm a bit biased against steam due to using PC's for a lot of Visual Novels. And their VN submissions have always been a lottery of some sorts, to the confusion of readers and developers alike. Nothing worse than having an existing product on the store and then suddenly having a sequel to the product rejected, while the first product still sits on shelves.
Plug the PC up to display and presto.
I never have to leave my sofa. I don't have to dick around with plugging and unplugging my PC. No keyboards to manage. No OS or software to keep updated.
Your solution is easier than some other options but I'll stick with mine.
Then have a firmware update ad some advertising to the experience.
Sure beats my experience of pulling out my 12 oz keyboard plus touchpad bluetooth keyboard connected to a real PC.
GabeN is partially correct: It's a money & service problem. It's money for some, service for others, sometimes a bit of both. During college I had no money, so the issue for me was money. Once I got a job after college it was service: I didn't want to drive to music store & hope they had the CD in stock that I was looking for, not when I could definitely get it in 5 minutes online. Similar issue for videogames: I didn't want to spend $30-$60 for a game I couldn't return, when my computer might choke on it & not run or if half an hour in I realized it was crap. On top of which I might have to drive around to half a dozen stores to find a copy. That was a mixture of service & money.
These days it's faster for me to pay $1 for a song than pirate it, and I can instantly buy, download, and return a game in an hour if it either doesn't run or I hate it immediately.
Free is enticing, but so is convenience & instant gratification.
that's where the "service problem" sentiment falls apart. All companies want to be this monopoly for you with no red tape over multiple governments. But of course, companies get the best cuts (100%) from hosting it themselves and countries (and media licensed) will never agree on what's okay.
In this case, piracy is a way around a world that hasn't quite caught up with how the internet works yet. I wonder in a few decades if governments worldwide create enough enforcement on this for it to be just as inconvinent as trying to steal a CD.
However, people professing this quote everywhere should note that it's very hard to compete with "free infinite media" for those with the knowledge to pirate. So don't be surprised if instead of catering to that crowd that they instead focus on people who can't or don't want to pirate. It's a double edged sword. If I do pirate, I don't pretend I do it in some effort to make the product better. I do it accepting the risk that they may never choose to cater to me.
It's so frustrating to see that 90%of the shows I want to see are unavailable on Netflix. Video streaming is just so fragmented right now. And they try to compensate with a bunch of low quality Netflix original shows.
Why can't they just replicate what has been done in audio streaming? Spotify is what Netflix should have been. It's been years I no longer need to pirate music.
A service problem and a money problem are almost the same thing. Time is money, and I value my free-time very high. People will pay to not have to spend time to find the free.
I have a shared folder on my home network where I download stuff from 1-click hosters with jdownloader. I get the links all on one platform.
I got that money. I paid for Netflix once but now I can't remember the last show I watched made by them. Instead I'd have to pay for at least 3 other platforms to watch those few shows I watch throughout the year. Sometimes I'd even have to use a VPN to get it in the original language.
It only is a service problem for me.
(there is a bit revenge for their inability to provide a single platform in there too)
I come from country where intellectual property was treated as a western joke.
Children younger than 10 learned how to pirate - by themselves, without knowing even English. A lot of people still can do that, and it's quite easy to find out how.
Can piracy be the bridge to tech literacy? Sure.
“It's easier just to pirate than keep up with all these streaming services.”
Which seems false on its face. Every TV has access to all these streaming services built in. Or Roku devices, which take moments to set up. This is unrelated to whether people are capable of learning, but I am even bearish on that when it comes to the average person in the current piracy environment.
You mean those same TVs and devices that plaster your screen with ads, arbitrarily modify the UI, suddenly make certain shows unavailable, spy on what you're watching, require unwieldy DRM, take minutes to turn on, interrupt your relaxation time to run "updates", randomly brick themselves, become obsolete in a short several years, and generally dictate your experience based on short-sighted corporate whims? Visiting someone else's house and seeing the garbage behavior they put up with from their "smart TV" is as mindblowing as seeing someone using a web browser without adblock!
"Piracy is easier" refers to the experience after you've gone through the work of setting up your own entertainment system. Setting it up certainly does require an investment of time and self-actualization, which for sure is more effort than searching "netflix" and following their "conversion" path. But after that, things just generally work without all of the corporate hassles. I don't foresee everyone choosing to make running a libre media setup one of their hobbies, but most people will know someone who has...
and the thread here as a whole is rebuking the argument that Netflix is losing money because people are pirating. Most people don't or can't go through this work, so that likely isn't the reason why Netflix is seeing drops.
Current market wise, I wouldn't be surprised if the Netflix situation is people canceling their membership to spend that money on a different streaming service, and then swapping between friends to get the union of shows for a similar $/month. This would explain both pushes of membership going down, plus them wanting to crack down on sharing.
ehh, It's more like a speedbump than a storm. There's too much money in the game for it to end up being caught in a hurricane.
I just see the other side on how piracy can also harm more niche mediums and discourage businesses from even bothering to compete, which is why I can't even say piracy is a 'meh' at worst.
The manga indusry outside of Japan has this problem in that it's 5+ years behind the already decade outdated online solution for digital comics. Several JP storefronts for phyical and digital manga, but that is almost non-existent in English. Manga is fantranslated so fast that there's no incentive to bother having official localizers outside of the already huge works. Easier to cash in pennies on anime adaptations and merch sales afterwards.
There are lists of how much it would cost to have all the streaming services, and for a LONG time, it was illegal for cable companies to prevent you from selecting the channels you would like a-la-carte... but it did NOT prevent them from charging too much for each channel to make that an unworkable...
"You want JUST HBO? Sure, no problem, if you don't buy it in the bundle, the individual channel cost is $29 per month!"
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That is THE failure of "regulation" ; THE GOVERNMENT WILL MANDATE THROUGH LOBBIED REGULATION THAT ONE MUST HAVE THIS [SERVICE] - HOWEVER, WE WILL NOT REGULATE HOW MUCH YU CAN BE CHARGED FOR THE SERVICE, BUT WE WILL FINE AND PUNISH YOU IF YOU DO NOT HAVE THIS SERVICE.
But if we're talking about the people who are buying all the streaming services, it's currently easier to pirate. I get that you haven't taken two seconds to do any amount of research on the matter and that complete lack of any experience whatsoever gives you a sense of expertise to call other people blind and absurd, but consider that maybe you just don't know what you're talking about?
The easy option will cost you 24000 over 10 years. If you earn 20 bucks an hour or less like near half of America this represents an additional 1200 labor hours or a full time job for 30 weeks.
You even call Netflix the easy option which is all I'm saying.
That's easy.
Most of my friends have no idea what Tor is. Many don't know the Pirate Bay, and most of those who know bittorrent haven't configured it to get past their firewall.
But you know what they do know? Turning the TV on, going to Roku, searching for a movie/show, and watching it in whatever app Roku suggests.
The things this person lists are things I agree with, however. I actually have Amazon Prime Video but still enjoyed watching my friend's pirated copies on Plex, because there is no way to force-disable shitty compression levels, even if I have gigabit Internet.
Also, my friend can make sure their video library never changes or goes away, and that certain rarer content is archived forever, not subject to the changes of George Lucas or Disney editing out "problematic" content.
Since they're in a low power-security environment, there's a lot of unexpected on-off cycles. Anyway, the whole thing still worked for them until recently and as things started failing (as they inevitably do with this max jank thing I've made them) they just figured out how to work with it.
At first, they ran out of content, so they learned how to go get it on ThePirateBay and find the right mirror.
Then OpenSubtitles (which was integrated with XBMC) stopped working on it for some reason, so they would go manually get srt files and stick them on the USB drive (visible over Samba from the network).
Then as the local external drive started failing, they used the home desktop's samba mounted drive (that I'd set up earlier).
Hilariously, the gradual collapse of the system seems to have worked as a natural training regimen, and now they're fully equipped with knowledge. So now they've got one of our old desktops in the living room hooked up to the TV, a small bluetooth keyboard lying on the coffee table, and watch pirate video on the TV.
The whole thing is positively comical because I pay for all the services so this isn't necessary at all. But availability is not complete and I'm sure it tickles them to be able to do this stuff themselves.
Anyway, thought it was a funny story. They're in their late 60s but they're doctors and last I knew, not particularly tech-savvy, so I am both proud and highly entertained.
This view is very US-centric.
In most of the "rest of the world", netflix either doesn't exist or has a very very limited show list (even here, in a relatively developed EU country), and piracy literally is the only way to get a lot of the very popular shows.
And if you already pirate 3 of the 5 shows that you watch, why would you pay for the other 2, that are available on netflix, if you can just pirate those too?
In many ways, pirating is like any subscription service: signing on is a difficult decision (whether financially or technically), but once you're there and all caught up with the UI, using it again is the default move for watching your next show/movie.
In my country (slovenia) there is a very good local torrent tracker + a lot of people use the few larger general torrent sites, and even "grandpas" can use them, if their "computer-savy" kid installs them a torrent client, and shows them where to search.
In you go further down the balkans, you can find full movies even on youtube, especially local ones (because youtube doesn't remove them). Not that long ago, you could also buy or rent pirated cds/dvds literally from street vendors and "movie clubs" (think blockbuster, but smaller, more local and pirated).
I don't mean to be rude, but in the grand scheme of things the other countries don't quite matter as much, financially speaking. And those smaller parts of the world pirating isn't a big loss. Similar to the video game industry in Japan; some games may get an overseas following, but if the domestic market is slacking, that studio may not get the chance to make a sequel for those overseas fans.
So back to the US-centric sentiment: American audiences don't have the excuse 99% of the time of "this content is region blocked in my country", so the sentiment here shifts to "I don't want to manage 4 streaming services".
I'm sure the industry will come up with new ways to intrude on the internet again to stop this before they get together to make another platform which would allow the audience to download everything in one place.
- On screen performers, stunt performers like myself and actors who grind out a comfortable living. Those residuals also go to qualifying for health insurance through earnings. You are directly stealing from my ability to provide health insurance to my family.
- Assistant Directors, who are saints dealing with every logistical problem imaginable. The best of them only work 1-2 movies a year because the workload causes severe burnout.
- The Union themselves! The more money that flows through the union, the more powerful they are. The more safer movie sets become and the better life is provided for the workforce that makes your entertainment.
- Yourself! You are reducing the value of producing quality TV and Movies by stealing them. Every time one a show is pirated, there is less incentive to spend more money on an entertainment spectacle.
Go check out my imdb and see how many of my credits you've watched https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1968249/
For every show imagine that it's a nickel you stole from my income. WOuldn't be surprised if you took a buck or two out of mine. Now multiply that by all the on screen performers and ADs and others I mentioned. Now multiply that all the people who steal like you.
You're directly responsible for sucking the quality of life away from people who make your entertainment and reducing the desire to make things you enjoy. You're going to end up with shows that are AI generated CGI sponsored by Mt. Dew and Chevy trucks.
Stop stealing our shit.
If it’s not easy to find and use on a subscription service that I already have, I’m just not gonna try to search for it or pay for it. What difference would it make if I pirated it and watched it anyways?
(FWIW I personally don’t pirate anything, I just really don’t see the merit to the “stealing” argument)
You want something. You don't want to pay for it. You take it without paying.
That's stealing.
If you really truly didn't want to watch it, you wouldn't steal it.
Which one of us gets to deposit the money?
If I copy your car key and use it to steal your car. I've copied the key but stolen your car.
The difference is one party at a time, i.e. household, library patron, etc, can enjoy the entertainment service.
When you pirate it, The original owner of the dvd retains the service value as well as providing the service to others without any value being transferred to the workforce/IP holders.
That's the difference and I personally am all in for a mythical solution that but still allows complete freedom of ownership while also stopping people from digitally reproducing assets and dispensing them exponentially.
I don't believe it will ever happen tho :/
If you accuse someone of stealing the income, but they haven't gotten any money out of it, how does that make sense? What you're describing is a missed opportunity for a sale; had someone 'stolen' nothing and simply passed the product by, you would still not have made that sale and nothing would have changed.
Nobody is TAKING anything. Everything is at the place where it belongs.
Also if you'd be able to make identical copies of money, of course people would accept it.
Yes, we all know copying a digital show isn't the same exact thing as stealing your car. However, you are still taking something of value! Let's say you snuck into my band's concert venue and didn't buy a ticket. Yeah you didn't physically take anything from me, but you are having access to something you shouldn't without paying.
Another word for it is stealing.
Is my request reasonable? Do you feel inclined to pay me? Do I incur $1000 of damages if you choose not to?
If you think that's a dumb deal then you don't have to take it. Pirating it is simply wrong.
And this is again a physical situation, where one more person takes up limited space, reducing something.
Copying does not reduce anything.
It also does not contribute anything, true, so I am not saying it is always ethical to do so.
But when a poor person in bangladesh or bolivia living under very different economic realities, where 10$ means a LOT and who could never afford to pay for western realities anyway, streams some hollywood movie from a warez site - than I see zero damage. And guess what, they all do. So do poor teenagers and students in the west and they usually start paying, once they can afford it.
Judging them all as "thefts" from a position of being born into wealth, is maybe not very ethical either. So to repeat it again, stealing implies taking something away. Which is not the case here.
Edit: to be clear, I agree it's not 'theft', but am pushing back on the way this distinction is sometimes used to insinuate that it is victimless (not saying the poster above is claiming that, just that it's worth pointing out)
You can metaphorically say it's theft, but it doesn't manifest as theft of actual property.
For example: many people (myself included) have downloaded the $1.000.000 torrent (a list of files whose value amounts to a million dollars). I found nothing of use in it so I just deleted it. Did I cause a million dollars in damages? Was the damage restored when I deleted it?
If you consider the same for actual property there's no question about it. Stealing a Bugatti does cause millions to be lost, and destroying it makes it irrecoverable.
I get that you have legit reasons for feeling strongly about this topic, but this is way over the top, so please don't do it on HN. We want curious conversation here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is an age old argument... I'm not taking anything. I'm merely looking at something. The same way that I'm not "stealing from Leonardo" when I look at statue of David. I understand that the makers of the movie had some hopes of monetizing my looking but alas, they failed. Based on pure logic alone, it's clear that piracy is not theft, it's something else.
Since when does it matter if I would've paid for it? If someone steals a Mercedes from a dealer is it not stealing if they wouldn't have bought it anyways?
"Intellectual property" doesn't really work like that.
Do they lose more income if I watch the content with friends?
In the early days of photography, people believed that if your photo was taken, it was stealing your soul [1].
I can understand the idea of piracy being wage theft in the same way I can understand the idea of photography being soul theft, but I think both are rather silly ideas.
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/8382
If you watch it with your friends, 5 people watch it for one purchase. If it's good, you all tell 3 more people. Of those 15 people, 20 percent end up purchasing a viewing and the system repeats.
When you pirate it you take all the service for zero cost. That affects real people.
If you don't, they won't, as shown by the proliferation of shitty streaming services and the gutting of content on Netflix.
It's got to suck to feel that people are stealing from you because you have no control over the content distribution mechanisms in the industry you work in, but I think you're largely engaging in fallacious argumentation here. It's pretty much the 90's version of piracy rhetoric. One pirated watch != one watch worth of income lost.
It's the "I don't want to pay for it, but I still want to watch it." that seems to be hang up for so many.
Let me explain it simply. That is stealing and it directly affects my ability to make a living as well the motivation for service providers to make more products you enjoy.
Is everyone there except me stealing? It feels to me a little bit like the N=1 vs N=0 problem of theism - I'm simply an atheist to one more god than you are. Similarly, I simply don't think it's theft to one more person in that context than you might (of course, here I'm assuming you don't think all those people are stealing).
That they want to share it is their business, not mine. If it's good, those friends will tell other friends and someone along the way will purchase it again, and I'll be even closer to my mortgage busting avocado toast
The hypothetical argument against that is "what if I get 100 friends, for 100 nights to watch it." Sure, hypothetically you could but then it'd be pretty expensive for you and added wear and tear on your home and a pretty big headache to deal with. THe only way to justify it would be to start charging, which at that point, would be stealing. So it always comes across as a thought problem, but I find it's not a real problem.
I don't mind if the town throws a movie festival once a month and plays my movie. I mind if they all get to go home with the luxory of having it on demand and the ability ot share it with everyone they know without providing the service fee requested.
> If you weren't going to watch it, you wouldn't.
This is flat out false and incredibly obviously so. You can easily see it just by cranking the numbers - if a video game is fun, but costs $500, do you really think that each person who pirates it is depriving the developer of $500? If some magical DRM scheme was implemented that could not be broken and guaranteed every person who played it, bought it, would everyone who pirated it in the previous hypothetical instead buy it for $500? No, they would ignore it, nobody would buy it, and the developer would have just as little money as they had before.
Pirating a piece of IP does not translate 1:1 into a lost sale as you keep variously asserting and acting like it does. It can even turn into a gained sale, in the case of video games or software, when people would not have bought it based on the promotional material but consider it worth buying after actually using it. You have a right to exclusivity on sales - selling pirated material is criminal - but you don't have a right to actually make any sales if nobody wants to buy it.
How about a college dorm hosting a movie night? Maybe theft?
What if a million people watch it for one purchase? I know you think that's theft, but I'm not sure where you'd draw the line.
I think the reality is that 90% of the population won't pirate because it's too much effort and legally ambiguous. If your content becomes popular through piracy, you will absolutely reap the rewards of good content creation.
If a billion people pirated your content because it was that good, you'd have absolutely no problem monetizing. You'd be a household name. When Disney loses their copyright on the Mouse, they're still going to be a huge company capable of monetizing all things Mickey.
If we get back to a state where everyone is pirating because the content services suck, then you need to petition your content distributors to lower friction and provide an experience worth paying for, but we're nowhere near that.
Gabe does it with Steam. I used to almost exclusively pirate games, and now I almost exclusively buy them, because Steam has value adds (achievements, friends, online play, tournaments, workshop content, etc).
Also, you have to understand that many people who have large collections of pirate content see themselves more as archivists than viewers. I'd guess most pirated content never even gets consumed, just downloaded for a "later" that never comes.
or he could have not watched it at all, told no one, and you would have 0% instead of 20%.
Pirating at scale is a real problem, but an individual pirate is just an opportunist. There is a difference between taking something off the shelf vs picking it out of the trash.
There is a small volume of "piracy" that could be considered "picking through the trash". Some (a lot) of entertainment looks like trash to some (a lot) of people and the only reason those people watch it is because it they get to watch it for free. And then when they are pleasantly surprised, they tell people about it. This is the heart of the "i wasnt going to pay for it anyway" argument. Its the type of person who wouldnt pay for a donut, but if you were about to throw them out theyll take one.
Id be curious to see statistics that shows the relation of being successful in the pirate world and successful in the real world. Because that is ultimately related to the argument you are making. that the current state of piracy is hurting your industry, not helping it - since you say this specific pirate is hurting you right now.
it certainly hurts the transactions bottom line when isolated to viewing your bottom line with or without pirate sales - but thats an incomplete financial scenario (this type of thing is my job). you shouldnt assume a gain of x% sales of pirates that 'would have paid for the content if they couldnt get it for free' without also subtracting y% of sales from people 'who only bought it because pirates started the conversation that ultimately led to their purchase'.
Sometimes the marketing for a movie sucks, and not a lot of people are interested in seeing it. There is a small time frame of relevance and pirates might help overcome the shortcomings of marketing efforts and make the movie more relevant which helps it reach more people than it would have.
In all of your discussion, you seem to presume that the pirates knew about and had an interest in your film to begin with. You assumed successful marketing of your film. maybe you're right, and it probably does 'hurt' (tax?) the biggest blockbuster of the year... but 'people who only watch things online for free' is a real community of maybe significant size and i dont know if there has been any work done to try to measure the impact of what penetrating that community has on the financial success of entertainment media in general.
"all theft is bad" is a nice story, but it ultimately is not always true. sometimes companies allow theft on purpose as a form of marketing. They do that as an observational response to the fact that the cause and effect of 'influencers' exists outside of the intent of the people involved.
This leads to a hypothesis that pirating is a form of marketing for your industry. If it were to become too easy to perform or too widespread, it would likely cross a line into being actually damaging. But if the people pirating it are mostly a small group of tech savvy, relatively intelligent, movie enthusiastic people (due to the technical requirements needed to pirate) then maybe when they pirate you they might be autonomously servicing your industry as an influencer. I know it sounds asinine, but if you want to talk money - there are a lot of factors to consider.
So are they stealing? sure. Are they taking money OUT of your pocket? very debatable; unclear. They are influencing with the pool of money that ends up in your pocket, and it isnt so black and white what their actions have on the size of that pool due to the complexity of your industry.
--------------- Sorry for the long post, and it isnt an attack on you or even a support of piracy in general (it might read that way) - i got caught up in mentally exploring the...
Say you have a business idea. Perhaps something that you want to patent. I use it and start my own business, rendering your potential business moot.
Did I steal from you? If so, what did I steal?
But the bottom line is, it's just not worth paying for digital content for me, merely by knowing the fact that it's available for free. A file has no intrinsic value, why should I pay for it?
I'll gladly pay for an experience, or service, such as a movie theatre or a streaming platform that does the work of delivering content to me. But there is so much free stuff out there, paying to download the latest Batman movie is simply not worth it.
When you pay for things you like, more of it gets made.
You need to consider that maybe the product you are producing is simply not that valuable.
I'm an artist myself. If someone took a photo of something I painted, and started making copies and selling them, yea I'd be pissed. That's what copyright law should be used to protect against.
If someone took a photo of my painting for their personal use, instead of buying one of the photos of my painting that I sell myself, I'd reconsider whether my business model of selling photos is the right one.
By "something else" do you mean "another activity instead of watching TV/movies/etc," or do you mean "watching TV/movies/etc, just via another method?"
If the former...who cares? That still doesn't justify it. Just because I chose another recreation activity instead of watching a movie doesn't mean that I'm entitled to the movie for free. Not choosing something doesn't have an effect on the price (at least on the micro level; on the macro level, this is of course the concept of "demand," but even if the demand is so low that the "correct" price is effectively $0, that still doesn't give you the right to steal it -- the Intellectual Property is still property of the owner, and they are the only ones who have the right to sell it or give it away, just as you or I have the right to sell or give away any of our property, be it a couch, a TV, a pair of shoes, an idea for a story, whatever. It's all property).
If the latter, what could possibly fit that criteria? You're either getting the TV/movie via official methods or piracy, there isn't any other way. It's binary. There isn't a way to get your hands on a film that is neither officially sanctioned nor piracy.
> You need to consider that maybe the product you are producing is simply not that valuable.
Not that valuable? Are you serious? We're talking about products that are considered "low budget" when they cost 1 million dollars to make and at best receive profits of hundreds of millions of dollars. The entire premise of this thread is that everyone wants to watch everything, they want access to everything (i.e. the demand is high and not going anywhere). They just don't want to pay for multiple separate services -- but only because they can compare to and prefer the brief, golden period wherein everything was accessible on Netflix and Hulu, back when they were the only two games in town and were a breath of fresh air compared to the expensive cable packages (which, might I remind you, people still paid -- economically, that means that the price is considered "fair" and commensurate to demand). Back when Netflix and Hulu were both unsustainably hemorrhaging money, I might add.
Paying for 100% of the streaming services now costs <= your typical cable package just 20 years ago, and that's not even adjusting for inflation. So things are still cheaper than they've ever been, with a not-insignificant raise in convenience and overall quality of the product to boot. Had we jumped from cable packages to the current situation, HN would be jumping with joy.
Just be honest: you want what you want, for as little as you can get it for. And that's fine! That's human nature. What's not fine is, because you can get it for $0 pretty much risk-free, you'll bend over backwards defending why doing so is okay.
(Comment too long for HN, continuing in the next one...)
Downloading a file (containing the show) from a publicly accessible server on the internet is completely outside of commercial contract so there’s no income in the first place.
Authorities can decide to make it illegal to download files from internet but it’s not "stealing"
stealing.
Not paying for things that they do not consume is voting with their dollars.
But flogging the tired comparison between stealing physical objects and making illegal copies of content is a losing argument. Everyone instinctively knows it's not the same thing. Just because an end user gains a benefit they didn't pay for doesn't mean it's theft. The owner still has the content and can sell it to as many paying customers as they like. Once the car is gone, it's gone and unavailable to sell to someone else. Consider: what would the auto market look like if we had Star Trek-style replicators and could make copies of physical objects for pennies? Let's use bikes instead. If you had the ability to make cheap copies of a bike, would it be ethical to deny the use of a bike to a poor farmer who could use it to get goods to market and make their life better, when your marginal cost is near zero? Do the needs of the R&D people who designed the bike override that consideration?
This is just as much of a problem for all the software creators on here as for the content creators, though the rise of SAAS has changed that somewhat. Content's inherent non-scarcity is one of the best things that has ever happened to humanity, it just happens to break our pre-existing economic model and hurt the people who create it. This is a fundamental shift in our economy that's underway and we have been lurching around trying to solve it for decades now. We need to solve it, but pretending that it's the same as theft is just not going to get us to a solution.
Society being in a lurch between how we handle our physical goods and our digital goods is a very important subject that is going to get ironed out over the next few generations I'm sure.
That doesn't make it not theft, even if its' really easy to do.
As gp said, your points are valid, but you're using a word incorrectly. Just use a different word so as not to have dictionaries disagree with you. Copyright infringement.
This is obvious. It’s crazy how many of you are twisting yourself into logical knots to try to justify this action. It’s not murder, but it’s clearly wrong on its face.
Consuming media/entertainment is no human right and if it is too expensive/too inaccessible/whatever and you wish to be ethical, don't pirate it in the first place.
Humans have great difficulty controlling their impulses especially in connection to crimes that are undetectable and easy to perform but the honest will at least own up to what they do.
Even the ease of use has declined, and the affordability is down the toilet. And as usual, we have people at the top reaping record profits and making victims of their greed blame each other at the same time.
EDIT: Fixed a grammar error.
>If it’s not easy to find and use on a subscription service that I already have, I’m just not gonna try to search for it or pay for it.
That is easy to say when you just take it for free regardless. I strongly suspect people saying that would actually pay for a decent amount of it if piracy wasn't an option.
And the number of pirate I know would plop down 15 bucks for a movies (since CAMs and TSs are terrible copies) but won't pay for a movie on VOD (since they can pirate it in clear 4k) confirms my suspicions.
You could claim it’s different with digital goods, but it’s not. Money still went into making that good (whether that’s software or a movie or even just a picture) and you’re still getting the benefits of owning that good without paying for it. Put another way, how does not caring enough about something entitle you to ownership?
So you are absolutely stealing whether you would “have paid for it“ or not.
When you steal cool stuff, cool stuff stops getting made.
Which is more powerful if consumers don't steal money out of their pocket.
Pay for cool things and you'll get more cool things.
Then the ephemeral luxuries, such as entertainment, begin to take a more relaxed position on our moral compass when one compares paying for entertainment services, vs, using funds for food.
In the future, I suspect we'll still have storytellers for the same reason we do today. To Inspire, educate, and entertain. I cannot envision society with zero entertainment.
I pirate-streamed the first season of discovery due to its lack of availability on other platforms. Felt like a 10 hour movie about a dystopian future with weak shallow characters rather than an episodic serial about the great people solving problems in a better society than we have today. Tried a few episodes of Picard and just didn't get into it. Neither were entertaining enough for my full attention, ended up watching on second monitor while playing a game.
I would feel like a schmuck if I paid CBS to subsidize this content: wasn't what I want more of in the world. There is no "voting with your dollar" in modern content delivery when you can't get a refund when a show ends up being a waste of time.
It seems to me like piracy of shows is tangential to whatever the root of the issue is. Folk are becoming disenchanted with streaming services. Whether they pirate or just stop watching instead, the services have clearly changed in ways that make them less valuable to consumers. Unless somebody figures that out, it's not going to improve. I doubt DRM is the answer, although a combination of higher prices and consolidated content might be. Folk would pay more for Netflix if it was still a "monopoly" with all the popular shows.
I think accusing folk of stealing money out of your pocket for downloading a video is quite hyperbolic and isn't winning you any arguments. You're trying to make it a moral issue, but it isn't really a moral issue, and nobody outside of the industry cares. You could claim that it's disrespectful to you as a participating member of society, and it probably is, but yelling at people to respect you more doesn't work, and has the opposite effect.
I think your point, though, is that it's a tragedy of the commons situation. The industry works as a whole because people are willing to pay a premium in exchange for entertainment. If people don't pay, then there's no incentive to produce. If folk value new entertainment, they need to support the industry that produces it.
The problem, as I see it, is entertainment is being seen as a "good" and not a "service." Physical dvds and vhs has conditioned us to think that it's a physical good, so there is no harm in replicating the digital product. In fact that emotional state derived from viewing the entertainment is the service that is being paid for.
Taking the value of receiving that entertainment without providing the cash value of that service is stealing.
There is no option for refunds. Pirating first gives the user more control over which films they economically incentivize iteration on.
While I agree with your sentiment, you can also make a better product. This is an easy fix with some of the smartest minds in the industry. People showed Netflix early on they were willing to PAY for ease of use.
The big studios know how many people are watching their stuff via theft. They are going to keep producting low end crap with studio friendly sponsorships, because piracy will have taught them that is a better business model.
Pay of the things you want to see and you'll see more of them.
Where can I pay for a streaming service with no geo-blocking, no DRM quality limitations on Linux, offline viewing and all the shows/movies I want to watch? Seems the only way to vote with my wallet is to refuse to pay, which morally isn't really different to piracy.
I don't know where to find all those requirements. Perhaps they exist. If they are that big of a dealbreaker for you, don't consume the value provided by entertainment services.
When you decide that the exact moral high point is to consume the goods and services while still maintaining integrity about not providing the cash value asked of those things, you are justifying being a thief.
> When you decide that the exact moral high point is to consume the goods and services while still maintaining integrity about not providing the cash value asked of those things, you are justifying being a [pirate].
Correct, it is justifying being a pirate. The justification being exactly what you suggested: voting with my wallet. I want to watch a certain piece of entertainment, but it's producer has made it unreasonably unobtainable thus pirating it signals that it is both desired and that a sale was lost.
I think you're being angry about the wrong thing here. Consumers don't want to pirate; they are pushed to piracy by shit service. That's not a fault of the consumers, that's a fault of the seller. If you actually want to reduce piracy you should be advocating for better service rather than telling people they're stealing from you.
And someday I'll be makign my own productions.
And he is yelling at us, which also have no control, he should be yelling at the people he works for that do have control.
Also, we’re going to end up with shitty generated content regardless of my $10. If you’re making strong statements like OP is stealing from _you_, then go advocate for change. You’re in the industry.
I do advocate for change, within my own union. Today I am educating consumers on who exactly they are stealing from when they pirate shows.
Amazon used to let me buy anything, and the Prime was there to entice me so I don't have to pay for individual catalog items, but that's not the case anymore.
Now I have a choice between:
1. paying for a crapton of streaming services so I can watch a handful of things I'd like
2. pirating
3. not watching most of the stuff I think I would like to watch
I'm not picking option 1 for what I hope are obvious reasons. I really don't want to pick option 2 because I empathize with people like you, who would be affected by that. For the moment, I'm picking option 3.
However, if you really want to "educate consumers", you might be more successful if you change your tone so it doesn't sound like aggressive victim-blaming. People like you and people like me are being screwed by a third group.
You have an option to pay for the service as offered, steal it, or move on.
Entertainment abounds in our society and is readily available at little to no cost all around you via local theater, open mic nights, libraries, etc.
The connivence of having that entertainment pumped directly on demand to your home is a luxury that has a certain value to it.
Currently that luxury is available via paying for the service or stealing it. The theft is relatively low risk, even by hilariously paying for a services that help hide your theft. That's the number one reason these services are being stolen.
We're living in a society where a huge number of people has experienced a good solution to the demand for that enrichment, and that good solution has been deliberately sabotaged so that a small, rich group of people could become even richer at the expense of everyone else.
Just like you argue people are not entitled to art and entertainment, so I would argue that those who deliberately restrict access to it in completely unnecessary ways are not entitled to the additional profits they squeeze out that way.
As for the comments about luxury of pumping the entertainment to our homes instead of enjoying it at little to no cost at the venues you mention, I'm reminded of Arthur Dent being told that the plans to demolish his house were on display all the time. Suffice it to say that your vision of how the majority of people live is very distorted.
What I was trying to do is have a conversation with you about why people "steal" or whatever the correct word for this thing is. Just like there are reasons people steal in real life, there are reasons for this behavior, too. You can try to understand it, or you can keep throwing everyone in the same bin, slap a label on that bin, and feel morally superior.
One of those two will lead to improvement for everyone. One of those two is easy. I'll leave it an exercise for you to figure out which one is which.
I don't think this is what you mean to do. I think you really care about this! Lay down your sword and listen. Hear what people are saying in response. Let their responses inform and refine your advocacy. You can't stroll in broadcasting an ideological, self-interested position and expect people to react well.
While this may be a way explain why the masses pirate, it's a poor justification for an individual to do it. If you don't find the available payment mechanisms convenient enough, then walk away and support a product that does have mechanism convenient to you. (For the same reason that you wouldn't steal from a store that only takes Amex.)
If you want people to "stop stealing our shit", you should really address how crappy the distribution system is.
- Can't get it in __ country
- Can only watch it on __ closed-source devices
- Can't watch it offline
- A is only available on platform 1, B is only on platform 2, and I don't want either crappy platform
Anyway, as I said, I don't really watch movies much anymore, and haven't seen any of the ones on your IMDB page, I mostly play games or read books these days, but I'd probably watch more if the distribution system was better.
- Can't get it with subtitles/dub in _ language
As opposed to movies/shows already high on CGI with poor and rehashed storylines, and whitewashed to cater to CCP censorship?
I'm fine with this. Some of the best movies ever were made in the 70s, after the Hollywood studio system collapsed and a ton of money was sucked out of the industry.
Advertizements everywhere stealing my attention, public space, and landscape beauty. Stealth taxes on empty hard drives and other storage media. Hardware-destroying rootkits and other malware (lost a DVD drive to DRM, will you reimburse me?). Draconian control mechanisms and lobbying stealing my control of the devices I own. Mountains upon mountains of disposable plastic promotional crap stealing my planet and ecosystem.
I'm not stealing from you. I'm extracting some small reparation for the many toxic behaviors your industry engages in. When you start offering an honest product I'll start honest buying. And I do - I pay more combined to good people producing good content via Patreon than a monthly Netflix subscription.
If you live in a big city you probably walk by people in the street slowly dying from a drawn out form of suicide because you can't possible change all their lives on your way to the grocery store or coffee shop and people at large are choosing to do the same with your income stream. They opt to deal with problems more important and more personal than fixing the way in which culture is monetized so as to funnel slightly more money to rich folks who could do more for society as soylent green in hopes that a few extra bucks will stick to the hands of useful folks like yourself.
For myself I'm not angry nor do I have any intention of fixing the problem because nobody with any decision making power gives two shits what my opinion on anything is. I have monetarily in life about nothing and indeed will have nothing tomorrow and the next day. You feel like people are violating the social contract by not paying for multimedia. Part of your problem is that you even believe that we are part of the same society or share the same ethics.
We really aren't. I am not the benefactor of the current situation nor do I have any meaningful power to negotiate new ground rules or even enforce existing ones so rejection makes worlds more sense.
You say stop downloading and I hear enjoy poverty but with fewer books, music, movies, games. I wont actually be supporting the folks you mentioned to any greater degree but you will find such more ethically palatable. HALF of America is sharing 12% of the income. We don't have anything but you can stick a $200 PC and plug it into a $20 monitor and courtesy of a $10 internet essentials package download as many books music movies shows as you can possibly consume.
I don't feel like making my shitty life shittier in order for you to feel better. Artificial scarcity is a dumb way to run a society and its not my fault the people with all the money in this society have chosen it.
Jobs will be lost, just like happened with farriers and switchboard operators. Your income will disappear regardless: the demand for stunts is elastic and the supply is increasingly competitive. Blaming pirates is being unable to see the forest for the trees.
A lot of us would gladly pay the cast and crew directly to own a copy of your output that we could access on our own terms, but that isn’t a reality for most trade under capitalism. There’s a reason Googlers on HN aren’t trying to guilt trip everyone for personally stealing their income by using ad blockers. Maybe this is particularly to the entertainment industry, but most of us would shrug our shoulders at the equivalent of petty shoplifting from our employers.
Imagine a hypothetical universe where, in order to watch one of your movies, people had to a) pay you $1 and also b) let you punch them in the nose. Then, when people sensibly start pirating your content instead because they don't want to get punched, you loudly proclaim that they are stealing the $1 you are owed.
That's what's happening here. People want to watch your content, and are willing to pay for it. But they don't want to pay for it AND get punched in the nose. They pirate because your distributors, and by extension you yourself, have made it impossible to watch your content (and pay you!) in any other way.
I get that your natural rejoinder will be "if the content is not worth being punched in the nose, just don't watch it!" Which is fair. Debatable, but fair. Just don't come here pretending that all you have asked for is the reasonable sum of $1 when you are actually demanding that your customers subject themselves to the indignity of your fist.
When you lend it out, are you still able to enjoy the entertainment service provided by the dvd?
The answers to these questions are the answers to your questions.
Thinking of all the stealing they've done from the public domain it makes my blood boil. Charging top dollar for artists work that have been dead for decades is a disgrace. How about "stealing" from the public and renting it out in perpetuity... Winnie the Pooh, anyone?
Hell of a position.
Our base pay is daily rate governed through SAG-Aftra CBA with the Producer's guild and scaled off the budget of the production. Then there are OT factors and bumps that go along with how difficult the particular work is.
There was about a decade when Netflix went full in on online streaming and was offering a fantastic service for a reasonable price with a far superior experience to piracy. That is no longer the case, and the unbundling to now a dozen+ of subscriptions is driving pretty much all my techie friends back to movie/tv piracy. I personally don't really watch much TV and might watch one or two movies a year, so I'll just not watch anything. I've already cancelled my Netflix subscription about a year ago, and I prefer playing video games and reading books anyway.
Until your industry can offer a product experience that is superior to piracy, people are going to pirate. The games and music industries have largely solved this problem. When will yours?
Until then tho..a person who steals from a moral high ground is still a thief stealing from my income.
Steam and Spotify have made it incredibly simple to just get what you want without having to juggle or manage any kind of bullshit.
Boutta go "steal" from you just to do it.
Games: yes. Music: yes. Books: yes. Magazines: yes. What happened to tv and film? Where are you all?
Let's say I want to purchase The Fifth Element and throw it on my plex server so I can watch it on vacation out of the country? How can I do that? The answer is simple: you cannot. So I pirate it. And enjoy watching it. If the industry WOULD provide me with some way to purchase The Fifth Element, get a high quality mkv or mp4 or whatever download of it, I would do it in an instant.
As I've said in the thread, for me the alternative to movies/TV isn't piracy, it's playing games or reading books, which I do pay for because the experiences of finding what I want, buying it, and consuming it is a superior experience to piracy. If that ever changes across the entire media landscape and games/books go the way of movies/TV that may change.
To put it really bluntly, pointing out how piracy is easier than paying again is not literally stealing money out of your pocket. The whole "lost sales" and "stolen income" thing doesn't always hold water, because you can't measure all the counterfactuals involved. A lot of pirates are either just data hoarders or collectors, and you aren't really in price competition with piracy as long as you are even slightly more convenient than it. Yes, that actually used to be the case for movies and TV shows, back when you could get access to everything you could ever want to watch just by subscribing to Netflix or maybe Hulu. Piracy was actually going away, right up until everyone pulled their content from Netflix to try and grab a larger slice of a smaller pie.
However, I don't want to actually trash your point too hard, because you did touch upon something worth talking about. I have noticed in HN and in other engineer-oriented spaces a certain contempt for the creative working class. I call it "kill and eat everyone below the talent line".
There's this weird meme that came about around the same time that the RIAA was indiscriminately suing casual pirates. Back then, some artists - usually ones at the start of their careers or doing it as a hobby - were distributing content over the Internet for free. In fact, some of them were even able to make money off of it through crowdfunding or advertisements without directly demanding payment to read, listen, or watch their work. So people made this assumption that this business model would be both sustainable long-term and scalable to large productions. Ergo, copyright is just an artifice of history, we can just abolish it, and the "real artists" will prosper while publishers and middlemen are out of a job.[0]
The problem is that "real artists" covers both the Toby Foxes of the world just as well as the Temmie Changs. Abolishing copyright beggars the songwriter in the name of the singer. A-list actors would actually survive and thrive in a crowdfunding-only market, because they have the name recognition to do so. But all the other people who support them would see their income shrink. And producers and publishers would just turn into the absolute worst kind of scummy for-sale pirates you could think of.[1]
The thing about piracy is that we as tinkerers and hobbyists assume it works exactly the same for everyone else as it does for us. I.e. me and my 10,000 friends all trade files around for free. Yes, a lot of pirates are data hoarders and collectors, but there's an entire world of bootlegs and knockoffs outside of the world of BitTorrent. For-profit piracy is far more pernicious than just the person with a Plex server, and it comes in a lot of forms you wouldn't even expect. For example, when Facebook launched their video service, there was an entire cottage industry of people reuploading YouTube videos and monetizing them on Facebook. This is the sort of thing that individual filesharers would not even recognize as piracy, but is absolutely immoral and wrong, and does pull nickels and dimes out of artists' pockets.
[0] The counterargument I'm making against copyright abolitionism does not apply to other things like shortening the length of copyright terms or adding more exceptions to it. Those at least still allow the existence of a creative working class.
[1] Fun fact: lousy speedsubbing jobs aren't just for modern anime pirates. Before we had international copyright, it was common for publishers to just take books published in other countries, translate themselves, and sell them before the original author could.
The concept that Pirates wouldn't have paid for it anyway is valid. Part of my problem with piracy is that so much bullshit gets consumed that without stealing, those things would be much less part of pop culture and we'd have a lot better stuff to entertain us.
However for definition sakes. Taking a service that you wouldn't have consumed by paying and using it for free is stealing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4
Netflix was on a path to successfully serve the first kind, the only remaining problems being region locking and an incomplete catalog. Demand for piracy went down. Then the industry got greedy, made one of those remaining problems much, much worse, and now the demand for piracy is on the rise again.
The industry spends a lot of resources making life worse for the second kind, in a misguided attempt to both satisfy them and fully prevent the possibility of piracy. Instead they fail at both. The result is an increased demand for piracy.
> You're directly responsible for sucking the quality of life away from people who make your entertainment and reducing the desire to make things you enjoy. You're going to end up with shows that are AI generated CGI sponsored by Mt. Dew and Chevy trucks.
So here's the problem: The only way I can spend money to encourage the production of content I want is to buy a terrible, abusive product I don't want. It only plays in 720p, it's only available through a shitty app, it may disappear from the platform it's on any time.
All of it is just a wrapper for content. Please sell me the content. Whatever file comes out at the end of the production process, sell it to me.
Instead I spend my money in other places. Streamers on Twitch want it. YouTubers want it. People on Patreon want it. Developers want it. Somehow they manage not to abuse the people willing to give them money.
Most of those who pirate, wouldn't pay and since the content is not going away because somebody pirates it, it can't be stealing.
And Jesus...please...it's not like you're starving out there. Start producing original stories. We don't even need all that fancy and expensive CGI crap. Just start writing properly and in a creative way. Pay THOSE people more IF they deliver (though I'm not sure anymore if you really understand what's missing here with all your sequels and remakes...). We're not the audience you should cry to, go to those managers who messed up that market so piracy is coming back again.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Although in this case, I have to imagine that first understanding the problem would enable the industry to fix itself and then make more money.
It really isn't and it's only cheaper if you don't put much value on your time.
Radarr and Sonarr don't do anything automatically. Setting them up takes more time than they are worth. I tried installing them. Most would describe me as technically savvy, but I just gave up.
example issues. Here's the quick start guide. https://wiki.servarr.com/radarr/quick-start-guide 1. Get stopped immediately at the indexer. No sane defaults there at all. No guidance either.
Plex doesn't do 4k streaming to Apple TV, doesn't do 4k to chromecast.
The movies you pirate frequently have technical problems, usually the sound is off. You are lucky to have subtitles that work(synced correctly).
Very true.
In the hours it takes to download and curate these movies and shows I've made more than enough to cover a Netflix, Disney+, Prime and HBO subscriptions for that month or pay for a few VOD titles for that month.
My time is way more fucking valuable than the time required to do this well.
And if I do without content or entertainment even better. Not everything is worth watch every month.
For the most people it’s too much struggle to run this, especially when plex has the default settings of „transcode everything to 2mbit if the server is not at home“.
I have multiple subscriptions, but most players suck (I look at you Amazon Prime). Plex is a way better experience.
Oh I use a Nvidia Shield as Client. It’s awesome!
I'd rather do without.
Wildly off-topic but perhaps you’re turning off a TV without the streaming device itself shutting down?
Hum... It's not that. It's just that it's impossible to access the long tail of Netflix content.
Personally, my "least favorite feature" is that hovering (with mouse) over any video would auto-play. In other words, just by moving the mouse you would be under threat of accidentally distracting yourself. Maybe some people don't feel the same way, but for me, it was destabilizing to the point that I couldn't recall what it was I was searching for / interested in in the first place. I think they have "fixed" this in the past year, but there are still times when auto-play completely interrupts my thought/intentionality.
Most people don't even know that it's an option. Horrible design for this particular feature's UX.
If you just want more search options, I agree but the search layout is also already a grid.
I'm asking for a specific implemented app that feels better in practice, not just something you think might work better. There are subtle issues with getting this layout right. Its not as obvious as you say when you need to deal with crap remote dpads and no keyboards.
It doesn't need to be a list of movie posters.
> If you want a grid, its basically what they have.
It's not though, you have to scroll horizontally for each section. That's not the same as a grid.
> I'm asking for a specific implemented app that feels better in practice, not just something you think might work better.
That's tough to do if everyone is implementing it poorly. However, I would say that something like this feels better in practice (even if it's still not ideal): https://i.imgur.com/AU6Az7e.jpeg
We used to watch five to ten movies a month via Netflix. We haven't used it in two or three years now.
They don't want to to get in and get out. They need subscribers and the revenue flow they bring. I think they should stop the binge model for new, original content. That is, release new seasons one episode at a time rather than drop them all at once.
I would probably watch more of their terrible shows if I could listen to commentary through an unsanctioned channel
Sense8, Travelers, Altered Carbon, basically there expensive science fiction.
Sure nailed it is fun but I won't miss it. The only one that I will truly miss is Big Mouth... but there are alternatives.
Apple TV+ is quickly becoming my science fiction go to and they seem to be going more than HBO route with a smaller catalog.