It makes some sense, when you have more options than you can handle you just stop thinking. There was this case with stores that sold jars of jam explained by Cialdini which shows that when people meet multiple decisions they often decline them all.
The big takeaway (for me) from this article is that streaming services are actively removing shows from their archives to save on residual payments.
So it's not just about a slowdown in new shows coming out, but also the loss of access to existing shows. For example HBO Max has entirely removed Westworld, a show that's not that old and just completed it's 4th and final season this year.
So the whole idea of "I'll watch this series later when I have time" that came with these large libraries is going away.
Are we heading back to syndication? Or a more generalized version of the "Disney Vault"?
That or this will just send everyone back to piracy.
I'd argue that it isn't sad but in fact quite wonderful that piracy is an option. These companies don't deserve our sympathies. They are doing it to themselves.
In a sense, I agree with you. But in another sense, I think it’s important to remember that copyright is a restriction on people’s behavior that does not naturally exist, but has been created by law.
It’s easier to see the moral case for this if we think about cases other than the simple “pirating” of a show. For example, preservation. Doctor Who is a popular show that predates the practice of saving the original tapes. There are several episodes that have been lost forever because the BBC did not routinely record (or did routinely record over) their own broadcasts. Many other episodes were thought to be lost, but thanks to enterprising individuals who made unauthorized copies, have since been preserved. Is the world worse off or better off with those people?
Or take Star Wars. George Lucas famously hated that anyone could prefer the pre‐Special Editions of the original trilogy, and only grudgingly allowed it to be released once afterward, in a highly compressed anamorphic format on one set of DVDs. No other version has been released since. People who like the original special effects, dialogue, and editing have since done 4k scans of original theater prints from the 70s and 80s. People don’t deserve to be able to watch copies of those—legally speaking, the copyright holder Lucas (and now Disney) is the arbiter of that. But would a world without the option be better than our world today?
And remember, laws are capricious. The movie industry was terrified of home video. They thought it would materially damage them by removing the desire to watch movies in theater, where they made their money. (Remember MPAA president Jack Valenti testifying before Congress? “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”) The VCR came within one vote of being outlawed as a piracy tool by the Supreme Court. A 5–4 decision. Because it survived, though, the people received a huge benefit from the new capabilities (like time shifting and media shifting) provided by this technology. And the movie industry benefited too, earning billions of dollars by embracing this new market… after they had tried to murder it in its crib.
How would today’s world look if one justice had voted the other way?
> But in another sense, I think it’s important to remember that copyright is a restriction on people’s behavior that does not naturally exist, but has been created by law.
So is physical property ownership. Someone not walking up to your car and taking it from you at the end of a shotgun is a restriction placed on everyone by law. The only natural right you have to your car is whether you can keep it from everyone else by sheer force.
And yes, just like piracy, people can still break the law and take your car regardless. But you at least have the force of the state on your side.
> So is physical property ownership. Someone not walking up to your car and taking it from you at the end of a shotgun is a restriction placed on everyone by law. The only natural right you have to your car is whether you can keep it from everyone else by sheer force.
These are interesting points, and worth making. But it's quite clear that the most pirated films/Tv programmes are the ones that have recently been released and are freely available if you're willing to pay.
TikTok and other social media need to be fed culture to have something to work with. Enough people watching current TV shows is what allows TikTok riffs and commentary to get popular in the first place.
Case in point, AFAIK the most recent craze on TikTok (and subsequently, on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, as these days they're downstream from TikTok and just rehashing or commenting on it) is "Wednesday dance" and other memes related to the new Addams family show on Netflix.
Services trimming their libraries will certainly become more commonplace as they seek to cut costs and drive up profits. This will remove a giant reason to subscribe to them in the first place.
Compound this with ever more streaming services, and it is an easy bet people will turn back to piracy. In this case, I think it is an ease of access issue vs a cost issue. Having 3-4 streaming subs is still vastly cheaper than cable, but when shows start vanishing and libraries become smaller and smaller or filled with junk, people will look to alternatives.
These days, VPN's are cheap and it has never been easier or better to set up a media streaming app in your own home. I've seen one that automatically downloads shows and movies with no input from the user. That is the type of ease of use coupled with the notion that content will always be available is likely to be a draw for a lot of people.
I know some people swear they can never go back to anything less after watching one 4K show, but I, for one, have no problem watching lower-quality media when there's no convenient way to get a high-quality version.
When there's no other way, I'd agree with you. I personally can't watch low quality videos because it strains my already very poor eyesight (even with prescription glasses on). HD videos have a kind of soothing affect on my eyes.
I wouldn't mind a disc if they removed all the ads from them. Put it in, play the movie. It's funny to watch something on DVD from decades ago to see ads for things released decades ago.
> Assuming you're talking about blu ray rather than dvd here too because my TV supports 4k HDR, and the last dvd player I owned was 480p.
My DVD player requires a separate input on the TV, controller, and wall socket. The player needs to be physically accessible too, and you need to store physical discs.
Changing DVDs is significantly more involved than changing a movie on Netflix, and finding something that you know you have on DVD Vs on Netflix required someone else to have correctly put the disk away.
I have a blue ray dvd player and the quality seems.. fine. I don’t really know. It’s quiet as well, and I always put my dvds away where they go.
And anyway, it’s not really competing with Netflix since I sort of gave up on Netflix because it didn’t reliably carry most of my favorite movies and tv shows. It’s a choice between loading a dvd or not being able to watch it, not between loading a dvd vs clicking on Netflix. I’m in Europe so the selection is even worse.
>That or this will just send everyone back to piracy.
I understand you're using "everyone" in a rhetorical sense but just to level-set about the real difficulties of piracy for non-techie viewers:
- downloading videos via bittorrent or visiting dubious warez websites of illegal videos with the risks of javascript popup malware
- downloaded videos (e.g. .mkv files) not easily playable on smartphones, tablets, or TVs that have the built-in "smart os" such as Android TV and Amazon Fire Stick.
A lot of viewers don't have media computers or laptops hooked up to TVs to take advantage of downloaded pirated videos. Even fewer will set up a DLNA media server so that their tablets can stream self-hosted videos.
This leaves only the computer-literate geeks as the group that can substitute paid streaming with piracy. This small subset is irrelevant to streaming companies. For everyone else, they just pick 1 or 2 streaming subscriptions (e.g. Disney+ for the kids and HBO MAX for the adults) -- and just live with the fact that their choices of shows are more limited and the existing ones may even disappear.
So "everyone" switching to piracy is a really small group of people.
I dunno. During the earlier age of piracy (before the described "golden age"), I was seeing talk from a lot of less-computer-literate people who were doing just fine with pirating shows.
More recently, there's even a new kind of piracy that has arisen: pirate streaming websites, where you just go and watch whatever shows in the browser, and as long as you have a decent adblock, you proooobably won't get a nasty virus.
Where there's a will, there's a way, and there's a lot of will among younger people who aren't already indoctrinated into the idea that we must accept what shows our corporate overlords give us.
>pirate streaming websites, where you just go and watch whatever shows in the browser, and as long as you have a decent adblock, you proooobably won't get a nasty virus.
These existed a decade ago too, yo be fair.
In reference to the computer literate part of your comment, my parents aren't tech savvy at all, and probably never pirated a movie in their lives until some guy came along with a £200 android TV box that just worked last year.
> there's a lot of will among younger people who aren't already indoctrinated into the idea that we must accept what shows our corporate overlords give us.
This sort of dismissal of "it's the young people" and talking about "corporate overlords" having some kind of magical control is getting tiring here. It's not a meaningful discussion, it's just navel gazing.
I would normally agree or even be the one making that point. But interestingly, and this hasn't of course always been the case, it's currently the non techies in my circle that are downloading pirated content and buying cheap android ip tv boxes. The techies don't want hassle and risk and just pay for streaming, they're busy enough with myriad geeky hobbies. The non techies are blissfully unaware of any risk and just want free tv.
The person who showed me the home media server is a SAHM (stay at home mom) with 0 tech background. She streams the her library to all her devices. Set up was trivial.
It's easy enough to run an HDMI cable from the laptop to the TV. Over Thanksgiving, I mentioned something about piracy and all of my twenty-something non-computer-literate nieces quickly mentioned their favorite pirate sites. I don't pirate often, but now I know who to ask if I ever need to.
These media streaming programs are trivial to set up. Just as trivial to stream to mobile devices in the home. No "warez" no "malware". The media server itself downloads new content automatically. Making toast is more difficult.
> just to level-set about the real difficulties of piracy for non-techie viewers
You missed one item on your list:
- Any of the free video streaming sites. There's almost always one up at any moment, and all you need to use it is a web browser, and perhaps an adblock to remove the noise (and avoid an occasional crypto miner). These sites tend to disappear after a year or two, but are always replaced by new ones.
(As I understand it, they don't even host the content themselves - they're just a frontend with a search engine, aggregating links to multiple third-party players and video files.)
You might not get 4K quality there, but you'll usually get 1080p, which is more than most people get from Netflix anyway. Such sites are stupidly easy to use, have been popular with non-tech-savvy users for over a decade, and (AFAIK) in plenty of jurisdictions, they're 100% legal to use.
You probably can't get them working on a smart TV (I don't own one, so I can't say), but I guess that's just another reason to buy a dumb TV and a Chromecast instead.
You're not wrong in saying it's a harder path, but I guess for me anecdotally I know more non-techie people who are still pirating all their TV and movies than techie people.
Anyways, appreciate the different perspective, and the alternate use of "everyone". ;-)
Can/Should writers, actors, etc unions contractually obligate availability? Seems shitty for HBO to drop content just to avoid having to pay residuals.
Or tie it to copyright law. Products that aren't readily available lose their copyright protections so others can make that content available to the people. Actually writing the law in such a way that doesn't enable the media companies to come up with some sort of malicious compliance, like requiring a VPN to Nepal and a payment of $10,000 for each episode of an show, would be challenging but since many of these tricks are already known from the music industry, the most common ones could be addressed. Problem is that the media companies have multiple branches of government in their pocket so such a solution will always be theoretical.
No. Given the obvious counter from a studio is "sure, but we won't pay any residuals on that given we can't commit to a blank cheque for seventy years. And you'll have to be liable for the music rights."
For a moment, Netflix was so great because they had "all" the stuff! (not all, but a lot of good stuff). Now every company and their mother are retiring their contents so they can have their own smaller subscription service. I have a couple of them, and that's my limit on all these companies' greed; for anything else that happens to not be available, I feel no issue with appealing to Jack Sparrow.
Problem with piracy, torrent at least, is that finding older stuff tends to be difficult. But that's exactly the kind of contents companies are removing, so there would be not much to gain by going with them.
> Streaming isn't going away, but there will be more ads and higher prices, and we'll have to see what happens to content libraries.
They'll all be available to those who pirate.
When Netflix first started its streaming service it obviously couldn't compete when it came to the amount of content, but it did a fantastic job competing in terms of convenience. This is gone now. Netflix and all others are competing with each other now. They all have their own subscription, their own crappy apps, login forms, VPN blocking mechanisms and whatnot. It's a nightmare. Maybe they'll offer something better in the future when they notice that they're not really competing with other legal streaming services anymore but with piracy.
Did they do that in the past? Or will they just invest more into anti-piracy lobbyism, that ocassionally busts some ex-pat server farm half way around the world?
One would demand active change and interest in the user, the other is easy scape goating. The ugly truth is, the state has no interest in preventing piracy. Piracy keeps the poor dormant and busy.
Piracy reduces other crime and works like paracetamol on societal problems.
The glowy rock shall distract them from the end of the world.
Though if you look at the resulting basement culture aka quanon, gamergate etc., this "cure" has run its course.
Literally nobody considers this aspect, at all, ever.
Content providers compete with each other, yet all of them think watching something without paying is taking money from the mouths of their babies even when that content is already ad-supported and shown free on OTA (over the air) broadcasts.
Depth of government thinking on this is inversely proportional to depth of content lobbyist pockets.
They all learn the sentence: "panem and circensis" and other aspects of the roman culture equivalent in every ivy league school ive heard about. Its there. Its implicit.
My wife and I don't watch a ton of tv, but even with our couple of streaming services one can see how the bill starts to creep towards what traditional cable costs. I can't imagine watching commercials ever again.
I still think the og (Hbo) has the winning combination.
Thanks to a past life making all this streaming stuff work in the first place, we still subscribe to “ALL THE THINGS!!!”
We also tape[1] the shows we like, to more easily watch time-shifted. We could rely on provider DVRs, but when we first set this up, most didn't offer that, or only offered in terrible quality.
In recent years, we nearly stopped. In 2021, for example, I didn't tape anything. In 2022, I did again because not all brands' DVRs supported offline viewing, and we're happy about it as we now find ourselves having taped things that have been taken off the services we pay to make their libraries available. We can still watch these, even though they've been memory-holed by the brand.
If they keep this up, it will create a new market for an updated TiVo, at least as easy to use as a VCR (which the linked item is not).
PS. Note that in US, time-shifting is fair use. Getting it to work is unreasonably difficult. A consumer product that simplified this would be cool but if too easy (a) would need a war-chest to defend itself, and (b) in that defense could put fair use itself at risk.
I used to use an HD home run prime with rabbits ears and a plex server in my old apartment. They had a beta DVR that would scrub commercials (plex did).
In all honesty, I'm pretty burn out by how much content is out there. The most enjoyment I get from tv these days is watching classic drama 90s movies (Denzel Washington, Matt Damon, etc.)
It would look like Netflix of the past. Some IP was pulled because the owner didn't want it on Netflix at any price. Most was pulled because Netflix couldn't afford the rates, which they could if they had 10x revenue.
why do you want bigger productions? especially now where we have the new lord of the rings, the MCU, the DCU and a new avatar that will most likely be forgotten just as quickly as the previous one to show for bigger budget productions.
There comes a point where having more money adds nothing, and in a lot of genres that point is quite low. I'd imagine CGI/SFX/animation is the biggest scaling cost, very few genres use it that much to justify it.
I think Hollywood's decades long risk aversion and reliance on their 'formula' for success (big budget bling and actor's with audience draw) has skewed focus away from investing in creative writers/story tellors with vision. IMHO creative writers worth their salt don't tend to chase fame or their name in lights. Big budget mentality has lost sight of this and the reason most modern shows lack compelling story telling.
There was a period of about 8-10 years where I didn't think much about pirating content but recently I find myself leaning more towards the dark side because it is cheaper, quicker and more convenient.
The thing is it's not even necessarily cheaper or quicker but it is more convenient. Rather than a show being on one of half a dozen services you can have it all in one place, e.g. Plex, and you know it will always be there. Especially if you're starting a long running show that could be dropped from the service before you've finished.
> One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue ... The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.
~10 years ago Netflix was superior. With the shifting catalog and the pricing tiers for high-quality streaming, the value proposition is not as clear today.
To really understand the golden age of streaming TV, you have to know about the Netflix/Starz deal [1]
In ~2008 Netflix delivered DVDs by post, and the only people getting their video online were pirates and anime fans. So when Netflix approached Starz to license streaming rights nobody else wanted them, and Netflix got a great price for loads of content like recent Hollywood movies. Allowing them to offer a huge catalogue to US viewers for $10/month.
By 2012, when the contract came up for renegotiation, Hollywood had worked out that streaming rights were big business - and they figured their output was worth way more than $10/month. There were $100/month cable packages that got you less than you got from a $10/month netflix membership, that's a lot of money left on the table - so of course the deal didn't get renewed.
Easy—thanks to the first sale doctrine, Netflix doesn’t need any deal to rent out DVDs. They can just buy the DVDs off the shelf and rent them out.
If renting out physical media were considered a right of the copyright holder under US law, you can bet that Netflix wouldn’t have been able to come to a deal on that either.
I assume this is partly why it used to be that new movies went to rental first for a couple months before public sale. Because they’d charge the rental places a much higher cost per unit and they couldn’t just get them from the store.
Years ago there were a few companies[1] that tried a clever workaround for streaming broadcast TV. The scheme ultimately didn't hold up in the US, but I've always wondered what keeps Netflix from doing something similar with their physical discs. Controlled digital lending[2] isn't exactly settled terrain, but given their resources and increasingly precarious position you'd think Netflix would press the issue.
We are long holdouts on Netflix’s DVD service. We kept the subscription since it first came out in the 90s. It was the only way to get the latest releases easily, and some movies were only available on DVD and not streamed anywhere.
Then Netflix had to make a deal with with the studios to delay new releases on DVDs for 30 days on their rental service. So, when we were desperate to watch any new release on a Friday night, we would just go to Redbox and rent it. That made it pointless to keep the Netflix DVD service and we canceled the subscription.
Then I think Redbox was also forced to delay new releases. I’m fuzzy on timing, but I think the Redbox restriction came much later. So, no new releases on Redbox DVD either.
Now, we just rent or purchase any movie we want to watch on Prime. We’ll do a quick search if the movie is available on the other platforms and then just pay for it on Prime. $19.99 is our limit for a brand new movie. I’ll even instinctively start to just pay for a movie before I remember to check the other streaming services.
I still get the Redbox emails about new releases hitting the boxes and I always think, “We watched that a month ago.” I worry if Redbox will survive.
That is interesting. I was totally fine with watching even very old content on Netflix (I watched Buffy 3 times or so before they removed it), I wonder how many people, like you, mostly go for the latest release?
I wish there was just a standard protocol for making movies and music available on the global market and then a pay per view based payment system. Cut most of the middle men and maximize availability across the world (instead of just/first to the US like is still common for some reason). I think that would result in shows reaching maximum audiences at minimal prices. For all I care put some ad filled alternatives out there for cheaper viewing while you're at it.
I do want streaming without ads. I just don't want multiple subscriptions and apps etc that are all not really good.
Not quite what I think you're describing, but we functionally have that for music. For a while, pirated music was hugely popular; now, for a fixed subscription, you can choose between a few major providers and they each have a global catalogue (or pretty close to it, for the requirements of most users).
It's not as if Spotify et al. provide particularly good services, but they're convenient enough for most people.
Making life less convenient for users in terms of streaming video is going to be a hard sell. No one wants to pay more for a worse service with less choice, more restrictions and adverts.
No one can take it so long as you can actually play the media. I own a large music collection and I’ve used various optical formats for data backup for decades now. It is becoming more of a challenge, build your own computer and some cases don’t even have places to put that Blu-ray reader/burner. You can buy a couple extra devices and just keep them stored but in 10 years SATA connectors might be phasing out.
There are real market pressures working against physical media. Live digital copies are easier, faster, more flexible.
Cinema paradiso is still around. Or musicmagpie, which I find to be more streamlined than eBay, but still the same concept; second hand purchase and then sell when you're done. Paradiso lets you have a limited number at one time, auto sending when you've shipped current media back.
Things I can think of that have changed since streaming started that are making streaming less attractive.
1. weekly releases of shows (episodes) instead of the whole thing
2. creep of advertising, including 'watch this rubbish trailer before we play your choice'
3. studios pulling their series/movies from netflix and trying to launch their own
The last one really annoys me. In the UK there is, last time I looked, apparently 70+ streaming services. I'm not paying 70x £8 per month for TV. Even just netflix, disney, and amazon is £30 or so a month. Now there's Paramount trying hard as well by pulling Disco off netflix. Well, sorry, that wasn't enough to make me pay for Paramount. Similarly with Disney pulling all the Marvel films off netflix.
It's as if the movie studios haven't learnt from Spotify/Apple Music/Napster etc. One service with all the things.
Whatever service has the least commercials and little time commitment is basically what I watch.
Right now I like YouTube premium. Although YouTube is making big mistakes like removing the downvote count. Gaslighting your users to appease creators and control narrative is not good.
I'm about to cut YouTube TV though. Its all commercials and bad content. Even CNBC is unwatchable to me.
Bloomberg as well. I have a $400 subscription to Bloomberg and they're still showing me commercials its absurd. How greedy can you be. I cant take that repeating chime and same 3 commercials hitting me in the head in the morning. Going to have a seizure.
I've found https://entertainmentstrategyguy.com to be a much better source of intel on streaming; he provides detailed breakdowns and actually takes apart what little data the streamers provide on viewership, performance metrics, and finances.
I would not consider the golden age of streaming over, btw. I'm not sure that ever existed. The entertainment industry is constantly being churned by economic conditions, trends, tastes, technology, etc.
I found myself alternating from one service for a few months to another for the next few. I keep prime all the time because of the other benefits. Im not the target audience of subscription services though as ive frequently gone months without subscribing to any
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadSo it's not just about a slowdown in new shows coming out, but also the loss of access to existing shows. For example HBO Max has entirely removed Westworld, a show that's not that old and just completed it's 4th and final season this year.
So the whole idea of "I'll watch this series later when I have time" that came with these large libraries is going away.
Are we heading back to syndication? Or a more generalized version of the "Disney Vault"?
That or this will just send everyone back to piracy.
No, but then neither do we deserve to watch their shows. Just as they have no inherit right to our money, we have no inherit right to their product.
It’s easier to see the moral case for this if we think about cases other than the simple “pirating” of a show. For example, preservation. Doctor Who is a popular show that predates the practice of saving the original tapes. There are several episodes that have been lost forever because the BBC did not routinely record (or did routinely record over) their own broadcasts. Many other episodes were thought to be lost, but thanks to enterprising individuals who made unauthorized copies, have since been preserved. Is the world worse off or better off with those people?
Or take Star Wars. George Lucas famously hated that anyone could prefer the pre‐Special Editions of the original trilogy, and only grudgingly allowed it to be released once afterward, in a highly compressed anamorphic format on one set of DVDs. No other version has been released since. People who like the original special effects, dialogue, and editing have since done 4k scans of original theater prints from the 70s and 80s. People don’t deserve to be able to watch copies of those—legally speaking, the copyright holder Lucas (and now Disney) is the arbiter of that. But would a world without the option be better than our world today?
And remember, laws are capricious. The movie industry was terrified of home video. They thought it would materially damage them by removing the desire to watch movies in theater, where they made their money. (Remember MPAA president Jack Valenti testifying before Congress? “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”) The VCR came within one vote of being outlawed as a piracy tool by the Supreme Court. A 5–4 decision. Because it survived, though, the people received a huge benefit from the new capabilities (like time shifting and media shifting) provided by this technology. And the movie industry benefited too, earning billions of dollars by embracing this new market… after they had tried to murder it in its crib.
How would today’s world look if one justice had voted the other way?
So is physical property ownership. Someone not walking up to your car and taking it from you at the end of a shotgun is a restriction placed on everyone by law. The only natural right you have to your car is whether you can keep it from everyone else by sheer force.
And yes, just like piracy, people can still break the law and take your car regardless. But you at least have the force of the state on your side.
Possession grants no "natural" rights by itself.
Good point. Property implies violence.
Point for the pirates, I mean.
Case in point, AFAIK the most recent craze on TikTok (and subsequently, on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, as these days they're downstream from TikTok and just rehashing or commenting on it) is "Wednesday dance" and other memes related to the new Addams family show on Netflix.
Compound this with ever more streaming services, and it is an easy bet people will turn back to piracy. In this case, I think it is an ease of access issue vs a cost issue. Having 3-4 streaming subs is still vastly cheaper than cable, but when shows start vanishing and libraries become smaller and smaller or filled with junk, people will look to alternatives.
These days, VPN's are cheap and it has never been easier or better to set up a media streaming app in your own home. I've seen one that automatically downloads shows and movies with no input from the user. That is the type of ease of use coupled with the notion that content will always be available is likely to be a draw for a lot of people.
I know some people swear they can never go back to anything less after watching one 4K show, but I, for one, have no problem watching lower-quality media when there's no convenient way to get a high-quality version.
Some of us lived through the RealPlayer era.
My DVD player requires a separate input on the TV, controller, and wall socket. The player needs to be physically accessible too, and you need to store physical discs.
Changing DVDs is significantly more involved than changing a movie on Netflix, and finding something that you know you have on DVD Vs on Netflix required someone else to have correctly put the disk away.
Lastly, those things are just noisy as hell.
And anyway, it’s not really competing with Netflix since I sort of gave up on Netflix because it didn’t reliably carry most of my favorite movies and tv shows. It’s a choice between loading a dvd or not being able to watch it, not between loading a dvd vs clicking on Netflix. I’m in Europe so the selection is even worse.
I understand you're using "everyone" in a rhetorical sense but just to level-set about the real difficulties of piracy for non-techie viewers:
- downloading videos via bittorrent or visiting dubious warez websites of illegal videos with the risks of javascript popup malware
- downloaded videos (e.g. .mkv files) not easily playable on smartphones, tablets, or TVs that have the built-in "smart os" such as Android TV and Amazon Fire Stick.
A lot of viewers don't have media computers or laptops hooked up to TVs to take advantage of downloaded pirated videos. Even fewer will set up a DLNA media server so that their tablets can stream self-hosted videos.
This leaves only the computer-literate geeks as the group that can substitute paid streaming with piracy. This small subset is irrelevant to streaming companies. For everyone else, they just pick 1 or 2 streaming subscriptions (e.g. Disney+ for the kids and HBO MAX for the adults) -- and just live with the fact that their choices of shows are more limited and the existing ones may even disappear.
So "everyone" switching to piracy is a really small group of people.
More recently, there's even a new kind of piracy that has arisen: pirate streaming websites, where you just go and watch whatever shows in the browser, and as long as you have a decent adblock, you proooobably won't get a nasty virus.
Where there's a will, there's a way, and there's a lot of will among younger people who aren't already indoctrinated into the idea that we must accept what shows our corporate overlords give us.
These existed a decade ago too, yo be fair.
In reference to the computer literate part of your comment, my parents aren't tech savvy at all, and probably never pirated a movie in their lives until some guy came along with a £200 android TV box that just worked last year.
> there's a lot of will among younger people who aren't already indoctrinated into the idea that we must accept what shows our corporate overlords give us.
This sort of dismissal of "it's the young people" and talking about "corporate overlords" having some kind of magical control is getting tiring here. It's not a meaningful discussion, it's just navel gazing.
And then there's the young ones :)
You missed one item on your list:
- Any of the free video streaming sites. There's almost always one up at any moment, and all you need to use it is a web browser, and perhaps an adblock to remove the noise (and avoid an occasional crypto miner). These sites tend to disappear after a year or two, but are always replaced by new ones.
(As I understand it, they don't even host the content themselves - they're just a frontend with a search engine, aggregating links to multiple third-party players and video files.)
You might not get 4K quality there, but you'll usually get 1080p, which is more than most people get from Netflix anyway. Such sites are stupidly easy to use, have been popular with non-tech-savvy users for over a decade, and (AFAIK) in plenty of jurisdictions, they're 100% legal to use.
You probably can't get them working on a smart TV (I don't own one, so I can't say), but I guess that's just another reason to buy a dumb TV and a Chromecast instead.
Anyways, appreciate the different perspective, and the alternate use of "everyone". ;-)
Sure.
Will they?
No. Given the obvious counter from a studio is "sure, but we won't pay any residuals on that given we can't commit to a blank cheque for seventy years. And you'll have to be liable for the music rights."
For a moment, Netflix was so great because they had "all" the stuff! (not all, but a lot of good stuff). Now every company and their mother are retiring their contents so they can have their own smaller subscription service. I have a couple of them, and that's my limit on all these companies' greed; for anything else that happens to not be available, I feel no issue with appealing to Jack Sparrow.
Problem with piracy, torrent at least, is that finding older stuff tends to be difficult. But that's exactly the kind of contents companies are removing, so there would be not much to gain by going with them.
They'll all be available to those who pirate.
When Netflix first started its streaming service it obviously couldn't compete when it came to the amount of content, but it did a fantastic job competing in terms of convenience. This is gone now. Netflix and all others are competing with each other now. They all have their own subscription, their own crappy apps, login forms, VPN blocking mechanisms and whatnot. It's a nightmare. Maybe they'll offer something better in the future when they notice that they're not really competing with other legal streaming services anymore but with piracy.
One would demand active change and interest in the user, the other is easy scape goating. The ugly truth is, the state has no interest in preventing piracy. Piracy keeps the poor dormant and busy. Piracy reduces other crime and works like paracetamol on societal problems. The glowy rock shall distract them from the end of the world.
Though if you look at the resulting basement culture aka quanon, gamergate etc., this "cure" has run its course.
Literally nobody considers this aspect, at all, ever.
Content providers compete with each other, yet all of them think watching something without paying is taking money from the mouths of their babies even when that content is already ad-supported and shown free on OTA (over the air) broadcasts.
Depth of government thinking on this is inversely proportional to depth of content lobbyist pockets.
I still think the og (Hbo) has the winning combination.
"Had"
Thanks to a past life making all this streaming stuff work in the first place, we still subscribe to “ALL THE THINGS!!!”
We also tape[1] the shows we like, to more easily watch time-shifted. We could rely on provider DVRs, but when we first set this up, most didn't offer that, or only offered in terrible quality.
In recent years, we nearly stopped. In 2021, for example, I didn't tape anything. In 2022, I did again because not all brands' DVRs supported offline viewing, and we're happy about it as we now find ourselves having taped things that have been taken off the services we pay to make their libraries available. We can still watch these, even though they've been memory-holed by the brand.
If they keep this up, it will create a new market for an updated TiVo, at least as easy to use as a VCR (which the linked item is not).
PS. Note that in US, time-shifting is fair use. Getting it to work is unreasonably difficult. A consumer product that simplified this would be cool but if too easy (a) would need a war-chest to defend itself, and (b) in that defense could put fair use itself at risk.
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1. i.e. https://www.silicondust.com/product/hdhomerun-scribe-4k/
In all honesty, I'm pretty burn out by how much content is out there. The most enjoyment I get from tv these days is watching classic drama 90s movies (Denzel Washington, Matt Damon, etc.)
The more money the streaming companies charge, the more they can spend on bigger productions.
Imagine the level of content you could produce if every subscriber paid $50?
Edit: changed 1 million to 10 million after I actually googled their budgets.
Rings of Power and Wheel of Time is the level of content you can produce if you have unlimited budgets.
It would look like Netflix of the past. Some IP was pulled because the owner didn't want it on Netflix at any price. Most was pulled because Netflix couldn't afford the rates, which they could if they had 10x revenue.
There comes a point where having more money adds nothing, and in a lot of genres that point is quite low. I'd imagine CGI/SFX/animation is the biggest scaling cost, very few genres use it that much to justify it.
> One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue ... The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.
~10 years ago Netflix was superior. With the shifting catalog and the pricing tiers for high-quality streaming, the value proposition is not as clear today.
In ~2008 Netflix delivered DVDs by post, and the only people getting their video online were pirates and anime fans. So when Netflix approached Starz to license streaming rights nobody else wanted them, and Netflix got a great price for loads of content like recent Hollywood movies. Allowing them to offer a huge catalogue to US viewers for $10/month.
By 2012, when the contract came up for renegotiation, Hollywood had worked out that streaming rights were big business - and they figured their output was worth way more than $10/month. There were $100/month cable packages that got you less than you got from a $10/month netflix membership, that's a lot of money left on the table - so of course the deal didn't get renewed.
And Netflix has never been the same since.
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2012/02/29/technology/netflix_starz/in...
10 years later, why can't Netflix or a competitor work out a deal to do the same thing but streaming instead of DVD?
For example, a plan that let's you stream one new release per week.
If renting out physical media were considered a right of the copyright holder under US law, you can bet that Netflix wouldn’t have been able to come to a deal on that either.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo#Service and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FilmOn#Legal_issues
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_digital_lending
Then Netflix had to make a deal with with the studios to delay new releases on DVDs for 30 days on their rental service. So, when we were desperate to watch any new release on a Friday night, we would just go to Redbox and rent it. That made it pointless to keep the Netflix DVD service and we canceled the subscription.
Then I think Redbox was also forced to delay new releases. I’m fuzzy on timing, but I think the Redbox restriction came much later. So, no new releases on Redbox DVD either.
Now, we just rent or purchase any movie we want to watch on Prime. We’ll do a quick search if the movie is available on the other platforms and then just pay for it on Prime. $19.99 is our limit for a brand new movie. I’ll even instinctively start to just pay for a movie before I remember to check the other streaming services.
I still get the Redbox emails about new releases hitting the boxes and I always think, “We watched that a month ago.” I worry if Redbox will survive.
I do want streaming without ads. I just don't want multiple subscriptions and apps etc that are all not really good.
It's not as if Spotify et al. provide particularly good services, but they're convenient enough for most people.
Making life less convenient for users in terms of streaming video is going to be a hard sell. No one wants to pay more for a worse service with less choice, more restrictions and adverts.
When I want to watch a movie I buy a DVD from eBay for a few bucks. Same with music.
No one can take it away, it’s cheap and convenient enough… I’m happy to wait a couple of day for delivery.
There are real market pressures working against physical media. Live digital copies are easier, faster, more flexible.
It would be nice to have access to a big catalogue without pirating, and I don't mind waiting 2/3 days.
1. weekly releases of shows (episodes) instead of the whole thing
2. creep of advertising, including 'watch this rubbish trailer before we play your choice'
3. studios pulling their series/movies from netflix and trying to launch their own
The last one really annoys me. In the UK there is, last time I looked, apparently 70+ streaming services. I'm not paying 70x £8 per month for TV. Even just netflix, disney, and amazon is £30 or so a month. Now there's Paramount trying hard as well by pulling Disco off netflix. Well, sorry, that wasn't enough to make me pay for Paramount. Similarly with Disney pulling all the Marvel films off netflix.
It's as if the movie studios haven't learnt from Spotify/Apple Music/Napster etc. One service with all the things.
They have learned from those services - none of those make any money.
Right now I like YouTube premium. Although YouTube is making big mistakes like removing the downvote count. Gaslighting your users to appease creators and control narrative is not good.
I'm about to cut YouTube TV though. Its all commercials and bad content. Even CNBC is unwatchable to me.
Bloomberg as well. I have a $400 subscription to Bloomberg and they're still showing me commercials its absurd. How greedy can you be. I cant take that repeating chime and same 3 commercials hitting me in the head in the morning. Going to have a seizure.
I would not consider the golden age of streaming over, btw. I'm not sure that ever existed. The entertainment industry is constantly being churned by economic conditions, trends, tastes, technology, etc.