Love how it doesn’t mention the fact that services are getting objectively worse content as they stretch thin, are increasing their prices across the board, and cracking down on password sharing which was previously touted as a benefit.
Exactly. There's too many platforms, not enough quality content on any one of them, and weaponized greed. Worse, these streaming services have "inspired" every asshole executive out there to make everything under the sun a subscription model.
The anti-piracy measures drive me to piracy, personally. There's no technical reason I shouldn't be able to stream 4K in Firefox, but Netflix won't let me. I have to jump through hoops just to get 1080p, even. Same with most other services. I pirate shit I'm already paying for.
Have done this several times for content on Disney+. I have an ultrawide, HDR1000 display. The movie I'm trying to watch is in 21:9 and available in HDR. Why in God's name are you delivering it in SDR and in a letterboxed 16:9 which is in turn pillarboxed on my display?!
The shift really proves that Gabe Newell was right and that piracy is a service issue and that, for a time, the many services available were worth paying for.
It was honestly really crazy to me when I was excited to see a game on sale, only to remember how I used to pirate everything. Steam has made it legitimately easier to buy games in so many cases.
I sometimes still do pirate games, especially if it's from a publisher I don't respect or the cracked version is known to run better, but I buy almost all of my games now days.
I've actually started setting up a home server for pirated movies and shows and getting rid of the couple streaming services I have.
I know a lot of people idolize him, and that's probably not healthy, but he just gets it. Provide value and convenience for consumers, and consumers will stick around. Be an inconvenience while squeezing consumers for money, and we'll leave with a parrot on our shoulders and a one-finger salute.
That's what happens when you're not beholden to shareholders.
The EUIPO speculates that financial pressures, like inflation, means that people have less money to spend on entertainment. This can be seen in the way that fewer people are signing up for Netflix or Amazon Prime – and some are even cancelling their subscriptions altogether.
Ah yes, that's the only reason. Not that streaming services are offering less content and functionality for more money, that can't be it.
I'm sure that economics is part of it. But I think the larger issue is the fact that you need 9 streaming services now just to see the shows you'd want. And then these streaming services are starting to remove the things people paid for. I set up a Plex server and just use that to watch things now.
The article wonders why would anyone pirate, let us give him the reason:
I forgot to add
Also wanna add:
It’s worth noting that although piracy is up, the rates are still far lower than they were 20, 10 or even five years ago. Whether people continue to access content illegally remains to be seen – hopefully this is just a ‘blip’ and rates of theft begin to fall again as the economy recovers.
I can't be bothered to pull back all the layers of naive optimism in just these two sentences.
Yep. Stop making shit deals and 100 different services to subscribe to and people will go back to paying for things. Gaben is the only smart one.
Hmmmmm. Let's see here.
People don't like cable, because it's too expensive and inconvenient
People start pirating
People like having 2-3 streaming services that show everything, without ads, for much cheaper even combined than cable. They stop pirating.
People don't like having 20-30 streaming services that show only a little in each service, NOW WITH ADS!?!?! and that become MUCH more expensive than cable ever was.
People start pirating again......
I wonder what happened?!?!
It's almost like making it nearly impossible to watch what we want and, at the same time, octupling our bills, while also increasing the cost of each would, somehow, force people into the desperation of piracy. Huh. Who woulda thunk it.
Let's not forget random pulling of content so that you can never tell if what you want is actually on any given service at any given time. This was the final straw that led me to rebuilding my own media collection.
I 100% believe this. The video streamers are getting too greedy and pushing out too much subpar content. When it was affordable and easy to find what you want streaming was great. Now it's expensive and stuff in on 12 different platforms.
Also most of what I watch is older so everyone on the creative and production side has been paid the only ones making money at this point are the studio fat cats.
Ads. It's all because of ads. There is a low tolerance by way more people now, and piracy is more convenient than putting up with platforms that can't build a UX to save their lives, and then put in ads. Fuck em, let them die.
I have subscriptions (and shared subscriptions) to... seven services that I can think of in 20 seconds.
Yet, time and time again, I try to figure out if what I want to watch is covered by one of them (not trivial to figure out), and end up falling back on piracy probably around 50% of the time.
Now that every fucking content owner has its own subscription plan, it makes subscriptions pointless because it's spread so damn thin.
Wow that wording, trying to make pirating sound like an evil crime lol. I feel no moral negativity pirating. In fact, my conscience is clean and I feel morally obligated to, considering how expensive they are making services.
I think reading between the lines is the real story: when they get greedy, pirating puts them I check and causes pricing to become affordable and people stop pirating. Once people are not pirating, greed increases and pirates have to return to put them in place again.
In conclusion... we need pirates to balance things out, this pirating is a necessity in our modern age..
You are welcome everyone, I am doing my part for myself and I am doing my part for you.
If not, we can expect to see legal channels raising their prices again to cover the losses caused by piracy.
what a shitty take. Well, anyone who has better memory than only one month back can realize that the reason the people turned to piracy was that they raised their prices. There is no loss caused by piracy. They only missed potential gains. And the reason they raised their prices were not because they were loosing money. Was because they needed to "grow infinitely". If the free market evangelists are right, the free market will self regulate and the prices will go down in order to attract back the lost customers lol
I believe it was Gabe Newell who said the best way to avoid piracy is by making legitimate purchasing easier and/or better.
In the early history of streaming services, you could get access to a lot of content in a straightforward way for not much money. People started doing that instead of pirating. The corporations got greedy, they made the services worse and increased the price to the point that piracy is preferable again.
And I don't have the least amount of sympathy. Yarr matey.
Guess what’s also been increasing? Prices.
Guess what also has refused to go up? Wages
Guess what also been increasing? The number of streaming platforms trying to out bid their competitors. You know what else is increasing? The number of streaming platforms going after account sharing and they wonder why people are going back to piracy. Piracy is king and no one will be able to stop it.
I just cancelled my Netflix that I had for like 10 years. Total shit nothing to watch.
Now there’s a million services, everything is plus. Paramount+, Disney+, Nutsack+
Even if I wanted to pay for all that shit, everyone has their own shitty app I have to install and configure and have a login and fuck you.
It’s just easier for me to torrent what I want.
hopefully this is just a ‘blip’ and rates of theft begin to fall again as the economy recovers.
If not, we can expect to see legal channels raising their prices again to cover the losses caused by piracy.
This is a crazy thing to write. Every streaming service already has their prices set at whatever they think will maximize profit. If they raise prices in response to piracy, they'll push even more people away.
If anything, piracy will serve as competition, and it will cause the streaming services to lower prices.
It's not just streaming services that have turned to shit. Society as a whole has been enshittified because shareholders and directors are chasing the dollar.
Reddit started charging out of their butt for API access, and had killed off 95% of third party apps in the process.
YouTube is downright unusable without a Premium subscription or uBlock Origin. Every content creator meanwhile risks demonetization if their videos are too kid-friendly or too inappropriate, and now have to fill half their videos with endorsements for shitty mobile games like Raid: Shadow Legends if they want to break even.
Porn sites are now astroturfed by e-girls shilling their $20/month OnlyFans pages.
Online dating apps are now a carbon copy of one another, are owned by an oligopoly of big corporations and charge you the same price of four WoW subscriptions for basic features like unlimited swipes, seeing who liked you, etc.
Even real life sucks now. Enjoy paying 70% of your monthly income to pay off some filthy rich landlord's mortgage while the rich continue to snap up properties, all while the wealthy continue to brainwash sheep into voting against their best interests.
It's tot BUY SOME SHIT! ally nothi BUY SOME SHIT! ng to do BUY SOME SHIT! with th BUY SOME SHIT! ere be BUY SOME SHIT! ing way to BUY SOME SHIT! o many a BUY SOME SHIT! ds to ma BUY SOME SHIT! ke stuff wa BUY SOME SHIT! tc BUY SOME SHIT! ha BUY SOME SHIT! bl BUY SOME SHIT! e.
Is a lobotomy needed to become a lobbyist?
1.) Article claims w/o any kind of source/data, that people cannot afford subscriptions 2.) Article warns that the big services have to raise their prices soon, because of losses made by piracy, which according to 1.) is caused by people not having enough money for the subscriptions
The article doesn't mention the shareholders, which get billions of wins by milking the subscribers stupid enough to sign up for the bullshit. ... oh, but the article mentions the poor artists/working people, which loose money because of online piracy. I almost forgot about the recent strikes, because the people actually producing the content don't get shit from the companies/shareholders.
Seriously, I'll cancel my last subscription right now, because I am feed up giving my money to shareholders, companies and lobbies who buy politicians and laws.
It's like no longer having one cheap and convinient way of seeing content makes people rather pirate things than paying 7 different platforms each one more expensive than the next and all of them trying to mess with you and your wallet in new and unexpected ways.
Streaming services are becoming increasingly fragmented, prices are increasing admist an inflationary environment, their service sucks.
But hey, online piracy is increasing, what a surprise!
The convenience of streaming services disappeared, this is just a natural consequence.
Hmm, wonder why. Couldn't be price increases on everything in existence.
This is what happens when you increase pricing, add advertising on top of increased pricing, remove your content from competitors and create your own additional platform, all while decreasing the quality and amount of content.
Often, piracy genuinely gives you a superior experience to the regular paid method. Lots of big service providers have been fucking us over in the past few years as well. So it's no surprise.
Glory to the piracy community!
Piracy is a service problem.
What service is $SHOW on? Doesn't matter, it's already in your favorite piracy site.
All I need is one VPN subscription.
The cost of rent/mortgages is going up, the cost of power is now higher than ever, and the cost of essentials (such as food and medication) is nearly double.
People are ditching streaming services because they can no longer afford them, and with price increases there it only makes things worse.
Piracy is the natural fallback, especially in a market where ownership has degenerated into rental. At this point, streaming might follow cable as folks lose access and realise the folly of rental over ownership. Piracy offers a superior service with a superior experience, and the rhetoric of "tHinK oF THe cREatIVes" is wearing thin in the public eye.
There are two main problems with digital piracy. First, it robs the creator of their income. It’s not just big companies who suffer – the people working behind the scenes lose out too.
No, robbery is theft under the threat of violence. Theft requires an intent to deprive the owner of their possession. Copyright infringement is not theft.
Businesses do not have a right to peoples' money.
Second, piracy is illegal. Penalties for stealing digital content vary from country to country, but they can be quite harsh. In the UK, digital pirates face up to five years in prison and a £5000 GBP fine (~$6000)
Criminal copyright infringement might attract prison time, but that has a fairly high bar, and is typically focused on profiting from piracy. Most copyright infringement is not a crime, but a civil offense - and it's only because of extensive lobbying by greedy businesses that crimes have been established on the books.
Outside of the US, copyright infringement can only attract actual damages, ie the proveable loss in income. Given that you can't easily prove that someone would've paid for the things they pirate, outside of the US there never really have been big cases of people downloading things being charged and facing significant fines.
What has changed?
The EUIPO speculates that financial pressures, like inflation, means that people have less money to spend on entertainment. This can be seen in the way that fewer people are signing up for Netflix or Amazon Prime – and some are even cancelling their subscriptions altogether.
The EUIPO suggests that rather than stop watching digital content online, these people are now turning to illegal sources to access the TV shows they watch. And that is why piracy rates are on the up.
Of course, it has nothing to do with the quality of these services going down as their prices go up...
2015: Share your Netflix between four people, everyone pays $4 per month, have access to 80% of all online content. The interface is shit but you keep up with it because it is cheap.
2023: You pay $20 for Netflix, pay $15 for Disney, pay $15 for Hulu, pay $10 for Amazon Prime, $15 for Discovery, $15 for Paramount, $15 for Youtube, have access to 50% of all online content. The interface is still shit and you wonder why you pay for that shit.
Joe Average: 🏴☠️😎🏴☠️😎🏴☠️😎🏴☠️😎🏴☠️😎🏴☠️ and the interface is easier than ever.
My 2013 Highest-End Smart-TV barely works with Youtube and no longer with anything else. But Burning Series still works marvellous. Another thing: "Consuming" pirated content is not "illegal" in Germany. It is a violation of private property which the rights owner can sue in a civil court. But as long as you don't use P2P services where you also upload - which would indeed be a fellony - he can not detect what you do and can not take any action against you - so One-Click-Hosters and Warez-Streaming is totally safe. And if the rights owner could find out about you he could at most send you a cease-and-desist-order with a one-time-fee of at max $100 because it is a minor incident. As far as I know there was never a user of Warez-Streaming who paid anything.
The only bad thing: DNS is nowadays filtered at the big Telcos and Providers which means I have to change the DNS inside my Routers to Cloudflare and Google. Which are a lot faster anyway.
I've started to pirate games again, which I never saw a reason to in 15 years. Simply because 2 hours refund window isn't enough for the crap they sell now. Performance from hell and half assed story after you left the tutorial.
Gamepass kind of stopped me a bit on that, but it's a subscription and only a matter of time till there's competition with exclusives and increased price.
Games also got too expensive, there's more competition than ever and I earn less money than my parents used to, I simply can't pay that much, yet the games start to cost 90€ upwards. So even if I buy a key, it's still 65€ or more, for an often broken game. No thank you.
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