A decade and a half on from the Pirate Bay trial, the winds have begun to shift. On an unusually warm summer’s day, I sit with fellow film critics by the old city harbour, once a haven for merchants and, rumour has it, smugglers. Cold bigstrongs in hand (that’s what they call pints up here), they start venting about the “enshittification” of streaming – enshittification being the process by which platforms degrade their services and ultimately die in the pursuit of profit. Netflix now costs upwards of 199 SEK (£15), and you need more and more subscriptions to watch the same shows you used to find in one place. Most platforms now offer plans that, despite the fee, force advertisements on subscribers. Regional restrictions often compel users to use VPNs to access the full selection of available content. The average European household now spends close to €700 (£600) a year on three or more VOD subscriptions. People pay more and get less.
According to London‑based piracy monitoring and content‑protection firm MUSO, unlicensed streaming is the predominant source of TV and film piracy, accounting for 96% in 2023. Piracy reached a low in 2020, with 130bn website visits. But by 2024 that number had risen to 216bn. In Sweden, 25% of people surveyed reported pirating in 2024, a trend mostly driven by those aged 15 to 24. Piracy is back, just sailing under a different flag.
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They’re just keeping up with inflation like any rational actor would do. Why isn’t your wage doing the same?
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I told Netflix to suck it in 2013 and never looked back lol
Hi, yes its me, I am a won’t pay-er. Canceled Netflix the 2nd time in a year they jacked rates. Canceled Spotify the 2nd time in a year that they jacked rates. Canceling Hulu and D+ at the end of this month. I used to torrent everything before Netflix and when Hulu was free, started paying because it was cheap and easy to see all the shows I wanted. Now streaming is just as bad and cable plans used to be so I am setting up my new seedbox now and its cheaper to pay for the premium seedbox + stream from Jellyfin and I can get back to seeing all my shows that fractured off in to streaming services I didn’t pay for.
Honestly I am impressed at how far seedbox services have come, they are almost totally plug and play, very little configurations needed
Pretty much only pay for realdebrid and apple music
Covid hungover. Everyone saw these numbers on web services, streaming, gaming, etc and thought they miss an opportunity to milk it for double, or that their product is just too essential now to quit. That confidence just sped up the degradation.
for-profit products can’t face poverty. fuck this headline.
Its referring to content in this case, not wealth.
As in lacking content, or only having parts of content (season 1 & 2, and then nothing until season 7).
ahh that makes sense
Can we talk about the article saying that 96% of TV and film piracy is streaming?? That one blows me away. We all talk here about downloading our own files and then self-hosting, but apparently all of us account for less than 5% of all piracy? Tf?
I know several people who watch everything on some iptv website for free. It’s one of those that bombard you with a dozen popup ads and ad overlays. It doesn’t require any technical knowledge to (eventually) get it to play and you can watch what you want to. 96% seems a bit high, but it is really common. Most people aren’t as tech savvy as the average lemmy user.
Especially since a good ad blocker gets rid of all those ads.
It’s what I do. I know for myself that torrenting would be my personal rubicon. I wouldnt be able to do it, morally speaking, without reseeding, and then I would have to start investing in a home server and get really stuck-in. I’m just not ready to do that until I’m willing to fully commit.
Do Usenet.
tabula-rasa.pw is open for signups and I only mention this because I just posted it. This is an indexer, not a provider. You also need a provider which costs more
That’s why private torrent sites & Usenet Indexers are mostly ignored by law enforcement. There’s bigger fish to catch than going after a minority who goes through the trouble of downloading first and then watching it. Not to mention the even smaller part who automates their downloading through the likes of *arr.
I’d argue torrent streaming (Streamio) is a major reason why many public torrent sites died over the last few years: Streaming and the big amount of users coming for the convenience paints a much bigger target on sites.
Consider pirate sport streams which by their nature are usually watched live and not downloaded. I have no idea about numbers, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they made up a significant part of that 96%, because sports are freaking huge.
That makes a lot of sense actually.
That’s because a lot of people in this community are techies, most people don’t have the skills to setup a seed box so it’s much easier to just go to a streaming site in their phone browser
that would legitimately blow my mind because every single streaming site I’ve ever found was significantly more difficult to find in the first place than downloading a torrent program and ultimately transient because they’re a single point of failure that will get taken down.
No, really. That’s what most people do.
You know how most people would think you are a hacker if you started running commands in terminal/CLI? Same thing with torrenting. Torrenting is this scary program that hackers use to put malware on your computer.
My wife was raised by an IT guy and uses firefox for everything, and she is also scared by torrenting. She’s more educated on it, sure, but she’s still scared of it because she thinks the FBI will arrest her for downloading pirated software. She’s much more comfortable going to one of those sketchy streaming sites behind the protection of a good adblocker.
thats what i did last decade, have adblock oner full b
I’d add to that that even less know how to securely set up a (remotely accessible) seedbox resistant to getting hacked
Any CEO that thinks a user should roll over and accept having 12 separate accounts to stream everything they want, is either monumentally fucking stupid, or just a disingenuous, greedy fuck. I’ll stick to Stremio + RD and they can rot while their stock plunges. I do not care.
I think this stems from everyone on the board at these corporations having so much money that they drop hundreds of dollars on a whim basically everyday. They have no conception of a tight budget not accommodating another $20 a month.
I always have to remind myself of how disconnected these people are from our reality.
any ceo who (…) Is wither monumentally fuvking stupid
Almost uniformly, yes. Thats like half of what business school is for.
a disingenuous greedy lying fuck
Also yes. That’s the other half.
I never left piracy. Had a friends Netflix for a while but didn’t use it because the browser sucks. Got a few free Prime memberships, again piracy is easier.
I have Netflix, Hulu, and D+
Wife watches random stuff on them all, but I still rip the stuff we enjoy to keep a copy.
I don’t mind paying the piper, but fuck off I’m gonna let them decide when to pull the rug on shit I’m watching.
No but see not letting them take it from you is bad for the artists
Nah, when they lose the license on it and let it go back It’s not like they’re putting it some other place where I’m going to jump ship and buy it. They’ve absolutely ruined the market, No money lost, I’m not chasing TV shows around the internet with my money.
I’m paying for three services and basic cable. They’re not getting any more money out of me. And the artist got fucked the second they canceled the contract, that has nothing to do with me.
So obviously the solution is to threaten and punish absolutely everyone until it’s fixed, only punishment. God im brilliant for thinking of that.
The last time I borrowed a Netflix account every show or movie would start at 1080p and then negotiate itself down to like 240p over 3-4 minutes. I have a very fast connection that can stream 4K just fine elsewhere and Netflix’s settings were set to high quality. They are just cheapskates that throttle based on your account patterns.
You can only have 4K if you use fully approved hardware, filthy pirate. Or if you pirate.
If I could find an efficient and reliable way to watch sports, I would drop everything. Soccer is all I need. But man sports streaming is such a pain.
It’s a crying shame more people didn’t adopt AceStream. It functioned exceptionally well, when the streaming sites put up links (hashes basically) instead of just http5 web streams. The fact it wasn’t open source probably didn’t help, but it did have a modified VLC client and was truly P2P.
I’ve been happy with IPTV. For a 100 euros a year I can watch pretty much any football match that’s broadcasted + thousands of TV channels.
unlicensed streaming is the predominant source of TV and film piracy, accounting for 96%
96% from streaming? Wow, really? That’s almost nothing being contributed by boring old-fashioned downloaded media from things like bittorrent and that other one that’s totally not worth talking about.
You guys might as well just ignore those ancient, decrepit download services. What a total waste of your valuable resources! There are so many people out there with jailbroken Fire Sticks! It would be such a waste of your time going on a wild goose chase after imaginary evil communist nerds who buy mechanical hard drives and download “free” software that’s been pre-approved by their communal repository authorities.
The constant desire for growth inherent in capitalism fucking ruins everything. You’ve got near trillion dollar companies still pushing for growth. Everything just turns to shit as they pursue every last dime.
Now they have to remove civil rights to keep going and taking everything. Trump has created marshal law is the US capitol. He is planning the resources to do it in any US city in case of protest, which is a constitutional right.
Okay bit, hear me out: what if we call for reform, and hit you with a stick a cpuple times to see if anything shiny like old fashioned filling or whatever comes out?
See! Ol capitalism still bad a few food tricks up iys sleeve to innovate with!
“The average European household now spends close to €700 (£600) a year on three or more VOD subscriptions. People pay more and get less.”
Lol, not me.
I’m proudly bellow average.
Please, threaten me with more exclusives. Please, put more excerpts for shows to promote your network exclusives, and see what I do.
