It’s not like I dropped Netflix and opted to pirate their content instead because of their password sharing restrictions or anything. Nah, can’t be that.
Yeah back in the golden era of streaming you only needed Netflix, most of the shows on there were good, and everything would eventually be on there. So piracy was too much of pain in the ass to bother with to save $10 a month.
Now there’s 10 different streaming services most of them cost a lot more than $10 per month, you have to wade through pages of crap to find anything worth watching. If you hear about a show or movie that sounds interesting you can’t just wait for it to show up on Netflix. You have to go and search for which streaming service has the show you want and there’s a good likelihood you’re not subscribed to that one.
It’s now far easier to search on the 'bay for what you want to see (you have to do a search anyway) and they always have it. Yeah I guess you’re not instantly watching it, but you’re not instantly watching a thing you want to see on a streaming service now anyway, because have to scroll past a wall of crap to find anything.
My general feeling on piracy is that when you’re young and don’t have much money, you can’t afford to pay for it anyway, you may as well pirate it. When you get older and can afford it then you should pay for movies and video games and stuff. But when they make it more of a pain in the ass to buy something than it is to pirate things, then I dunno what to say. I have money and want to pay for a service that I can just chill and watch cool stuff, but they seem more interested in various schemes to impress shareholders than providing me the thing I’m willing to pay for.
You also won’t instantly watch anything on that streaming you found the movie you wanted on “justwatch” since you have to make a new account, go get your credit card to fill out the form, etc.
Netflix is getting worse month after month. Same for the streaming market as a whole. Much worse service than before, no accountability for failures on their part. I would gladly pay >15€ every month if I had at least FHD, no ads, all series / animes (excluding very nice ones ). Some months ago I did an experiment: subscribe to Netflix + Disney + hbo. I still had to torrent in order to get some content (not niche stuff) and good quality. If piracy is increasing, the culpability is also on streaming services. People are fed up of being stomped on
Pirate: Get pwned, bitch!
“Lets make 50 competing services while people have less buying power than ever. Everything will be $15 if you want anything of value. P.s. the thing you wanted leaves next month HURRY”
Cant imagine why people pirate /s
Netflix is so bad. Sometimes there is something i actually want to see, which is kinda rare. Then i can pick between three languages that i don’t speak.
Yep, there was a time when streaming services actually became easier than piracy. That was when there was basically just Netflix and Hulu. If you had both of those, you had everything.
Yuuup. I stopped for a few years until everything went to shit and i learned my lesson. Yar and download anything you want to keep.
Infinitely reproducible digital media has little inherent value. As the article acknowledges, the value proposition Netflix offered was convenience. If pirate sites offer more convenience than Netflix offers legitimate users, Netflix will lose. I find it baffling they are fucking around with ads and locking down access, making their experience worse. Same with Amazon Prime. It’s like they forgot their own business model.
Yo, Netflix! This one right here! Read it and understand plz
Exactly. Steam figured this out early on and it’s how they have maintained their dominance in the game distribution business. It’s the same lessons the entertainment streaming platforms must learn - your value is convenience. Add more walls between consumers and content? you will be cast aside.
CEOs: *Do a greedflation, raking in historic profits.*
Also CEOs: “Why does no one want to pay for a subscription?”
So here’s a novel idea, maybe stop driving people away from your business with constant rate-hikes, removal of content, killing new shows after 1 season, etc…
Step one, provide good service.
Netflix: Welp, I guess we should just pack it in.
The 3rd panel needs to be updated to somehow show that it’s also crazy expensive…
No - piracy, since it always carries at least some amount of difficulty and risk, is easy to compete against. And in fact, paid services, including Netflix, have proven that over and over. All it takes is to offer dependable convenience and quality and to treat customers well. People are always willing to pay a reasonable price for that.
The problem is that piracy becomes difficult to compete against when, as Netflix is currently doing, you shift from a business model of providing good service under fair terms for a reasonable price to a business model of providing crappy service under onerous terms for too much money, because the greedy, selfish, short-sighted sacks of shit at the top want to make even more obscene amounts of money. That’s the point at which piracy gains enough of an advantage to outweigh its difficulties and risks.
And when that’s the case, it’s pretty obvious what the real problem is.
There was a decent 5 year span in my life where the only time I ever pirated was to see British TV shows I wouldn’t be able to watch in the U.S. And if I could have paid the British TV license fee to see those, I would have paid it too. Because that would have been a total of two streaming services.
Even now that we’re down to one income we can afford two streaming services- one for video and one for music. But we sure as fuck can’t afford the dozen streaming services you need to have if you expect to watch all the programming people rave about as amazing.
I can’t afford Max and Disney+ and AppleTV+. If I want to find out why The Last of Us is so good and why The Mandalorian was a terrific show and how funny Ted Lasso is, and have the temerity to expect no ads when I’m already paying to watch, that alone would cost me almost $40 a month. Add Netflix and Amazon to that and it’s another $30+.
That is what I was paying for cable except with far less programming. On-demand and no ads are definitely advantages, but pay the same amount for a fraction of the programming advantages? Not for me.
Fr stop producing c-tier content for millions of dollars and just pay for better content and/or make it cheaper. I don’t need 14 generic action movies starring Ryan Reynolds and dozens of forgettable shows.
Also, don’t greenlight 100 shows if you only plan on giving 5 of them a second season, and you base that decision entirely on algorithms instead of genuine human feedback.
And please, for the love of god, let me look at a movie for longer than 1 second before you start automatically playing it because your almighty algorithm determined that it would force users to pick a movie faster. It’s the most annoying “feature” that makes me inclined to avoid Netflix as much as possible.And please, for the love of god, let me look at a movie for longer than 1 second before you start automatically playing it
This is a setting that’s on be default and buried in the user settings. It might also only be available to change on desktop (but will then set per profile for all devices), but this setting does exist and it’s so much better once you toggle it
What Jupiter Ascending are you talking about here?
It also doesn’t help that the studios all band together under banners that each launch their own streaming services and withhold all of their titles from the others. Maybe Netflix should spend less time fighting consumers and more time fighting the other cutthroat corporations who effectively make it impossible for their artists to choose their own distribution networks.
I’m back on the seas. Once I couldn’t leave my Netflix account set at my work site and my house, then they upped the price and added ads, it’s just easier to pirate anything I’d like to binge. My phone has like 640 GB of space. I can carry my own Netflix, with beer and hookers.
The trick is to make as much money as possible then jump ship to a newer competing company that has the ability to grow more before you leech it to death again
OH NO BOO HOO!!
Maybe you shouldn’t have become the monster you fought to destroy.
There was a resounding chorus of “DUUUUUUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH” that echoed across the land as Netflix discovers this reality.
Piracy isn’t even free! People pay thousands of dollars for hardware, and hundreds per year for service providers and electricity.
But they actually get what they want for that money: Being able to watch whatever you want, anytime, on any device, in high quality and without ads. It must be really hard for streaming services to compete with features as futuristic as that!
I think many people may view those sort of costs differently than the monthly subscription costs of Netflix, etc. Hardware is generally seen as a “one time” cost, and the added electricity costs are difficult to tease out from all the other variable electricity costs.
My personal argument is that I pay a monthly subscription ($15/mo) for a seed box, which is roughly the same cost as subscribing to a single streaming service.
Back before the password sharing crackdown, I had access to my parents’ Netflix account, and every once in a while, I’d try it out, but I’d always quickly get annoyed and would finish watching whatever I was watching via my Plex server.Opex vs capex
The difference is that we own the hardware. We can treat it as bad/good as we wants and we only have ourselves to blame if things go wrong. It also costs exactly the same whether we use it for 1 month or 100 years.
Seriously. I’m running a Synology with 12x16TB. That’d buy a bunch of months of streaming services…but this way actually gives me content to watch that I want to watch.
Just out of curiosity, what drive configuration are you running?
RAID6, one big storage pool. On that one, the bulk of it’s usage in a single shared folder for video, though I do have another carved out for a VMware datastore for the homelab, though it’s mostly just there for somewhere to stick VMs when I’m updating DSM on the smaller DS9220+ (4x8TB in RAID 5).
You’ve made my DS220+ blush
I’ve got a DS920+ on a shelf, and she’s super jealous of the Rackstation.
And offline. And in the quality you define. And on any device.
Gee whiz, can’t imagine why…
Netflix should’ve realised this would be the end result. The moment you needed 5-6 different streaming platforms to watch all the movies and tv shows you want, was the moment it became easier and significantly cheaper to pirate the content.
None of the big companies that decided to cash in ever stood a chance.
