Aint nobody pirating Netflix shows.
This. It’s just goyslop.
Access to pirated media hasn’t changed all that much since Netflix rose to prominence… Hmm, I wonder what has changed since then.
They know the game. Articles like this are to gain sympathy amongst the rest of society and cast pirates as ruthless criminals in order to gain public support for some future draconian legislation. We’ll probably see some SOPA-like legislation in the near future (probably after the election)
The access hasn’t changed much, but I feel like the knowledge got easier to access for a non-pirates.
2013 Netflix competed just fine. Piracy was mostly dead back then
But 2013 Netflix didn’t have to compete with Prime Video, Disney Plus, Paramount Plus, HBO Max, Apple TV, Hulu, Peacock, or any of the million “add-on” channels that Amazon uses as an excuse to paywall you off from the content.
The fact that they all run in their own UI, desperate the shove the next instalment of mediocrity down your throat, means that I’ve gone back to piracy. It’s just much easier to type what I’m after into Radarr or Sonarr than it is to go through the services to see what’s available. Sure, I can use Justwatch, but 80% of the time what I’m after isn’t on anything I have.
More competition should mean lower prices. How is competition diving prices up? Seems rigged.
It is rigged. Exclusive deals keep content restricted so they’re not directly competing; if you want that show you have to pay for service X. Or, you know, yarrrr.
prices are lower, piracy is nearly free for most, no?
It’s only competition if they provide similar products.
The current landscape is like farmers markets and butchers. Sure they both provide food, but they don’t really directly compete with eachother.
They certainly do compete with each other but it’s just a general misconception that competition lowers prices.
Pepsi and Coke have been competing with each other for decades and Coke has larger market share. So why doesn’t Pepsi just lower prices? Pepsi even has the diversified income of doing more than drinks. Lowering prices doesn’t lead to market share and Coke can just match the price.
Look at Apple’s growth in the American market, they can sell a product that is significantly more expensive than competitors and still gain market share.
I still think you’re looking at competition slightly wrong.
Coke and Pepsi do compete with eachother, along with the rest of the drink market. And overall prices in that industry are pretty low, some people will buy other competitors (the store brand Cola’s). But overall condition is working.
Apple only kinda competes. Sure a phone is a phone and a laptop is a laptop. But unless someone is entering the market for the first time. They already have applications they are looking to use, so if you need an iPhone, you need an iPhone, and same for a Mac. But if you’re an android or Windows user, suddenly you have a lot more choice because there is lots of competition!
The reason companies setup walled gardens, or pay for exclusive access to a piece of media is to erode competition. If a user wants that thing, they can only get it from that one place.
Are you’re saying competition doesn’t exist because products aren’t the same?
I’m trying to not disparage your argument here but if I go with your reasoning then I feel like there is no competition so that you can justify prices not going down. Where I believe competition simply doesn’t lower prices because capitalism desires more profit not less profit. Why fight over scraps when you can create a market by manipulating people into thinking: Green chat bubble mean poor so me no use RCS or open blue bubble because green bubble mean poor.
If competition didn’t exist for apple then they could give android an imessage app.
I’m saying the competition can only exist because products that actually fill the same need.
If you decide that you need product A, and have multiple options on where to get that, you have competition.
So if you’re looking for a Cola, you have options.
If you’re looking to play StardewValley, you have options where you want to buy it and which platform you want to play it on, you don’t need to buy a new game system to play it.
If you’re looking to play the latest Zelda game, you don’t have options, you need to buy a Switch.
If you’re looking to watch Ozarks, you don’t have options, you can only watch Netflix.
If you’re looking to just have something playing on TV and don’t really care what it is, you have options.
If you’re looking to listen to music, you have options, most of the steaming services have most of the music.
If you’re looking to be able to text friends, you have options, any phone will work.
If you’re looking to be able to iMessage friends and for your case only iMessage will work, iPhone is your only option.
Competition is complex and is more dependent on a consumer needs than just classification of what a product is. In your earlier point you used Apple as an example of a company that can increase prices despite competition, but really Apple is a prime example of a company putting up walls to an ecosystem making it really hard to leave once you’re in.
Generally in the current tech landscape there barely is any competition outside openish platforms. But with tech, you often can’t look at competition as product A vs Product B. Like while we can say that Window competes with OSx, it’s harder to say that a Mac laptop competes with a given Dell laptop (because what you can do with each OS is different to different people).
This is why I like to think of all the tv streaming services as different types of food stores. There is no supermarket that supplies everything, you’re forced to have memberships to the single butcher, the single milk man, the single bakery, etc. if you want a particular food, there is currently no (or very little) competition. You can certainly survive on just bread, and people are happy to do that, but that bakery can and will increase prices whenever because they aren’t really competing with the butcher.
Same amount of content, more players, outbidding each other, passing on those lovely reverse savings.
See if it was like music, with a massive back catalogue available to everyone, you’d have four or five services competing on price. But it isn’t. And it will suffer for that.
if it was like music
If it were* like music
When using be in an if clause for an unreal conditional sentence, always conjugate it as were, no matter what the subject is. Even if the subject is first-person singular (I) or third-person singular (he, she, or it), still use were with an if clause in unreal conditional sentences.
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/conditional-sentences-was-instead-of-were/
Calling people out for their grammar isn’t cool anymore; now we just let one another live in peace. You should try it.
I hope this is sarcasm. They weren’t being a dick, just educating people, which is a good thing
Your comment makes no sense to me. It was never cool, and it isn’t now.
If it was never cool, there’s no need to extra uncool it now.
When using be in an if clause for an unreal conditional sentence
*When using “be” in an “if” clause for an unreal conditional sentence
When referring to words, use quotation marks for clarity.
Great suggestion, thank you
Streaming services are middle men with exclusivity rights on products. They sell simular but different things, think of them like dealership repair shops, they both fix cars but they fix different cars.
I used to pay for Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and Paramount+. Then me and m wife noticed that every time we wanted to rewatch a show or a movie, it was not available on any of those. So now I only pay for Newsgroups.
I would like to see some evidence that the competition resulted in Netflix losing a lot of subscribers, and thus money, rather than not hitting their predicted revenue targets. Because I would bet it’s the latter and not the former. I don’t know of too many people who said, “well, I had Netflix, but Disney is doing streaming video now so I won’t be watching Bake-Off anymore.” They just ended up getting Netflix and Disney+.
For a while anyway. Now people are dropping these services due to the price hikes. Unless you downgraded your Netflix service when they added lower tiers with fewer options and ads, to maintain the basic Netflix service you had in 2016, you’re paying an additional $5 a month today.
Netflix and all the other streaming services are built upon the insane idea that there are an infinite number of new customers that will continue to sign up regularly. Some of them don’t even think you need all that much programming to draw them. Paramount+ has a fraction of the original programming of Netflix, Peacock, Apple, Amazon, etc. but still costs $10 a month and will most assuredly continue to raise its prices based on the idea that there are either an infinite number of Star Trek fans or they will have to raise their prices.
Same thing for me. I can also use Findroid on my Android phone with microG to watch stuff from my Jellyfin server. I think the Netflix app wouldn’t even work on my phone.
Most accurate piracy meme I’ve ever seen
sorry netflix i can’t hear your whining because I canceled after your second price hike. Fuck you. You sell nothing.
Funny, you had no problem competing in the past. Hmmmm wonder why that is…
🤏🎻
Netflix Buddy, friend, matey. If I have to pop open Google to find where I can watch something, find the best offers on pricing, and how to circumvent ads or whatever, or how to get Netflix to run on my devices without installing invasive crap or derooting my phone etc, and it’s actually quite expensive.
I’ll just do one search and not worry about whether I’ll have to fight ads, or automatic iffy quality settings, weird compression algorithms, device compatibility etc.
I was happy to hang up the peg leg when I could just VPN to usa and watch everything for the price of a lunch a month. I like simplicity, I enjoyed your more arty shows. It was you who changed the deal Netflix, not I. you decided being insanely profitable wasn’t enough and you needed infinite growth.
To be fair to Netflix before other networks took streaming seriously they were charging very little to license their content on Netflix. That’s why it had everything and was so good to be better than piracy. The royalties from Netflix couldn’t be enough to fund these networks. Even Netflix themselves as the studio has struggled substantially promoting these price hikes and the effective recreation of cable TV.
As they lose more of the licensed content they’re forced to focus on their own. Unfortunately for the just part they can’t compete with constant new mediocre shows and movies. The streaming industry as a whole has lost sight of what made it popular in the first place.
It’s the point that these jerk wuads are trying to run their own studios that’s causing the mainstay of the failure.
They’re expecting us to pay for their content failures.
Prior to everybody running their own crappy studio, They licensed what we wanted to watch, they negotiated decent prices and we watched it. If a studio didn’t make good content it didn’t get purchased.
It’s the whole discovery channel aliens, reality TV enshitification all over again.
They’re hemorrhaging, money they’ll stop producing the more expensive stuff they’ll produce the cheaper stuff people watch the cheaper stuff, the whole time screaming it’s the pirates fault.
The problem with this argument is that it’s still the same content, but studios and streamers expect more money for it. They aren’t asking for more money because they’re adding value, they’re asking for more because they feel entitled to more simply because they exist. With so many different streaming services and mostly nothing but exclusive content, there isn’t much to combat price hikes apart from piracy as these companies don’t compete based on service. Imagine if Walmart had exclusive rights to sell cereal or bread and it’s easy to see how tainted this market is. Pirating sidesteps the bullshit which is why they want to crush it.
Sure but it’s not like networks get anything from piracy so they have to content themselves with some rather than infinity. Especially for old content, it’s just not worth much individually. There’s also a looooot of massively overpaid and wasteful people involved in the major networks.
I know it’s not just Netflix but you know, poetic licence or something. also I don’t really give a shit about being fair to multibillion dollar corporations that do basically nothing pro social :p
Trying to run a VPN through a streaming service because the content you’re trying to watch is straight up unavailable in your region – but it’s trying to block the VPN, is the worst.
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.
Womp womp
The ever increasing subscription prices and rights holders pulling content have nothing to do with it at all I am sure. /s
Piracy predates Netflix, if it was hard to fight against then Netflix as we know it wouldn’t have taken off
Nah, it’s easy, just lower your prices and expand your catalogue. Nothing to it.
Oh, and stop paying your executives like kings.
So hard.
Boohoo magic piracy is stealing all my stuffs, its not that i’m losing the content wars to other, bigger, meaner shitheads
Good.
Netflix blaming piracy is just a warning that hostile legislation will pass and all of this will be shut down. Call me pessimistic.
What legislation? Piracy was never legal to begin with.
In my country, while it is illegal to download or to share pirated content, our law enforcement really only goes after the big fish doing the sharing. Sites may go down, but as an end user, my only real risk is getting a DMCA notice from my ISP if I’m sharing data (seeding torrents) while not using a VPN, and possibly having my service disconnected if I continue. While technically I could be in trouble with the law, it is not really a fear in my country to be a downloader of pirated media.
Stronger legislation could mean laws that entice law enforcement to act on smaller uploaders or even downloaders.
Luckily the speed at which new counter-measures to anti-piracy technologies can be developed is much faster than any legislative body can ever hope to move. It’s an impossible battle to win by enforcement alone. These companies need to realize that they need to provide actual value to retain customers and remain competitive. People aren’t going to stand for a reskinned version of cable.
The big media corporations have been pushing legislation and legal crackdowns since the 90s and it hasn’t made a dent in piracy. They’ll keep trying of course, but it still won’t work.
