Back to piracy ...
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
4 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
34438 readers
183 users here now
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
The era of cheap streaming is over, now begins the era of free streaming
Long live 1337x and Stremio.
Nah, streaming is still completely free
They want >$100 a month to come out with maybe one movie and maybe two TV shows worth watching each year? No thanks, piracy for me has become more of a means to assuage my fear of missing out and keeping in touch with the cultural moment than actual enjoyment of the media they're putting out right now.
I do not believe the quality would go down if their budgets were cut significantly.
yaaaaarrr tis cheaper than eva matey
But Wednesday’s move to significantly bump prices, marked an acknowledgment by Iger of the media giant’s intent to squeeze more revenue out of streaming by pushing consumers to the advertising-supported plans, which have proven to be more profitable.
“The advertising marketplace for streaming is picking up,” Iger told investors on the quarterly earnings call. “It’s more healthy than the advertising marketplace for linear television. We believe in the future of advertising on our streaming platforms, both Disney+ and Hulu.”
This is extremely important for them. Netflix's excellent deal for most of its streaming existence was obviously a thorn in the side of many other businesses. Even if streaming services can get you to pay an exorbitant amount of money on an ad-free tier, advertisers are frothing for the chance to advertise to you regardless. They want you to see their ads so badly. And let's not forget all the big tech companies, Netflix included, were riding high during the free money days of 0% interest loans. Those days are over, and the bill is due. Wall Street wants its money. And we are all the ones who have to pay up. Cheap streaming is officially over.
This is why these companies, including Netflix, have all introduced ad tiers. Not only is it a great way for them to juice their revenue streams, but also every other company wants a permanent residence in your brain, and then some. Given the way things have been going since duo-eras of the COVID pandemic and corporate profit-based inflation, they don't even need to collude on prices. All the execs need to do is look at the business press and say, "Hey, they're getting away with increased prices and password sharing crackdowns. We can do the same thing. The pay pigs keep paying!"
I really cannot understand why advertising is such a huge business. Where does all the money spent on advertising really come from?
As far as I know internet advertising is an economy destroying sunk cost fallacy. No one makes money off of it, but if they stop basically everything collapses catastrophically, so they just keep pouring more money in to it in hopes that someone will find a way to make it profitable before the bill comes due.
Ehhh, not really. If showing 10,000 people an ad costs you $10 and even one person made a purchase off that, you've paid for the ad buy. Internet ad conversions are considered unbelievably excellent if 1% of viewers click on the ad and 1% of those people make a purchase.
Also, if you don't advertise, then your competition that do advertise are going to eat your lunch.
Big advertising budgets that are funded from the value alienated from exploited workers and consumers. Information asymmetry in the marketplace means that even if you make a superior product at a lower price, you could still be outcompeted by an expensive inferior product if more people know about that worse product and don't know about your product.
That's for most basic products anyway. Luxury products like bags and clothes are almost all marketing since the cost to create them is so low compared to their sales price. People buy them because of perceptions created by marketing and not any inherent value in the product itself.
I'm paying for Spotify and Netflix because they are very convenient. I'm not paying for another 5 subscriptions because they maybe have this one show I would like to watch. They worked hard on fragmenting the marked and now they will complain people don't want to pay for 10 different subscriptions
Music services are almost a necessity to me because of the amount of music I listen to, but it's also a different animal. They all have mostly the same library, so you won't typically be subscribing to more than one.
The problem with streaming video services is that most people watch a couple genres, and there's content in every genre on every streaming platform. I watch a lot of scifi, for example. So I would need to subscribe to Apple TV for Silo and Foundation, Paramount+ for Star Trek, etc...
Well, hell. I guess I'll go back to watching less and buying DVDs. I'm not watching commercials on a service I pay for. That's a non starter.
Worst comes to worse, I can dust off my eye patch, grab my parrot, and take to the high seas. I don't wanna, I prefer to pay for stuff, but ffs, if they can't be reasonable, I guess it's back to arrr me hearties.
who the fuck pays to watch ads. what a ludicrous proposition. that's the part that makes no sense to me.
No one pays to watch ads. They pay to watch movies and shows, which are (optionally) supplemented in cost by ads.
But you can watch those movies and shows for free. The only part you're paying for are the ads.
...what are you talking about? No it's not.
I assure you all movies and TV shows are absolutely free to the end user should they so choose
You mean should they choose to steal them? No shit, everything is free if you steal it. Not everyone wants to be a thief.
It's not theft, because it doesn't deprive the original owner of anything.
But if it did, theft from billionaire hollywood studio owners is cool and good.
You're not paying the wages of the hollywood workers, you're just increasing the funds the studios have to break the worker's strikes and further depress their conditions.
It’s legally theft. You can try as much mental gymnastics as you want to try and convince yourself you’re not breaking the law, but you are.
It’s probably the most victimless theft that there is, but it’s still theft.
What's legal is not necessarily what's moral, and there's nothing immoral about freely procuring an infinitely replicable digital product. If anything, it's immoral to enclose upon them and charge rents for them. No better than landlords, the big streaming companies, save for the fact that entertainment isn't vital for living.
There’s absolutely something immoral about stealing. If you don’t think there is then it just means your morals are out of whack.
You think people renting out their property is immoral? Yeah nah, your opinion on this is wrong.
Landlords are parasites that prey on the vulnerable and produce nothing of value. Corporations who own and profit from ”intellectual property” are no different.
You think people renting out their property is immoral?
Correct. All wealth is the product of labor, therefore rent and profit are theft, and workers taking back a bit of the wealth stolen from them is good.
I'm quite aware there's some silly laws written by those same billionaire's lobbies and passed by their politicians.
Copying something is quite obviously not stealing from someone.
But again, stealing back some of the wealth the billionaires have stolen from us is morally good. If you're not stealing from them, you're stealing from your family to support your family's further deprivation.
It absolutely is stealing. You’re taking something that is not yours, something that someone else owns and charges money for.
Mental gymnastics.
And did you at any point ask yourself why they own these things? Why Netflix the corporate entity owns media it did not produce while stiffing the people that did out of just compensation? Or how that information slightly complicates the otherwise simple nature of property and theft?
The only mental gymnast here is you bud. The simple fact is, labor creates value, and Netflix has no part in that. I doubt they even put up any of their own capital in producing these shows.
Why they own these things? Because they paid for it.
How are Netflix stiffing people out of compensation? Netflix pays the rights holders for the right to stream the content.
On your last part you could not be more wrong. Netflix spent over $6 billion in 2021 on original content. Content they created. They pay for the streaming rights to everything that’s on Netflix up front - in 2021 they paid $11 billion to the rights holders of the content in order to stream it on their platform.
You’re trying to justify theft. You’re the one doing the mental gymnastics.
I cant believe I'm seeing anyone here defending a corporation. What the hell??
It was over the day the studios wanted to have their own services instead of licensing content to Netflix and competitors.
Here in Australia I remember when we were told that every free to air station was working together to make a single streaming app, was very excited and it would have made me actually watch more free to air stuff.
Then those talks broke down and instead we got 6 different streaming apps all requiring their own accounts and with differing levels of quality in their apps.
I did not end up watching more free to air tv.
Couldn’t you just subscribe for a month, download the videos and cancel the subscription? Just slap a new 2 TB hard disk on your computer and start downloading 24/7 until the disk is full. Surely that’s enough stuff to watch for several months.
Thats the same as regular pirating with extra steps.
era of torrenting unaffected
Is that true? Most of the best public trackers got shut down. Anything left has bots recording your IP and you're getting a letter from your ISP.
If you're not on a private ratio tracker or paid tracker it's basically a non starter. So I'm not sure about unaffected era the last 10 years have been brutal for pirates via torrent.
VPN has been necessary for pirating for a long time. And fortunately a VPN is cheaper then any streaming service, and has other benefits besides.
Not on my Emby server
Oh well, there's plenty of space for all of ya here on the high seas, welcome aboard, mateys!
Paid Plex shares are the way to go