“Piracy is Difficult to Compete Against”
Have you tried
Not Enshittifying
?
The really stupid thing is that everyone knows Netflix succeeded by offering - for the first time - a better product than piracy. A decade ago, Netflix offered a huge library of high quality, ad free content, which was easy to navigate and relatively free of bugs and viruses. People signed up because it was better than piracy where content could be difficult to find, time consuming to download or slow to buffer, with risks of malware or questionable websites.
People are willing to pay for a better experience that supports the people making art and entertainment.
Netflix already knows how to do this, built a company around it and launched an industry based on the knowledge that people will pay for a product that is better than free options. Now, it’s gone all the way back around. Streaming services are fragmented and expensive, content is hard to find and disappears without warning, streaming apps don’t always work on the devices they’re supposed to, quality gets unexpectedly throttled, and the ads are inescapable and unskippable.
Tbf, a lot of the problem is from content producers making their own platforms
I’m not sure I buy it. Just because content producers wall+jerk themselves off doesn’t mean you have to enshittify your own product, not when you are winning. Besides, Netflix already became a content producer themself partly as an answer to that.
People wouldn’t care nearly as much about password sharing crackdowns and random limitations if Netflix had a complete content library. Netflix with their originals aren’t going to match Disney’s decades-long catalog of content regardless of how much money they pour into it. Tack on Paramount, NBC, and Warner Bros, and that task becomes impossible. Piracy came back because people couldn’t get the content they wanted on Netflix or Hulu, and they couldn’t get that content because producers got super greedy.
TBH they could just have kept streaming their archived copies of that content (they did make backups, right? They work on IT, they would have known how important it is to have backups). If Disney or someone complains, let each side just pick their lawyer staff and toss them together at a mud cage match with wet T-shirts, for a couple of years, maybe a decade. They have way over good amounts of money to waste on that, and people would have kept enjoying a good alternative to piracy in the meantime.
Netflix would lose that lawsuit almost immediately.
EDIT: To explain further, it literally doesn’t matter if Netflix has copies of that media. If Netflix loses the rights to distribute that media, they can’t distribute that media. If Netflix continued to distribute said media, they would not have a case in US courts. When people in the US buy physical media, they only receive a license (intangible) and a copy of the media. With some exceptions, people have to adhere to the terms of that license. Even if ripping for personal use is allowed, you can’t buy a DVD, rip it, and then pass the DVD to a friend to keep because you transfer your license to use that media onto a friend.
doesn’t mean you have to enshittify your own product, not when you are winning
Since Netflix is a publicly traded company now, they pretty much have to.
Gotta pursue that infinite stock growth…
Fair point, capitalism ruins everything by definition.
This is it. The stock market is pretty much the reason everything goes to shit. It’s run in rampantly criminal fashion in the first place, just a meat grinder for money, and if our legal system weren’t run in such a fast and loose, revolving-door echo chamber fashion, someone would have clamped down on it years ago. Why this isn’t more obvious to people is stunning to me.
It’s like religion. It corrupts you, makes you angry, sanctimonious and blind, and hence stupid. Avoid it like the plague it is.
Maybe it’s not even the stock market, but the laws surrounding it. To the best of my knowledge, a company’s primary legal obligation is to maximize shareholder value. Ethics and maintenance seem to be secondary as a result. There needs to be legal ways or more incentives for companies to be satisfied with their progress and seek stability/maintenance, and keep their stock price stable.
Also true. Netflix decided on their own to limit resolution to 720p for browsers even for account that pay for 4k content
oh they’ve definitely fucked themselves in the ear with a corn schucker, but watching your most profitable content flee your platform would make anybody panic.
We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas
hey now, don’t discount bitching and moaning!
Press releases like this are corporate signaling to US Congress that they would like some lawfare and are willing to pay for it.
Pirate streaming growth itself doesn’t ‘threaten legal services’ as TF suggests. Any threat that arises is created by industry’s market response. It comes back to margins. Netflix could decide overnight to invest in a long-term ‘hearts and minds’ approach that includes a quality platform user experience free of hostile design, non-discrimination amongst devices, relaxed household access rules, attentive customer service, commitment to finishing programming properly, improved stream quality, etc. Becoming the Valve of streaming represents an expenditure increase, though. You’re now a lower margin business with a very sticky and content customer base. That’s not a story industry wants to tell its investors, knowing they will respond with ‘you should be petitioning for bills that enable more market captivity’.
They do the right thing only as a last resort, because the right thing is expensive.
Bullshit. Make it reasonably priced, fast and easy to access, no bullshit, clean interface, no ads, great customer support, and I’ll rip this parrot right off my mother lovin shoulder.
Weird, Netflix used to compete with piracy so well that many people stopped pirating altogether, by offering a more convenient service at a reasonable price that was hard for even the most stubborn of pirates to refuse and resulted in a massive boom for its own industry. I wonder what could have changed that caused the people to leave Netflix and return to piracy. Hmm. I wonder.
Is it more that the original pricing model was unsustainable though? Like they were making a loss, or being funded continuously to capture the market and then raise prices?
Obviously it doesn’t help that all the shareholders want their cut and thus the money has to come from somewhere.
2015 - 2018 I pirated very, very little. Didn’t need to. Between Netflix, Hulu, and HBO, I wanted for nothing. Then, every time I went to the bathroom, someone was creating their own streaming service. Suddenly everyone was pulling their IP from Netflix and Hulu. Netflix wouldn’t stop raising their prices. Their original shows are ok, but their movies are terrible.
It’s a mystery! I’ll never understand why the week after yet another price hike, I quit because of the price hike. I guess I just act randomly in response to price hikes.
My issue was cutting out the sharing. I was paying for 4 screens at a time. Why should they care which 4 screens are being used?
Once I realized a decent VPN was $5/month, that I could get TV shows without the 35% time addition of commercials, and stop worrying about what I get going away, the issue wasn’t that Netflix was bad, it was just worse than the alternative.
edit: not that Netflix has commercials, but the fact one could get anything without them as well (like paying for cable…)
not that Netflix has commercials
There’s a tier with commercials for many countries now.
I used to sail the seas like freakin Luffy, but Netflix and Steam (plus becoming a wage earning adult) got me on the straight and narrow for a good long while. Then when all the different services started to compete I started dipping my toes in the water again with some sense of guilt. But after various struggles getting Netflix running in different locations I frequent and my parents not being able to use my account anymore, I have no shame flying the Jolly Roger.
I fondly recall excitedly using Netflix on my PS3 all the fucking time in like 2011. It was cheap, there was an app right there on the device I already bought, and there was a pretty good selection of content that got updated frequently enough. I had friends who would pirate and I was interested in getting into that until Netflix came along and completely fulfilled the need for me. The incredible convenience made it worth it over the work to learn how to pirate and the time to safely find everything and the risk of getting caught, and then even after doing all of that it would be on a computer and not just a couple of button presses from my couch. I know piracy has gotten to a point now where it’s much more convenient, but back then it was a totally different beast. All of this was. YouTube was so much better for users and for certain classes of creators. Media and media platforms across the board are fucking terrible compared to back then. We used to chastise people for still having cable because Netflix was so fucking incredible in comparison. Idk what comes next, but these streaming companies are on the way out if they don’t figure it the fuck out. At this point, I’d rather go backwards to go to a goddamn Blockbuster these days.
Your local library probably has a better selection of movies and TV for free than any streaming service you might consider paying for. Let’s starve these beasts.
I miss my local movie store. Going to the movie store added a little adventure to movie night. Go out, browse a little. Get a stack of movies you have no clue about. Stop and get Chinese, maybe ice cream.
Ok, it doesn’t make sense anymore but I still miss it.
I think that still makes sense. Sometimes it feels like stuff like streaming and amazon orders have reduced our need to leave our homes. In general, this is largely a good thing, but I fear that people are becoming a little too isolated and aren’t being exposed to social interactions nearly as much. I don’t think people know how to respectfully disagree anymore, and I think that might lead to higher tension and make socializing even harder on people. I’m only 35, but it really does feel like most kids are having a more passive childhood than I remember having, and many adults today also live passively while feeling nostalgic for their more actively lived childhood. I don’t think people are particularly happy with life being this efficient and convenient.
So yeah, go out and get a movie and some Chinese food. Have a conversation with a stranger. I bet you’ll enjoy that more than doordash and scrolling through netflix.
Everyone decided they wanted to have their own streaming and wanted a bigger piece of the pie. That fragmented where to watch and caused old shows and movies to cost way more for streaming rights.
Then Netflix cancels too many originals without proper endings, which passes people off. After that they got rid of password sharing which made it a pain to have a work and home type of viewing experience. Now they’re adding ads. They’ve become shit and now it’s making it a bit harder for themselves.
It was inevitable and that’s even why Netflix started making their own content. Honestly, they should have made deals with the cable companies explaining if they entered the space they would create a consumer hostile environment and destroy the market. They probably wouldn’t have listened but Netflix should have known their only product was convenience.
Pirate: Get pwned, bitch!
Once, not so long ago, streaming was more convenient than pirating. But, as expected the commercial services went through their Standard Cycle of Enshittification and now we either let ourselves get flogged by 50 competing predatory services or just take the easy way and sail the high seas.
The choice is not that hard. Yarr.
Of course this returns us to the state where the streaming companies who have literally “enshitted their own beds” now turn to legislators and policymakers (who they hated, just couple of weeks ago) to ask them to provide some “law and order” to this unruly mob and to defend the corporations right to put thumbscrews on the population for ever increasing profits.
And so it goes.
Fully agree. I‘m shocked though that corpo shills are not all over this post as they are in every other community. They probably stay out of this community or get banned quickly.
I‘m getting blasted regularly on memes and other communities.
I’d love some kind of federated streaming service. So that different content providers can sell their stuff, you pay once monthly into a pool, and you can choose different clients to access all content services. Then the money gets distributed depending on your viewing habits.
Legislators could just offer a very easy solution. They could simply mandate copyright holders to offer the copyright to all interested parties at a fair price. If content ist held back or only exclusively distributed through one party it should go public domain, as the holder of the rights clearly does not intend to profit in a legitimate way from.
The intend of copyright is to make sure, that the holder of the right can get a fair compensation. It is not the intend that his work is abused to manipulate the markets.
I came to the exact same conclusion as you. The way copyright currently works creates monopolies. Just allow anyone to distribute the media while paying the copyright holder their fair share and don’t give the copyright holder complete control over who can distribute it and the issue is fixed.
Edit: quick research is looking like I’m entirely misremembering and entirely wrong. Quoting my original comment for posterity
If I’m remembering my history correctly, they actually had a similar problem in the early 20th century with movie theaters and movie studios. Studios would strong arm theatres into restrictive contracts for what they could screen, and when it looked too much like a federal law would drop restricting their behavior the industry instead opted to self-regulate and formed a private regulatory body
Everyone is blaming Netflix, but it’s not their fault.
It’s the fault of the content owners. Disney, fox, paramount etc……
Rather than make a little money off of Netflix, they decided they could scam more money by launching their own competing service
Being first does not make you the legitimate proprietor of a flawed system.
The greatest flaw in the system is the fragmentation and consequential cost - when things were consolidated under Netflix, things weren’t perfect but it can’t be said that they weren’t far better.
The true underlying flaw is capitalism, but isn’t it always?
It’s the fault of copyright. Restricting what shows you can stream to your users instead of, for example, being required to pay a royalty, inevitably leads to this situation. Netflix being the sole company allowed to stream every show and film would result in a monopoly that would be bad for everyone as they progressively sought to increase profits year over year. One company having all that power would not be a good thing for anyone, including content holders.
The solution is simple: every streaming service should be allowed to stream every show/film in every country. Then, piracy can only compete on price. That requires significant copyright reform, however, and is very unlikely to happen.
It’s also Netflix’s fault.
It’s less Netflix fault than others’ fault.
I probably wouldn’t have cancelled Netflix if it weren’t for their password policy change. That’s Netflix’s fault, but the content wasn’t great, so it made it easier to pull the plug.
Exactly same here. Even with the loss of content, I was happy to carry on as I wanted 4k so had to take 4 screens, but shared with my sister and mum. In exchange, my sister bought Disney plus so was a good arrangement. When they took away sharing, 4k was not worth it. What am I going to do with 4 screens when I don’t even have that many people in the house! Now we buy neither service and sail the seas. I’d rather pay for Usenet or Debrid than these jokers.
Also, it got annoying that half the decent TV shows ended after two seasons. You get invested and then bam, you’ll never see it again.
Both of these are purely Netflix’s decisions.
Please elaborate…
They all collectively and individually enshittified until it became worthwhile to pirate again.
They can point fingers all they want, or change their attitudes for longer-term gain.
The problem is, of course, their shareholders who are pushing for maximizing short-term profits, and then shareholder primacy, meaning they are legally obligated to obey their shareholders, even at the cost of business collapse.
Let them die.
Netflix has become as bad as any of the others. Its all shit. ⚓
In the 90s, my cable company kept adding new channels but the price didn’t keep shooting up.
Yeah it did, they just weren’t upfront with you about it. They just billed you at a higher rate
The likes of FMovies and movie-web offer a virtually unlimited catalogue that contains everything you could ever stream, for free. And their streaming quality is almost always at par with Netflix, if not more. There is zero rational reason why anyone would turn to those “legit” streaming platforms if they know about them.
The only thing separating is app support on smart TVs. It’s Game Over once TVs start allowing PWAs and ad-blocking browsers (do they already? I don’t know).
Well my smart TV does, oh shit, I added a laptop with a dead screen to the TV because the smarts were dumb and slow and didn’t do what I wanted
Jellyfin / self hosting is so great. You get the experience of a good streaming service and you can share with your friends and family, and there is no risk of a DMCA other than the initial seeding.
Unless you are friends or family with one of the Disney execs.
Most of this sits squarely on Netflix’s fault. I had stopped torrenting when I started with netflix, but their sheer stupidity between the password sharing and constantly taking down titles, not to mention the fact the rest of the industry is going copying them has pushed me to setup a plex server and share between my friends. Yarr… Ye gang be back me maytees!
EDIT: Fucking LOL, Hulu just emailed me this…
What a mystery this is
Wow! It’s almost as if greed and hubris caused all the media companies to split everything up so they wouldn’t have to share with netflix and now no one can keep track of which services are hosting what shows in which countries.
So learning how to pirate things and paying for a VPN that won’t snitch is easier than paying for a dozen different streaming services in addition to your internet connection.
MULLVAD! ProtonVPN! QBITTORRENT! POPCORN-TIME! KASPERSKY!
Sorry…I have Tourette’s syndrome. FUCKING QUANTUM RESISTANT ENCRYPTION WITH MULLVAD! PORT FORWARDING OFF ON PROTON! Sorry…I meant to say that piracy is immoral and wrong! How are billionaires supposed to afford their diamond studded, solid gold toilets or their giant mansions on huge plots of land if we pirate things?!
As Lord Gaben once said: Piracy is a service problem.
Make better service, have less piracy.
That Gabe that made not owning shit you paid for popular?
looking forward to the shitstorm when gaben dies, the investors get their claws in and Steam enshittifies
Spotify is a good example of this imo, I can listen everything, so it’s not necessary to pirate music. I do have some issues, but never had the problem of not being able to listen what I want
Music piracy also seems to be on the rise again though. By far not as severely as with video but still… And while music streaming got a little more expensive over the last few years, it’s not by that much.
Yep. Spotify and such are getting expensive. And the service is getting worse.
Trying to shove podcasts and other features down your throat all in one UI.
Please just show me tabs with artists, songs, ad playlists. Spotify is so cluttered.
I tried Spotify years ago and even then it was terrible. Have been using Apple Music ever since and the app is clean, logical and orderly. Can only recommend, even for android users. Compared to Spotify’s focus on playlists and discovery, Adobe music is very library centric. There are enough ways to discover new music but the standard tab when you open the app is your library
Music streaming is also much cheaper to run than video, so they can offer more reasonable pricing.
Yea, even HiRes audio is a fraction of the size of even a potato quality video. But spotify seems to still lose money…
And while Spotify’s price has gone up, it feels like it’s followed inflation on average
And they have Spotify DJ, which not everyone likes but I think it’s great, worth the £10 a month to me
Is that with a paid plan? My brief experience using it was very much not like that. I’d search for a song and it would tell me something along the lines of “you can’t choose a song to play but you can listen to a channel based on it” and a lot of stuff didn’t seem to be on there at all. This was probably 5(maybe more) years ago now, so I have no idea how it’s changed since then.
Yes, that’s with a paid plan.
What you were experiencing was a free tier limitation
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.
Cry less, make better service more.
