How Disney and Warner Bros. Are Causing Internet Piracy to Boom | Platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ were supposed to do away with pirated media. Instead, they may make them stronger than ever.::Platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ were supposed to do away with pirated media. Instead, they may make them stronger than ever.
I know it gets quoted a lot, but Gabe was 100% right. It boggles my mind how people in power over these streaming services just don’t get it:
One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.
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Haven’t pirated a game in over a decade
I have, but that’s an access issue where I live, where there are no official stores to buy things from, and the places which do exist don’t have the games I want (on PS4). I download all Disney content as + is not available here either.
The last game I pirated was Skyrim, and that mostly because I was unemployed and poor at the time
I have pirated GTA5 and Cyberpunk 2077. Both were a disappointment.
I prayed doom eternal, that was the only one. Then I bought it a week later.
That’s called “the mantis movement”.
I never have, I don’t see the point when steam is just so convenient and has sales all the time. Just be patient on pricing, the game isn’t going to go away because you didn’t buy on release.
I also don’t trust downloading unverified, modified, software. An mp3 or mkv is probably going to be safe as you can’t load software through those really, but an exe can do anything
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He was absolutely right.
People generally are absolutely fine with paying, so long as it’s not absurd pricing and the service is convenient.
I was happy paying for Netflix until the recent bullshit. I still pay for Spotify. I buy all my games outside of old ones that I need to emulate (again proving Gabe correct - if I could legally access them easily then I’d do that instead, but am I fuck jumping through hoops like spending thousands on old consoles I don’t have the space for nor the time to search for/import games)
P.s. I’m from India. Not one of these “pasty-faced white people” that you seem to take issue with
Capcom just started adding game breaking DRM to their archive of old single player Steam games because an exec got butthurt over a nude mod for Street Fighter. Now Steam Deck support is broken and my mods don’t work with games I purchased years ago. The pirated version is now better once again.
At almost the exact same time, Valve sent a DMCA notice to Portal64 because for some reason they care about people playing a homebrew port of a $2 15 year old game on 30 year old hardware.
I used to think Capcom and Valve were two of the last good ones. Turns out there aren’t any good ones…
Can’t read the article (acts like it’s paywalled but the paywall doesn’t even come up,maybe ad blocking is borking it), but let me guess… Every time a show gets big, someone splits it off into a new sub service, and people are getting sick of that shit and pulling the plug on the people they pulled the plug on cable for…
My kids hit me up for yet another subscription last week, because they wanted to watch a show. I was very close to cancelling everything instead, and teaching them some slightly sketchy skills, but I took the “high road” on it. They’re getting close to the age where that ain’t gonna happen anymore though :)
Consolidate yo shit media dudes. You got a finite limit on how many pieces of the pie can exist. When the slices get too small because you cut it into too many slices, nobody buys a slice anymore…
I will pay for one streaming service, if your content isn’t available on there it will be on my jellyfin and my kids are happy to use that.
This is roughly where I’m at. I’m paying for one, maybe two. That’s it. After that I’m not gonna waste my time, esp. when a VPN is cheaper and can give me better overall service.
I started having the piracy discussion with my kid today. First lesson: until you understand computer security, piracy always comes with the risk of nuking your system.
Once you understand computer security, piracy always comes with the risk of nuking your system.
Know how to rebuild your system before you get spicy, and let’s talk about network provisions too.
Not if you hang out in the right places. There are some trust rings where you can procure media by alternative means with absolute security and peace of mind. But it’s a club and you ain’t in it.
Yup.
I basically don’t pirate music because streaming is convenient.
I generally don’t pirate games because steam and GOG is convenient. (Sometimes if I’m not sure ill enjoy it I’ll pirate as a no limit trail then buy or drop).
I generally have to with movies and shows. Even though I have access to several streaming platforms though stuff like T-Mobile, AT&T, etc. it’s too annoying to jump around a bunch of apps and the quality is bad compared to the UHD rips of stuff
I used netflix until the majority of my searches didnt show a result. and then went back to pirating.
using jellyfin+jellyseer and radarr/sonarr make it almost as convenient
So true!
If I want to buy a game it’s super easy to search for it on my choice of digital store front, pay for it and download it.
If I want to watch a show I could do a search for which streaming service it’s available on and hope it’s one I have an account with, or for the same amount of effort I could do a search for the torrent and be able to watch it if the internet goes down.
Weird how an open source media streaming app works fine, but Disney can’t keep their app working on Android to save their lives.
I assume bullshit DRM has something to do with it, but I wouldn’t know because there’s way easier (and even legal!) ways to get media onto my server than that.
Please share. I dont understand where people get media especially legal nowadays. I would go to pirate bay if I need something.
I buy DVDs.
When they stop selling DVDs I’ll have to reevaluate.
There’s plenty of screen and audio capture technology that is immune to DRM (sending the signal across a primitive wire to a separate DRM-free device), check your area for legality, but I don’t think any non-asshole would disagree with your moral right to backup your digital purchases.
But at some point if they keep making it hard for me to pay money for media, well, yo ho ho, and avast!
Stremio+Torrentio add-on for streaming torrents.
I’m filling my wants of CDs and BDs from eBay, new stuff Amazon because I’m lazy. (then it lives on sans the case in a Case Logic binder)
Pretty straight forward for me.
They all got greedy. All of them. We wanted a streaming service to watch our shows and movies on, and they all decided to pretend that what we really wanted was a return to paying $100+ a month for a collection of channels with content that we mostly don’t watch on them, only this time with a bunch of additional apps you have to install for each one, most of them remarkably shitty. Like cable, but stupider.
Remember when the streaming setup was simple? There was basically just Netflix, it paid for licenses to content from Disney, Paramount, etc., and provided guaranteed income for those companies. Small income, sure, but steady.
Then each of them said, “Hey, why don’t we replace Netflix, only all we’ll stream is our own stuff! And sure, most of it’s trash, but people will stick around for the good shows!”
No. No, they won’t. They’ll go back to pirating it. No one is paying for Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Paramount+, Max, Peacock, AppleTV, ESPN+, Prime, and whatever other shitty “exclusive” streaming service pops up.
Prime is like: you know that service we sold you that played movies without commercials? We’re putting commercials in it.
I’m like: Bye felicia. I’ll be fucked to pay more for data transit in 2024 than I paid before, the movement of bits and streaming of bytes have not gone up fuckwits. And I don’t need the rest of the amazon trash either. Thanks for making it easy!
Prime is like: you know that service we sold you that played movies without commercials? We’re putting commercials in it.
Also that movie you want to watch? You gotta rent it. Fuck your subscription.
I don’t think that content producers should be able to have their own streaming services. Similar to how movie studios couldn’t own theaters or whatever until lobbyists killed that too.
Or follow the one good thing the music industry does… allow music across different platforms. I can listen to the same songs on YouTube Music, Spotify, Apple, etc. none of this “get the XYZ app to listen to a band, and another app to listen to others”.
If politicians didn‘t have their own horses in this race to the bottom of costumer satisfaction those anti trust laws would have been expanded on 100% but unfortunately we got a corrupt pile of crap.
I’m past 40. I don’t give a fuck about TV or movies anymore. Disney is in trouble.
I’m in the same boat. I feel like everything is just regurgitated over and over again. Every twist, every turn. And I’m tired of watching something and be able to predict, what the plot will be. It’s the same with music. Many songs are written to perform by metrics, like length and listener retention in the first 30 seconds, so that you reach the magical monetization line on the streaming platform of your labels choice.
We are saturated in low-quality media these days, most of which is predictable and poorly written. We’ve seen all the whiz-bang CGI, the standard plots, the trite romantic scenes, the heroes and the anti-heroes. Movies, in particular, suffer because of their short format. Movies essentially rely on stock characters and formulaic plots because there isn’t enough time available for a complex story arc or character development. Because of that, I’d wager that well-planned limited series are more popular than movies among people over 40.
I’m not pirating officer. I’m just collecting information for training my AI model.
Won’t be long until my ai model can produce it’s very own Linux distro complete with 7 fingered keyboard layouts
I had almost gotten to the point where I could reasonably pay for most stuff and didn’t have to steal shit that wasn’t even available “in my market”, which, as a concept, can go fuck itself entirely to death as far as I’m concerned; but now everybody’s being dicks to each other and core content is leaving platforms I’m paying for and moving onto platforms i’m not allowed to use, so, no, it’s not the fault of the big guys per se but the collective and progressive brain death of the entertainment industry, whose obscene copyright regime is finally biting it in the ass but they’re still reeling from their latest cocaine decision and haven’t figured out why they can’t sit down yet. … I think that’s the longest sentence I’ve ever written.
But it doesn’t even matter. As soon as the competition dies down and things settle into a pattern, they’ll start putting the screws to us anyway, because that’s just what capitalism is. Enshittification ftw!
My household still subscribes to most streaming services at the moment, but I’ve often considered “alternative means of acquisition” just because it’s now such a pain in the ass to figure out which service has the content I want to watch. Things move around way too much and sometimes disappear completely. It’s just easier to go to one site, download, and watch.
I setup a Plex server with all the Arr’s and it took me maybe 1 hour and about $1500 in hardware such as a desktop PC and 4 x 10TB drives. Then I had to pay for a News Servers service ($100 for 15 months) and I opted to purchase a domain for like $7/year. Quite the upfront cost but easy to setup and maintain and I can watch anything I want with the best possible experience possible. If my internet goes down? I can still watch everything. When my News Servers subscription runs out, I still keep everything I have and can watch it as many times as I want. It’s so simple to use, my wife who LOVES TV now prefers ‘on demand’.
All thanks to the greedy fuckers running literally every streaming service.
for anyone afraid of the upfront cost: you don’t need to buy so many expensive hard disk drives to self host a media server like Jellyfin/Plex
RAID arrays add complexity and get expensive very fast while not being a proper backup solution at all, it’s nice to have but not requiredon a budget buying a large hard disk drive (12~16 TB is a good sweet spot right now) and later down the road another one as periodic backup solution might be the wiser choice while accumulating your collection of media
Raid is exactly as much or as little of a proper backup solution as you configure it to be isnt it?
It basically only protects against hardware failure. It’s not going to protect you from ransomware or even just accidentally clicking delete.
Thanks. I was misunderstanding concepts here in a big way
I’d also put that as a “nice to have”.
I’ve upgraded my server similarly. But I initially just plugged Unraid into an old (~2012) desktop with a handful of old 1-2 terabyte drives. It’s super easy to spread out the cost over time. I just moved machines and it was literally as simple as having all the same hard drives plugged into the new machine.
Yup, good point. You don’t have to buy a new desktop with the latest Intel CPU with massive storage. You can start small and upgrade as needed. I know I wanted this solution so I invested to make sure I had something I can use for a long time. I got a desktop with a 12th gen i5 so it can do transcoding though it’s not needed.
I also recently started pirating again. The cost is too damn high for all these streaming platforms, not to mention a lot of the base packages have ads/commercials (gross). I use Stremio+Torrentio+Real Debrid (which is insanely cheap compared to purchasing 6 different streaming platforms). Until there is a massive change to how media is circulated this is gonna be my setup.
When the day will come, and once I pay for something I have the ability to just hit download and it will fetch an .mkv/.mp4 from a CDN, that’s when I’ll pay for it. Sadly that day isn’t even remotely close, so torrenting it is. Oh and fuck you WideVine.
One day… We hope.
That’s how Louis CK distributes his shows since he was cancelled.
All this hasn’t forced me into piracy.
It’s worse than that.
It’s forced me to stop caring about shows or movies entirely.
I’ve been reading a lot more.
Yes me too, I find myself watching movies less and less.
I find myself buying real books, ebooks online and buying vinyls.
I still stream music though, but the thing is, most music that could be found on Spotify, could be found on Apple Music or Deezer.
That’s odd. I find myself unable to keep up with all the movies I want to see. You should check out the Criterion collection.
The same thing happened to me. It’s really sad.
im glad i still care because i never let them josh me
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This may come as a shock, but some people happen to enjoy content.
Crazy concept, I know.
I am most definitely far more passive in my consumption than before. YouTube is actually where most of my media comes from now. Then my colleagues are always on about the Masked Singer or whatever is going on. I managed to make it through maybe 2 episodes before it made me sick.
I was sort of like this before, not really caring too much about most movies or TV shows, but that was just because I had higher standards to what I would be willing to take the time to watch. When I did find something I thought was worth my time, like for instance Full Metal Alchemist (yes I know it’s an anime, it still counts as a TV show imo. Also it’s great, I definitely recommend watching it). The general decrease in quality and increase in quantity of shows and movies just made me stop caring to watch really anything; why take a chance with a likely shitty show or movie when I can get much more fun out of playing video games? I know there’s likely some “hidden gem” kind of show that nobody really talks about because it’s hidden away in all the crappy shows, so I usually only decide to watch something if I’ve heard good things about it more than once. Even then, I may still not watch it, like for instance One Piece, which I’ve heard is incredibly long.
What Usenet groups are people using these days?
NFL this weekend forcing you to have a Peacock subscription for a playoff game. Are you crazy?!?
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American foot-of-the-ball.
Not for life
OK, but is it actually booming?
Piracy of movies and T.V. shows really took off when torrents first appeared in the early 2000s. It seemed to peak five or six years ago, as new streaming services proliferated.
According to the European Union Intellectual Property Office, piracy bottomed out in 2021—before increasing again. “Current piracy levels are still nowhere near what they were five years ago,” Van der Sar wrote in a recent article.
We’re seeing a slight uptick possibly because of how fractured and inconsistent the streaming services have become, but we’re definitely not in some piracy renaissance yet.
It’s not when torrents appeared, more when people got connected to ADSL and later fiber which made the download of very large files feasible.
Think there also was a big switch from torrenting to using the online streaming sites. Wonder if that’s affecting the count.
