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Remember, streaming only has a business model as long as it has a better user experience than piracy. That’s why iTunes took off in the era of Napster. When a streaming service’s user experience drops below that of digging up pirate treasure off a shitty ad-ridden torrent site, that service is not long for the world.
I cancelled Netflix and prime and went back to piracy a few months ago, it’s been a nice blast from the past
Netflix will also be raising prices soon. Again.
I’m about ready to do the same.
I bought a raspberry pi, a SATA SSD and usb adaptor, and installed Plex now I’m the new netflix for my family, they send me movies and shows they want to watch and I put them on there, then they connect to my server and watch
It’s been really good
If you can’t save it, its not yours. Sail the seas.
Or buy it on physical media. More and more studios are pulling their disks and it is getting harder to find. If you have a disk, it can never be recalled.
technically you dont own the disks either bro have you never read the back of a DvD box
I mean, yeah, but so what? We are talking about an article where Amazon pulled a video someone purchased down so they can never watch it again. I have never heard of a company recalling physical media and demanding it’s return.
This is a non-story.
“Who knew $EvilCo would fuck me over for a sub-$10 profit?!”
I never stopped stealing media, and I never will.
You can’t steal media unless you steal the medium.
Copyright infringement is a crime you might commit but by its draconian length, most cases are the public taking back what’s rightfully ours.
Superman II (any version) should be in the public domain.
you can’t steal media, it’s still there but just copied over.
Amazon’s Music service, while it takes some hoops to jump through, actually does let you download music. Though I don’t know if that’s a general policy or on a per music/per artist basis.
Everything should allow you to download what you purchased. The fact that the music industry has pushed streaming so goddamn hard is because they’re mad that people can still download MP3s.
And above all of this, let’s not forget that a major negotiating point of the Hollywood strike was getting residuals per stream, something that never existed when people actually had their own media. It’s greed on every single side in that corrupt, hell town and I’m at the point where I don’t even watch TV or movies any more, not only because it all sucks, but because of this bullshit. The greed and the corruption needs to be punished.
and save outside of their app as a non DRM’ed file because otherwise its extra hoops for the same problem
Sucks for online games though…
Why is owning sth you might watch once every 10 years so important? I don’t care about it, as long as it isn’t some niche content or stuff I watch every year.
Because paying actual money for something that can be taken away with the changing of ever shifting IP ownership and steaming rights is a giant waste of money.
I disagree. Like I said, I don’t need to ‘own’ something I rarely use. I’m fine just borrowing it for a couple of days as well.
This is why I continue to buy high quality Blu-ray releases for films I love. Physical media is something you own. I generally rip it and put it on a Plex server for easy access and it reduces wear and tear on my precious criterion discs.
What software do you use to rip the DVDs?
ddon linuxThe cassettes? Just a regular double deck player and recorder.
Edit: people didn’t catch on the joke that we started with bluerays, then dvds, and finally cassettes. Oh well.
It’s just a long term licence to watch it
Strictly speaking, so is a DVD or other physical media, per the EULA they flash across the screen for half a second before starting the show and therefore makes it legally binding.
The big difference is that nobody’s running around trying to claw back DVDs. Whereas, with Amazon, its trivially easy to just click “Remove License” from the repository and snatch back an arbitrary number of licenses. Purely a question of convenience.
Of course, if you have a… uh… backup copy stored conveniently on a PLEX server, then they can’t claw that back either.
They did try to do expiring dvds thank god it didn’t work
Are you a fellow janitor?
Because I know a whole bunch of janitors that recently watched that movie.
Lol.
There might be something else going on, because my YouTube feed was recently bombarded with a bunch of clips of Superman 2 Richard donner cut.
They removed books from your Kindle in the past. Who could have seen this comming?
Yeah seriously. The day news of this broke, I switched my book library over to Calibre+DeDRM and put my device in airplane mode.
This is why I still rip Blu-rays for my home media server,
Reported to the MPAA
ill remind you that a copy for home personal use is LEGAL
Breaking the DRM is not
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post this on piracy bro they can get it to the front page
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I assumed you could use a capture card to record your video. Does this work similarly?
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Or just use PlayOn to record your shows.
We’re all the way back to recording movies from TV with our VCR.
It’s easy to scoff at this whole “You will own nothing, and you will be happy” phrase, but it’s really gone too far already.
I’m really tired of hearing “you don’t own it you own a license to it” like it’s some revelation for people complaining. We’re aware that the system has been constructed to benefit media companies at the expense of consumers.
To be honest; I never really bought the argument anyway. From a legal standpoint I don’t give half a shit. From a layman’s standpoint it’s bullshit. Nowhere do they use terms like “rent” or “lease”. They explicitly use terms like “buy” and it’s not until the fine print that the term license even comes up.
They know they’re pissing on you and telling you it’s raining and the goobers doing their legwork by repeating the sentence like they just came up with it annoy me to no end.
Yeah, I understand that hearing the same simple explanation of “you don’t own it…” gets to be annoying. Especially in places like this where most people are pretty well aware of the situation.
The primary issue seems to be that enough people support this type of service willingly for the sake of convenience and are generally ignorant to the potential long-term issues. It feels pretty exploitative as a consumer.
But I don’t see how making the distinction between ownership of the content vs the license is providing legwork for those services. In my mind, that distinction is key for understanding that the service is not for me. And I may just be looking at this too optimistically, but I would hope the same would be true for users who don’t read the fine print, or happen to have not understood the issue until something like this post is presented.
Nowhere do they use terms like “rent” or “lease”. They explicitly use terms like “buy” and it’s not until the fine print that the term license even comes up.
This! It really should be illegal to present something with the phrasing “buy” unless it is provided to you via a license that prevent it from being withdrawn. To “sell” cloud hosted media without having the licensing paperwork in place for it to be a sale is fraud.
We’ve been screaming about it for 20+ years now and no one seems to be listening.
I’m hoping that someone will tie digital ownership rights to a block chain sooner or later and offer me movies, music, games and books that I can actually own resale rights to - but as publishers are already drinking from the rent-seeking model teat where every single license is a new sale I’m not terribly optimistic about that particular future.
block chain
No. Never. Stop asking. Crypto is not a currency and blockchain is a solution in search of a problem.
Well put
Adding blockchain into the mix changes nothing. Whether your digital ownership is stored in their centralized database or a distributed database, they still have control over everything because they’re the ones streaming it to you. They can just as well block your access & block resale.
The only way to actually digitally own something is to have a full DRM-free copy of it (ianal though this still might not be enough to allow resale).
Adding blockchain into the mix changes nothing. Whether your digital ownership is stored in their centralized database or a distributed database, they still have control over everything because they’re the ones streaming it to you. They can just as well block your access & block resale.
So you push digital goods to a robust public platform like IPFS and tie decryption to a signed, non-revokable, rights token that you own on a block chain. It’s a transparent and consumer friendly model compared to what we accept now. I know people are over block chain hype but this type of publishing model is where it’s actually useful.
Transferable digital rights tokens and chain of custody are places where block chain tech actually works.
Edit: People seem really hung up on crypto as currency which I’m not asking for at all. I’m asking for control, ownership and resale rights to digital goods I’ve paid for which isn’t possible at all on current digital publishing platforms. I appreciate that people hate crypto shit, that’s fine, but at least read the content you’re replying to.
So you push digital goods to a robust public platform like IPFS and tie decryption to a signed, non-revokable, rights token that you own on a block chain.
What you describe is fundamentally impossible. In order to decrypt something you need a decryption key. Put that on the blockchain and anyone can decrypt it.
Even if you can, pirates would only need to buy a single decryption key and suddenly your movie might as well be freely available to download. Pirates never pay hosting fees because it’s using the same infrastructure as customers and they can’t be taken down because they’re indistinguishable from customers.
Fuck no. I ain’t paying a transaction fee each time I want to take a breath. If you don’t want to be robbed by streaming companies, blockchain is the last (or maybe not even a) thing you should consider as a solution.
Hyperbole much?
it’s quite fun to see the whole thing you want to engineer just to have an excuse to use a blockchain.
Have you ever heard of Torrents? USENET? eDonkey? Those things are more resilient than your blockchain, they’ve proved themselves by being around more than 20 years and still in use.
This sounds worse than communism. At least communism said “everyone will own everything”.
I think it makes sense in some areas. For example private ownership of cars is completely unsustainable in the literal sense of the word.
But when it comes to digital goods, clearly it’s all for the profit of the media cartels. There’s no justification.
Yeah that’ll happen for anything streamed and licensed.
If you want to own something, you need to own it physically. Buy an actual disk. People won’t and I’ll be surprised if they are still making blurays at all in ten years but that’s the only way you can actually buy media now.
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blu-rays are often as cheap or cheaper than “digital copies”, and ripping them to my NAS is pretty trivial these days thanks to makemkv.
the best part is, uncle jeff cannot legally break into your house and take back the disc just because of some petty rights issue.
I just bought a big ass TV, and I’ve just started buying discs for movies I truly want to own for a few reasons.
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You own it, period.
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Even if you trust Amazon, do you trust your ISP to stream 4K reliably on demand? I don’t. Fuck Comcast.
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A physical collection just kind of looks nice, especially if you fork out for Steelbooks and only buy your favorites. Steelbooks on eBay are like ~$30.
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I recently bought a 4k Blu-ray player. My brother asked me if I also bought a fax machine because streaming is “where it’s at” . Nah My 4k player cleans up DVDs really nice where streaming has artifacts and banding. Not only is it true ownership but a better quality.
4k streaming is also way lower quality than a 4k blu-ray
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That is misinformation. The quality disparity you’re both pointing out is from streaming services compressing their media to much lower bitrates to ease bandwidth stress on their servers/clients and has nothing to do with a physical or digital medium.
lower bitrate == lower quality when using the same compression algorithms.
most streaming services are using h.265, same as 4k blu ray, but at substantially lower bitrates
streaming dolby vision profiles are also gimped considerably compared to blu-ray dolby vision
Doubling down on the misinformation, I see. H.265 is a high-efficiency codec, or in other words a better compression standard. Not a static compression level. This is why when you convert media there’s an input for quality, even when using HEVC. And you can absolutely stream the same Dolby Vision profile as a Blu-ray with single track double layer.
You’re still conflating digital medium with streaming services.
i am more than well aware of all of this. nothing i said is misinformation. same algorithm, different settings. the primary means by which you reduce bitrate with h.265 is by reducing the quality setting. there is no magical way to cut your bitrate by 75% using the same compression algorithm without sacrificing quality. no commercial streaming service is offering video at the same quality level as a 4k blu-ray.
few streaming boxes even support dolby vision profile 7, and no commercial streaming service offers it. so saying you can get it through a streaming service is actual misinformation.
i have literally been doing this shit for 20 years
i am more than well aware of all of this. nothing i said is misinformation
Your entire presupposition that Blu-ray quality is better than streaming quality by default is misinformation, and I’ve already explained why.
no commercial streaming service is offering video at the same quality level as a 4k blu-ray.
What does that have to do with digital media?
This is also demonstrably untrue if you take 5 seconds to research self-hosted streaming services.
few streaming boxes even support dolby vision profile 7, and no commercial streaming service offers it
Plex on Nvidia Shield. EZPZ.
there is no magical way to cut your bitrate by 75% using the same compression algorithm without sacrificing quality
I never said anything in contradiction to this. I don’t know who you’re shadow-boxing.
Hey! Don’t point that out or they’ll add it to the TOS!
I hate this but refunding with a little extra seems fair enough. Would be better if you had the option to refund to your card though.
Companies want to make it so you don’t own anything just rent the use of it.
Gift card. GIFT CARD! Those bastards “refund” with gift card instead of actual money! I hope EU will haunt their asses. Big corpro hunting season is open.
Nope, even in EU the only option is a gift card (or a coupon) if you need to reinburse someone if more that a certain time is passed (usually about a week). There are fiscal reasons to this.
“Sorry we fucked you over on your previous purchase, but here, as compensation we’re giving you the illustrious privilege of spending money with us again!”
well, at least they paid you back for it. that’s actually quite respectable of them. and if they didn’t, it would have been a class action lawsuit, so kind of a moot point all around. You got your money back. I recommend using it to obtain several tiers of backup hard drives and make sure you have two physical copies of every piece of media you feel is not replaceable. Because some day, you won’t be able to replace it. the corporate dream is nobody owns anything, you just have to jack into their “stream” and consume whatever they feed you. the funniest thing is, people are already getting a head start on that dystopian future. they’re doing it to themselves, by actually paying for shitty streaming services. You really shouldn’t do that, as it only emboldens them.
They absolutely didn’t get their money back. They got a voucher. They got scrip.
Getting money back would be getting money back.
I agree it’s still better than walking away empty handed, but let’s not pretend that got their money back.
That’s $5.99 in their Amazon account.
It’s as good as cash. It’s an IOU
