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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No - piracy, since it always carries at least some amount of difficulty and risk, is easy to compete against. And in fact, paid services, including Netflix, have proven that over and over. All it takes is to offer dependable convenience and quality and to treat customers well. People are always willing to pay a reasonable price for that.
The problem is that piracy becomes difficult to compete against when, as Netflix is currently doing, you shift from a business model of providing good service under fair terms for a reasonable price to a business model of providing crappy service under onerous terms for too much money, because the greedy, selfish, short-sighted sacks of shit at the top want to make even more obscene amounts of money. That’s the point at which piracy gains enough of an advantage to outweigh its difficulties and risks.
And when that’s the case, it’s pretty obvious what the real problem is.
The trick is to make as much money as possible then jump ship to a newer competing company that has the ability to grow more before you leech it to death again
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I’m back on the seas. Once I couldn’t leave my Netflix account set at my work site and my house, then they upped the price and added ads, it’s just easier to pirate anything I’d like to binge. My phone has like 640 GB of space. I can carry my own Netflix, with beer and hookers.
I’ve never seen a magnet link respond with “this is not available in your country”.
They won’t even let you watch stuff like anime with subtitles if it’s not dubbed in your language. Like why?
In Disney+, in order to watch anything in French, you have to change the language of the entire interface to French for the option to appear. And then you lose most other languages.
The only reason I have a Disney+ subscription is because it’s hard to find kids’ shows in languages other than English in the high seas. And they make it so friggin’ difficult for no reason.
Finding stuff in German is also really hard. Wish I had a torrent tracker or usenet indexer/provider that had more German stuff.
Try SceneNZBs, they have tons of German content!
I actually bought a one year subscription yesterday. Will see how it goes.
Do you mean actual German shows/movies or German dubs of shows/movies?
I was raised in the Netherlands and I’m fairly sure that German Society is so braindead because they never had to indulge in foreign languages. Just teach your kid English, it’ll be good for everyone. Kids absorb other languages like a sponge.
I mean German dubs. Also, there’s a lot of immigrants here so a lot of people speak more than just German and English and we do learn other languages like French or Spanish in school but it’s mostly optional or only if you continue school after 10th grade. Calling us all braindead because we’re not forced to learn languages that we’ll never use is not very nice.
I have lived in Germany for over 30 years now. I just saw the difference between the Netherlands and Denmark vs Germany. It’s kind of sad how we shut ourselves into our own little language bubble, yet the world has so much to offer. I prefer watching movies in French/Spanish/Japanese/whatever with subtitles. I believe that a huge portion of the trade that is acting is conveyed through language. By overdubbing these movies a lot of the actual appeal is lost.
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Piracy isn’t even free! People pay thousands of dollars for hardware, and hundreds per year for electricity and various service providers.
But they actually get what they want for that money: Being able to watch whatever you want, anytime, on any device, in high quality and without ads. It must be really hard for streaming services to compete with features as futuristic as that!
Seriously. I’m running a Synology with 12x16TB. That’d buy a bunch of months of streaming services…but this way actually gives me content to watch that I want to watch.
I think many people may view those sort of costs differently than the monthly subscription costs of Netflix, etc. Hardware is generally seen as a “one time” cost, and the added electricity costs are difficult to tease out from all the other variable electricity costs.
My personal argument is that I pay a monthly subscription ($15/mo) for a seed box, which is roughly the same cost as subscribing to a single streaming service.
Back before the password sharing crackdown, I had access to my parents’ Netflix account, and every once in a while, I’d try it out, but I’d always quickly get annoyed and would finish watching whatever I was watching via my Plex server.The difference is that we own the hardware. We can treat it as bad/good as we wants and we only have ourselves to blame if things go wrong. It also costs exactly the same whether we use it for 1 month or 100 years.
Infinitely reproducible digital media has little inherent value. As the article acknowledges, the value proposition Netflix offered was convenience. If pirate sites offer more convenience than Netflix offers legitimate users, Netflix will lose. I find it baffling they are fucking around with ads and locking down access, making their experience worse. Same with Amazon Prime. It’s like they forgot their own business model.
Exactly. Steam figured this out early on and it’s how they have maintained their dominance in the game distribution business. It’s the same lessons the entertainment streaming platforms must learn - your value is convenience. Add more walls between consumers and content? you will be cast aside.
Yo, Netflix! This one right here! Read it and understand plz
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That’s just an engineering problem… Not a particularly hard one either
Wtf would you keep re-encoding it? If you don’t, it’s just binary. You can run error checks on it, save it on raid config with high redundancy, and it’s more stable than any physical media
Load it into memory and you can copy it all you want, do error checking at the destination and you’re golden.
The exception is if you keep uploading it to and ripping it from hosting sites which keep re-encoding/compressing it… But replication itself is easy
Cry less, make better service more.
Operating Revenue: 33,723,297,000
Cost of Revenue: 19,715,368,000
Gross Profit: 14,007,929,000
Operating Expense: 7,053,926,000
Operating Income: 6,954,003,000
“Our profits may be obscene, but they’re not obscene enough! How could these evil pirates ever do this to us?”
The constant growth aspect of capitalism means that profits are never obscene enough for any business.
Hmmmmm it’s almost like growing infinitely large is not sustainable. Who would have thought?
What a communist thing to say. Are you a communist? Why do you hate freedom?
Communism is when you don’t convert all resources in the universe to large digital numbers
I like dividing net profit by total employees in 2022 they could pay everyone $350k extra that year.
4.49bil/12800
All we can do is 50k and some fruits in the office.
And a pizza party at the end of the year!
Note: Pizza will count as a taxable benefit in kind.
Maybe 3.5k and a pizza party.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
“Lets make 50 competing services while people have less buying power than ever. Everything will be $15 if you want anything of value. P.s. the thing you wanted leaves next month HURRY”
Cant imagine why people pirate /s
Yep, there was a time when streaming services actually became easier than piracy. That was when there was basically just Netflix and Hulu. If you had both of those, you had everything.
Yuuup. I stopped for a few years until everything went to shit and i learned my lesson. Yar and download anything you want to keep.
Netflix is so bad. Sometimes there is something i actually want to see, which is kinda rare. Then i can pick between three languages that i don’t speak.
Piracy is really easy to compete against. Ask GabeN. Steam has singlehandedly taken me out of the piracy game because they have what I want, it’s super easy to get and if it’s not reasonably priced today I’ll wishlist it until it goes on sale (and it will). If it sucks, or my hardware can’t run it, I just dm someone and I get my money back. I know they can disappear shit from my library like any online store but they haven’t abused that privilege with me yet and that makes me confident they won’t.
With Netflix, there’s a small chance that they actually have what I want. If they do, it’s gonna disappear soon. Prices only ever go up, not down, and that series you love is gonna be cancelled as soon as it stops driving new subscriptions. To watch everything I want I can spend a hundred dollars a month on a rotating set of accounts on several streaming services or I can go LOOK for the MOVIE 2 stream for free without even messing with a DOT TOrrent file.
Piracy is easy to prevent if you provide a better service than the pirates. What he meant was that it’s hard to get people to pay you to shit in their mouths when someone else is giving out sandwiches.
in fact for the games that have been removed I actually still have full access, like rocket League still in my library just not purchasable anymore
Isn’t that just because RL went free to play?
It’s because Epic bought the Rocket League devs, Psyonix, in 2019. In 2020, they pulled it from Steam, to drive traffic to the Epic store. And yes, it’s also free to play now, but you still can’t get it on Steam, unless you bought it there before they pulled it. If you did, it still works fine on Steam today.
“We successfully competed against piracy and drove it to near-extinction, but now that we’re enshittified we can’t compete with piracy while continuing to make the obscene amounts of money that we want to make”
It’s not just the enshittification of their own service; it’s the fact that so many audios decided to pull their content and set up their own enshittified services.
Now, if I want to watch stuff legally, I have to have a bunch of subscriptions, and we’re back to where we started from.
“Piracy is Difficult to Compete Against”
Have you tried
Not Enshittifying
?
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.
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.
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.
Content producers raised their prices to drive traffic away from Netflix.
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.
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
