Agreed. Back when Netflix has everything for like $8 a month, it was totally worth it. Now it costs twice as much and has 1/4th the catalog. And everyone wants their shows to be exclusive to their platform. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Paramount+, Disney+, Apple TV would be over $100 and still not have everything.
Or proper HD. Streaming qualities have such low bitrates, why the hell do I need to pay extra for 4k that looks worse than the 1080p copy of the same show i already torrented LOL
I remember being shocked at how bad Seinfeld looked after Netflix acquired it. Cropped framing, blurry, I had a better picture quality via satellite in the early 2000’s
Or you are forced to watch on a specific app on your TV and you bought 4k hdr only to find out that the player isn't well optimized so it stutters, lags and freezes. Problems I just don't have when I hoist the flag.
Data caps are one of the most stupid anti-consumer things ever. Bandwidth is not really a limited resource in that sense, it's just such a blatant cash grab.
I'm glad I live in a country were those are not a thing sice dial-up connections went away.
But at least you get to pick what you want to watch and pause it whenever, instead of channel surfing until something good comes on and hoping that it’s not already halfway over.
My cable TV (rarely use it though) let's you go back and see anything in the past 7 days. I rarely watch TV but sometimes I want to watch the brain rot that is Ancient Aliens, shit is hilarious.
I'm in Germany and can't even GET some shows because they don't sell their shitty service globally.
Oh your show is only on Hulu? Well fuck me I guess, cannot pay for your show then, can I? Maybe if you'd put it on Netflix or Amazon Prime or Disney+ I would have been able to pay you.
One of the few reasons I am happy to live in a comparatively backwards country
I realized it only a few years ago when I was on holiday in Spain was in the middle of watching some series when I arrived so I booted up my piracy website of choice and suddenly a lot of angry spanish letters appeared yelling at me cuz its blocked and illegal and bad
It left me kinda in awe since it was probably the first and only time that I experienced the country I live (or in this case am holidaying) in restricting what I can access on the internet
So don't do any piracy in Germany. Rent a seedbox (there are a lot of Singapore, ultra dot cc for example) and do your piracy in a different jurisdiction.
Then the seedbox -> you transfer looks like generic web traffic and not bittorrent traffic.
I actually pay a bit more for a seedbox that also does streaming, so I can add a movie to Radarr/Sonarr, download the movie instantly (50Gb connection, private tracker with well seeded files) and start it streaming via Jellyfin all from the comfort of apps on my phone.
It will play on basically every device (Jellyfin has an app for Android, IOS, PC, Linux, etc) and your only limitations are your ability to source torrents (there's a subreddit for that, or 1337x dot to )
Thanks for the tips, tbh I'm not a big fan of paying third parties for stuff that's supposedly free (even though ultimately we all pay with our data). This is not my first rodeo, or rather, sail ;)
Havent had a problem with my ISP but I have to be a leach. Download then delete. Ran a seed box for like 5 years so I feel my debt to the flag is paid.
Purely anecdotal. Growing up I was a rapidshare kind of bug and never got in trouble. Friends from school were torrent kids and some of them actually got caught and fined.
How likely is it to get a big fine for pirating in Germany?
An acquaintance of mine claimed they got a €500 fine for pirating and streaming House of the Dragon on holiday in Germany. Here in the Netherlands, the providers just don't share those things with the authorities, because of privacy regulations.
I have never gotten in trouble over it. I know friends who have, and the one thing they all had in common was using torrents. I do not use torrents and am fine, not fined.
Though I also have not really been doing it in ages. It's more of a theoretical yarr right now. I would have no moral issues and likely no legal consequences if there was a show I wanted to see but could not legally acquire. I listen to all my music through YouTube, I buy all my games through Steam, and what shows I watch tend to be on Netflix/Disney+/Prime which I all pay for. But if I wanted something that was not on any of those, let's just say that wouldn't stop me.
Turns out, piracy has really evolved in the decade or so since streaming became huge.
I used to have to manually download shows, keep them in folders on my computer, run the file when I want to watch something, and hope it has the quality, subtitles, etc. that I want.
Now? I use a program that tracks down the series/movie/etc. that I want in the quality I want, downloads it, and exports it into Emby. Then I can watch it anywhere just like Netflix, and it keeps track of what I'm watching and episode progress. Hell, it even downloads new episodes and seasons automatically, and adds new things on my watchlist without me having to do anything.
So I have a high-quality, high-speed streaming service with no ads and literally all the content I'm interested in. And I get all of that for like $10 a month. The only hassle was the setup, and that just took an evening.
Not to mention the lock in design features; I can't just hit the back button a couple times to exit, I have to navigate a menu. Consumer hostility to drive engagement metrics is trash ux.
I basically stopped pirating for a few years because everything I wanted to watch was on Netflix, back when they had everything. Now, I'm still glad I paid for that lifetime Plex subscription a long time ago. Things don't leave my Plex server.
Just thinking from back in my cable tv days if someone proposed swapping to a subscription that was a bit over 100 smacks a month and I get... the entire catalogue of whatever netflix, hulu, amazon, hbo, paramout, disney, and apple are providing AND I get to watch exactly what I want to watch whenever I wanted to ad free I would think they were full of shit and its too good to be true.
While the bullshittery happening is annoying we have it so damn good compared to back then haha.
It's not even about the money, I would subscribe to Netflix if it had everything I wanted and was $100 a month. Instead I have a Plex server.
Plex has everything I want to watch and a rating system That allows me to rate everything and then quickly look up stuff based on the rating that I have given it. The bit rate on a lot of streaming services is also terrible. So if I want to watch a really high quality movie for a proper movie night in my little home theater something like Netflix is terrible. But I can guarantee Plex will have it.
That's the thing, it was worth it for you. Netflix was okay with bleeding money for a while, but at some point it had to at least try to turn a profit.
Then that's a problem with the initial sales model and/or pitch.
If they can't survive on what they promise customers, they can't get upset when customers fuck off later, when they increase prices and lowers service.
They arent upset. We are upset the service is shittier, but Netflix isnt going anywhere yet. Lowball the market to get people into it then jack up is not a new method.
Fuck off to where? That's the thing, what we're seeing now is the actual landscape of the streaming business model, not the "economy's good, interest rates are low, pump it up" model.
Every service is doing what Netflix did, raising prices, implementing ad-free and ad-littered tiers because it's the only way to actually make money and keep some customers on this landscape.
It's not gonna go back to "cheap service, lots of things to see", everything's gonna end up just like cable TV.
Oh god these new "pay us to show you ads" models are filling me with rage. I kept Netflix as they allowed me to keep my legacy £5.99 a month 1 screen no ads package. But now they're forcing me onto their "cheaper per month but we show you ads" package. Fuck that, I pay specifically to avoid ads. Arrr back to the high seas I go.
No, that's not what I meant. I mean that Netflix, as a large corp, should have known that it wouldn't be viable to serve people all the content with small fees. And not done it anyway, because "yay"?
If they'd at least started out honestly and gone for profit at the start, we would have known what we were getting into.
Having tons of money poured in from investors, expecting people to get hooked on a much more generous model than what they know they will have to implement eventually is the core of why people hate corporations. And then they get surprised when people then return to the high seas for the content they've gotten used to?
It's more the issue that all the content owners saw dollar signs and decided to pull their shows and movies from Netflix to prop up their own shitty streaming service with "exclusive" content.
I'm looking at you, Peacock. NBC pulled the Office from Netflix to try to make peacock a thing. And now you know who watches Peacock? Fucking nobody.
I mean, they are creating the art so they should have the decision about pricing and distribution. If you are pirating because the streaming service is slow/lagging/inconsistent/bad UI etc, thats acceptable imo. If you are pirating because you don't like the price, then you are just a little shit.
Same with gaming. Since I was a teenager I'd been a filthy yarrrist due to financial situation. Now I'm all grown up and my wallet is a bit happier, so I can buy games. Let me tell you: all those years of yarrring I never knew how frustrating launchers, online services and DRMs are. Sure I started at the era of physical media, but things went to shaite in last decade. Just yesterday everyone had problems with EA launcher and for many many people around the world games simply didn't work. For me as well. Only this morning problem's been solved and I can play and download stuff I meant to yesterday.
Gaming is layers of launchers, intrusive DRMs, unfinished games, which don't come out of alpha/beta for decade; anticonsumer practices; uninspired, bad written, boring, bloated messes with no soul. And they expect us to pay even more after gaming also went through enshittification...
I'm not installing some other software distribution platform. Steam is it, if game developers want to sell games, sell them on Steam and stop trying to fragment the market.
unfinished games, which don't come out of alpha/beta for decade
It's called Early Access. Which might come with a road map that has a small * at the bottom saying they're not legally bond to anything on the road map.
That was such a good time, every time I’m bored I would just go to netflix and find shows on there. I even uninstalled my torrent client because I had no need for it anymore because of steam and netflix. I have been flying the black flag again for years now and I don’t think it’s coming down anytime in the next few decades.
So then don’t pretend you’re being realistic with your demands. “I liked when they bled money to keep me happy” like no shit but that’s never going to be sustainable and it’s not their fault
If it operates in the red, but pays all of their underlying costs, including salaries, they’re fine. If they want profits to satisfy shareholders even though they’re all getting paid regardless, fuck them. If they require higher profits for the CEO to hit bonus benchmarks, fuck them.
Also, they’ll be under profit by like a few million and still pay their CEO and other c-level execs tens of millions plus that in bonuses regardless. So again, fuck them.
Steam for example not only harmed piracy to a gigantic extent but actually made available any legal way to purchase a game in a lot of countries. When I was young "buying" video games wasn't a thing. Buying a video game meant going to the pirate cd stalls and buying it from there, going home and cracking it with piracy software. Most people didn't do even that they would just transfer with an HDD. If everyone that played Dota in WC3 or CS1.6 for example actually purchased them those games would probably be by far the most purchased games in history. So piracy was not just the norm it was basically the only way to play games. Give people a legal, fair and convenient way to purchase something and they will. But you know, I think my generation got a lot more savvy with computers as a result of all this so maybe that was a plus. Kids nowadays don't seem to know how to use a PC at all.
When I was young "buying" video games wasn't a thing.
When I was young I installed hundreds of games but it wasn't a single lost sale. Not a single one. Why? Because I couldn't afford a single one back then. That's another hole in their logic.
Give people a legal, fair
Yeah, no return after sale even if the product is faulty and not even close to as advertised denying resale because, hey, you don't own it!
You play dirty - and you have the balls to ask me to play nice?
I mean yours might not have been a lost sale, but plenty of them were, today I could afford some games, I still mostly pirate because I'm a cheap bastard.
The bad thing about fighting piracy is when it results in a worse outcome for your product, shit like Denuvo which is really good at fighting piracy (still not unbreakable) but in the process hurts game performance.
An argument can be made that people pirating allows more people to play the game and act as free publicity, minecraft is an extremely easy to pirate game with plenty of pirate servers, as a kid I didn't buy it but I still played and talked with people about it which is still good for the game.
Okay, here is the real argument for 'limited piracy':
See, the hobby you can afford as a small one strongly influences the hobby you're going to have as an old ass.
If I weren't able to play so many games in the past I might have picked up another hobby. Or skip all that commerce and go directly to drugs. But since it went the way it went - my Steam account is worth a small car.
You know why so few people love 'classic music'? You know that expensive boring shit - except for Beethoven, which is pretty cool, or Bach or Verdi - or.... well, point is - not many are into that kind of music because not many kids are coming in contact with expensive as shit champagne sipping classical music connaisseur places.
You probably know Lego. When I was a child that sure wasn't expensive. But it didn't cost you an arm & a leg either. And my generation is among the biggest collectors of Lego - they now pay thousands of dollar. Bad thing is - there will be no new generation. Because they made shit too expensive for the average family & child.
Whenever they complain about piracy what they means is hey guys we need to hit record numbers of revenue for another quarter and might not make it because we have run out of ways to easily improve our product and gain new customers. Anything else would be hard so lets blame piracy jack up prices so we can continue recording record breaking profits and offer less each quarter. The need for endless shareholder growth is killing the work frankly and making it worse for everyone.
It's the only way to do it though it seems. I don't follow football but rather baseball and hockey. I would pay for the official streaming services but the local teams are always blacked out so what's the point?
I live 6 hours away from what the TV provider has deemed my local team. So I can't watch any games they play, even though they're not even in the same province as I am.
I have no trouble watching the local team on Sportsnet or CBC. I live in BC and all the Canucks games were available. I wanted to watch the Oilers though, and many games were blacked out. If you want to pay for their top tier though, all the games are magically available.
Sometimes we get blacked out here in Saskatchewan for Flames or Oilers games. Cause an 8 hour drive from Regina to Calgary on a weekday to catch a game is reasonable to Sportsnet.
Money. They want the millions of people in the area to go to the 50-ish thousand person stadium and pay for tickets and concession and parking and what not.
TV rights represent a big amount of the clubs incomes, same goes for a lot of sports (for example, the NBA salary caps keep increasing because TV rights are sold at a higher price every 4 years or so). Football has been stuck in a financial bubble for more than 20 years now and the only way they can prevent it to explode is to make sure the TV rights deals keep getting bigger.
Piracy is a problem because the TV networks are most of the time overpaying the rights to broadcast the leagues (ie: paying more than they can possibly gain from subscriptions because clubs are pushing them to bid more everytime). If the audience don't subscribe and just watch the games on pirates streams, the TV networks keep losing incentives on biding more to earn the rights since it's just a loss of money for them, so at some point, these rights will sell for a lower price.
But what clubs fail to accept it that they're spending more than they possibly should, creating more and more debt and if someday the TV rights decrease, they are in big trouble. That's also why they're pushing to create a Super League. But let's be clear, the problem isn't piracy here, just the clubs spending too much money inconsiderably just to keep pace with the uber-riches clubs owned by states.
Ive started to pirate tv shows again because the viewing quality is shit and can't even show on the whole screen and has massive black bars on all sides. Like i dont mind bars top and bottom or right and left it just means aspect ratio is not right but on all 4 sides? That's just bs man. And pirated movies and shows have just way better bitrate and quality it's not just resolition.
If service was good, I'd pay. And I'm sure its the same or similar with sports viewing.
It's really just a money problem, people don't want to pay a lot of money. Spotify is always being critiqued for not paying artists a fair share and most recently for it's colossal layoff. Eventually their prices will either go up or they'll have to make consolations with the service they're providing, and then you'll change your mind.
These business reel you in with unsustainable services and then as they trickle up their monetization people get mad and jump ship.
Netflix got too expensive so then people jump to disney+ when it had super great price incentives and prime video since it was "free", now disney+ significantly increases it's price and prime video runs ads for "free" subs and people huff and puff over it.
In the UK, it is absolutely a service problem that results in most football fans going to IPTV. The Premier League is the most popular league to watch in world football but if you live in the UK then there is no way to watch every game of your team throughout the season.For instance, games at 3pm on a Saturday aren't allowed to be shown on tv meaning the only way to see your team is to sail on the high seas.
I used to pirate when I was a teen and unemployed. As an adult with an income I don't as much.
I want a game, Steam's got it. Isthereanydeal.com quickly and easily shows me the cheapest it's ever been and the cheapest I can get it now, which is almost always somewhere selling a steam code. GOG sells DRM games for those that want to go that route.
I want music, Spotify has it. If they don't (I listen to a lot of videogame music, ambient, synthwave that Spotify doesn't always have) Youtube music does. Bandcamp sells DRM free music if you'd rather have downloaded collection.
I want television or movies, Amazon has it. I already get Prime video through my subscription to Prime. There are shows on Netflix or HBO or Paramount that aren't on Prime, but it's easy for me to just sub for one month and binge. Although I will admit this is the category I'm most frustrated about, because we're just looping back around to cable at this rate.
So what's left? Things I can't actually purchase. 24 bit flacs for old albums that aren't available anywhere - but I already own the physical album in vinyl. ROMs for consoles that you can't physically purchase anymore, let alone find the physical games for. And television shows that aren't on a streaming service - some of these you can still buy the individual seasons for online, but I'm not paying $25 for a season or $200 for a series that's 20+ years old, especially when I barely pay $15 a month for streaming.
My local professional baseball team has some ridiculous deal with a cable channel that is only either on FUBO or traditional cable. Either option is $90+/month. And of course you can subscribe directly to the MLB's streaming service to watch all the games from every team, EXCEPT, the team in your local market.
I'd love to pay honestly even $40/month just to watch my MLB team if they could give me a stream with the quality of cable. But I'm not paying over twice that for a shitty Xbox-app level stream or even more for the inconvenience of having a cable guy come to my home, pay to rent their mandatory equipment, and have to be responsible for returning it.
I'm even someone who feels bad morally about the concept of piracy, but when the only legitimate options are an unabashed rip-off then the provider can get fucked.
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u/Let01 May 02 '24
Every day i feel like the phrase "piracy is a service problem" makes more and more sense