Step one, provide good service.
Netflix: Welp, I guess we should just pack it in.
The 3rd panel needs to be updated to somehow show that it's also crazy expensive...
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.
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 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.
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
Fr stop producing c-tier content for millions of dollars and just pay for better content and/or make it cheaper. I don't need 14 generic action movies starring Ryan Reynolds and dozens of forgettable shows.
Also, don't greenlight 100 shows if you only plan on giving 5 of them a second season, and you base that decision entirely on algorithms instead of genuine human feedback.
And please, for the love of god, let me look at a movie for longer than 1 second before you start automatically playing it because your almighty algorithm determined that it would force users to pick a movie faster. It's the most annoying "feature" that makes me inclined to avoid Netflix as much as possible.
And please, for the love of god, let me look at a movie for longer than 1 second before you start automatically playing it
This is a setting that's on be default and buried in the user settings. It might also only be available to change on desktop (but will then set per profile for all devices), but this setting does exist and it's so much better once you toggle it
What Jupiter Ascending are you talking about here?
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.
There was a decent 5 year span in my life where the only time I ever pirated was to see British TV shows I wouldn't be able to watch in the U.S. And if I could have paid the British TV license fee to see those, I would have paid it too. Because that would have been a total of two streaming services.
Even now that we're down to one income we can afford two streaming services- one for video and one for music. But we sure as fuck can't afford the dozen streaming services you need to have if you expect to watch all the programming people rave about as amazing.
I can't afford Max and Disney+ and AppleTV+. If I want to find out why The Last of Us is so good and why The Mandalorian was a terrific show and how funny Ted Lasso is, and have the temerity to expect no ads when I'm already paying to watch, that alone would cost me almost $40 a month. Add Netflix and Amazon to that and it's another $30+.
That is what I was paying for cable except with far less programming. On-demand and no ads are definitely advantages, but pay the same amount for a fraction of the programming advantages? Not for me.
I've never seen a magnet link respond with "this is not available in your country".
I want this as a sticker for my laptop.
t-shirt for me
Mug
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.
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.
Hope you get banned. Anyone can feel free to go through my comments. They'll find that I'm anti AfD. Fuck Nazis, fuck the AfD (edited the last part out, as it was a personal insult. The rest still stands though!)
Yeah that was a bit of a weird accusation. For the public record, I checked and there isn't anything of that nature in your post history. I've removed @LemonLord@endlesstalk.org's comment. You might want to contact the admins of endlesstalk.org if the harassment by that user continues.
Thank you very much! And please excuse my harsh phrasing. Let me change that, in retrospect that was a bit over the top. I'm massively over-worked and get triggered rather quickly nowadays.
Try SceneNZBs, they have tons of German content!
I actually bought a one year subscription yesterday. Will see how it goes.
What I want is content in Greek, which is a lost cause.
I know very little about this topic, do not take this as fact. One possible reason is licensing issues. It's a mess. Not an unsolvable one, but one that pirates usually don't have to deal with.
Might be licensing but I think it's actually just that they will hide everything that's not dubbed in the language you speak because I didn't find anything on Netflix (back when I had it) that wasn't dubbed in German
It's just US managers who cannot imagine people speaking more than one language
My bad, I misunderstood your previous comment as saying you could only watch in your native language.
Searching a bit, I found an old blogpost explaining how to filter Netflix content so it only showed stuff available in English. So I assume it isn't (or at least wasn't) that they only show content dubbed in your language.
However, from my understanding, dubbing is quite popular. Especially so in Germany, or so say my 10 minutes of superficial research into the topic.
Netflix may simply noticed that dubbed was the more popular option by a significant margin and accordingly decided to invest a lot into making shows available with dubs, or not "waste" money making them available at all.
For most things that's true but 99% of anime aren't dubbed in any language other than Japanese. I still wanted to watch them tho, I always watch those in the original language with subtitles anyway. Was one of the main reasons I stopped using Netflix.
I completely understand. Though I rarely watch it nowadays, I'm much the same. Sometimes I'll make an exception when I hear the dubbed version is worth it.
Since spotify was increasing the price AGAIN, I was willing to give Apple music a chance. Guess what, many of the soundtracks I listen to are not available in my country. Like why would you block it I already pay for the thing just let me listen to it. But I guess they just know better. And now I'm gonna selfhost my music just like I selfhost movies and tv shows.
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.
And offline. And in the quality you define. And on any device.
You've made my DS220+ blush
I've got a DS920+ on a shelf, and she's super jealous of the Rackstation.
RAID6, one big storage pool. On that one, the bulk of it's usage in a single shared folder for video, though I do have another carved out for a VMware datastore for the homelab, though it's mostly just there for somewhere to stick VMs when I'm updating DSM on the smaller DS9220+ (4x8TB in RAID 5).
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.
They had piracy all but beat. It was their insatiable greed that drove people back to the sea.
Netflix was a core part of my life for well over a decade. The vast majority of my entertainment came from there.
In other News my Plex server is coming along great!
To be fair, for me the fact that they content is now spread across many subscription services is the problem more than Netflix's price or current quality.
Once I set are services, torrent and jellyfin for all of the others, I'm not making exceptions for Netflix
Yeah, by "they", I meant the studios more than Netflix. Netflix itself was negatively impacted by studio greed, since a lot of them pulled their content from the platform so they can push their own shitty subscription service. It's frustrating that these studios fought streaming tooth and nail, while Netflix pioneered the industry and proved a profitable streaming model. As soon as it was impossible to dispute that the model works, all the individual studios suddenly want to run their own streaming service. They fragmented the content across a dozen different services, and drove the industry back to unaffordability and inconvenience.
Its ironic. On a decentralized platform we are discussing how a big issue with streaming services is that they are not centralized ^-^
I dont even disagree with you. I just think its interesting that we dont apply the ideological standard of centralization and monopoly being inherently bad evenly across the board.
Im not really sure I have a greater point to make here. I'm not trying to knock or dissent what your saying at all.
Just a stoned observation.
It's exclusivity deals that are the problem. Governments should legislate them away so that there can be competition.
Then we'd all choose the marketplace of our preference. Like supermarkets.
Video streaming, music streaming, games consoles, even mobile OSs all could benefit from some anti-monopoly legislation.
This, why did the government stop on prohibiting studios from owning cinemas?
I see your point, but I don't think this would qualify as decentralized. It went from 1 to maybe 8 players depending on where you are, but they are separated and closed. Each one of them is centralized, it's just that there are several competing ones. Each one is taking away their shows or making some third party ones exclusive, so the more there are, the less vale each provides.
And of course the issue is that each one has to be paid separately, so there's a economic incentive to participate in as few as you can.
With Lemmy for instance, you might want want an instance that's very connected with others, one that's quite closed and focussed or even create several users or even spin your own instance to have it your way.
Excellent point. Calling the current streaming landscape decentralized is like calling the current social media landscape decentralized, since you can choose between twitter, reddit, tiktok, or meta. It's unfortunate that it's unlikely that a properly decentralized network for video will exist, since the hosting costs are so astronomical.
A centralized service's hosting costs are astronomical because they are trying to serve the whole world. Is your Plex server hosting cost astronomical? What if you share it with friends? Everyone contributes to a decentralized service. Piracy is decentralized, and the hosting costs are not astronomical.
You can read things from all servers on the server you choose to connect with though. Bad analogy.
Yet streaming music has basically the same artists no matter which service you use. And Tidal integrates with Plex seamlessly with my own local collection. Worth the subscription for that.
Do that. (But they won't)
One should acknowledge that this is not on Netflix alone.
Other media companies pulling their content to set up their own streaming services has fractured the market and made each individual service much worse in the process.
You're correct. I actually did acknowledge it further down in the comments chain here: https://lemmy.world/comment/7277901
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.
piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue.
- Gabe Newell
I just realised I've never pirated a video game, yet I download almost everything I watch... 🤔
A high price is a bad thing to serve.
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.
Yo, Netflix! This one right here! Read it and understand plz
poor service
bad library
too expensive
can’t share passwords
“How could pirates do this!?!??!”
Don’t forget terrible video quality, even compared to other streaming services.
It really is surprising how bad Netflix's quality is. I can notice it on my TV and it's only 1080p.
When Glass Onion (terrible film) came out, a friend and I started watching it on his rather good TV and it was horrible even though we had the best 4K HDR, no bandwith limitation quality Netflix offered. Like, the water in the background looked like it was playing back at at 6fps instead of 24.
After half an hour my friend noped out because the film and video quality was so bad and I finished it alone on my 15 year old 720p projector. It looked better on there…
A lot of their content is just 1080/720 up scaled to 4k and HDR graded. If it looks like crap, it’s because it is crap with a shiny 4k label.
Yea but like… Glass Onion is a Netflix original… They have special requirements for cameras to be true 4K. So everything points to it being actual 4K HDR just with a bitrate so abominably low that you might as well not bother.
Right, their 10mbps 4k stream is a joke compared to blu-ray.
Not just Bluray, even compared to other streaming services that sometimes push up to 40mbps. That’s still less than BluRay but imo enough. Heck, a well encoded 25mbps HEVC video file can look great. Sure, not as good as a 4K Bluray but better than a regular Bluray at least
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.
won't somebody think of the parasites shareholders‽
"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 almost like some people don't like being fucked.
2013 Netflix competed just fine. Piracy was mostly dead back then
But 2013 Netflix didn't have to compete with Prime Video, Disney Plus, Paramount Plus, HBO Max, Apple TV, Hulu, Peacock, or any of the million "add-on" channels that Amazon uses as an excuse to paywall you off from the content.
The fact that they all run in their own UI, desperate the shove the next instalment of mediocrity down your throat, means that I've gone back to piracy. It's just much easier to type what I'm after into Radarr or Sonarr than it is to go through the services to see what's available. Sure, I can use Justwatch, but 80% of the time what I'm after isn't on anything I have.
More competition should mean lower prices. How is competition diving prices up? Seems rigged.
It's only competition if they provide similar products.
The current landscape is like farmers markets and butchers. Sure they both provide food, but they don't really directly compete with eachother.
They certainly do compete with each other but it's just a general misconception that competition lowers prices.
Pepsi and Coke have been competing with each other for decades and Coke has larger market share. So why doesn't Pepsi just lower prices? Pepsi even has the diversified income of doing more than drinks. Lowering prices doesn't lead to market share and Coke can just match the price.
Look at Apple's growth in the American market, they can sell a product that is significantly more expensive than competitors and still gain market share.
I still think you're looking at competition slightly wrong.
Coke and Pepsi do compete with eachother, along with the rest of the drink market. And overall prices in that industry are pretty low, some people will buy other competitors (the store brand Cola's). But overall competition is working.
Apple only kinda competes. Sure a phone is a phone and a laptop is a laptop. But unless someone is entering the market for the first time. They already have applications they are looking to use, so if you need an iPhone, you need an iPhone, and same for a Mac. But if you're an android or Windows user, suddenly you have a lot more choice because there is lots of competition!
The reason companies setup walled gardens, or pay for exclusive access to a piece of media is to erode competition. If a user wants that thing, they can only get it from that one place.
Are you're saying competition doesn't exist because products aren't the same?
I'm trying to not disparage your argument here but if I go with your reasoning then I feel like there is no competition so that you can justify prices not going down. Where I believe competition simply doesn't lower prices because capitalism desires more profit not less profit. Why fight over scraps when you can create a market by manipulating people into thinking: Green chat bubble mean poor so me no use RCS or open blue bubble because green bubble mean poor.
If competition didn't exist for apple then they could give android an imessage app.
I'm saying the competition can only exist because products that actually fill the same need.
If you decide that you need product A, and have multiple options on where to get that, you have competition.
So if you're looking for a Cola, you have options.
If you're looking to play StardewValley, you have options where you want to buy it and which platform you want to play it on, you don't need to buy a new game system to play it.
If you're looking to play the latest Zelda game, you don't have options, you need to buy a Switch.
If you're looking to watch Ozarks, you don't have options, you can only watch Netflix.
If you're looking to just have something playing on TV and don't really care what it is, you have options.
If you're looking to listen to music, you have options, most of the steaming services have most of the music.
If you're looking to be able to text friends, you have options, any phone will work.
If you're looking to be able to iMessage friends and for your case only iMessage will work, iPhone is your only option.
Competition is complex and is more dependent on a consumer needs than just classification of what a product is. In your earlier point you used Apple as an example of a company that can increase prices despite competition, but really Apple is a prime example of a company putting up walls to an ecosystem making it really hard to leave once you're in.
Generally in the current tech landscape there barely is any competition outside openish platforms. But with tech, you often can't look at competition as product A vs Product B. Like while we can say that Window competes with OSx, it's harder to say that a Mac laptop competes with a given Dell laptop (because what you can do with each OS is different to different people).
This is why I like to think of all the tv streaming services as different types of food stores. There is no supermarket that supplies everything, you're forced to have memberships to the single butcher, the single milk man, the single bakery, etc. if you want a particular food, there is currently no (or very little) competition. You can certainly survive on just bread, and people are happy to do that, but that bakery can and will increase prices whenever because they aren't really competing with the butcher.
This isn't how market competition is done though. Otherwise every product you listed is a monopoly.
I thought I listed a bunch of cases where there were options (and not monopolies). But yes, 100% inside many ecosystems are monopolies, and those ecosystems/walled gardens have been slowly expanding every chance these companies have.
I agree but they are not technically market monopolies.
Streaming services are middle men with exclusivity rights on products. They sell simular but different things, think of them like dealership repair shops, they both fix cars but they fix different cars.
It is rigged. Exclusive deals keep content restricted so they're not directly competing; if you want that show you have to pay for service X. Or, you know, yarrrr.
Same amount of content, more players, outbidding each other, passing on those lovely reverse savings.
See if it was like music, with a massive back catalogue available to everyone, you'd have four or five services competing on price. But it isn't. And it will suffer for that.
if it was like music
If it were* like music
When using be in an if clause for an unreal conditional sentence, always conjugate it as were, no matter what the subject is. Even if the subject is first-person singular (I) or third-person singular (he, she, or it), still use were with an if clause in unreal conditional sentences.
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/conditional-sentences-was-instead-of-were/
Calling people out for their grammar isn't cool anymore; now we just let one another live in peace. You should try it.
Your comment makes no sense to me. It was never cool, and it isn't now.
If it was never cool, there's no need to extra uncool it now.
I don't think it can be made any more uncool than it already is
If it was possible, you could!
Aha! You're now expecting me to be bigger than myself, but I'm a very, very small person, therefore:
If it were* possible
I hope this is sarcasm. They weren't being a dick, just educating people, which is a good thing
When using be in an if clause for an unreal conditional sentence
*When using "be" in an "if" clause for an unreal conditional sentence
When referring to words, use quotation marks for clarity.
Great suggestion, thank you
prices are lower, piracy is nearly free for most, no?
I would like to see some evidence that the competition resulted in Netflix losing a lot of subscribers, and thus money, rather than not hitting their predicted revenue targets. Because I would bet it's the latter and not the former. I don't know of too many people who said, "well, I had Netflix, but Disney is doing streaming video now so I won't be watching Bake-Off anymore." They just ended up getting Netflix and Disney+.
For a while anyway. Now people are dropping these services due to the price hikes. Unless you downgraded your Netflix service when they added lower tiers with fewer options and ads, to maintain the basic Netflix service you had in 2016, you're paying an additional $5 a month today.
Netflix and all the other streaming services are built upon the insane idea that there are an infinite number of new customers that will continue to sign up regularly. Some of them don't even think you need all that much programming to draw them. Paramount+ has a fraction of the original programming of Netflix, Peacock, Apple, Amazon, etc. but still costs $10 a month and will most assuredly continue to raise its prices based on the idea that there are either an infinite number of Star Trek fans or they will have to raise their prices.
Same thing for me. I can also use Findroid on my Android phone with microG to watch stuff from my Jellyfin server. I think the Netflix app wouldn't even work on my phone.
Or use jellyseerr/overseerr, and browse for media. Just like the streaming services.
Most accurate piracy meme I've ever seen
"Piracy is Difficult to Compete Against"
Have you tried
Not Enshittifying
?
We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas
hey now, don't discount bitching and moaning!
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.
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....
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.
Fair point, capitalism ruins everything by definition.
Also true. Netflix decided on their own to limit resolution to 720p for browsers even for account that pay for 4k content
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.
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.
Content producers raised their prices to drive traffic away from Netflix.
Cry less, make better service more.
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.
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.
Yep, Steam is my "video game piracy canary". The day I lose access to my games on Steam will be the last day I ever buy any video game, and probably any non-physical piece of media for the rest of my life.
Mostly the same for me. I'd still be open to it if it's convenient, DRM-free, and easy to back up somewhere, but far less likely to put effort into finding out.
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?
when gaben dies the enshittification of steam will happen in short order. don't put all your eggs in one basket
If that happens well then Piracy still exists. None of the other baskets aside from GOG are worth putting eggs in
until it goes on sale (and it will)
Except Factorio. It has never and will never go on sale, and they were able to use that policy to get money back that they lost from G2A.
That being said, Factorio is worth the price tag
G2a?
Gobble two asses
but you usually get paid for that
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
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.
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?
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
Also Netflix: We should raise our prices again.
the entire industry: "...and also fragment our offerings across a dozen different subscription services."
Netflix: This problem we practically solved ten years ago but have been steadily and diligently working to bring back pledge to double down on those efforts and eventually make it the only viable option for a good consumer experience.
Netflix used to have plenty of content people wanted to watch, and you could share your account with family in different physical houses. Now neither is true.
Netflix: "why would pirates do this?"
It wasn't Netflix's decision to pull the content people wanted to watch. That was content creators like Disney that pulled their content to start their new streaming services. Netflix was stuck with creating their own content, which as it turns out is hard.
It was Netflix's decision to add ads to paid subscriptions and limit browsers to 720p even for accounts that pay for 4k. Neflix isn't the only cause, but they are part of the problem
it's hilarious the way they all get bugs up their asses about irrelevant problems and then dream up these punitive solutions that wind up killing their business, because they're autist morons. The executive class is the biggest single problem in capitalism - the idea that one supergenius exists who knows best how to run your special little snowflake? It's pathetic.
As Lord Gaben once said: Piracy is a service problem.
Make better service, have less piracy.
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, and 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
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
So here's a novel idea, maybe stop driving people away from your business with constant rate-hikes, removal of content, killing new shows after 1 season, etc...
That's funny, I haven't stolen music in over 10 years thanks to Spotify, but they haven't split all the music into 20 services or jacked up the price every year.
Granted they don't pay the artists, but that's not my problem.
And even the "they don't pay the artist thing" is somewhat defensible in that the record labels take a much larger cut than Spotify.
They're the main ones taking the money away from artists.
By far my main issue with Spotify is for giving massive paycheques to the likes of Joe Rogan
I want to quit spotify so bad because they shove a ton of money into joe rogan's ass AGAIN while firting their staff.
Yeah the Rogan shit is infuriating
I lived in a country where spotify wasn't available, so I never stopped. Now that I'm in a country where it is available, I just don't want to spend the cash on it, since all these streaming services have me over a barrel.
Build a Plex server, it will pay for itself in less than a year
Unfortunately the only reason we have streaming services is because of the ease of built-in subtitles that are a pain in the ass to otherwise get (not English).
This would be a great use for all this dumb AI shit, I'm sure it would butcher them though
Unfortunately any automated translation I've seen on various websites is garbage to the target language. I wish it wasn't. But we're a long way off from good translation on certain languages.
Funny, you had no problem competing in the past. Hmmmm wonder why that is...
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.
You also won't instantly watch anything on that streaming you found the movie you wanted on "justwatch" since you have to make a new account, go get your credit card to fill out the form, etc.
They didn't seem to have any problems before they started fucking around with their pricing and policies and everyone else also started their own streaming services, splitting everything across multiple subscriptions instead of 1, convenient service.
I could keep up with what's available where and shuffle my subscriptions around every few months to see what I want when it's new... But it's way easier to just use a torrent site now.
Piracy is service problem
I’m kinda surprised that the article only mentioned convenience and completely skipped rising costs, ad injection, crackdowns on password sharing, and more fees.
The subscriptions cost a shitload more, even if you’re a paid subscriber you still get ads, you have to pay more fees to get rid of ads or watch a program that is either new or the service has decided to charge for, and you can’t share password with anyone outside your household.
It’s not a convenience problem, it’s a money problem.
Eh, it's also a convenience problem. If I want to watch a specific movie, good luck figuring out what streaming service it's on. It's so nice to be able to just watch what I want without that hassle.
Fair enough. I was reaching back to Netflix’s early days where you could get DVD’s of most anything decent even if you couldn’t stream it.
Just about everything's on Fmoviesz dot to. if what i want isn't on the two platforms i'm currently coughing up for, it'll be on there!
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.
Piracy predates Netflix, if it was hard to fight against then Netflix as we know it wouldn’t have taken off
Nah, it's easy, just lower your prices and expand your catalogue. Nothing to it.
Oh, and stop paying your executives like kings.
So hard.
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.
Netflix already defeated piracy by producing endless mid “content” like The Grey Man that you can’t even be bothered to watch for free.
Solution: create a common platform for all online services (Netflix, Paramount, Disney, Warner, ...) and have EVERYTHING there, even old movies and not often seen ones.
When overpriced streaming services keep becoming worse and worse, it's hard to avoid piracy
"We keep raising our prices and having content splinter off between dozens of competitors, I don't understand why the people won't just pay!"
There's nothing Netflix can do about content splintering except make their own content and revenge splinter it.
They are paying a lot more for the most popular shows they can get. Some other shows just don't have rights. Companies like Disney refuse to sell the rights because they want Disney+ subs.
How are the pirates so good at this without even taking my money? Maybe they should teach the money people how the computers work.
CEOs: *Do a greedflation, raking in historic profits.*
Also CEOs: "Why does no one want to pay for a subscription?"
I was rather happy with Netflix for nearly a decade. The price was reasonable and family members could also watch. When I moved out I upgraded to the 4K package (split 3 ways between family members) and it was fine at first.
But there were several caveats:
- 4K only works on TVs, on my 1440p monitor I could only watch 1080p. Sucked, but it's not too bad
- Price kept going up, in the end it was 18€ a month. That's okay split between 3 people, but otherwise far too much for what is offered
- Series that I liked kept getting cancelled, while trash was getting renewed or they messed up the later seasons (Looking at you, The Witcher..)
- They cracked down on password sharing, suddenly you need to be in the same WiFi to count as home or you need a travel code (limited to 2 a month and only for 2 weeks each), so if you regularly move between places it's a no-go for a service you pay for
I finally cancelled it, sick of their shit. Which also has the benefit of no longer having to take care of the account for the family. Unfortunately my dad accidentally took over the account (while trying to create a new one) and keeps paying the 4K price (I suggested at least going down to 1080p as the quality is shit either way). Simply idiotic :-/
Personally I tried out Real Debrid and it has been pretty alright so far. The quality is better too, which is ridiculous.
Netflix literally will not take my money anymore. I had cancelled my subscription during covid because money was tight, but I was willing to temporarily re-subscribe when the next season of select shows came out. I tried to re-enable my original account, but I couldn't because they wouldn't accept my credit card. I tried different cards, then tried to make new accounts with different emails and different credit cards, but still couldn't. Netflix kept rejecting all my cards. I ran out of credit cards.
Look, I was willing to give Netflix my money, it's not my fault they were unwilling to take it.
Steam has never tried to battle piracy head on, yet it succeeds. Please take note, Netflix, it is your card to lose.
To be fair, only a handful of publishers were able to take their cards and go elsewhere. The media companies were a lot more on top of dragging their products off of Netflix.
Nobody would be on steam just for Valve games, after all, and indie has a much lower barrier of entry.
While they could certainly distribute their current products better, a lot of the issues they have now (see: belated frogs comment) aren't things they really had control over.
Netflix is full of reptiles who don't care to offer a better service. All they want is enough market share to strongarm consumers into giving them more money.
Says the guys that reduced piracy to a fraction of its former self before getting too greedy. Piracy wasn't affecting them, but it's a side effect of what they have become.
Netflix blaming piracy is just a warning that hostile legislation will pass and all of this will be shut down. Call me pessimistic.
Luckily the speed at which new counter-measures to anti-piracy technologies can be developed is much faster than any legislative body can ever hope to move. It's an impossible battle to win by enforcement alone. These companies need to realize that they need to provide actual value to retain customers and remain competitive. People aren't going to stand for a reskinned version of cable.
The big media corporations have been pushing legislation and legal crackdowns since the 90s and it hasn't made a dent in piracy. They'll keep trying of course, but it still won't work.
What legislation? Piracy was never legal to begin with.
Hey Netflix, you need to compete on price AND the service offering. Make piracy feel inconvenient compared to paying and subscribing and you'll retain the userbase that is willing to pay. You'll never get those who aren't willing to pay no matter what.
As long as Netflix doesn't do 1080p on Firefox and reduces their price considerably and gets rid of stupid limitations on account sharing and ads, I'm never paying for it. Same for games with DRM. I'm not suffering from DRM bs when I can pirate the same without DRM. Why should i pay these asshole companies more and be more restricted than a pirate lol.
Netflix, steam, and Spotify got me out of piracy. Companies who owned the IP just decided they all wanted to replicate what Netflix did without understanding that it was impossible for more than one company to accomplish that.
It's possible for more than one companies to thrive in streaming space. Just look at music streaming industry. There are healthy competition there with several global music streaming apps and various regional/country-specific music streaming apps. All they have to do is not locking contents behind exclusivity deals and compete on price and features instead. Also, not cracking down too much on family sharing usage also helps.
SurprisedPikachuFace.jpg
It’s not like cable was going to vanish and leave us with this wonderful ad-free Ala carte service we've always wanted. They dangled the bait and once everyone bit they set the hook and reeled in the suckers with an even worse, and costlier, scenario. In every avenue of entertainment, marketing is there to make sure it fucking sucks. Even some of the pirate apps have ads in them. Greed ruins everything and will be remembered as the true folly of man.
Set sail mofos! 🏴☠️
Eh, honestly the current situation is still better than cable. Having to only watch what was being played, no choice in what episode of a show you watch and chasing the channel's schedule rather than getting to pick what you want to watch when is still far worse than what we have now with on-demand streaming
The ever increasing subscription prices and rights holders pulling content have nothing to do with it at all I am sure. /s
Boohoo magic piracy is stealing all my stuffs, its not that i'm losing the content wars to other, bigger, meaner shitheads
I think Jeff Gerstmann once said "you ha e to be able to compete with free" to combat piracy. Tech companies used to understand this...
it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it
It's really not free. Piracy is still a bit of a chore. It's just less of a chore than juggling a dozen streaming services, shitty and inconsistent apps and playing the whole "what major corporation's subscription service has the rights for this show?" game.
They ought to try sucking less.
OH NO BOO HOO!!
Maybe you shouldn’t have become the monster you fought to destroy.
dear netflix: may i interest you in the concept of not raising prices every year, not cancelling every queer show you put out, and not catering to transphobic bigot comedians?
Being someone who is less sensitive to those signals I wonder if it's that they are being phobic or if it's a situation where those issues and associated audiences are easier to marginalize... oh shit, had another revelation in the white, 35 and up market over here. Those systems roll hard.
Guys! If you are part of a group that has a month things might not be going well.
All jokes aside. Thanks for pointing this out as something I can be aware of. I'm pretty pro-human but things skip through the cracks. Good luck out there friend.
Netflix should've realised this would be the end result. The moment you needed 5-6 different streaming platforms to watch all the movies and tv shows you want, was the moment it became easier and significantly cheaper to pirate the content.
None of the big companies that decided to cash in ever stood a chance.
The thing is that we need an class action Anti-Competitive lawsuit that says that streaming providers are not allowed to only host shows on their own platform and need to "sell themselves" their shows at the same price as they sell to others in pay-per-view terms. That way all streaming providers can host all shows and everyone gets theirs.
It'll also bring out other streaming services that specialise in low-volume purchases with an a-la-carte payment model.
All shows on every platform should be the standard and subscriptions should focus on packaging it into "100/200/1000" views per month, SD/HD/4K model just like Internet service providers do.
Rip not going to see that before I die so that's the pirates life for me. 🦜🏴☠️
I find that sarcastically interesting.
I initially signed up for Netflix all those many years ago because it was finally a solution that was easier than piracy.
Didn't take long for them to completely fuck me and the service over, and I left to go back to piracy and I'll never look at Netflix again.
It really isn't because Netflix did it easily in the 2010s. But then, as always, capitalism got in the way and we are back to the cable era where even if you pay, you still have ads.
Cable TV 2.0: "Boohoo, pirates are eating my profits!"
I wouldn't mind paying for netflix if I didn't have to pay extra to not get ads, and if I didn't have to use a "smart" tv to actually get uhd, and if I trusted them with the data that they would get from that tv, and if I could share my account with my family in different cities, and if they had shows I actually wanted to watch and probably some other stuff too, but i stopped caring.
Make Netflix more convenient than my ARR setup and I'll happily come back.
When Netflix was under $10 I stopped pirating and just watched stuff on Netflix because it was worth it for the convenience at the price point.
That is how they solve piracy. Everything they have been doing over the last couple of years is the reason for the increase in piracy.
Netflix: “Should I get short term profits by price gouging and forcing commercials on people (thereby driving people to piracy) or should I forgo year over year profit increases by continuing to provide decent tv with no commercials and no price increases and delivering consistent profits?”
Also Netflix:
While I agree, it doesn't really apply to Netflix. It was always a rental/streaming business. Netflix never offered to sell the media, just temporary access to it.
Buying is owning. You just didn't buy what you thought you did.
But they are telling us we're "buyiing" it while hiding the truth 100 pages deep in the fine print. Screw 'em
..If you are expecting wild profits, year after year, ever increasing. Turns out that's unsustainable.
CuriosityStream: “In light of the compelling consumer proposition, piracy services are subject to rapid global growth”
They really are just copying this statement lmao, I actually did try to find their content elsewhere since there's no way I'm paying for a streaming in USD, but couldn't, don't remember which documentary it was.
Honest question: could some of Netflix's enshittification be because of the media industry, and not their fault? The fragmentation of streaming was the opposite of what they wanted. So maybe his point is that it's impossible to compete because the industry is so powerful and greedy that they couldn't hold onto their monopoly. Spotify has been able to hold onto theirs because record labels hold less power and don't want to get into the streaming business.
Little bit column A, little bit column B.
If your business model relies on you being the only game in town forever, it's a really shitty business model.
the enshittification is just the visual media version of the end-stage capitalist cashgrab we can see across the board. Weird how they think hoarding money will save them, when the collapse they work for will make money worthless.
It's all because of the media industry.
Try making a decent product again then, that seemed to limit piracy quite a bit
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...
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.
Gee whiz, can't imagine why...
There was a resounding chorus of "DUUUUUUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH" that echoed across the land as Netflix discovers this reality.
Good
sorry netflix i can't hear your whining because I canceled after your second price hike. Fuck you. You sell nothing.
What a mystery this is
Netflix is getting worse month after month. Same for the streaming market as a whole. Much worse service than before, no accountability for failures on their part. I would gladly pay >15€ every month if I had at least FHD, no ads, all series / animes (excluding very nice ones ). Some months ago I did an experiment: subscribe to Netflix + Disney + hbo. I still had to torrent in order to get some content (not niche stuff) and good quality. If piracy is increasing, the culpability is also on streaming services. People are fed up of being stomped on
Good.
Hahaha, good
I love taking from all these billionaire companies.
Oh no!
Anyways
SURRENDER, Netflix!
Womp womp
Aint nobody pirating Netflix shows.