- cross-posted to:
- piracy@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- piracy@lemmy.ml
The pirates are back - Anew study from the European Union’s Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) suggest that online piracy has increased for the first time in years. In fact, piracy rates have bee…::We analyze a new study where the EUIPO suggests online piracy is on the increase within the European Union.
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Love how it doesn’t mention the fact that services are getting objectively worse content as they stretch thin, are increasing their prices across the board, and cracking down on password sharing which was previously touted as a benefit.
Exactly. There’s too many platforms, not enough quality content on any one of them, and weaponized greed. Worse, these streaming services have “inspired” every asshole executive out there to make everything under the sun a subscription model.
The anti-piracy measures drive me to piracy, personally. There’s no technical reason I shouldn’t be able to stream 4K in Firefox, but Netflix won’t let me. I have to jump through hoops just to get 1080p, even. Same with most other services. I pirate shit I’m already paying for.
Have done this several times for content on Disney+. I have an ultrawide, HDR1000 display. The movie I’m trying to watch is in 21:9 and available in HDR. Why in God’s name are you delivering it in SDR and in a letterboxed 16:9 which is in turn pillarboxed on my display?!
This so much. I’m lucky enough to be able to afford enough streaming services to cover the majority of what I want to watch (although that’s changing for the worse over time). I just want to pipe them all through Kodi or some other software into a unified interface that is media source agnostic, that can also stream the content in the best quality available for my screen.
At that point the content is already paid for, I don’t need to use your own individual reinvention of the interface that inevitably focuses on pushing uninteresting content instead of making it as easy as possible to continue what I’ve already started watching or to find what I want.
Also none of the apps have any kind of audio equalizer or range compression, so if you don’t have an audio receiver then you’re doomed to constantly turning up the volume for spoken sections. Absolute minimum viable product garbage.
For sure. Why should I suffer umpteen different video interfaces designed by separate entities who aren’t really in the business of designing highly functional video interfaces? I’d much rather play everything in
mpv, which I can configure exactly the way I like it. I can adjust brightness and contrast, set up specific keyboard/mouse controls, adjust subtitle font/size/color/style/location, and I can even enable motion interpolation if I want to. I can fix those stupid hardcoded letterboxes with a keystroke. I can monomize or normalize audio. That’s because mpv’s entire reason to exist is to be a highly functional video player, and it’s open and extensible.Fuck your proprietary bare-minimum video interfaces. Even YouTube lags like 5-10 years behind the state of the art for video players, and most other services lag years behind YouTube.
Do one thing and do it well!
Fully agree. Shit makes me so mad.
It’s the same reason most car infotainment centers are awful. They aren’t software companies so their software sucks
I wonder how many Youtube users today ever used it when it used quicktime player, you could actually pause and buffer the entire video, it wouldn’t ever jump into an ad, it was the glory days. Aside from the fact it took a few minutes to load at times ahah.
Yeah, honestly same. There isn’t much I’m not already paying for, but being able to watch it all in one app (Stremio) is so much nicer.
The push for more money, and no more password sharing, is just making me think more about cutting those services, but that wouldn’t stop me watching.
Enshittification. Every human who uses computers on a daily basis needs to understand this word.
Yep, the only thing I still pay for is Spotify, and as soon as they start carving up music into different exclusivity contracts I’ll go back to piracy for that as well. I’m willing to pay $10-$20/month for one streaming service, but they want you to spend like $200 on services you don’t even end up watching.
It’s just greed, the way the streaming executives talked during the writers strike showed that. You could easily find an equilibrium that works for content creators and consumers, but the middlemen just want too much.
Or vanish.
Google play music merged into YouTube music.
I already had a Plex server so I just rolled.my.own music server.
And then with the emergence of plexamp… I don’t need a streaming music service now.
Have they gotten better? I’ve not had great experience with PMS handling music, even when using PlexAmp, but I last tried maybe about a year ago.
This fear is why I’m careful to maintain my old man MP3 and CD collection because I can’t fully trust a business.
I think streaming music will be good for awhile at least, somehow, the fucking music industry got it right with streaming (At least on the consumer side, the artist side has been in trouble for some time now (esp with Spotify)). Most big services have most things and a handful of niche services to handle the gaps for the most part.
Xbox Game Pass otoh for Games is a wildcard, who knows where that shits going to end up lmfao people should get in on it now while it’s still good lol
I mean, they’re already doing exclusivity contracts for podcasts (eg. Joe Rogan on Spotify only), it’s going to be a small leap to go to artists being exclusively on one service, and before you know the labels will all start their own streaming service, so you have to have different apps for Sony BMG artists, another app for indie artists, etc.
The enshittification is mostly pushed by wall street, who want instant bigger profits, and they’re happy to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs in the process. Spotify is not immune to those pressures.
That plus actively removing older shows
No new ones…
Star Trek prodigy
People aren’t also willing to spend as much on Oreo’s due to inflation so it’s also probably that if theres a game or movie everyone’s playing, sailing the seven seas is tried and true…and free.
Exactly. That’s when I went back to the seas. My family across 2 states uses Netflix and I already paid for the $20/month high tier. When they told my sister that it wasn’t about to be more expensive, I put my foot down and said I’m gonna setup a plex/overseer box on my on PC. It’s been working mostly alright.
Weird thing to love but you do you
The EUIPO speculates that financial pressures, like inflation, means that people have less money to spend on entertainment. This can be seen in the way that fewer people are signing up for Netflix or Amazon Prime – and some are even cancelling their subscriptions altogether.
Ah yes, that’s the only reason. Not that streaming services are offering less content and functionality for more money, that can’t be it.
I’m sure that economics is part of it. But I think the larger issue is the fact that you need 9 streaming services now just to see the shows you’d want. And then these streaming services are starting to remove the things people paid for. I set up a Plex server and just use that to watch things now.
And that’s only talking about streaming.
Everyone wants to be Netflix now: Microsoft Office? Monthly subscription. Adobe? Monthly subscription. A simple weather app? Monthly subscription. Cloud backup? Monthly subscription.
Fair enough for cloud storage as it costs real money to keep rust spinning. The rest not so much.
Yes, kinda. But take Windows for instance - the native backup tools got deprecated and are pretty much hidden, the systems constantly wants the user to use OneDrive.
So yes, it makes sense to pay for cloud storage - but many people didn’t even need it before, and now it’s another new expense.
eh, everyone should be using some form of cloud backup, with the small exception of like people with extreme privacy needs, and even then you have to get to a fraction of a fraction before the answer isn’t encrypted cloud backups.
That said, Win11 basically turning into an ad platform is gross as hell.
I think with quite a lot of software, monthly subs are really the best way to do it, and I think if you look at the history of things software is cheaper than it’s ever been. Aside from the obvious things that just cost monthly money to operate (cloud storage, even weather apps don’t keep working without servers) the reality is that we expect software to stay up to date and keep getting better. Aside from the fact that prior to sub fees for this type of software, the “one time” purchase cost used to be several orders of magnitude higher, and you would still basically end up “subscribing.” Meaning, you didn’t just buy Office in '95 for $300-$500 and keep using it until even 2005. MS would change a file format or upgrade a thing or something, and suddenly your $400 Office suite needed an upgrade, so you paid another $400 in '97.
People have never liked paying for software, but I think this is the most equitable, true model of the actual cost. I like it less with the bigger companies, but especially with smaller devs, the software I rely on I’m happy to pay a monthly sub on because I know that’s a much more stable model and will encourage the dev to keep the software up to date and releasing new features.
I think perpetual fallback licenses hit a decent middle ground. Pay a subscription to stay up to date, but have the option of stopping and retaining the current version. Of course, FOSS is better, but we have to take what we can get.
This is a good point.
I like how my music DAW (bitwig) does it. You buy your lifetime license with one year of updates. After the year is up you keep the latest version you have and it keeps working “forever”. If you decide you want another year of updates you get a discount. I usually don’t need new functions so I let it lapse, I bought the updates once because there was a function I wanted.
we expect software to stay up to date and keep getting better.
Well, we’ve been conditioned to expect that… Just because that’s how it’s been doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. It made sense in the past, applications were limited by the hardware’s technical capabilities, which kept improving over time - but we’ve reached a point where for the most part, the hardware is good enough to meet the needs of the software. That’s not saying it won’t continue to improve, but it’s not the limiting factor it once was. At some point, at least in theory, a product should be able to be “finished”, as in it has all the features it needs, possible exploits have been found and patched. Compare to buying tools - you don’t need to buy a new hammer every two years, well, maybe you do if you abuse the shit out of it and break it, but you don’t need to because of ongoing development in the techniques of building hammers.
Corporations don’t want competition, they want monopolies. If the good they are selling is in unlimited supply, like music or shows in digital formats are, they create artificial scarcity through exclusivity deals.
Netflix has +9 million users in the past quarter
That’s not enough growth. It’s never enough. It literally can’t ever be enough.
So they raise prices and pay for astroturfed articles blaming everything but the executives charged with infinite growth forever.
First thing that came to mind. I want to see back to back to back quarters of falling subscribers
As someone that went initially got back into piracy for the “no you just raised your prices for this one service I only use for this one show anyway, I’ll download it instead” reason. I have significantly increased my piracy because it’s honestly a much better user experience. For me to easily set sonarr/radarr to grab what I want and have a beautiful and customizable UI/UX like jellyfin to consume that content, which works on all my devices. Fucking Hulu, Disney, Amazon, peacock, max all suck in comparison from a pure UX perspective
The shift really proves that Gabe Newell was right and that piracy is a service issue and that, for a time, the many services available were worth paying for.
It was honestly really crazy to me when I was excited to see a game on sale, only to remember how I used to pirate everything. Steam has made it legitimately easier to buy games in so many cases.
I sometimes still do pirate games, especially if it’s from a publisher I don’t respect or the cracked version is known to run better, but I buy almost all of my games now days.
I’ve actually started setting up a home server for pirated movies and shows and getting rid of the couple streaming services I have.
I still Piraten EA games, just because the forced origin injection into their games on steam is so fucking annoying, especially if you’re on Linux.
I fucking hate origin, yeah
I know a lot of people idolize him, and that’s probably not healthy, but he just gets it. Provide value and convenience for consumers, and consumers will stick around. Be an inconvenience while squeezing consumers for money, and we’ll leave with a parrot on our shoulders and a one-finger salute.
That’s what happens when you’re not beholden to shareholders.
Sadly most companies are focused on short term profit over long term growth, Steam is the best example of the opposite.
The article wonders why would anyone pirate, let us give him the reason:
- Ads
- Multiple streaming services costing many times more than food. With nothing to see except for re runs and rehashes of old content.
- Ads
- Rising prices for poor service and shit content.
- Ads
- Geoblocking
- Ads
- Low quality videos even if you are willing to pay just because you don’t wish to use their specified player or browser. Why can’t I stream it to VLC player without the overhead of a browser.
- Ads
- All the while the CEO and the executive of the companies raking in billions on the money they are saying charging us for the artists.
- Ads
- Low Video Quality because you don’t want to install Windows
- Craptastic UI
- Forcing me to buy a new TV because my current one is suddenly an “unsupported device”.
- Not allowing me to watch Netflix in my summer house because they’re “cracking down on sharing accounts”.
Is 14 really a thing? Or are you talking about having to buy a new smart device that may or may not be included in your TV and that in any case can be replaced but a separate device?
Yep. Very much. Translated to English it says “Netflix is no longer supported on this device. Visit netflix.com/compatibledevices for a list of supported devices”.
This is when hitting the netflix button on the tv remote. Worked until a few days ago.
I’d chuck that up more to “smart TVs are trash”.
They have crappy processing power and TV makers support them for the shortest of timespans. I’ve solved that but turning my smart TV into a dumb screen and an NVidia Shield TV as its brains (NVidia has so far been exemplary in supporting Shield TVs).
I don’t disagree that smart TVs are trash, but this wasn’t the TV not keeping up, this was netflix deciding that I couldn’t use it anymore.
I give them money, why are they making it hard for me to use their product.
Vendors should be entitled to withdraw support on particular hardware, but they shouldn’t be allowed to brick the service as a result ‘just because’. All it needs is a TOS/EULA update prompt advising that viewers with X hardware are on their own as of now. I’d be willing to bet this denial of service practice originates in kickback discussions between TV manufacturers and streamers.
It strikes me as another case where corporate can inculcate learned helplessness in the customer by having him think disallowing and withdrawing support for are indivisible.
I wouldn’t mind using proprietary apps if they weren’t so fucking horrible to use.
Goddammit, if you’re going to force me to install your shitty program just because I want to watch a show you own the license to, at least put a semblance of effort into the UI…
I forgot to add
- Removing content when it is not making enough money.
- Ads
- Editing exsting content with no warning or notice (for whatever reason- political correctness or losing the soundtrack license doesn’t matter why)
- Ads.
Also wanna add:
- Missing subtitles in the language you want (looking at you apple tv without English subtitles on local language movies.)
- Ads
- Only the 2 random seasons in the middle of a TV show are available. And new seasons not added.
- Ads
As a person who loves watching movies with subtitles, this is why I’m canceling Amazon Prime. The fuckers literally won’t offer me English language subtitles for some flicks because I Iive outside the US.
I don’t care if the movie itself is in English, why the hell can’t I watch with subtitles in the same language as the film itself? Holy fuck.
why the hell can’t I watch with subtitles in the same language as the film itself? Holy fuck.
Probably because the subtitles have their own copyright separate from the film itself and Amazon likely doesn’t have the license to the English subtitles outside of the USA. It wouldn’t surprise me, music lyrics have their own separate copyright from the recording after all.
The copyright system is the biggest problem here. It simply isn’t fit for purpose in the digital age, unless that purpose was to benefit a handful of legacy mega corps while harming independent content creators and stifling culture across the globe.
Had no idea subtitles could be copyrighted separate from the film/media they’re subtitling (but, it does make sense when you think about it).
I agree with you completely: the current US copyright system is a joke that serves little purpose (in today’s media scape).
I wish it was just the US copyright system that’s the problem, some nations have worse copyright laws. In France for example architecture can have copyright, and renovations have a separate copyright from the original architecture… The lights on the Eiffel Tower have a separate copyright from the Eiffel Tower itself, which is currently in the public domain. So while it’s completely fine to take a photo of the Tower during the day at night you need to have permission from the copyright holder, and they have taken action against people who have taken photos of the Tower at night.
Then there are some nations where there isn’t even a public domain and stuff never loses their copyright.
Many of these worse laws have been driven by US and EU trade policies and Trade Agreements mandating draconian copyright and intellectual property laws.
Copyright laws are just a nightmare writ large.
And rip watching a Christopher Nolan Movie without subtitles nowadays
Yep, exactly.
Fuck you - if I’m paying to watch, I should get the very basic of features. Piracy is literally a better user experience right now.
And don’t forget about the ads.
deleted by creator
Also everything is just streaming. You can’t actually buy DRM-free movies (important for things like VR headsets or when without Internet), often you can’t even buy anything at all, it’s all just the library of the streaming service were content comes and goes at random.
You will own nothing and you will like it!
- Content that is pulled halfway through watching it.
You forgot about stuff that just gets taken down one day.
Edit: oh you added it in a comment.
There are a few what I’ll term magnet shows on each streaming service. They want you to pay for the service for the magnet shows and then stick around and watch other half-baked filler garbage or a seasons of a show they cancelled before giving them any hope of finishing their story arc.
Most streaming networks have abundant garbage content I’d never want to watch, knockoffs of other shows, and global content that’s often of soap opera quality with subtitles.
They also (on purpose) often offer no way to filter to the things you want to see other than search, and search is often misleading or terrible too.
It’s basically a race to the bottom just like Amazon. Junk programs created for pennies pretending to match your results.
The whole thing is a crap fest that’s quickly becoming worse than the cable network structure it replaced.
No, thank you.
True I start a new movie or a series but can’t see it past a few minutes.
If you go through the front page, there is usually only 100 shows the platform is pushing, ad nauseam. Like the algorithm is maybe some shows it thinks youll like, or shows they want to astroturf. I would really like a way to go into the dregs, the shit, the stuff netflix thinks is at the bottom of my metrics. Granted, piracy doesn’t do this either (lol how would that even work? I put everything on that server myself) but I would have considered keeping my subscription if they did.
More than food? That math just doesn’t add up for me.
Hmmmmm. Let’s see here.
People don’t like cable, because it’s too expensive and inconvenient
People start pirating
People like having 2-3 streaming services that show everything, without ads, for much cheaper even combined than cable. They stop pirating.
People don’t like having 20-30 streaming services that show only a little in each service, NOW WITH ADS!?!?! and that become MUCH more expensive than cable ever was.
People start pirating again…
I wonder what happened?!?!
It’s worth noting that although piracy is up, the rates are still far lower than they were 20, 10 or even five years ago. Whether people continue to access content illegally remains to be seen – hopefully this is just a ‘blip’ and rates of theft begin to fall again as the economy recovers.
I can’t be bothered to pull back all the layers of naive optimism in just these two sentences.
Yep. Stop making shit deals and 100 different services to subscribe to and people will go back to paying for things. Gaben is the only smart one.
Until this month I paid more than $100 for multiple streaming services. I finally got pissed off when something I wanted to watch was no longer available. Instead I went and torrented it and canceled 90% of the services. It’s time to go back to self streaming everything.
Welcome back
Wow that wording, trying to make pirating sound like an evil crime lol. I feel no moral negativity pirating. In fact, my conscience is clean and I feel morally obligated to, considering how expensive they are making services.
I think reading between the lines is the real story: when they get greedy, pirating puts them I check and causes pricing to become affordable and people stop pirating. Once people are not pirating, greed increases and pirates have to return to put them in place again.
In conclusion… we need pirates to balance things out, this pirating is a necessity in our modern age…
You are welcome everyone, I am doing my part for myself and I am doing my part for you.
Another reason why piracy is needed is to prevent pieces of culture from being erased from history to satisfy some perverse corporate accounting requirements.
Fucking rights
They call “refusing to be exploited” piracy. Generally industries where there are huge monopolies like media, groceries, and other such thing are most sensitive to this because they lack the ability to deal with outside pressures any more.
Vilifying people fighting back is the cheapest way to manage this.
I’m kinda looking forward to seeing what replaces things like Netflix and Spotify
Yeah it should be interesting. I’m also looking forward to see what new trackers come into relevance as the userbase increases.
Redacted as the only viable music tracker is a real shame. Just like everything else, we need more options not less.
I really felt like all the good stuff was only on private trackers the last few years. A few of the biggest public trackers also went down, that certainly didn’t help, but even before that I had a hard time finding some older, rarer things. If piracy gets bigger, I hope to see more reliable public trackers again with bigger catalogues.
My 🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️ brother
Companies are stealing from you every single day of your life from the second you’re born to the moment you die.
No harm in returning the favor.
I have subscriptions (and shared subscriptions) to… seven services that I can think of in 20 seconds.
Yet, time and time again, I try to figure out if what I want to watch is covered by one of them (not trivial to figure out), and end up falling back on piracy probably around 50% of the time.
Now that every fucking content owner has its own subscription plan, it makes subscriptions pointless because it’s spread so damn thin.
try to figure out if what I want to watch is covered by one of them
Justwatch.com, my dude.
Doesn’t always work. I’m not in the US. So shows that it says are on a service, aren’t in my country, or if it’s on a service, it doesn’t know because it’s on that service in my country and not the us. For me, Justwatch.com, has been more miss than hit. Sometimes, asking google works, but some services that are available in my country won’t integrate with Google in my country, but if use a VPN for the us on my Android TV it loads all the US features and the integration starts working and everything is correct. So yeah, unless you’re in the US, the experience of figuring out where it is what you want to watch is more miss than hit.
Justwatch has localised results for me in Australia. If your browser is anonymized it may default to US listings. You can change it in the URL path using your country code, e.g. instead of justwatch.com/us/ I go to justwatch.com/au/ and it’s been totally accurate
I use the mobile and tv app.
Oh yes this is so true. I have stopped trying to research where each is that I want to watch; if it’s not on netflix or prime video I just download it.
Cancel all those subs man. They are eating your money without return. It’s better to download the specific show you want to watch.
If not, we can expect to see legal channels raising their prices again to cover the losses caused by piracy.
what a shitty take. Well, anyone who has better memory than only one month back can realize that the reason the people turned to piracy was that they raised their prices. There is no loss caused by piracy. They only missed potential gains. And the reason they raised their prices were not because they were loosing money. Was because they needed to “grow infinitely”. If the free market evangelists are right, the free market will self regulate and the prices will go down in order to attract back the lost customers lol
Guess what’s also been increasing? Prices.
Guess what also has refused to go up? Wages
Guess what also been increasing? The number of streaming platforms trying to out bid their competitors. You know what else is increasing? The number of streaming platforms going after account sharing and they wonder why people are going back to piracy. Piracy is king and no one will be able to stop it.
That’s what I’m worried about….billionaires will convince governments (who haven’t banned them yet) a “think of the children act” which will ban VPNs
VPN is basically just a encrypted channel between 2 systems, while one of them forward traffic to the internet and unless they block/filter every encrypted connection, there is no way to block it at mass…
It can’t be impossible because certain countries have been trying. Hasn’t China already been fining people for using VPNs?
Way too many businesses rely on VPNs to ban them.
Oh you sweet child. They only need to ban them for citizens, not for business / shareholders.
Well….how does China and Russia and other authoritarian shitholes that have banned them operate?
I don’t know about China, but Russia has not banned VPNs. They banned specific VPN services. I’m guessing it’s similar in China. And there are plenty of grey and black market VPN services for people in those countries to use. And they use them.
Well, at some point people will remember that it’s possible to share things via USB stick or a drive.
Man, those were the times… Borrowing hard drives from friends, burning CDs, sharing lists of who has what…
Yeah, it’s scary. France and the UK are already well on their way to heading down that path.
I just cancelled my Netflix that I had for like 10 years. Total shit nothing to watch.
Now there’s a million services, everything is plus. Paramount+, Disney+, Nutsack+
Even if I wanted to pay for all that shit, everyone has their own shitty app I have to install and configure and have a login and fuck you.
It’s just easier for me to torrent what I want.
Thing is, I’m not averse to paying for good content, I like to support the creators. But
When every show is on a different app and they’re all $15 a month…buying a couple hard drives and saving every show just makes more financial sense and I don’t need 15 different login credentials so fuck off yarrr
Now there’s a million services, everything is plus. Paramount+, Disney+, Nutsack+
I think the + is to streaming services what the i prefix was to electronic junk.
I pay for them still. But still download and watch on Plex. Oh shit I meant a friend of mine does this.
Nutsack+ 🤣🤣
I’ve apparently gotten a subscription to nutsack+!
Time to make a Dr appointment.
I believe it was Gabe Newell who said the best way to avoid piracy is by making legitimate purchasing easier and/or better.
In the early history of streaming services, you could get access to a lot of content in a straightforward way for not much money. People started doing that instead of pirating. The corporations got greedy, they made the services worse and increased the price to the point that piracy is preferable again.
And I don’t have the least amount of sympathy. Yarr matey.
Services get worse so piracy gets more popular.
Yeah. 2 things stop piracy, a fair price and quality content. We don’t have either.
We had it, then the corporate greed came in. But hey Netflix subscribers have risen again…fun…
Yup. The enshitification of … everything.
hopefully this is just a ‘blip’ and rates of theft begin to fall again as the economy recovers.
If not, we can expect to see legal channels raising their prices again to cover the losses caused by piracy.
This is a crazy thing to write. Every streaming service already has their prices set at whatever they think will maximize profit. If they raise prices in response to piracy, they’ll push even more people away.
If anything, piracy will serve as competition, and it will cause the streaming services to lower prices.
piracy will serve as competition
for shows sold exclusively to one streaming service then piracy is indeed the only competition
Wow they’re just straight up calling it theft now. They can’t even pretend to understand the difference.
That’s nothing new. “You wouldn’t steal a car” was in the 90s…
Piracy doesn’t compete on price. Maintaining a server, Internet, and VPN access has a cost beyond the technical knowledge needed to set it all up.
Piracy competes on service. Sick of ads? Sick of your favorite shows disappearing from your services? Tired of the Disney vault (they have the content but won’t let you stream it any more) problem? Can’t find the thing on any service? Like obscure and rare content? Like fan edits? Like to curate collections and playlists? Like HD on any and every device you own? Like easy offline content syncning for when you’re traveling to a spot with spotty Internet? Like sharing your library with friends and family? Tired managing multiple streaming subscriptions and navigating the content to find what you really want to watch? Your friendly neighborhood pirate community has a solution for you. Lower prices aren’t even in the top ten reasons lots of people pirate.
