How Disney and Warner Bros. Are Causing Internet Piracy to Boom | Platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ were supposed to do away with pirated media. Instead, they may make them stronger than ever.::Platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ were supposed to do away with pirated media. Instead, they may make them stronger than ever.
I know it gets quoted a lot, but Gabe was 100% right. It boggles my mind how people in power over these streaming services just don’t get it:
One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.
Haven’t pirated a game in over a decade
I have, but that’s an access issue where I live, where there are no official stores to buy things from, and the places which do exist don’t have the games I want (on PS4). I download all Disney content as + is not available here either.
I have pirated a few games due to cost, since my SO is studying at the moment, and one of us has basically always been on parental leave the last 3.5 years. I bought both Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3 when I could afford it though, since both of them brought me more than 100 hours of fun.
I never have, I don’t see the point when steam is just so convenient and has sales all the time. Just be patient on pricing, the game isn’t going to go away because you didn’t buy on release.
I also don’t trust downloading unverified, modified, software. An mp3 or mkv is probably going to be safe as you can’t load software through those really, but an exe can do anything
The list of games I’ve pirated in the past 15 years and steam publish games I’ve played are disparate/disjointed sets.
I prayed doom eternal, that was the only one. Then I bought it a week later.
That’s called “the mantis movement”.
The last game I pirated was Skyrim, and that mostly because I was unemployed and poor at the time
I hadn’t either until the Steam autumn sale 2023, I wanted Dirt Rally 2 GOTY edition because it includes all the DLC, but I couldn’t buy it because I already own the base game…
I have pirated GTA5 and Cyberpunk 2077. Both were a disappointment.
It boggles my mind how people in power over these streaming services just don’t get it:
Oh they get it, you can be sure of that. It’s just they’re so, so greedy they don’t care that eventually in the future the well will dry up, they only care about more money NOW.
That’s how the system is set up. Even if the people in the corporation weren’t greedy, they need the line to go up every quarter. And when the higher leadership recognizes that, they hardly ever think about long term investments. So a corporation is not a money making machine, no, it’s a money maximizing machine. That’s why we call them greedy.
Yep, came to post this. I think I’ve spent more and more on Steam every year because they have actually stuck to this principle.
Don’t get me wrong I love GOG for the confirmed lack of DRM. But they just don’t do service like Valve.
I mean GOG Galaxy exists, which can even show you all games from GOG, Steam, Epic, … besides keeping your games updated.
It’s still not as good as Steam, but at least a better solution than manually checking and installing updates.
I would love to buy games from GOG, but they haven’t worked on a Linux version of GOG Galaxy. It’s back to a service issue again.
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/galaxy/release_gog_galaxy_20_for_linux
I would definitely say GOG has good service overall. The one time I had to return a game they were pretty helpful and accommodating. It’s just not at the level of Steam with a continual push of innovative and player-friendly features.
I’m on Linux where Heroic Launcher fills the app role, so GOG gets a smidge less credit there.
That’s a bingo. Used to pirate, then stopped because streaming was cheap and it wasn’t worth the hassle. It’s still not worth the hassle, but I’d rather just stop watching than deal with the bloated streaming market.
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Usually populations do a few diffrent things under oppression:
- everything is fine, look at our source of pride,
- it sucks but what are you gonna do?
- lay flat defeatism
- WERE FUCKING BURNING SOMTHING
Right now they want to think we live in a option 1 and 2 country. We will be an option 3 and/or 4 verry soon. They cant mask the minipulation in option 4 and cant continue to funtion with either 3 or 4.
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He was absolutely right.
People generally are absolutely fine with paying, so long as it’s not absurd pricing and the service is convenient.
I was happy paying for Netflix until the recent bullshit. I still pay for Spotify. I buy all my games outside of old ones that I need to emulate (again proving Gabe correct - if I could legally access them easily then I’d do that instead, but am I fuck jumping through hoops like spending thousands on old consoles I don’t have the space for nor the time to search for/import games)
P.s. I’m from India. Not one of these “pasty-faced white people” that you seem to take issue with
Capcom just started adding game breaking DRM to their archive of old single player Steam games because an exec got butthurt over a nude mod for Street Fighter. Now Steam Deck support is broken and my mods don’t work with games I purchased years ago. The pirated version is now better once again.
At almost the exact same time, Valve sent a DMCA notice to Portal64 because for some reason they care about people playing a homebrew port of a $2 15 year old game on 30 year old hardware.
I used to think Capcom and Valve were two of the last good ones. Turns out there aren’t any good ones…
All this hasn’t forced me into piracy.
It’s worse than that.
It’s forced me to stop caring about shows or movies entirely.
My coworkers talk about various TV shows and movies. I may not be able to keep up with the shows and miss out on the discussions, but fuck FOMO.
There’s been almost no movies that have come out that I’ve really cared about, nor.most of my friends.
I’ve found TV shows to be somewhat more compelling. But it’s been really hard to decide what to try to get into (limited time, partly).
But also the shared element isn’t there like it used to be. There’s just so MUCH stuff to watch, finding people to talk to about the stuff is harder than it used to be. That’s good in the sense of having choice, but worse in having the entertainment provide a connection to people and talk about. Which was always one of my motivators to watch stuff.
Plus games and YouTube and other things competing, and fragmentation of where stuff is, and corporate plbullshit turning me off, I just care less about long form shows being put out.
But people are definitely still watching tons and tons of shit. “Consuming” and “binging” is bigger than ever. I guess it’s just not us so much.
More stuff is switching to weekly rollouts and I end up not watching at all because of that.
There’s nothing wider than binging a show then getting the last episode 2 weeks later.
Binging shows is one of the reasons why we live in the entertainment hellscape that we have. When everything is instant gratification, it means less and it’s less enjoyable. Wait a week for the next episode creates excitement and ultimately more joy over the several year period it’ll take you to finish watching the show. The same goes for people. You’re more likely to have fond feelings for the person you’ve known all your life rather than the person you sat next to on the bus for a couple hours.
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Find a watching buddy.
Will you be my buddy
I would but then I would be doxxing myself on the account that I use for promoting my naked hairy balls and terrorism.
Fair enough.
I honestly haven’t heard a coworker mention a TV show since White Lotus last January. Not a single show.
I’ve talked about a couple with friends: Scott Pilgrim, The Last of Us, House of Usher, but generally I brought it up and really 2023 was not a very memorable year for TV shows.
TLOU was pretty good, although there’s literally nothing to talk about given how directly faithful it is to the game.
I’ve been reading a lot more.
Yes me too, I find myself watching movies less and less.
I find myself buying real books, ebooks online and buying vinyls.
I still stream music though, but the thing is, most music that could be found on Spotify, could be found on Apple Music or Deezer.
most music that could be found on Spotify, could be found on Apple Music or Deezer.
As it should be. Compete witg additional features not with exclusivity.
Epic tries to do the same with Steam trying to strongarm the gaming community with free games.
And yet the users will still pay on Steam.That’s odd. I find myself unable to keep up with all the movies I want to see. You should check out the Criterion collection.
Same. I gave up on star wars after glub shitto was given to fake Luke at the end of that series. Just haven’t been able to care about the flood of B tier content after. Same with marvel after end game. There’s like 6 half assed shows and 8 movies or something now. It’s just too much filler and there’s no way I’m paying 3 or 4 services for mediocre content. I pirated everything in my early 20s and this feels like going back to the old times when the Internet was better. The nostalgia alone is making me happy to pirate again.
The same thing happened to me. It’s really sad.
I am most definitely far more passive in my consumption than before. YouTube is actually where most of my media comes from now. Then my colleagues are always on about the Masked Singer or whatever is going on. I managed to make it through maybe 2 episodes before it made me sick.
im glad i still care because i never let them josh me
Other than A24, aint nothing really worth watching these days. Which is great, because I have a backlog of great movies and TV backed up that I’m going to spend the next couple decades crushing.
I was sort of like this before, not really caring too much about most movies or TV shows, but that was just because I had higher standards to what I would be willing to take the time to watch. When I did find something I thought was worth my time, like for instance Full Metal Alchemist (yes I know it’s an anime, it still counts as a TV show imo. Also it’s great, I definitely recommend watching it). The general decrease in quality and increase in quantity of shows and movies just made me stop caring to watch really anything; why take a chance with a likely shitty show or movie when I can get much more fun out of playing video games? I know there’s likely some “hidden gem” kind of show that nobody really talks about because it’s hidden away in all the crappy shows, so I usually only decide to watch something if I’ve heard good things about it more than once. Even then, I may still not watch it, like for instance One Piece, which I’ve heard is incredibly long.
Hi, One Piece fan here. Yes, it’s really long and really intimidating to start. I haven’t watch most of the anime too, and never recomment others to watch it. I’m solely reading the manga (and live action).
I suggest waiting for the netflix anime readaptation that’s in production now. Logically, it should have better pace and much less filler than the first anime. It’s gonna be way easier to pick up than the first anime with its thousand episodes.
I suggest waiting for the netflix anime readaptation that’s in production now. Logically, it should have better pace and much less filler than the first anime.
I mean, it IS Netflix, so it shouldn’t be presumed to be better in any way. Still, I will try pirating it first, rather than giving Netflix any money beforehand only to find out it’s crap.
Same, I’ll watch one every once in a while but in general I much prefer educational content and documentaries.
YouTube is my is DoC :)
You cared to begin with?
This may come as a shock, but some people happen to enjoy content.
Crazy concept, I know.
They all got greedy. All of them. We wanted a streaming service to watch our shows and movies on, and they all decided to pretend that what we really wanted was a return to paying $100+ a month for a collection of channels with content that we mostly don’t watch on them, only this time with a bunch of additional apps you have to install for each one, most of them remarkably shitty. Like cable, but stupider.
Remember when the streaming setup was simple? There was basically just Netflix, it paid for licenses to content from Disney, Paramount, etc., and provided guaranteed income for those companies. Small income, sure, but steady.
Then each of them said, “Hey, why don’t we replace Netflix, only all we’ll stream is our own stuff! And sure, most of it’s trash, but people will stick around for the good shows!”
No. No, they won’t. They’ll go back to pirating it. No one is paying for Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Paramount+, Max, Peacock, AppleTV, ESPN+, Prime, and whatever other shitty “exclusive” streaming service pops up.
I don’t think that content producers should be able to have their own streaming services. Similar to how movie studios couldn’t own theaters or whatever until lobbyists killed that too.
If politicians didn‘t have their own horses in this race to the bottom of costumer satisfaction those anti trust laws would have been expanded on 100% but unfortunately we got a corrupt pile of crap.
Or follow the one good thing the music industry does… allow music across different platforms. I can listen to the same songs on YouTube Music, Spotify, Apple, etc. none of this “get the XYZ app to listen to a band, and another app to listen to others”.
Prime is like: you know that service we sold you that played movies without commercials? We’re putting commercials in it.
I’m like: Bye felicia. I’ll be fucked to pay more for data transit in 2024 than I paid before, the movement of bits and streaming of bytes have not gone up fuckwits. And I don’t need the rest of the amazon trash either. Thanks for making it easy!
“Oh, and 2/3 of our content is only available via ‘channels’ which require an additional monthly subscription almost as much as the subscription you’re already paying for.”
Amazon, you literally own MGM. No I am not paying you even more money to watch MGM content, you greedy fucks.
Prime is like: you know that service we sold you that played movies without commercials? We’re putting commercials in it.
Also that movie you want to watch? You gotta rent it. Fuck your subscription.
I’m not pirating officer. I’m just collecting information for training my AI model.
Won’t be long until my ai model can produce it’s very own Linux distro complete with 7 fingered keyboard layouts
And the disney movies will give the distro “flavor”
It’s just such a shame the filtering process for good training material is by hand. I’ve yet to find anything of high enough quality.
Maybe you should train an AI on how to filter and clean training sets so the AI can do it on its own.
Yup.
I basically don’t pirate music because streaming is convenient.
I generally don’t pirate games because steam and GOG is convenient. (Sometimes if I’m not sure ill enjoy it I’ll pirate as a no limit trail then buy or drop).
I generally have to with movies and shows. Even though I have access to several streaming platforms though stuff like T-Mobile, AT&T, etc. it’s too annoying to jump around a bunch of apps and the quality is bad compared to the UHD rips of stuff
the quality is bad compared to the UHD rips of stuff
This is why I pirate Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. I have a subscription to pretty much every streaming service in my country (Netflix, prime video, HBO max, apple TV, Sky showtime, etc. ) but Sky only has SNW in 1080p SDR. I can download it in 4k HDR. I don’t feel one bit guilty about it, I pay for the damn service that offers it. Just not in an acceptable picture quality.
It’s not just quality compared with UHD rips, it’s things like prime video refusing to play anything except 480p on a web browser… WTF are they thinking?
I don’t use if on a browser, but even on my Shield Pro it’s not great. Prime Video seems to use a very low bitrate, there’s lots of compression artifacts, even on the 4k streams.
It’s just more enshittification. If they can get away with smaller files, they absolutely will.
What do you mean with SDR?
Standard Dynamic Range. It’s a term adopted to differentiate non-HDR video from HDR video.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Standard-dynamic-range video (SDR video) is a video technology which represents light intensity based on the brightness, contrast and color characteristics and limitations of a cathode ray tube (CRT) display. SDR video is able to represent a video or picture's colors with a maximum luminance around 100 cd/m2, a black level around 0.1 cd/m2 and Rec.709 / sRGB color gamut. It uses the gamma curve as its electro-optical transfer function.The first CRT television sets were manufactured in 1934 and the first color CRT television sets were manufactured in 1954. The term "standard-dynamic-range video" was adopted to distinguish SDR video from high-dynamic-range video (HDR video), a new technology that was developed in the 2010s to overcome SDR's limits.Oh, cool. Another gimmick that we are going to be fighting about which standard to use for the next few decades, making terabytes of libraries seem obsolete, and another convenient excuse for the manufacturers to discontinue old models and keep the TV prices up despite offering no real improvements and manufacturing costs and quality dropping to the floor. Nice.
I used netflix until the majority of my searches didnt show a result. and then went back to pirating.
using jellyfin+jellyseer and radarr/sonarr make it almost as convenient
If I want to buy a game it’s super easy to search for it on my choice of digital store front, pay for it and download it.
If I want to watch a show I could do a search for which streaming service it’s available on and hope it’s one I have an account with, or for the same amount of effort I could do a search for the torrent and be able to watch it if the internet goes down.
Why not just rent each movie for 48 hours from Amazon for the bargain price of “pretty much the same as a Blu-ray disc, and often higher”?
This was especially frustrating with kids. All too often, with the shorter attention span of little ones, and general lack of time, where we couldn’t finish a movie that quickly. Maybe I understand that for physical media but for digital where the only scarcity is artificial?
Someone missed out on so much of my money for streaming movies when my kids were little, simply because I couldn’t guarantee finishing them in 48 hours so I didn’t rent
So true!
Netflix did stop me from pirating for several years until it went to shit. Once the other companies started rolling out their own streaming services and pulling their content off Netflix I went back to piracy. It’s way easier to manage one VPN subscription than try to keep track of a bunch of streaming services.
I still have more subs for these than I would like, but I generally download anything I actually want to watch anyway. Like, the fact that justwatch.com even exists is an indictment of the way this works.
I am still convinced that they eventually give up and license their content back to Netflix for a nice passive income. We’ll get back to those days.
People with MBAs can’t fucking help themselves. They got a goose that lays golden eggs, but it doesn’t lay those golden eggs fast enough, so without even taking off their wristwatch they reach right up the poor bird’s cloaca, grab the first thing that feels vaguely round and pull as hard as they can. So then they have a half inside out goose and no more golden eggs ever again.
People pay for a Master’s degree to learn how to do this.
Reminds me of a passage in Ben Rich’s autobiography. Ben Rich spent his career at the Lockeed Skunkworks, started off designing a heater for the relief tube of jet fighters so the pilot’s penis wouldn’t freeze to the side of the tube while taking a piss, ended up running the team that designed the F-117. While he was second in command, his boss sent him to Harvard’s Business School, who ran a time crunched program for adults who are already in careers and “need” additional business schooling. Upon his return, his boss asked him what he learned. And he wrote on the chalkboard “2/3 HBS = BS”
It has less to to with people having MBAs and much more to do with companies having shareholders. Once you’re a publicly traded company there are overwhelmingly strong external forces that compell companies to increase revenue. Even if the business model is perfectly solid and it doesn’t make sense to expect rising profits the shareholders only care about growth rates. On the stock market a companies value is only dependent on its growth.
Take Netflix for example. They’ve had so many users some years ago when they were basically the only streaming service that one might have said they reached market saturation. That would’ve been a money making machine that people could be content with. But since the market always needs growth it isn’t enough and netflix is always trying to “innovate” or squeezie more monthly payments from the existing customer base.
cory doctorow has coined the great word “enshittification” to describe this process. And its driven by the need to grow further even though its to the detriment of the service or the customers. In the end it’s the people with the MBAs doing it. But if they’re not doing it the shareholders replace them with those that do.
I mean, thats the way the capitalist, stock-return-driven economy works. The market expects a company to constantly grow to pump their stock price, so they have to find new revenue or cut costs somewhere. But they can’t do that forever…
The founders build a great product to pull in users, then they go public, then the MBAs turn to enshittification to drive more revenue and get rich while they can. The rest of us then move on to the next platform, if it even exists…
“2/3 HBS = BS”
So HBS is Harvard Business School, BS is bullshit. What does “2/3” refer to?
Two-thirds. As in two of the three letters of HBS
Oh, gotcha.
Two thirds of HBS is BS, I guess it’s saying it literally and playing that HBS has 3 letters and BS 2
Ah, thanks!
top secret ball bearings rolling across pentagon desks, goddamn that’s a good freakin’ book :D
They can’t even admit this mindset is stupid because after they ruin every worthwhile company they just jump to the next thing while the industry they left sinks.
Markets are greedy and never satisfied. A fracturing of services has led to situation where it’s impossible for the average person to be able to afford all the streaming services they need in order to watch their stuff. And even if they could, they now have to pay extra to exclude adverts - the lack of which was a major selling point for streaming services. Pay extra to watch in high quality and no matter what service you use and what content you’ve bought - music, TV, books, movies. games - it’s all stuffed full of DRM that can literally remove the media from your devices. You don’t even really own the stuff you’ve bought.
So yeah, I fully appreciate why some people pirate stuff.
When the day will come, and once I pay for something I have the ability to just hit download and it will fetch an .mkv/.mp4 from a CDN, that’s when I’ll pay for it. Sadly that day isn’t even remotely close, so torrenting it is. Oh and fuck you WideVine.
One day… We hope.
You don’t need to hope as you can do this now without even having to pay first. If anyone should be hopeful, it’s these studios/distribution platforms.
That’s how Louis CK distributes his shows since he was cancelled.
I had almost gotten to the point where I could reasonably pay for most stuff and didn’t have to steal shit that wasn’t even available “in my market”, which, as a concept, can go fuck itself entirely to death as far as I’m concerned; but now everybody’s being dicks to each other and core content is leaving platforms I’m paying for and moving onto platforms i’m not allowed to use, so, no, it’s not the fault of the big guys per se but the collective and progressive brain death of the entertainment industry, whose obscene copyright regime is finally biting it in the ass but they’re still reeling from their latest cocaine decision and haven’t figured out why they can’t sit down yet. … I think that’s the longest sentence I’ve ever written.
But it doesn’t even matter. As soon as the competition dies down and things settle into a pattern, they’ll start putting the screws to us anyway, because that’s just what capitalism is. Enshittification ftw!
Can’t read the article (acts like it’s paywalled but the paywall doesn’t even come up,maybe ad blocking is borking it), but let me guess… Every time a show gets big, someone splits it off into a new sub service, and people are getting sick of that shit and pulling the plug on the people they pulled the plug on cable for…
My kids hit me up for yet another subscription last week, because they wanted to watch a show. I was very close to cancelling everything instead, and teaching them some slightly sketchy skills, but I took the “high road” on it. They’re getting close to the age where that ain’t gonna happen anymore though :)
Consolidate yo shit media dudes. You got a finite limit on how many pieces of the pie can exist. When the slices get too small because you cut it into too many slices, nobody buys a slice anymore…
I will pay for one streaming service, if your content isn’t available on there it will be on my jellyfin and my kids are happy to use that.
This is roughly where I’m at. I’m paying for one, maybe two. That’s it. After that I’m not gonna waste my time, esp. when a VPN is cheaper and can give me better overall service.
Who even needs a VPN?
at least everyone in the US, probably in several other countries as well
But, but, but, I thought the US was the land of the free…
… companies?
I started having the piracy discussion with my kid today. First lesson: until you understand computer security, piracy always comes with the risk of nuking your system.
Once you understand computer security, piracy always comes with the risk of nuking your system.
Know how to rebuild your system before you get spicy, and let’s talk about network provisions too.
Not if you hang out in the right places. There are some trust rings where you can procure media by alternative means with absolute security and peace of mind. But it’s a club and you ain’t in it.
I nuked my system once. I was 5-6 years old and I deleted system32 to make space for SimCity 2000. PC didn’t turn on after resetting.
I’ve downloaded stuff and pirated media from the internet since I was like 10 (no internet access before that). Never have I ever nuked my system from piracy, even if I may have downloaded a virus or two (without notable consequences).
I feel like clicking ads on YouTube nowadays or downloading random crap from the play store is more dangerous for your security than piracy is. I respect your decision though!
When it was just Netflix and Hulu, it was great for consumers because having a couple streaming services could easily replace the need for cable TV for most people (unless you wanted to watch live sports) and the entertainment companies could still profit from licensing their content to the streaming services. But that wasn’t enough for the entertainment companies, and they all thought they could get in on the streaming game with their own platforms, only to discover that keeping a streaming service running and keeping subscribers is expensive for both the company and the consumer, and consumers only have so much time and disposable income they can spend on those services. So the market has become oversaturated with a million streaming services all carrying limited libraries of content that make it tough for any consumer to feel it’s worth it to pay for any of them except when one or two certain shows on each have a new season. This leaves most services running at a loss after expenses of keeping servers up and trying to make content to bring in and keep those subscribers, which many fail to do. The current state of it is unsustainable and I think in the end it’s eventually going to return to a model where only a few will survive, probably the larger ones owned by the entertainment companies themselves who have deep enough pockets from their other ventures to keep their services alfoat during off-peak times. A LOT of content is going to become lost media as that purge of services happens.
All of these media companies splitting everything up and making it nearly impossible to figure out which service is hosting what shows is what did this. They got greedy and raised their prices.
So naturally people are going to be inclined to figure out how to safely pirate things and then they’re going to do it.
You should never pirate things, that would be immoral to use mullvad and qbittorrent to pirate things!
Movies (7) and (9) anime are very expensive to make! You’re stealing from corporate executives when you pirate!
I also recently started pirating again. The cost is too damn high for all these streaming platforms, not to mention a lot of the base packages have ads/commercials (gross). I use Stremio+Torrentio+Real Debrid (which is insanely cheap compared to purchasing 6 different streaming platforms). Until there is a massive change to how media is circulated this is gonna be my setup.
I pay 16€ for my torrenting and another 7 per month for usenet and can have almost every movie, show and media I want.
Exactly
OK, but is it actually booming?
Piracy of movies and T.V. shows really took off when torrents first appeared in the early 2000s. It seemed to peak five or six years ago, as new streaming services proliferated.
According to the European Union Intellectual Property Office, piracy bottomed out in 2021—before increasing again. “Current piracy levels are still nowhere near what they were five years ago,” Van der Sar wrote in a recent article.
We’re seeing a slight uptick possibly because of how fractured and inconsistent the streaming services have become, but we’re definitely not in some piracy renaissance yet.
It’s not when torrents appeared, more when people got connected to ADSL and later fiber which made the download of very large files feasible.
Momentum is picking back up for it. It takes time.
