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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
im glad i still care because i never let them josh me
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 :)
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.
You cared to begin with?
This may come as a shock, but some people happen to enjoy content.
Crazy concept, I know.
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.
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.
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.
Think there also was a big switch from torrenting to using the online streaming sites. Wonder if that’s affecting the count.
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.
NFL this weekend forcing you to have a Peacock subscription for a playoff game. Are you crazy?!?
What is NFL?
American foot-of-the-ball.
Not for life
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.
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.
“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
Two thirds of HBS is BS, I guess it’s saying it literally and playing that HBS has 3 letters and BS 2
What Usenet groups are people using these days?
Give https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy a try!
Edit: Lemmy link - [email protected]
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]
Ahh, I was trying to figure out how that worked on Fediland. You just opened a door for me on the Fediverse.
Power to the pirates, the only ones making all content accessible to everyone.
Forget streaming, physical media is ripe for hoarding right now. Thrift stores, antique malls, junk stores, etc can’t give this stuff away. Even 4k blurays on amazon are deeply discounted right now.
Also, rip and share your physical media if you can.
Services like these combatted convenience not price. It just happened that prices were able to be low whilst these companies could afford it.
Unfortunately due to greed and rising energy costs (but let’s face it, it’s greed) prices are rising which makes convenience matter less.
And to add to that, having multiple streaming services isn’t convenient. Again, this is caused by greed.
Weird how an open source media streaming app works fine, but Disney can’t keep their app working on Android to save their lives.
I assume bullshit DRM has something to do with it, but I wouldn’t know because there’s way easier (and even legal!) ways to get media onto my server than that.
Well to be fair, subtitles are often messed up on the open source one, but OH BOY you haven’t seen the state of Belgian streaming apps.
Casting doesn’t work on most, subtitles only work on 1/3 with some reality shows having burned in subs, tapping the screen in logical places to play/pause doesn’t work (like the giant play button in the middle of the screen when paused), one of them literally doesn’t even have a search function.
Ads are ridiculous, 10+ ads every 10 minutes. Not to mention that if you scrub at all instead of just forward/back, automatic ad break plays. Recently played just stopped being broken and giving wrong episodes. It is an absolute mess.
Please share. I dont understand where people get media especially legal nowadays. I would go to pirate bay if I need something.
My biggest question is despite how expensive Disney+ is and their huge subscriber base, how are they not profitable? Nebula is a fraction of the price without any ads and plenty of originals and is quite profitable despite having under 1 million subs.
They spent $350 million making Secret Invasion, which was a bad show in every way. They have no control over their costs, yet they squeeze everyone as hard as they can.
They are profitable. Just not profitable enough.
No, they actually aren’t profitable.
From https://arstechnica.com/culture/2023/12/its-shakeout-time-as-losses-of-netflix-rivals-top-5-billion/
“Disney, the largest traditional media company, is in the midst of a gutting restructuring that has featured 7,000 job cuts and attacks from activist investors. It lost more than $1.6 billion from its streaming businesses in the first nine months of 2023, during which its Disney+ service gained 8 million subscribers. The company says it will turn a profit in streaming in late 2024.”
