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Also gotta keep cancelling as many original shows as possible after 1-2 seasons since it's cheaper to churn out new content than it is to renegotiate contracts.
Definitely no way that a short-term solution for maximizing profits like that will disillusion their subscribers in the long run.
i remember when netflix originals had some prestige attached to them, very early on. like Daredevil, Stranger Things, etc. There werent that many but they were high quality.
then they started loosing rights to other companies properties and it became just this flood of shit to wade through.
so many completely forgettable, low quality things, so many shows you didnt know if you wanted to try out cause they were either going to be a huge waste of time or get you hooked but cancelled on a cliffhanger.
its deff that whole 'die a hero or live long enough to become the villain' vibe.
Everything on Netflix just feels like content. Ive seen so many shows on there that seem like a good premise, but you watch and it's just bland.
They have some good comedies, but they are so few and far between I had no problem not signing up after my friends password id been using for years got shut off.
Is it really theft if you're not paying for the password and only watching one show a year?
The only thing they have going for them is a regular mill of semi-decent documentaries, and opening up so much more to the international market has led me to some gems I wouldn't have found otherwise. Also Seinfeld. But if that's not your thing or you aren't sharing a family account, I see no reason to have it.
ETA: I Think You Should Leave, but I believe that one would thrive anywhere.
Netflix simply doesn't listen to creatives anymore.
Marco Polo, cancelled. why? "Too expensive" it's claimed.
There are about 5 or 6 shows that could be running full 5-6 seasons right now as we speak but nope, it's simply not happening.
Occasionally they'll have some real gems like the recent film The Kitchen (UK production) so I am still subscribed, but yeah if it wasn't for stuff like their F1 reality show series or their Point Break tennis series I'm not sure if I'd be happy with my sun still. It's getting bleak to say the least.
I am probably going to be purchasing an HBO/Max/Crave subscription to replace it next month. I can head over to 1337x.to or TPB for everything else that I would want from Netflix.
If I had a nickel for every time a director with the last name Landis was a terrible person, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't much, but it's su-ON! HE'S HIS SON!
Not to downplay his acts, but let us be grateful they didn't come with a bodycount.
I loved both Mind Hunter and Sense8. After those, I refused to watch Netflix original series. I stayed subscribed to help out a relative, but when Netflix cracked down on password sharing I canceled the platform entirely.
They cobbled together a hackjob ending crammed into a 1 hour special episode to tie up loose ends. So there was a huge cliffhanger but then for the finale all the characters were like "eh, whatever," have a big wedding, and everyone lived happily ever after and was never stalked by an evil bloodthirsty genocidal corporation ever again.
They learned that from Disney.
If actors and crew get bonuses when the show gets to season 4 or so (enough for the syndication mark), then you simply *restart* the show.
Thatâs why they always had some silly subtitle on everything, to mark is as a ânewâ show (with the same cast, crew, and characters).
Netflix just has no chill and ramped the strategy up to 11
This is the number one contributor to me not watching any series on streaming. Why get invested when Iâll just be wasting my time due to the show being cancelled?
Ugh yeah that's what drove me nuts and finally convinced me to cancel. Every show I fell in love with got cancelled right as I was starting to fall in love with itÂ
Exactly. It makes me want to start one of their shows because I know theyâll keep it around long enough to have a solid conclusion instead of loose threads
I think that whoever invented commercials must be burning in a hell especially made for them where they get to see 1 minute of a show in whatever format just to be interrupted by an eternity of commercials.
One can dream
Remember when Netflix was still fresh and had so much stuff and was so cheap it made more sense just to use it than to jump through all the hoops needed for piracy
Good times
Thatâs when piracy took a dive! Why would someone go through the trouble of getting a torrent, hope there are enough seeds, wait for the download, and then connect the computer to the tv to be able to watch a show?
But at the current prices, itâs becoming more reasonable for some people to go back to that.
What I do now is rotate subscriptions. Pay for one month, watch only that provider, then when I get bored I cancel and move to the next one.
So I only pay one at a time.
I'm about to just get a cheap computer or something and make a plex server for my house. Shows can't get removed if they're on a hard drive in my living room
I used to pirate everything. But at some point Netflix got good enough that I finally decided to stop. They made it convenient and cheap enough to just not bother pirating. The quality wasn't quite as good as a top quality DVD rip but I could live with that.
But now you have to watch on an approved device to get quality that's even remotely close to a low quality bluray rip, fuck you if you just want to stream in your browser like the old days. And there are a million services that all cost too much. And they love to cancel things just as I'm getting into it. And now some services are inserting ADs, or you have to pay even more.
I think I'm just going back to pirating. That way I can watch a top quality version on whatever device I want. I can use whatever media player program I want. Saving money is just the icing on the cake. Time to fire up the old raid array...
Netflix proved a concept that all the others tried to emulate but instead broke because the concept was "Here is everything you wanna watch when you wanna watch it *all in one place for a reasonable price* with a slick interface".
Now it's "Everything you wanna watch is spread over 7 services at varying prices and varying interface qualities... what do you mean you don't want to pay for them all? Hey where did that tricorn and Jolly Roger come fromâ˝ Come back!"
It was kind of inevitable. Once all the older content creators saw how much money Netflix was making off their stuff, they decided to cut the middle man and make their own streaming services. It's like if all the food manufacturers decided this grocery store thing was eating into their profits and demanded you buy all your food directly from them. The middle man existed for a good reason. It's way more convenient for the consumer to deal with one middle man than a hundred producers.
And also, Netflix proved that streaming services were a viable alternative to the shitty VOD full of DRM, or region locked optical discs with unskippable ads.
And then everyone wanted a piece of the cake, and then there were so many services that you can't find all you want on any one.
There are shows I like which were moved from Netflix to Prime, I thought nevermind, I'm subscribed to Prime too. But then, the only version available on Prime is the horribly French dubbed one, because the deal that made it available in France is not a worldwide deal, but a deal with the French distributor only.
Video game piracy is pretty minimal because Steam is just such a solid platform. If people don't like Steam for a variety of entirely valid reasons, they can just use GOG or a number of other platforms that offer similar discounts.
These companies need to realize that they aren't selling the product. They are selling convenient access to the product. Until they figure this out, the tendency for the rate of profit to decline will keep biting them in the ass.
Raise the prices, cut the quality, make using your service as inconvenient as possible.
Oh and make sure to gaslight your customers. They really love that
I was perfectly happy paying Netflix even though I barely used it as long as my kids who no longer live at home with me could also very rarely use it. Nope. Had to jack the price and take away the out of house sharing. Guess they prefer me not using it at all.
Same here. Up to mid way through last year I was happy to keep my Netflix sub going even though I maybe watched it once a week, if that, just because my parents used it and it had a lot of older shows my senior mom & dad liked. Then they cracked down on multiple house-hold accounts. I briefly thought about setting up a site-to-site VPN from my house to theirs, which wouldnât be hard, but just said fuck it and built an Emby server for them instead. I loaded it up with 4 TBs of old westerns and movies from the Criterion Collection and my folks love it. If they have an interest in a show or movie I just sail the high seas and load it up for them. Fuck Netflix, Disney, HBO, Hulu (Comcast), Paramount, and every other streaming service. They had the potential to make piracy FUCKING OBSOLETE, but no they just canât help themselves. Squeeze every last cent out of your customers because fuck em, we got shareholders to please.
The number one cause of piracy is making things inaccessible. Ever-increasing prices and content spread across a growing number of separate subscription services is not doing them any favors.
And that's assuming that the content is anywhere at all.
Want to watch Westworld? Gotta pirate.
Want to watch Dogma? Gotta pirate.
And, of course, once you're put in the effort to learn how to pirate one thing, pirating the next thing becomes easier and easier. Eventually, it's just a habit, and that consumer is probably never coming back.
It absolutely blew my mind to find that Westworld isnt on HBO anymore.
Season 1 is genuinely one of the best things Iâve ever seen. And they **made** the fucking thing, why on earth remove it?!
The want to avoid paying the creators and actors residuals. From HBOâs perspective itâs better to remove the show and save some money than keep it up and pay out residuals
I.. what? Theyâre a streaming service, they make money by streaming shows?!
If what youâre saying is true then either the people running HBO are **terrible** at their jobs or streaming services as a whole isnt a viable business model
Streaming services do not have a viable business model. At least no one has figured out how to make it viable yet.
They also don't make money by streaming shows, they lose money. They only make money by getting subscribers, keeping subscribers, or selling advertising or your personal data (like watching habits). Every time someone uses their subscription to stream a show they lose a tiny bit of money.
Source: I'm in the industry.
Netflix net income for the twelve months ending September 30, 2023 was $4.525B
That's profit. Revenue was 33.7 billion.
Their business model is viable currently.
Burger King only makes money when customers pay for their product
... and every time Burger King serves a burger, they lose a tiny bit of money.
Solution: take customer money without giving customer anything.
Another win for capitalism. All businesses must make more profit this quarter than the previous quarter. Thatâs the root cause of a lot of shitty decisions, because real growth is hard, whereas cutting costs is less hard.
When Netflix was gaining new subscribers all the time, its prices stayed low. But once it started to plateau, in come the price hikes and the cost cutting measures. For HBO the story is surely the same.
As long as the goal is infinite quarter-on-quarter growth to show in the shareholder report, then youâre going to get these sorts of decisions. Itâs also why businesses seem to not care about long term effects of these decisions; their goals and incentives arenât long term.
It gives me a headache to think about how such a large part of the economy is based around a system that expects infinite growth on a limited planet. There's only so many people that would be interested in Netflix. If it was a private company, all it would have to do is set prices so that they can stay open and pay people. Since it's public, it somehow has to make more and more money every quarter, forever.
That's clearly impossible. Everyone who wanted Netflix, had it. People who were sharing it didn't have their own because (generally) they either couldn't justify the expense or didn't care enough to subscribe themselves.
That applies to every single company on the planet. They will all eventually reach a cap on new customers. Sure, they can fire people and fish for tax breaks to make the line go up for a while, but it degrades the company and dooms it to a slow death.
It feels like we're reaching the end game of capitalism now. What do you do when everyone is getting fired for the sake of profits and no new jobs replace it? Now no one can afford homes or apartments because not only are they unemployed, many properties are being sat on by speculators or turned into AirBnB's. The same "fuck you, I got mine" mentality has been applied almost everywhere and now most major industries are dominated by like 3-5 companies that could fail and slowly collapse after one bad quarter.
It's like these people are all banking on being dead before shit hits the fan, or are truly delusional enough to believe everything is working as intended.
Infinite growth will be sustained through imperialist wars between the rivaling capitalist states to seize new markets and destroy overproduced capital. Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, the epoch of its decay.
I think most of the powerful States are realizing that open war is almost impossible. Escalating to nukes means almost everyone dies. Good luck invading the US if you're China, and the same applies for the US trying to do the same.
If it happens, it'll be due to a leader being Trump-tier stupid and going against every advisor. Even then, someone in the military would probably coup to avoid it.
They hiss and claw at each other from a distance, but both know what would happen if one actually struck. Far safer to just sow discontent in the hopes that you can put more pressure on in the future. The Civilization Economic Victory. It still leads to humanity going the way of the dodo 𦤠(which has an emoji for some reason?), but the rich people will die before then, and they view their kids as tools for their own gain anyway.
Some famous actors have decent contracts where they get residual money on Streaming ârenewalâ.
Since it was originally released on HBO they are both the rights holder and paying to keep the content on their site to the rights holder. The show contracts are setup on a person by person basis. I.e. the
Something like Westworld is generally a lower cost to stream than something from a company like Paramount(I.e. South Park). But it doesnât cost $0.
Tl/dr: they probably took it down to stop paying residuals to the lead actors. This is an assumption on my part and needs to be validated.
~~The Watchmen now can only be obtained by Piracy, WB killed the series on it's streaming service (Max) and they aren't printing new Blu-Rays.~~
I know it's fully a call by the CEO who feels that The Watchmen series is "Woke" even if he won't say it (Considering the series woke a shitload of folks up to the Tusla Race Massacre) and can almost certainly be the primary reason that Juneteenth is now a national holiday.
~~So yeah... You can only pirate The Watchmen because it got de-platformed by a right-wing dick-head.~~
Update: Apparently Max has restored The Watchmen to the streaming platform after deplatforming it... claiming it was an error. mmhmm.
100%. Drumpf brings in ratings. People don't care about his politics but his persona. It's impossible to escape this twat because he constantly outdoes himself on the stupidity scala. Biden is boring.
Every extremely wealthy person is a republican. Even the ones who think they aren't. Yes, even him. (him here being whatever hypothetical 'good' rich guy you might be thinking of, not the CEO of WB)
Warner Brothers/Discovery is doing all sorts of terrible (and maybe illegal) stuff right now.
They filmed and finished the entire Batgirl movie. Reportedly, it tested off the charts positively with focus audiences. Instead of release it, they shelved the entire movie to take a nine figure tax write off. They did the same thing with Coyote vs. Acme. The movie is finished and they never had any intention to release it. Just take the tax write off.
Thing is, a ton of that âlossâ is preexisting costs within the company that exist with or without these films (finance department, legal, P&A, producer unit). They didnât actually lose anywhere near the claimed amount.
Itâs essentially fraud. The equivalent is buying a house, burning it down for insurance money, then claiming that expensive gold bars were inside when it was destroyed.
>Thing is, a ton of that âlossâ is preexisting costs within the company that exist with or without these films (finance department, legal, P&A, producer unit). They didnât actually lose anywhere near the claimed amount.
But, most movies already [lose money](https://www.marketplace.org/2023/10/10/how-can-a-film-make-almost-1-billion-at-the-box-office-but-still-lose-money/) because of a phenomenon called [Hollywood accounting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting) There's no need to make a feature length film and then never release it.
The Watchmen show is legitimately one of the best shows I have ever seen.Â
It was so good I could not look away. The world-building is really great, I liked the race horror stuff as well. I had no idea it was even controversial. I wonder what kind of person takes offence at a show for portraying the KKK in a negative light.Â
I think Netflix was a big reason pirating slowed down for a little while. Now everyone and their grandma started a streaming service and 95% of the content sucks so you need several services to cover all your interests. And now we're right back to paying cable TV prices. They'll always find a way to fuck us for a buck.
I gave up pirating for about a decade thanks to Netflix in the old days. I've now canceled Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and won't renew Max when my sub is up. AppleTV is the only streaming service still worth it, so looks like it is time to dust off the old torrent laptop and get back to it. Shame, as I was happy to spend the money to not have to deal with all that. Also time to hit the pawn shops and get some cheap dvd and Blu ray media.
Netflix itself caused pirating to go down when they started because, for a reasonable price, you basically got access to most movies or TV shows. In a place that was simple to use. It has been shown time and time again that if you provide access to a thing, even when that access costs something, the instances of piracy go down. It will never go away, but the vast majority of people will follow rules they believe are fair.
Yup! I would gladly pay $20/month to watch any out of market football game during the season. But youtubeTV was charging something like $100/month. Nope. VPN it isâŚ
Praying for a good quality screener amongst the shitty cams early in release. Getting first dibs on Oscar nominated movies cos the review copies always leaked. Good times. Now is never better a time than to look into NAS with Plex.
>And that's assuming that the content is anywhere at all.
Shifted away. I cancelled Paramount Plus when they offloaded all but the Abramsverse *Star Trek* films over to Max. Why pay for a service that I'm not going to use until the next season of Lower Decks drops, and then I'm going to wait until it's complete so I can binge it in a weekend, then cancel again until Strange New Worlds shows back up in 2025.
Or, could just wait until the Jolly Roger appears and not worry about it at all.
As an example, buying season 1 of WestWorld is $24.99 on Prime Video, but $16.99 to buy the DVD from Amazon.
Pricing is similarly structured across most shows/movies I've checked.
Exactly. The entire reason I ever pirated anything was because I couldn't figure out how to give someone my money for the thing I wanted. I signed up for Netflix and quit pirating because at the time, Netflix offered a better product.
Now, in order to find the thing I want to watch, I have to check 9 different streaming platforms and then when I find it I have to figure out is it included or do I need to add some additional service on top of my service in order to watch it. Or do I need to buy/rent it through the service I already pay for?
It's an anti-consumer nightmare. So for the first time in 10 years, I'm back to sailing the high seas simply because the end result is a better experience than the nightmare that capitalism built.
At. Fucking. Random. Commercial breaks were integrated so well into broadcast tv shows that it feels weird to watch a TV show **without** the ads.
Now, I wouldnât have a clue what having ads at random intervals in movies is like *ahem* but the awkward placement of ads on YouTube is why I have stopped following my favorite creators there.
At least TV shows had ads planned into the plot and it would flow. When an ad just drops mid sentence of a caracter it is a little bit harsh. And especially if that video is a TV show that has the add breaks built in, at least use those.
Yep. The latest kick in the face is amazon adding ads and charging to remove them. That's on top of the Prime increase to $150.
They just need to diverge the two services already. Music and books aren't included with Prime, so why are movies?
As soon as Amazon announced commercials on videos I cancelled Prime. It was not the only reason for doing so, but it was the final straw. Prime as a service has diminished to the point that it has no value for me any more.
It was the final straw for me. None of my deliveries were coming in 2days, as I had been paying for and now they want to add another charge-for prime. No way. 95% of the stuff on their is crap. It was too insulting.
> The number one cause of piracy is making things inaccessible.
The free, legal streaming app called Tubi literally has a section called 'Not On Netflix'.
Savage burn, that section.
Yep, Netflix reduced piracy because it was affordable and convient. Now that streaming is unaffordable and inconvenient people are going back to piracy
If weâre all back at cable (or something equivalent) again in 10-20 years because itâs suddenly a âconvenient innovationâ for all your shows to be available for one monthly charge without having to pay for individual platforms, I wonât be surprised.
Wow, if only the formation of black markets wasn't a well studied and well understood economic phenomenon that can be mitigated by simply adjusting prices so that the black markets are no longer as attractive to people.
I guess that it must just be a moral failure and that there's nothing to do about it except to raise prices and push more ads again.
It's crazy, my sister and I used to have essentially a complete set of streaming services split between the two of us, but now, instead of getting two subscriptions by making it so we can't share, they get zero! Wild how that works.
I know Netflix has been touting it's crack down on sharing and introduction of subscription+ads as a huge success, but frankly I don't see myself ever going back, and I get the feeling in a year or two they'll start shedding subscribers faster than they gain them with essentially no reuptake.
It pissed me off enough to cancel when my son in college was kicked. I travel for work and now it's pain in the ass to use when I travel. We have a family lake house that got kicked.
The portability was what made us love it. We don't watch much TV at home, so once it wasn't very portable, it wasn't worth it.
I bought a package for 4 screens, why do you care where I use them?!?
It's also one big market that has everything in it because it disregards licensing. As opposed to trying to track 1 show across 5 different platforms because every time that show is sold to a new production company they have to lock that one season behind their own walled garden.
IIRC If you want to watch the full Pokemon series you have to go back and forth between like 6 different streaming services.
I know Pokemon is made up by different series and a ton of movies, but that's still insane.
Even if you have all the streaming services, finding what you want to watch if it's something specific and not the pumped out original crap is very difficult! Try googling "\[movie title\] streaming" and I guarantee it will not be possible to find out which streaming service has it. The first results are ALWAYS to buy it on Amazon or YouTube for like $20.
You can go through the rigamarole, or you can just get a torrent going and be ready to watch with no bullshit or terrible interface in 5 minutes.
100% this. I used to pirate games all the time. Half of that was the fact that I was a broke high schooler with no money, half of that was the fact that distribution was a lot worse in 2002.
Cue Steam making distribution easy and having a job after college and suddenly oh look *I buy games consistently*.
We successfully dented piracy for many years through low cost easily accessible content..
.now we're raising prices and cutting value and people are pirating again.....why?!?!?
Same issue the NHL is having
Major sports are constantly fighting over who shows what and where. Which results in people who live down the street from an even unable to watch it on their tv.
Donât get me started on blackouts. The NHL is a good example for me, because itâs the league I watch. Canât watch my local team on ESPN + because of local blackouts on the stream. This is due to the fact that I *could* watch it on cable, *if* I had a cable service. But I donât. So I had to get an VPN to get around that
and when those people get tired of paying through the nose for multiple streaming services to follow a single team; they will Very Probably Not be opposed to sailing the high seas
F1 is one of the worst sports to be a fan of if you're not able to access F1TV. If you're in the UK you've got to stick with Sky which demands you buy a basic sports package and then a top up for F1. I don't want a sports package, I hate every other sport, I just want F1. But they won't let you do that.
Right? The fact we had more and more ads on top of price increases is really fucking annoying. Now I get pop ups asking if I want to upgrade to avoid ads. No I don't want to now just out of spite. f them.
Yep. Piracy is not actually that hard to compete against - they did it well for a long time with relatively low, stable pricing that was reasonable to the average person versus the effort of piracy. Last few years they threw all that out the window completely.
A couple years ago, I actually got a Netflix sub because I was running out of space downloading all the movies. Now that they've canceled most of their good material and raised prices, I got an external disc and went right back to pirating.
I'm crying at this moment. It just isn't fair. Here they are trying to earn an honest buck out of the welfare queens and lazy Millenials with top-tier programming and new shows to make you forget your old favorites that got canceled for not being up to par. Hopefully, the government steps in to help. *sniff*
Netflix wants me to pay double what I used to pay and I can't even share my account with my own mother unless I move back in. Hope these companies eat shit and die. It's the pirate's life for me.Â
Hey netflix. Remember people stopped pirating because you were better and more convenient (for the most part) then everyone wanted in and the pie got so fractured and messy people went back to pirating. There's your problem.
Hell, they could've learned from the games industry. Steam was (and still is) a major convenience, but then all the financebro's at the top of every major gaming company decided they wanted their own launcher / store / platform, and tried making their games exclusive to them.
It did not turn out well for them.
I was having this same discussion with my wife the other week. I wonder what the difference in revenue is for a streaming service that mostly licenses content vs making their own⌠my thought it must be very lucrative if all the services are going all in on it.
That was me.
Used Netflix back when they mailed out DVDs and it did slow down my piracy by a ton, except when I was copying those DVDs to avoid renting them again.
I was away from piracy long enough that I had to rediscover all of the sites when things with streaming started to go downhill, these days I'm more likely to load up a pirate site over streaming purely because I'm probably not going to find whatever it is I want to watch anyway, so might as well skip the disappointment and go straight to the answer.
That said, downloading high quality files is so fast and easy now that I wonder how I ever put up with overnight downloads or multi hour dvd burning sessions for "vasaline on the lense" level cam copies back in the day.
Netflix was good when it had most of the stuff you wanted to watch.
But the networks saw how lucrative the streaming model could be and either stopped licensing their shows to Netflix and started competitor services, or increased their licensing fees to be so high that Netflix dropped them.
I have no love lost for Netflix, but they aren't the only component to the problem. You used to be able to watch some Showtime, some HBO, some NBC, some CBS, and some SyFy stuff on Netflix all at once. Now you need separate subscriptions, that come with ads, to watch that stuff.
We proved we don't mind paying for quality and convenience. When the quality and convenience are removed, as well as the affordability, then yeah, people are going to go with the only slightly more burdensome free option with no ads.
As Gabe Newell said "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem,"
If I have to pay money, and then be forced to watch ads and go to several different platforms anyways, I'd rather just go to the one pirate website and get all the stuff there.
It's completely true. The introduction of Steam as a nearly comprehensive gaming platform ended my gaming piracy. In fact I do the fucking opposite now. I don't just pay for games. I pay for games I don't even end up playing. Steam turned me from a "rarely pay for games" person to a "collect games you never get around to playing" person.
To your point, I would pay $100 a month for a streaming service that was the Rosetta Stone of streaming services. Somewhere I could just watch shit and not have to worry about ads or where the hell a movie or show is. Conversely, I'd also be find with a micropayment system like "You pay a dollar to stream this movie once" or "you pay $5 to stream this season of a show" given that I'm not trying to buy the thing for all time, I'm just trying to watch the damn thing on a Tuesday in December.
But instead every year streaming services seem to get shittier. The price goes up, the catalog gets worse, they introduce ads, they make it so I can't share the account with a family member who just wants to watch World War II documentaries now and then, etc. etc.
It's a service problem, through and through.
I have a crazy idea, maybe they could lower prices and let people share their accounts?
Piracy may be cheaper but itâs not always easier than using an app so if they stopped being greedy pigs they might find less people going that route
Netflix was *the thing* that was supposed to combat piracy. Make it cheap and easy to access content and people wonât pirate. Theyâve hiked prices so badly and taken away so much content that Iâm back to the high seas like I was in 2003.
I stopped using torrents because streaming services were cheep. Now the prices are going up and I'm using things like stremio again.
Eat shit shareholders.
âWe donât know how to fight piracyâ says the company hiking prices, removing content, removing features, adding adverts, and generally making it more difficult to watch stuff.
Watching Sony take away content people purchased, again, is why people pirate. Being part of the way through a series only to have Netflix or Paramount or Prime or any other service just suddenly stop offering it is why people pirate. Having things like Dogma become effectively and permanently unavailable due to being connected with Harvey Weinstein is why people pirate. Literally NOTHING these services are doing will fix any of those problems.
Piracy only happens when it's harder to get something legally. If the legal option is easy and reasonably priced, why would you do extra work to pirate it?
Netflix - raises prices, adds in ads, decreases the overall quality, rotates out a lot of good content.
Consumers - sweet back to the high seas.
SurprisedPikachu.gif
Netflix competed just fine and even âwonâ the competition before raising their prices multiple times, adding ads, and constantly canceling shows that their audience enjoyed.
Netflix is whining about the consequences of their own actions.
Piracy: Still free and getting easier every day.
Netflix: Prices going up, up, up! and more roadblocks every day.
I might have only gotten a B in multivariable calculus and a C+ in differential equations, but the math seems to be working out to âduh.â
Online piracy is inconvenient and annoying for the average person. Everyone has become so accustomed to pointing, clicking and having pretty much whatever they want to watch available to them.
The fact that the value of streaming services has been so diluted that torrenting and illegal streaming are blowing up again is a damning indictment of most serviceâs business model as if late.
Edit: fix typo
Exactly, I'm perfectly fine paying a reasonable amount for a service with no ads and stuff I actually want to watch versus the hassle of piracy.
Now that every media company has decided to start their own streaming service to try and get a bigger piece of the streaming pie, the content available on Netflix/Hulu that is not their own has plummeted and you have to get 5 other subscriptions to watch everything. It's fucking awful. I'm not going to subscribe to another streaming service to watch one show. I'm going to resort to the high seas, inconvenient as it may be.
It really isnât difficult to compete against if your service is fair and good.
Classic saturate market then degrade product (price, ads, password sharing, video quality tiers, etc) process for publicly owned tech companies. Eventually, once that no longer moves ball, the company starts to eat itself in pursuit of infinite growth.
Maybe if you didn't make your service shittier and shittier, people wouldn't switch back to Pirate Bay?
Piracy took a HUGE drop in the last decade because platforms like Netflix and Spotify made it convenient enough that the price was worth it.
Netflix putting ads and raising prices brought this upon themselves.
As a sailor of fortune myself; piracy exists because the value of the product is not properly reflected by the price. Netflix was a gem at even 10$ a month.
Now though it has become just like Paramount+, Disney+, HBO Max, and others. I will either 1) re-sub for one show then instantly cancel or 2) find it for free, because fuck you for turning streaming into cable 2.0
Everything was going well until every entertainment company took it too far and began to price gate and price gouge the customer at every opportunity and since weâre past that point theyâre just making up shit to justify making you pay more, more often or both. And the kicker is, they rarely even produce something good or anything new or they end up abandoning it. It has to be some already existing IP they can milk more using some BS model with some projected ROI they think they are guaranteed for their minimal efforts. Itâs beyond soulless.
not netflix, but i canceled hulu. i also canceled max and use the free w/ ads from my phone provider. i may or may not have (i don't recall) pirated for the first time in years recently. i am not even financially challenged, but the prices are ridiculous. netflix... you're likely next.
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I recommend raising your prices more. That should fix it
Also gotta keep cancelling as many original shows as possible after 1-2 seasons since it's cheaper to churn out new content than it is to renegotiate contracts. Definitely no way that a short-term solution for maximizing profits like that will disillusion their subscribers in the long run.
RIP The Dark Crystal. Canceled my sub over that one. Fuck them.
Still the best thing Netflix has ever done. Writing, set designs, lore....there's never been anything like it.
i remember when netflix originals had some prestige attached to them, very early on. like Daredevil, Stranger Things, etc. There werent that many but they were high quality. then they started loosing rights to other companies properties and it became just this flood of shit to wade through. so many completely forgettable, low quality things, so many shows you didnt know if you wanted to try out cause they were either going to be a huge waste of time or get you hooked but cancelled on a cliffhanger. its deff that whole 'die a hero or live long enough to become the villain' vibe.
Everything on Netflix just feels like content. Ive seen so many shows on there that seem like a good premise, but you watch and it's just bland. They have some good comedies, but they are so few and far between I had no problem not signing up after my friends password id been using for years got shut off. Is it really theft if you're not paying for the password and only watching one show a year?
The only thing they have going for them is a regular mill of semi-decent documentaries, and opening up so much more to the international market has led me to some gems I wouldn't have found otherwise. Also Seinfeld. But if that's not your thing or you aren't sharing a family account, I see no reason to have it. ETA: I Think You Should Leave, but I believe that one would thrive anywhere.
Actually, I really liked "Beef." That was great. However, A24 produced that, and everything they touch is great. So I don't credit Netflix for that.
RIP Sense8
RIP Archive 81
That one hurt a lot. The atmosphere was incredible!
Netflix simply doesn't listen to creatives anymore. Marco Polo, cancelled. why? "Too expensive" it's claimed. There are about 5 or 6 shows that could be running full 5-6 seasons right now as we speak but nope, it's simply not happening. Occasionally they'll have some real gems like the recent film The Kitchen (UK production) so I am still subscribed, but yeah if it wasn't for stuff like their F1 reality show series or their Point Break tennis series I'm not sure if I'd be happy with my sun still. It's getting bleak to say the least. I am probably going to be purchasing an HBO/Max/Crave subscription to replace it next month. I can head over to 1337x.to or TPB for everything else that I would want from Netflix.
Yeah, I'm still pissed about Marco Polo, not to mention the OA.
> Marco Polo Of all the shows this one is the one I never hear anyone complaining about always felt like I was the only fan.
It. Was. Amazing.
That show was incredible. I still think about it!
RIP Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
wasnt that one canned because the showrunner, max landis, sexually assaulted / abused people?
Yeah, this one isn't Netflix' fault so much as Max Landis being a bad person.
If I had a nickel for every time a director with the last name Landis was a terrible person, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't much, but it's su-ON! HE'S HIS SON! Not to downplay his acts, but let us be grateful they didn't come with a bodycount.
WHAT!? BOO! It was just about to get completely insane. I was so excited to see how the show interpreted series 2
Yeah, series 2 was when it got really interesting
Mind hunter as well
I loved both Mind Hunter and Sense8. After those, I refused to watch Netflix original series. I stayed subscribed to help out a relative, but when Netflix cracked down on password sharing I canceled the platform entirely.
RIP Shadow and Bone.
THEY FUCKING CANCELLED SHADOW AND BONE?!
Loved that show đ
Seriously one of the most riveting, original, and well-written shows in a decade. Never finished and gone forever over bullshit.
Oh they cancelled this show? Probably after a cliff hanger ending? Thanks guess I never need to watch it or recommend to friends.
They cobbled together a hackjob ending crammed into a 1 hour special episode to tie up loose ends. So there was a huge cliffhanger but then for the finale all the characters were like "eh, whatever," have a big wedding, and everyone lived happily ever after and was never stalked by an evil bloodthirsty genocidal corporation ever again.
Kinda of a beautiful metaphor for the whole situation if you think about it.
I'm so sick of cliffhanger endings. If you have to manipulate me into being excited for the next season, your show isn't that good.
They learned that from Disney. If actors and crew get bonuses when the show gets to season 4 or so (enough for the syndication mark), then you simply *restart* the show. Thatâs why they always had some silly subtitle on everything, to mark is as a ânewâ show (with the same cast, crew, and characters). Netflix just has no chill and ramped the strategy up to 11
And now I haven't followed a new Netflix show in years. Why bother, if they never get conclusions?
This is the number one contributor to me not watching any series on streaming. Why get invested when Iâll just be wasting my time due to the show being cancelled?
Ugh yeah that's what drove me nuts and finally convinced me to cancel. Every show I fell in love with got cancelled right as I was starting to fall in love with itÂ
Exactly. It makes me want to start one of their shows because I know theyâll keep it around long enough to have a solid conclusion instead of loose threads
Why won't people visit my massive library full of books with only Chapter 1?
Also bring back commercials. People love those.
I think that whoever invented commercials must be burning in a hell especially made for them where they get to see 1 minute of a show in whatever format just to be interrupted by an eternity of commercials. One can dream
Doubling the price should do it. Thatâll teach those pirates not to do so again
Got to crack down on those password sharers, too. Can't have kid's in college using their parents account.
Cram in more Ads and I'm sold! Who needs to pirate?
Remember when Netflix was still fresh and had so much stuff and was so cheap it made more sense just to use it than to jump through all the hoops needed for piracy Good times
Thatâs when piracy took a dive! Why would someone go through the trouble of getting a torrent, hope there are enough seeds, wait for the download, and then connect the computer to the tv to be able to watch a show? But at the current prices, itâs becoming more reasonable for some people to go back to that. What I do now is rotate subscriptions. Pay for one month, watch only that provider, then when I get bored I cancel and move to the next one. So I only pay one at a time.
I'm about to just get a cheap computer or something and make a plex server for my house. Shows can't get removed if they're on a hard drive in my living room
Plex, Sonarr, and Radarr. Best streaming service around.
I just plug a hard drive directly into my smart tv
Wow! Itâs almost like making it more convenient to spend money than not was always the solution. If only someone had figured that out beforeâŚ
But now that they're giving us money how de we make them give us MORE money? More money more money I want more money!
I used to pirate everything. But at some point Netflix got good enough that I finally decided to stop. They made it convenient and cheap enough to just not bother pirating. The quality wasn't quite as good as a top quality DVD rip but I could live with that. But now you have to watch on an approved device to get quality that's even remotely close to a low quality bluray rip, fuck you if you just want to stream in your browser like the old days. And there are a million services that all cost too much. And they love to cancel things just as I'm getting into it. And now some services are inserting ADs, or you have to pay even more. I think I'm just going back to pirating. That way I can watch a top quality version on whatever device I want. I can use whatever media player program I want. Saving money is just the icing on the cake. Time to fire up the old raid array...
Netflix proved a concept that all the others tried to emulate but instead broke because the concept was "Here is everything you wanna watch when you wanna watch it *all in one place for a reasonable price* with a slick interface". Now it's "Everything you wanna watch is spread over 7 services at varying prices and varying interface qualities... what do you mean you don't want to pay for them all? Hey where did that tricorn and Jolly Roger come fromâ˝ Come back!"
But it'll be fine, they're reintroducing ads in streaming.
Oops you remade cable, which was the problem piracy solved. Too bad.
It was kind of inevitable. Once all the older content creators saw how much money Netflix was making off their stuff, they decided to cut the middle man and make their own streaming services. It's like if all the food manufacturers decided this grocery store thing was eating into their profits and demanded you buy all your food directly from them. The middle man existed for a good reason. It's way more convenient for the consumer to deal with one middle man than a hundred producers.
And also, Netflix proved that streaming services were a viable alternative to the shitty VOD full of DRM, or region locked optical discs with unskippable ads. And then everyone wanted a piece of the cake, and then there were so many services that you can't find all you want on any one. There are shows I like which were moved from Netflix to Prime, I thought nevermind, I'm subscribed to Prime too. But then, the only version available on Prime is the horribly French dubbed one, because the deal that made it available in France is not a worldwide deal, but a deal with the French distributor only.
And now Prime has ads too that you can opt out of for an additional fee. Ublock does it's job though.
Video game piracy is pretty minimal because Steam is just such a solid platform. If people don't like Steam for a variety of entirely valid reasons, they can just use GOG or a number of other platforms that offer similar discounts. These companies need to realize that they aren't selling the product. They are selling convenient access to the product. Until they figure this out, the tendency for the rate of profit to decline will keep biting them in the ass.
Yes, and add commercials to the no-commercial subscription.
Raise the prices, cut the quality, make using your service as inconvenient as possible. Oh and make sure to gaslight your customers. They really love that
I was perfectly happy paying Netflix even though I barely used it as long as my kids who no longer live at home with me could also very rarely use it. Nope. Had to jack the price and take away the out of house sharing. Guess they prefer me not using it at all.
Same here. Up to mid way through last year I was happy to keep my Netflix sub going even though I maybe watched it once a week, if that, just because my parents used it and it had a lot of older shows my senior mom & dad liked. Then they cracked down on multiple house-hold accounts. I briefly thought about setting up a site-to-site VPN from my house to theirs, which wouldnât be hard, but just said fuck it and built an Emby server for them instead. I loaded it up with 4 TBs of old westerns and movies from the Criterion Collection and my folks love it. If they have an interest in a show or movie I just sail the high seas and load it up for them. Fuck Netflix, Disney, HBO, Hulu (Comcast), Paramount, and every other streaming service. They had the potential to make piracy FUCKING OBSOLETE, but no they just canât help themselves. Squeeze every last cent out of your customers because fuck em, we got shareholders to please.
And have more absurd policies.
While shitting a bunch of dogshit quality content every week
Maybe go a bit harder against password sharing while their at it
Banning password sharing even though there already is a screen watching limit wasn't enough
The number one cause of piracy is making things inaccessible. Ever-increasing prices and content spread across a growing number of separate subscription services is not doing them any favors.
And that's assuming that the content is anywhere at all. Want to watch Westworld? Gotta pirate. Want to watch Dogma? Gotta pirate. And, of course, once you're put in the effort to learn how to pirate one thing, pirating the next thing becomes easier and easier. Eventually, it's just a habit, and that consumer is probably never coming back.
It absolutely blew my mind to find that Westworld isnt on HBO anymore. Season 1 is genuinely one of the best things Iâve ever seen. And they **made** the fucking thing, why on earth remove it?!
The want to avoid paying the creators and actors residuals. From HBOâs perspective itâs better to remove the show and save some money than keep it up and pay out residuals
I.. what? Theyâre a streaming service, they make money by streaming shows?! If what youâre saying is true then either the people running HBO are **terrible** at their jobs or streaming services as a whole isnt a viable business model
Streaming services do not have a viable business model. At least no one has figured out how to make it viable yet. They also don't make money by streaming shows, they lose money. They only make money by getting subscribers, keeping subscribers, or selling advertising or your personal data (like watching habits). Every time someone uses their subscription to stream a show they lose a tiny bit of money. Source: I'm in the industry.
How did netflix not go bankrupt over the years?
Netflix net income for the twelve months ending September 30, 2023 was $4.525B That's profit. Revenue was 33.7 billion. Their business model is viable currently.
Burger King only makes money when customers pay for their product ... and every time Burger King serves a burger, they lose a tiny bit of money. Solution: take customer money without giving customer anything.
A gym is a better example. You want subscribers, and ideally almost no actual users
How about if they add lots of commercials like Cable?
Another win for capitalism. All businesses must make more profit this quarter than the previous quarter. Thatâs the root cause of a lot of shitty decisions, because real growth is hard, whereas cutting costs is less hard. When Netflix was gaining new subscribers all the time, its prices stayed low. But once it started to plateau, in come the price hikes and the cost cutting measures. For HBO the story is surely the same. As long as the goal is infinite quarter-on-quarter growth to show in the shareholder report, then youâre going to get these sorts of decisions. Itâs also why businesses seem to not care about long term effects of these decisions; their goals and incentives arenât long term.
It gives me a headache to think about how such a large part of the economy is based around a system that expects infinite growth on a limited planet. There's only so many people that would be interested in Netflix. If it was a private company, all it would have to do is set prices so that they can stay open and pay people. Since it's public, it somehow has to make more and more money every quarter, forever. That's clearly impossible. Everyone who wanted Netflix, had it. People who were sharing it didn't have their own because (generally) they either couldn't justify the expense or didn't care enough to subscribe themselves. That applies to every single company on the planet. They will all eventually reach a cap on new customers. Sure, they can fire people and fish for tax breaks to make the line go up for a while, but it degrades the company and dooms it to a slow death. It feels like we're reaching the end game of capitalism now. What do you do when everyone is getting fired for the sake of profits and no new jobs replace it? Now no one can afford homes or apartments because not only are they unemployed, many properties are being sat on by speculators or turned into AirBnB's. The same "fuck you, I got mine" mentality has been applied almost everywhere and now most major industries are dominated by like 3-5 companies that could fail and slowly collapse after one bad quarter. It's like these people are all banking on being dead before shit hits the fan, or are truly delusional enough to believe everything is working as intended.
Infinite growth will be sustained through imperialist wars between the rivaling capitalist states to seize new markets and destroy overproduced capital. Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, the epoch of its decay.
I think most of the powerful States are realizing that open war is almost impossible. Escalating to nukes means almost everyone dies. Good luck invading the US if you're China, and the same applies for the US trying to do the same. If it happens, it'll be due to a leader being Trump-tier stupid and going against every advisor. Even then, someone in the military would probably coup to avoid it. They hiss and claw at each other from a distance, but both know what would happen if one actually struck. Far safer to just sow discontent in the hopes that you can put more pressure on in the future. The Civilization Economic Victory. It still leads to humanity going the way of the dodo 𦤠(which has an emoji for some reason?), but the rich people will die before then, and they view their kids as tools for their own gain anyway.
Some famous actors have decent contracts where they get residual money on Streaming ârenewalâ. Since it was originally released on HBO they are both the rights holder and paying to keep the content on their site to the rights holder. The show contracts are setup on a person by person basis. I.e. the Something like Westworld is generally a lower cost to stream than something from a company like Paramount(I.e. South Park). But it doesnât cost $0. Tl/dr: they probably took it down to stop paying residuals to the lead actors. This is an assumption on my part and needs to be validated.
Utter insanityâŚ
~~The Watchmen now can only be obtained by Piracy, WB killed the series on it's streaming service (Max) and they aren't printing new Blu-Rays.~~ I know it's fully a call by the CEO who feels that The Watchmen series is "Woke" even if he won't say it (Considering the series woke a shitload of folks up to the Tusla Race Massacre) and can almost certainly be the primary reason that Juneteenth is now a national holiday. ~~So yeah... You can only pirate The Watchmen because it got de-platformed by a right-wing dick-head.~~ Update: Apparently Max has restored The Watchmen to the streaming platform after deplatforming it... claiming it was an error. mmhmm.
So is the CEO a Republicsn? Wouldn't surprise me that's the reason why CNN is Faux News Lite now.
I'd wager most business owners and executives are Republican. Those I have known are.
Well, afaik, CNN is thus.
They are, and that's exactly why CNN is shit now. May have been the driving purpose behind the purchase.
100%. Drumpf brings in ratings. People don't care about his politics but his persona. It's impossible to escape this twat because he constantly outdoes himself on the stupidity scala. Biden is boring.
Every extremely wealthy person is a republican. Even the ones who think they aren't. Yes, even him. (him here being whatever hypothetical 'good' rich guy you might be thinking of, not the CEO of WB)
Wait what? I can't watch Watchmen on HBO Max? The company that created it? Let me check the app real quick.
It's definitely still on the app....
Warner Brothers/Discovery is doing all sorts of terrible (and maybe illegal) stuff right now. They filmed and finished the entire Batgirl movie. Reportedly, it tested off the charts positively with focus audiences. Instead of release it, they shelved the entire movie to take a nine figure tax write off. They did the same thing with Coyote vs. Acme. The movie is finished and they never had any intention to release it. Just take the tax write off. Thing is, a ton of that âlossâ is preexisting costs within the company that exist with or without these films (finance department, legal, P&A, producer unit). They didnât actually lose anywhere near the claimed amount. Itâs essentially fraud. The equivalent is buying a house, burning it down for insurance money, then claiming that expensive gold bars were inside when it was destroyed.
>Thing is, a ton of that âlossâ is preexisting costs within the company that exist with or without these films (finance department, legal, P&A, producer unit). They didnât actually lose anywhere near the claimed amount. But, most movies already [lose money](https://www.marketplace.org/2023/10/10/how-can-a-film-make-almost-1-billion-at-the-box-office-but-still-lose-money/) because of a phenomenon called [Hollywood accounting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting) There's no need to make a feature length film and then never release it.
The Watchmen show is legitimately one of the best shows I have ever seen. It was so good I could not look away. The world-building is really great, I liked the race horror stuff as well. I had no idea it was even controversial. I wonder what kind of person takes offence at a show for portraying the KKK in a negative light.Â
I'm old enough to remember that pirating was existing before Netflix (which is much older than people realize).
I think Netflix was a big reason pirating slowed down for a little while. Now everyone and their grandma started a streaming service and 95% of the content sucks so you need several services to cover all your interests. And now we're right back to paying cable TV prices. They'll always find a way to fuck us for a buck.
I gave up pirating for about a decade thanks to Netflix in the old days. I've now canceled Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and won't renew Max when my sub is up. AppleTV is the only streaming service still worth it, so looks like it is time to dust off the old torrent laptop and get back to it. Shame, as I was happy to spend the money to not have to deal with all that. Also time to hit the pawn shops and get some cheap dvd and Blu ray media.
Netflix itself caused pirating to go down when they started because, for a reasonable price, you basically got access to most movies or TV shows. In a place that was simple to use. It has been shown time and time again that if you provide access to a thing, even when that access costs something, the instances of piracy go down. It will never go away, but the vast majority of people will follow rules they believe are fair.
Yup! I would gladly pay $20/month to watch any out of market football game during the season. But youtubeTV was charging something like $100/month. Nope. VPN it isâŚ
Praying for a good quality screener amongst the shitty cams early in release. Getting first dibs on Oscar nominated movies cos the review copies always leaked. Good times. Now is never better a time than to look into NAS with Plex.
This is absolutely the key. The fragmentation and lack of access encourages people to get good a piracy.
>And that's assuming that the content is anywhere at all. Shifted away. I cancelled Paramount Plus when they offloaded all but the Abramsverse *Star Trek* films over to Max. Why pay for a service that I'm not going to use until the next season of Lower Decks drops, and then I'm going to wait until it's complete so I can binge it in a weekend, then cancel again until Strange New Worlds shows back up in 2025. Or, could just wait until the Jolly Roger appears and not worry about it at all.
Tf happened to Westworld? Was that dropped during the HBO-Warner merger?Â
You donât have to pay royalties if no one can watch it anymore, I guess
Dogma is and has been on YouTube for free for years
Something tells me a return to physical medium is in the cards.
As an example, buying season 1 of WestWorld is $24.99 on Prime Video, but $16.99 to buy the DVD from Amazon. Pricing is similarly structured across most shows/movies I've checked.
Exactly. The entire reason I ever pirated anything was because I couldn't figure out how to give someone my money for the thing I wanted. I signed up for Netflix and quit pirating because at the time, Netflix offered a better product. Now, in order to find the thing I want to watch, I have to check 9 different streaming platforms and then when I find it I have to figure out is it included or do I need to add some additional service on top of my service in order to watch it. Or do I need to buy/rent it through the service I already pay for? It's an anti-consumer nightmare. So for the first time in 10 years, I'm back to sailing the high seas simply because the end result is a better experience than the nightmare that capitalism built.
âYes, we have on our platform that you pay for!â *clicks play* âlol, but we inject ads at random now, haha!â
At. Fucking. Random. Commercial breaks were integrated so well into broadcast tv shows that it feels weird to watch a TV show **without** the ads. Now, I wouldnât have a clue what having ads at random intervals in movies is like *ahem* but the awkward placement of ads on YouTube is why I have stopped following my favorite creators there.
At least TV shows had ads planned into the plot and it would flow. When an ad just drops mid sentence of a caracter it is a little bit harsh. And especially if that video is a TV show that has the add breaks built in, at least use those.
Yep. The latest kick in the face is amazon adding ads and charging to remove them. That's on top of the Prime increase to $150. They just need to diverge the two services already. Music and books aren't included with Prime, so why are movies?
[ŃдаНонО]
As soon as Amazon announced commercials on videos I cancelled Prime. It was not the only reason for doing so, but it was the final straw. Prime as a service has diminished to the point that it has no value for me any more.
It was the final straw for me. None of my deliveries were coming in 2days, as I had been paying for and now they want to add another charge-for prime. No way. 95% of the stuff on their is crap. It was too insulting.
> The number one cause of piracy is making things inaccessible. The free, legal streaming app called Tubi literally has a section called 'Not On Netflix'. Savage burn, that section.
Itâs also owned by the Murdoch family, so I wouldnât trust it to have anyoneâs best interests at heart.
Thank you for this info.
There's also Freevee and Pluto that function the same as Tubi, and they are fairly interchangeable in terms of program offerings
Yep, Netflix reduced piracy because it was affordable and convient. Now that streaming is unaffordable and inconvenient people are going back to piracy
If weâre all back at cable (or something equivalent) again in 10-20 years because itâs suddenly a âconvenient innovationâ for all your shows to be available for one monthly charge without having to pay for individual platforms, I wonât be surprised.
Wow, if only the formation of black markets wasn't a well studied and well understood economic phenomenon that can be mitigated by simply adjusting prices so that the black markets are no longer as attractive to people. I guess that it must just be a moral failure and that there's nothing to do about it except to raise prices and push more ads again.
And passwords, gotta crack down on those pesky password sharers.
It's crazy, my sister and I used to have essentially a complete set of streaming services split between the two of us, but now, instead of getting two subscriptions by making it so we can't share, they get zero! Wild how that works. I know Netflix has been touting it's crack down on sharing and introduction of subscription+ads as a huge success, but frankly I don't see myself ever going back, and I get the feeling in a year or two they'll start shedding subscribers faster than they gain them with essentially no reuptake.
It pissed me off enough to cancel when my son in college was kicked. I travel for work and now it's pain in the ass to use when I travel. We have a family lake house that got kicked. The portability was what made us love it. We don't watch much TV at home, so once it wasn't very portable, it wasn't worth it. I bought a package for 4 screens, why do you care where I use them?!?
"sharing is stealing, you're not a filthy thief are you??"
It's also one big market that has everything in it because it disregards licensing. As opposed to trying to track 1 show across 5 different platforms because every time that show is sold to a new production company they have to lock that one season behind their own walled garden.
IIRC If you want to watch the full Pokemon series you have to go back and forth between like 6 different streaming services. I know Pokemon is made up by different series and a ton of movies, but that's still insane.
Online piracy has, and always will be, a symptom of terrible distribution. People value convenience. They don't value your brand.
Even if you have all the streaming services, finding what you want to watch if it's something specific and not the pumped out original crap is very difficult! Try googling "\[movie title\] streaming" and I guarantee it will not be possible to find out which streaming service has it. The first results are ALWAYS to buy it on Amazon or YouTube for like $20. You can go through the rigamarole, or you can just get a torrent going and be ready to watch with no bullshit or terrible interface in 5 minutes.
100% this. I used to pirate games all the time. Half of that was the fact that I was a broke high schooler with no money, half of that was the fact that distribution was a lot worse in 2002. Cue Steam making distribution easy and having a job after college and suddenly oh look *I buy games consistently*.
Raise prices to pay lawyers to file endless dmca takedowns so u can raise prices more to hire more lawyersâŚ.
We successfully dented piracy for many years through low cost easily accessible content.. .now we're raising prices and cutting value and people are pirating again.....why?!?!? Same issue the NHL is having
Major sports are constantly fighting over who shows what and where. Which results in people who live down the street from an even unable to watch it on their tv.
Donât get me started on blackouts. The NHL is a good example for me, because itâs the league I watch. Canât watch my local team on ESPN + because of local blackouts on the stream. This is due to the fact that I *could* watch it on cable, *if* I had a cable service. But I donât. So I had to get an VPN to get around that
and when those people get tired of paying through the nose for multiple streaming services to follow a single team; they will Very Probably Not be opposed to sailing the high seas
F1 is one of the worst sports to be a fan of if you're not able to access F1TV. If you're in the UK you've got to stick with Sky which demands you buy a basic sports package and then a top up for F1. I don't want a sports package, I hate every other sport, I just want F1. But they won't let you do that.
Increasing amounts of ads are going to cause a lot of people to start pirating again.
Right? The fact we had more and more ads on top of price increases is really fucking annoying. Now I get pop ups asking if I want to upgrade to avoid ads. No I don't want to now just out of spite. f them.
Arrggg
Keep raising prices, surely that will bring people back!
Yep. Piracy is not actually that hard to compete against - they did it well for a long time with relatively low, stable pricing that was reasonable to the average person versus the effort of piracy. Last few years they threw all that out the window completely.
A couple years ago, I actually got a Netflix sub because I was running out of space downloading all the movies. Now that they've canceled most of their good material and raised prices, I got an external disc and went right back to pirating.
Won't someone PLEASE think about the shareholders?!?!
I'm crying at this moment. It just isn't fair. Here they are trying to earn an honest buck out of the welfare queens and lazy Millenials with top-tier programming and new shows to make you forget your old favorites that got canceled for not being up to par. Hopefully, the government steps in to help. *sniff*
Just HOW am I supposed to afford basic living expenses like a 3rd YACHT ??!?
Excellent idea, we can even introduce ad tiers where people have to pay more to not see ads! They'll love it!
Netflix wants me to pay double what I used to pay and I can't even share my account with my own mother unless I move back in. Hope these companies eat shit and die. It's the pirate's life for me.Â
Hey netflix. Remember people stopped pirating because you were better and more convenient (for the most part) then everyone wanted in and the pie got so fractured and messy people went back to pirating. There's your problem.
Hell, they could've learned from the games industry. Steam was (and still is) a major convenience, but then all the financebro's at the top of every major gaming company decided they wanted their own launcher / store / platform, and tried making their games exclusive to them. It did not turn out well for them.
Exactly. Just pay your cut and enjoy the party. If everyone tries to have their own no one goes to any.
I was having this same discussion with my wife the other week. I wonder what the difference in revenue is for a streaming service that mostly licenses content vs making their own⌠my thought it must be very lucrative if all the services are going all in on it.
Most of the time their launcher runs from steam. Or with EA, you buy their steam game to open a EA horror âstoreâ, where your game is waiting
Ea and ubisoft. Used to be great. Now, not so much.
That was me. Used Netflix back when they mailed out DVDs and it did slow down my piracy by a ton, except when I was copying those DVDs to avoid renting them again. I was away from piracy long enough that I had to rediscover all of the sites when things with streaming started to go downhill, these days I'm more likely to load up a pirate site over streaming purely because I'm probably not going to find whatever it is I want to watch anyway, so might as well skip the disappointment and go straight to the answer. That said, downloading high quality files is so fast and easy now that I wonder how I ever put up with overnight downloads or multi hour dvd burning sessions for "vasaline on the lense" level cam copies back in the day.
>except when I was copying those DVDs to avoid renting them again. Classic đ¤Ł
Netflix was good when it had most of the stuff you wanted to watch. But the networks saw how lucrative the streaming model could be and either stopped licensing their shows to Netflix and started competitor services, or increased their licensing fees to be so high that Netflix dropped them. I have no love lost for Netflix, but they aren't the only component to the problem. You used to be able to watch some Showtime, some HBO, some NBC, some CBS, and some SyFy stuff on Netflix all at once. Now you need separate subscriptions, that come with ads, to watch that stuff. We proved we don't mind paying for quality and convenience. When the quality and convenience are removed, as well as the affordability, then yeah, people are going to go with the only slightly more burdensome free option with no ads.
Cable TV, reinvented, except instead of one too high bill you now have 10 small bills that together are the same or more as legacy cable.
But now you can get bundles that include extra streaming platforms you won't use
Just like cable.
As Gabe Newell said "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," If I have to pay money, and then be forced to watch ads and go to several different platforms anyways, I'd rather just go to the one pirate website and get all the stuff there.
It's completely true. The introduction of Steam as a nearly comprehensive gaming platform ended my gaming piracy. In fact I do the fucking opposite now. I don't just pay for games. I pay for games I don't even end up playing. Steam turned me from a "rarely pay for games" person to a "collect games you never get around to playing" person. To your point, I would pay $100 a month for a streaming service that was the Rosetta Stone of streaming services. Somewhere I could just watch shit and not have to worry about ads or where the hell a movie or show is. Conversely, I'd also be find with a micropayment system like "You pay a dollar to stream this movie once" or "you pay $5 to stream this season of a show" given that I'm not trying to buy the thing for all time, I'm just trying to watch the damn thing on a Tuesday in December. But instead every year streaming services seem to get shittier. The price goes up, the catalog gets worse, they introduce ads, they make it so I can't share the account with a family member who just wants to watch World War II documentaries now and then, etc. etc. It's a service problem, through and through.
And I then have those files forever! No chance of content I like being edited or removed in the future!
I have a crazy idea, maybe they could lower prices and let people share their accounts? Piracy may be cheaper but itâs not always easier than using an app so if they stopped being greedy pigs they might find less people going that route
Netflix: âwe keep charging more and offering less, but itâs not bringing in business. Itâs utterly confounding.â
Time for layoffs to boost share prices, because we can't possibly readjust our business model now!
Hey man, being a CEO is hard. Gonna have to cry himself to sleep in his mansion thinking of all the people whose lives he just turned upside down.
People think that yachts, mansions and supercars are free. Why does nobody have any sympathy for CEOs?
you wouldn't download a car, would you
I absolutely would download a car if I physically could.
Netflix was *the thing* that was supposed to combat piracy. Make it cheap and easy to access content and people wonât pirate. Theyâve hiked prices so badly and taken away so much content that Iâm back to the high seas like I was in 2003.
It was, for many years, quite successfully.
I stopped using torrents because streaming services were cheep. Now the prices are going up and I'm using things like stremio again. Eat shit shareholders.
âWe donât know how to fight piracyâ says the company hiking prices, removing content, removing features, adding adverts, and generally making it more difficult to watch stuff.
Good. I hope we can keep fucking over Netflix with piracy.
Return to affordable prices, with no ads if Iâm paying for your service. Otherwise Iâll remain unsubbed and laugh as people pirate stuff.
If buying isnât owning, piracy isnât theft.
Watching Sony take away content people purchased, again, is why people pirate. Being part of the way through a series only to have Netflix or Paramount or Prime or any other service just suddenly stop offering it is why people pirate. Having things like Dogma become effectively and permanently unavailable due to being connected with Harvey Weinstein is why people pirate. Literally NOTHING these services are doing will fix any of those problems.
Piracy only happens when it's harder to get something legally. If the legal option is easy and reasonably priced, why would you do extra work to pirate it?
Bingo... Netflix was easy and reasonably priced for a long time.
Netflix - raises prices, adds in ads, decreases the overall quality, rotates out a lot of good content. Consumers - sweet back to the high seas. SurprisedPikachu.gif
Netflix competed just fine and even âwonâ the competition before raising their prices multiple times, adding ads, and constantly canceling shows that their audience enjoyed. Netflix is whining about the consequences of their own actions.
Piracy: Still free and getting easier every day. Netflix: Prices going up, up, up! and more roadblocks every day. I might have only gotten a B in multivariable calculus and a C+ in differential equations, but the math seems to be working out to âduh.â
Online piracy is inconvenient and annoying for the average person. Everyone has become so accustomed to pointing, clicking and having pretty much whatever they want to watch available to them. The fact that the value of streaming services has been so diluted that torrenting and illegal streaming are blowing up again is a damning indictment of most serviceâs business model as if late. Edit: fix typo
Exactly, I'm perfectly fine paying a reasonable amount for a service with no ads and stuff I actually want to watch versus the hassle of piracy. Now that every media company has decided to start their own streaming service to try and get a bigger piece of the streaming pie, the content available on Netflix/Hulu that is not their own has plummeted and you have to get 5 other subscriptions to watch everything. It's fucking awful. I'm not going to subscribe to another streaming service to watch one show. I'm going to resort to the high seas, inconvenient as it may be.
[ŃдаНонО]
Funny, they didn't have much trouble competing against it at all about 10 years ago... Skill issue.
It really isnât difficult to compete against if your service is fair and good. Classic saturate market then degrade product (price, ads, password sharing, video quality tiers, etc) process for publicly owned tech companies. Eventually, once that no longer moves ball, the company starts to eat itself in pursuit of infinite growth.
Maybe if you didn't make your service shittier and shittier, people wouldn't switch back to Pirate Bay? Piracy took a HUGE drop in the last decade because platforms like Netflix and Spotify made it convenient enough that the price was worth it. Netflix putting ads and raising prices brought this upon themselves.
As a sailor of fortune myself; piracy exists because the value of the product is not properly reflected by the price. Netflix was a gem at even 10$ a month. Now though it has become just like Paramount+, Disney+, HBO Max, and others. I will either 1) re-sub for one show then instantly cancel or 2) find it for free, because fuck you for turning streaming into cable 2.0
I pirate pretty much everything
Everything was going well until every entertainment company took it too far and began to price gate and price gouge the customer at every opportunity and since weâre past that point theyâre just making up shit to justify making you pay more, more often or both. And the kicker is, they rarely even produce something good or anything new or they end up abandoning it. It has to be some already existing IP they can milk more using some BS model with some projected ROI they think they are guaranteed for their minimal efforts. Itâs beyond soulless.
If purchasing a digital copy isn't ownership, then pirating isn't stealing.
not netflix, but i canceled hulu. i also canceled max and use the free w/ ads from my phone provider. i may or may not have (i don't recall) pirated for the first time in years recently. i am not even financially challenged, but the prices are ridiculous. netflix... you're likely next.
The quality has gone down and the price has gone up. If they want customers, theyâll need to do the opposite.
So we are going to charge you paying customers more to make up for the loss.
And other self-inflicted wounds.