Given all the streaming services,
cable and sling alternatives being roughly the same price, and just general prices of games/dlcs, Spotify/YouTube premium (the full page ads and frequency of them on YouTube is at a new level without premium).
I just feel like if we’re at peak monetization, I might as well go back to my old teenage ways.
Don't even get me started on "there's this movie I heard about and I want to watch, but I need a subscription to this obscure random service and then also pay a rental fee on top to even get to watch it". It's just absurd.
It's easier to pirate stuff.
I generally want my lists of books/films/music playlists whatever that I've seen, reviewed or marked as "to watch" to be managed seperately from any one particular vendor, and owned by me.
There seems to be some movement towards this with e.g. smart TVs that will search all your apps for shows, and sites that will tell you where a specific film or show is available, but I've not seen anything either super geeky, or super easy to use.
Prime video is quite unique, but I'm very much past them putting pre-roll ads on the content I want to watch. It's universally an advert for their own craptastic, homegrown version of an existing well-defined format. If I was interested in watching Law & Order I can start from Season 1, not from their knockoff version of it.
Amazon Music would be another great service I'd be willing to pay for, but all the available clients are so buggy it's an impediment to me using it.
eBay sellers also tend to ship promptly, which used to be one of the main reasons to use Amazon/Prime. The latter's shipping speeds have increased by orders of magnitude in some parts of the country over the last couple years. It's not uncommon these days for a Prime order to sit in limbo for 3-4 days before being shipped, while the same order to the same city shipped instantly in 2018.
Actually you cannot. Only Law & Order SVU is available on streaming. The original series and the other spinoffs only have the most recent season available online.
Their add-on services all felt lackluster too. Most of the prime video content is not well-rated.
Ebay is fine I guess, but I'd lose my mind if I had to wait a week for something. That makes the $140/yr worth it to me.
Netflix allowed a huge library of DVDs to be rented. You could have 3-4 DVDs on rotation for a rather cheap price.
This happened when Blockbuster would charge you $5 per movie, and Netflix would charge $10.99 for unlimited DVDs, but you could only have 3 DVDs checked out.
That's why Netflix was huge and killed Video Store rentals.
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This is why I don't subscribe to any of the streaming services, they all utterly fail at having the movies I want to watch when I want to watch them. These services are mostly for people who want to watch something and don't particularly care what it is. TV as background noise. I expunged that sloppy style of TV watching from my life and I'm never going back to it. The only time I watch something is when I want to watch that thing specifically before I even sat down. And the odds of the streaming services I might have subscribed to having that thing is basically zero.
Unlike in my teenage years I'm happy to support artists with my money (and do!), but it's often a puzzle to figure out what content is on what service and in what region at what price.
Couple services with plenty of good content managed to put together teams to build their mobile / web apps that can barely code their ways out of a paper bag (in the non-trivial space of high-capacity video streaming, nonetheless). It's enough to make me yell "Just give me the damn file and I'll play it myself."
As far as I know, the only two companies that have their own video streaming expertise of any note are Netflix and Disney (after the BAMTech acquisition).
Any other company with sufficient funding can outsource it.
While not perfect, you have a way less unreasonable user experience especially in terms of DRM and hostile in software and APIs, and the fragmentation and balkanization is not even close to at the same level.
Most people who pay seem content with what they do and complement with free and open (mostly legal save for much on the YouTube). Public warez is spotty outside of that and the toplists. Private trackers are extremely exclusive, insular and inaccessible except for the very dedicated.
What's the dominating factor here? IP ownership and legal differences? Market dynamics? Opex costs? Industry corporate cultural differences? Or is it just circumstance that Spotify and Apple Music have been able and willing enough to make it happen while what.cd left a legacy where insular elitism became the norm and video pirates have always been more Tallyho?
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What I will say is there are certain genres or types of content where I just feel like watching that type of content and any of the services will meet that need. Rarely is there a "killer show" that I will pay for a service that hosts it anymore. If I want to watch documentaries about murderers they all have some version of that, or cop shows or home shows or ... you get the idea.
Maybe this is age showing and just the nature of how Hollywood constantly regurgitates characters, shows or "franchises" where I feel like I've seen things already when they are brand new.
That's not true. There are a number of services/products you can simply purchase or rent content without an additional subscription fee.
It is.
What's needed is some kind of aggregator; a firm that will sublicence content from the major providers, and sell it to consumers. I'm not going to set up a Netflix account to watch one show.
Of course, the big content providers won't sublicence; they'll have to be forced to. But I would watch more of their content if I could pay for just what I want to watch, without subscribing to a mess of bundles containing mainly dross content.
I pirate stuff when it's somewhere else or when it's not available anywhere (surprisingly that's 50% of cases, but maybe that's just my country). So the spread availability is one of the problems, but not having a chance to watch something legally is another.
The same problem is with videogames. Some of them can't be bought anymore (excluding used physical copies on CD/DVD, but that's not something I prefer).
Pirating movies is even legal in my coutry - it's legal to download a movie that's already shared - I just can't share it. So at least they can't jail me for this sporadic crime.
Do I feel bad? Partially. I'd prefer to pay, I love paying for stuff that's even free (donations), but I don't want to feel like I'm an animal that predators want to lacerate.
There have been many times where I've found DRM encumbered products inferior: trying to stream anime on Crunchyroll during primetime only to experience slowdowns; trying to screenshot something for a wallpaper only to get it blacked out; trying to download offline shows with subtitles, only to find subtitles didn't get downloaded with the video. Compound that with The Streaming Wars, I can't help but feel like a lot of people will turn to piracy out of necessity. It isn't enough that there are like 10 subscriptions to get all of the content you might want. It's also that each provider reinvents the wheel and each version is slightly jagged in different ways and doesn't work like a wheel. It's like 10 inferior clones of a wheel. Piracy, much to the chagrin of all of these services, usually fixes this: an H.265 .mkv file usually "just works" without problems in your favorite media player.
It's just a mess right now.
Piracy is our last refuge from companies delivering awful user experiences and shitting on our rights as consumers.
Just so you know you can fix EA games on the Steam Deck by logging into EA with your steam account and linking it. All the EA launcher games will work again.
Go to EAs help page. https://help.ea.com/en/contact-us/ Click login, and choose the Steam option. Link your steam with your ea account. Then try launching your game again. You’ll get the gray screen but give it time and it will go away.
I end up paying a big premium in practice over Kindle DRM and discounted paperbacks, but I'm doing my part to convince publishers to offer DRM-free.
> Denuvo DRM Outage Leads to Major Games Being Unplayable
[0] https://gamerant.com/denuvo-drm-outage-major-games-unplayabl...
> The cracked version of Resident Evil Village runs better, testing confirms
[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/resident-evil-village-drm-denuvo-stu...
> Shadow of the Tomb Raider Reportedly Runs Better Now That Denuvo Has Been Removed
[2] https://gamerant.com/shadow-of-the-tomb-raider-reportedly-ru...
If the pirated version wasn't so buggy I'd use that, even though I've paid for the game.
Piracy is not necessarily better. Languages are very few (english essentially), subtitles may not exist at all, quality is variable, and speed can be a problem as well, since it depends on how popular a movie is.
Most importantly, malware push from pirate websites is a very serious problem. I warn non-power users not to download from pirate websites.
I found this out when I was going to send a screenshot of a funny scene to a friend. Ok, I guess they don't want free advertising.
At the time this was as well-received as any other strong-arming.
Netflix, Amazon, Disney et al, aren't interested in showing me what I want to watch for a purchase price, they are after my attention, and to divert me to their most profitable revenue stream (Netflix in house creations etc).
My attention is not for sale, I'll buy content if it is sold in a manner that is attractive to me in a consumer friendly model, Louis CK selling his standup specials on his own website come to mind, otherwise I won't bother.
The problem is there's no end game for these companies, if you agree to buy something, they'll stop selling it and sell you a subscription instead. If you buy the subscription, they'll chuck ads in front of the subscribed service, and then periodically cut off access to certain content in an effort to maximize their own profit. There's no way to manage you're own library, you're subject to whatever the shareholders think they can keep squeezing out of you. On top of that, even if I yield to them completely, I still have to run their DRM blobs on my computing devices for the priviledge.
It's "amoral" to pirate in my worldview, but these companies are equally amoral. I still want to participate in the collective modern culture of tv, movies, etc, so somethings got to give.
It's our whole economic system. Everything is set up for the expectation of endless growth. Every company is expected to increase their revenue and share price and employee compensation.
This is a bit of a problem for global tech companies because when you already have a big chunk of the world's population as your customers then growing your numbers becomes difficult. The only way to get more cash then is to extract more cash from your existing users.
Even (or especially) if you're already making vast sums of cash, the expectation is that you'll produce increasing amounts of it year on year. As a result you almost have to give your users a worse experience each year.
No one seems terribly keen on the actual effects of this, but individual decision makers' performance is generally measured on how well they impel users to give up more cash.
I don't see how this situation improves without some rethinking of our whole economic system.
They will remove content that involves people talking about suicide. They will remove content that is offensive. They have even gone back and edited previous episodes and content. This has happened in Stranger Things (actual edits with no notice) and Arrested Development (a redesign of the fourth season that is far worse than the original version of it). (I could not watch the fifth season. It was way too terrible.)
Other services are going the same way. Netflix being a first mover was able to license a lot of content for what must have been more favorable rates, now that it's much easier for a studio to spin up their OWN streaming service (there are vendors out there that will sell you, essentially, a streaming service in a box) they are experimenting with increasing their rates for licensing and simultaneously running their own service.
This is all region dependent of course. Often you'll see stuff available only on the studio's streaming service in north america, but licensed to more general streaming services overseas.
We'll see how this shakes out. Perhaps someone like paramount determines that their in-house streaming service just isn't profitable and move back to a licensed model.
They don't even really want your attention. In house creations aren't the most profitable because they make money, they are the most profitable because they cost the least. As long as you keep paying your subscription they are happy. The content is intended to keep you just happy enough to stay subscribed (or upgrade your plan) as well as to attract new subscribers.
Basically their income is subscriptions, their costs are largely video licensing (or creation). Serving content is probably a minor additional cost.
Amoral or immoral? Companies (being legal entities) are amoral; and I am fine with being amoral in return; but many would complain that it's immoral :-)
> I still want to participate in the collective modern culture ... so somethings got to give.
Same comment applies to this forum. I want to participate in discussions on HN, and therefore I am subject to the occasional job ad from YC companies. It's not perfect, but it's a bit facetious to compare that to the attention grabbing of Youtube/Amazon, etc who will intentionally curtail my efforts to find content I want, in lieu of something they want to promote.
It also doesn't ask for a lot of attention. You don't get notifications, infinite scrolling, custom content for your preferences, and click bait is limited, per the enforced guidelines. There's a bit of FOMO since articles only stay at the top for a while, but there's ways to get around that (RSS, which I use).
HN is a place to discuss interesting ideas first, and YC startups second. The hard work from dang deserves more praise than that!
But at the same time I engage in piracy less than ever before. For me it seems like the hard part used to be obtaining the content — “why can’t I buy or rent the new Sopranos online” — but now the hard part is choosing something worth my time in the oceans of available titles.
This past week I watched a Norwegian miniseries about people stuck in an airport at Christmas (Netflix). Prior week I watched videos from a London Clojure conference (YouTube premium). Prior to that I rewatched an old Jim Jarmusch movie (Criterion). A couple months ago I was on a Hulu binge (The Bear, Only Murderers) before cancelling. I bought a comedy special from Louis CK’s own website. I only used a couple months of a free year of Apple TV, to watch Ted Lasso.
My default is to watch old Anthony Bourdain, either streaming (back when I had Hulu, or when I had HBO Now for Curb Your Enthusiasm) or buy a copy on Apple’s store.
But just as often I look around and give up. Most nights there’s nothing I want to watch. If I can, I make myself read a book or do some coding or maybe a podcast. I subscribe to streaming platforms then cancel. It’s so easy to sign up and then leave.
My point is, if I can find something I want watch it’s only a few clicks to watch it legally for a decent price (helps that I am not in my 20s, income wise). But it’s hard to find anything I want to watch. Piracy is almost a non sequitir these days, most of the time. But sure, if you find something you love, make sure to torrent a copy, because it will disappear eventually for one reason or another.
WTF. Why even subscribe in the first place. Absolutely ridiculous.
I'm seriously astounded that someone thought this was a good idea.
At the same time, I want to support creators, and I'll donate/use services like Bandcamp to directly support folks I appreciate. I have a $100/mo "donation" fund.
Has nothing to do with the price as I'm more than happy to support creators. Just not through centralized platform that doesn't respect my freedom.
I was happily paying a netflix and spotify sub for over a decade, but once we started getting greedy with Paramount+, AppleTV+, Discovery+, Peacock, etc. I decided it was high time to sail the seven seas again, which I hadn't done since college.
I keep waiting for all the netflix-likes to fail and people go back to just selling their content to netflix, but I don't think it's going to happen. I might be yaaar matey for the rest of my life.
Take a TV show for example - hundreds of people work on these things. There's no real way to support the show when you pirate something. TV shows don't have patreons or kickstarters.
Piracy is quite attractive because of how hostile the copyright holders are to end users. Sticking it to the megacorps that treat us with such disdain, even in these small ways, feels great. But this leaves a difficult question of how to actually support the people who are making the thing.
As far as I can tell, if you are serious about this, the closest thing to directly supporting a complex creative endeavor like a TV show is to "purchase" it from Amazon. Of course, you realize you "own" nothing, and Amazon still takes its cut, but at least it's a "sale" for the specific work in some spreadsheet.
The point is that you can get the actual video file from ~wherever~ and you're legally fine because you own the license.
Now the streaming platforms compete for being the best video delivery service for the array of things you own a license for.
Movies Anywhere is the closest thing to this I have seen. It only works for movies though, and it's a centralized service.
I wonder why not. If you're already doing payroll for the production of a TV show, it should be trivial to express each payout as a percentage (this particular gaffer gets 0.56%, etc).
It would then be easy to encode that in software somewhere (smart contract?) such that when payments come in, they get split up and disbursed accordingly.
If you coupled the addresses of these contracts with the content itself (as metadata on the file or in a lookup table somewhere, keyed by CTPH) consumers could then be choosy about whether they're supporting content which transparently supports all of its creators vs content that just lets a middleman soak up the profits.
Funnily enough Firefox can apparently use Google Widevine on MacOS: https://www.drm.cloud/platform-compatibility/
I am puzzled at these ridiculous restrictions but I am happy with their effect: a million papercuts driving viewers away.
https://www.defectivebydesign.org/
From our perspective the two most valuable subscriptions are AppleTV+ and Disney Plus. Apple are making by far the best "prestige" TV, and that seems to be their strategy. Quality over quantity, much like their other product ranges.
My wife and I watch slightly less on Disney, but the value it brings us as a family (8yo + 4yo) is enormous. If we could only have one subscription it would be that one.
Amazon Prime Video is just a value add on a subscription we have anyway, although we increasingly shop less on Amazon, without the free shipping we probably would cancel the video subscription.
Netflix I subscribe to for about 1 month per year to binge the latest of whatever I'm watching (this year: Stranger Things, The Crown) and then cancel. Anything else (Hulu, etc) is a 1 month and churn kind of situation.
Netflix especially seems to be in a content death spiral of sorts. They cancel their original content so aggressively and often in such unsatisfying ways for the audience that I've decided I don't want to watch anything on Netflix until after it is an established success with multiple seasons produced. I wish they would put more wood behind fewer arrows. Or maybe just make a move toward miniseries so at least the audience can have a satisfying beginning, middle, and end to something they've invested time in watching. I would so much rather have 5-8 episodes that form a cohesive story, than a Season 1 that sets up a world and then never gets to go anywhere because some algorithm decided the show wasn't successful enough to continue.
I have great respect for HBO: The Leftovers is a great show but wasn't doing well. They threw the director a bone and gave him an extra season, the 3rd and final, to wrap things up. And what a memorable season it was! So glad they did it!
On the other hand, they canceled Westworld, but that's been dragging on its feet for too long. So that's on the directors.
The experience is awful. They have a similar experience as Amazon video where they pretend to have a lot of content and when you find something you want to watch they throw up a pay gate. If you have to do research online ahead of time to figure out which shows are on the service you can spend that same time finding it elsewhere.
There's also plenty of annoying quirks with the UI like assumptions that you only watch a show on your account and never anywhere else so navigating to seasons is a pain.
The original shows are pretty good (they seem to have a weird Disney+ aversion to any nudity but violence is fine) but it was an easy choice to cancel before any free trial periods ended.
Do you see them stopping that ability at some point, and requiring a yearly subscription? I remember the cable companies wouldn't let you start and stop premium channels each month. You'd have to sign up for at least a year.
Maybe a pay per series could work, but then that's them admitting that they don't make enough good content to justify a subscription.
Amazon has never made sense to me. Living in Toronto the regular free shipping usually arrives in 1-2 days anyways. Is this wildly different in other cities? My partner pays for prime and I usually just order on my account anyways since there is little difference. Even if there is I rarely need something urgently.
That makes buying much more risk-free. I haven't paid for return shipping on an Amazon purchase for years.
I don't know that I return enough to compensate for the ~$120 annual cost (I guess it's going up to $140?), but it does get me faster (and more to the point, deterministic) shipping as well, _and_ the other benefits like Prime Video.
Overall I find it still makes sense. But you do you.
BTW, your partner can probably share the Prime shipping benefit with you, if they aren't already sharing it with someone else, and if you live together. My wife can buy things on Prime with our one subscription.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html%3FnodeI...
Where the streaming services are getting in trouble is if they are less convinient than piracy. Steam's success is largly built on being more convinient than pirating games, and similarly early Netflix was more convinient than pirating movies. Netflix and Amazon Prime still are on the "more convinient than piracy" side for me, the plethora of other streaming services not so much.
And then there's the question whether watchin Youtube with adblocker and SponsorBlock is equivalent to piracy. It is damn convienient.