Again, it might be news for you, but it’s a huge business with many layers. There are plenty of professional rippers and crackers who earn a living one way or another. There are plenty of underground translators and streamers. Ads, hostings, seed boxes, TV boxes, different partnerships - there’s a lot of money flowing.
Just go to any public tracker and you will see ads. Download some subtitles and they often contain ads as well. And then you have partnerships like targeted attacks on software developers, etc. Then there are normies who are getting scammed into buying pirated content for full retail price by physical media vendors. All kinds of handy people who will install you a dish to receive pirated satellite TV “for free”.
Steam and Netflix are the sole reasons I stopped pirating as a teenager/young adult.
I canceled Netflix long ago at this point and have been on the brink of going back to pirating films/TV. Too many streaming services… it’s just like TV packages before Netflix disrupted the model.
The only viable strategy for Netflix in the long run to stay in the game is to exploit people’s FOMO. You’ll sell way more subscriptions if you have a hot brand new show that everyone wants to watch. There will always be pirates, so if they want to stay one step ahead of them, they have to make sure there’s an abundance of quality programming on their platform coming out pretty much constantly.
Eh, that only goes so far. Any appeal to their original content is eroded by their practices surrounding streaming packages.
I canceled when they bumped their price up a lot, and had it structured to where the HD streaming was paired with the package for a bunch of devices. It’s bullshit that they don’t allow HD streaming with a package with only 1 or 2 devices.
I am also deterred by their password sharing crackdown, because I used to share subscription payments with my brother in another household.
I read that they’re planning on doing away with the commercial free subscription, and I have no interest to resubscribe if it’s a payment plus commercial model.
The convince of having quality original content in one place is nullified by their sleazy bullshit practices. There’s no way that their “convince” outweighs the little effort it takes to pirate the content IMO.
Honestly, with services like Jellyfin/Plex and the Sonarr suite, pirating has never been more convenient.
I add something to my Plex watchlist, and it automatically appears on my Plex server in 1080p or 4K (whichever format I prefer, with subtitles and metadata ready to go,) in like 20 minutes. And I can stream that to as many devices as I want. Hell, I can even give friends access to my server, and I can access theirs too. All through a single UI, with no regional restrictions or “sorry you can’t watch that without signing into your home wifi, because we want to make sure you’re in the same household” BS.
Streaming services were supposed to save us from the hassle of physical media, and be better than cable TV…
No subscription fee to use Steam. Games are available to download and play offline. 3 clicks of the mouse to buy, install, and play a game. It’s so damn easy to use Steam, I don’t miss buying physical PC games and I certainly don’t miss rolling the dice on russian cracks.
Steam also has so many features that cracks usually can’t or don’t offer. Friends system, anticheat, workshop modding, cosmetics, multiplayer (although this is actually a case of it usually being locked behind Steam), fast updates, Proton, just to name a few.
This has to be stopped. Just look at what Napster did to the music industry. That’s right, there used to be a music industry and now it’s just…gone. No more music, no more money to be made in music. Don’t let these evil streaming services do the same to poor defenceless Hollywood, bastion of women’s rights!
Jokes aside, I have paid for Google’s music service since it launched (RIP Play Music), but I am a millisecond away from canceling my subscription because Google does not provide me with any way to randomize playlists. I don’t mean shuffle play. That shit is broken and always has been. It would not be a big deal if I could randomize my playlists on demand, but no.
Pure randomness isn’t great for music playlists. The algo needs to account for recency so you don’t hear the same some 6 times in a row. Technically still random but no one wants that.
That’s the difference between randomizing a playlist and shuffle play. If you randomize a playlist, the songs will never repeat unless you have them in the list twice. YouTube Music’s shuffle play often plays the same twenty songs over and over out of a playlist with over six hundred songs.
The people who are stealing our movies and our television shows and operating piracy sites are not mom and pop operations,” says Charlie Rivkin, chief executive officer of the MPA, who adds that some of the operators also engage in drug trafficking, child pornography, prostitution and money laundering. “This is organized crime.”
I like how they always have to fabricate a connection to organized crime. Trying to convince the reader that is not just copyright infringement.
Hollywood was founded on IP theft of European filmmakers’ work and funded by various mobs, which then went on to lobby (bribe) politicians into changing certain regulations on gambling in AZ, et al, to pave the way for Vegas and the like.
I just spent like an hour trying several methods to install this on Android, sadly I was not successful. If anyone can inform me on how to install this on Firefox for Android (not a fork), please let me know.
Is this talking about stuff like private torrent trackers and Usenet providers, or are there more Netflix-like things out there that people are paying for?
So Hollywood copyright lawyers will target illegal subscription services rather than individual downloaders? Fine by me.
I can understand paying for a legal streaming service where at least a tiny percentage of profits goes into producing new material. I pirate out of convenience and availability, because movies and series aren’t released immediately in my region.
Paying somebody for streaming film and TV shows that they have no hand in producing, and thus not supporting new productions — same as I can download for free myself? — that makes no sense to me.
If someone makes it so I can stream all the shows and all the movies and such in one convenient place, without having to find them myself, hunt down the right versions, etc, I’m good with paying them for that.
It’d be better if it was from a legal service, but as long as exclusives are allowed that can’t happen. If the owners of the content were required to allow anyone who wants to distribute it to do so, at the same cost with no special deals for one distributor over another, then every streaming service could have everything, if they choose. They could then compete on quality of service and which content they choose to have, not on what content they can lock down for themselves alone.
Paying somebody for streaming film and TV shows that they have no hand in producing, and thus not supporting new productions — same as I can download for free myself? — that makes no sense to me
It makes sense for me. The one i’m using is $20 per year. I just think of it as convenience fee. It has netflix features but for all movies and tv shows.
And like I said, I get convenience/availability. I guess paying for stolen goods is one step too far for me. Like, “Dude, pass it around, but it’s not yours to sell”.