How Disney and Warner Bros. Are Causing Internet Piracy to Boom | Platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ were supposed to do away with pirated media. Instead, they may make them stronger than ever.::Platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ were supposed to do away with pirated media. Instead, they may make them stronger than ever.
I know it gets quoted a lot, but Gabe was 100% right. It boggles my mind how people in power over these streaming services just don’t get it:
One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.
It boggles my mind how people in power over these streaming services just don’t get it:
Oh they get it, you can be sure of that. It’s just they’re so, so greedy they don’t care that eventually in the future the well will dry up, they only care about more money NOW.
The answer is Stremio + Torrentio with Real Debrid.
Weird how an open source media streaming app works fine, but Disney can’t keep their app working on Android to save their lives.
I assume bullshit DRM has something to do with it, but I wouldn’t know because there’s way easier (and even legal!) ways to get media onto my server than that.
Please share. I dont understand where people get media especially legal nowadays. I would go to pirate bay if I need something.
Well to be fair, subtitles are often messed up on the open source one, but OH BOY you haven’t seen the state of Belgian streaming apps.
Casting doesn’t work on most, subtitles only work on 1/3 with some reality shows having burned in subs, tapping the screen in logical places to play/pause doesn’t work (like the giant play button in the middle of the screen when paused), one of them literally doesn’t even have a search function.
Ads are ridiculous, 10+ ads every 10 minutes. Not to mention that if you scrub at all instead of just forward/back, automatic ad break plays. Recently played just stopped being broken and giving wrong episodes. It is an absolute mess.
People with MBAs can’t fucking help themselves. They got a goose that lays golden eggs, but it doesn’t lay those golden eggs fast enough, so without even taking off their wristwatch they reach right up the poor bird’s cloaca, grab the first thing that feels vaguely round and pull as hard as they can. So then they have a half inside out goose and no more golden eggs ever again.
People pay for a Master’s degree to learn how to do this.
Reminds me of a passage in Ben Rich’s autobiography. Ben Rich spent his career at the Lockeed Skunkworks, started off designing a heater for the relief tube of jet fighters so the pilot’s penis wouldn’t freeze to the side of the tube while taking a piss, ended up running the team that designed the F-117. While he was second in command, his boss sent him to Harvard’s Business School, who ran a time crunched program for adults who are already in careers and “need” additional business schooling. Upon his return, his boss asked him what he learned. And he wrote on the chalkboard “2/3 HBS = BS”
“2/3 HBS = BS”
So HBS is Harvard Business School, BS is bullshit. What does “2/3” refer to?
Two thirds of HBS is BS, I guess it’s saying it literally and playing that HBS has 3 letters and BS 2
Ah, thanks!
Two-thirds. As in two of the three letters of HBS
Oh, gotcha.
It has less to to with people having MBAs and much more to do with companies having shareholders. Once you’re a publicly traded company there are overwhelmingly strong external forces that compell companies to increase revenue. Even if the business model is perfectly solid and it doesn’t make sense to expect rising profits the shareholders only care about growth rates. On the stock market a companies value is only dependent on its growth.
Take Netflix for example. They’ve had so many users some years ago when they were basically the only streaming service that one might have said they reached market saturation. That would’ve been a money making machine that people could be content with. But since the market always needs growth it isn’t enough and netflix is always trying to “innovate” or squeezie more monthly payments from the existing customer base.
cory doctorow has coined the great word “enshittification” to describe this process. And its driven by the need to grow further even though its to the detriment of the service or the customers. In the end it’s the people with the MBAs doing it. But if they’re not doing it the shareholders replace them with those that do.
Markets are greedy and never satisfied. A fracturing of services has led to situation where it’s impossible for the average person to be able to afford all the streaming services they need in order to watch their stuff. And even if they could, they now have to pay extra to exclude adverts - the lack of which was a major selling point for streaming services. Pay extra to watch in high quality and no matter what service you use and what content you’ve bought - music, TV, books, movies. games - it’s all stuffed full of DRM that can literally remove the media from your devices. You don’t even really own the stuff you’ve bought.
So yeah, I fully appreciate why some people pirate stuff.
Power to the pirates, the only ones making all content accessible to everyone.
Netflix did stop me from pirating for several years until it went to shit. Once the other companies started rolling out their own streaming services and pulling their content off Netflix I went back to piracy. It’s way easier to manage one VPN subscription than try to keep track of a bunch of streaming services.
I still have more subs for these than I would like, but I generally download anything I actually want to watch anyway. Like, the fact that justwatch.com even exists is an indictment of the way this works.
Put out more good shows/movies, that way I don’t feel like I’m being taken for a $15 ride every month for 1 decent show and maybe 1 movie.
When it was just Netflix and Hulu, it was great for consumers because having a couple streaming services could easily replace the need for cable TV for most people (unless you wanted to watch live sports) and the entertainment companies could still profit from licensing their content to the streaming services. But that wasn’t enough for the entertainment companies, and they all thought they could get in on the streaming game with their own platforms, only to discover that keeping a streaming service running and keeping subscribers is expensive for both the company and the consumer, and consumers only have so much time and disposable income they can spend on those services. So the market has become oversaturated with a million streaming services all carrying limited libraries of content that make it tough for any consumer to feel it’s worth it to pay for any of them except when one or two certain shows on each have a new season. This leaves most services running at a loss after expenses of keeping servers up and trying to make content to bring in and keep those subscribers, which many fail to do. The current state of it is unsustainable and I think in the end it’s eventually going to return to a model where only a few will survive, probably the larger ones owned by the entertainment companies themselves who have deep enough pockets from their other ventures to keep their services alfoat during off-peak times. A LOT of content is going to become lost media as that purge of services happens.
My biggest question is despite how expensive Disney+ is and their huge subscriber base, how are they not profitable? Nebula is a fraction of the price without any ads and plenty of originals and is quite profitable despite having under 1 million subs.
They are profitable. Just not profitable enough.
No, they actually aren’t profitable.
From https://arstechnica.com/culture/2023/12/its-shakeout-time-as-losses-of-netflix-rivals-top-5-billion/
“Disney, the largest traditional media company, is in the midst of a gutting restructuring that has featured 7,000 job cuts and attacks from activist investors. It lost more than $1.6 billion from its streaming businesses in the first nine months of 2023, during which its Disney+ service gained 8 million subscribers. The company says it will turn a profit in streaming in late 2024.”
All of these media companies splitting everything up and making it nearly impossible to figure out which service is hosting what shows is what did this. They got greedy and raised their prices.
So naturally people are going to be inclined to figure out how to safely pirate things and then they’re going to do it.
You should never pirate things, that would be immoral to use mullvad and qbittorrent to pirate things!
Movies (7) and (9) anime are very expensive to make! You’re stealing from corporate executives when you pirate!
Forget streaming, physical media is ripe for hoarding right now. Thrift stores, antique malls, junk stores, etc can’t give this stuff away. Even 4k blurays on amazon are deeply discounted right now.
What about Tubi and Pluto TV? That’s what I use.
