A decade and a half on from the Pirate Bay trial, the winds have begun to shift. On an unusually warm summer’s day, I sit with fellow film critics by the old city harbour, once a haven for merchants and, rumour has it, smugglers. Cold bigstrongs in hand (that’s what they call pints up here), they start venting about the “enshittification” of streaming – enshittification being the process by which platforms degrade their services and ultimately die in the pursuit of profit. Netflix now costs upwards of 199 SEK (£15), and you need more and more subscriptions to watch the same shows you used to find in one place. Most platforms now offer plans that, despite the fee, force advertisements on subscribers. Regional restrictions often compel users to use VPNs to access the full selection of available content. The average European household now spends close to €700 (£600) a year on three or more VOD subscriptions. People pay more and get less.
According to London‑based piracy monitoring and content‑protection firm MUSO, unlicensed streaming is the predominant source of TV and film piracy, accounting for 96% in 2023. Piracy reached a low in 2020, with 130bn website visits. But by 2024 that number had risen to 216bn. In Sweden, 25% of people surveyed reported pirating in 2024, a trend mostly driven by those aged 15 to 24. Piracy is back, just sailing under a different flag.
They keep charging more and more for less and less content.
They keep inflating over promises that never arrive no matter how many people you kill for in “exchange” for selling your sole. If you still think any of that made you busy, your forgot Ness,
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never go full retard
The thing that drives me to piracy is the fact that you can buy something online, and if that platform loses the right, they just take it from you. You paid for it, and they can just take it away with no refund. Fuck that shit
Yeah if i want something forever i buy it physical. I hate it when things only release on dvd though, then you’re just making the best way to experience it is through piracy. It’s kinda like with heavy drm on single player games. The pirates get to play the best version of the game without the drm and without needing to buy it. It’s backwards. If you pay for something you should have the best version.
Been sailing the seven seas for forever, never suffered a drop in quality, availability, or quantity. Never gonna give it up.
About to install Pi3 with Tailscale in my homeland to route Deluge traffic though because piracy is normality there
“The average European household now spends close to €700 (£600) a year on three or more VOD subscriptions. People pay more and get less.”
Lol, not me.
I’m proudly bellow average.
Please, threaten me with more exclusives. Please, put more excerpts for shows to promote your network exclusives, and see what I do.
Remember when everyone just put their shit on Netflix? Good times, I knew this was gonna happen the second Disney said “Maybe we make our own service?”
The balkanization of video streaming.
The constant desire for growth inherent in capitalism fucking ruins everything. You’ve got near trillion dollar companies still pushing for growth. Everything just turns to shit as they pursue every last dime.
Now they have to remove civil rights to keep going and taking everything. Trump has created marshal law is the US capitol. He is planning the resources to do it in any US city in case of protest, which is a constitutional right.
Okay bit, hear me out: what if we call for reform, and hit you with a stick a cpuple times to see if anything shiny like old fashioned filling or whatever comes out?
See! Ol capitalism still bad a few food tricks up iys sleeve to innovate with!
I just got a mal from Spotify that they increase the prices from €17 to €21 (family) I don’t want to pay 25% more for that AI-slob filled garbage.
The changes apply to existing accounts in 3 months. Then, I will rip all my hearted songs and playlists.
Do they check for your actual region? I currently have Ukrainian IP address, so it shows me $7.99/month for family plan.
They can get your actual region off your billing details for subscription pricing. The content availability might vary by IP, but the pricing is going to go off your billing address. That’s why I pay taxes on some of my subscription services is because my state has a tax on that while other states don’t. When signing up for a new service, it doesn’t show me the total with tax until I enter my address.
unlicensed streaming is the predominant source of TV and film piracy, accounting for 96%
96% from streaming? Wow, really? That’s almost nothing being contributed by boring old-fashioned downloaded media from things like bittorrent and that other one that’s totally not worth talking about.
You guys might as well just ignore those ancient, decrepit download services. What a total waste of your valuable resources! There are so many people out there with jailbroken Fire Sticks! It would be such a waste of your time going on a wild goose chase after imaginary evil communist nerds who buy mechanical hard drives and download “free” software that’s been pre-approved by their communal repository authorities.
They chose to kill the golden goose by jacking up prices over and over and over. I don’t feel bad for greedy corporations who did this to themselves.
But, but think about the children…of the executives, do youbreally want that they have to work? You monster!
/s
It’s not even that. It’s the fact that each of them has so little content, any attempt to find what you want leads you skipping between like three apps, only to find that your only way to watch that 10 year old movie is to rent it from Amazon for £11.99.
And then you look up how to set up Jellyfin.
rent it from Amazon for £11.99.
And then you check it, also on Amazon, and there it is, on DVD for £3 and BluRay (not UHD) for like £6.
Just checking an average movie I have in cart on UK Amazon (prices are in EUR because I buy them from Slovakia)
Passengers 2017 - New DVD: €3.40 ; New BluRay: €7.56 ; Used BluRay (Very Good condition): €2.08 ; YouTube High Definition: €8.99 (bruh…)
IMO the biggest thing is in the fracturing they had the ability to do what everyone thought cable should do.
IE cable packages could have been made to work, if say they were actually split by genre or similar. But instead if you want a package for X, you pay for 500 channels you don’t want.
IE if the streaming services split up by genre. Like off the top of my head discovery + was the only one that IMO did a cool thing, IE focused on purely giving a solid theme where if you like educational type programs, that’s the one to get.
If there were like a sci fi focused streaming, or comedy etc… but rather than going focused, we’ve got 20 generalists. As a result if say you only like one type of show, you need to buy 6 streaming services, for the 6 good shows in that genre.
You definitely articulated the problem with the current streaming paradigm: not split in a way that is useful to consumers (e.g. by genre).
We’ve gone full circle. Not only with needing a bunch of packages (or separate services, as it is now) because of how things have been split up, but also ads getting pushed back in. That’s going to keep getting worse too.
I think the YouTube model is more of the high tech future of entertainment that was promised to us. It’s one subscription to a massive service that has entire channels dedicated to whatever niche subject you are after.
Unfortunately, that great idea of a project got purchased by Google a very long time ago, and it is well into the user-hostile enshittification phase.
Hey, so, I’m old as shit and sti remember utopian scifi. Hi. No.
We were promised art without the need for patronage. Plenty. Post-scarcity. Was the dream. Was what even both sides of the fucking cold war at least had to claim, one maybe even kind of believed in¹. No subscription. No pay. And if you want to pull the ‘well yes but we aren’t all the way there yet’ card, then explain to me how anyone can afford to eat off what YouTube or spotify pays them, then find me someone dumb enough that they still believe that’s where any of this is aiming or heading.
¹while executing an unspeakably bloody purge over a bad font choice. Not, like, ‘american primary school’ bloody, but certainly well past the bounds of good taste.
My first reaction to your reply was that post-scarcity utopia is a bit broader in scope than having a decent streaming platform with existing technology.
But nah, you’re right. It’s the same greedy bullshit preventing something resembling a post-scarcity world that prevents tech products from staying good.
Unless they are free, of course. In both ways!
My first reaction to your reply was that post-scarcity utopia is a bit broader in scope than having a decent streaming platform with existing technology.
But nah, you’re right. It’s the same greedy bullshit preventing something resembling a post-scarcity world that prevents tech products from staying good.
Unless they are free, of course. In both ways!
I mean if you are talking pre-google youtube, I don’t believe it had a subscription model… or any real plan to profit or pay it’s creators. It was both hemorrhaging money itself, and giving it’s creators nothing.
Post google youtube, I guess yeah it is, but worth noting mostly it isn’t exactly a high production values system, with the exception of like mr beast etc… which make a boatload of money by still following the same traps as regular TV, catering to the lowest common denominators, microanalyzing maximum views on every aspect.
The cable bundles made sense because there was never going to be enough interest for many of the smaller channels to stay viable, even if they had dedicated fans who loved their content. Bundling something like Logo with E! TV and ESPN meant that cable companies could offer you Logo at a loss while collecting big bucks from the industry giants. People DON’T want to pay for loads of small channels, they want to pay someone once and get everything they want.
That’s why Netflix was so popular 12 years ago. They had just about everything you wanted to watch all under ine tent for a fraction of a cable package. Now the content people want is scattered across various companies so people opt out
People DON’T want to pay for loads of small channels, they want to pay someone once and get everything they want.
That varries a bit, yes they want to pay someone once for everything they want. But they really hate seeing their bill go up more and more each year, while getting less of what they want every year. When their bill goes up from 120 to 150, and all they see happen is adding a bunch of channels they don’t want, they start feeling like the bulk of their money is going into things they don’t want.
I agree, the 2 options are a fairly low price that includes EVERYTHING including what they want… or extremely low prices but at least some confirmation that what they are paying for is actually what they want.
Agreed netflix as it was when streaming picked up but before everyone and their grandmother started their own streaming channel was pretty ideal, low cost and had just about everything.
but yeah once everything was evenly distributed among Netflix, Hulu, Apple, paramount, amazon etc… those days are gone. But the concept still applies that the real pet peve for users that want to get their own, is they’d want to pay one low cost to get the shows that they want. But no matter what your tastes are… odds are what you want is perfectly evenly spaced among the competing channels, and would easily cost well over 100 a month to actually get it.
The golden goose (global society, habitable Earth, pick one) is already dead. They’re just trying to eat as much of the corpse as they can so we can’t have any.
They’re not even eating it babe, that meat’s going to rot and you know it. Big monumemtal piles of rotting meat stripped off the world, and all of us paying men with guns to keep us away from it. To make sure nobody who didnt earn it gets a single bite.
Insert Grapes of Wrath quote
You know, now that you said that, thanks to the “if you aren’t growing you’re dying” business culture our business owners and executives have become more like farmers of businesses rather than stakeholders and caretakers.
Enshittification is the harvest!
The goal is not to create a good business. The goal is to force feed and fatten it up until it is right at the point where its legs will break under its own weight the next time it stands up. Then you start to harvest, consume, or sell every bit of the grotesque thing you can before you either sell it cheap to some sucker up in the mountains or watch it die at your feet.
But to be fair, I do know actual small-time livestock farmers. Cows and horses. They care way WAY way more about their animals than sociopathic MBAs care about their organizations, employees, customers, human families, and so on.
startups in a nutshell
My understanding is that rightsholders didn’t take it seriously, so content was cheap to license in the early days of Netflix streaming. That’s no longer the case.
Further, the studios saw how Apple cornered the market selling songs for a dollar and didn’t want any one company (Netflix) to have that kind of control again. And it happened the same way: the record industry didn’t take the iTunes Store as anything that could be a huge success and gave Apple a sweetheart deal that they later regretted for leaving money on the table.
The lesson they didn’t learn is that it takes competitive pricing to wipe out (most of) piracy. The desire to squeeze every last drop of profit leads to its resurgence.
Good riddance to studios opening a bajillion streaming services. Sail the high seas and be merry.
I think that’s fine, but now all the rights holders want 100% of the profit so you have to subscribe to umpteen services that are mostly paid and have unskippable ads.
They had a good thing going and were getting tons of free money from their back catalogs and the customer has never been happier.
yet somehow Spotify figured this shit out.
I mean they’re still enshittifying for shareholders but not due to lack of content.
impoverished streaming services
won’t someone pls think of the poor mega million dollar media companies
I think in this context the impoverishment is implied to be that of content, not liquidity.
I.e. poorer (quality) streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy.
But, yes, fuck them greedy fuckers.
oh fair point
All Billionaires Are Bad.
They’re gonna have to downgrade to a Gulfstream 3 😭
Any CEO that thinks a user should roll over and accept having 12 separate accounts to stream everything they want, is either monumentally fucking stupid, or just a disingenuous, greedy fuck. I’ll stick to Stremio + RD and they can rot while their stock plunges. I do not care.
any ceo who (…) Is wither monumentally fuvking stupid
Almost uniformly, yes. Thats like half of what business school is for.
a disingenuous greedy lying fuck
Also yes. That’s the other half.
I think this stems from everyone on the board at these corporations having so much money that they drop hundreds of dollars on a whim basically everyday. They have no conception of a tight budget not accommodating another $20 a month.
I always have to remind myself of how disconnected these people are from our reality.
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I never left piracy. Had a friends Netflix for a while but didn’t use it because the browser sucks. Got a few free Prime memberships, again piracy is easier.
I have Netflix, Hulu, and D+
Wife watches random stuff on them all, but I still rip the stuff we enjoy to keep a copy.
I don’t mind paying the piper, but fuck off I’m gonna let them decide when to pull the rug on shit I’m watching.
No but see not letting them take it from you is bad for the artists
Nah, when they lose the license on it and let it go back It’s not like they’re putting it some other place where I’m going to jump ship and buy it. They’ve absolutely ruined the market, No money lost, I’m not chasing TV shows around the internet with my money.
I’m paying for three services and basic cable. They’re not getting any more money out of me. And the artist got fucked the second they canceled the contract, that has nothing to do with me.
So obviously the solution is to threaten and punish absolutely everyone until it’s fixed, only punishment. God im brilliant for thinking of that.
The last time I borrowed a Netflix account every show or movie would start at 1080p and then negotiate itself down to like 240p over 3-4 minutes. I have a very fast connection that can stream 4K just fine elsewhere and Netflix’s settings were set to high quality. They are just cheapskates that throttle based on your account patterns.
