Weird, Netflix used to compete with piracy so well that many people stopped pirating altogether, by offering a more convenient service at a reasonable price that was hard for even the most stubborn of pirates to refuse and resulted in a massive boom for its own industry. I wonder what could have changed that caused the people to leave Netflix and return to piracy. Hmm. I wonder.
It’s a mystery! I’ll never understand why the week after yet another price hike, I quit because of the price hike. I guess I just act randomly in response to price hikes.
My issue was cutting out the sharing. I was paying for 4 screens at a time. Why should they care which 4 screens are being used?
Once I realized a decent VPN was $5/month, that I could get TV shows without the 35% time addition of commercials, and stop worrying about what I get going away, the issue wasn’t that Netflix was bad, it was just worse than the alternative.
edit: not that Netflix has commercials, but the fact one could get anything without them as well (like paying for cable…)
not that Netflix has commercials
There’s a tier with commercials for many countries now.
I fondly recall excitedly using Netflix on my PS3 all the fucking time in like 2011. It was cheap, there was an app right there on the device I already bought, and there was a pretty good selection of content that got updated frequently enough. I had friends who would pirate and I was interested in getting into that until Netflix came along and completely fulfilled the need for me. The incredible convenience made it worth it over the work to learn how to pirate and the time to safely find everything and the risk of getting caught, and then even after doing all of that it would be on a computer and not just a couple of button presses from my couch. I know piracy has gotten to a point now where it’s much more convenient, but back then it was a totally different beast. All of this was. YouTube was so much better for users and for certain classes of creators. Media and media platforms across the board are fucking terrible compared to back then. We used to chastise people for still having cable because Netflix was so fucking incredible in comparison. Idk what comes next, but these streaming companies are on the way out if they don’t figure it the fuck out. At this point, I’d rather go backwards to go to a goddamn Blockbuster these days.
Your local library probably has a better selection of movies and TV for free than any streaming service you might consider paying for. Let’s starve these beasts.
I miss my local movie store. Going to the movie store added a little adventure to movie night. Go out, browse a little. Get a stack of movies you have no clue about. Stop and get Chinese, maybe ice cream.
Ok, it doesn’t make sense anymore but I still miss it.
I think that still makes sense. Sometimes it feels like stuff like streaming and amazon orders have reduced our need to leave our homes. In general, this is largely a good thing, but I fear that people are becoming a little too isolated and aren’t being exposed to social interactions nearly as much. I don’t think people know how to respectfully disagree anymore, and I think that might lead to higher tension and make socializing even harder on people. I’m only 35, but it really does feel like most kids are having a more passive childhood than I remember having, and many adults today also live passively while feeling nostalgic for their more actively lived childhood. I don’t think people are particularly happy with life being this efficient and convenient.
So yeah, go out and get a movie and some Chinese food. Have a conversation with a stranger. I bet you’ll enjoy that more than doordash and scrolling through netflix.
Everyone decided they wanted to have their own streaming and wanted a bigger piece of the pie. That fragmented where to watch and caused old shows and movies to cost way more for streaming rights.
Then Netflix cancels too many originals without proper endings, which passes people off. After that they got rid of password sharing which made it a pain to have a work and home type of viewing experience. Now they’re adding ads. They’ve become shit and now it’s making it a bit harder for themselves.
It was inevitable and that’s even why Netflix started making their own content. Honestly, they should have made deals with the cable companies explaining if they entered the space they would create a consumer hostile environment and destroy the market. They probably wouldn’t have listened but Netflix should have known their only product was convenience.
2015 - 2018 I pirated very, very little. Didn’t need to. Between Netflix, Hulu, and HBO, I wanted for nothing. Then, every time I went to the bathroom, someone was creating their own streaming service. Suddenly everyone was pulling their IP from Netflix and Hulu. Netflix wouldn’t stop raising their prices. Their original shows are ok, but their movies are terrible.
Is it more that the original pricing model was unsustainable though? Like they were making a loss, or being funded continuously to capture the market and then raise prices?
Obviously it doesn’t help that all the shareholders want their cut and thus the money has to come from somewhere.
Step one, provide good service.
Netflix: Welp, I guess we should just pack it in.
The 3rd panel needs to be updated to somehow show that it’s also crazy expensive…
They didn’t seem to have any problems before they started fucking around with their pricing and policies and everyone else also started their own streaming services, splitting everything across multiple subscriptions instead of 1, convenient service.
I could keep up with what’s available where and shuffle my subscriptions around every few months to see what I want when it’s new… But it’s way easier to just use a torrent site now.
I’ve never seen a magnet link respond with “this is not available in your country”.
I want this as a sticker for my laptop.
t-shirt for me
Mug
They won’t even let you watch stuff like anime with subtitles if it’s not dubbed in your language. Like why?
In Disney+, in order to watch anything in French, you have to change the language of the entire interface to French for the option to appear. And then you lose most other languages.
The only reason I have a Disney+ subscription is because it’s hard to find kids’ shows in languages other than English in the high seas. And they make it so friggin’ difficult for no reason.
Finding stuff in German is also really hard. Wish I had a torrent tracker or usenet indexer/provider that had more German stuff.
Do you mean actual German shows/movies or German dubs of shows/movies?
I was raised in the Netherlands and I’m fairly sure that German Society is so braindead because they never had to indulge in foreign languages. Just teach your kid English, it’ll be good for everyone. Kids absorb other languages like a sponge.
I mean German dubs. Also, there’s a lot of immigrants here so a lot of people speak more than just German and English and we do learn other languages like French or Spanish in school but it’s mostly optional or only if you continue school after 10th grade. Calling us all braindead because we’re not forced to learn languages that we’ll never use is not very nice.
I have lived in Germany for over 30 years now. I just saw the difference between the Netherlands and Denmark vs Germany. It’s kind of sad how we shut ourselves into our own little language bubble, yet the world has so much to offer. I prefer watching movies in French/Spanish/Japanese/whatever with subtitles. I believe that a huge portion of the trade that is acting is conveyed through language. By overdubbing these movies a lot of the actual appeal is lost.
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Try SceneNZBs, they have tons of German content!
I know very little about this topic, do not take this as fact. One possible reason is licensing issues. It’s a mess. Not an unsolvable one, but one that pirates usually don’t have to deal with.
Might be licensing but I think it’s actually just that they will hide everything that’s not dubbed in the language you speak because I didn’t find anything on Netflix (back when I had it) that wasn’t dubbed in German
My bad, I misunderstood your previous comment as saying you could only watch in your native language.
Searching a bit, I found an old blogpost explaining how to filter Netflix content so it only showed stuff available in English. So I assume it isn’t (or at least wasn’t) that they only show content dubbed in your language.
However, from my understanding, dubbing is quite popular. Especially so in Germany, or so say my 10 minutes of superficial research into the topic.
Netflix may simply noticed that dubbed was the more popular option by a significant margin and accordingly decided to invest a lot into making shows available with dubs, or not “waste” money making them available at all.
For most things that’s true but 99% of anime aren’t dubbed in any language other than Japanese. I still wanted to watch them tho, I always watch those in the original language with subtitles anyway. Was one of the main reasons I stopped using Netflix.
It’s just US managers who cannot imagine people speaking more than one language
Since spotify was increasing the price AGAIN, I was willing to give Apple music a chance. Guess what, many of the soundtracks I listen to are not available in my country. Like why would you block it I already pay for the thing just let me listen to it. But I guess they just know better. And now I’m gonna selfhost my music just like I selfhost movies and tv shows.
No - piracy, since it always carries at least some amount of difficulty and risk, is easy to compete against. And in fact, paid services, including Netflix, have proven that over and over. All it takes is to offer dependable convenience and quality and to treat customers well. People are always willing to pay a reasonable price for that.
The problem is that piracy becomes difficult to compete against when, as Netflix is currently doing, you shift from a business model of providing good service under fair terms for a reasonable price to a business model of providing crappy service under onerous terms for too much money, because the greedy, selfish, short-sighted sacks of shit at the top want to make even more obscene amounts of money. That’s the point at which piracy gains enough of an advantage to outweigh its difficulties and risks.
And when that’s the case, it’s pretty obvious what the real problem is.
The trick is to make as much money as possible then jump ship to a newer competing company that has the ability to grow more before you leech it to death again
Fr stop producing c-tier content for millions of dollars and just pay for better content and/or make it cheaper. I don’t need 14 generic action movies starring Ryan Reynolds and dozens of forgettable shows.
Also, don’t greenlight 100 shows if you only plan on giving 5 of them a second season, and you base that decision entirely on algorithms instead of genuine human feedback.
And please, for the love of god, let me look at a movie for longer than 1 second before you start automatically playing it because your almighty algorithm determined that it would force users to pick a movie faster. It’s the most annoying “feature” that makes me inclined to avoid Netflix as much as possible.And please, for the love of god, let me look at a movie for longer than 1 second before you start automatically playing it
This is a setting that’s on be default and buried in the user settings. It might also only be available to change on desktop (but will then set per profile for all devices), but this setting does exist and it’s so much better once you toggle it
What Jupiter Ascending are you talking about here?
It also doesn’t help that the studios all band together under banners that each launch their own streaming services and withhold all of their titles from the others. Maybe Netflix should spend less time fighting consumers and more time fighting the other cutthroat corporations who effectively make it impossible for their artists to choose their own distribution networks.
There was a decent 5 year span in my life where the only time I ever pirated was to see British TV shows I wouldn’t be able to watch in the U.S. And if I could have paid the British TV license fee to see those, I would have paid it too. Because that would have been a total of two streaming services.
Even now that we’re down to one income we can afford two streaming services- one for video and one for music. But we sure as fuck can’t afford the dozen streaming services you need to have if you expect to watch all the programming people rave about as amazing.
I can’t afford Max and Disney+ and AppleTV+. If I want to find out why The Last of Us is so good and why The Mandalorian was a terrific show and how funny Ted Lasso is, and have the temerity to expect no ads when I’m already paying to watch, that alone would cost me almost $40 a month. Add Netflix and Amazon to that and it’s another $30+.
That is what I was paying for cable except with far less programming. On-demand and no ads are definitely advantages, but pay the same amount for a fraction of the programming advantages? Not for me.
I’m back on the seas. Once I couldn’t leave my Netflix account set at my work site and my house, then they upped the price and added ads, it’s just easier to pirate anything I’d like to binge. My phone has like 640 GB of space. I can carry my own Netflix, with beer and hookers.
Solution: create a common platform for all online services (Netflix, Paramount, Disney, Warner, …) and have EVERYTHING there, even old movies and not often seen ones.
They had piracy all but beat. It was their insatiable greed that drove people back to the sea.
To be fair, for me the fact that they content is now spread across many subscription services is the problem more than Netflix’s price or current quality.
Once I set are services, torrent and jellyfin for all of the others, I’m not making exceptions for Netflix
Its ironic. On a decentralized platform we are discussing how a big issue with streaming services is that they are not centralized -
I dont even disagree with you. I just think its interesting that we dont apply the ideological standard of centralization and monopoly being inherently bad evenly across the board.
Im not really sure I have a greater point to make here. I’m not trying to knock or dissent what your saying at all.
Just a stoned observation.
It’s exclusivity deals that are the problem. Governments should legislate them away so that there can be competition.
Then we’d all choose the marketplace of our preference. Like supermarkets.
Video streaming, music streaming, games consoles, even mobile OSs all could benefit from some anti-monopoly legislation.
This, why did the government stop on prohibiting studios from owning cinemas?
You can read things from all servers on the server you choose to connect with though. Bad analogy.
I see your point, but I don’t think this would qualify as decentralized. It went from 1 to maybe 8 players depending on where you are, but they are separated and closed. Each one of them is centralized, it’s just that there are several competing ones. Each one is taking away their shows or making some third party ones exclusive, so the more there are, the less vale each provides.
And of course the issue is that each one has to be paid separately, so there’s a economic incentive to participate in as few as you can.
With Lemmy for instance, you might want want an instance that’s very connected with others, one that’s quite closed and focussed or even create several users or even spin your own instance to have it your way.
Excellent point. Calling the current streaming landscape decentralized is like calling the current social media landscape decentralized, since you can choose between twitter, reddit, tiktok, or meta. It’s unfortunate that it’s unlikely that a properly decentralized network for video will exist, since the hosting costs are so astronomical.
A centralized service’s hosting costs are astronomical because they are trying to serve the whole world. Is your Plex server hosting cost astronomical? What if you share it with friends? Everyone contributes to a decentralized service. Piracy is decentralized, and the hosting costs are not astronomical.
Yeah, by “they”, I meant the studios more than Netflix. Netflix itself was negatively impacted by studio greed, since a lot of them pulled their content from the platform so they can push their own shitty subscription service. It’s frustrating that these studios fought streaming tooth and nail, while Netflix pioneered the industry and proved a profitable streaming model. As soon as it was impossible to dispute that the model works, all the individual studios suddenly want to run their own streaming service. They fragmented the content across a dozen different services, and drove the industry back to unaffordability and inconvenience.
Yet streaming music has basically the same artists no matter which service you use. And Tidal integrates with Plex seamlessly with my own local collection. Worth the subscription for that.
Do that. (But they won’t)
Netflix was a core part of my life for well over a decade. The vast majority of my entertainment came from there.
In other News my Plex server is coming along great!
One should acknowledge that this is not on Netflix alone.
Other media companies pulling their content to set up their own streaming services has fractured the market and made each individual service much worse in the process.You’re correct. I actually did acknowledge it further down in the comments chain here: https://lemmy.world/comment/7277901
Netflix already defeated piracy by producing endless mid “content” like The Grey Man that you can’t even be bothered to watch for free.
As Lord Gaben once said: Piracy is a service problem.
Make better service, have less piracy.
Spotify is a good example of this imo, I can listen everything, so it’s not necessary to pirate music. I do have some issues, but never had the problem of not being able to listen what I want
Music piracy also seems to be on the rise again though. By far not as severely as with video but still… And while music streaming got a little more expensive over the last few years, it’s not by that much.
Music streaming is also much cheaper to run than video, so they can offer more reasonable pricing.
Yea, even HiRes audio is a fraction of the size of even a potato quality video. But spotify seems to still lose money…
Yep. Spotify and such are getting expensive. And the service is getting worse.
Trying to shove podcasts and other features down your throat all in one UI.
Please just show me tabs with artists, songs, and playlists. Spotify is so cluttered.
I tried Spotify years ago and even then it was terrible. Have been using Apple Music ever since and the app is clean, logical and orderly. Can only recommend, even for android users. Compared to Spotify’s focus on playlists and discovery, Adobe music is very library centric. There are enough ways to discover new music but the standard tab when you open the app is your library
And while Spotify’s price has gone up, it feels like it’s followed inflation on average
Is that with a paid plan? My brief experience using it was very much not like that. I’d search for a song and it would tell me something along the lines of “you can’t choose a song to play but you can listen to a channel based on it” and a lot of stuff didn’t seem to be on there at all. This was probably 5(maybe more) years ago now, so I have no idea how it’s changed since then.
Yes, that’s with a paid plan.
What you were experiencing was a free tier limitation
And they have Spotify DJ, which not everyone likes but I think it’s great, worth the £10 a month to me
That Gabe that made not owning shit you paid for popular?
looking forward to the shitstorm when gaben dies, the investors get their claws in and Steam enshittifies
Funny, you had no problem competing in the past. Hmmmm wonder why that is…
piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue.
- Gabe Newell
I just realised I’ve never pirated a video game, yet I download almost everything I watch… 🤔
Piracy is service problem
Piracy isn’t even free! People pay thousands of dollars for hardware, and hundreds per year for electricity and various service providers.
But they actually get what they want for that money: Being able to watch whatever you want, anytime, on any device, in high quality and without ads. It must be really hard for streaming services to compete with features as futuristic as that!
Seriously. I’m running a Synology with 12x16TB. That’d buy a bunch of months of streaming services…but this way actually gives me content to watch that I want to watch.
And offline. And in the quality you define. And on any device.
Just out of curiosity, what drive configuration are you running?
RAID6, one big storage pool. On that one, the bulk of it’s usage in a single shared folder for video, though I do have another carved out for a VMware datastore for the homelab, though it’s mostly just there for somewhere to stick VMs when I’m updating DSM on the smaller DS9220+ (4x8TB in RAID 5).
You’ve made my DS220+ blush
I’ve got a DS920+ on a shelf, and she’s super jealous of the Rackstation.
I think many people may view those sort of costs differently than the monthly subscription costs of Netflix, etc. Hardware is generally seen as a “one time” cost, and the added electricity costs are difficult to tease out from all the other variable electricity costs.
My personal argument is that I pay a monthly subscription ($15/mo) for a seed box, which is roughly the same cost as subscribing to a single streaming service.
Back before the password sharing crackdown, I had access to my parents’ Netflix account, and every once in a while, I’d try it out, but I’d always quickly get annoyed and would finish watching whatever I was watching via my Plex server.Opex vs capex
The difference is that we own the hardware. We can treat it as bad/good as we wants and we only have ourselves to blame if things go wrong. It also costs exactly the same whether we use it for 1 month or 100 years.
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They know the game. Articles like this are to gain sympathy amongst the rest of society and cast pirates as ruthless criminals in order to gain public support for some future draconian legislation. We’ll probably see some SOPA-like legislation in the near future (probably after the election)
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poor service
bad library
too expensive
can’t share passwords
“How could pirates do this!?!??!”
Don’t forget terrible video quality, even compared to other streaming services.
It really is surprising how bad Netflix’s quality is. I can notice it on my TV and it’s only 1080p.
When Glass Onion (terrible film) came out, a friend and I started watching it on his rather good TV and it was horrible even though we had the best 4K HDR, no bandwith limitation quality Netflix offered. Like, the water in the background looked like it was playing back at at 6fps instead of 24.
After half an hour my friend noped out because the film and video quality was so bad and I finished it alone on my 15 year old 720p projector. It looked better on there…
A lot of their content is just 1080/720 up scaled to 4k and HDR graded. If it looks like crap, it’s because it is crap with a shiny 4k label.
Yea but like… Glass Onion is a Netflix original… They have special requirements for cameras to be true 4K. So everything points to it being actual 4K HDR just with a bitrate so abominably low that you might as well not bother.
Right, their 10mbps 4k stream is a joke compared to blu-ray.
