this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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The pirates are back - Anew study from the European Union’s Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) suggest that online piracy has increased for the first time in years. In fact, piracy rates have bee...::We analyze a new study where the EUIPO suggests online piracy is on the increase within the European Union.

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[–] [email protected] 417 points 10 months ago (8 children)

Love how it doesn’t mention the fact that services are getting objectively worse content as they stretch thin, are increasing their prices across the board, and cracking down on password sharing which was previously touted as a benefit.

[–] [email protected] 159 points 10 months ago

Exactly. There's too many platforms, not enough quality content on any one of them, and weaponized greed. Worse, these streaming services have "inspired" every asshole executive out there to make everything under the sun a subscription model.

[–] [email protected] 122 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

The anti-piracy measures drive me to piracy, personally. There's no technical reason I shouldn't be able to stream 4K in Firefox, but Netflix won't let me. I have to jump through hoops just to get 1080p, even. Same with most other services. I pirate shit I'm already paying for.

[–] [email protected] 85 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Have done this several times for content on Disney+. I have an ultrawide, HDR1000 display. The movie I'm trying to watch is in 21:9 and available in HDR. Why in God's name are you delivering it in SDR and in a letterboxed 16:9 which is in turn pillarboxed on my display?!

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago

This so much. I'm lucky enough to be able to afford enough streaming services to cover the majority of what I want to watch (although that's changing for the worse over time). I just want to pipe them all through Kodi or some other software into a unified interface that is media source agnostic, that can also stream the content in the best quality available for my screen.

At that point the content is already paid for, I don't need to use your own individual reinvention of the interface that inevitably focuses on pushing uninteresting content instead of making it as easy as possible to continue what I've already started watching or to find what I want.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Also none of the apps have any kind of audio equalizer or range compression, so if you don't have an audio receiver then you're doomed to constantly turning up the volume for spoken sections. Absolute minimum viable product garbage.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (2 children)

For sure. Why should I suffer umpteen different video interfaces designed by separate entities who aren't really in the business of designing highly functional video interfaces? I'd much rather play everything in mpv, which I can configure exactly the way I like it. I can adjust brightness and contrast, set up specific keyboard/mouse controls, adjust subtitle font/size/color/style/location, and I can even enable motion interpolation if I want to. I can fix those stupid hardcoded letterboxes with a keystroke. I can monomize or normalize audio. That's because mpv's entire reason to exist is to be a highly functional video player, and it's open and extensible.

Fuck your proprietary bare-minimum video interfaces. Even YouTube lags like 5-10 years behind the state of the art for video players, and most other services lag years behind YouTube.

Do one thing and do it well!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Fully agree. Shit makes me so mad.

It's the same reason most car infotainment centers are awful. They aren't software companies so their software sucks

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I wonder how many Youtube users today ever used it when it used quicktime player, you could actually pause and buffer the entire video, it wouldn't ever jump into an ad, it was the glory days. Aside from the fact it took a few minutes to load at times ahah.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago

Yeah, honestly same. There isn’t much I’m not already paying for, but being able to watch it all in one app (Stremio) is so much nicer.

The push for more money, and no more password sharing, is just making me think more about cutting those services, but that wouldn’t stop me watching.

[–] [email protected] 57 points 10 months ago

Enshittification. Every human who uses computers on a daily basis needs to understand this word.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Yep, the only thing I still pay for is Spotify, and as soon as they start carving up music into different exclusivity contracts I'll go back to piracy for that as well. I'm willing to pay $10-$20/month for one streaming service, but they want you to spend like $200 on services you don't even end up watching.

It's just greed, the way the streaming executives talked during the writers strike showed that. You could easily find an equilibrium that works for content creators and consumers, but the middlemen just want too much.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Or vanish.

Google play music merged into YouTube music.

I already had a Plex server so I just rolled.my.own music server.

And then with the emergence of plexamp... I don't need a streaming music service now.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Have they gotten better? I've not had great experience with PMS handling music, even when using PlexAmp, but I last tried maybe about a year ago.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Oh absolutely. Especially with Plex pass. Plexamp is a quality product.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

My biggest pain points were that it seemed to do some kind of analysis (reading file information) on my library all the time, which wasn't good when I have it on a cloud drive. Guess I'll try it out again and hope they fixed all that :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

You can disable that, however, it’s helpful when having the system make automated mixes.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

What I wish it had was something similar to Roon which would be a Spotify integration. If I search for something and I don’t have it in my personal library, let me just stream it from my streaming service subscription.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago

This fear is why I'm careful to maintain my old man MP3 and CD collection because I can't fully trust a business.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I think streaming music will be good for awhile at least, somehow, the fucking music industry got it right with streaming (At least on the consumer side, the artist side has been in trouble for some time now (esp with Spotify)). Most big services have most things and a handful of niche services to handle the gaps for the most part.

Xbox Game Pass otoh for Games is a wildcard, who knows where that shits going to end up lmfao people should get in on it now while it's still good lol

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I mean, they're already doing exclusivity contracts for podcasts (eg. Joe Rogan on Spotify only), it's going to be a small leap to go to artists being exclusively on one service, and before you know the labels will all start their own streaming service, so you have to have different apps for Sony BMG artists, another app for indie artists, etc.

The enshittification is mostly pushed by wall street, who want instant bigger profits, and they're happy to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs in the process. Spotify is not immune to those pressures.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That plus actively removing older shows

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

No new ones..

Star Trek prodigy

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago

People aren't also willing to spend as much on Oreo's due to inflation so it's also probably that if theres a game or movie everyone's playing, sailing the seven seas is tried and true...and free.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago

Exactly. That’s when I went back to the seas. My family across 2 states uses Netflix and I already paid for the $20/month high tier. When they told my sister that it wasn’t about to be more expensive, I put my foot down and said I’m gonna setup a plex/overseer box on my on PC. It’s been working mostly alright.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Weird thing to love but you do you