Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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Streaming Pirates Are Hollywood’s New Villains - Illegal subscription services that steal films or TV shows bring in $2 billion a year in ads and subscriber fees. (www.bloomberg.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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…

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

This is exactly the route I've been thinking about heading!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

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.