lol 2007.
this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2024
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Gentle reminder that i2p exists where torrents can be downloaded anonymously.
Kinda inverts inverted the causality of Netflix starting their own production and other companies pulling their licences. Netflix started their own production to survive the licences getting pulled, which was inevitable as soon as Netflix looked profitable.
They didn't get greedy, they probably started out greedy, ran a good service to grab market share, then had to make moves to defend against the predictable greed of the incumbents.
It's greedy turtles all the way down
Anon: 2007
The music industry ca. 1981:
So we left side b blank so you can help!
Also the book piracy that existed in universities through photocopying and sharing pages.
This is making a comeback with scanning.
Amazon was the place to buy manuals(art,hobby, do it yourself etc.). Now authors have pulled their books from print and expecting people to sign a subscription on patreon. Now there are sharks overpricing any remaining physical print second hand by 2000%.
pirates have scanned these books and selling access to uploaded jpgs for a fraction of what the manual would have cost had it just stayed in print.
2007 ? Everybody around me was pirating every single piece of media in 2000 and we were late to the party
Napster was a household name and made mp3 piracy mainstream in 1999!
The golden days of the net 🥲
People were pirating games over bbs in the 80s. I have a shoebox of 5.25" floppies for the commodore 64 with hand written labels.
Netflix entered into the already existing sphere of greed based commodification / exploitation that legacy media created decades ago. these legacy media conglomerates (owned circularly by the same big players in wall street black rock, vangaurd, state street et all.) dominate and control multiple industries and now Netflix is just part of that same ecosystem amassing wealth for their own self centered agenda without much, if any oversight at all. Theres just few greedy old cigar smoking men or rather boardrooms lead by these same men controling a majority of the world. Blackrock, blackston, state street and vanguard circularly own about 20% of disney and they own around the same percentage of netflix as well. Nevermind all the other media outlets they own large shareholding positions of. Greed is not the accidental result its the primary objective
I really wish I was a consultant for these fucking jokers.
Back when Disney+ was just "Rumor has it Disney wants to launch their own Netflix-like streaming service.", I called this shit. I said "Well that's just going to cause this whole thing to fall apart, no one's going to juggle 50 different streaming services just to be able to find something to watch."
And I was fucking right.
The only ethical streaming service is Tubi as it doesn't charge relying on ads alone, and it's a neat little bonus that Tubi has actively aided in the restoration of lost media.
If it aint on Tubi, then I'm going to yo-ho-ho with a bottle of fuck you.
just going to cause this whole thing to fall apart
Disney Plus generated $8.4 billion revenue in 2023, an 13% increase year-on-year.
lol
Yes, but they also brought back piracy, eroded faith in the brand, and while Disney+ is making money.....
Disney's newer efforts are kinda showing it's not the powerhouse it used to be. With the only thing they really have going for them are the legacy media that they're holding hostage on a platform, they arbitrarily removes things from time to time for seemingly no reason (the Willow series for example, which makes very little sense since that was original to Disney+ to begin with and for some reason Buzz Lightyear of Star Command isn't on the platform despite all the other Toy Story media being present... and there are several episodes of The Simpsons that are just straight up memory-holed; most infamously the Michael Jackson episode)
If this trend continues, Disney will be left with people pirating the legacy media that people at home have shaky access to at best (Monthly fee for content that may be removed with no notice and for no reason), especially as prices soar and wages stay the same, and interest in newer project dwindling.
Or to be blunt, one of the most classic blunders: High short term profits at the cost of being unsustainable in the long term.
Sure it's easy to think of Disney as laughing its way to the bank, but.. think of it this way.
Disney's been king of the world, especially in animation (Which has been getting sidelined in favor of live-action. I guarantee if Mufasa was animated it'd be running neck and neck with Sonic 3 instead of lagging behind). They're a luxury limousine running fast on a road that has no other cars (because Disney bought those cars), and the tank's running out of gas. You won't know it's running on fumes until it comes to a complete stop, but at the speed it's going it will take awhile...
And the second it stops, a simple fuel service isn't going to get it running again. It will get running again, too many people need it to run. So they'll call a mechanic, and it will take to the streets once more.
Is Disney cooked? of course not, but they will see a return of their darkest days. A decade or two of the Disney brand no longer being that shining seal of quality people take it for.
I see it comparable to Nintendo's Wii-U days when the company was a joke with no 3rd Party support and consumers who weren't even sure what the Wii-U was even supposed to be. (Too many passed on it, believing it to be an overpriced gimmicky tablet add-on for the Wii... The launch title being NSMBU instead of something fans hadn't already seen before I think is a big part of the blame for that.)
Nintendo didn't wind up in bankruptcy, but they'd need to reinvent the wheel via the Switch, win back 3rd Party Support, and rekindle the faith of the fans, to get back to being a power house.
I guarantee if Mufasa was animated it'd be running neck and neck with Sonic 3 instead of lagging behind).
But mufasa IS animated
It's also shit. Animation only goes so far.
Say what you will about Sonic. No one involved in those films is having a bad time. There's a lotta heart there and it shows.
Mufasa is shlok incarnate.
You know what I mean
And they somehow just became profitable... while also already legacy owning thr vast majority of content
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2007? I remember watching a DivX of The Matrix back in 99. Prior to that I remember watching south park episodes in the RealPlayer.
I watched the entirety of Blair witch project the week before it came out in a real player at 300 by 200 pixels. I kept rotating between watching it thumbnail sized and watching it regular player sized. Both were equally inferiorating
Those RealPlayer Southpark episodes were 15mb and had 8 pixels
South Park's graphics were so bad back then that probably almost sufficed.
Yeah this was going on before that. Media Piracy really set-off in the late 90s when DSL, and cable, internet services became mainstream. Also Netflix started making their own content in response to a growing number of competing services, all fighting over the same pool of production companies' work, and having exclusive rights to one IP, or another, rather than other services being the result of netflix making their own content.
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Exactly this and more.
I'm not even pirating because it's cheaper, or easier. I have near 100TB in storage, and it takes hours per week to search material, have it downloaded, checked, etc. I just am done with the marketing, the branding, the advertising, the bullshit rules. I just want to watch what I want to watch and media companies made this impossible so I'm forced to sail the high seas
Why not just... Automate that with an Arr stack? And use Jellyseer to find new and popular movies and shows.
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Netflix didn't get greedy (well not in that way). The movie companies wanted to make their own platform, which would have left Netflix with nothing. So they had to become their own production company. They said "we have to become a production company faster than production companies become streaming companies".
I feel like people are ignoring that Netflix was bleeding money during their "golden age". They only switched to being profitable a couple years back. A lot of times what people describe as enshittification is just unprofitable companies having to come up with an actual business model as venture capital dries up.
Also, merry Christmas:)
You can also argue that silicon valley has that particular business model of purposely making a product look great and cheap until enough people sign up.
It's distinct from how most companies run in the red at their inception in that those traditional businesses would gladly be in the black but are waiting for economies of scale or building a reputation among consumers.
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All I'm going to say is every computer I had was equipped with 2 disk drives until 2010. Elder Millennials and Gen X know why.
I really don't know why. I never had that.
For what - burning CD to CD? But u don't need 2 drives for that, u would just create an iso and burn it using same drive.
My first home computer was an Apple IIgs. It had no hard drive. You need to use a "boot disk" that loaded the operating system, and then once that was in RAM, you could swap out that disk for the one with your program on it. The OS looked a little like early MacOS; it was called ProDOS. You could technically use it to copy floppy disks (the program for that was "Copy II Plus"), but it took forever, because the copy program had to copy a chunk of the disk into RAM, then get you to swap to the target disk, write that chunk, get you to swap back to the first disk, load a new chunk, get you to swap disks again... It generally took about 40 swaps for a 3.5" high-density (by which they meant 800kb) floppy. It was incredibly tedious. If you had two disk drives, though, it could just work continuously without needing to wait for you to swap disks all the time.
It was more of a convenience thing. If you had 1 drive you had to babysit the read portion to then install the CD-R after. If you had two it was just load both and carry on for 20 minutes and come back to it.
That was just if you were burning a copy and not ripping. But you're right it wasn't necessary. I just remember more than once wanting a second drive so I didn't have to sit and wait to put the CD-R in after.
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So you can play videogames while burning disks? Idk.
I haven't stopped sailing those seas. A pirate's life for me. :)
I mean, yeah. More or less.
Compare with the music industry, where there are a good number of streaming services, and pretty much all of them offer the same selection of music, all of it.
I don't think I know of anyone who pirates music at all.
The answer is greed. They make more being vertically integrated doing their own streaming than they would make taking a cut from a third party to host the same content.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Except people aren’t necessarily going back to piracy en masse
Torrent sites are dwindling, even the big ones have sad membership numbers compared to 10yrs ago
A large amount of internet users access the internet via devices that are openly hostile to or outright disallow anything that would enable piracy. The devices are then connected to an internet that is further hostile and aims to steer you away from anything deemed unsavory
Phones and tablets are cumbersome and unintuitive to navigate. In the case of apple torrent clients are not allowed to be listed on their app store and sideloading is involved and kind of a pain. Chromebooks and windows 11 are better obviously but less utilized then you’d think
But that leads to the second point, which is kind of angry old man yells at cloud, but people are just less tech inclined now. It makes sense because modern tech is designed to oppress the user whereas tech in the late 90s and early 2000s was more to empower them. They don’t bother to figure out how to install applications, use the file explorer, change settings, etc. the very basic steps needed to pirate shit (you obviously don’t need to be a super hacker). They don’t need to. The command prompt or a terminal is something that makes them think you’re hacking shit
They download applications like steam and then their browser auto opens the installer, then steam handles installing games and mods from that point on. They are safeguarded against having to deal with the icky filesystem and their hand is held every step of the way. Or they just download stuff from the official MS app store and even more hand holding. It’s okay because they’re only gonna install 5 streaming apps anyway and then use the browser to visit the 6 approved websites that google or bing search sends you to for basically any query.
And that’s only if they actually have a proper computer. If they have a tablet or phone they either are pushed extremely heavily towards the above scenario, or in the case of apple they simply have no other option
10 years from now the internet will just be 2-3 social media sites, a few shopping conglomerates, wikis, and streaming sites. The devices used to access will no longer let you access the filesystem directly, apps will be unable to be installed if they aren’t code signed by apple or google or ms or whoever, sealed in epoxy, and draconian drm everywhere. 40 years from now your grandchildren will think you’re weird for complaining about how you used to have autonomy and authority over your devices once you owned them and they’ll remind you it’s time to pay another $400 bezobucks to rent the google chrome ar internet hub for another month because you’re not allowed to own it and it’s a federal crime to take it apart
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