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.

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.

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

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.

That plus actively removing older shows

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.

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.

Weird thing to love but you do you

It was honestly really crazy to me when I was excited to see a game on sale, only to remember how I used to pirate everything. Steam has made it legitimately easier to buy games in so many cases.

I sometimes still do pirate games, especially if it's from a publisher I don't respect or the cracked version is known to run better, but I buy almost all of my games now days.

I've actually started setting up a home server for pirated movies and shows and getting rid of the couple streaming services I have.

I know a lot of people idolize him, and that's probably not healthy, but he just gets it. Provide value and convenience for consumers, and consumers will stick around. Be an inconvenience while squeezing consumers for money, and we'll leave with a parrot on our shoulders and a one-finger salute.

Sadly most companies are focused on short term profit over long term growth, Steam is the best example of the opposite.

I'm sure that economics is part of it. But I think the larger issue is the fact that you need 9 streaming services now just to see the shows you'd want. And then these streaming services are starting to remove the things people paid for. I set up a Plex server and just use that to watch things now.

Corporations don't want competition, they want monopolies. If the good they are selling is in unlimited supply, like music or shows in digital formats are, they create artificial scarcity through exclusivity deals.

Netflix has +9 million users in the past quarter

https://www.statista.com/statistics/250934/quarterly-number-of-netflix-streaming-subscribers-worldwide/

As someone that went initially got back into piracy for the "no you just raised your prices for this one service I only use for this one show anyway, I'll download it instead" reason. I have significantly increased my piracy because it's honestly a much better user experience. For me to easily set sonarr/radarr to grab what I want and have a beautiful and customizable UI/UX like jellyfin to consume that content, which works on all my devices. Fucking Hulu, Disney, Amazon, peacock, max all suck in comparison from a pure UX perspective

11. Ads
12. Low Video Quality because you don't want to install Windows

I forgot to add

14. Removing content when it is not making enough money.
15. Ads

Also wanna add:

18. Missing subtitles in the language you want (looking at you apple tv without English subtitles on local language movies.)
19. Ads
20. Only the 2 random seasons in the middle of a TV show are available. And new seasons not added.
21. Ads

And don't forget about the ads.

I feel like there's a common theme here but just can't put my finger on it....

This comment was brought to you by Google AdSense.

11. Content that is pulled halfway through watching it.

Also everything is just streaming. You can't actually buy DRM-free movies (important for things like VR headsets or when without Internet), often you can't even buy anything at all, it's all just the library of the streaming service were content comes and goes at random.

You forgot about stuff that just gets taken down one day.

Edit: oh you added it in a comment.

There are a few what I'll term magnet shows on each streaming service. They want you to pay for the service for the magnet shows and then stick around and watch other half-baked filler garbage or a seasons of a show they cancelled before giving them any hope of finishing their story arc.

Most streaming networks have abundant garbage content I'd never want to watch, knockoffs of other shows, and global content that's often of soap opera quality with subtitles.

They also (on purpose) often offer no way to filter to the things you want to see other than search, and search is often misleading or terrible too.

It's basically a race to the bottom just like Amazon. Junk programs created for pennies pretending to match your results.

The whole thing is a crap fest that's quickly becoming worse than the cable network structure it replaced.

No, thank you.

More than food? That math just doesn't add up for me.

Yep. Stop making shit deals and 100 different services to subscribe to and people will go back to paying for things. Gaben is the only smart one.

"The more you tighten your grip big tech, the more users will slip through your fingers"

Yeah, it's reall not even about the prices. It's just so inconvenient to go between all those apps, and then login forgot your password, rest, 2FA so i have to get up from my couch and grab my phone.

All these paid services could be totally free from a monetary perspective and I still wouldn't sign back up for them. It's a worse service than cable TV used to be at this point.

Let's not forget random pulling of content so that you can never tell if what you want is actually on any given service at any given time. This was the final straw that led me to rebuilding my own media collection.

Ads. It's all because of ads. There is a low tolerance by way more people now, and piracy is more convenient than putting up with platforms that can't build a UX to save their lives, and then put in ads. Fuck em, let them die.

I disagree in that I don’t necessarily think all of the content is subpar. But making everything on a different service and each service continues to jack up its prices makes it very difficult to justify subscribing to any one of them. Like, I’m never gonna subscribe to peacock even though it has a few things I’d watch on it, that’s ridiculous.

Everything doesn’t have to be a different service, studios are just being extraordinarily greedy.

Another reason why piracy is needed is to prevent pieces of culture from being erased from history to satisfy some perverse corporate accounting requirements.

They call "refusing to be exploited" piracy. Generally industries where there are huge monopolies like media, groceries, and other such thing are most sensitive to this because they lack the ability to deal with outside pressures any more.

Vilifying people fighting back is the cheapest way to manage this.

I'm kinda looking forward to seeing what replaces things like Netflix and Spotify

My 🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️ brother

Companies are stealing from you every single day of your life from the second you’re born to the moment you die.

No harm in returning the favor.

try to figure out if what I want to watch is covered by one of them

Justwatch.com, my dude.

Cancel all those subs man. They are eating your money without return. It's better to download the specific show you want to watch.

You're missing the point, the article is wrong: it's not about the prices.

I'm not disagreeing with you—the conclusion these services have taken are indeed not logical ones based on historical trends—but I'm curious how you know these services didn't need to raise the fees? Why have you assumed that it's to "grow infinitely"?

From my understanding, almost all streaming video providers except Netflix have been operating on a loss. That can only be sustained for so long before the parent company will need to see it begin to generate a positive revenue stream. The most straightforward way to do that is to increase subscription fees. Furthermore, the number of subscribers of Paramount+, MGM+ or even Disney+ is certainly not trending towards "infinite growth."

I'm not justifying anything, because with five monthly services that have been hiking prices I'm looking at what to slash myself, but I was eager to encourage a bit more discourse on this topic.

And Steam is a show of success

It's funny because I pirate everything... except PC games. Because it's so cheap and convenient on steam to just buy them, I like the tracked achievements thing and comparing to friends, and I can play the games on any PC or my steam deck with a quick login and install. I can easily download and install PC games from my private trackers but steam is just so easy and cheap. If movies and TV were as convenient and affordable as steam I wouldn't pirate any of it. But as it stands, I'd have to pay over $200 a month just to have access to all the streaming services that have shows that I like. Fuck that noise. Someone needs to make a version of Steam for media. Kind of like Vudu but less crappy. Just let me pay a few bucks to own a series or a movie, have lots of good sales and deals, let me access the content on all platforms easily, and I would definitely start building a library over time like I've done with steam.

edit: I still do pirate games on PC sometimes just to try them, but usually end up buying on steam because it works better and it can be played on multiple devices easily.

With the advent of self hosted streaming services and the arr services the option is even easier now. If 1 in 20 ppl are motivated/tech savvy that's 20 streaming products not being paid for.

Guess what also been increasing? The number of streaming platforms trying to out bid their competitors. You know what else is increasing? The number of streaming platforms going after account sharing and they wonder why people are going back to piracy. Piracy is king and no one will be able to stop it.

Thing is, I’m not averse to paying for good content, I like to support the creators. But

When every show is on a different app and they’re all $15 a month…buying a couple hard drives and saving every show just makes more financial sense and I don’t need 15 different login credentials so fuck off yarrr

Now there’s a million services, everything is plus. Paramount+, Disney+, Nutsack+

I think the + is to streaming services what the i prefix was to electronic junk.

I pay for them still. But still download and watch on Plex. Oh shit I meant a friend of mine does this.

Nutsack+ 🤣🤣

piracy will serve as competition

for shows sold exclusively to one streaming service then piracy is indeed the only competition

Wow they're just straight up calling it theft now. They can't even pretend to understand the difference.

Piracy doesn't compete on price. Maintaining a server, Internet, and VPN access has a cost beyond the technical knowledge needed to set it all up.

Piracy competes on service. Sick of ads? Sick of your favorite shows disappearing from your services? Tired of the Disney vault (they have the content but won't let you stream it any more) problem? Can't find the thing on any service? Like obscure and rare content? Like fan edits? Like to curate collections and playlists? Like HD on any and every device you own? Like easy offline content syncning for when you're traveling to a spot with spotty Internet? Like sharing your library with friends and family? Tired managing multiple streaming subscriptions and navigating the content to find what you really want to watch? Your friendly neighborhood pirate community has a solution for you. Lower prices aren't even in the top ten reasons lots of people pirate.

Yeah. 2 things stop piracy, a fair price and quality content. We don't have either.

Yup. The enshitification of .. everything.

Society as a whole has been enshittified

Porn sites are now astroturfed by e-girls shilling their $20/month OnlyFans pages.

It was a veritable new Dark Age for humanity.

I don't think sex workers being paid better is comparable to what megacorporations have been doing to the internet for the past 10 years.

Porn sites offer the best free user service on the Internet with the exception of Wikipedia. I don't know what you mean with that point, honestly.

Xnxx has 1 uhm... YouTube would call it shelf... with egirl ads on the first page of your search and that's it. If you proceed directly to page 2, you will never see it. I don't even block that element, it's easy to ignore.

I wish I could up AND downvote this, as it gets the point across well, but MAN do I hate that point. Also, the fact that EVERYTHING has its own streaming service now... No, I'm not paying you a subscription to watch 1 show. If you dont want to give the main streaming players a cut, just sell each season as a oje time purchase

Man was this very hard for me to read. Still up voting it, though

what a ride

In the early 2000s, tools like Napster and Limewire allowed people to download music and video files for free – depriving artists of their income. The emergence of streaming services like Netflix, Apple Music and Spotify make it easy to access unlimited content – and ensure that artists are paid for their creations.

Seriously... This told me all I needed to know about how objective this article was going to be. Stopped reading right there.

I'm literally paying money to pirate content. $20 a year and I can stream anything from Netflix, apple, Disney, HBO, etc through a single app. So much less hassle.

Cable sucked for other reasons and I sure wouldn't have ever really called it cheap. There's a reason people wanted to get away from it in the first place. I've been seeing a lot of pro cable nonsense going around and it would be such a pity if the streaming situation devolved back to putting up with the predatory nature of cable-like services.

I would spend 300$ supporting piracy services before giving 20$ to Netflix

🧲

And password share cracking on Netflix

Speedrunning the demise of cable tv!

That is, according to Gaben, the main driver of piracy is the fact pirates provide better service.