Netflix: Piracy is Difficult to Compete Against and Growing Rapidly

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...

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...)
- 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.
- 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.
- I used to sail the seas like freakin Luffy, but Netflix and Steam (plus becoming a wage earning adult) got me on the straight and narrow for a good long while. Then when all the different services started to compete I started dipping my toes in the water again with some sense of guilt. But after various struggles getting Netflix running in different locations I frequent and my parents not being able to use my account anymore, I have no shame flying the Jolly Roger.
- 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.

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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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'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
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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.

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.
  
  You've made my DS220+ blush
  
  Just out of curiosity, what drive configuration are you running?
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  Opex vs capex

They had piracy all but beat. It was their insatiable greed that drove people back to the sea.
- 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!
- 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
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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)
- 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

It's not like I dropped Netflix and opted to pirate their content instead because of their password sharing restrictions or anything. Nah, can't be that.

Infinitely reproducible digital media has little inherent value. As the article acknowledges, the value proposition Netflix offered was convenience. If pirate sites offer more convenience than Netflix offers legitimate users, Netflix will lose. I find it baffling they are fucking around with ads and locking down access, making their experience worse. Same with Amazon Prime. It's like they forgot their own business model.
- Exactly. Steam figured this out early on and it's how they have maintained their dominance in the game distribution business. It's the same lessons the entertainment streaming platforms must learn - your value is convenience. Add more walls between consumers and content? you will be cast aside.
- Yo, Netflix! This one right here! Read it and understand plz
- That's just an engineering problem... Not a particularly hard one either
  Wtf would you keep re-encoding it? If you don't, it's just binary. You can run error checks on it, save it on raid config with high redundancy, and it's more stable than any physical media
  Load it into memory and you can copy it all you want, do error checking at the destination and you're golden.
  The exception is if you keep uploading it to and ripping it from hosting sites which keep re-encoding/compressing it... But replication itself is easy

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... 🤔
- A high price is a bad thing to serve.

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.

Operating Revenue: 33,723,297,000
Cost of Revenue: 19,715,368,000
Gross Profit: 14,007,929,000
Operating Expense: 7,053,926,000
Operating Income: 6,954,003,000
- "Our profits may be obscene, but they're not obscene enough! How could these evil pirates ever do this to us?"
  
  The constant growth aspect of capitalism means that profits are never obscene enough for any business.
- I like dividing net profit by total employees in 2022 they could pay everyone $350k extra that year.
  4.49bil/12800
  
  All we can do is 50k and some fruits in the office.
  
  won't somebody think of the ~~parasites~~ shareholders‽

"We successfully competed against piracy and drove it to near-extinction, but now that we're enshittified we can't compete with piracy while continuing to make the obscene amounts of money that we want to make"
- It's not just the enshittification of their own service; it's the fact that so many audios decided to pull their content and set up their own enshittified services.
  Now, if I want to watch stuff legally, I have to have a bunch of subscriptions, and we're back to where we started from.
- It's almost like some people don't like being fucked.

Cry less, make better service more.

"Piracy is Difficult to Compete Against"
Have you tried
Not Enshittifying
?
- We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas
  
  hey now, don't discount removed and moaning!
- The really stupid thing is that everyone knows Netflix succeeded by offering - for the first time - a better product than piracy. A decade ago, Netflix offered a huge library of high quality, ad free content, which was easy to navigate and relatively free of bugs and viruses. People signed up because it was better than piracy where content could be difficult to find, time consuming to download or slow to buffer, with risks of malware or questionable websites.
  People are willing to pay for a better experience that supports the people making art and entertainment.
  Netflix already knows how to do this, built a company around it and launched an industry based on the knowledge that people will pay for a product that is better than free options. Now, it's gone all the way back around. Streaming services are fragmented and expensive, content is hard to find and disappears without warning, streaming apps don't always work on the devices they're supposed to, quality gets unexpectedly throttled, and the ads are inescapable and unskippable.
- Tbf, a lot of the problem is from content producers making their own platforms
  
  I'm not sure I buy it. Just because content producers wall+jerk themselves off doesn't mean you have to enshittify your own product, not when you are winning. Besides, Netflix already became a content producer themself partly as an answer to that.

Press releases like this are corporate signaling to US Congress that they would like some lawfare and are willing to pay for it.
Pirate streaming growth itself doesn't 'threaten legal services' as TF suggests. Any threat that arises is created by industry's market response. It comes back to margins. Netflix could decide overnight to invest in a long-term 'hearts and minds' approach that includes a quality platform user experience free of hostile design, non-discrimination amongst devices, relaxed household access rules, attentive customer service, commitment to finishing programming properly, improved stream quality, etc. Becoming the Valve of streaming represents an expenditure increase, though. You're now a lower margin business with a very sticky and content customer base. That's not a story industry wants to tell its investors, knowing they will respond with 'you should be petitioning for bills that enable more market captivity'.
They do the right thing only as a last resort, because the right thing is expensive.

2013 Netflix competed just fine. Piracy was mostly dead back then
- But 2013 Netflix didn't have to compete with Prime Video, Disney Plus, Paramount Plus, HBO Max, Apple TV, Hulu, Peacock, or any of the million "add-on" channels that Amazon uses as an excuse to paywall you off from the content.
  The fact that they all run in their own UI, desperate the shove the next instalment of mediocrity down your throat, means that I've gone back to piracy. It's just much easier to type what I'm after into Radarr or Sonarr than it is to go through the services to see what's available. Sure, I can use Justwatch, but 80% of the time what I'm after isn't on anything I have.
  
  More competition should mean lower prices. How is competition diving prices up? Seems rigged.
  
  I would like to see some evidence that the competition resulted in Netflix losing a lot of subscribers, and thus money, rather than not hitting their predicted revenue targets. Because I would bet it's the latter and not the former. I don't know of too many people who said, "well, I had Netflix, but Disney is doing streaming video now so I won't be watching Bake-Off anymore." They just ended up getting Netflix and Disney+.
  For a while anyway. Now people are dropping these services due to the price hikes. Unless you downgraded your Netflix service when they added lower tiers with fewer options and ads, to maintain the basic Netflix service you had in 2016, you're paying an additional $5 a month today.
  Netflix and all the other streaming services are built upon the insane idea that there are an infinite number of new customers that will continue to sign up regularly. Some of them don't even think you need all that much programming to draw them. Paramount+ has a fraction of the original programming of Netflix, Peacock, Apple, Amazon, etc. but still costs $10 a month and will most assuredly continue to raise its prices based on the idea that there are either an infinite number of Star Trek fans or they will have to raise their prices.
  
  Same thing for me. I can also use Findroid on my Android phone with microG to watch stuff from my Jellyfin server. I think the Netflix app wouldn't even work on my phone.
  
  I used to pay for Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and Paramount+. Then me and m wife noticed that every time we wanted to rewatch a show or a movie, it was not available on any of those. So now I only pay for Newsgroups.
  
  Or use jellyseerr/overseerr, and browse for media. Just like the streaming services.
- Most accurate piracy meme I've ever seen

Piracy is really easy to compete against. Ask GabeN. Steam has singlehandedly taken me out of the piracy game because they have what I want, it's super easy to get and if it's not reasonably priced today I'll wishlist it until it goes on sale (and it will). If it sucks, or my hardware can't run it, I just dm someone and I get my money back. I know they can disappear shit from my library like any online store but they haven't abused that privilege with me yet and that makes me confident they won't.
With Netflix, there's a small chance that they actually have what I want. If they do, it's gonna disappear soon. Prices only ever go up, not down, and that series you love is gonna be cancelled as soon as it stops driving new subscriptions. To watch everything I want I can spend a hundred dollars a month on a rotating set of accounts on several streaming services or I can go LOOK for the MOVIE 2 stream for free without even messing with a DOT TOrrent file.
Piracy is easy to prevent if you provide a better service than the pirates. What he meant was that it's hard to get people to pay you to shit in their mouths when someone else is giving out sandwiches.
- Yep, Steam is my "video game piracy canary". The day I lose access to my games on Steam will be the last day I ever buy any video game, and probably any non-physical piece of media for the rest of my life.
  
  Mostly the same for me. I'd still be open to it if it's convenient, DRM-free, and easy to back up somewhere, but far less likely to put effort into finding out.
- in fact for the games that have been removed I actually still have full access, like rocket League still in my library just not purchasable anymore
  
  Isn't that just because RL went free to play?
- when gaben dies the enshittification of steam will happen in short order. don't put all your eggs in one basket
  
  If that happens well then Piracy still exists. None of the other baskets aside from GOG are worth putting eggs in
- until it goes on sale (and it will)
  Except Factorio. It has never and will never go on sale, and they were able to use that policy to get money back that they lost from G2A.
  That being said, Factorio is worth the price tag
  
  G2a?

Also Netflix: We should raise our prices again.
- the entire industry: "...and also fragment our offerings across a dozen different subscription services."
- Also Netflix: "Let's cancel all the popular series that we hyped up all last year because they are too expensive."

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.
  
  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.
  
  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

Everyone is blaming Netflix, but it’s not their fault.
It’s the fault of the content owners. Disney, fox, paramount etc…..
Rather than make a little money off of Netflix, they decided they could scam more money by launching their own competing service
- It's also Netflix's fault.
  
  It's less Netflix fault than others' fault.
- They all collectively and individually enshittified until it became worthwhile to pirate again.
  They can point fingers all they want, or change their attitudes for longer-term gain.
  The problem is, of course, their shareholders who are pushing for maximizing short-term profits, and then shareholder primacy, meaning they are legally obligated to obey their shareholders, even at the cost of business collapse.
  Let them die.
- Being first does not make you the legitimate proprietor of a flawed system.
  
  The greatest flaw in the system is the fragmentation and consequential cost - when things were consolidated under Netflix, things weren't perfect but it can't be said that they weren't far better.
  The true underlying flaw is capitalism, but isn't it always?
- Netflix has become as bad as any of the others. Its all shit. ⚓
- It's the fault of copyright. Restricting what shows you can stream to your users instead of, for example, being required to pay a royalty, inevitably leads to this situation. Netflix being the sole company allowed to stream every show and film would result in a monopoly that would be bad for everyone as they progressively sought to increase profits year over year. One company having all that power would not be a good thing for anyone, including content holders.
  The solution is simple: every streaming service should be allowed to stream every show/film in every country. Then, piracy can only compete on price. That requires significant copyright reform, however, and is very unlikely to happen.
  
  It’s a branding issue, ultimately. If I make a product, I should be able to choose where I sell that product and the brands I associate with. Now imagine I sell a pen with a special ink only
  Uniball and Pilot make ink, but that they weren’t really using it so sold it to me at a discount. Everyone starts using my pens and the ink shows up everywhere. As a consequence, the ink industry slowly starts pulling their ink from my pens and raising prices. With everyone now selling the fancy ink pens and me without the original ink, it’s no longer just a branding issue, it leans to common carrier provisions. The ink is like the network, it is common currency in the market, like laid infrastructure. Treating it like a brand now will reduce competition and stagnant the market.
  The ink is also the streaming content. Prevent companies from preventing fair use and you fix the issue. What stops Disney from making 5 “competing” streaming services and “licensing” to itself and blocking others? It’s a media creating monopoly, you can’t let that slide.
- In the 90s, my cable company kept adding new channels but the price didn't keep shooting up.
  
  Yeah it did, they just weren’t upfront with you about it. They just billed you at a higher rate
  https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/10/19/your-cable-bill-has-increased-188-since-the-mid-90.aspx

Netflix: This problem we practically solved ten years ago but have been steadily and diligently working to bring back pledge to double down on those efforts and eventually make it the only viable option for a good consumer experience.
- Netflix used to have plenty of content people wanted to watch, and you could share your account with family in different physical houses. Now neither is true.
  Netflix: "why would pirates do this?"
  
  It wasn't Netflix's decision to pull the content people wanted to watch. That was content creators like Disney that pulled their content to start their new streaming services. Netflix was stuck with creating their own content, which as it turns out is hard.
  
  it's hilarious the way they all get bugs up their asses about irrelevant problems and then dream up these punitive solutions that wind up killing their business, because they're autist morons. The executive class is the biggest single problem in capitalism - the idea that one supergenius exists who knows best how to run your special little snowflake? It's pathetic.

Funny, you had no problem competing in the past. Hmmmm wonder why that is...

Yeah back in the golden era of streaming you only needed Netflix, most of the shows on there were good, and everything would eventually be on there. So piracy was too much of pain in the ass to bother with to save $10 a month.
Now there's 10 different streaming services most of them cost a lot more than $10 per month, you have to wade through pages of crap to find anything worth watching. If you hear about a show or movie that sounds interesting you can't just wait for it to show up on Netflix. You have to go and search for which streaming service has the show you want and there's a good likelihood you're not subscribed to that one.
It's now far easier to search on the 'bay for what you want to see (you have to do a search anyway) and they always have it. Yeah I guess you're not instantly watching it, but you're not instantly watching a thing you want to see on a streaming service now anyway, because have to scroll past a wall of crap to find anything.
My general feeling on piracy is that when you're young and don't have much money, you can't afford to pay for it anyway, you may as well pirate it. When you get older and can afford it then you should pay for movies and video games and stuff. But when they make it more of a pain in the ass to buy something than it is to pirate things, then I dunno what to say. I have money and want to pay for a service that I can just chill and watch cool stuff, but they seem more interested in various schemes to impress shareholders than providing me the thing I'm willing to pay for.
- You also won't instantly watch anything on that streaming you found the movie you wanted on "justwatch" since you have to make a new account, go get your credit card to fill out the form, etc.

So here's a novel idea, maybe stop driving people away from your business with constant rate-hikes, removal of content, killing new shows after 1 season, etc...

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.

That's funny, I haven't stolen music in over 10 years thanks to Spotify, but they haven't split all the music into 20 services or jacked up the price every year.
Granted they don't pay the artists, but that's not my problem.
- And even the "they don't pay the artist thing" is somewhat defensible in that the record labels take a much larger cut than Spotify.
  They're the main ones taking the money away from artists.
  By far my main issue with Spotify is for giving massive paycheques to the likes of Joe Rogan
- I want to quit spotify so bad because they shove a ton of money into joe rogan's ass AGAIN while firting their staff.
  
  Yeah the Rogan shit is infuriating
- I lived in a country where spotify wasn't available, so I never stopped. Now that I'm in a country where it is available, I just don't want to spend the cash on it, since all these streaming services have me over a barrel.
  
  Build a Plex server, it will pay for itself in less than a year

Piracy is service problem

Piracy predates Netflix, if it was hard to fight against then Netflix as we know it wouldn’t have taken off
- Nah, it's easy, just lower your prices and expand your catalogue. Nothing to it.
  Oh, and stop paying your executives like kings.
  So hard.

I’m kinda surprised that the article only mentioned convenience and completely skipped rising costs, ad injection, crackdowns on password sharing, and more fees.
The subscriptions cost a shitload more, even if you’re a paid subscriber you still get ads, you have to pay more fees to get rid of ads or watch a program that is either new or the service has decided to charge for, and you can’t share password with anyone outside your household.
It’s not a convenience problem, it’s a money problem.
- Eh, it's also a convenience problem. If I want to watch a specific movie, good luck figuring out what streaming service it's on. It's so nice to be able to just watch what I want without that hassle.
  
  Fair enough. I was reaching back to Netflix’s early days where you could get DVD’s of most anything decent even if you couldn’t stream it.
  
  Just about everything's on Fmoviesz dot to. if what i want isn't on the two platforms i'm currently coughing up for, it'll be on there!

Netflix Buddy, friend, matey. If I have to pop open Google to find where I can watch something, find the best offers on pricing, and how to circumvent ads or whatever, or how to get Netflix to run on my devices without installing invasive crap or derooting my phone etc, and it's actually quite expensive.
I'll just do one search and not worry about whether I'll have to fight ads, or automatic iffy quality settings, weird compression algorithms, device compatibility etc.
I was happy to hang up the peg leg when I could just VPN to usa and watch everything for the price of a lunch a month. I like simplicity, I enjoyed your more arty shows. It was you who changed the deal Netflix, not I. you decided being insanely profitable wasn't enough and you needed infinite growth.
- Trying to run a VPN through a streaming service because the content you’re trying to watch is straight up unavailable in your region – but it’s trying to block the VPN, is the worst.
- To be fair to Netflix before other networks took streaming seriously they were charging very little to license their content on Netflix. That's why it had everything and was so good to be better than piracy. The royalties from Netflix couldn't be enough to fund these networks. Even Netflix themselves as the studio has struggled substantially promoting these price hikes and the effective recreation of cable TV.
  As they lose more of the licensed content they're forced to focus on their own. Unfortunately for the just part they can't compete with constant new mediocre shows and movies. The streaming industry as a whole has lost sight of what made it popular in the first place.
  
  The problem with this argument is that it's still the same content, but studios and streamers expect more money for it. They aren't asking for more money because they're adding value, they're asking for more because they feel entitled to more simply because they exist. With so many different streaming services and mostly nothing but exclusive content, there isn't much to combat price hikes apart from piracy as these companies don't compete based on service. Imagine if Walmart had exclusive rights to sell cereal or bread and it's easy to see how tainted this market is. Pirating sidesteps the bullshit which is why they want to crush it.
  
  Sure but it's not like networks get anything from piracy so they have to content themselves with some rather than infinity. Especially for old content, it's just not worth much individually. There's also a looooot of massively overpaid and wasteful people involved in the major networks.
  I know it's not just Netflix but you know, poetic licence or something. also I don't really give a shit about being fair to multibillion dollar corporations that do basically nothing pro social :p
  
  It's the point that these jerk wuads are trying to run their own studios that's causing the mainstay of the failure.
  They're expecting us to pay for their content failures.
  Prior to everybody running their own crappy studio, They licensed what we wanted to watch, they negotiated decent prices and we watched it. If a studio didn't make good content it didn't get purchased.
  It's the whole discovery channel aliens, reality TV enshitification all over again.
  They're hemorrhaging, money they'll stop producing the more expensive stuff they'll produce the cheaper stuff people watch the cheaper stuff, the whole time screaming it's the pirates fault.

- 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)
- The access hasn't changed much, but I feel like the knowledge got easier to access for a non-pirates.
  
  I remember growing up it was insanely easy - Kazaa, Limewire, Napster - you just downloaded the client, searched for what you wanted and started the download.
  Torrenting plus VPN/proxy has been standard for a while and is fairly straight forward. The motivation has changed rather than the access - all the content has fragmented between multiple paywalls again as the big media companies try to milk customers. And at the same time all the media companies are cutting back on content spending. So there is less good new stuff, more expensive to access and inconvenient as its spread more widely.
  
  Bananas. I'm not saying it's hard now, but it used to be insanely easy to pirate. Everyone I know my age had a PC full of pirated films and music just searching directly on Kazaa or limewire without having ever even heard of terms like "VPN."
  
  I don't know. I used to pirate like crazy. It was ridiculously easy. I wouldn't even know where to begin today when it's more important to protect yourself than it was back then. As far as I know at least, due to new laws etc.

Bullshit. Make it reasonably priced, fast and easy to access, no bullshit, clean interface, no ads, great customer support, and I'll rip this parrot right off my mother lovin shoulder.

Once, not so long ago, streaming was more convenient than pirating. But, as expected the commercial services went through their Standard Cycle of Enshittification and now we either let ourselves get flogged by 50 competing predatory services or just take the easy way and sail the high seas.
The choice is not that hard. Yarr.
Of course this returns us to the state where the streaming companies who have literally "enshitted their own beds" now turn to legislators and policymakers (who they hated, just couple of weeks ago) to ask them to provide some "law and order" to this unruly mob and to defend the corporations right to put thumbscrews on the population for ever increasing profits.
And so it goes.
- I'd love some kind of federated streaming service. So that different content providers can sell their stuff, you pay once monthly into a pool, and you can choose different clients to access all content services. Then the money gets distributed depending on your viewing habits.
  
  Legislators could just offer a very easy solution. They could simply mandate copyright holders to offer the copyright to all interested parties at a fair price. If content ist held back or only exclusively distributed through one party it should go public domain, as the holder of the rights clearly does not intend to profit in a legitimate way from.
  The intend of copyright is to make sure, that the holder of the right can get a fair compensation. It is not the intend that his work is abused to manipulate the markets.
  
  Ehhhhhh video storage is one of those things that’s a little too data intensive to federate well
- Fully agree. I‘m shocked though that corpo shills are not all over this post as they are in every other community. They probably stay out of this community or get banned quickly.
  I‘m getting blasted regularly on memes and other communities.

Netflix already defeated piracy by producing endless mid “content” like The Grey Man that you can’t even be bothered to watch for free.
- Petition to stop calling things that are 'trash' 'mid'. 'Mid' means middle. I would not be upset by watching something that's mid but I wouldn't be happy about it either. I take it that if you can't be bothered to watch it even for free, it's probably just 'trash'
  
  Trash can be fun. It is so trash its fun, like sharknado or human centipede. But mid just means it is neither good enough nor trash enough to be fun.
  
  Middling, which is medium. But I'd say The Grey meets that for its target audience.
  
  Man if it's made well and some people like it, that's a mid.
- I fucking loved Grey Man.
  
  Haha, I was wondering about this - I enjoyed it, too. It was worth the time if only to see Chris Evans having so much fun playing a psychopath.

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.
- And you know what would be good? Your subscription money will be divided equally between everything you watched that month.
  If they want your money, they better make high quality show that's actually interesting.
  Let them fight each other for our subscription money.
  
  It's the exclusive deals that fuel the fragmentation. If you could watch the same content on any streaming service, you wouldn't need to subscribe to a half dozen (or turn to piracy).
  Of course that's exactly why Netflix, Prime, Apple, et al started making their own exclusive content that they totally control.
- And also remove Digital Restrictions Management (DRM)
- Yeah, but they all want to be the one to run it.
  In the meantime, there's Jellyfin.
- So basically just cable but for the internet age.
- Can we have a la carte payments back? I don't pirate movies/tv because I barely watch any movies/tv, but the only time in the past year I paid for one was when I could rent it for 48h for $4. I hate subscriptions and would rather just pay once per every time I watch.
- like socialism.
- I've got a platform like that!
- I'm always surprised when people propose monopolies as if a) they're good, and b) that's not what everyone in the game right now is trying to provide.
  Everyone wants to be the one collecting the subscription fee. No one wants to be the one trusting the guy collecting the subscription fee to give them a fair cut.
  
  I'm always surprised too. At least the market is sorta working.
  In a lot of ways Netflix won. Many people aren't going to bother pirating their content and would rather just pay or at least subscription hop. We're in the greed portion of streaming where everyone wants a bigger and bigger slice. If Netflix did not create original content, I'm not sure they'd still be around.
  
  I don't propose a monopoly but a common platform. The platform doesn't create content. The creators don't fragment the market.
  And I say this as an answer to the problem content creators have. Not from the user POV.

When overpriced streaming services keep becoming worse and worse, it's hard to avoid piracy
- "We keep raising our prices and having content splinter off between dozens of competitors, I don't understand why the people won't just pay!"
  
  There's nothing Netflix can do about content splintering except make their own content and revenge splinter it.

How are the pirates so good at this without even taking my money? Maybe they should teach the money people how the computers work.
- They get paid in satisfaction knowing big companies are losing money

I was rather happy with Netflix for nearly a decade. The price was reasonable and family members could also watch. When I moved out I upgraded to the 4K package (split 3 ways between family members) and it was fine at first.
But there were several caveats:
4K only works on TVs, on my 1440p monitor I could only watch 1080p. Sucked, but it's not too bad
Price kept going up, in the end it was 18€ a month. That's okay split between 3 people, but otherwise far too much for what is offered
Series that I liked kept getting cancelled, while trash was getting renewed or they messed up the later seasons (Looking at you, The Witcher..)
They cracked down on password sharing, suddenly you need to be in the same WiFi to count as home or you need a travel code (limited to 2 a month and only for 2 weeks each), so if you regularly move between places it's a no-go for a service you pay for
I finally cancelled it, sick of their shit. Which also has the benefit of no longer having to take care of the account for the family. Unfortunately my dad accidentally took over the account (while trying to create a new one) and keeps paying the 4K price (I suggested at least going down to 1080p as the quality is shit either way). Simply idiotic :-/
Personally I tried out Real Debrid and it has been pretty alright so far. The quality is better too, which is ridiculous.
- I've had a Netflix subscription from before they even did streaming. I had the 4k plan, and even when I wasn't watching much on there anymore, my kids would use it often. The price hikes just would not stop. Then they started moving into video games, and I started seeing headlines reading "Netflix plans to open brick and mortar locations" - followed by more price hikes and ads being integrated. It started to feel like I was just funding their dumb business moves that I'm not ever going to benefit from.
  So now I have a beautiful new NAS running Plex. Just accounting for the Netflix subscription price, I'll break even in 2 years, and I'm using it for a lot more than just a media server.

CEOs: Do a greedflation, raking in historic profits.
Also CEOs: "Why does no one want to pay for a subscription?"

🤏🎻

"Lets make 50 competing services while people have less buying power than ever. Everything will be $15 if you want anything of value. P.s. the thing you wanted leaves next month HURRY"
Cant imagine why people pirate /s
- Yep, there was a time when streaming services actually became easier than piracy. That was when there was basically just Netflix and Hulu. If you had both of those, you had everything.
  
  Yuuup. I stopped for a few years until everything went to shit and i learned my lesson. Yar and download anything you want to keep.
- Netflix is so bad. Sometimes there is something i actually want to see, which is kinda rare. Then i can pick between three languages that i don't speak.

Netflix literally will not take my money anymore. I had cancelled my subscription during covid because money was tight, but I was willing to temporarily re-subscribe when the next season of select shows came out. I tried to re-enable my original account, but I couldn't because they wouldn't accept my credit card. I tried different cards, then tried to make new accounts with different emails and different credit cards, but still couldn't. Netflix kept rejecting all my cards. I ran out of credit cards.
Look, I was willing to give Netflix my money, it's not my fault they were unwilling to take it.
- I've had similar experience. I wanted to resub after a year of D+ and Prime. Guess I'll stick to Paramount+ and binge nutrek shit.
  
  and binge nutrek shit.
  I hate how all of the new Trek shows seem so intent on subverting/dismantling the hopeful and utopian world of Star Trek.
  Like, at least to me, the whole point of Star Trek is that while we have no shortage of pessimistic dystopian Sci-Fi, there's painfully few major properties that paint a hopeful picture for the future. Star Trek was always an aspirational look at humanity to me; the new shows seem so focused on being tense and dramatic that they forget they're supposed to have that aspirational quality.

Steam has never tried to battle piracy head on, yet it succeeds. Please take note, Netflix, it is your card to lose.
- This will only remain as long as Valve's original leadership (and Lord Gaben) stays in place. Once the MBAs start taking over it will go to shit fast.
  Ironic that I'm saying this, since I am an MBA myself.
- To be fair, only a handful of publishers were able to take their cards and go elsewhere. The media companies were a lot more on top of dragging their products off of Netflix.
  Nobody would be on steam just for Valve games, after all, and indie has a much lower barrier of entry.
  While they could certainly distribute their current products better, a lot of the issues they have now (see: belated frogs comment) aren't things they really had control over.
- Netflix is full of reptiles who don't care to offer a better service. All they want is enough market share to strongarm consumers into giving them more money.

Netflix blaming piracy is just a warning that hostile legislation will pass and all of this will be shut down. Call me pessimistic.
- Luckily the speed at which new counter-measures to anti-piracy technologies can be developed is much faster than any legislative body can ever hope to move. It's an impossible battle to win by enforcement alone. These companies need to realize that they need to provide actual value to retain customers and remain competitive. People aren't going to stand for a reskinned version of cable.
- The big media corporations have been pushing legislation and legal crackdowns since the 90s and it hasn't made a dent in piracy. They'll keep trying of course, but it still won't work.
- What legislation? Piracy was never legal to begin with.
  
  In my country, while it is illegal to download or to share pirated content, our law enforcement really only goes after the big fish doing the sharing. Sites may go down, but as an end user, my only real risk is getting a DMCA notice from my ISP if I'm sharing data (seeding torrents) while not using a VPN, and possibly having my service disconnected if I continue. While technically I could be in trouble with the law, it is not really a fear in my country to be a downloader of pirated media.
  Stronger legislation could mean laws that entice law enforcement to act on smaller uploaders or even downloaders.

Says the guys that reduced piracy to a fraction of its former self before getting too greedy. Piracy wasn't affecting them, but it's a side effect of what they have become.

Hey Netflix, you need to compete on price AND the service offering. Make piracy feel inconvenient compared to paying and subscribing and you'll retain the userbase that is willing to pay. You'll never get those who aren't willing to pay no matter what.

As long as Netflix doesn't do 1080p on Firefox and reduces their price considerably and gets rid of stupid limitations on account sharing and ads, I'm never paying for it. Same for games with DRM. I'm not suffering from DRM bs when I can pirate the same without DRM. Why should i pay these asshole companies more and be more restricted than a pirate lol.

It’s not like cable was going to vanish and leave us with this wonderful ad-free Ala carte service we've always wanted. They dangled the bait and once everyone bit they set the hook and reeled in the suckers with an even worse, and costlier, scenario. In every avenue of entertainment, marketing is there to make sure it fucking sucks. Even some of the pirate apps have ads in them. Greed ruins everything and will be remembered as the true folly of man.
Set sail mofos! 🏴‍☠️
- Eh, honestly the current situation is still better than cable. Having to only watch what was being played, no choice in what episode of a show you watch and chasing the channel's schedule rather than getting to pick what you want to watch when is still far worse than what we have now with on-demand streaming

SurprisedPikachuFace.jpg

Netflix, steam, and Spotify got me out of piracy. Companies who owned the IP just decided they all wanted to replicate what Netflix did without understanding that it was impossible for more than one company to accomplish that.
- It's possible for more than one companies to thrive in streaming space. Just look at music streaming industry. There are healthy competition there with several global music streaming apps and various regional/country-specific music streaming apps. All they have to do is not locking contents behind exclusivity deals and compete on price and features instead. Also, not cracking down too much on family sharing usage also helps.

The ever increasing subscription prices and rights holders pulling content have nothing to do with it at all I am sure. /s

Boohoo magic piracy is stealing all my stuffs, its not that i'm losing the content wars to other, bigger, meaner shitheads

dear netflix: may i interest you in the concept of not raising prices every year, not cancelling every queer show you put out, and not catering to transphobic bigot comedians?
- Being someone who is less sensitive to those signals I wonder if it's that they are being phobic or if it's a situation where those issues and associated audiences are easier to marginalize... oh shit, had another revelation in the white, 35 and up market over here. Those systems roll hard.
  Guys! If you are part of a group that has a month things might not be going well.
  All jokes aside. Thanks for pointing this out as something I can be aware of. I'm pretty pro-human but things skip through the cracks. Good luck out there friend.

I think Jeff Gerstmann once said "you ha e to be able to compete with free" to combat piracy. Tech companies used to understand this...
- It's really not free. Piracy is still a bit of a chore. It's just less of a chore than juggling a dozen streaming services, shitty and inconsistent apps and playing the whole "what major corporation's subscription service has the rights for this show?" game.
  They ought to try sucking less.
- it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it

piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue.

Not Enshittifying