Can’t pay, won’t pay: impoverished streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
As subscription costs rise and choice diminishes on legal sites, film and TV fans are turning to VPNs and illicit streamers, with Sweden – home of both Spotify and The Pirate Bay – leading the way
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“Piracy is not a pricing issue,” Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve, the company behind the world’s largest PC gaming platform, Steam, observed in 2011. “It’s a service issue.” Today, the crisis in streaming makes this clearer than ever. With titles scattered, prices on the rise, and bitrates throttled depending on your browser, it is little wonder some viewers are raising the jolly roger again. Studios carve out fiefdoms, build walls and levy tolls for those who wish to visit. The result is artificial scarcity in a digital world that promised abundance.
This hits the nail on the head...
I wonder if these greedy fuckers know this but don't give a shit in favor of short term profits,or if they're actually so dense and holed up in their own world disconnected from reality that they don't see it?
They know it, but refuse to belive it, because they've built an empire on a faulty premise and can't conceive that they may be wrong.
Source: two decades in the industry. But I got better out.
I don't know that I'd say they refuse to believe it, it's more that there are short term goals and milestones to hit because literally every single industry is held to the standards and timelines of speculative investors rather than actual investors.
Everybody understands you should be servicing your audience and keeping them happy, and everybody is happy with you doing that... as long as it's within the constraints of hitting quarterly goals. In a world where content routinely takes 3-5 years to make that is not a great fit.
Newell doesn't have any investors to answer to so he gets to say those things when he's in billionaire club. Everybody else just goes "no shit, Gabe" and keeps working on squeezing something out to keep pretending to have done better year on year.
It's a remarkable example of the aggregation of incentives going against every single individual person involved, including those setting the incentives.
The problem is mostly that the C-suite is only capable of thinking a quarter at a time, which is a side effect of the desire for perpetual growth.
It doesn't matter if a policy can net them huge profits in a year if it makes this quarter look worse than last quarter.
They don't care. They know they'll lose subscribers but they'll make more money overall on the suckers that stick out the monopoly pricing. Same thing is happening in the auto industry where they sell less cars but are more profitable.
99% of the general public will not pirate anything because they lack the ability to do so. Of the 1% left, 99% of them use public trackers with variable results regarding quality and shady website shenanigans. The most common form of piracy going forward will probably be like those hacked fire sticks that would stream pirated content, because it's easy and low barrier, like the hacked cable box cards/chips from the 90s.
If you count using shady free streaming websites, I think the number is waaaay bigger than 1%
I don't even think most people own a PC at this point, just tablets and phones.
Then there's me running multiple servers from my home.
You don't need a PC to use a shady streaming website though
You think people don't have laptops? Everyone I know does. 22 yo
What's the average socioeconomic status of your friend group? Most people have tablets now because they can "get them free" from the phone company.
In 2011. It's been 14 years and for streaming portal things just got worse and worse.
