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.
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.
RAID6, one big storage pool. On that one, the bulk of it’s usage in a single shared folder for video, though I do have another carved out for a VMware datastore for the homelab, though it’s mostly just there for somewhere to stick VMs when I’m updating DSM on the smaller DS9220+ (4x8TB in RAID 5).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…)
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.
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.
I think that still makes sense. Sometimes it feels like stuff like streaming and amazon orders have reduced our need to leave our homes. In general, this is largely a good thing, but I fear that people are becoming a little too isolated and aren’t being exposed to social interactions nearly as much. I don’t think people know how to respectfully disagree anymore, and I think that might lead to higher tension and make socializing even harder on people. I’m only 35, but it really does feel like most kids are having a more passive childhood than I remember having, and many adults today also live passively while feeling nostalgic for their more actively lived childhood. I don’t think people are particularly happy with life being this efficient and convenient.
So yeah, go out and get a movie and some Chinese food. Have a conversation with a stranger. I bet you’ll enjoy that more than doordash and scrolling through netflix.
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.
While I agree, it doesn’t really apply to Netflix. It was always a rental/streaming business. Netflix never offered to sell the media, just temporary access to it.
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.
Jellyfin / self hosting is so great. You get the experience of a good streaming service and you can share with your friends and family, and there is no risk of a DMCA other than the initial seeding.
Unless you are friends or family with one of the Disney execs.
Most of this sits squarely on Netflix’s fault. I had stopped torrenting when I started with netflix, but their sheer stupidity between the password sharing and constantly taking down titles, not to mention the fact the rest of the industry is going copying them has pushed me to setup a plex server and share between my friends. Yarr… Ye gang be back me maytees!
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
There was a resounding chorus of “DUUUUUUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH” that echoed across the land as Netflix discovers this reality.
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.
Try making a decent product again then, that seemed to limit piracy quite a bit
Make Netflix more convenient than my ARR setup and I’ll happily come back.
When Netflix was under $10 I stopped pirating and just watched stuff on Netflix because it was worth it for the convenience at the price point.
That is how they solve piracy. Everything they have been doing over the last couple of years is the reason for the increase in piracy.
CEOs: *Do a greedflation, raking in historic profits.*
Also CEOs: “Why does no one want to pay for a subscription?”
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
I’ve got a DS920+ on a shelf, and she’s super jealous of the Rackstation.
Just out of curiosity, what drive configuration are you running?
RAID6, one big storage pool. On that one, the bulk of it’s usage in a single shared folder for video, though I do have another carved out for a VMware datastore for the homelab, though it’s mostly just there for somewhere to stick VMs when I’m updating DSM on the smaller DS9220+ (4x8TB in RAID 5).
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
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.
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.
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.
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…)
There’s a tier with commercials for many countries now.
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.
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.
I think that still makes sense. Sometimes it feels like stuff like streaming and amazon orders have reduced our need to leave our homes. In general, this is largely a good thing, but I fear that people are becoming a little too isolated and aren’t being exposed to social interactions nearly as much. I don’t think people know how to respectfully disagree anymore, and I think that might lead to higher tension and make socializing even harder on people. I’m only 35, but it really does feel like most kids are having a more passive childhood than I remember having, and many adults today also live passively while feeling nostalgic for their more actively lived childhood. I don’t think people are particularly happy with life being this efficient and convenient.
So yeah, go out and get a movie and some Chinese food. Have a conversation with a stranger. I bet you’ll enjoy that more than doordash and scrolling through netflix.
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.
Piracy isn’t stealing if buying isn’t owning.
Buying is owning. You just didn’t buy what you thought you did.
But they are telling us we’re “buyiing” it while hiding the truth 100 pages deep in the fine print. Screw 'em
While I agree, it doesn’t really apply to Netflix. It was always a rental/streaming business. Netflix never offered to sell the media, just temporary access to it.
Steam has never tried to battle piracy head on, yet it succeeds. Please take note, Netflix, it is your card to lose.
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.
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.
OH NO BOO HOO!!
Maybe you shouldn’t have become the monster you fought to destroy.
Gee whiz, can’t imagine why…
…If you are expecting wild profits, year after year, ever increasing. Turns out that’s unsustainable.
Jellyfin / self hosting is so great. You get the experience of a good streaming service and you can share with your friends and family, and there is no risk of a DMCA other than the initial seeding.
Unless you are friends or family with one of the Disney execs.
Most of this sits squarely on Netflix’s fault. I had stopped torrenting when I started with netflix, but their sheer stupidity between the password sharing and constantly taking down titles, not to mention the fact the rest of the industry is going copying them has pushed me to setup a plex server and share between my friends. Yarr… Ye gang be back me maytees!
EDIT: Fucking LOL, Hulu just emailed me this…
Funny definition of ‘agreement’