How Disney and Warner Bros. Are Causing Internet Piracy to Boom | Platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ were supposed to do away with pirated media. Instead, they may make them stronger than ever.
(www.thedailybeast.com)
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 11 Jan 2024 00:00
https://lemmy.world/post/10556297
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 11 Jan 2024 00:00
https://lemmy.world/post/10556297
How Disney and Warner Bros. Are Causing Internet Piracy to Boom | Platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ were supposed to do away with pirated media. Instead, they may make them stronger than ever.::Platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ were supposed to do away with pirated media. Instead, they may make them stronger than ever.
threaded - newest
I know it gets quoted a lot, but Gabe was 100% right. It boggles my mind how people in power over these streaming services just don’t get it:
Haven’t pirated a game in over a decade
The list of games I’ve pirated in the past 15 years and steam publish games I’ve played are disparate/disjointed sets.
I have, but that’s an access issue where I live, where there are no official stores to buy things from, and the places which do exist don’t have the games I want (on PS4). I download all Disney content as + is not available here either.
The last game I pirated was Skyrim, and that mostly because I was unemployed and poor at the time
I prayed doom eternal, that was the only one. Then I bought it a week later.
That’s called “the mantis movement”.
I have pirated a few games due to cost, since my SO is studying at the moment, and one of us has basically always been on parental leave the last 3.5 years. I bought both Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3 when I could afford it though, since both of them brought me more than 100 hours of fun.
I have pirated GTA5 and Cyberpunk 2077. Both were a disappointment.
I never have, I don’t see the point when steam is just so convenient and has sales all the time. Just be patient on pricing, the game isn’t going to go away because you didn’t buy on release.
I also don’t trust downloading unverified, modified, software. An mp3 or mkv is probably going to be safe as you can’t load software through those really, but an exe can do anything
I hadn’t either until the Steam autumn sale 2023, I wanted Dirt Rally 2 GOTY edition because it includes all the DLC, but I couldn’t buy it because I already own the base game…
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Usually populations do a few diffrent things under oppression:
Right now they want to think we live in a option 1 and 2 country. We will be an option 3 and/or 4 verry soon. They cant mask the minipulation in option 4 and cant continue to funtion with either 3 or 4.
Oh they get it, you can be sure of that. It’s just they’re so, so greedy they don’t care that eventually in the future the well will dry up, they only care about more money NOW.
That’s how the system is set up. Even if the people in the corporation weren’t greedy, they need the line to go up every quarter. And when the higher leadership recognizes that, they hardly ever think about long term investments. So a corporation is not a money making machine, no, it’s a money maximizing machine. That’s why we call them greedy.
That’s a bingo. Used to pirate, then stopped because streaming was cheap and it wasn’t worth the hassle. It’s still not worth the hassle, but I’d rather just stop watching than deal with the bloated streaming market.
Yep, came to post this. I think I’ve spent more and more on Steam every year because they have actually stuck to this principle.
Don’t get me wrong I love GOG for the confirmed lack of DRM. But they just don’t do service like Valve.
I mean GOG Galaxy exists, which can even show you all games from GOG, Steam, Epic, … besides keeping your games updated.
It’s still not as good as Steam, but at least a better solution than manually checking and installing updates.
I would love to buy games from GOG, but they haven’t worked on a Linux version of GOG Galaxy. It’s back to a service issue again.
www.gog.com/…/release_gog_galaxy_20_for_linux
I would definitely say GOG has good service overall. The one time I had to return a game they were pretty helpful and accommodating. It’s just not at the level of Steam with a continual push of innovative and player-friendly features.
I’m on Linux where Heroic Launcher fills the app role, so GOG gets a smidge less credit there.
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He was absolutely right.
People generally are absolutely fine with paying, so long as it’s not absurd pricing and the service is convenient.
I was happy paying for Netflix until the recent bullshit. I still pay for Spotify. I buy all my games outside of old ones that I need to emulate (again proving Gabe correct - if I could legally access them easily then I’d do that instead, but am I fuck jumping through hoops like spending thousands on old consoles I don’t have the space for nor the time to search for/import games)
P.s. I’m from India. Not one of these “pasty-faced white people” that you seem to take issue with
Capcom just started adding game breaking DRM to their archive of old single player Steam games because an exec got butthurt over a nude mod for Street Fighter. Now Steam Deck support is broken and my mods don’t work with games I purchased years ago. The pirated version is now better once again.
At almost the exact same time, Valve sent a DMCA notice to Portal64 because for some reason they care about people playing a homebrew port of a $2 15 year old game on 30 year old hardware.
I used to think Capcom and Valve were two of the last good ones. Turns out there aren’t any good ones…
Can’t read the article (acts like it’s paywalled but the paywall doesn’t even come up,maybe ad blocking is borking it), but let me guess… Every time a show gets big, someone splits it off into a new sub service, and people are getting sick of that shit and pulling the plug on the people they pulled the plug on cable for…
My kids hit me up for yet another subscription last week, because they wanted to watch a show. I was very close to cancelling everything instead, and teaching them some slightly sketchy skills, but I took the “high road” on it. They’re getting close to the age where that ain’t gonna happen anymore though :)
Consolidate yo shit media dudes. You got a finite limit on how many pieces of the pie can exist. When the slices get too small because you cut it into too many slices, nobody buys a slice anymore…
I will pay for one streaming service, if your content isn’t available on there it will be on my jellyfin and my kids are happy to use that.
This is roughly where I’m at. I’m paying for one, maybe two. That’s it. After that I’m not gonna waste my time, esp. when a VPN is cheaper and can give me better overall service.
Who even needs a VPN?
at least everyone in the US, probably in several other countries as well
But, but, but, I thought the US was the land of the free…
… companies?
I started having the piracy discussion with my kid today. First lesson: until you understand computer security, piracy always comes with the risk of nuking your system.
Once you understand computer security, piracy always comes with the risk of nuking your system.
Know how to rebuild your system before you get spicy, and let’s talk about network provisions too.
I nuked my system once. I was 5-6 years old and I deleted system32 to make space for SimCity 2000. PC didn’t turn on after resetting.
I’ve downloaded stuff and pirated media from the internet since I was like 10 (no internet access before that). Never have I ever nuked my system from piracy, even if I may have downloaded a virus or two (without notable consequences).
I feel like clicking ads on YouTube nowadays or downloading random crap from the play store is more dangerous for your security than piracy is. I respect your decision though!
Not if you hang out in the right places. There are some trust rings where you can procure media by alternative means with absolute security and peace of mind. But it’s a club and you ain’t in it.
They all got greedy. All of them. We wanted a streaming service to watch our shows and movies on, and they all decided to pretend that what we really wanted was a return to paying $100+ a month for a collection of channels with content that we mostly don’t watch on them, only this time with a bunch of additional apps you have to install for each one, most of them remarkably shitty. Like cable, but stupider.
Remember when the streaming setup was simple? There was basically just Netflix, it paid for licenses to content from Disney, Paramount, etc., and provided guaranteed income for those companies. Small income, sure, but steady.
Then each of them said, “Hey, why don’t we replace Netflix, only all we’ll stream is our own stuff! And sure, most of it’s trash, but people will stick around for the good shows!”
No. No, they won’t. They’ll go back to pirating it. No one is paying for Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Paramount+, Max, Peacock, AppleTV, ESPN+, Prime, and whatever other shitty “exclusive” streaming service pops up.
I don’t think that content producers should be able to have their own streaming services. Similar to how movie studios couldn’t own theaters or whatever until lobbyists killed that too.
If politicians didn‘t have their own horses in this race to the bottom of costumer satisfaction those anti trust laws would have been expanded on 100% but unfortunately we got a corrupt pile of crap.
Or follow the one good thing the music industry does… allow music across different platforms. I can listen to the same songs on YouTube Music, Spotify, Apple, etc. none of this “get the XYZ app to listen to a band, and another app to listen to others”.
Prime is like: you know that service we sold you that played movies without commercials? We’re putting commercials in it.
I’m like: Bye felicia. I’ll be fucked to pay more for data transit in 2024 than I paid before, the movement of bits and streaming of bytes have not gone up fuckwits. And I don’t need the rest of the amazon trash either. Thanks for making it easy!
Also that movie you want to watch? You gotta rent it. Fuck your subscription.
“Oh, and 2/3 of our content is only available via ‘channels’ which require an additional monthly subscription almost as much as the subscription you’re already paying for.”
Amazon, you literally own MGM. No I am not paying you even more money to watch MGM content, you greedy fucks.
What about Tubi and Pluto TV? That’s what I use.
I love those. They’re underrated. Crackle is pretty nice, too.
The paid streaming services are all running ads now anyway, so it makes sense not to bother paying for it.
Yeah, I oughta use Crackle myself.
Thanks for the recommendation!
The answer is Stremio + Torrentio with Real Debrid.
I am partial to Kodi, Seren and real-debrid.
Weird how an open source media streaming app works fine, but Disney can’t keep their app working on Android to save their lives.
I assume bullshit DRM has something to do with it, but I wouldn’t know because there’s way easier (and even legal!) ways to get media onto my server than that.
Please share. I dont understand where people get media especially legal nowadays. I would go to pirate bay if I need something.
I’m filling my wants of CDs and BDs from eBay, new stuff Amazon because I’m lazy. (then it lives on sans the case in a Case Logic binder)
Pretty straight forward for me.
Stremio+Torrentio add-on for streaming torrents.
I buy DVDs.
When they stop selling DVDs I’ll have to reevaluate.
There’s plenty of screen and audio capture technology that is immune to DRM (sending the signal across a primitive wire to a separate DRM-free device), check your area for legality, but I don’t think any non-asshole would disagree with your moral right to backup your digital purchases.
But at some point if they keep making it hard for me to pay money for media, well, yo ho ho, and avast!
Well to be fair, subtitles are often messed up on the open source one, but OH BOY you haven’t seen the state of Belgian streaming apps.
Casting doesn’t work on most, subtitles only work on 1/3 with some reality shows having burned in subs, tapping the screen in logical places to play/pause doesn’t work (like the giant play button in the middle of the screen when paused), one of them literally doesn’t even have a search function.
Ads are ridiculous, 10+ ads every 10 minutes. Not to mention that if you scrub at all instead of just forward/back, automatic ad break plays. Recently played just stopped being broken and giving wrong episodes. It is an absolute mess.
I download subtitles from addic7ed (shows) and subscene (movies). Rarely had any problems.
www.defectivebydesign.org
I’m past 40. I don’t give a fuck about TV or movies anymore. Disney is in trouble.
I’m in the same boat. I feel like everything is just regurgitated over and over again. Every twist, every turn. And I’m tired of watching something and be able to predict, what the plot will be. It’s the same with music. Many songs are written to perform by metrics, like length and listener retention in the first 30 seconds, so that you reach the magical monetization line on the streaming platform of your labels choice.
It’s always been this way. We’re just old enough now to see the cycle for what it is.
No, I don’t believe that to be true.
Writing these shows is now so industrial that inspiration is never the driving factor.
It’s the difficult second album problem. Your first album was a big success because you’d been polishing the tracks for 5-10 years whilst you were trying to get noticed. Youve now got 6 months to write the next album.
TV and film writers are never given the time to properly develop ideas because the industry needs more content now.
We are saturated in low-quality media these days, most of which is predictable and poorly written. We’ve seen all the whiz-bang CGI, the standard plots, the trite romantic scenes, the heroes and the anti-heroes. Movies, in particular, suffer because of their short format. Movies essentially rely on stock characters and formulaic plots because there isn’t enough time available for a complex story arc or character development. Because of that, I’d wager that well-planned limited series are more popular than movies among people over 40.
So much this! None of it is worth our time. The Hollywood capitalism machine has just gotten really good at making people believe that every film or show is going to be the next important cultural touchstone and if you don’t see it you will be left out. But after it goes off the air and people stop talking about it, none of it really mattered. “Fast content” is like “fast fashion” - designed to be disposable and to keep consumers paying for it over and over.
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People with MBAs can’t fucking help themselves. They got a goose that lays golden eggs, but it doesn’t lay those golden eggs fast enough, so without even taking off their wristwatch they reach right up the poor bird’s cloaca, grab the first thing that feels vaguely round and pull as hard as they can. So then they have a half inside out goose and no more golden eggs ever again.
People pay for a Master’s degree to learn how to do this.
Reminds me of a passage in Ben Rich’s autobiography. Ben Rich spent his career at the Lockeed Skunkworks, started off designing a heater for the relief tube of jet fighters so the pilot’s penis wouldn’t freeze to the side of the tube while taking a piss, ended up running the team that designed the F-117. While he was second in command, his boss sent him to Harvard’s Business School, who ran a time crunched program for adults who are already in careers and “need” additional business schooling. Upon his return, his boss asked him what he learned. And he wrote on the chalkboard “2/3 HBS = BS”
top secret ball bearings rolling across pentagon desks, goddamn that’s a good freakin’ book :D
So HBS is Harvard Business School, BS is bullshit. What does “2/3” refer to?
Two-thirds. As in two of the three letters of HBS
Oh, gotcha.
Two thirds of HBS is BS, I guess it’s saying it literally and playing that HBS has 3 letters and BS 2
Ah, thanks!
They can’t even admit this mindset is stupid because after they ruin every worthwhile company they just jump to the next thing while the industry they left sinks.
I mean, thats the way the capitalist, stock-return-driven economy works. The market expects a company to constantly grow to pump their stock price, so they have to find new revenue or cut costs somewhere. But they can’t do that forever…
The founders build a great product to pull in users, then they go public, then the MBAs turn to enshittification to drive more revenue and get rich while they can. The rest of us then move on to the next platform, if it even exists…
It has less to to with people having MBAs and much more to do with companies having shareholders. Once you’re a publicly traded company there are overwhelmingly strong external forces that compell companies to increase revenue. Even if the business model is perfectly solid and it doesn’t make sense to expect rising profits the shareholders only care about growth rates. On the stock market a companies value is only dependent on its growth.
Take Netflix for example. They’ve had so many users some years ago when they were basically the only streaming service that one might have said they reached market saturation. That would’ve been a money making machine that people could be content with. But since the market always needs growth it isn’t enough and netflix is always trying to “innovate” or squeezie more monthly payments from the existing customer base.
cory doctorow has coined the great word “enshittification” to describe this process. And its driven by the need to grow further even though its to the detriment of the service or the customers. In the end it’s the people with the MBAs doing it. But if they’re not doing it the shareholders replace them with those that do.
I had almost gotten to the point where I could reasonably pay for most stuff and didn’t have to steal shit that wasn’t even available “in my market”, which, as a concept, can go fuck itself entirely to death as far as I’m concerned; but now everybody’s being dicks to each other and core content is leaving platforms I’m paying for and moving onto platforms i’m not allowed to use, so, no, it’s not the fault of the big guys per se but the collective and progressive brain death of the entertainment industry, whose obscene copyright regime is finally biting it in the ass but they’re still reeling from their latest cocaine decision and haven’t figured out why they can’t sit down yet. … I think that’s the longest sentence I’ve ever written.
But it doesn’t even matter. As soon as the competition dies down and things settle into a pattern, they’ll start putting the screws to us anyway, because that’s just what capitalism is. Enshittification ftw!
Yup.
I basically don’t pirate music because streaming is convenient.
I generally don’t pirate games because steam and GOG is convenient. (Sometimes if I’m not sure ill enjoy it I’ll pirate as a no limit trail then buy or drop).
I generally have to with movies and shows. Even though I have access to several streaming platforms though stuff like T-Mobile, AT&T, etc. it’s too annoying to jump around a bunch of apps and the quality is bad compared to the UHD rips of stuff
So true!
If I want to buy a game it’s super easy to search for it on my choice of digital store front, pay for it and download it.
If I want to watch a show I could do a search for which streaming service it’s available on and hope it’s one I have an account with, or for the same amount of effort I could do a search for the torrent and be able to watch it if the internet goes down.
Why not just rent each movie for 48 hours from Amazon for the bargain price of “pretty much the same as a Blu-ray disc, and often higher”?
This was especially frustrating with kids. All too often, with the shorter attention span of little ones, and general lack of time, where we couldn’t finish a movie that quickly. Maybe I understand that for physical media but for digital where the only scarcity is artificial?
Someone missed out on so much of my money for streaming movies when my kids were little, simply because I couldn’t guarantee finishing them in 48 hours so I didn’t rent
I used netflix until the majority of my searches didnt show a result. and then went back to pirating.
using jellyfin+jellyseer and radarr/sonarr make it almost as convenient
This is why I pirate Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. I have a subscription to pretty much every streaming service in my country (Netflix, prime video, HBO max, apple TV, Sky showtime, etc. ) but Sky only has SNW in 1080p SDR. I can download it in 4k HDR. I don’t feel one bit guilty about it, I pay for the damn service that offers it. Just not in an acceptable picture quality.
What do you mean with SDR?
Standard Dynamic Range. It’s a term adopted to differentiate non-HDR video from HDR video.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Standard-dynamic-range_video
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Standard-dynamic-range video (SDR video) is a video technology which represents light intensity based on the brightness, contrast and color characteristics and limitations of a cathode ray tube (CRT) display. SDR video is able to represent a video or picture’s colors with a maximum luminance around 100 cd/m2, a black level around 0.1 cd/m2 and Rec.709 / sRGB color gamut. It uses the gamma curve as its electro-optical transfer function.The first CRT television sets were manufactured in 1934 and the first color CRT television sets were manufactured in 1954. The term “standard-dynamic-range video” was adopted to distinguish SDR video from high-dynamic-range video (HDR video), a new technology that was developed in the 2010s to overcome SDR’s limits.^article^ ^|^ ^about^
Oh, cool. Another gimmick that we are going to be fighting about which standard to use for the next few decades, making terabytes of libraries seem obsolete, and another convenient excuse for the manufacturers to discontinue old models and keep the TV prices up despite offering no real improvements and manufacturing costs and quality dropping to the floor. Nice.
It’s not just quality compared with UHD rips, it’s things like prime video refusing to play anything except 480p on a web browser… WTF are they thinking?
I don’t use if on a browser, but even on my Shield Pro it’s not great. Prime Video seems to use a very low bitrate, there’s lots of compression artifacts, even on the 4k streams.
It’s just more enshittification. If they can get away with smaller files, they absolutely will.
First time I’ve seen … a paywall where trying reader mode showed an entirely different story
The article changed for you?
Same title, but in reader mode, the text started with
I’ve seen it a few times on different sites. Very strange. The strangest was when the different story was on the same topic, so I didn’t realize at first.
Markets are greedy and never satisfied. A fracturing of services has led to situation where it’s impossible for the average person to be able to afford all the streaming services they need in order to watch their stuff. And even if they could, they now have to pay extra to exclude adverts - the lack of which was a major selling point for streaming services. Pay extra to watch in high quality and no matter what service you use and what content you’ve bought - music, TV, books, movies. games - it’s all stuffed full of DRM that can literally remove the media from your devices. You don’t even really own the stuff you’ve bought.
So yeah, I fully appreciate why some people pirate stuff.
My household still subscribes to most streaming services at the moment, but I’ve often considered “alternative means of acquisition” just because it’s now such a pain in the ass to figure out which service has the content I want to watch. Things move around way too much and sometimes disappear completely. It’s just easier to go to one site, download, and watch.
I setup a Plex server with all the Arr’s and it took me maybe 1 hour and about $1500 in hardware such as a desktop PC and 4 x 10TB drives. Then I had to pay for a News Servers service ($100 for 15 months) and I opted to purchase a domain for like $7/year. Quite the upfront cost but easy to setup and maintain and I can watch anything I want with the best possible experience possible. If my internet goes down? I can still watch everything. When my News Servers subscription runs out, I still keep everything I have and can watch it as many times as I want. It’s so simple to use, my wife who LOVES TV now prefers ‘on demand’.
All thanks to the greedy fuckers running literally every streaming service.
I’d also put that as a “nice to have”.
I’ve upgraded my server similarly. But I initially just plugged Unraid into an old (~2012) desktop with a handful of old 1-2 terabyte drives. It’s super easy to spread out the cost over time. I just moved machines and it was literally as simple as having all the same hard drives plugged into the new machine.
Yup, good point. You don’t have to buy a new desktop with the latest Intel CPU with massive storage. You can start small and upgrade as needed. I know I wanted this solution so I invested to make sure I had something I can use for a long time. I got a desktop with a 12th gen i5 so it can do transcoding though it’s not needed.
for anyone afraid of the upfront cost: you don’t need to buy so many expensive hard disk drives to self host a media server like Jellyfin/Plex
RAID arrays add complexity and get expensive very fast while not being a proper backup solution at all, it’s nice to have but not required
on a budget buying a large hard disk drive (12~16 TB is a good sweet spot right now) and later down the road another one as periodic backup solution might be the wiser choice while accumulating your collection of media
Raid is exactly as much or as little of a proper backup solution as you configure it to be isnt it?
Technically speaking, RAID is redundancy not backup. A proper backup is an archived copy of the data stored not stored in the same logical infrastructure as the primary data.
With a RAID you can swap in a new drive if one (or more, depending on your RAID#) drive in your RAID array dies. If enough of your redundancy in a RAID fails, you will lose data.
With a proper backup you can restore the entirety of the RAID array even if the original data has been physically destroyed.
This was actually something i thought newer raid features included and is why asked the question!
Thanks for letting me know, im so far out of being in touch with current technology it makes me sad. But i still find i love listening to people like my brother explain to me the stuff hes always keeping up on that we had used in years gone by. Technology is so cool but its so hard to keep up with if you dont work with it professionally. Or have the time/capacity/talent and disposable money if you lack the ability for self learning.
We live in such a disappointing technologically advanced world of the future.
You just happened to get a reply from a former backup engineer who has had to explain this concept to customers.
Something else in the backup world that gets regularly misused: backups != disaster ecovery.
Disaster recovery is a whole plan of action. Backups can be a part of DR, yes, but I have had way too many companies consider their backups as the totality of their DR.
Well I really appreciate you taking the time to respond.
I really wasnt thinking of backup more than a drive failing, which for personal use i think is what most people have in their heads.
I remember having to use rerecordable dvds each day at one of my early jobs and then the owner also having monthly back ups as well. For home entertainment i never really think of that kind of planning.
I imagine you are familiar with zip and jaz drives? I still kinda think of backups being something like that to some degree if im not actually thinking about it. Not those technologies per say but just something the average home user will never see and is kinda mythical?
They seemed so future tech to a much younger me. Like when you were on dial up and someone said they were able to use an oc3 line once! (Ah the 90s kids we were)
I know of several very large companies that still use tape backups. Granted they’re not like the cassette tapes we used back in the 20th century, but it is still the same tech.
Those tape libraries are more akin to zip/jaz drives.
Neat. Back ups in that world im sure there is a whole world of options/solutions depending on what it is that needs to be preserved?
It basically only protects against hardware failure. It’s not going to protect you from ransomware or even just accidentally clicking delete.
Thanks. I was misunderstanding concepts here in a big way
I just download what I want to watch, watch it, then delete it. I have a 500gb SSD in my Mac, and about 30gb of it is currently taken up by Plex.
Netflix did stop me from pirating for several years until it went to shit. Once the other companies started rolling out their own streaming services and pulling their content off Netflix I went back to piracy. It’s way easier to manage one VPN subscription than try to keep track of a bunch of streaming services.
I still have more subs for these than I would like, but I generally download anything I actually want to watch anyway. Like, the fact that justwatch.com even exists is an indictment of the way this works.
I am still convinced that they eventually give up and license their content back to Netflix for a nice passive income. We’ll get back to those days.
Power to the pirates, the only ones making all content accessible to everyone.
Meh. None of it is worth watching anyway. The older you get the more you see it’s all trash and always has been trash.
While I agree with your sentiment, there’s no need to yuck anybody’s yum
Hey no yuck shaming
I think a majority of people would say that every single new Marvel, Star Wars, and DC product is shit.
That’s even more of a reason for me to pirate. I have access to pretty much every TV show, movie, book, comic, etc that I could possibly want from before my existence til now. I can get to it from anywhere in the world and i know that i’m not just gonna arbitrarily remove it. I can also get specific releases or better formats. I have scripts to easily remux audio or subtitles or whatever I want. I’ve even learned how to Web-DL from services I get for free from my ISP and cell carrier. My Plex server is definitely better than any single streaming service and I have quite a bit of stuff that isn’t on any. Would never choose to go back at this point with how convoluted and expensive streaming is now.
Lol all available movies and all available tv shows from all time are trash?
“I don’t subscribe to ‘sPoTiFy’ or ‘aPpLe MuSiC.’ When I hit 22 I realized music SUUUUCKS.”
To write off entire art forms is…an interesting position to take.
When you grow up you’ll see
I’m old. I love music, I love film, I enjoy the craft of writing and appreciate what it takes to write a story that will play out visually and be spoken aloud and embodied by different types of artists and then lit by another type of artist and shot by another type of artist.
Age has nothing to do with liking art. Taste does. You either hate art or you just are very bad at finding things to enjoy.
That’s going to have to wait. In my 40s now, and still waiting for the “when you grow up you’ll be conservative” to happen.
That’s a big duh. I saw this coming four or five years ago.
“Stronger than ever”… I still feel like the golden age of piracy is long lost
Care to elaborate?
Maybe this is just a regional thing, but 10 to 20 years ago piracy was everywhere and it was pretty accessible. You could download anything from common social media and forum links with out caring a lot about security. Games, books, music, programs. There where torrent clients dedicated entirely for music and videos, video players for pirated movies filmed by a freaking hero sliding a camera and a tripod to a local cinema and translated by another hero. You got sites to host shit without any restriction and anyone with a hand and a computer could access it. Just click and go.
One of those hosting sites, megaupload, the mecca of piracy got a few lawsuits because of that and the owner ended up taking the site down. That was a dark day and after that hosting sites started falling one by one. Torrents become increasingly popular. There were tons of them, commented and maintain, leaving messages for the christian behind you was a thing. ‘Seed please, seeeeeed!’ And shit. This isnt something that happened in my country, but as I understand, arround that time groups of lawyers tarted monitoring internet to catch people pirating things and vpns polulated everywhere. At one point some torrent sites started being raided (tpb, now accessed through a proxy) or just closed
Both abundancy and easyness to access pirated things have become increasingly difficult over the years… there are still places to go. In spanish, book repositories close from time to time now they have move everything to lib-gen. Standards? You could download them from TPB long time ago. Last time i had to dive in VK to get them, now i dont know what to do if I lose them.
Some things i say could be wrong*
Edit: another jewl from the golden age, i remember downloading MW3 a day before it got launched. Some dudes (teknogods) used a loop in the user agreement to make some sort of a server client, and of course there was no restriction for pirated versions. It was even better than buying the game. I live in sudamerica and always played with 300 ping (MW, cod 4) with teknogods it was closer to 30.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. I guess I’ve gotten so use to today’s pirating techniques that my perception of what is considered easy has changed. Reading through your post, I’m reminded of how much easier it really was back then.
Ship based piracy absolutely.
Digital piracy:
I remember Kazaa and LimeWire where you hoped the thing you were downloading for hours/days wasn’t a virus or a joke meme making fun of you for trusting someone. Getting an entire album of mp3s that were actually the band you hoped for and not missing any songs was a minor miracle.
Now there are dozens of automated tools that talk to each other. I type the name of the movie into a search bar, look through a list of posters and click the ‘request’ button. It get’s torrented in the background and then shows up on my Plex server. If I paid for a usenet group all that could happen an order of magnitude faster.
Search in one place, watch in one place.
It’s not quite as instant as streaming, but at this point I have such a back catalogue to work through that that isn’t really an issue.
You ain’t kidding! I recently got Sonarr/Radar/Prowlarr/Overseer setup and oh my gosh is it glorious! Look through trending movies/shows, couple clicks and it’s in Jellyfin in minutes. The industry is going to have to produce something VERY consumer-focused/friendly to even begin to tempt me away from this. They done fucked up. 😂
I downloaded Matilda the other day. Yes the movie about a child that’s brilliant and might have super powers and the premise of the entire movie is basically Ha ha child abuse. It’s a movie I had not thought about in decades and on a whim wanted to watch for nostalgia. I checked all the streaming services I have. None of them had it. I checked TPB. I had it in 1080p in five minutes.
This is not an unusual story. I mean the Matilda part but I feel like this is the exact same story for nearly everyone pirating things more frequently.
Put out more good shows/movies, that way I don’t feel like I’m being taken for a $15 ride every month for 1 decent show and maybe 1 movie.
When it was just Netflix and Hulu, it was great for consumers because having a couple streaming services could easily replace the need for cable TV for most people (unless you wanted to watch live sports) and the entertainment companies could still profit from licensing their content to the streaming services. But that wasn’t enough for the entertainment companies, and they all thought they could get in on the streaming game with their own platforms, only to discover that keeping a streaming service running and keeping subscribers is expensive for both the company and the consumer, and consumers only have so much time and disposable income they can spend on those services. So the market has become oversaturated with a million streaming services all carrying limited libraries of content that make it tough for any consumer to feel it’s worth it to pay for any of them except when one or two certain shows on each have a new season. This leaves most services running at a loss after expenses of keeping servers up and trying to make content to bring in and keep those subscribers, which many fail to do. The current state of it is unsustainable and I think in the end it’s eventually going to return to a model where only a few will survive, probably the larger ones owned by the entertainment companies themselves who have deep enough pockets from their other ventures to keep their services alfoat during off-peak times. A LOT of content is going to become lost media as that purge of services happens.
When the day will come, and once I pay for something I have the ability to just hit download and it will fetch an .mkv/.mp4 from a CDN, that’s when I’ll pay for it. Sadly that day isn’t even remotely close, so torrenting it is. Oh and fuck you WideVine.
One day… We hope.
You don’t need to hope as you can do this now without even having to pay first. If anyone should be hopeful, it’s these studios/distribution platforms.
That’s how Louis CK distributes his shows since he was cancelled.
I also recently started pirating again. The cost is too damn high for all these streaming platforms, not to mention a lot of the base packages have ads/commercials (gross). I use Stremio+Torrentio+Real Debrid (which is insanely cheap compared to purchasing 6 different streaming platforms). Until there is a massive change to how media is circulated this is gonna be my setup.
I pay 16€ for my torrenting and another 7 per month for usenet and can have almost every movie, show and media I want.
Exactly
All this hasn’t forced me into piracy.
It’s worse than that.
It’s forced me to stop caring about shows or movies entirely.
Yes me too, I find myself watching movies less and less.
I find myself buying real books, ebooks online and buying vinyls.
I still stream music though, but the thing is, most music that could be found on Spotify, could be found on Apple Music or Deezer.
As it should be. Compete witg additional features not with exclusivity.
Epic tries to do the same with Steam trying to strongarm the gaming community with free games.
And yet the users will still pay on Steam.
That’s odd. I find myself unable to keep up with all the movies I want to see. You should check out the Criterion collection.
I’ve been reading a lot more.
My coworkers talk about various TV shows and movies. I may not be able to keep up with the shows and miss out on the discussions, but fuck FOMO.
There’s been almost no movies that have come out that I’ve really cared about, nor.most of my friends.
I’ve found TV shows to be somewhat more compelling. But it’s been really hard to decide what to try to get into (limited time, partly).
But also the shared element isn’t there like it used to be. There’s just so MUCH stuff to watch, finding people to talk to about the stuff is harder than it used to be. That’s good in the sense of having choice, but worse in having the entertainment provide a connection to people and talk about. Which was always one of my motivators to watch stuff.
Plus games and YouTube and other things competing, and fragmentation of where stuff is, and corporate plbullshit turning me off, I just care less about long form shows being put out.
But people are definitely still watching tons and tons of shit. “Consuming” and “binging” is bigger than ever. I guess it’s just not us so much.
More stuff is switching to weekly rollouts and I end up not watching at all because of that.
There’s nothing wider than binging a show then getting the last episode 2 weeks later.
Binging shows is one of the reasons why we live in the entertainment hellscape that we have. When everything is instant gratification, it means less and it’s less enjoyable. Wait a week for the next episode creates excitement and ultimately more joy over the several year period it’ll take you to finish watching the show. The same goes for people. You’re more likely to have fond feelings for the person you’ve known all your life rather than the person you sat next to on the bus for a couple hours.
.
Find a watching buddy.
Will you be my buddy
I would but then I would be doxxing myself on the account that I use for promoting my naked hairy balls and terrorism.
Fair enough.
I honestly haven’t heard a coworker mention a TV show since White Lotus last January. Not a single show.
I’ve talked about a couple with friends: Scott Pilgrim, The Last of Us, House of Usher, but generally I brought it up and really 2023 was not a very memorable year for TV shows.
TLOU was pretty good, although there’s literally nothing to talk about given how directly faithful it is to the game.
.
This may come as a shock, but some people happen to enjoy content.
Crazy concept, I know.
Other than A24, aint nothing really worth watching these days. Which is great, because I have a backlog of great movies and TV backed up that I’m going to spend the next couple decades crushing.
The same thing happened to me. It’s really sad.
Same. I gave up on star wars after glub shitto was given to fake Luke at the end of that series. Just haven’t been able to care about the flood of B tier content after. Same with marvel after end game. There’s like 6 half assed shows and 8 movies or something now. It’s just too much filler and there’s no way I’m paying 3 or 4 services for mediocre content. I pirated everything in my early 20s and this feels like going back to the old times when the Internet was better. The nostalgia alone is making me happy to pirate again.
im glad i still care because i never let them josh me
I am most definitely far more passive in my consumption than before. YouTube is actually where most of my media comes from now. Then my colleagues are always on about the Masked Singer or whatever is going on. I managed to make it through maybe 2 episodes before it made me sick.
I was sort of like this before, not really caring too much about most movies or TV shows, but that was just because I had higher standards to what I would be willing to take the time to watch. When I did find something I thought was worth my time, like for instance Full Metal Alchemist (yes I know it’s an anime, it still counts as a TV show imo. Also it’s great, I definitely recommend watching it). The general decrease in quality and increase in quantity of shows and movies just made me stop caring to watch really anything; why take a chance with a likely shitty show or movie when I can get much more fun out of playing video games? I know there’s likely some “hidden gem” kind of show that nobody really talks about because it’s hidden away in all the crappy shows, so I usually only decide to watch something if I’ve heard good things about it more than once. Even then, I may still not watch it, like for instance One Piece, which I’ve heard is incredibly long.
Hi, One Piece fan here. Yes, it’s really long and really intimidating to start. I haven’t watch most of the anime too, and never recomment others to watch it. I’m solely reading the manga (and live action).
I suggest waiting for the netflix anime readaptation that’s in production now. Logically, it should have better pace and much less filler than the first anime. It’s gonna be way easier to pick up than the first anime with its thousand episodes.
I mean, it IS Netflix, so it shouldn’t be presumed to be better in any way. Still, I will try pirating it first, rather than giving Netflix any money beforehand only to find out it’s crap.
Same, I’ll watch one every once in a while but in general I much prefer educational content and documentaries.
YouTube is my is DoC :)
What Usenet groups are people using these days?
Give lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy a try!
Edit: Lemmy link - !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Ahh, I was trying to figure out how that worked on Fediland. You just opened a door for me on the Fediverse.
NFL this weekend forcing you to have a Peacock subscription for a playoff game. Are you crazy?!?
.
American foot-of-the-ball.
Not for life
OK, but is it actually booming?
We’re seeing a slight uptick possibly because of how fractured and inconsistent the streaming services have become, but we’re definitely not in some piracy renaissance yet.
Think there also was a big switch from torrenting to using the online streaming sites. Wonder if that’s affecting the count.
It’s not when torrents appeared, more when people got connected to ADSL and later fiber which made the download of very large files feasible.
Momentum is picking back up for it. It takes time.
My biggest question is despite how expensive Disney+ is and their huge subscriber base, how are they not profitable? Nebula is a fraction of the price without any ads and plenty of originals and is quite profitable despite having under 1 million subs.
They are profitable. Just not profitable enough.
No, they actually aren’t profitable.
From arstechnica.com/…/its-shakeout-time-as-losses-of-…
“Disney, the largest traditional media company, is in the midst of a gutting restructuring that has featured 7,000 job cuts and attacks from activist investors. It lost more than $1.6 billion from its streaming businesses in the first nine months of 2023, during which its Disney+ service gained 8 million subscribers. The company says it will turn a profit in streaming in late 2024.”
They spent $350 million making Secret Invasion, which was a bad show in every way. They have no control over their costs, yet they squeeze everyone as hard as they can.
All of these media companies splitting everything up and making it nearly impossible to figure out which service is hosting what shows is what did this. They got greedy and raised their prices.
So naturally people are going to be inclined to figure out how to safely pirate things and then they’re going to do it.
You should never pirate things, that would be immoral to use mullvad and qbittorrent to pirate things!
Movies (7) and (9) anime are very expensive to make! You’re stealing from corporate executives when you pirate!
I never subscribed to streaming services.
I always used free streaming sites like fmovies or downloaded stuff I really liked.
Forget streaming, physical media is ripe for hoarding right now. Thrift stores, antique malls, junk stores, etc can’t give this stuff away. Even 4k blurays on amazon are deeply discounted right now.
Services like these combatted convenience not price. It just happened that prices were able to be low whilst these companies could afford it.
Unfortunately due to greed and rising energy costs (but let’s face it, it’s greed) prices are rising which makes convenience matter less.
And to add to that, having multiple streaming services isn’t convenient. Again, this is caused by greed.
Also, rip and share your physical media if you can.
Sometimes I wonder whether these ‘piracy back on the menu’ write-ups are entertainment industry plants whose purpose is to manipulate congress critters.