• Chozo@kbin.social
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    11 months ago

    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.

    • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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      11 months ago

      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.

    • DashboTreeFrog@discuss.online
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      11 months ago

      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.

  • sndmn@lemmy.ca
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    11 months ago

    I’ve never seen a magnet link respond with “this is not available in your country”.

  • WatDabney@sopuli.xyz
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    11 months ago

    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.

    • variants@possumpat.io
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      11 months ago

      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

  • shrugal@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    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!

    • ShepherdPie@midwest.social
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      11 months ago

      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)

  • DevilOfDoom@lemmy.one
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    11 months ago

    As Lord Gaben once said: Piracy is a service problem.

    Make better service, have less piracy.

    • Legoraft@reddthat.com
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      11 months ago

      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

      • Specal@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        And they have Spotify DJ, which not everyone likes but I think it’s great, worth the £10 a month to me

  • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    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.

    • histic@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      11 months ago

      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

    • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      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

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      11 months ago

      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.

      • Kbobabob@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        More competition should mean lower prices. How is competition diving prices up? Seems rigged.

        • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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          11 months ago

          Same amount of content, more players, outbidding each other, passing on those lovely reverse savings.

          See if it was like music, with a massive back catalogue available to everyone, you’d have four or five services competing on price. But it isn’t. And it will suffer for that.

  • EpicVision@monero.town
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    11 months ago

    When overpriced streaming services keep becoming worse and worse, it’s hard to avoid piracy

    • Asafum@feddit.nl
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      11 months ago

      “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!

  • psycho_driver@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    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.

    • jkrtn@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      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?”

      • Banzai51@midwest.social
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        11 months ago

        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.

        • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          It was Netflix’s decision to add ads to paid subscriptions and limit browsers to 720p even for accounts that pay for 4k. Neflix isn’t the only cause, but they are part of the problem