I’m glad I switched to a debrid service with Stremio, and after about six months moved over to Omni Content Hub. For around $32 a year with Real-Debrid, I can stream or torrent anything I want to...
I’m glad I switched to a debrid service with Stremio, and after about six months moved over to Omni Content Hub. For around $32 a year with Real-Debrid, I can stream or torrent anything I want to watch. Setup took less than an hour, and now I’ve got access to all major streaming content and movies in one place. Honestly, I just got tired of overpaying and supporting companies whose practices don’t align with my values.
Content creators don't get paid when you switch to piracy. If you're fine with that, you do you, but I will never understand why you guys can't keep your knowledge to yourselves. There's plenty of...
Content creators don't get paid when you switch to piracy. If you're fine with that, you do you, but I will never understand why you guys can't keep your knowledge to yourselves. There's plenty of ways to purchase media on the terms that you want: blu-rays, digital retailers, or streaming. The only thing that you're not able to decide is media at the price you want. When that happens, just discreetly do your thing. I have a NAS; I'm not blind to the realities of it. But I also purchase media because I can and because artists get compensation for it.
The vast majority of them barely get paid when I buy it too haha. At least with music. I suppose with the way production companies get spun up for TV and film it’s maybe a bigger piece of the pie...
The vast majority of them barely get paid when I buy it too haha. At least with music. I suppose with the way production companies get spun up for TV and film it’s maybe a bigger piece of the pie to the creators and less to the lawyers negotiating rights but I’m honestly not sure. I think pirating a piece of media and then directly wiring the production company $5 would probably end up getting them more money than spending $35 a month on streaming it.
But either way it’s feeling like the social contract has worn pretty thin, and a lot of “little people” no longer feel any obligation to hold up their end of it when it’s become very clear that none of the elites care to. What’s the point? We’re basically in a transition process to becoming a low trust society, which is ironically a situation where norms ensure that corruption and lawlessness will flourish. As it is for businesses, it applies for societal norms too.. When every interaction with big business seems like an attempt to upcharge me to remove inconveniences they’ve introduced to create something to upcharge for, and the government is actively being looted by corrupt billionnaires in plain sight, what actual buy in do any of us have to uphold these norms around property rights that are structured to ensure those same people become fabulously wealthy at our expense?
Yes, in one very limited view of it, but no. Let's take a band for example. If you buy a song for 1.29, sure it's not a lot of that 1.29 making it to the band member by the end of it. But that...
Yes, in one very limited view of it, but no. Let's take a band for example. If you buy a song for 1.29, sure it's not a lot of that 1.29 making it to the band member by the end of it. But that 1.29 is part of an ecosystem that enabled the record label to hire out a studio and pay in advance for the work required to product an album.
If you're pirating the song and sending the 1.29 to the band directly, the macro effect of everyone doing this would break the current ecosystem, leading to no studios financially risking it on new bands in the future. Sending the 1.29 to the band directly also fails to compensate literally every other person involved in the recording except the band. Performing the music is just a slice of what it takes to create a song.
Paying via streaming or purchasing media is still the most fair way to distribute profits as we've had decades to refine the royalty model so that people in the chain get paid a portion of the direct sales. Unless you find a better way to do so, you end up weighting too heavily towards one part of it.
Arguably, we're paying too little for media these days. With inflation and the move towards and streaming, the average person is probably paying way less for media today than they were paying 20 years ago.
Yes I know how the ecosystem effects work. But like I said, nobody feels like they’re bought into the system as it exists. If every aspect of your interaction with it makes it clear that you are...
Yes I know how the ecosystem effects work. But like I said, nobody feels like they’re bought into the system as it exists. If every aspect of your interaction with it makes it clear that you are viewed as a bag of money to be squeezed as hard as possible, it naturally puts people in a mental mode where they want to avoid being squeezed in any way possible. The shared sense of contributing to an ecosystem doesn’t really work when everything is being run by guys like Zaslav out there demanding we all swallow down whatever slop they design to provide us. It’s really much more like the creators’ livelihoods are being held hostage by the execs who are demanding us to pay up.
Arguably, we're paying too little for media these days. With inflation and the move towards and streaming, the average person is probably paying way less for media today than they were paying 20 years ago.
That might have been true before but it’s quickly becoming not true as an average bundle of streaming packages approaches the prices of a cable subscription. Also, just focusing on how much people pay over time is only looking at one piece of the puzzle. The better question is “who is capturing the value?” Because productivity has actually massively increased and distribution and marketing costs have been driven down as well. It would make sense that we pay less when it costs a lot less to deliver the content. But then, as usual, most of the returns from these increases accrue to the people who control the logistics regardless of who is adding or deriving the most value.
Even if they don’t understand it I think intuitively people can feel this. They can tell when a service is cancelling shows they like for not driving enough subscriptions, the sorts of shows that may have been modestly successful under older business models or if the industry was less monopolistic and fixated on monster hits, they can tell something is off. People who care a lot about this stuff can sense that something is off.
People today eat out more than they ever have. They travel more than they ever have. People aren't unable to pay $20/month for streaming; they just have an easy and cheaper alternative to it lol....
People today eat out more than they ever have. They travel more than they ever have. People aren't unable to pay $20/month for streaming; they just have an easy and cheaper alternative to it lol. People have always been viewed as bags of money to be squeezed; someone in the 80s was under no delusion that the media companies of those times wanted more money. When people could steal cable connections, they did. When people didn't know how or were afraid, they didn't. That's the only thing that's changed in the modern era; every person today knows how to access media for cheaper.
That might have been true before but it’s quickly becoming not true as an average bundle of streaming packages approaches the prices of a cable subscription.
The fact that it's only approaching prices from over a decade ago despite money having devalued so much should show how not-unreasonable-by-historic-measures media is today. Any person can access more media than they have time to watch by paying $20/month and changing services every month. No one needs to have every streaming service available every month.
They have not. There has been a marked shift in business culture and how services are offered to focus on “whale hunting,” where every good and service is tiered and structured to be able to...
People have always been viewed as bags of money to be squeezed; someone in the 80s was under no delusion that the media companies of those times wanted more money.
They have not. There has been a marked shift in business culture and how services are offered to focus on “whale hunting,” where every good and service is tiered and structured to be able to squeeze more money from people who can afford it. It makes the actual experience of using any service one where you are being continually hassled to part with a little extra money past the point where you’ve already made the decision to make your purchase. The whole experience is designed to leave you unsatisfied because there’s just too much money in it for the company to up-charge people to that next level of satisfaction. That’s just how it is now, everything from airlines to Disneyworld to streaming services are taking UX design cues from Candy Crush.
This used to be rightly understood not just as terrible customer service, but undignified ‘panhandling’ type behavior. But as income inequality has gotten worse middle-class buyers are no longer where the money is at and the strategy switched to figuring out premium and super-premium add ons to everything as a way to identify people who can afford to give you fatter margins to enjoy red carpet treatment.
The fact that it's only approaching prices from over a decade ago despite money having devalued so much should show how not-unreasonable-by-historic-measures media is today. Any person can access more media than they have time to watch by paying $20/month and changing services every month.
If you’re talking about this in terms of an undifferentiated mass of “content” then you’re really identifying the problem without realizing it. People aren’t just watching a movie to enjoy some content. Some people watch a movie for intrinsic properties of the movie and most watch them to participate in the mass cultural activity talking about and referencing the movie. If we lived in a world where everyone just had a handful of channels and 12 movies out each summer I don’t actually think most people would be meaningfully less happy with what they’re watching. It’s just that having more choices means, in order to participate in the mass culture around talking about shows and movies, you need to be able to access the stuff everyone is talking about. People aren’t paying for the content, they’re trying to maintain access to a “scene” and participate in pop culture. The value function isn’t just based on what size library you have available.
No one needs to have every streaming service available every month.
Well the world doesn’t need to have 20 different tentpole franchises worth of forgettable slop either. If the economics stop working out to support producing that it’ll just stop being produced and, like I said, I genuinely don’t think the median consumer will be any less happy. They’ll just watch 1 of the 5 tentpole things everyone is talking about instead of 3 out of 20.
The people who might be happy are the folks on the long-tail who like weird, experimental, and niche stuff that might dry up if there’s less money sloshing around. But as everything has been financialized and the business looks more and more monopolistic those sorts of B-tier movies aren’t as much of a priority anyway. As far as I can tell, the geeks are still willing to pay $500 for a Wes Anderson box set and spend on Criterion streaming and such. It’s the mass market schlocky stuff that is mostly likely to be hit by piracy because people just care about it less.
I think you're speaking to an ideal that I am not even railing against given that I'm only commenting in a thread that chooses to not show any nuance. I wouldn't speak up if the poster I replied...
People aren’t paying for the content, they’re trying to maintain access to a “scene” and participate in pop culture. The value function isn’t just based on what size library you have available.
I think you're speaking to an ideal that I am not even railing against given that I'm only commenting in a thread that chooses to not show any nuance. I wouldn't speak up if the poster I replied to mentioned anything about paying for content up to the point that they could afford and supplementing with piracy when they can't. What does payment have to do with being able to participate in the cultural zeitgeist, unless payment is not possible? All of what you referenced is not something I'm occluding by telling people that they should be discreet about piracy; all I'm hearing from certain (not all, but some) people in this thread is that they don't want to pay, not that they can't afford to. Again, let me emphasize, I'm not pointing at you.
And besides all that, there's a lot of talk about sending payment to creators directly that continues to miss the point that everyone else gets fucked. The editors, the makeup artists, the writers, etc. Those people can get bent, I suppose. The next time a Tilderino posts about the new book they helped edit, I hope someone comes in here to mention that the book can be found at m******m.org, right? And just send a few dollars to author; screw the editor! It's classless, is my point. Even if you do it, I do it, whoever does it, whatever I don't care. Just don't talk about it so openly. We used to have standards on the internet.
I’m not speaking in favor of against an ideal here really. I’m speaking more anthropologically to point out that I think we’ve just shifted over to being a much lower trust society where people...
I’m not speaking in favor of against an ideal here really. I’m speaking more anthropologically to point out that I think we’ve just shifted over to being a much lower trust society where people genuinely don’t feel any obligation to support or maintain these kinds of collective norms. I think that suggests people no longer see these norms as being part of a collective project they are bought into.
Even what you point out about it being classless is another example of this. Being classy is a matter of social norms and customs and people really just don’t give a shit anymore. And it’s not just the internet, it’s society in general. I’m generally a norms and institutions defender but I genuinely have a hard time convincing anyone to care or wanting to care myself about these big monopolistic slop factories. I can barely convince people to care about aspects of shared society I value.
As an actual ecologist, I want to provide the completely unhelpful comment that using "ecosystem" in a tech sense is almost completely nonsensical to me. What exactly is an "ecosystem effect" when...
As an actual ecologist, I want to provide the completely unhelpful comment that using "ecosystem" in a tech sense is almost completely nonsensical to me. What exactly is an "ecosystem effect" when talking about streaming digital media? What about it, exactly, is "eco"? I would love an answer.
If anyone wants to talk about actual outdoor ecosystems, too, hit me up.
You can probably guess. It’s the whole world if associated businesses that operate around it. Law firms that negotiate contracts, rights holders and production companies that raise money, actors...
You can probably guess. It’s the whole world if associated businesses that operate around it. Law firms that negotiate contracts, rights holders and production companies that raise money, actors and other creatives that produce the media, craft services and all of the other various services.
Like I can’t tell if you’re being facetious because the metaphor seems extremely obvious to me.
Not facetious! Why isn't is just a "system" then? What about the wider infrastructure makes it specifically an "ecosystem" vs just a regular "system"? What, specifically, does "eco" mean in a...
Exemplary
Not facetious! Why isn't is just a "system" then? What about the wider infrastructure makes it specifically an "ecosystem" vs just a regular "system"? What, specifically, does "eco" mean in a business sense? When is it an "ecosystem" vs. any other system? When we want it to sound big? When we want it to sound cool?
It may seem like a triviality, but it's really not. The terms population, community, and ecosystem have specific meanings in ecology, and to me, "ecosystem" in techland is just a buzzword to mean "a system, but bigger". It detracts from discussions and understanding of actual ecosystems, and I absolutely despise the use of it as a marketing term.
No it’s a community consisting of lots of independent entities of various kinds that occupy various niches in a broader unit/industry, not unlike the many variegated lifeforms and non-living...
No it’s a community consisting of lots of independent entities of various kinds that occupy various niches in a broader unit/industry, not unlike the many variegated lifeforms and non-living processes that create an ecology. It’s not designed with any design intention, as a system would be, it emerges organically (I hope I don’t have to specify that this doesn’t mean everything in it is from a family of carbon-based molecules) through different independent agents trying to get fed (by which I mean ‘get paid,’ another metaphor since companies and legal entities don’t have to digest food).
It detracts from discussions and understanding of actual ecosystems, and I absolutely despise the use of it as a marketing term.
I don’t know if it’s worth getting this worked up over a metaphor, especially since, as far as metaphors go, this is a fairly obvious and straightforward one. If I wanted to get equally nitpicky I might dispute your use of the term “marketing” in the context of a discussion that has nothing to do with the corporate function known as “marketing” since we aren’t publicizing a good or service for sale or trying to create demand to drive purchasing behavior. But it’d be pointless since it’s pretty obvious that you’re just reaching for a pejorative term that vaguely gestures in the direction of “business and corporate stuff with the implication of it being disingenuous and phony” and I can interpret that intended usage just fine.
you've convinced me never to use the term in business speak again. I'll switch to mega / complex / interdependent / web of / system of systems etc. We've only got the one ecosystem, and it doesn't...
you've convinced me never to use the term in business speak again. I'll switch to mega / complex / interdependent / web of / system of systems etc. We've only got the one ecosystem, and it doesn't get enough attention as it is, without being raided for meaning by money talk.
Not necessarily arguing that the term isn't misused by any technical definition, but figured I could weigh in with how I see it used. In a tech setting I would say that 'ecosystem' typically has...
Not necessarily arguing that the term isn't misused by any technical definition, but figured I could weigh in with how I see it used.
In a tech setting I would say that 'ecosystem' typically has implications of it being a heterogeneous system made up of many independent actors with their own concerns and drives but sharing use of some foundational environment or structure.
Whereas 'system' by itself is so semantically overloaded as to be not a very useful descriptor in most circumstances without modifiers or clarification.
You don't have to swallow anything from Zaslav, least of all Disney content. The alternate, though, isn't to pirate it, it's just to... not watch it. It's fine. There is more content available to...
it naturally puts people in a mental mode where they want to avoid being squeezed in any way possible...
Zaslav out there demanding we all swallow down whatever slop they design to provide us.
You don't have to swallow anything from Zaslav, least of all Disney content. The alternate, though, isn't to pirate it, it's just to... not watch it. It's fine.
There is more content available to watch at prices at 0 or close enough to 0 that no human could ever watch all of it - when you add in all the content that comes with a personally agreeable price tag, that's hundreds of human lifetimes.
I don't think you should get to have your cake and eat it too. It's OK just to say, this isn't worth the price you're asking, so I'm going to not consume it.
The fact of the matter is that intellectual property rights and copyrights are legal fictions we, as a society, have invented to encourage and facilitate the production of art. For most of human...
The fact of the matter is that intellectual property rights and copyrights are legal fictions we, as a society, have invented to encourage and facilitate the production of art. For most of human history creative output was considered to just exist freely out there once it’s created. Many cultures didn’t even really prioritize the concept of “authorship” because it is, in fact, sort of debatable how much any individual person attached to producing a creative work actually did it themselves.
The legal fiction has an instrumental purpose, it is not some inherent moral entitlement that anyone has. Enabling people to make money off it is the mechanism by which we create the opportunities for people to have a livelihood creating art. The idea that you shouldn’t consume the cake if you want to abstain requires everyone to buy into the broader social consensus that we need to pretend someone serving this cake, that is nearly free to produce at the margin, is actually entitled to a charge a fee for it. If people don’t feel bought in, they just won’t respect it. When the vast majority of the money and even the creative control over what is produced accrues to some finance bros, lawyers, and tech gatekeepers with some scraps going to the people producing the stuff then the actual relationship between artist and participant becomes so attenuated that I don’t think people feel that buy in anymore.
Like I said in another comment, where that feeling of connection is strong people still shell out big money on collectors’ boxes and boutiquey services. If people don’t feel that connection as they log into the service then it’s inevitable they won’t care anymore. Who is out there making the case that they should care? What’s being done to make people feel like this whole thing is a broad social project that we’re all participating in and all benefit from? They’ve taken the social contract around this stuff for granted and allowed it to fray so this is the result.
Apple music pays out $0.01 per stream, which is on the higher end of the spectrum. Which basically means that unless you're a multi-platinum artist, you'll make more money from one pirate...
If you buy a song for 1.29, sure it's not a lot of that 1.29 making it to the band member by the end of it.
Apple music pays out $0.01 per stream, which is on the higher end of the spectrum. Which basically means that unless you're a multi-platinum artist, you'll make more money from one pirate attending a concert than a thousand people streaming it legally.
One thousand listens is not a lot. If I buy a song for $1.29, I could listen to that song a thousand times on my own over the course of a decade. There's a reason why those rates are low, by the...
One thousand listens is not a lot. If I buy a song for $1.29, I could listen to that song a thousand times on my own over the course of a decade. There's a reason why those rates are low, by the way. The amount that the artist gets paid is directly linked to the number of plays x revenue per user. The only way to increase the amount the artist gets paid is to raise the subscription price (which is what this thread is railing against?) or restrict the number of listens a user gets per month. When the pie is $11 and the number of songs practically limitless, there's really not much to go on.
The "attend a concert" model doesn't work as cleanly for tv shows and movies.
(not the guy you're replying to) I think it is. I noticed that many bands that I listen to have surprisingly few plays on spotify. I just looked at my friend's band - it's probably one of the best...
(not the guy you're replying to)
One thousand listens is not a lot.
I think it is. I noticed that many bands that I listen to have surprisingly few plays on spotify. I just looked at my friend's band - it's probably one of the best authentic 40s rock'n'roll bands in Europe, so slightly niche, but they commonly play abroad on various rockabilly festivals, classic car festivals etc. (apart from specifically rock n roll gigs), the scenes are definitely populated with people who use Spotify. Yet their most played song has just over 13k plays since 2015.
The most popular album of probably the best authentic 20s - 40s jazz & swing big band in central Europe, much more well known than the band above and quite popular even in the mainstream here, plays reasonably large festivals here and abroad etc., varies between 14k and 71k plays with the exception of 3 most popular songs which have just below or over 100k. But this is since 2012 and the band is as mainstream as you can get within the genre, plays on national TV, consists of professional musicians and it's no hobby project.
The Canadian post-punk band Nomeansno with a cult following that toured US, Canada and Europe for about 25 years and has probably 1000 concerts on their belt has about the same numbers on their most popular album.
The amount that the artist gets paid is directly linked to the number of plays x revenue per user.
I wish this was literal. There are months where I simply don't listen too much and I'd love it if my 11 USD were split among the few great artists that I listened to that month.
The current ecosystem for commercial music is already broken. The large music publishers have been corrupt to the core for the greater portion of the last century, and nowadays they're part of...
The current ecosystem for commercial music is already broken. The large music publishers have been corrupt to the core for the greater portion of the last century, and nowadays they're part of even larger media comglomerates who are even more evil than they ever have been. If a person wants to make music, they don't need blessings from a megacorp; it's never been easier to self-produce and even self-distribute music.
Beyond that, arguing for how much we "should" be paying for music is kind of a moot point. Music has been around for at least as long as civilization, and the vast majority of musicians in history have been either poor, largely being paid via patronage. The massive popularity of single musicians is, to an extent, a freak thing that happened due to advent of mass reproduction recordings. But we do not need massive industries to produce those records anymore. We are living in a time when a person can download a free music-making app on their phone, upload it to any number of places that will host it for free, and call themselves a musician.
Yeah, I'm reading through this whole discussion and much of it is based on a flawed assumption: I hate big studios. I hate the RIAA. I want these businesses to fail (and yet it's not gonna happen,...
Yeah, I'm reading through this whole discussion and much of it is based on a flawed assumption:
leading to no studios financially risking it on new bands in the future
I hate big studios. I hate the RIAA. I want these businesses to fail (and yet it's not gonna happen, even without any third party white knights valiantly defending them). I understand there are a lot of non-artist jobs attached to the music industry that provide added value, and I respect the expertise of the people who do them, but I've seen "the studios" resist progress with everything they could, using every legal system as a cudgel against their musicians' listener base. As Weird Al wrote, doesn't matter if you're a grandma or a seven-year-old girl, they'll treat you like the evil hard-bitten criminal scum you are.
The liberalization of music production and publishing has brought us far, but not yet far enough. The industry is still fiercely holding back progress. I remember the stories of people whistling songs while working a business and getting in trouble with performing rights' associations. What the hell? There still isn't a good music search engine. Stream it online and your video gets muted. You get a copyright strike in your e-mail. The only tenuous reason we're not still in the 1960s when it comes to music enjoyment is Youtube and its licensing deals, and even that doesn't work all that well most of the time. People attempt to construct projects around it, and a non-negligible amount can see years of work wiped out when a single artist wakes up in a bad mood and decides to flip a switch and get entire channels removed.
It's a strange system where basically everyone other than total parasites are getting screwed in one way or another. But no one without a cult-like following will ever again generate the kind of revenue 20th century artists did(n't actually get for themselves) anyway, so I say burn it all down and let people perform and enjoy music in peace.
Oh no the real reason is mass piracy in the 90s that scared the record companies shitless. Turns out piracy is the default state of consumption, because people love sharing what they enjoy with...
The only tenuous reason we're not still in the 1960s when it comes to music enjoyment is Youtube and its licensing deals
Oh no the real reason is mass piracy in the 90s that scared the record companies shitless.
Turns out piracy is the default state of consumption, because people love sharing what they enjoy with others. Blank cassettes are what kept places like Radio Shack alive. Because everyone and their mother was duping tapes the copied off the radio and other tapes. It's how we made playlists back in the day. And it was even easier than ripping a CD.
Napster didn't poularize piracy. It gave insight to the breadth.
I used to be on that train. Super excited when self-publishing books looked like it could take off. Internet services that published whatever you wanted as long as you were willing to pay. Kindle...
I used to be on that train. Super excited when self-publishing books looked like it could take off. Internet services that published whatever you wanted as long as you were willing to pay. Kindle would publish your eBooks. But in the last two decades, all I've learned is that while the democratization of these methods has increased availability, the large studio/publisher is still largely in use. It turns out that most artists do not have the ability to put up a lot of money to create art and try to sell it.
Let's look at comic books. Image Comics consistently puts out some great comics (hi, Manifest Destiny). Creators get to own their intellectual property. There's less sharing of profits than if they went with Marvel and DC. And yet.. so many creators still work for the Big 2. Why? Because at Image, as I understand it, for each print run the creator has to put up the finances required to get a print run going. If the sales are bad, they could be financially ruined.
So coming back to the earlier example of music, if the music publishers are so unnecessary and the tooling today is so great, then why do so many artists keep going to the publishers? They need them. Economically, if giving away your music for free in exchange for exposure is so great, few artists seem to be able to make it work?
You do realize that publishing comic books and music are incredibly different for many different reasons, yes? Music is almost entirely distributed online now, and physical media is nearly dead....
You do realize that publishing comic books and music are incredibly different for many different reasons, yes? Music is almost entirely distributed online now, and physical media is nearly dead. And I say this as one of the weird people who buys music on CD 99% of the time. When I hear people talking about wanting to return to physical media, they're talking about buying used iPods, not investing in discs. Sure, there was a trend for new vinyl records for a while, but that was a novelty and not meant to be the only way people listened to their music. Frankly, I think the comparison is so different, you might as well compared the work of furniture designers.
But even within the realm of comic books, it really doesn't work because there are many artists who either self-publish or otherwise digitally publish their works. We tend to call them webcomics. I've been reading Gunnerkrigg Court for two decades now and Tom Siddell seems to be doing well; his comics have had multiple physical releases and new editions continue to be published. It should be mentioned that the publisher is none of the companies you mentioned, it's another large comic book publisher - Dark Horse Comics. But we should also be real here, large international comic book publishers are not the only comics in the world who are capable of publishing comic books! None of these assumptions about how things work actually hold water.
People across creative fields go to publishers for a very simple reason; publishers have massive amounts of money to spend on exclusive merchandising and marketing capabilities, which means that they can sell a lot of their art. And while I'm sure that part of it is just trying to get their music heard by as many people as possible, let's be real here: they want to make more money. They may have also been influenced by images of riches and success. Do artists make more money with large publishers than by going their own way? Sometimes, yes, but not always. But I can practically guarantee you that for most of those deals, the publishers will take more of that profit than they give to the artist. I say "practically" here because these deals are notoriously opaque, so I don't have a way to actually prove it. There's an argument that publishers are needed for the sake of curation that I think might have some merit, but it's not one that particularly convinces me.
Does anyone actually do that? Pirate a movie, go find the like 500 people that made the movie and wire them all 5 dollars? Pirate a song and go find the songwriter and audio technitions and...
Does anyone actually do that? Pirate a movie, go find the like 500 people that made the movie and wire them all 5 dollars?
Pirate a song and go find the songwriter and audio technitions and producers and of course the primary performing artists and wire them 5 dollars?
I stole the hell out of most of Mankind is Obsolete's discography, to the point my LastFM-scrobbling-Subsonic server pegged them as one of my most listened to artists. A couple weeks ago I picked...
I stole the hell out of most of Mankind is Obsolete's discography, to the point my LastFM-scrobbling-Subsonic server pegged them as one of my most listened to artists. A couple weeks ago I picked up an album I didn't have via Bandcamp, where one sets their own price (past an artist-set minimum).
My price was ~$100. Paying the artist [as] directly [as I can] ensures the money goes to (primarily) the people that made the music.
This, I think, leaves us with two takeaways:
I would recommend "Rise", if one is looking for a new album to try
Should any one, any where, ask "Does any one actually do this?", no matter how odd, someone will crawl out of the woodwork to say yes
A ton of my music library is music I torrented and then bought later when I could afford to do so. You're definitely not the only one who's done that. On the subject of LastFM: my most listened-to...
A ton of my music library is music I torrented and then bought later when I could afford to do so. You're definitely not the only one who's done that.
On the subject of LastFM: my most listened-to band of all time there, Indochine (French rock/new wave band) ended up all the way up there in a similar manner. I torrented their discography when I was like 14 but didn't manage to actually buy any of their albums until four years later, when I bought some CDs and merch at one of their shows. Since then I've acquired all their albums legally, so I'm hoping I made up for what I downloaded back then lol
I think it happens very occasionally with small-time creators, like at the patreon level. I don’t think anyone does it for, like, the company that produces “The Office.” I pirated a lot of comic...
I think it happens very occasionally with small-time creators, like at the patreon level. I don’t think anyone does it for, like, the company that produces “The Office.”
I pirated a lot of comic books when I was in college and broke and then when I grew up and had money I did end up buying trades of those issues when they came out even though I had no intention of reading it as a sort of “penance.” But I think that’s unusual and also not really helping since creators actually need the support when they’re starting out and not established in their careers yet, not 10+ years later when they’ve already become successful enough that someone rereleased their work as an anthology.
I don’t consider it piracy. In my day, we recorded mix tapes straight from FM radio and shared them with friends. I was there when MP3s first changed the world, and when Redbox arrived, I often...
I don’t consider it piracy. In my day, we recorded mix tapes straight from FM radio and shared them with friends. I was there when MP3s first changed the world, and when Redbox arrived, I often invited people outside my family to enjoy a movie together. Sometimes, if I had an extra rental day, I’d even let a neighbor or friend borrow it before returning it.
By the strictest interpretation of modern standards, that might make me a “serial pirate” since childhood — but I see it differently. Knowledge, art, and creativity are meant to be shared. People should have the freedom to make their own choices about what’s right for their lives. Just as a horse knows how to eat the hay and spit out the sticks, people should be trusted to take in information responsibly and discard what doesn’t serve them.
As for the argument that content creators are not being paid, that’s not always so clear-cut. In an age dominated by mergers and corporate consolidation, it’s often the large conglomerates that control the profits while the actual creators see only a fraction of the value their work generates. The system itself deserves as much scrutiny as the people who share and consume the art it produces.
Piracy was mainstream about about 1600-1850 when acts of piracy were justified via letters of marque between warring nations. Similarly governments justified these letter via appeals to justice...
Piracy was mainstream about about 1600-1850 when acts of piracy were justified via letters of marque between warring nations. Similarly governments justified these letter via appeals to justice and righting of grievances between nations.
I hear your frustration, and I think the conversation deserves more nuance than a quick dismissal. First, the legality of streaming content varies wildly by jurisdiction, and in a global forum...
I hear your frustration, and I think the conversation deserves more nuance than a quick dismissal.
First, the legality of streaming content varies wildly by jurisdiction, and in a global forum it’s impossible to apply a single legal framework. That uncertainty doesn’t excuse hostile silencing; it calls for open dialogue about the underlying issues.
What’s often missing from the "piracy=theft" narrative is a look at the economics of content delivery. Production costs have fallen dramatically thanks to digital tools and global collaboration, yet the price gap hasn’t kept pace. Much of the extra revenue ends up with label owners, shareholders, or other entities that don’t directly contribute to the creative process. This creates a service gap.
Gabe Newell’s (of Steam fame) observation captures this well:
“Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 × 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region‑locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick‑and‑mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.”
The quote underscores that accessibility and convenience often outweigh price. When official services fail to meet those basic expectations, people turn to the alternatives that do.
That service gap has only widened as streaming platforms have layered ever tighter protection mechanisms onto their libraries.
Device locking forces users to stay within a single ecosystem (e.g., a specific console, smart TV, or mobile OS).
Location locking restricts content to the country where the account was created, often ignoring large user bases.
Service locking means a title may appear on one platform one month and disappear the next, leaving paying users scrambling for a replacement.
These restrictions turn a product that should be readily accessible into a moving target. Consumers who are willing to follow every rule the official channels sets find themselves paying for a service that repeatedly denies them the very content they purchased. In the long run, such friction erodes goodwill, drives users toward more flexible (and often illicit) alternatives, and ultimately hurts the creators whose work the protections were meant to safeguard.
That’s why I’m uncomfortable with the suggestion to cut the person out of conversation. Dismissing them as just another pirate reinforces a classist narrative that culture is a luxury only for those who can afford premium pricing. It also shuts down the very discussion that could lead to better, more inclusive distribution models.
Instead of silencing, let’s talk. How about some questions to get the dialogue going. What barriers are preventing legal access in your region? How could official platforms improve timing, pricing, or availability? What role can creators and fans play together to bridge that service gap?
A constructive conversation can surface solutions that benefit creators, distributors, and audiences alike. It's more important than reinforcing a divide between legitimate and illicit consumers.
Again, it’s pirates justifying their piracy. At the end of the day, it’s an illegal practice. No matter the argument. And I’ll note that I’m not coming from a holier-than-thou place. I’ve sailed...
Again, it’s pirates justifying their piracy. At the end of the day, it’s an illegal practice. No matter the argument.
And I’ll note that I’m not coming from a holier-than-thou place. I’ve sailed the seas plenty and have been considering setting sail again. I simply think that justifying the action is stupid, as is trying to change a pirate’s mind.
I am in no position to enact any change in the matter. Are you? A prolonged discussion would be posturing to soothe my ego.
Talking about things it is one of the most effective tools for change in the world. In silence things fester. Even if you aren't looking for discussion, trying to stifle other conversations feels...
Talking about things it is one of the most effective tools for change in the world. In silence things fester. Even if you aren't looking for discussion, trying to stifle other conversations feels mean spirited.
I assume that this might be illegal in your country. Laws change all the time. there have been some laws that by today's standards seem archaic, but people ignored them, and now the laws are different. It isn't so cut and dry it seems. This conversation might not be able to sway the laws, but snowballs have to start somewhere.
Ego soothing is also important. If you feel overwhelmed or frustrated at the state of things I'm happy to listen and give you my two cents. I can't promise anything will change, but at least you will know that you are not alone, and I think that's a start.
I'm still pretty confused as to why you decided to jump into a conversation if you didn't want to discuss. What where you hoping to get out of these interactions? Validation that piracy is...
I'm still pretty confused as to why you decided to jump into a conversation if you didn't want to discuss. What where you hoping to get out of these interactions? Validation that piracy is unjustifiable?
My first comment was to state how pointless a discussion attempting to convince a pirate that piracy is theft was. A point (the pointlessness) I've maintained and not deviated from. Counting two...
My first comment was to state how pointless a discussion attempting to convince a pirate that piracy is theft was. A point (the pointlessness) I've maintained and not deviated from. Counting two superfluous comments (this being one of them), I have been in one thread for a total of four comments, none of which are particularly long or nuanced.
I fail to see how you could be confused. I will mark further replies to me in this thread as noise.
Well, I see you are bowing out so I will mark my final thoughts here for others reading this thread. If piracy was truly theft we obviously wouldn't need another word. We would just call it theft....
Well, I see you are bowing out so I will mark my final thoughts here for others reading this thread.
If piracy was truly theft we obviously wouldn't need another word. We would just call it theft. The fact that another word exists obviously means that there is a distinction. Therefore I will extrapolate your comment to mean that piracy is not LEGALLY justifiable. Since you could have also been trying to say it is not morally justifiable. I obviously disagree about the morality of piracy.
That being said I am not a lawyer. As above, the laws around what is and isn't piracy are vastly different in different countries. It is possible that what the OP described is considered illegal where you live. I just think using laws as a replacement for critical thinking and moral judgment is a dangerous shorthand.
Obviously you are free to do you, I am however glad that you grew enough to recognize that your disinterest in the conversation is not a reason to not have it.
If I'm reading correctly, it seems like Real-Debrid is a content caching service, and Streamio/Omni Content Hub are just streaming media players that can connect to various services (including...
If I'm reading correctly, it seems like Real-Debrid is a content caching service, and Streamio/Omni Content Hub are just streaming media players that can connect to various services (including Real-Debrid). I would be concerned about the longevity of something like Real-Debrid, as it seems they may be a pretty big target for copyright claims. Maybe I'm missing something though?
Real Debrid has already been sued and the effects were rather negligible. They had to purge their cache of a bunch of content and I think add those torrent infohashes to a block list. They also...
Real Debrid has already been sued and the effects were rather negligible. They had to purge their cache of a bunch of content and I think add those torrent infohashes to a block list. They also had to remove some feature I don't recall, but it overall still works fine. Blocking some infohashes does little because people frequently upload alternatives with slight changes that mean new hashes (different encoding, different audio or subtitle language options, different resolutions, etc.).
There are also a bunch of other debrid services, including ones that headquarter in areas that aren't as interested in accepting copyright suits. RD is in France, but as an example that I hope I remember correctly TorBox is in South Africa and seems to be depending a bit on that South Africa is less likely to care about copyright infringement of Western media empires.
A rather standard setup is Stremio + Torrentio + Debrid. Stremio would claim they don't support piracy, but also don't monitor addons. Torrentio would claim all they do is wrap existing public trackers in a Stremio addon, but don't have any data of their own. Debrid would claim they aren't for piracy and it's on the users to not download copyrighted content, not them to invasively monitor what every torrent contains. A weird liability shell game.
OK, thanks for the context. I'd still be skeptical of the debrid services since they seem to be crossing that (very fuzzy) boundary of actually storing content. Streamio and Torrentio would seem...
OK, thanks for the context. I'd still be skeptical of the debrid services since they seem to be crossing that (very fuzzy) boundary of actually storing content. Streamio and Torrentio would seem to have better legal shields IMO.
I'm not really interested in debating whether the service itself is right or wrong, to be clear. I'm just imagining that it might suck to pay for a service that could be taken away without notice. FWIW, I've had similar thoughts about perfectly legal services like Spotify suddenly disappearing half of the music I enjoy. 🤷♂️
That is a real concern. It usually gets handwaved away though with claims that they'll just switch to a different debrid. On the side of "I'll just switch": the torrents themselves are the...
That is a real concern. It usually gets handwaved away though with claims that they'll just switch to a different debrid.
On the side of "I'll just switch": the torrents themselves are the content, not the debrid cache. So if someone wants the content on another service the main price to pay is just the time for it to download from torrent again. Since debrid services tend to not really house much other state beyond "here are the torrents you've added and whether or not they're currently in cache" this argument is mostly fair. To use the Stremio example, their Stremio account stores what they're watching and its progress and all that on their end and the debrid only gets involved when Stremio directly requests a specific file to play.
On the side of "losing it would suck": debrid caches can be rather significant. There can be, and often is, content with 0 seeders but is available due to having previously been cached. When someone switches debrid providers they also switch to the new provider's cache, which may or may not be significantly smaller. There's also the obvious direct monetary loss for users from that a service that is being forced to shut down is unlikely to refund the time that is paid for but not serviced.
And yeah, I'm not trying to debate anything either. I just find this topic interesting so wanted to share some of what I learned from independent research after a different thread about Stremio.
@Zestier is right that it's usually handwaved away with a simple explanation. But it's true and the reason is that it's cheap. Setting up another debrid provider will cost about ten to fifteen...
@Zestier is right that it's usually handwaved away with a simple explanation.
But it's true and the reason is that it's cheap. Setting up another debrid provider will cost about ten to fifteen minutes and about ten to fifteen dollars. The risk assessment is so trivial that I wouldn't even mind if I paid for a six month subscription and lost it the next day. I'll be out ten dollars, sad, and then hop skip to the next service and pay again.
The biggest downside is the cache as @zestier also pointed out. Torrents being what they are makes that problem largely moot unless multiple debrids will purge their cache at once. Stuff will get lost over time, though none of the files are as ephemeral as sometimes entire seasons are unavailable from one day to the next on Prime.
That they're increasing prices every single year is already gutsy enough. With people thoroughly sick of Marvel, and a year of Agent Orange and economic uncertainty they're not skipping the hike...
That they're increasing prices every single year is already gutsy enough. With people thoroughly sick of Marvel, and a year of Agent Orange and economic uncertainty they're not skipping the hike this year?
Disney doesn't have backing from Carr, who, since last week, has denied threatening ABC's broadcasting licenses over Kimmel's statements. This week, he aimed to direct all blame for Kimmel being pulled on Disney, saying, "Disney on its own made the business decision not to have him air..."
Serves them right for pre-emptively kowtowing to power
Man if they could just get Bob Iger and Robert Downey Jr back they could Make America 2018 Again, but that's a ridiculous pipe dream that would definitely without fail solve the problems Chapek...
Man if they could just get Bob Iger and Robert Downey Jr back they could Make America 2018 Again, but that's a ridiculous pipe dream that would definitely without fail solve the problems Chapek introduced but that will never ever happen.
Don't feel bad you're not alone, as I write this your whoosh has twice the upvotes compared to the joke you missed. Great illustration of internet discourse :D
Don't feel bad you're not alone, as I write this your whoosh has twice the upvotes compared to the joke you missed. Great illustration of internet discourse :D
We have been finding ourselves using Peacock, Tubi and Pluto so much that we really haven't been using Disney+ that often. Unless we can snag a good deal for them on Black Friday, I don't see us...
We have been finding ourselves using Peacock, Tubi and Pluto so much that we really haven't been using Disney+ that often. Unless we can snag a good deal for them on Black Friday, I don't see us getting another year despite having young kids.
My kids despise the ads. I don't normally mind them but Disney+ really takes it to another level. We were watching The Little Mermaid (1988) and there were ads roughly every 15 minutes. My daughter missed a scene and I went back maybe 30 seconds. It replayed ads it JUST played.
I understand that it's still a popular movie but it's nearing 4 decades old and that is absurd.
I don't know, these days I mostly don't care about mainstream streaming services anymore as the value is not really there neither in price but mostly just the deliberate decisions about the design...
I don't know, these days I mostly don't care about mainstream streaming services anymore as the value is not really there neither in price but mostly just the deliberate decisions about the design of the sites and discoverability of content.
Mostly I read free webseries and fanfictions whose curated selection is on average more entertaining that the similar in mainstream streaming media. Not to say good series and films don't exists, I just don't seem to find much in recent offerings.
The only video streaming service I find myself paying for is Nebula. I watch very little TV, but might occasionally subscribe to Netflix, Apple, HBO etc. for a month here and there. I feel like...
The only video streaming service I find myself paying for is Nebula. I watch very little TV, but might occasionally subscribe to Netflix, Apple, HBO etc. for a month here and there. I feel like the value just isn't there for me. Back in the day with cable TV channels had this level of coherence of theme and quality that was more conducive to content consumption. Maybe it's something else and the real issue is the paradox of choice with online streaming.
For years I've felt like a lot of the best content is produced by YouTubers. It's not as high budget and often on an irregular schedule, but I'll pretty much always pick the passionate nerd making a video over a studio trying to get a return on investment.
My guess is they already have items like probability of boycott and projected losses from boycotts already baked into their forecasting. This recent one probably didn't exceed their expectations,...
My guess is they already have items like probability of boycott and projected losses from boycotts already baked into their forecasting. This recent one probably didn't exceed their expectations, so there wasn't a need to put an emergency stop to their pricing plans. So yeah, they literally did not anger enough people for anything to matter.
I'm a little disappointed that there wasn't a stronger response to this recent FCC Kimmel issue though. I considered this a serious case of censorship, and I cancelled my Disney+ subscription in response. Not a huge action, but I don't know what else I can do.
They probably don't have Hari Seldon on staff, but I'm sure they do not price things arbitrarily. I remember seeing a news story about Target sending out pregnancy related ads to people to people...
They probably don't have Hari Seldon on staff, but I'm sure they do not price things arbitrarily.
I remember seeing a news story about Target sending out pregnancy related ads to people to people who hadn't yet told their family about it, based on analytics on their purchases. I just looked it up, and that was in 2012, so 13 years ago. The amount of data collection and analysis has increased by a huge amount since then. I'm sure there's a lot more data behind corporate decisions than most people might imagine.
As some who has priced some of these things it is fairly arbitrary when you’re dealing with managing risks of black swan type events like this. You need historic reference points to actually have...
As some who has priced some of these things it is fairly arbitrary when you’re dealing with managing risks of black swan type events like this. You need historic reference points to actually have data. Trying to model things in a context full of sui generis events is mostly vibes.
Also these sorts of pricing and strategy decisions are mostly being made by corporate strategists, MBAs, and accounting types. There’s not that much data science/modeling going on like you’d see in dedicated data practices. That Target anecdote is impressive (I actually wrote a case study on it when I was a management consultant), but when you dig into it it’s pretty intuitive. They have a pharmacy, they can see if you’ve stopped ordering birth control, they can see when you’re ordering pregnancy tests, they can identify that you’re shopping for baby and maternity things. It’s not a huge leap to know you have a very high chance of being pregnant or getting pregnant soon.
Although I'm not working on it myself, I know my company has quite a lot of data going into its pricing, but I'm definitely just speculating in this case. I was thinking more like some number...
Although I'm not working on it myself, I know my company has quite a lot of data going into its pricing, but I'm definitely just speculating in this case.
I was thinking more like some number cruncher considers average annual loss from boycotts or somesuch along with a hundred other factors and rolls it up in some figure about risk and variance and whatnot, and if projections stay within a certain range there's no reason to hit the panic button on price increases. I mean, Disney seems to have some calls for boycott every other year, with the Snow White thing last year, the Lightyear thing, Mulan actress Hong Kong thing, etc. I'm sure this risk has got to have some effect on their plans, but they've got to be used to it by now. I could be wrong about their ability to react quickly, but I would think that if a ton of people actually unsubscribed, they might consider tapping the brakes on a price increase. So, maybe this isn't really a black swan event, because those are by definition impactful.
Yeah they’ll try to value it but honestly I don’t think they really can. There’s too much that’s just up to vibes over the long term. Like losing the Disney+ subscriptions by themselves are...
Yeah they’ll try to value it but honestly I don’t think they really can. There’s too much that’s just up to vibes over the long term. Like losing the Disney+ subscriptions by themselves are probably not a huge deal, but I think what actually spooks them is eroding the brand affinity. Disney’s whole business model is based on building love for its characters and brands through its movies and shows and then using that affinity to sell merch and park vacations which deepen affinity for the movies and such that encourage people to watch more and try to pass on the loyalty to their kids. . .
If the sorts of rich parents with disposable income no longer feel like showing their kids whatever Mickey Mouse show on Disney+ and have them watch Daniel Tiger instead, then that’s a generation’s worth of money being spent on non-Disney vacations, buying non-Disney toys, etc. just because the kids don’t care about meeting Mickey Mouse as much. It can have a deep impact on the company’s bottom line over the long term.
I’ve only seen the first season and liked it, but haven’t had the chance to catch up. Figuring out what happened to the Empire based on the scant clues you pick up from the Foundation folks was...
I’ve only seen the first season and liked it, but haven’t had the chance to catch up. Figuring out what happened to the Empire based on the scant clues you pick up from the Foundation folks was always more interesting to me than anything happening in the Foundation itself. It’s almost a shame they’ve tied the books to the show because it sounds like they went in a sufficiently different direction with it that they might as well not bother having to shoehorn Hari Seldon or anything else but the concept of “Psychohistory” to make it work.
We've been using my Sister-In-Laws subscription and honestly after the Kimmel stuff, I should have encouraged her to cancel. I very much doubt she would have, but we barely use it anyway,...
We've been using my Sister-In-Laws subscription and honestly after the Kimmel stuff, I should have encouraged her to cancel. I very much doubt she would have, but we barely use it anyway, generally just watching Netflix, Youtube or downloading whatever we want and storing it on our local server.
But the price increases suggest to me that they're not really hurting for subscribers, even after a boycott. Seems that if they were, they'd hold steady or decrease prices to bring people back and that's not happening, so they must be in a fairly strong position.
Or the price increase is a yearly program by a different team, so as long as there isn't a from the top directive they were going to do this, regardless of current events. Or, that's what they'll...
Or the price increase is a yearly program by a different team, so as long as there isn't a from the top directive they were going to do this, regardless of current events. Or, that's what they'll say and gives them room for less of an increase this year to show contrition
I’m glad I switched to a debrid service with Stremio, and after about six months moved over to Omni Content Hub. For around $32 a year with Real-Debrid, I can stream or torrent anything I want to watch. Setup took less than an hour, and now I’ve got access to all major streaming content and movies in one place. Honestly, I just got tired of overpaying and supporting companies whose practices don’t align with my values.
Content creators don't get paid when you switch to piracy. If you're fine with that, you do you, but I will never understand why you guys can't keep your knowledge to yourselves. There's plenty of ways to purchase media on the terms that you want: blu-rays, digital retailers, or streaming. The only thing that you're not able to decide is media at the price you want. When that happens, just discreetly do your thing. I have a NAS; I'm not blind to the realities of it. But I also purchase media because I can and because artists get compensation for it.
The vast majority of them barely get paid when I buy it too haha. At least with music. I suppose with the way production companies get spun up for TV and film it’s maybe a bigger piece of the pie to the creators and less to the lawyers negotiating rights but I’m honestly not sure. I think pirating a piece of media and then directly wiring the production company $5 would probably end up getting them more money than spending $35 a month on streaming it.
But either way it’s feeling like the social contract has worn pretty thin, and a lot of “little people” no longer feel any obligation to hold up their end of it when it’s become very clear that none of the elites care to. What’s the point? We’re basically in a transition process to becoming a low trust society, which is ironically a situation where norms ensure that corruption and lawlessness will flourish. As it is for businesses, it applies for societal norms too.. When every interaction with big business seems like an attempt to upcharge me to remove inconveniences they’ve introduced to create something to upcharge for, and the government is actively being looted by corrupt billionnaires in plain sight, what actual buy in do any of us have to uphold these norms around property rights that are structured to ensure those same people become fabulously wealthy at our expense?
Yes, in one very limited view of it, but no. Let's take a band for example. If you buy a song for 1.29, sure it's not a lot of that 1.29 making it to the band member by the end of it. But that 1.29 is part of an ecosystem that enabled the record label to hire out a studio and pay in advance for the work required to product an album.
If you're pirating the song and sending the 1.29 to the band directly, the macro effect of everyone doing this would break the current ecosystem, leading to no studios financially risking it on new bands in the future. Sending the 1.29 to the band directly also fails to compensate literally every other person involved in the recording except the band. Performing the music is just a slice of what it takes to create a song.
Paying via streaming or purchasing media is still the most fair way to distribute profits as we've had decades to refine the royalty model so that people in the chain get paid a portion of the direct sales. Unless you find a better way to do so, you end up weighting too heavily towards one part of it.
Arguably, we're paying too little for media these days. With inflation and the move towards and streaming, the average person is probably paying way less for media today than they were paying 20 years ago.
Yes I know how the ecosystem effects work. But like I said, nobody feels like they’re bought into the system as it exists. If every aspect of your interaction with it makes it clear that you are viewed as a bag of money to be squeezed as hard as possible, it naturally puts people in a mental mode where they want to avoid being squeezed in any way possible. The shared sense of contributing to an ecosystem doesn’t really work when everything is being run by guys like Zaslav out there demanding we all swallow down whatever slop they design to provide us. It’s really much more like the creators’ livelihoods are being held hostage by the execs who are demanding us to pay up.
That might have been true before but it’s quickly becoming not true as an average bundle of streaming packages approaches the prices of a cable subscription. Also, just focusing on how much people pay over time is only looking at one piece of the puzzle. The better question is “who is capturing the value?” Because productivity has actually massively increased and distribution and marketing costs have been driven down as well. It would make sense that we pay less when it costs a lot less to deliver the content. But then, as usual, most of the returns from these increases accrue to the people who control the logistics regardless of who is adding or deriving the most value.
Even if they don’t understand it I think intuitively people can feel this. They can tell when a service is cancelling shows they like for not driving enough subscriptions, the sorts of shows that may have been modestly successful under older business models or if the industry was less monopolistic and fixated on monster hits, they can tell something is off. People who care a lot about this stuff can sense that something is off.
People today eat out more than they ever have. They travel more than they ever have. People aren't unable to pay $20/month for streaming; they just have an easy and cheaper alternative to it lol. People have always been viewed as bags of money to be squeezed; someone in the 80s was under no delusion that the media companies of those times wanted more money. When people could steal cable connections, they did. When people didn't know how or were afraid, they didn't. That's the only thing that's changed in the modern era; every person today knows how to access media for cheaper.
The fact that it's only approaching prices from over a decade ago despite money having devalued so much should show how not-unreasonable-by-historic-measures media is today. Any person can access more media than they have time to watch by paying $20/month and changing services every month. No one needs to have every streaming service available every month.
They have not. There has been a marked shift in business culture and how services are offered to focus on “whale hunting,” where every good and service is tiered and structured to be able to squeeze more money from people who can afford it. It makes the actual experience of using any service one where you are being continually hassled to part with a little extra money past the point where you’ve already made the decision to make your purchase. The whole experience is designed to leave you unsatisfied because there’s just too much money in it for the company to up-charge people to that next level of satisfaction. That’s just how it is now, everything from airlines to Disneyworld to streaming services are taking UX design cues from Candy Crush.
This used to be rightly understood not just as terrible customer service, but undignified ‘panhandling’ type behavior. But as income inequality has gotten worse middle-class buyers are no longer where the money is at and the strategy switched to figuring out premium and super-premium add ons to everything as a way to identify people who can afford to give you fatter margins to enjoy red carpet treatment.
If you’re talking about this in terms of an undifferentiated mass of “content” then you’re really identifying the problem without realizing it. People aren’t just watching a movie to enjoy some content. Some people watch a movie for intrinsic properties of the movie and most watch them to participate in the mass cultural activity talking about and referencing the movie. If we lived in a world where everyone just had a handful of channels and 12 movies out each summer I don’t actually think most people would be meaningfully less happy with what they’re watching. It’s just that having more choices means, in order to participate in the mass culture around talking about shows and movies, you need to be able to access the stuff everyone is talking about. People aren’t paying for the content, they’re trying to maintain access to a “scene” and participate in pop culture. The value function isn’t just based on what size library you have available.
Well the world doesn’t need to have 20 different tentpole franchises worth of forgettable slop either. If the economics stop working out to support producing that it’ll just stop being produced and, like I said, I genuinely don’t think the median consumer will be any less happy. They’ll just watch 1 of the 5 tentpole things everyone is talking about instead of 3 out of 20.
The people who might be happy are the folks on the long-tail who like weird, experimental, and niche stuff that might dry up if there’s less money sloshing around. But as everything has been financialized and the business looks more and more monopolistic those sorts of B-tier movies aren’t as much of a priority anyway. As far as I can tell, the geeks are still willing to pay $500 for a Wes Anderson box set and spend on Criterion streaming and such. It’s the mass market schlocky stuff that is mostly likely to be hit by piracy because people just care about it less.
I think you're speaking to an ideal that I am not even railing against given that I'm only commenting in a thread that chooses to not show any nuance. I wouldn't speak up if the poster I replied to mentioned anything about paying for content up to the point that they could afford and supplementing with piracy when they can't. What does payment have to do with being able to participate in the cultural zeitgeist, unless payment is not possible? All of what you referenced is not something I'm occluding by telling people that they should be discreet about piracy; all I'm hearing from certain (not all, but some) people in this thread is that they don't want to pay, not that they can't afford to. Again, let me emphasize, I'm not pointing at you.
And besides all that, there's a lot of talk about sending payment to creators directly that continues to miss the point that everyone else gets fucked. The editors, the makeup artists, the writers, etc. Those people can get bent, I suppose. The next time a Tilderino posts about the new book they helped edit, I hope someone comes in here to mention that the book can be found at
m******m.org, right? And just send a few dollars to author; screw the editor! It's classless, is my point. Even if you do it, I do it, whoever does it, whatever I don't care. Just don't talk about it so openly. We used to have standards on the internet.I’m not speaking in favor of against an ideal here really. I’m speaking more anthropologically to point out that I think we’ve just shifted over to being a much lower trust society where people genuinely don’t feel any obligation to support or maintain these kinds of collective norms. I think that suggests people no longer see these norms as being part of a collective project they are bought into.
Even what you point out about it being classless is another example of this. Being classy is a matter of social norms and customs and people really just don’t give a shit anymore. And it’s not just the internet, it’s society in general. I’m generally a norms and institutions defender but I genuinely have a hard time convincing anyone to care or wanting to care myself about these big monopolistic slop factories. I can barely convince people to care about aspects of shared society I value.
As an actual ecologist, I want to provide the completely unhelpful comment that using "ecosystem" in a tech sense is almost completely nonsensical to me. What exactly is an "ecosystem effect" when talking about streaming digital media? What about it, exactly, is "eco"? I would love an answer.
If anyone wants to talk about actual outdoor ecosystems, too, hit me up.
You can probably guess. It’s the whole world if associated businesses that operate around it. Law firms that negotiate contracts, rights holders and production companies that raise money, actors and other creatives that produce the media, craft services and all of the other various services.
Like I can’t tell if you’re being facetious because the metaphor seems extremely obvious to me.
Not facetious! Why isn't is just a "system" then? What about the wider infrastructure makes it specifically an "ecosystem" vs just a regular "system"? What, specifically, does "eco" mean in a business sense? When is it an "ecosystem" vs. any other system? When we want it to sound big? When we want it to sound cool?
It may seem like a triviality, but it's really not. The terms population, community, and ecosystem have specific meanings in ecology, and to me, "ecosystem" in techland is just a buzzword to mean "a system, but bigger". It detracts from discussions and understanding of actual ecosystems, and I absolutely despise the use of it as a marketing term.
No it’s a community consisting of lots of independent entities of various kinds that occupy various niches in a broader unit/industry, not unlike the many variegated lifeforms and non-living processes that create an ecology. It’s not designed with any design intention, as a system would be, it emerges organically (I hope I don’t have to specify that this doesn’t mean everything in it is from a family of carbon-based molecules) through different independent agents trying to get fed (by which I mean ‘get paid,’ another metaphor since companies and legal entities don’t have to digest food).
I don’t know if it’s worth getting this worked up over a metaphor, especially since, as far as metaphors go, this is a fairly obvious and straightforward one. If I wanted to get equally nitpicky I might dispute your use of the term “marketing” in the context of a discussion that has nothing to do with the corporate function known as “marketing” since we aren’t publicizing a good or service for sale or trying to create demand to drive purchasing behavior. But it’d be pointless since it’s pretty obvious that you’re just reaching for a pejorative term that vaguely gestures in the direction of “business and corporate stuff with the implication of it being disingenuous and phony” and I can interpret that intended usage just fine.
you've convinced me never to use the term in business speak again. I'll switch to mega / complex / interdependent / web of / system of systems etc. We've only got the one ecosystem, and it doesn't get enough attention as it is, without being raided for meaning by money talk.
Not necessarily arguing that the term isn't misused by any technical definition, but figured I could weigh in with how I see it used.
In a tech setting I would say that 'ecosystem' typically has implications of it being a heterogeneous system made up of many independent actors with their own concerns and drives but sharing use of some foundational environment or structure.
Whereas 'system' by itself is so semantically overloaded as to be not a very useful descriptor in most circumstances without modifiers or clarification.
You don't have to swallow anything from Zaslav, least of all Disney content. The alternate, though, isn't to pirate it, it's just to... not watch it. It's fine.
There is more content available to watch at prices at 0 or close enough to 0 that no human could ever watch all of it - when you add in all the content that comes with a personally agreeable price tag, that's hundreds of human lifetimes.
I don't think you should get to have your cake and eat it too. It's OK just to say, this isn't worth the price you're asking, so I'm going to not consume it.
The fact of the matter is that intellectual property rights and copyrights are legal fictions we, as a society, have invented to encourage and facilitate the production of art. For most of human history creative output was considered to just exist freely out there once it’s created. Many cultures didn’t even really prioritize the concept of “authorship” because it is, in fact, sort of debatable how much any individual person attached to producing a creative work actually did it themselves.
The legal fiction has an instrumental purpose, it is not some inherent moral entitlement that anyone has. Enabling people to make money off it is the mechanism by which we create the opportunities for people to have a livelihood creating art. The idea that you shouldn’t consume the cake if you want to abstain requires everyone to buy into the broader social consensus that we need to pretend someone serving this cake, that is nearly free to produce at the margin, is actually entitled to a charge a fee for it. If people don’t feel bought in, they just won’t respect it. When the vast majority of the money and even the creative control over what is produced accrues to some finance bros, lawyers, and tech gatekeepers with some scraps going to the people producing the stuff then the actual relationship between artist and participant becomes so attenuated that I don’t think people feel that buy in anymore.
Like I said in another comment, where that feeling of connection is strong people still shell out big money on collectors’ boxes and boutiquey services. If people don’t feel that connection as they log into the service then it’s inevitable they won’t care anymore. Who is out there making the case that they should care? What’s being done to make people feel like this whole thing is a broad social project that we’re all participating in and all benefit from? They’ve taken the social contract around this stuff for granted and allowed it to fray so this is the result.
Most of the works that we say were written by Shakespear are secondhand accounts from the people performing them.
Apple music pays out $0.01 per stream, which is on the higher end of the spectrum. Which basically means that unless you're a multi-platinum artist, you'll make more money from one pirate attending a concert than a thousand people streaming it legally.
One thousand listens is not a lot. If I buy a song for $1.29, I could listen to that song a thousand times on my own over the course of a decade. There's a reason why those rates are low, by the way. The amount that the artist gets paid is directly linked to the number of plays x revenue per user. The only way to increase the amount the artist gets paid is to raise the subscription price (which is what this thread is railing against?) or restrict the number of listens a user gets per month. When the pie is $11 and the number of songs practically limitless, there's really not much to go on.
The "attend a concert" model doesn't work as cleanly for tv shows and movies.
(not the guy you're replying to)
I think it is. I noticed that many bands that I listen to have surprisingly few plays on spotify. I just looked at my friend's band - it's probably one of the best authentic 40s rock'n'roll bands in Europe, so slightly niche, but they commonly play abroad on various rockabilly festivals, classic car festivals etc. (apart from specifically rock n roll gigs), the scenes are definitely populated with people who use Spotify. Yet their most played song has just over 13k plays since 2015.
The most popular album of probably the best authentic 20s - 40s jazz & swing big band in central Europe, much more well known than the band above and quite popular even in the mainstream here, plays reasonably large festivals here and abroad etc., varies between 14k and 71k plays with the exception of 3 most popular songs which have just below or over 100k. But this is since 2012 and the band is as mainstream as you can get within the genre, plays on national TV, consists of professional musicians and it's no hobby project.
The Canadian post-punk band Nomeansno with a cult following that toured US, Canada and Europe for about 25 years and has probably 1000 concerts on their belt has about the same numbers on their most popular album.
I wish this was literal. There are months where I simply don't listen too much and I'd love it if my 11 USD were split among the few great artists that I listened to that month.
No, but as an aside to this, support your local theater scene! Theatre is an amazing artform that I feel that more people should partake in!
The current ecosystem for commercial music is already broken. The large music publishers have been corrupt to the core for the greater portion of the last century, and nowadays they're part of even larger media comglomerates who are even more evil than they ever have been. If a person wants to make music, they don't need blessings from a megacorp; it's never been easier to self-produce and even self-distribute music.
Beyond that, arguing for how much we "should" be paying for music is kind of a moot point. Music has been around for at least as long as civilization, and the vast majority of musicians in history have been either poor, largely being paid via patronage. The massive popularity of single musicians is, to an extent, a freak thing that happened due to advent of mass reproduction recordings. But we do not need massive industries to produce those records anymore. We are living in a time when a person can download a free music-making app on their phone, upload it to any number of places that will host it for free, and call themselves a musician.
Yeah, I'm reading through this whole discussion and much of it is based on a flawed assumption:
I hate big studios. I hate the RIAA. I want these businesses to fail (and yet it's not gonna happen, even without any third party white knights valiantly defending them). I understand there are a lot of non-artist jobs attached to the music industry that provide added value, and I respect the expertise of the people who do them, but I've seen "the studios" resist progress with everything they could, using every legal system as a cudgel against their musicians' listener base. As Weird Al wrote, doesn't matter if you're a grandma or a seven-year-old girl, they'll treat you like the evil hard-bitten criminal scum you are.
The liberalization of music production and publishing has brought us far, but not yet far enough. The industry is still fiercely holding back progress. I remember the stories of people whistling songs while working a business and getting in trouble with performing rights' associations. What the hell? There still isn't a good music search engine. Stream it online and your video gets muted. You get a copyright strike in your e-mail. The only tenuous reason we're not still in the 1960s when it comes to music enjoyment is Youtube and its licensing deals, and even that doesn't work all that well most of the time. People attempt to construct projects around it, and a non-negligible amount can see years of work wiped out when a single artist wakes up in a bad mood and decides to flip a switch and get entire channels removed.
It's a strange system where basically everyone other than total parasites are getting screwed in one way or another. But no one without a cult-like following will ever again generate the kind of revenue 20th century artists did(n't actually get for themselves) anyway, so I say burn it all down and let people perform and enjoy music in peace.
Oh no the real reason is mass piracy in the 90s that scared the record companies shitless.
Turns out piracy is the default state of consumption, because people love sharing what they enjoy with others. Blank cassettes are what kept places like Radio Shack alive. Because everyone and their mother was duping tapes the copied off the radio and other tapes. It's how we made playlists back in the day. And it was even easier than ripping a CD.
Napster didn't poularize piracy. It gave insight to the breadth.
I used to be on that train. Super excited when self-publishing books looked like it could take off. Internet services that published whatever you wanted as long as you were willing to pay. Kindle would publish your eBooks. But in the last two decades, all I've learned is that while the democratization of these methods has increased availability, the large studio/publisher is still largely in use. It turns out that most artists do not have the ability to put up a lot of money to create art and try to sell it.
Let's look at comic books. Image Comics consistently puts out some great comics (hi, Manifest Destiny). Creators get to own their intellectual property. There's less sharing of profits than if they went with Marvel and DC. And yet.. so many creators still work for the Big 2. Why? Because at Image, as I understand it, for each print run the creator has to put up the finances required to get a print run going. If the sales are bad, they could be financially ruined.
So coming back to the earlier example of music, if the music publishers are so unnecessary and the tooling today is so great, then why do so many artists keep going to the publishers? They need them. Economically, if giving away your music for free in exchange for exposure is so great, few artists seem to be able to make it work?
You do realize that publishing comic books and music are incredibly different for many different reasons, yes? Music is almost entirely distributed online now, and physical media is nearly dead. And I say this as one of the weird people who buys music on CD 99% of the time. When I hear people talking about wanting to return to physical media, they're talking about buying used iPods, not investing in discs. Sure, there was a trend for new vinyl records for a while, but that was a novelty and not meant to be the only way people listened to their music. Frankly, I think the comparison is so different, you might as well compared the work of furniture designers.
But even within the realm of comic books, it really doesn't work because there are many artists who either self-publish or otherwise digitally publish their works. We tend to call them webcomics. I've been reading Gunnerkrigg Court for two decades now and Tom Siddell seems to be doing well; his comics have had multiple physical releases and new editions continue to be published. It should be mentioned that the publisher is none of the companies you mentioned, it's another large comic book publisher - Dark Horse Comics. But we should also be real here, large international comic book publishers are not the only comics in the world who are capable of publishing comic books! None of these assumptions about how things work actually hold water.
People across creative fields go to publishers for a very simple reason; publishers have massive amounts of money to spend on exclusive merchandising and marketing capabilities, which means that they can sell a lot of their art. And while I'm sure that part of it is just trying to get their music heard by as many people as possible, let's be real here: they want to make more money. They may have also been influenced by images of riches and success. Do artists make more money with large publishers than by going their own way? Sometimes, yes, but not always. But I can practically guarantee you that for most of those deals, the publishers will take more of that profit than they give to the artist. I say "practically" here because these deals are notoriously opaque, so I don't have a way to actually prove it. There's an argument that publishers are needed for the sake of curation that I think might have some merit, but it's not one that particularly convinces me.
Does anyone actually do that? Pirate a movie, go find the like 500 people that made the movie and wire them all 5 dollars?
Pirate a song and go find the songwriter and audio technitions and producers and of course the primary performing artists and wire them 5 dollars?
I stole the hell out of most of Mankind is Obsolete's discography, to the point my LastFM-scrobbling-Subsonic server pegged them as one of my most listened to artists. A couple weeks ago I picked up an album I didn't have via Bandcamp, where one sets their own price (past an artist-set minimum).
My price was ~$100. Paying the artist [as] directly [as I can] ensures the money goes to (primarily) the people that made the music.
This, I think, leaves us with two takeaways:
I would recommend "Rise", if one is looking for a new album to try
Should any one, any where, ask "Does any one actually do this?", no matter how odd, someone will crawl out of the woodwork to say yes
A ton of my music library is music I torrented and then bought later when I could afford to do so. You're definitely not the only one who's done that.
On the subject of LastFM: my most listened-to band of all time there, Indochine (French rock/new wave band) ended up all the way up there in a similar manner. I torrented their discography when I was like 14 but didn't manage to actually buy any of their albums until four years later, when I bought some CDs and merch at one of their shows. Since then I've acquired all their albums legally, so I'm hoping I made up for what I downloaded back then lol
I think it happens very occasionally with small-time creators, like at the patreon level. I don’t think anyone does it for, like, the company that produces “The Office.”
I pirated a lot of comic books when I was in college and broke and then when I grew up and had money I did end up buying trades of those issues when they came out even though I had no intention of reading it as a sort of “penance.” But I think that’s unusual and also not really helping since creators actually need the support when they’re starting out and not established in their careers yet, not 10+ years later when they’ve already become successful enough that someone rereleased their work as an anthology.
I don’t consider it piracy. In my day, we recorded mix tapes straight from FM radio and shared them with friends. I was there when MP3s first changed the world, and when Redbox arrived, I often invited people outside my family to enjoy a movie together. Sometimes, if I had an extra rental day, I’d even let a neighbor or friend borrow it before returning it.
By the strictest interpretation of modern standards, that might make me a “serial pirate” since childhood — but I see it differently. Knowledge, art, and creativity are meant to be shared. People should have the freedom to make their own choices about what’s right for their lives. Just as a horse knows how to eat the hay and spit out the sticks, people should be trusted to take in information responsibly and discard what doesn’t serve them.
As for the argument that content creators are not being paid, that’s not always so clear-cut. In an age dominated by mergers and corporate consolidation, it’s often the large conglomerates that control the profits while the actual creators see only a fraction of the value their work generates. The system itself deserves as much scrutiny as the people who share and consume the art it produces.
Pirates justifying their piracy is a tale as old as time.
It's not worth the energy.
Really only as old as 1950 or so. When piracy was mainstream as it was the main selling point of these fancy new reel-to-reel recorders.
Piracy was mainstream about about 1600-1850 when acts of piracy were justified via letters of marque between warring nations. Similarly governments justified these letter via appeals to justice and righting of grievances between nations.
I hear your frustration, and I think the conversation deserves more nuance than a quick dismissal.
First, the legality of streaming content varies wildly by jurisdiction, and in a global forum it’s impossible to apply a single legal framework. That uncertainty doesn’t excuse hostile silencing; it calls for open dialogue about the underlying issues.
What’s often missing from the "piracy=theft" narrative is a look at the economics of content delivery. Production costs have fallen dramatically thanks to digital tools and global collaboration, yet the price gap hasn’t kept pace. Much of the extra revenue ends up with label owners, shareholders, or other entities that don’t directly contribute to the creative process. This creates a service gap.
Gabe Newell’s (of Steam fame) observation captures this well:
The quote underscores that accessibility and convenience often outweigh price. When official services fail to meet those basic expectations, people turn to the alternatives that do.
That service gap has only widened as streaming platforms have layered ever tighter protection mechanisms onto their libraries.
These restrictions turn a product that should be readily accessible into a moving target. Consumers who are willing to follow every rule the official channels sets find themselves paying for a service that repeatedly denies them the very content they purchased. In the long run, such friction erodes goodwill, drives users toward more flexible (and often illicit) alternatives, and ultimately hurts the creators whose work the protections were meant to safeguard.
That’s why I’m uncomfortable with the suggestion to cut the person out of conversation. Dismissing them as just another pirate reinforces a classist narrative that culture is a luxury only for those who can afford premium pricing. It also shuts down the very discussion that could lead to better, more inclusive distribution models.
Instead of silencing, let’s talk. How about some questions to get the dialogue going. What barriers are preventing legal access in your region? How could official platforms improve timing, pricing, or availability? What role can creators and fans play together to bridge that service gap?
A constructive conversation can surface solutions that benefit creators, distributors, and audiences alike. It's more important than reinforcing a divide between legitimate and illicit consumers.
Again, it’s pirates justifying their piracy. At the end of the day, it’s an illegal practice. No matter the argument.
And I’ll note that I’m not coming from a holier-than-thou place. I’ve sailed the seas plenty and have been considering setting sail again. I simply think that justifying the action is stupid, as is trying to change a pirate’s mind.
I am in no position to enact any change in the matter. Are you? A prolonged discussion would be posturing to soothe my ego.
Talking about things it is one of the most effective tools for change in the world. In silence things fester. Even if you aren't looking for discussion, trying to stifle other conversations feels mean spirited.
I assume that this might be illegal in your country. Laws change all the time. there have been some laws that by today's standards seem archaic, but people ignored them, and now the laws are different. It isn't so cut and dry it seems. This conversation might not be able to sway the laws, but snowballs have to start somewhere.
Ego soothing is also important. If you feel overwhelmed or frustrated at the state of things I'm happy to listen and give you my two cents. I can't promise anything will change, but at least you will know that you are not alone, and I think that's a start.
Feel free to justify piracy to literally anyone else, please.
I'm still pretty confused as to why you decided to jump into a conversation if you didn't want to discuss. What where you hoping to get out of these interactions? Validation that piracy is unjustifiable?
My first comment was to state how pointless a discussion attempting to convince a pirate that piracy is theft was. A point (the pointlessness) I've maintained and not deviated from. Counting two superfluous comments (this being one of them), I have been in one thread for a total of four comments, none of which are particularly long or nuanced.
I fail to see how you could be confused. I will mark further replies to me in this thread as noise.
Well, I see you are bowing out so I will mark my final thoughts here for others reading this thread.
If piracy was truly theft we obviously wouldn't need another word. We would just call it theft. The fact that another word exists obviously means that there is a distinction. Therefore I will extrapolate your comment to mean that piracy is not LEGALLY justifiable. Since you could have also been trying to say it is not morally justifiable. I obviously disagree about the morality of piracy.
That being said I am not a lawyer. As above, the laws around what is and isn't piracy are vastly different in different countries. It is possible that what the OP described is considered illegal where you live. I just think using laws as a replacement for critical thinking and moral judgment is a dangerous shorthand.
Obviously you are free to do you, I am however glad that you grew enough to recognize that your disinterest in the conversation is not a reason to not have it.
If I'm reading correctly, it seems like Real-Debrid is a content caching service, and Streamio/Omni Content Hub are just streaming media players that can connect to various services (including Real-Debrid). I would be concerned about the longevity of something like Real-Debrid, as it seems they may be a pretty big target for copyright claims. Maybe I'm missing something though?
Real Debrid has already been sued and the effects were rather negligible. They had to purge their cache of a bunch of content and I think add those torrent infohashes to a block list. They also had to remove some feature I don't recall, but it overall still works fine. Blocking some infohashes does little because people frequently upload alternatives with slight changes that mean new hashes (different encoding, different audio or subtitle language options, different resolutions, etc.).
There are also a bunch of other debrid services, including ones that headquarter in areas that aren't as interested in accepting copyright suits. RD is in France, but as an example that I hope I remember correctly TorBox is in South Africa and seems to be depending a bit on that South Africa is less likely to care about copyright infringement of Western media empires.
A rather standard setup is Stremio + Torrentio + Debrid. Stremio would claim they don't support piracy, but also don't monitor addons. Torrentio would claim all they do is wrap existing public trackers in a Stremio addon, but don't have any data of their own. Debrid would claim they aren't for piracy and it's on the users to not download copyrighted content, not them to invasively monitor what every torrent contains. A weird liability shell game.
Seems fair exchange when mega Corps and governments do the same shell game on us for lack of accountability and environmental clean ups
OK, thanks for the context. I'd still be skeptical of the debrid services since they seem to be crossing that (very fuzzy) boundary of actually storing content. Streamio and Torrentio would seem to have better legal shields IMO.
I'm not really interested in debating whether the service itself is right or wrong, to be clear. I'm just imagining that it might suck to pay for a service that could be taken away without notice. FWIW, I've had similar thoughts about perfectly legal services like Spotify suddenly disappearing half of the music I enjoy. 🤷♂️
That is a real concern. It usually gets handwaved away though with claims that they'll just switch to a different debrid.
On the side of "I'll just switch": the torrents themselves are the content, not the debrid cache. So if someone wants the content on another service the main price to pay is just the time for it to download from torrent again. Since debrid services tend to not really house much other state beyond "here are the torrents you've added and whether or not they're currently in cache" this argument is mostly fair. To use the Stremio example, their Stremio account stores what they're watching and its progress and all that on their end and the debrid only gets involved when Stremio directly requests a specific file to play.
On the side of "losing it would suck": debrid caches can be rather significant. There can be, and often is, content with 0 seeders but is available due to having previously been cached. When someone switches debrid providers they also switch to the new provider's cache, which may or may not be significantly smaller. There's also the obvious direct monetary loss for users from that a service that is being forced to shut down is unlikely to refund the time that is paid for but not serviced.
And yeah, I'm not trying to debate anything either. I just find this topic interesting so wanted to share some of what I learned from independent research after a different thread about Stremio.
@Zestier is right that it's usually handwaved away with a simple explanation.
But it's true and the reason is that it's cheap. Setting up another debrid provider will cost about ten to fifteen minutes and about ten to fifteen dollars. The risk assessment is so trivial that I wouldn't even mind if I paid for a six month subscription and lost it the next day. I'll be out ten dollars, sad, and then hop skip to the next service and pay again.
The biggest downside is the cache as @zestier also pointed out. Torrents being what they are makes that problem largely moot unless multiple debrids will purge their cache at once. Stuff will get lost over time, though none of the files are as ephemeral as sometimes entire seasons are unavailable from one day to the next on Prime.
Is that on your Apple TV or what? I'd like to hear more about it, thanks.
Yes, you can inbox me and I’ll give you detailed info.
That they're increasing prices every single year is already gutsy enough. With people thoroughly sick of Marvel, and a year of Agent Orange and economic uncertainty they're not skipping the hike this year?
Serves them right for pre-emptively kowtowing to power
Man if they could just get Bob Iger and Robert Downey Jr back they could Make America 2018 Again, but that's a ridiculous pipe dream that would definitely without fail solve the problems Chapek introduced but that will never ever happen.
Bob Iger is still in charge of Disney since Chapek was ousted at the end of 2022. These things are happening under his leadership.
They also have RDJ back so I suspect this was tongue in cheek
i felt very clever lol
Oops, lol. Sorry for the whoosh.
Don't feel bad you're not alone, as I write this your whoosh has twice the upvotes compared to the joke you missed. Great illustration of internet discourse :D
My take away here is that this is all RDJ's fault. Damn you, Iron Man!
We have been finding ourselves using Peacock, Tubi and Pluto so much that we really haven't been using Disney+ that often. Unless we can snag a good deal for them on Black Friday, I don't see us getting another year despite having young kids.
My kids despise the ads. I don't normally mind them but Disney+ really takes it to another level. We were watching The Little Mermaid (1988) and there were ads roughly every 15 minutes. My daughter missed a scene and I went back maybe 30 seconds. It replayed ads it JUST played.
I understand that it's still a popular movie but it's nearing 4 decades old and that is absurd.
I don't know, these days I mostly don't care about mainstream streaming services anymore as the value is not really there neither in price but mostly just the deliberate decisions about the design of the sites and discoverability of content.
Mostly I read free webseries and fanfictions whose curated selection is on average more entertaining that the similar in mainstream streaming media. Not to say good series and films don't exists, I just don't seem to find much in recent offerings.
The only video streaming service I find myself paying for is Nebula. I watch very little TV, but might occasionally subscribe to Netflix, Apple, HBO etc. for a month here and there. I feel like the value just isn't there for me. Back in the day with cable TV channels had this level of coherence of theme and quality that was more conducive to content consumption. Maybe it's something else and the real issue is the paradox of choice with online streaming.
For years I've felt like a lot of the best content is produced by YouTubers. It's not as high budget and often on an irregular schedule, but I'll pretty much always pick the passionate nerd making a video over a studio trying to get a return on investment.
My guess is they already have items like probability of boycott and projected losses from boycotts already baked into their forecasting. This recent one probably didn't exceed their expectations, so there wasn't a need to put an emergency stop to their pricing plans. So yeah, they literally did not anger enough people for anything to matter.
I'm a little disappointed that there wasn't a stronger response to this recent FCC Kimmel issue though. I considered this a serious case of censorship, and I cancelled my Disney+ subscription in response. Not a huge action, but I don't know what else I can do.
The field of psychohistory is not yet advanced enough to be able to model stuff like this.
They probably don't have Hari Seldon on staff, but I'm sure they do not price things arbitrarily.
I remember seeing a news story about Target sending out pregnancy related ads to people to people who hadn't yet told their family about it, based on analytics on their purchases. I just looked it up, and that was in 2012, so 13 years ago. The amount of data collection and analysis has increased by a huge amount since then. I'm sure there's a lot more data behind corporate decisions than most people might imagine.
As some who has priced some of these things it is fairly arbitrary when you’re dealing with managing risks of black swan type events like this. You need historic reference points to actually have data. Trying to model things in a context full of sui generis events is mostly vibes.
Also these sorts of pricing and strategy decisions are mostly being made by corporate strategists, MBAs, and accounting types. There’s not that much data science/modeling going on like you’d see in dedicated data practices. That Target anecdote is impressive (I actually wrote a case study on it when I was a management consultant), but when you dig into it it’s pretty intuitive. They have a pharmacy, they can see if you’ve stopped ordering birth control, they can see when you’re ordering pregnancy tests, they can identify that you’re shopping for baby and maternity things. It’s not a huge leap to know you have a very high chance of being pregnant or getting pregnant soon.
Although I'm not working on it myself, I know my company has quite a lot of data going into its pricing, but I'm definitely just speculating in this case.
I was thinking more like some number cruncher considers average annual loss from boycotts or somesuch along with a hundred other factors and rolls it up in some figure about risk and variance and whatnot, and if projections stay within a certain range there's no reason to hit the panic button on price increases. I mean, Disney seems to have some calls for boycott every other year, with the Snow White thing last year, the Lightyear thing, Mulan actress Hong Kong thing, etc. I'm sure this risk has got to have some effect on their plans, but they've got to be used to it by now. I could be wrong about their ability to react quickly, but I would think that if a ton of people actually unsubscribed, they might consider tapping the brakes on a price increase. So, maybe this isn't really a black swan event, because those are by definition impactful.
Yeah they’ll try to value it but honestly I don’t think they really can. There’s too much that’s just up to vibes over the long term. Like losing the Disney+ subscriptions by themselves are probably not a huge deal, but I think what actually spooks them is eroding the brand affinity. Disney’s whole business model is based on building love for its characters and brands through its movies and shows and then using that affinity to sell merch and park vacations which deepen affinity for the movies and such that encourage people to watch more and try to pass on the loyalty to their kids. . .
If the sorts of rich parents with disposable income no longer feel like showing their kids whatever Mickey Mouse show on Disney+ and have them watch Daniel Tiger instead, then that’s a generation’s worth of money being spent on non-Disney vacations, buying non-Disney toys, etc. just because the kids don’t care about meeting Mickey Mouse as much. It can have a deep impact on the company’s bottom line over the long term.
I’ve only seen the first season and liked it, but haven’t had the chance to catch up. Figuring out what happened to the Empire based on the scant clues you pick up from the Foundation folks was always more interesting to me than anything happening in the Foundation itself. It’s almost a shame they’ve tied the books to the show because it sounds like they went in a sufficiently different direction with it that they might as well not bother having to shoehorn Hari Seldon or anything else but the concept of “Psychohistory” to make it work.
We've been using my Sister-In-Laws subscription and honestly after the Kimmel stuff, I should have encouraged her to cancel. I very much doubt she would have, but we barely use it anyway, generally just watching Netflix, Youtube or downloading whatever we want and storing it on our local server.
But the price increases suggest to me that they're not really hurting for subscribers, even after a boycott. Seems that if they were, they'd hold steady or decrease prices to bring people back and that's not happening, so they must be in a fairly strong position.
Or the price increase is a yearly program by a different team, so as long as there isn't a from the top directive they were going to do this, regardless of current events. Or, that's what they'll say and gives them room for less of an increase this year to show contrition
A giant mega corp behaves in a manner consistent with a giant mega corp, more on this obvious turn of events at 11.