fuck streaming, long live piracy
this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2024
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lol 2007.
Definitely my reaction lol try 2001
Hell, we were on Napster in 99.
Usenet early/mid 90's. A huge stack of floppy disks and a few weeks of all night downloads so dad didn't lose his shit over the telephone screaming at him.
I miss that most of all
Dling metallica…
Bootlegs in the 80s
Yeah I think I was using Morpheus then Kazaa…2000/2001?
These fucking dumbass kids. Whyyyyy won't they just open up a book-shaped website and read the actual history?
Of course I say that in a country that literally forgot what happened just four years ago so...nvmd, back to "human race deserves itself" mode.
2007... that guy was late to the game. And before this we had burned CDs and Zip Drives
Anon: 2007
The music industry ca. 1981:
So we left side b blank so you can help!
Also the book piracy that existed in universities through photocopying and sharing pages.
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Kinda inverts inverted the causality of Netflix starting their own production and other companies pulling their licences. Netflix started their own production to survive the licences getting pulled, which was inevitable as soon as Netflix looked profitable.
They didn't get greedy, they probably started out greedy, ran a good service to grab market share, then had to make moves to defend against the predictable greed of the incumbents.
It's greedy turtles all the way down
This is basically it except the trick was Netflix wasn't actually all that profitable based strictly off of customers to start. It was a long con. It was ostensibly funded by people placing a bet. They offered a service that wasn't just disruptive, it was operating at a loss. People piled into the service so licences started to get dicey. Netflix started producing and filming, initially at independent rates amd sweetheart deals in my union territory because everybody looked at as being a little baby studio that needed nurturing and to be fair working a Netflix show back when it started had perks. They placed bets on creators who wanted to make something different. Not nessisarily great but different giving their production teams a lot of creative freedom. Paid lunches, cell allowance, sometimes better hours and crew gifts when a number of studios like Disney were pulling penny pinching bullshit and trying to pretend they were an independent studio to get lower rates while letting their producers act like skeeze.
Thing was it was a cuckoo all along.
They flushed the market with a business model sustained by outside money so everybody else started doing the same thing. It destroyed all the union and contract protections syndicated television once had particularly erasing residuals. That was the main thing. Creators used to make money off of the amalgamation of their lifetime work by being owed a small amount everytime a rerun was aired... But streaming didn't do that. They had those sweetheart deals that made streaming services exempt from on demand access counting as replays. So you cut off the career curve of creators from building security and only paid them for stuff they made once turning them effectively gig worker.
Once everyone was playing by the same rules the funding at the top cut out because they got what they wanted out of it they started jacking prices, removing titles, selling advertising because what the hell were you going to do, go back to cable? Now the boom is over and our local Industry is a bloody dust bowl. My seniority has jumped up more in the past year than it has in the full ten years before as folk have been retiring or dropping from the union to find new careers.
Gentle reminder that i2p exists where torrents can be downloaded anonymously.
Anon got it backwards, networks noticed how profitable Netflix was and bumped the price for Netflix to stream their stuff. Netflix responded by producing their own content rather than leasing others’ at exorbitant rates. Then Netflix later got greedy and bumped their prices, lowered their quality, and cancelled all of their good shows.
I think it's a bit of both. Netflix knew that companies choosing to pull their content would be a threat, so they prematurely started producing content (famously starting with House of Cards and Orange is the New Black). Whether because they saw this as a threat or because of the perceived greater profitability of their own platforms (probably a bit of both), other studios started pulling their content from Netflix and setting up their own streaming sites.
And naturally, other companies pulling their content accelerated Netflix's desire to produce their own content to ensure they weren't left in the lurch.
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I’m doing my part 🫡
I feel like people are ignoring that Netflix was bleeding money during their "golden age". They only switched to being profitable a couple years back. A lot of times what people describe as enshittification is just unprofitable companies having to come up with an actual business model as venture capital dries up.
Also, merry Christmas:)
You can also argue that silicon valley has that particular business model of purposely making a product look great and cheap until enough people sign up.
It's distinct from how most companies run in the red at their inception in that those traditional businesses would gladly be in the black but are waiting for economies of scale or building a reputation among consumers.
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2007 ? Everybody around me was pirating every single piece of media in 2000 and we were late to the party
I really wish I was a consultant for these fucking jokers.
Back when Disney+ was just "Rumor has it Disney wants to launch their own Netflix-like streaming service.", I called this shit. I said "Well that's just going to cause this whole thing to fall apart, no one's going to juggle 50 different streaming services just to be able to find something to watch."
And I was fucking right.
The only ethical streaming service is Tubi as it doesn't charge relying on ads alone, and it's a neat little bonus that Tubi has actively aided in the restoration of lost media.
If it aint on Tubi, then I'm going to yo-ho-ho with a bottle of fuck you.
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Exactly this and more.
I'm not even pirating because it's cheaper, or easier. I have near 100TB in storage, and it takes hours per week to search material, have it downloaded, checked, etc. I just am done with the marketing, the branding, the advertising, the bullshit rules. I just want to watch what I want to watch and media companies made this impossible so I'm forced to sail the high seas
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Except people aren’t necessarily going back to piracy en masse
Torrent sites are dwindling, even the big ones have sad membership numbers compared to 10yrs ago
A large amount of internet users access the internet via devices that are openly hostile to or outright disallow anything that would enable piracy. The devices are then connected to an internet that is further hostile and aims to steer you away from anything deemed unsavory
Phones and tablets are cumbersome and unintuitive to navigate. In the case of apple torrent clients are not allowed to be listed on their app store and sideloading is involved and kind of a pain. Chromebooks and windows 11 are better obviously but less utilized then you’d think
But that leads to the second point, which is kind of angry old man yells at cloud, but people are just less tech inclined now. It makes sense because modern tech is designed to oppress the user whereas tech in the late 90s and early 2000s was more to empower them. They don’t bother to figure out how to install applications, use the file explorer, change settings, etc. the very basic steps needed to pirate shit (you obviously don’t need to be a super hacker). They don’t need to. The command prompt or a terminal is something that makes them think you’re hacking shit
They download applications like steam and then their browser auto opens the installer, then steam handles installing games and mods from that point on. They are safeguarded against having to deal with the icky filesystem and their hand is held every step of the way. Or they just download stuff from the official MS app store and even more hand holding. It’s okay because they’re only gonna install 5 streaming apps anyway and then use the browser to visit the 6 approved websites that google or bing search sends you to for basically any query.
And that’s only if they actually have a proper computer. If they have a tablet or phone they either are pushed extremely heavily towards the above scenario, or in the case of apple they simply have no other option
10 years from now the internet will just be 2-3 social media sites, a few shopping conglomerates, wikis, and streaming sites. The devices used to access will no longer let you access the filesystem directly, apps will be unable to be installed if they aren’t code signed by apple or google or ms or whoever, sealed in epoxy, and draconian drm everywhere. 40 years from now your grandchildren will think you’re weird for complaining about how you used to have autonomy and authority over your devices once you owned them and they’ll remind you it’s time to pay another $400 bezobucks to rent the google chrome ar internet hub for another month because you’re not allowed to own it and it’s a federal crime to take it apart
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Netflix didn't get greedy (well not in that way). The movie companies wanted to make their own platform, which would have left Netflix with nothing. So they had to become their own production company. They said "we have to become a production company faster than production companies become streaming companies".
2007? I remember watching a DivX of The Matrix back in 99. Prior to that I remember watching south park episodes in the RealPlayer.
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Try the 70s.
That was when VHS and cassette tapes started to hit the market and there was no copy protection on those. Following that, people copied floppy disks enough that they had to make that "dont copy that floppy" jingle.
There was a brief period with the switch to digital and CDROMs where piracy stopped, but then CD burners hit the market and it started again.
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