Step one, provide good service.

Netflix: Welp, I guess we should just pack it in.

Weird, Netflix used to compete with piracy so well that many people stopped pirating altogether, by offering a more convenient service at a reasonable price that was hard for even the most stubborn of pirates to refuse and resulted in a massive boom for its own industry. I wonder what could have changed that caused the people to leave Netflix and return to piracy. Hmm. I wonder.

No - piracy, since it always carries at least some amount of difficulty and risk, is easy to compete against. And in fact, paid services, including Netflix, have proven that over and over. All it takes is to offer dependable convenience and quality and to treat customers well. People are always willing to pay a reasonable price for that.

The problem is that piracy becomes difficult to compete against when, as Netflix is currently doing, you shift from a business model of providing good service under fair terms for a reasonable price to a business model of providing crappy service under onerous terms for too much money, because the greedy, selfish, short-sighted sacks of shit at the top want to make even more obscene amounts of money. That's the point at which piracy gains enough of an advantage to outweigh its difficulties and risks.

And when that's the case, it's pretty obvious what the real problem is.

I've never seen a magnet link respond with "this is not available in your country".

Piracy isn't even free! People pay thousands of dollars for hardware, and hundreds per year for electricity and various service providers.

But they actually get what they want for that money: Being able to watch whatever you want, anytime, on any device, in high quality and without ads. It must be really hard for streaming services to compete with features as futuristic as that!

They had piracy all but beat. It was their insatiable greed that drove people back to the sea.

It's not like I dropped Netflix and opted to pirate their content instead because of their password sharing restrictions or anything. Nah, can't be that.

Infinitely reproducible digital media has little inherent value. As the article acknowledges, the value proposition Netflix offered was convenience. If pirate sites offer more convenience than Netflix offers legitimate users, Netflix will lose. I find it baffling they are fucking around with ads and locking down access, making their experience worse. Same with Amazon Prime. It's like they forgot their own business model.

poor service

bad library

too expensive

can’t share passwords

“How could pirates do this!?!??!”

piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue.

- Gabe Newell

Operating Revenue: 33,723,297,000

Cost of Revenue: 19,715,368,000

Gross Profit: 14,007,929,000

Operating Expense: 7,053,926,000

Operating Income: 6,954,003,000

Cry less, make better service more.

"We successfully competed against piracy and drove it to near-extinction, but now that we're enshittified we can't compete with piracy while continuing to make the obscene amounts of money that we want to make"

Press releases like this are corporate signaling to US Congress that they would like some lawfare and are willing to pay for it.

Pirate streaming growth itself doesn't 'threaten legal services' as TF suggests. Any threat that arises is created by industry's market response. It comes back to margins. Netflix could decide overnight to invest in a long-term 'hearts and minds' approach that includes a quality platform user experience free of hostile design, non-discrimination amongst devices, relaxed household access rules, attentive customer service, commitment to finishing programming properly, improved stream quality, etc. Becoming the Valve of streaming represents an expenditure increase, though. You're now a lower margin business with a very sticky and content customer base. That's not a story industry wants to tell its investors, knowing they will respond with 'you should be petitioning for bills that enable more market captivity'.

They do the right thing only as a last resort, because the right thing is expensive.

"Piracy is Difficult to Compete Against"

Have you tried

Not Enshittifying

?

2013 Netflix competed just fine. Piracy was mostly dead back then

Piracy is really easy to compete against. Ask GabeN. Steam has singlehandedly taken me out of the piracy game because they have what I want, it's super easy to get and if it's not reasonably priced today I'll wishlist it until it goes on sale (and it will). If it sucks, or my hardware can't run it, I just dm someone and I get my money back. I know they can disappear shit from my library like any online store but they haven't abused that privilege with me yet and that makes me confident they won't.

With Netflix, there's a small chance that they actually have what I want. If they do, it's gonna disappear soon. Prices only ever go up, not down, and that series you love is gonna be cancelled as soon as it stops driving new subscriptions. To watch everything I want I can spend a hundred dollars a month on a rotating set of accounts on several streaming services or I can go LOOK for the MOVIE 2 stream for free without even messing with a DOT TOrrent file.

Piracy is easy to prevent if you provide a better service than the pirates. What he meant was that it's hard to get people to pay you to shit in their mouths when someone else is giving out sandwiches.

Also Netflix: We should raise our prices again.

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

Make better service, have less piracy.

Netflix: This problem we practically solved ten years ago but have been steadily and diligently working to bring back pledge to double down on those efforts and eventually make it the only viable option for a good consumer experience.

Everyone is blaming Netflix, but it’s not their fault.

It’s the fault of the content owners. Disney, fox, paramount etc…..

Rather than make a little money off of Netflix, they decided they could scam more money by launching their own competing service

Yeah back in the golden era of streaming you only needed Netflix, most of the shows on there were good, and everything would eventually be on there. So piracy was too much of pain in the ass to bother with to save $10 a month.

Now there's 10 different streaming services most of them cost a lot more than $10 per month, you have to wade through pages of crap to find anything worth watching. If you hear about a show or movie that sounds interesting you can't just wait for it to show up on Netflix. You have to go and search for which streaming service has the show you want and there's a good likelihood you're not subscribed to that one.

It's now far easier to search on the 'bay for what you want to see (you have to do a search anyway) and they always have it. Yeah I guess you're not instantly watching it, but you're not instantly watching a thing you want to see on a streaming service now anyway, because have to scroll past a wall of crap to find anything.

My general feeling on piracy is that when you're young and don't have much money, you can't afford to pay for it anyway, you may as well pirate it. When you get older and can afford it then you should pay for movies and video games and stuff. But when they make it more of a pain in the ass to buy something than it is to pirate things, then I dunno what to say. I have money and want to pay for a service that I can just chill and watch cool stuff, but they seem more interested in various schemes to impress shareholders than providing me the thing I'm willing to pay for.

Funny, you had no problem competing in the past. Hmmmm wonder why that is...

So here's a novel idea, maybe stop driving people away from your business with constant rate-hikes, removal of content, killing new shows after 1 season, etc...

They didn't seem to have any problems before they started fucking around with their pricing and policies and everyone else also started their own streaming services, splitting everything across multiple subscriptions instead of 1, convenient service.

I could keep up with what's available where and shuffle my subscriptions around every few months to see what I want when it's new... But it's way easier to just use a torrent site now.

That's funny, I haven't stolen music in over 10 years thanks to Spotify, but they haven't split all the music into 20 services or jacked up the price every year.

Granted they don't pay the artists, but that's not my problem.

Piracy is service problem

I’m kinda surprised that the article only mentioned convenience and completely skipped rising costs, ad injection, crackdowns on password sharing, and more fees.

The subscriptions cost a shitload more, even if you’re a paid subscriber you still get ads, you have to pay more fees to get rid of ads or watch a program that is either new or the service has decided to charge for, and you can’t share password with anyone outside your household.

It’s not a convenience problem, it’s a money problem.

Piracy predates Netflix, if it was hard to fight against then Netflix as we know it wouldn’t have taken off

Netflix Buddy, friend, matey. If I have to pop open Google to find where I can watch something, find the best offers on pricing, and how to circumvent ads or whatever, or how to get Netflix to run on my devices without installing invasive crap or derooting my phone etc, and it's actually quite expensive.

I'll just do one search and not worry about whether I'll have to fight ads, or automatic iffy quality settings, weird compression algorithms, device compatibility etc.

I was happy to hang up the peg leg when I could just VPN to usa and watch everything for the price of a lunch a month. I like simplicity, I enjoyed your more arty shows. It was you who changed the deal Netflix, not I. you decided being insanely profitable wasn't enough and you needed infinite growth.

Bullshit. Make it reasonably priced, fast and easy to access, no bullshit, clean interface, no ads, great customer support, and I'll rip this parrot right off my mother lovin shoulder.

Once, not so long ago, streaming was more convenient than pirating. But, as expected the commercial services went through their Standard Cycle of Enshittification and now we either let ourselves get flogged by 50 competing predatory services or just take the easy way and sail the high seas.

The choice is not that hard. Yarr.

Of course this returns us to the state where the streaming companies who have literally "enshitted their own beds" now turn to legislators and policymakers (who they hated, just couple of weeks ago) to ask them to provide some "law and order" to this unruly mob and to defend the corporations right to put thumbscrews on the population for ever increasing profits.

And so it goes.

Netflix already defeated piracy by producing endless mid “content” like The Grey Man that you can’t even be bothered to watch for free.

Solution: create a common platform for all online services (Netflix, Paramount, Disney, Warner, ...) and have EVERYTHING there, even old movies and not often seen ones.

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

How are the pirates so good at this without even taking my money? Maybe they should teach the money people how the computers work.