Step one, provide good service.
Netflix: Welp, I guess we should just pack it in.
The 3rd panel needs to be updated to somehow show that it’s also crazy expensive…
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.
The trick is to make as much money as possible then jump ship to a newer competing company that has the ability to grow more before you leech it to death again
Fr stop producing c-tier content for millions of dollars and just pay for better content and/or make it cheaper. I don’t need 14 generic action movies starring Ryan Reynolds and dozens of forgettable shows.
Also, don’t greenlight 100 shows if you only plan on giving 5 of them a second season, and you base that decision entirely on algorithms instead of genuine human feedback.
And please, for the love of god, let me look at a movie for longer than 1 second before you start automatically playing it because your almighty algorithm determined that it would force users to pick a movie faster. It’s the most annoying “feature” that makes me inclined to avoid Netflix as much as possible.And please, for the love of god, let me look at a movie for longer than 1 second before you start automatically playing it
This is a setting that’s on be default and buried in the user settings. It might also only be available to change on desktop (but will then set per profile for all devices), but this setting does exist and it’s so much better once you toggle it
What Jupiter Ascending are you talking about here?
It also doesn’t help that the studios all band together under banners that each launch their own streaming services and withhold all of their titles from the others. Maybe Netflix should spend less time fighting consumers and more time fighting the other cutthroat corporations who effectively make it impossible for their artists to choose their own distribution networks.
I’m back on the seas. Once I couldn’t leave my Netflix account set at my work site and my house, then they upped the price and added ads, it’s just easier to pirate anything I’d like to binge. My phone has like 640 GB of space. I can carry my own Netflix, with beer and hookers.
There was a decent 5 year span in my life where the only time I ever pirated was to see British TV shows I wouldn’t be able to watch in the U.S. And if I could have paid the British TV license fee to see those, I would have paid it too. Because that would have been a total of two streaming services.
Even now that we’re down to one income we can afford two streaming services- one for video and one for music. But we sure as fuck can’t afford the dozen streaming services you need to have if you expect to watch all the programming people rave about as amazing.
I can’t afford Max and Disney+ and AppleTV+. If I want to find out why The Last of Us is so good and why The Mandalorian was a terrific show and how funny Ted Lasso is, and have the temerity to expect no ads when I’m already paying to watch, that alone would cost me almost $40 a month. Add Netflix and Amazon to that and it’s another $30+.
That is what I was paying for cable except with far less programming. On-demand and no ads are definitely advantages, but pay the same amount for a fraction of the programming advantages? Not for me.
I’ve never seen a magnet link respond with “this is not available in your country”.
I want this as a sticker for my laptop.
t-shirt for me
Mug
They won’t even let you watch stuff like anime with subtitles if it’s not dubbed in your language. Like why?
In Disney+, in order to watch anything in French, you have to change the language of the entire interface to French for the option to appear. And then you lose most other languages.
The only reason I have a Disney+ subscription is because it’s hard to find kids’ shows in languages other than English in the high seas. And they make it so friggin’ difficult for no reason.
Finding stuff in German is also really hard. Wish I had a torrent tracker or usenet indexer/provider that had more German stuff.
Try SceneNZBs, they have tons of German content!
I actually bought a one year subscription yesterday. Will see how it goes.
What I want is content in Greek, which is a lost cause.
Do you mean actual German shows/movies or German dubs of shows/movies?
I was raised in the Netherlands and I’m fairly sure that German Society is so braindead because they never had to indulge in foreign languages. Just teach your kid English, it’ll be good for everyone. Kids absorb other languages like a sponge.
I mean German dubs. Also, there’s a lot of immigrants here so a lot of people speak more than just German and English and we do learn other languages like French or Spanish in school but it’s mostly optional or only if you continue school after 10th grade. Calling us all braindead because we’re not forced to learn languages that we’ll never use is not very nice.
I have lived in Germany for over 30 years now. I just saw the difference between the Netherlands and Denmark vs Germany. It’s kind of sad how we shut ourselves into our own little language bubble, yet the world has so much to offer. I prefer watching movies in French/Spanish/Japanese/whatever with subtitles. I believe that a huge portion of the trade that is acting is conveyed through language. By overdubbing these movies a lot of the actual appeal is lost.
Removed by mod
I know very little about this topic, do not take this as fact. One possible reason is licensing issues. It’s a mess. Not an unsolvable one, but one that pirates usually don’t have to deal with.
Might be licensing but I think it’s actually just that they will hide everything that’s not dubbed in the language you speak because I didn’t find anything on Netflix (back when I had it) that wasn’t dubbed in German
It’s just US managers who cannot imagine people speaking more than one language
My bad, I misunderstood your previous comment as saying you could only watch in your native language.
Searching a bit, I found an old blogpost explaining how to filter Netflix content so it only showed stuff available in English. So I assume it isn’t (or at least wasn’t) that they only show content dubbed in your language.
However, from my understanding, dubbing is quite popular. Especially so in Germany, or so say my 10 minutes of superficial research into the topic.
Netflix may simply noticed that dubbed was the more popular option by a significant margin and accordingly decided to invest a lot into making shows available with dubs, or not “waste” money making them available at all.
For most things that’s true but 99% of anime aren’t dubbed in any language other than Japanese. I still wanted to watch them tho, I always watch those in the original language with subtitles anyway. Was one of the main reasons I stopped using Netflix.
I completely understand. Though I rarely watch it nowadays, I’m much the same. Sometimes I’ll make an exception when I hear the dubbed version is worth it.
Since spotify was increasing the price AGAIN, I was willing to give Apple music a chance. Guess what, many of the soundtracks I listen to are not available in my country. Like why would you block it I already pay for the thing just let me listen to it. But I guess they just know better. And now I’m gonna selfhost my music just like I selfhost movies and tv shows.
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.
Netflix was a core part of my life for well over a decade. The vast majority of my entertainment came from there.
In other News my Plex server is coming along great!
To be fair, for me the fact that they content is now spread across many subscription services is the problem more than Netflix’s price or current quality.
Once I set are services, torrent and jellyfin for all of the others, I’m not making exceptions for Netflix
Yeah, by “they”, I meant the studios more than Netflix. Netflix itself was negatively impacted by studio greed, since a lot of them pulled their content from the platform so they can push their own shitty subscription service. It’s frustrating that these studios fought streaming tooth and nail, while Netflix pioneered the industry and proved a profitable streaming model. As soon as it was impossible to dispute that the model works, all the individual studios suddenly want to run their own streaming service. They fragmented the content across a dozen different services, and drove the industry back to unaffordability and inconvenience.
Its ironic. On a decentralized platform we are discussing how a big issue with streaming services is that they are not centralized -
I dont even disagree with you. I just think its interesting that we dont apply the ideological standard of centralization and monopoly being inherently bad evenly across the board.
Im not really sure I have a greater point to make here. I’m not trying to knock or dissent what your saying at all.
Just a stoned observation.
It’s exclusivity deals that are the problem. Governments should legislate them away so that there can be competition.
Then we’d all choose the marketplace of our preference. Like supermarkets.
Video streaming, music streaming, games consoles, even mobile OSs all could benefit from some anti-monopoly legislation.
This, why did the government stop on prohibiting studios from owning cinemas?
I see your point, but I don’t think this would qualify as decentralized. It went from 1 to maybe 8 players depending on where you are, but they are separated and closed. Each one of them is centralized, it’s just that there are several competing ones. Each one is taking away their shows or making some third party ones exclusive, so the more there are, the less vale each provides.
And of course the issue is that each one has to be paid separately, so there’s a economic incentive to participate in as few as you can.
With Lemmy for instance, you might want want an instance that’s very connected with others, one that’s quite closed and focussed or even create several users or even spin your own instance to have it your way.
Excellent point. Calling the current streaming landscape decentralized is like calling the current social media landscape decentralized, since you can choose between twitter, reddit, tiktok, or meta. It’s unfortunate that it’s unlikely that a properly decentralized network for video will exist, since the hosting costs are so astronomical.
A centralized service’s hosting costs are astronomical because they are trying to serve the whole world. Is your Plex server hosting cost astronomical? What if you share it with friends? Everyone contributes to a decentralized service. Piracy is decentralized, and the hosting costs are not astronomical.
You can read things from all servers on the server you choose to connect with though. Bad analogy.
Yet streaming music has basically the same artists no matter which service you use. And Tidal integrates with Plex seamlessly with my own local collection. Worth the subscription for that.
Do that. (But they won’t)
One should acknowledge that this is not on Netflix alone.
Other media companies pulling their content to set up their own streaming services has fractured the market and made each individual service much worse in the process.You’re correct. I actually did acknowledge it further down in the comments chain here: https://lemmy.world/comment/7277901
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.
poor service
bad library
too expensive
can’t share passwords
“How could pirates do this!?!??!”
Don’t forget terrible video quality, even compared to other streaming services.
It really is surprising how bad Netflix’s quality is. I can notice it on my TV and it’s only 1080p.
When Glass Onion (terrible film) came out, a friend and I started watching it on his rather good TV and it was horrible even though we had the best 4K HDR, no bandwith limitation quality Netflix offered. Like, the water in the background looked like it was playing back at at 6fps instead of 24.
After half an hour my friend noped out because the film and video quality was so bad and I finished it alone on my 15 year old 720p projector. It looked better on there…
A lot of their content is just 1080/720 up scaled to 4k and HDR graded. If it looks like crap, it’s because it is crap with a shiny 4k label.
Yea but like… Glass Onion is a Netflix original… They have special requirements for cameras to be true 4K. So everything points to it being actual 4K HDR just with a bitrate so abominably low that you might as well not bother.
Right, their 10mbps 4k stream is a joke compared to blu-ray.
Not just Bluray, even compared to other streaming services that sometimes push up to 40mbps. That’s still less than BluRay but imo enough. Heck, a well encoded 25mbps HEVC video file can look great. Sure, not as good as a 4K Bluray but better than a regular Bluray at least
piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue.
- Gabe Newell
I just realised I’ve never pirated a video game, yet I download almost everything I watch… 🤔
A high price is a bad thing to serve.
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
“Our profits may be obscene, but they’re not obscene enough! How could these evil pirates ever do this to us?”
The constant growth aspect of capitalism means that profits are never obscene enough for any business.
Hmmmmm it’s almost like growing infinitely large is not sustainable. Who would have thought?
What a communist thing to say. Are you a communist? Why do you hate freedom?
Communism is when you don’t convert all resources in the universe to large digital numbers
I like dividing net profit by total employees in 2022 they could pay everyone $350k extra that year.
4.49bil/12800
All we can do is 50k and some fruits in the office.
And a pizza party at the end of the year!
Note: Pizza will count as a taxable benefit in kind.
won’t somebody think of the
parasitesshareholders‽
“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”
It’s not just the enshittification of their own service; it’s the fact that so many audios decided to pull their content and set up their own enshittified services.
Now, if I want to watch stuff legally, I have to have a bunch of subscriptions, and we’re back to where we started from.
It’s almost like some people don’t like being fucked.
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.
Cry less, make better service more.
“Piracy is Difficult to Compete Against”
Have you tried
Not Enshittifying
?
We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas
hey now, don’t discount bitching and moaning!
The really stupid thing is that everyone knows Netflix succeeded by offering - for the first time - a better product than piracy. A decade ago, Netflix offered a huge library of high quality, ad free content, which was easy to navigate and relatively free of bugs and viruses. People signed up because it was better than piracy where content could be difficult to find, time consuming to download or slow to buffer, with risks of malware or questionable websites.
People are willing to pay for a better experience that supports the people making art and entertainment.
Netflix already knows how to do this, built a company around it and launched an industry based on the knowledge that people will pay for a product that is better than free options. Now, it’s gone all the way back around. Streaming services are fragmented and expensive, content is hard to find and disappears without warning, streaming apps don’t always work on the devices they’re supposed to, quality gets unexpectedly throttled, and the ads are inescapable and unskippable.
Tbf, a lot of the problem is from content producers making their own platforms
I’m not sure I buy it. Just because content producers wall+jerk themselves off doesn’t mean you have to enshittify your own product, not when you are winning. Besides, Netflix already became a content producer themself partly as an answer to that.
Also true. Netflix decided on their own to limit resolution to 720p for browsers even for account that pay for 4k content
People wouldn’t care nearly as much about password sharing crackdowns and random limitations if Netflix had a complete content library. Netflix with their originals aren’t going to match Disney’s decades-long catalog of content regardless of how much money they pour into it. Tack on Paramount, NBC, and Warner Bros, and that task becomes impossible. Piracy came back because people couldn’t get the content they wanted on Netflix or Hulu, and they couldn’t get that content because producers got super greedy.
TBH they could just have kept streaming their archived copies of that content (they did make backups, right? They work on IT, they would have known how important it is to have backups). If Disney or someone complains, let each side just pick their lawyer staff and toss them together at a mud cage match with wet T-shirts, for a couple of years, maybe a decade. They have way over good amounts of money to waste on that, and people would have kept enjoying a good alternative to piracy in the meantime.
Netflix would lose that lawsuit almost immediately.
EDIT: To explain further, it literally doesn’t matter if Netflix has copies of that media. If Netflix loses the rights to distribute that media, they can’t distribute that media. If Netflix continued to distribute said media, they would not have a case in US courts. When people in the US buy physical media, they only receive a license (intangible) and a copy of the media. With some exceptions, people have to adhere to the terms of that license. Even if ripping for personal use is allowed, you can’t buy a DVD, rip it, and then pass the DVD to a friend to keep because you transfer your license to use that media onto a friend.
oh they’ve definitely fucked themselves in the ear with a corn schucker, but watching your most profitable content flee your platform would make anybody panic.
Content producers raised their prices to drive traffic away from Netflix.
2013 Netflix competed just fine. Piracy was mostly dead back then
But 2013 Netflix didn’t have to compete with Prime Video, Disney Plus, Paramount Plus, HBO Max, Apple TV, Hulu, Peacock, or any of the million “add-on” channels that Amazon uses as an excuse to paywall you off from the content.
The fact that they all run in their own UI, desperate the shove the next instalment of mediocrity down your throat, means that I’ve gone back to piracy. It’s just much easier to type what I’m after into Radarr or Sonarr than it is to go through the services to see what’s available. Sure, I can use Justwatch, but 80% of the time what I’m after isn’t on anything I have.
More competition should mean lower prices. How is competition diving prices up? Seems rigged.
It’s only competition if they provide similar products.
The current landscape is like farmers markets and butchers. Sure they both provide food, but they don’t really directly compete with eachother.
They certainly do compete with each other but it’s just a general misconception that competition lowers prices.
Pepsi and Coke have been competing with each other for decades and Coke has larger market share. So why doesn’t Pepsi just lower prices? Pepsi even has the diversified income of doing more than drinks. Lowering prices doesn’t lead to market share and Coke can just match the price.
Look at Apple’s growth in the American market, they can sell a product that is significantly more expensive than competitors and still gain market share.
I still think you’re looking at competition slightly wrong.
Coke and Pepsi do compete with eachother, along with the rest of the drink market. And overall prices in that industry are pretty low, some people will buy other competitors (the store brand Cola’s). But overall competition is working.
Apple only kinda competes. Sure a phone is a phone and a laptop is a laptop. But unless someone is entering the market for the first time. They already have applications they are looking to use, so if you need an iPhone, you need an iPhone, and same for a Mac. But if you’re an android or Windows user, suddenly you have a lot more choice because there is lots of competition!
The reason companies setup walled gardens, or pay for exclusive access to a piece of media is to erode competition. If a user wants that thing, they can only get it from that one place.
Are you’re saying competition doesn’t exist because products aren’t the same?
I’m trying to not disparage your argument here but if I go with your reasoning then I feel like there is no competition so that you can justify prices not going down. Where I believe competition simply doesn’t lower prices because capitalism desires more profit not less profit. Why fight over scraps when you can create a market by manipulating people into thinking: Green chat bubble mean poor so me no use RCS or open blue bubble because green bubble mean poor.
If competition didn’t exist for apple then they could give android an imessage app.
I’m saying the competition can only exist because products that actually fill the same need.
If you decide that you need product A, and have multiple options on where to get that, you have competition.
So if you’re looking for a Cola, you have options.
If you’re looking to play StardewValley, you have options where you want to buy it and which platform you want to play it on, you don’t need to buy a new game system to play it.
If you’re looking to play the latest Zelda game, you don’t have options, you need to buy a Switch.
If you’re looking to watch Ozarks, you don’t have options, you can only watch Netflix.
If you’re looking to just have something playing on TV and don’t really care what it is, you have options.
If you’re looking to listen to music, you have options, most of the steaming services have most of the music.
If you’re looking to be able to text friends, you have options, any phone will work.
If you’re looking to be able to iMessage friends and for your case only iMessage will work, iPhone is your only option.
Competition is complex and is more dependent on a consumer needs than just classification of what a product is. In your earlier point you used Apple as an example of a company that can increase prices despite competition, but really Apple is a prime example of a company putting up walls to an ecosystem making it really hard to leave once you’re in.
Generally in the current tech landscape there barely is any competition outside openish platforms. But with tech, you often can’t look at competition as product A vs Product B. Like while we can say that Window competes with OSx, it’s harder to say that a Mac laptop competes with a given Dell laptop (because what you can do with each OS is different to different people).
This is why I like to think of all the tv streaming services as different types of food stores. There is no supermarket that supplies everything, you’re forced to have memberships to the single butcher, the single milk man, the single bakery, etc. if you want a particular food, there is currently no (or very little) competition. You can certainly survive on just bread, and people are happy to do that, but that bakery can and will increase prices whenever because they aren’t really competing with the butcher.
Streaming services are middle men with exclusivity rights on products. They sell simular but different things, think of them like dealership repair shops, they both fix cars but they fix different cars.
It is rigged. Exclusive deals keep content restricted so they’re not directly competing; if you want that show you have to pay for service X. Or, you know, yarrrr.
Same amount of content, more players, outbidding each other, passing on those lovely reverse savings.
See if it was like music, with a massive back catalogue available to everyone, you’d have four or five services competing on price. But it isn’t. And it will suffer for that.
if it was like music
If it were* like music
When using be in an if clause for an unreal conditional sentence, always conjugate it as were, no matter what the subject is. Even if the subject is first-person singular (I) or third-person singular (he, she, or it), still use were with an if clause in unreal conditional sentences.
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/conditional-sentences-was-instead-of-were/
Calling people out for their grammar isn’t cool anymore; now we just let one another live in peace. You should try it.
Your comment makes no sense to me. It was never cool, and it isn’t now.
If it was never cool, there’s no need to extra uncool it now.
I hope this is sarcasm. They weren’t being a dick, just educating people, which is a good thing
When using be in an if clause for an unreal conditional sentence
*When using “be” in an “if” clause for an unreal conditional sentence
When referring to words, use quotation marks for clarity.
Great suggestion, thank you
deleted by creator
prices are lower, piracy is nearly free for most, no?
I would like to see some evidence that the competition resulted in Netflix losing a lot of subscribers, and thus money, rather than not hitting their predicted revenue targets. Because I would bet it’s the latter and not the former. I don’t know of too many people who said, “well, I had Netflix, but Disney is doing streaming video now so I won’t be watching Bake-Off anymore.” They just ended up getting Netflix and Disney+.
For a while anyway. Now people are dropping these services due to the price hikes. Unless you downgraded your Netflix service when they added lower tiers with fewer options and ads, to maintain the basic Netflix service you had in 2016, you’re paying an additional $5 a month today.
Netflix and all the other streaming services are built upon the insane idea that there are an infinite number of new customers that will continue to sign up regularly. Some of them don’t even think you need all that much programming to draw them. Paramount+ has a fraction of the original programming of Netflix, Peacock, Apple, Amazon, etc. but still costs $10 a month and will most assuredly continue to raise its prices based on the idea that there are either an infinite number of Star Trek fans or they will have to raise their prices.
I used to pay for Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and Paramount+. Then me and m wife noticed that every time we wanted to rewatch a show or a movie, it was not available on any of those. So now I only pay for Newsgroups.
Same thing for me. I can also use Findroid on my Android phone with microG to watch stuff from my Jellyfin server. I think the Netflix app wouldn’t even work on my phone.
Or use jellyseerr/overseerr, and browse for media. Just like the streaming services.
Most accurate piracy meme I’ve ever seen
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.
Yep, Steam is my “video game piracy canary”. The day I lose access to my games on Steam will be the last day I ever buy any video game, and probably any non-physical piece of media for the rest of my life.
Mostly the same for me. I’d still be open to it if it’s convenient, DRM-free, and easy to back up somewhere, but far less likely to put effort into finding out.
in fact for the games that have been removed I actually still have full access, like rocket League still in my library just not purchasable anymore
Isn’t that just because RL went free to play?
deleted by creator
when gaben dies the enshittification of steam will happen in short order. don’t put all your eggs in one basket
If that happens well then Piracy still exists. None of the other baskets aside from GOG are worth putting eggs in
until it goes on sale (and it will)
Except Factorio. It has never and will never go on sale, and they were able to use that policy to get money back that they lost from G2A.
That being said, Factorio is worth the price tag
G2a?
Gobble two asses
but you usually get paid for that
deleted by creator
