Gabe Newell (Valve CEO, creator of the Steam platform) on piracy (via the Escapist, 2011):

“We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem,” he said. “If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 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.
[...] Our success comes from making sure that both customers and partners (e.g. Activision, Take 2, Ubisoft…) feel like they get a lot of value from those services, and that they can trust us not to take advantage of the relationship that we have with them.”

Thirteen years later and this is still true. The pivot points have changed a bit in streaming media: region locks are still a thing, but now it's sometimes a question of services arbitrarily removing content, or content moving between services due to licensing deals. Sometimes it's just reluctance to keep paying a provider's steadily increasing fees when the same provider keeps restricting access (pay more for higher-def video, pay more for multiple users, &c) while at the same time canceling shows after a season or two based on some inscrutable algorithm.

Meanwhile pirating has never been easier. It's not going away anytime soon. (I've canceled Netflix but I still use Steam every day.)
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 2:27 AM on January 15 [34 favorites]

Guess I'm glad that the first article exists, because it shows me a different world. I know some people who pirate, but far more common in my world are the people who do drop services all the time. The idea of Netflix, with its stable of original and absolute shit content, as a fixed cost is hilarious to me.

Missing from some of these discussions is the now naked disregard that leaders of many streaming services show for their existing customers vs. putative future customers. Ditto the shenanigans regarding shows being memory-holed or shelved for tax purposes. Streaming was sold as the replacement for physical media, and whoa buddy...
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:20 AM on January 15 [13 favorites]

This notion that there's lockdown-scale adressable market and as-yet-not-disposed income for a given studio's output in one exclusive place ... that's a poor, self-congratulatory idea.

Disney+ is a huge vault of stuff, C.20 Fox plus Star Wars plus Disney itself (and some comic-book adaptations) ... and yet it's a loss-maker.

The economics are wrong and they're making the service worse. Newell is right and rightly cited ^^ for seeing this as a service problem.
posted by k3ninho at 3:29 AM on January 15 [11 favorites]

The articles seem to argue that Netflix is such a powerful brand that people subscribe to it anyway, whereas my experience suggests that people have Netflix for a while and then cancel it as there’s very little worth watching. It’s kind of security through obscurity- nobody is torrenting the second season of Warrior Nun because nobody wanted to watch it
posted by The River Ivel at 3:51 AM on January 15 [3 favorites]

It’s kind of security through obscurity- nobody is torrenting the second season of Warrior Nun because nobody wanted to watch it

Clearly, you don’t spend much time on social sites full of young queer media fans, like anything related to The Locked Tomb series.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:06 AM on January 15 [9 favorites]

A key feature of media and fandoms on the internet at this point is deep niches. Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of people may be deeply into some ~*~thing~*~ that you are not only not into, but which you may barely even realize exists. You can't keep all of the things in mind that you don't know about.

Like, 30,000 people watching other people sitting in an apartment play ancient computer games? Are you fucking kidding me? Let alone commentators for this? And yet.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:28 AM on January 15 [15 favorites]

If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 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.

This is literally the difference between whether I'd buy music legally (mostly iTunes, some Amazon Music) or go to the torrents.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:39 AM on January 15 [7 favorites]

cupcakeninja: A key feature of media and fandoms on the internet at this point is deep niches.

That's absolutely true in my family's case. We have a subscription to Disney+ because they have a lot of Icelandic-language content, thanks to decades' worth of cartoon and family movie dubbing. If it weren't for that, we probably wouldn't subscribe to any streaming service. Very much a niche need. I think Netflix kinda gets that, which explains why they've got a lot of strange content, and Disney accidentally fills a lot of niches, just by dint of its ownership of so many disparate things. The rest all seem like they're run on "build it and they will come" logic.
posted by Kattullus at 5:52 AM on January 15 [7 favorites]

The articles seem to argue that Netflix is such a powerful brand that people subscribe to it anyway, whereas my experience suggests that people have Netflix for a while and then cancel it as there’s very little worth watching.

I mean, they did kinda get there first, and "very little worth watching" is definitely a matter of personal opinion, and it's entirely plausible to me that huge swaths of the population don't want to bother bouncing around between paid streaming networks with the cancelling and the signing up again and again and again every month or three months or whatever and the tracking of what's on where so you can decide which services to sign up for.

Note that even though The Internet went ballistic over Netflix's password sharing crackdown with people dramatically cancelling and predicting the death of Netflix, there's some evidence that it actually worked and they gained millions of subscribers.

Convenience and inertia can be big factors in consumer behavior.
posted by soundguy99 at 5:55 AM on January 15 [3 favorites]

The articles seem to argue that Netflix is such a powerful brand that people subscribe to it anyway

My SO has an apparently insatiable appetite for dreadful US teen drama and anything with elimination rounds is the reason we subscribe. For me, it is well past the point where it would be on a break and I don't know when it would make it off that break, since it seems to have much less in the way of stuff that stands out as reason why I would restart a subscription, in the way that Apple does and Disney and NOW (UK channel for drama) sometimes do.
posted by biffa at 6:07 AM on January 15 [1 favorite]

Region locks are definitely still a thing. Even in Canada there are shows and movies that don't show up on a streamer here, or stay as a paid rental vs being part of a service's library, or the service itself isn't available internationally.

That's compounded with the ubiquity of American media reporting. When a website announces show X or movie Y is now available on streaming, it's always a coin flip if that means it was released on a world-wide platform or this is a US-only release.

I'm not nearly the pirate I used to be - I don't have the time or energy to manage my own Plex server anymore and have enough disposable income to subscribe to a few different streaming services. But there are times where piracy is still the only way for someone out of the US to see certain shows and movies.
posted by thecjm at 6:14 AM on January 15 [13 favorites]

I had netflix for years, it was easy, and I'm lazy. I also had hulu for a while, I got deal for that & spotify for one price. I stopped hulu & spotify when I discovered that while I was paying for the service, I got commercials. Fuck that. Then netflix started raising their price. Tmobile was offering it for free so I started using it through my t-mobile account. At some point everything I wanted to watch on netflix, had been watched. I left.
I have one more streaming service, crunchyroll. I love anime. I had gotten rid of it, but came back to it when I discovered they were the only streamer that had all the episodes of a particular anime, I liked.
I use pirate services for most of my streaming media. It's easy, it's cheap, and there are no commercials. The big media companies, it seems to me, are happy to pull bullshit price hikes, and adding commercials, because they can. People will put up with it because it's easier to deal with than dumping them and finding alternatives.
I hope I'm an early RE adopter of pirate services. I'm happy to watch as these service commit slow suicide because they refuse to understand that there's a point at which people will refuse to put up with their bullshit.
posted by evilDoug at 6:23 AM on January 15 [7 favorites]

I think piracy is an unvarnished good. It makes media vastly more accessible, especially outside the first world, it preserves media for future generations, and it makes it possible for people without disposable income to engage with culture.

The fact the streaming services have proven to be unreliable both as products and as participants in the creative process just makes the value of piracy that much clearer.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 7:04 AM on January 15 [23 favorites]

piracy is the free hand of the market at work and those who would outlaw it are communist running dogs
posted by logicpunk at 7:21 AM on January 15 [21 favorites]

Netflix is absolutely atrocious for LGBTQIA+ content. I know they cancel a lot of shows, and often for good reason. A huge portion of shows with the tiniest bit of queer content does not get a second season. Economics, idiot management, misunderstanding the media environment, or bigotry? The world needed a second season of Warrior Nun, or dear gods Julie and the Phantoms or Teenage Bounty Hunters way, way, way more than it needed a multiple million dollar Chapelle transphobic rant. At some point, pirating becomes the ethical choice, oddly enough
posted by Jacen at 7:28 AM on January 15 [17 favorites]

I used to pay for multiple streaming services until a buddy hooked me up with an account on his pirate server.
It is amazing and even has a UI that lets me search for just about anything and it goes and finds it and puts it on the server, sometimes within minutes.
posted by Dirk at 8:27 AM on January 15 [6 favorites]

I still can't get over how providers like Disney plus have managed to make people both pay for the service and pay to NOT watch ads. Isn't the point of paying in the first place to not have to sit through commercials?

Same with Amazon prime. They basically have slowly turned into an online rental site since so much of it isn't free anymore.

No wonder peopler are fed up with it.
posted by Liquidwolf at 8:38 AM on January 15 [12 favorites]

I mean, price is somewhat of a motivator as to whether I go to piracy as an option -- if the only way to see a movie is to pay $20 to Amazon to rent it for two days, I'm gonna pirate it.

My main problem with torrents: poor support for subtitles. Particularly for movies where somebody talks in another language for 5 minutes somewhere in the middle, it's disappointing.

I've actually signed up for two streaming services lately, because they were the only place to see something and I definitely wanted to watch it -- The Criterion Channel and Mubi. Both have artsy films, I can easily watch on my laptop or Roku, and they've definitely earned their money from me so far. If you make a streaming services that fulfills my needs, I'll give you my credit card number. If you've only got one interesting TV series that you'll probably cancel after this season, I'm not paying you for it.

My wife and I were recently talking about the number of streaming services we have, and she watches a lot of Netflix; I watch a lot of my artsy films, we watch Disney+ together for the MCU and Star Wars -- Hulu is probably the weakest service at the moment, but we have a Hulu+Disney package that's probably about the same cost as Disney+ by itself. Netflix is the most expensive because we share it with my wife's parents, but if people are watching it, we'll keep paying for it. AppleTV may be the next thing we sign up for, because we've watched a few series that came from it.
posted by AzraelBrown at 8:53 AM on January 15 [4 favorites]

As one of Plex's co-founders, I have to agree with Gabe here. We created the platform in 2008 to solve the usability and distribution issues with video content. It was always our point of view and experience that people who loved media so much to go to the trouble to torrent and run a media server also are willing to spend money to get content legally if the experience was reasonable. In the early days, you couldn't even get most of the content streamed to your house at any price.

I'm no longer with the company and the streaming solutions are good enough these days that I haven't even bothered to use Plex for 4-5 years, and I prefer that the content creators get paid for their efforts.
posted by ill3 at 8:55 AM on January 15 [34 favorites]

I have, many times, pirated videos that are on streaming platforms I pay for simply because it's easier than figuring out which streaming service has a particular thing.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 8:56 AM on January 15 [11 favorites]

I’m not presenting this as an argument. I’m just sharing my opinion and practices.

We don’t generally pirate at my house. We do use our very excellent (overall, the last couple of months have been trying due to a hacked system) library system and streaming it provides, we pay for 2-3 streaming services at a time, and we also donate to our library. My view has been that as someone who assigned and made a salary at web editorial content in the past, and as a writer, it’s important for me to pay for most of it.

I will sometimes go to an ungated link, but I try to pay for, or use library resources to access, most of my media. I’m a huge supporter of libraries as the source of free media so that there’s continued incentive for everyone to continue to shore up those truly public resources. I’m also a believer in paying creators and paying to watch movies and things I support. Sometimes I don’t agree with those choices but I guess having been through the collapse of local journalism etc., I hold a belief that if no one pays, eventually there is a tier of things that just won’t get made.
posted by warriorqueen at 9:38 AM on January 15 [11 favorites]

I hold a belief that if no one pays, eventually there is a tier of things that just won’t get made.

That is true, but if people do keep paying, the current streaming economy is likely to continue, which doesn't seem like a good thing either.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 9:41 AM on January 15 [7 favorites]

I literally pirated videos of a show from a streaming service I subscribe to yesterday because I'm going on vacation and wanted to be able to watch it with a friend offline.

In general though, I find that the big utility of streaming services is the ability to browse. As content studios, I'm typically irritated by them because the financial incentives for the studio are to cancel early and often to end on cliffhangers, and from a storytelling perspective that blows. But they've been very useful for browsing for documentary content, for which I have an unabashed fondness.

At some point, pirating becomes the ethical choice, oddly enough
This is a really weird statement, and I'm picking on it because it reflects a lot of broader sentiment about the ethics of media consumption that I see around me. The trouble is that the financial compensation lines between various kinds of staff involved with producing media is so opaque that it becomes unclear how subscriptions or views benefit those staff, and the relationship between income for staff and subscription fees decays.

That being said: there is no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism. I find that there is so much anxiety tied to what you watch and what you enjoy in many spaces that it can be a huge trap for people who care a lot about social justice to fall into, as if we can make meaningful changes with consumer dollars. If there's anything the last two decades have shown us, it's that this is more or less a pipe dream.
posted by sciatrix at 9:41 AM on January 15 [10 favorites]

Two nights ago I wanted to show my uncle 28 Days Later, a film I own in multiple formats, but none where I am this moment. None of the devices had it, not even VPNing to different regions. It's been taken off all streaming possibly due to rights issues. Had to pirate it. Had to!
posted by Iteki at 10:18 AM on January 15 [10 favorites]

At some point I decided that the streaming services had failed to uphold their side of the social contract, and that I was no longer obligated to them.
posted by constraint at 10:36 AM on January 15 [8 favorites]

There are too many streaming services, and it seems impossible that any one subscription could service a normal person's viewing desires.

I suppose you could, if contract permitted, switch monthly. What sort of life is that though? Even if you did how would you decide your next switch? I've never successfully found a service's current roster online. Maybe it becomes available after you subscribe? I'll probably never know.

I also don't pirate, but that's more because I haven't been bothered to research how to do so in a hassle-free fashion.
posted by BCMagee at 10:48 AM on January 15 [1 favorite]

I see nothing on the top downloads list in the article that you couldn't basically "rent" for a month for $10. (In the US, at least, but again per the article the US is the leader in these downloads.)

I'm in my fifties. When I was a teenager people were pirating because it was so hard to get something legally. It's a million times easier, cheaper and more convenient now, but still essentially the same arguments rationalizing it unchanged. I'm not especially worked up about other people downloading stuff for whatever reason, but the vast majority of people are doing it because they don't want to cough up the money for the deal on the table.

I suppose you could, if contract permitted, switch monthly. What sort of life is that though? Even if you did how would you decide your next switch?

I basically do that, started a couple years ago. Never seen a contract that stops you from cancelling. I decide what I want to switch to based on what has enough cool shows to interest me for a few months.

I probably get mildly annoying when I rave about Ted Lasso or the Mandalorian a couple years after everyone else was really into it, but otherwise it's a fine life.
posted by mark k at 10:56 AM on January 15 [3 favorites]

I have, many times, pirated videos that are on streaming platforms I pay for simply because it's easier than figuring out which streaming service has a particular thing.

We have amazon prime for shipping, so we have prime video too. Our streamer, receiver, tv all support hdr10 and dolby vision. Amazon has hdr10 or dolby vision versions of many of their offerings.

I bring up the entry for the Expanse. It says 4k hdr. I start playing, and get sdr. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ So I invited my beltalowda friends to come live on my server.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 10:56 AM on January 15 [10 favorites]

It's a million times easier, cheaper and more convenient now

I mean, yes, but also no? I could navigate 182837 different services, trying to find out who purveys what, when, and for how much, if it's even on offer any more, and then just fork over monthly to some cross-section of those services. Or I could hop around on them, trying to game the system in a futile hope of min-maxing my expenditure on the massively fragmented system.

Or... I could punch two words into Ombi as soon as I hear about something cool — completely ignorant of how to navigate the ridiculous fragmentation, studio economic islands, regions, HD limitations, service choices — and come back in 20 minutes with my Plex populated by Radarr/Sonarr/Lidarr. If it's got forced subs, it's probably already be taken care of, but if not, the Bazarr run that night will square it away.

Piracy is still a service problem, and the service is still shitty. When decent streaming services appeared, I stopped going to the trouble of pirating. When decent streaming services went away to become an endless source of hassle for diminishing returns, and containerized service-oriented architecture piracy automation became terrific and trivial to set up and maintain... well, piracy is the better product right now, by a lot.
posted by majick at 11:18 AM on January 15 [13 favorites]

My main problem with torrents: poor support for subtitles. Particularly for movies where somebody talks in another language for 5 minutes somewhere in the middle

Just making sure: you know about Subscene.com, right? Opensubtitles.org is another one.

And if you're looking for just the foreign-language bits subtitled, but not captions for the entire thing, you want to look for the ones marked "English (forced)" -- i.e., what a media player would turn on by default even if you otherwise weren't watching with subtitles.
posted by nobody at 11:26 AM on January 15 [6 favorites]

This notion that there's lockdown-scale adressable market and as-yet-not-disposed income for a given studio's output in one exclusive place ... that's a poor, self-congratulatory idea.

The first link in the FPP cited a Forbes survey, but inverted its numbers (e.g. 20% of respondents don't have Netflix, as opposed to saying 80% do). It's a weird way to think about it, but I do wonder what the actual addressable market for streaming services is supposed to be. Is it everybody with a TV? Everybody who used to have cable? Everybody with high speed internet, and if so, by whose definition of high speed?

We started being a little more active churning our services after we got "The Disney Bundle" through our cell phone provider and realized that Hulu had dislodged Netflix as our #1 service. We canceled Netflix then, and probably should have canceled Amazon Prime for a partial refund, but instead we rode that one out (we canceled it this past weekend, as it happened). Right now we also have Peacock and "Paramount+ with Showtime" as it may still be called this week, thanks to discount offers, but we definitely get less use out of them than Hulu.

But as for privacy: for the most part we don't bother. There's plenty of stuff available on the services we do have, and if we're really missing out on something we'll just sign up for whatever service it's on for a few months. It's regrettable when privacy is the easiest choice, but it reminds me of when I went to Oktoberfest in Munich decades ago. There were signs in every beer hall, in multiple languages, highlighting the fine for stealing a Maßkrug and saying it would be cheaper to buy one. So I bought one, and the process took me an hour, with the server eventually bringing me a sticker marking the mug I had as paid. Then over the next couple days, every time I finished a beer, I'd take that sticker out of my backpack, slap it on the next mug, and walk back to my hotel. Nobody ever accosted me or checked for the sticker. While acquiring the mug legally was inexpensive, acquiring it illegally was much, much easier.
posted by fedward at 12:33 PM on January 15 [3 favorites]

Just making sure: you know about Subscene.com, right? Opensubtitles.org is another one.

It's not just getting the subtitles, it's getting subtitles that I can make work with Plex without spending a half hour twiddling, which defeats the purpose. The simplest method I've found is to just burn the subtitles in with Handbrake but that's still a multistep, time consuming process.
posted by AzraelBrown at 1:12 PM on January 15 [3 favorites]

So, I currently have active subscriptions to
Netflix
Disney
Binge
Acorn
and a few other subscription services

and I STILL end up having to pirate stuff because it is not available on any of my subscription services

(in many cases, the TV show that I want to watch is simply not available in Australia no matter which subscription services you have)

On the whole I prefer to pay for TV shows and films where I can, because

a) I need closed captions/subtitles

b) I want more of the TV shows that I like to get made
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:48 PM on January 15 [7 favorites]

the vast majority of people are doing it because they don't want to cough up the money for the deal on the table.

Point of the poet is that that's not the case though? And supported by multiple anecdata in the thread?

In my example above, the item doesn't exist. I have Netflix, HBO, Cineasterna, Apple+, Disney and Prime, that's every streaming service in my market area. I used to pirate media, then I started paying when that became a better option, now it is becoming a worse option, let's see what happens.

I have also pirated stuff from my DVD collection cos I was too lazy to get up and take down the DVD.
posted by Iteki at 2:16 PM on January 15 [5 favorites]

On the subtitle / caption thing, generally what you want is the raw untouched file that came straight out of the streaming service, they would contain all 35 language subtitles.

A 160 minute movie at 4K at 25mbps would be 28GB.

You can also get them reduced in size to 5GB-10GB at lower quality while retaining subtitles and original audio, Atmos 8 channel or whatever they do today.

Though I suspect this is an entirely different subculture, people who want to store a DRM-free digital copy offline rather than have to connect online to stream it or buy a compatible player.

Interestingly, paying customers today are still barred from watching 4K movies on their PC from Amazon, Disney and other services because they're somehow afraid people will record it. That horse left the barn ages ago, lol. Even Netflix 4K requires complex workarounds compared to just opening a pirate file on your PC which just plays flawlessly.

I haven't torrented anything in 15 years due to privacy concerns, I don't think even a VPN mitigates those concerns.

From what I can tell, the best practice now is just direct downloads of files via private and anonymous Mega lockers from a closed community you trust (membership is set up at the outset then closed to outsiders forever). Ironically, this is essentially going back to the old days, when one person would buy a book or video tape and share it with their friends.

There are also services which break up a file into 50 different fragments and store them in unreadable and unidentifiable fragments anonymously on different sharing services around the world which you reassemble yourself once you have them all, which, is like a torrent with extra steps lol.
posted by xdvesper at 5:47 PM on January 15 [1 favorite]

Hulu really is the best. They’ve consistently got a really good selection of interesting movies and shows, and with FX putting everything there too, I definitely watch it more than any others. I’ve also found that Hulu at least seems to be paying attention to what people are searching for. Many times I have searched for something and get no results on Hulu, only to have it show up a couple months later. It happens to regularly for me that I think they’re doing it on purpose.

Between me, my BFF, and my cousin, I have all the streaming services you can pay for in the US (except Starz, does anyone have Starz streaming?). It’s incredibly frustrating to have literally ever service I possibly could and still not find that specific thing I was looking for.

Disney and their IP vacuum is pretty shit for the entertainment industry in general, but since they own all their shit, the don’t have the same kind of region locking problems like Netflix or others. And Disney is actually really good about having subtitles for everything in 35+ languages (possibly, I haven’t actually counted)

I know people have said this before but you can get around region locking with a VPN. It opens up the entire world of Netflix for you! Also works for any US people traveling or living abroad but still want that American TV. I haven’t lived in the US in 6 years now but I’ll be damned if I’m giving up my shows!
posted by LizBoBiz at 6:13 PM on January 15 [1 favorite]

A recent experience:

I wanted to watch David Attenborough's Planet Earth III.

Was it on ABC iview? No
Could I rent or purchase it from Apple? No
Could I watch it with an Apple TV subscription? No
Could I watch it with a Netflix subscription? No
Could I watch it with a Disney subscription? No
Could I watch it with a Binge subscription? No
Could I watch it with an Acorn subscription? No

Of all the other streaming services available in Australia not named above, (eg Amazon, Stan etc) did ANY of them enable me to watch it legally? No
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:22 AM on January 16 [5 favorites]

Chariot pulled by cassowaries, I'm in Australia too, Planet Earth III aired on free to air TV on 9HD in November last year so I watched it then. But you'll be happy to know it's still streaming free on 9Now, you can watch it through your TV or computer.
posted by xdvesper at 3:38 AM on January 16 [2 favorites]

A 160 minute movie at 4K at 25mbps would be 28GB.

A 4k hdr stream from netflix / prime / disneyhulu is more likely to top out 12-18mbps. More likely, not an inexorable rule.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 3:42 AM on January 16 [1 favorite]

Wait, people are still having issues with navigating streaming platforms? I thought Dunkey had just solved this issue with his guide!
posted by FatherDagon at 8:13 AM on January 16 [1 favorite]

As a lot of folks here seem to be saying that Netflix is not enjoying a sort of incumbent effect as the one streaming platform most people (in the US at least, who want to stream) are willing to pay for.

What then are y’all saying is the reason for the finding in the 2nd link?

They found taking a slate of shows off Netflix and moving them to Hulu resulted in 20% more interest in piracy of those shows.
posted by teece303 at 8:47 AM on January 16 [1 favorite]

It's not just getting the subtitles, it's getting subtitles that I can make work with Plex without spending a half hour twiddling, which defeats the purpose. The simplest method I've found is to just burn the subtitles in with Handbrake but that's still a multistep, time consuming process.

i can't emphasize how important the non-fiddling part is. i don't spend a lot of time on streaming, but almost all of it is netflix because I want subtitles on for all content, all the time and i want to make this choice exactly one time

i spend almost zero time thinking about where i might get video content or worrying about whatever shows are trending where. trying to navigate music services/access is a big enough headache.
posted by lescour at 11:02 PM on January 16 [3 favorites]

In a faraway time, I was the official pirate for a major, major, major entertainment company back when Napster and Kazaa and torrents were first starting. My job was to explore and understand what was available online and how it would impact the business.

Even way back then, sitting across from the chief high muckety mucks and helping them through the landscape as it existed - I explained to them "this doesn't go away. you can't sue it into oblivion. you can't legislate it into the shadows. All you can do is make it easier for your customers to get your products."

They actually understood, which surprised me, but they didn't have any answers except to do those things as a delaying tactic. And for a while, streaming worked like a charm until the MBAs decided to try and maximize their extract potential by hoarding IP into their own apps. Outside of some well defiined niches like "Marvel", "Anime" "British Murder Shows in Quaint Villages That Should Know Better" - nobody gives one good damn or thought about "ohh, that's a Paramount show".

They've segmented the content on brand lines that the average consumer doesn't know or care to know about. They've made the experience frustrating while suddenly discovering that owning the pipeline is expensive. And they've made it worse by leaning hard on common carriers (like Netflix or cable/satellite) for massive carriage fee hikes.

More solid proof that there isn't anything an MBA can't make worse.
posted by drewbage1847 at 10:09 AM on January 17 [9 favorites]

I believe Diesel Sweeties coined the phrase, but around my house we still prefer the term Buccaneer American.
posted by ericales at 2:32 AM on January 18 [1 favorite]

For those who say they can't figure out who is showing which thing, I have found justwatch to be pretty good, although getting it to recognize I am in canada is sometimes a bit of a headache.

A couple of years ago I wanted to show "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" to my family but I specfically wanted the original with noomi rapace because it's better than the english one (the english one is pretty good too, just not AS good). Could not find it for love nor money. Spent a couple of hours on a saturday afternoon trying to figure out how to pirate it (been a long time since I monkeyed with Xnews or mu-torrent!) and decided I was not willing to take on the security risks to my own machine and network.

as everyone says here: make it easy, and keep a full range of stuff, and I'm happy (more or less) to pay for a legit service. Fragment it, make it hard, and memory hole stuff? go fuck yourself.
posted by hearthpig at 1:27 PM on January 19 [1 favorite]