If you follow some of the links to pirate sites in the article you'll get redirected to some anti-piracy site which amongst other things tells you this:
*removed externally hosted image*
Bitch ... that's literally the reason I pirate.
My mind is turning on the piracy front. I've paid for Netflix for like a decade, and it was good.
I tried not to pirate, but there was no legal way to stream Game of Thrones, so we would do watch parties. Eventually HBO came to Canada through bell and I could watch it online.
That moment was pretty great, I could watch all my shows, and HBO, and Netflix was putting out some strong content.
Then everyone decided they wanted a piece of the pie. Netflix has continued increasing prices while everyone pulled their content out, Amazon turned prime video into a roulette wheel of "can I watch this or not", and Disney+ launched and very quickly turned into only shovelling garbage quality star wars and marvel projects, and now everyone is stuffing ads into their shitty content fiefdoms.
We're back to where piracy is the better experience and now I can't watch the content I want because it's at most 2 shows a year per platform.
When they remove access to content I paid for... Fuck em.
If buyin' ain't owning, piracy ain't stealin'
The solution is so easy. Make your content available at a reasonable price, make it easy to use, don't restrict it by geography, and let people watch it on any device that can connect to your service.
Piracy is about ease of use (it's getting even easier), and about value. DRM has repeatedly been shown to hurt only the people who try to pay for legitimate access. Not a single time has it prevented me from getting a copy of something if I wanted to, and it's clearly not stopping people from providing those copies or streams.
So stop wasting bathtubs of money on stopping piracy, but maybe take a few less buckets of money from consumers in exchange for your service. As long as you price it such that the cost of being legit can't compete with the ease of use and value from piracy, some folks aren't going to make the choice you want them to.
Some folks won't be able to spend on your service anyway, because they just can't afford it - but they still might buy other merchandise, they can still spread how great your show is to their friends who possibly will subscribe to your service, but regardless you aren't going to get their dollars no matter what you do. So stop trying.
sparking concerns on Wall Street that the services will never be as profitable as cable once was
Obligatory fuck Wall Street
Yeah this was the entire reason streaming was successful. It was cheaper than cable. Did they think more money would appear from nothing?
Oh my God, that's disgusting! Illegal streaming services online? Where? Where did they post those?
It's so funny to me that we have to circumvent the site's paywall in order to read an article about pirating.
Lol, so true.
Though anymore I archive pretty much any article I share. I have a Macrodroid script to grab the link from my clipboard and send it to archive.ph and open it in a browser.
I'm currently setting up ArchiveBox for my own use too.
there’s a special place in heaven for people that link to archive sites to avoid paywalls
That illustration with the hook through the film reel is so clever, I love it.
Adding to the discussion, if you want to watch anything that's not mainstream (i.e. non-western, or arthouse), you're basically supposed to either wait for it to stream on Mubi or get a Blu-ray/DVD (that are often out of circulation if it's more than 5 years old). So the only real option is pirating.
So what they're saying is they could get all that extra revenue if they lower their price and just undercut the competition?
I've been doing this for free.
Meme: You guys are getting paid?
