Visits to piracy websites have increased 12% in the past four years
LOL.
We pay for 4K, but we don't get more than 720p unless we use some proprietary shit hardware and agree to their super-invasive "privacy policy" - and they expect people to NOT set sail in the high seas? GTFO..
https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-service-not-price/
As Gabe Newell said: "Piracy isn't a pricing issue, its a service issue"
As my friend said: "every time a plastic video disc says " operation not permitted " a torrent is born...
As I say: "People will pay when it's easy, more reliable and more convenient." As a software product manager, I forbid my product from ever wasting developer cycles with copy protection.. It's expensive to deliver, annoying to real customers and doesn't make us any more money...
As a user of software, I salute you.
I don't disagree with anything but I feel like GabeN said that before streaming and subscriptions took over.
Photoshop is an incredibly easy to use and powerful tool for creators - I'd be happy to drop like $200 on, for example, the 2024 version. I'm not happy to spend $10 or $30+ a month for life to use it, especially when they lock you in to a year subscription and charge you a fee if you cancel early so you literally can't just sub only the month when you need it, it's the whole year, period. I'll just pirate or use photopea or whatever.
Similar for streaming. Netflix gave us the option to pay for more screens to watch on. Now suddenly it matters whose house it's in?? All while you're constantly removing value from the platform and you cancel anything decent if the production value is too high? Fuck you man I'm not paying like $30 monthly for that.
Please do keep voting with your wallet - its one of the few remaining ways to express our discontent!) That being said, I feel like both of those examples are where the service provided by adobe and then Netflix are terrible.
Adobe is making you buy a whole year and Netflix is hassling you for "letting your pensioner mum watch your account".. To me, both of those are examples of bad service (coupled with cost).
For me, a counter example for me is amazon.com: I hate what they're doing to the retail landscape but find it hard to resist, as I find them SOOO convenient, and their customer service (for now) is absolutely stunning!!! Now if their prices were too high, I'd personally probably pay for that convenience a bit. (Where there model breaks for me completely is warranty major purchases: I've had warranty denied by manufacturers for items purchased through non approved amazon resellers. So now, for me, anything over $100 and I'm looking for direct purchase from the manufacturer as a preference. )
I think not getting what you paid for is a pretty big service problem idk man
12% over four years? Damn. Somehow I had the impression that there'd been a significant increase.
Netflix revenue is up by roughly 60% in the same four years.
Thank you for keeping things in perspective.
if these two numbers were reversed, piracy sites would get the same treatment as videos with actual criminal content. we're lucky
I'm really surprised by this, specially since I cancelled Netflix over a year ago myself...
It's like renting movies that can be taken away at any time since you don't own them. And ads can be introduced whenever. Not to mention poor streaming quality on top of all this.
Cracking down on account sharing has sent lots of people sailing as well, and market fragmentation.
Don't forget ads.
I'd happily pay for anything I consume if it were convenient, private, and no ads. Since I can't get that anymore, well, it's the high seas for me. I pay as much for high seas related services as I would for the official streamers, but the experience is 10x better.
Sometimes piracy is the only method of archival
Some things are literally not available anymore by legal means. Piracy is an important tool in preserving content for future generations. Future historian will be proud of pirates.
I really want to show my friend the original Fullmetal Alchemist series, but Funimation has completely replaced it with the newer Brotherhood series everywhere. It's such bullshit. I would be happy to pay them to watch it, but literally the only option is piracy.
Absolutely true, I was actually looking for this flash game mike shadow and the vending machine and it's partly lock cause reasons, pirates where you at
Put everything on 1 or 2 platforms and take cuts depending on what people are watching.
I don't care if there are 10 platforms. Let them compete on features and customer service, but the content should be available on all. A bit like ISPs, give me the content and pay the creator a cut when n I watch.
But fuck this 10 services with fragmented content.
That would be smart and is what originally happened.
Well streaming prices have gotten ridiculous.
It's not just the prices, people are lazy. You can go to one place and get all the things or search 10 different places.
It’s not just the prices, people are lazy.
Or they just demand good value for their service. Netflix hugely curtailed piracy in their early days. Same with Valve's Steam.
I stuck around with streaming for as long as I could but with the price increases, the restrictions, the lack of content as they revert back into cable bullshit has driven me back to getting the bulk of my stuff via torrents again.
Honestly, I'm pretty shocked that streaming remained decent for as long as it did but we all knew this was inevitable because we all know how this song and dance with greedy corporations go.
The lack of content is really bothering me.
Disney plus is the absolute worst there's nothing on that platform for like 9 months of the year. Then they'll have an interesting program (usually Star wars related) you can binge and then nothing for another 9 months.
Paying up to 23$ a month (not including other streaming services) to watch maybe 5% of the shows and movies I'm interested in just didn't seem like a good deal after a while.
Nope, you need more than 1 subscription, because quite often services only offer a few of the seasons of your favorite show, while the others are on different services.
Example: https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-episodes-movies
EIGHT different services? That is some corporate greed bullshit right there.
LOL if it wasn't on the official website I'd have assumed it was a joke.
Would you:
Or... Just click on "get all missing episodes" on sonarr?
And for those that are able to keep to just one subscription, switching to another when they've finished watching whatever show it is that said service had, they aren't safe either.
One of the next steps that these corporations are going to take is to add fees for dropping their services, with year long contracts.
They don't want competition, so they will try to force you to stay.
Kind of what I meant as being a problem but thanks I guess.
I know a lot of people who are sailing the Seas until the streaming Market crashes. There's way too many businesses trying to do the same exact thing which has limited the media selection available without paying multiple $12 a month subscriptions. Eventually they will either fold or merge together again
Ironically this is a double edged sword. If they merge, expect prices to rise. Won't be long before $100/mo is expected and accepted.
Those are rookie numbers! Let's pump it up!
This is the number one reason I won't ever pay for a netflix subscription (or others) again. Pay for 4K but you dont get 4K if you want to watch on your laptop or android streaming box that they don't approve of. Like how much fucking greedier could you be? Fuck them I hope they all go the way of blockbuster soon.
When Netflix had (seemingly) everything I was totally cool and the gang with paying for that service.
Now I have:
and I still can't find the content I want to watch. I had an urge to watch The Good, The Bad And The Ugly the other day. Could I find it on any services I pay a combined £50+ a month for? Could I fuck. Why would they be surprised they're pushing people to 'alternative' sources? Sure, I can rent or buy Barbie and Oppenheimer if I want, but I don't want. What I want is access to the tens of thousands of old, excellent, films that have been made.
My NAS literally arrived today.
I'm done.
Been paying for years but it's becomming equally predatory as linear TV so I'm out.
That's honestly one of the biggest wtf things to me. Movies like that are old as fuck. How many people are still buying the DVD? Or paying to rent it? Not talking down on the movie itself. There's a reason it's still talked about. But honestly, it's not making much, if anything.
Why not have it throw up on a streaming service? At that point, if I had the rights, and Netflix said they would pay me like $200 a week, I would probably still do it. That's probably $200 more than what it's currently making a week. Netflix gets to have it for cheap. And then the people who want to watch it get to.
But yet its a problem for us to pirate it?
I need to continue the dollars trilogy, A Fistful of Dollars was pretty good.
For A Few Dollars More is so-so (but I'd still watch it again), but The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly is epic.
And if you enjoy them, then take a crack at High Plains Drifter or Pale Rider which are both excellent though share an underlying theme. The Outlaw Josey Wales is also well worth a watch, as is the magnificent (and best picture Oscar winner) Unforgiven starring and directed by an older, wiser, and grittier Clint Eastwood.
1 of those 12% is just me lol /s
I get pissed at my family for being traditional hoarders but I somewhat inherited that as a data hoarder. The amount of stuff I have pirated over the years and not actually used or watched is hilarious.
Just upgraded my truenas and plex to 8tb drives. 1600+ movies, 60+ TV series, 40,000 songs. I seed as much as I can, have uploaded over 5TB this month alone. Come get some.
I can easily say that the amount of my friends and family that have become interested in my Emby setup has expontentially consistently increased every round that these streaming providers have increased their rates.
The experience of launching 7 different streaming apps to find something, content constantly vanishing or moving platforms, and just an overall poor user experience coupled with doubling/tripling of each platforms costs....
The companies have almost successfully re-introduced the very problem that streaming originally solved.
It's like this dipshits don't want our money. I've always been firm that any content removed from streaming services is a message from that content company that they don't want the money of the customers subscribed to said service and thus are okay with those people pirating it instead.
If they cared about the money, they'd had left the content there.
Bold of you to think that they even think of us at all.
I actually mean that seriously: we continue seeing, over and over, that no, quite often they do NOT expect people to NOT do that, they quite simply DGAF. They pirate us, we pirate them, it becomes just another "cost of doing business", until they are strong enough to eventually crack down further. See ad blocking & Chrome recently, after multiple decades of internet ads pushing the limits.
It's like a zombie nom noming your brains - after like 2 bites it'll get bored and wander off, and it literally doesn't even need to "eat", it simply is so fucking DUMB that it doesn't know what else to do with itself. It is truly horrifying b/c while your entrails may be strewn about on the floor, or in the throats of tens of zombies, they in turn... don't even have the decency to be aware that you've died!?
Lower-level managers sell ideas to higher-level managers, and "logic" has little to do with those conversations, compared to the amount of emo-stroking that goes on "oh, you will become so rich, and powerful, and handsome, and brave, and precious" (from here:-P) - and so long as enough people play along, that happens!
Our world is just so fucking STUPID.
That said, what they do is on them, while what we do is on us. Find a way to live - hopefully by finding a way to contribute, if/where you can.
Us: We think about you all the time!
Corporations: Funny, because we don't think of you ever.
(Funny b/c in this pic, corps are the ones who are dicks:-P)
emo-stroking
Is that what my girlfriend & I were doing in her bedroom in the early 00s listening to Brand New and Death Cab?
Probably, and it was surely glorious (if you did it right)!:-P
Piracy has changed so much. Back when people were making the transition from p2p to torrents there was very little if any streaming sites.
Nowadays if you sneeze hard enough you're bound to spray down some big name streaming service.
Now there are even whole front ends that allow you to stream whatever you want anytime you want even on a little, but very powerful handheld computer.
I would say that 12% is more on the low end. If you were to factor in ad blocking and the various front ends I mentioned earlier I could see that number going up much higher.
Flixtor
I fucking wonder why. When owning isn't owning them piracy is totally justified.
We pay for 4K, but we don’t get more than 720p unless we use some proprietary shit hardware and a
Not only that... you pay to get tv content and suddenly they remove it because of licensing or political correctness bullshit.
Not gonna lie, if you asked me what I would think the increase would be and I would have assumed it be a lot higher.
But then again, that could be the part of the pirate crew that doesn't use a VPN and is easily identified upon entering the site.
I agree. These stats are to be taken with a grain of salt.
Personally, I saw an extreme increase among my peers in piracy, streaming and Plex servers.
don't need to use a VPN when my country could not fucking care less about piracy. Hell, some major chain shops here run pirated windows
Hope it goes up more
I'm torn. I think everybody should fight back the predatory practices of the entertainment industry. But the more mainstream the piracy practices become, the more crackdown there's gonna be, and the more of a hassle it's gonna be to find pirated content.
the more pirating there is the more incentive there is to find ways around the crackdown too so wouldn't be too worried. also they will presumably stop when they understand that pirating does not decrease when you increase crackdowns (or does not increase because of less crack downs).
If enough people pirate, there will be popular support for reforming copyright, so eventually there's less crackdown
What can they possibly do to private trackers?
What you say is exactly what I feel.
When I pay for a service, as long as I abide by the ToS, service provider should give me their products in full.
Your protection should not violate my right.
And will continue.
I bet we'll reach a point again where normal services are just so shit that piracy is normal again. Then they'll try and take down even more things. Hopefully then we'll decide to move operations to I2P.
I wonder what happened in those four years that gave people a lot of time to watch movies but not a lot of money to pay for them 🤔
Literally every single time I want to watch any specific movie it's not on any streaming service without buying or renting, and I don't mean new or recent movies. So yeah, I'm pirating again.
Perfect time for any aspiring system admin to create another piracy website (something I've been working out the kinks on)
This gives me hope
Pirates up to the mountains!
What's that about only getting 720p though? My TV shows the 4K HDR stuff great from places like Netflix or Prime, has done for years now, and my TV isn't even new. Surely all modern stuff will show all that high definition stuff just fine.
I think my browser does too, though I only have a 2K screen as of recently on my PC, but I'm certain it's not playing video in 720p for sure. It's at least 1080p if not more.
But yeah, these services aren't giving enough bang for their pound these days, it's reaching insulting levels, it's unsurprising people are forced into piracy.
The consumer (or if you prefer, the market) decides what someone is worth, and if it's being sold for above market value.... people won't buy. Simple as that.
We've shown we're happy to pay a reasonable amount of money for these services, and yet they insist on squeezing exorbitant amounts of money out of us for less and less value. Madness.
I've bought a lot of 4K movies/TV shows on Google Movies and they're all 480 on my browser. Support tell me they understand my frustrations and say I gotta use Safari or Edge or something and they're like 720P or something. I'm like, oh great, thanks.
Firefox and Piracy seem more alluring to me.
What's that about only getting 720p though?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=o4GZUCwVRLs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Most likely it's Russians
Just pay for your content, it's not that hard sheesh
I think you missed the OP's point about the ongoing enshitification of paid services. From the words of Gabe Newell, "The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
The reason why so many people are pirating even when they can afford it is because companies continue to make their services worse for their paying customers. Simply "paying for your content" will encourage these companies to continue their predatory, behavior.
Edit: I think I should add this isn't really true if you can buy physical copies of the content, but that's becoming less and less of an option as large streaming services make sure the only way to watch their content legally is buying their shitty subscriptions
I don't exactly recall when or where I heard/read this quote, but man it is dope
If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing.
I hope you noticed that the key phrase in your comment is "your content"
Good luck claiming any of the content on the streaming platforms as "your"
no
Cringe
There are a lot of times where my privacy set up, which isn't anything fancy, precludes me from watching something. That coupled with the fact that prices have been consistently rising in our late stage shit system, you have to realize at some point that the same system that drives companies to scrape every possible iota of a profit out of users is the same system that makes people equally not want to be gutted financially and have every data point about themselves be out on an open market. Complacency doesn't change anything.
I'm willing to pay for one, maybe two subscriptions, and ain't nobody got time to dig for which service has what show to find out season 2 is on some other service entirely.
Piracy provides a better user experience 🤷♂️
I generally agree with him, but there are a lot of people who pirate simply because they don’t want to pay. And I’m not casting moral judgment here, i just feel like it bears mentioning lol “almost always” is pretty generous
Im willing to pay for two. It used to be netflix and prime, then hulu, paramount plus, disney…
Now its down to one- Proton VPN 🏴☠️
I use Mullvad. How good is Proton?
How do people still not grasp that Netflix can't just buy whatever they want to stream? Licenses are often being held by other services at the time. They also have no control over if a show gets pulled or not. I still see people complaining that Netflix "got rid" of the Office.
Like, I have no love for Netflix or any streaming service at this point, but at least shit on them for things that are actually in their control.
And frankly, this is how HBO, Showtime, Stars, etc have operated like this for decades before Netflix came along. It's so weird people think "shows/movies being pulled because the license deal expired" is something unique to Netflix.
For the record, you can use justwatch.com and it will tell you exactly where you can watch it, and which seasons. But I'm still not paying for multiple subscriptions.
Since #1 on the list is always The Seven Seas there's no reason to proceed further.
Stremio also has a default addon with this info
I saw this on someone's phone and was wondering what it was, seems neat tbh but I already own a ship 🏴☠️
Hell, I even pay for a service that has all the magnet links resolved and ready to stream, no downloading involved. For 30 bucks (a year!) it's been the most convenient way of enjoying movies & shows.
I am actually paying for a piracy service : )
Got two. Not doing anymore. Ive had up to 4 or 5 and still couldn't find what I wanted.