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.
It’s a mystery! I’ll never understand why the week after yet another price hike, I quit because of the price hike. I guess I just act randomly in response to price hikes.
My issue was cutting out the sharing. I was paying for 4 screens at a time. Why should they care which 4 screens are being used?
Once I realized a decent VPN was $5/month, that I could get TV shows without the 35% time addition of commercials, and stop worrying about what I get going away, the issue wasn’t that Netflix was bad, it was just worse than the alternative.
edit: not that Netflix has commercials, but the fact one could get anything without them as well (like paying for cable…)
not that Netflix has commercials
There’s a tier with commercials for many countries now.
I fondly recall excitedly using Netflix on my PS3 all the fucking time in like 2011. It was cheap, there was an app right there on the device I already bought, and there was a pretty good selection of content that got updated frequently enough. I had friends who would pirate and I was interested in getting into that until Netflix came along and completely fulfilled the need for me. The incredible convenience made it worth it over the work to learn how to pirate and the time to safely find everything and the risk of getting caught, and then even after doing all of that it would be on a computer and not just a couple of button presses from my couch. I know piracy has gotten to a point now where it’s much more convenient, but back then it was a totally different beast. All of this was. YouTube was so much better for users and for certain classes of creators. Media and media platforms across the board are fucking terrible compared to back then. We used to chastise people for still having cable because Netflix was so fucking incredible in comparison. Idk what comes next, but these streaming companies are on the way out if they don’t figure it the fuck out. At this point, I’d rather go backwards to go to a goddamn Blockbuster these days.
Your local library probably has a better selection of movies and TV for free than any streaming service you might consider paying for. Let’s starve these beasts.
I miss my local movie store. Going to the movie store added a little adventure to movie night. Go out, browse a little. Get a stack of movies you have no clue about. Stop and get Chinese, maybe ice cream.
Ok, it doesn’t make sense anymore but I still miss it.
I think that still makes sense. Sometimes it feels like stuff like streaming and amazon orders have reduced our need to leave our homes. In general, this is largely a good thing, but I fear that people are becoming a little too isolated and aren’t being exposed to social interactions nearly as much. I don’t think people know how to respectfully disagree anymore, and I think that might lead to higher tension and make socializing even harder on people. I’m only 35, but it really does feel like most kids are having a more passive childhood than I remember having, and many adults today also live passively while feeling nostalgic for their more actively lived childhood. I don’t think people are particularly happy with life being this efficient and convenient.
So yeah, go out and get a movie and some Chinese food. Have a conversation with a stranger. I bet you’ll enjoy that more than doordash and scrolling through netflix.
Everyone decided they wanted to have their own streaming and wanted a bigger piece of the pie. That fragmented where to watch and caused old shows and movies to cost way more for streaming rights.
Then Netflix cancels too many originals without proper endings, which passes people off. After that they got rid of password sharing which made it a pain to have a work and home type of viewing experience. Now they’re adding ads. They’ve become shit and now it’s making it a bit harder for themselves.
It was inevitable and that’s even why Netflix started making their own content. Honestly, they should have made deals with the cable companies explaining if they entered the space they would create a consumer hostile environment and destroy the market. They probably wouldn’t have listened but Netflix should have known their only product was convenience.
I used to sail the seas like freakin Luffy, but Netflix and Steam (plus becoming a wage earning adult) got me on the straight and narrow for a good long while. Then when all the different services started to compete I started dipping my toes in the water again with some sense of guilt. But after various struggles getting Netflix running in different locations I frequent and my parents not being able to use my account anymore, I have no shame flying the Jolly Roger.
2015 - 2018 I pirated very, very little. Didn’t need to. Between Netflix, Hulu, and HBO, I wanted for nothing. Then, every time I went to the bathroom, someone was creating their own streaming service. Suddenly everyone was pulling their IP from Netflix and Hulu. Netflix wouldn’t stop raising their prices. Their original shows are ok, but their movies are terrible.
Is it more that the original pricing model was unsustainable though? Like they were making a loss, or being funded continuously to capture the market and then raise prices?
Obviously it doesn’t help that all the shareholders want their cut and thus the money has to come from somewhere.
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.
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.
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What I want is content in Greek, which is a lost cause.
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!
Seriously. I’m running a Synology with 12x16TB. That’d buy a bunch of months of streaming services…but this way actually gives me content to watch that I want to watch.
And offline. And in the quality you define. And on any device.
You’ve made my DS220+ blush
I’ve got a DS920+ on a shelf, and she’s super jealous of the Rackstation.
Just out of curiosity, what drive configuration are you running?
RAID6, one big storage pool. On that one, the bulk of it’s usage in a single shared folder for video, though I do have another carved out for a VMware datastore for the homelab, though it’s mostly just there for somewhere to stick VMs when I’m updating DSM on the smaller DS9220+ (4x8TB in RAID 5).
I think many people may view those sort of costs differently than the monthly subscription costs of Netflix, etc. Hardware is generally seen as a “one time” cost, and the added electricity costs are difficult to tease out from all the other variable electricity costs.
My personal argument is that I pay a monthly subscription ($15/mo) for a seed box, which is roughly the same cost as subscribing to a single streaming service.
Back before the password sharing crackdown, I had access to my parents’ Netflix account, and every once in a while, I’d try it out, but I’d always quickly get annoyed and would finish watching whatever I was watching via my Plex server.The difference is that we own the hardware. We can treat it as bad/good as we wants and we only have ourselves to blame if things go wrong. It also costs exactly the same whether we use it for 1 month or 100 years.
Opex vs capex
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.
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.
Exactly. Steam figured this out early on and it’s how they have maintained their dominance in the game distribution business. It’s the same lessons the entertainment streaming platforms must learn - your value is convenience. Add more walls between consumers and content? you will be cast aside.
Yo, Netflix! This one right here! Read it and understand plz
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That’s just an engineering problem… Not a particularly hard one either
Wtf would you keep re-encoding it? If you don’t, it’s just binary. You can run error checks on it, save it on raid config with high redundancy, and it’s more stable than any physical media
Load it into memory and you can copy it all you want, do error checking at the destination and you’re golden.
The exception is if you keep uploading it to and ripping it from hosting sites which keep re-encoding/compressing it… But replication itself is easy
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
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.
Maybe 3.5k and a pizza party.
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.
“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.
doesn’t mean you have to enshittify your own product, not when you are winning
Since Netflix is a publicly traded company now, they pretty much have to.
Gotta pursue that infinite stock growth…
This is it. The stock market is pretty much the reason everything goes to shit. It’s run in rampantly criminal fashion in the first place, just a meat grinder for money, and if our legal system weren’t run in such a fast and loose, revolving-door echo chamber fashion, someone would have clamped down on it years ago. Why this isn’t more obvious to people is stunning to me.
It’s like religion. It corrupts you, makes you angry, sanctimonious and blind, and hence stupid. Avoid it like the plague it is.
Maybe it’s not even the stock market, but the laws surrounding it. To the best of my knowledge, a company’s primary legal obligation is to maximize shareholder value. Ethics and maintenance seem to be secondary as a result. There needs to be legal ways or more incentives for companies to be satisfied with their progress and seek stability/maintenance, and keep their stock price stable.
Fair point, capitalism ruins everything by definition.
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.
Cry less, make better service more.
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.
