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Hollywood Sees Illegal Streaming Devices as 'Piracy 3.0' (torrentfreak.com)
After hunting down torrent sites for more than a decade, Hollywood now has a more complex piracy threat to deal with. From a report: Piracy remains a major threat for the movie industry, MPA Stan McCoy said yesterday during a panel session at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. Much like Hollywood, copyright infringers are innovators who constantly change their "business models" and means of obtaining content. Where torrents were dominant a few years ago, illegal streaming devices are now the main threat, with McCoy describing their rise as Piracy 3.0. "Piracy is not a static challenge. The pirates are great innovators in their own right. So even as we innovate in trying to pursue these issues, and pursue novel ways of fighting piracy, the pirates are out there coming up with new business models of their own," McCoy said. "If you think of old-fashioned peer-to-peer piracy as 1.0, and then online illegal streaming websites as 2.0, in the audio-visual sector, in particular, we now face challenge number 3.0, which is what I'll call the challenge of illegal streaming devices."
Conversely, they'd be much more profitable if they didn't waste so much money on useless DRM and fighting piracy.
Then perhaps they could reinvest those profits in quality programming.
Thats how it used to be... You entertained, and were well fed and regularly boarded. Now, we adorn you with gold and diamonds, and allow you rob us blind for every song, every movie, and every music video. Every second off the night and day. All while greater Men and Women do the actual WORK of society. Many of whom do jobs FAR more important than the task of entertaining the masses. (Maintaining a power reactor, monitoring the environment, servicing a commercial airplane...) Though these people all make FAR LESS than you all do. Though we continually hear you all whine and complain about how poor you all are... Its pathetic. Seriously. To the point that I have boycotted the movies entirely, and have not purchased any music in about 20 years. As I am certain others have. Get a Grip Hollywood... You cannot fly around in a private jet that drinks $10,000 an hour in fuel, and tell us all to be more frugal, friendly to the envirnment and not to clip your overpriced "auto-tune fabricated", over/under acted, CRAP from the interwebs... Yours Truly, the People who Feed and Clothed you for the past 3500+ years...
The devices themselves are not illegal. They're referring to the abundant amount of Android set top boxes available on Amazon and eBay. The thing with these though is that they come pre-loaded with Kodi, plus plugins for Kodi for easy access to illegal streaming services. This is just another example of a tool which can be used for either side being slandered just because it COULD be used for illegal activities. I, however, have one of these boxes and love it. I use it to stream from a root-top mounted digital OTA TV receiver that streams the TV channels over LAN. I get nearly perfect reception on 56 TV stations now, vs questionable reception from about 20 before. Without the Android box, I wound't have a way to watch this legit content otherwise!
You know, if these hollywood types were to be believed; the feds should encourage people to pirate CP, since that would put them out of business.
But really the average pirate fits into a few categories
1. they weren't going to buy it anyways. revenue lost: 0.
2. they want to buy it, but you refuse to sell to them. revenue lost.
3. they did buy it, but you make it more convenient to use a pirated copy (unskippable bullshit menus, insistence on optical media) revenue lost: 0 (unless you truly expect people to buy it more than once?)
4. they would buy it, but it's priced too high. revenue lost: debateable. it's just as much the industries fault for not pricing their product appropriately. But easier to blame the pirates.
Piracy makes for an excellent boogeyman, since anytime revenue numbers don't meet expectations they can blame pirates. Anytime congress needs to be pestered to get more favorable laws and such for your industry, pirates can be blamed.
side note: piracy is not the right word, nor is theft. if i download something from TPB, i'm not *stealing* from anyone. I'm not depriving anyone of their copy of said item.
Side note 2: how much innovation has been the direct result of 'piracy' over the years? How many times have we heard of some start up that started out using less than legit software, only to become billion dollar companies (and then immediately turn around join the BSA or similar?)
Please explain why you can have a subscription that allows you to watch over 1000 tv shows for under $15/mo but a single season of a tv show may cost $25+ a single movie may cost $20 and I've yet to find a service that allows the rental of tv shows.
How about this you can buy shows by the episode for $1 but you can rent them for $0.25 an episode. Still higher than you would like but way more reasonable for something you will very likely never watch again.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!