Disney Ditching Netflix Keeps Piracy Relevant (torrentfreak.com)

Yesterday, Disney announced its intent to pull its movies from Netflix and start its own streaming service. This upset many users across the web as the whole appeal of the streaming model becomes diluted when there are too many "Netflixes." TorrentFreak argues that "while Disney expects to profit from the strategy, more fragmentation is not ideal for the public" and that the move "keeps piracy relevant." From the report: Although Disney's decision may be good for Disney, a lot of Netflix users are not going to be happy. It likely means that they need another streaming platform subscription to get what they want, which isn't a very positive prospect. In piracy discussions, Hollywood insiders often stress that people have no reason to pirate, as pretty much all titles are available online legally. What they don't mention, however, is that users need access to a few dozen paid services, to access them all. In a way, this fragmentation is keeping the pirate ecosystems intact. While legal streaming services work just fine, having dozens of subscriptions is expensive, and not very practical. Especially not compared to pirate streaming sites, where everything can be accessed on the same site.

Comments

Greed!!

[grumpy-cowboy]

No I will not paying for another streaming service. Good luck with that.

Good, let it fragment more

[Kjella]

There's two alternatives here:

1) One or a few distribution companies manages to hit critical mass so everyone else "have to" be there. This is what happened with Spotify in the music business, who is now making a big squeeze play on the artists instead of the label.

2) All these fragmented little services realize that even though they're competing, they're also pissing off the consumer by lacking the basic interoperability you got by changing channels on a remote control and make some kind of broad, open joint effort to offer different subscriptions through the same interface.

I think the latter is the best solution for the long run, you don't want to make Netflix or Amazon be the new gatekeeper.

public domain games

[harvey the nerd]

As far as I'm concerned, any copyrighted material more than 28 years old is pirated public domain. I might settle for arguments of 17 - 20 years.