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Netflix Is Not Going to Kill Piracy, Research Suggests (torrentfreak.com)
Even as more people than ever are tuning to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and other streaming services to look, piracy too continues to thrive, a research suggests. An anonymous reader shares a report: Intrigued by this interplay of legal and unauthorized viewing, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Universidade Catolica Portuguesa carried out an extensive study. They partnered with a major telco, which is not named, to analyze if BitTorrent downloading habits can be changed by offering legal alternatives. The researchers used a piracy-tracking firm to get a sample of thousands of BitTorrent pirates at the associated ISP. Half of them were offered a free 45-day subscription to a premium TV and movies package, allowing them to watch popular content on demand. To measure the effects of video-on-demand access on piracy, the researchers then monitored the legal viewing activity and BitTorrent transfers of the people who received the free offer, comparing it to a control group. The results show that piracy is harder to beat than some would expect. Subscribers who received the free subscription watched more TV, but overall their torrenting habits didn't change significantly. "We find that, on average, households that received the gift increased overall TV consumption by 4.6% and reduced Internet downloads and uploads by 4.2% and 4.5%, respectively. However, and also on average, treated households did not change their likelihood of using BitTorrent during the experiment," the researchers write.
I suggest we abandon the fruitless and ill-conceived war on drugs, and focus all that effort and time in a new war on piracy. Harsh, mandatory penalties, three-strike rules, the whole shebang. No death penalty of course because that's too much, but everything up to that, including life in prison for multiple high-profile offenses. With drugs, you're mostly fucking up your own life. When you pirate, you're stealing from other people, and hurting them and their families. There is a clear and distinct difference. It should be vigorously rooted out and destroyed.
simple as that: if you can't find it on netflix, what then?
hulu? amazon? youtube?
when you run out of options it comes back to torrent (or whatever the kids are using)
These are pretty fucking obvious things to try to make into headlines or articles...
A 45-day temporary trial account isn't the same thing as free. This no doubt had a huge effect on adoption numbers. Its seen more as an advertisement than anything else.
Overall I expect that legal services have had a huge impact on piracy but lots of people simply cannot afford them and so piracy will always be preferable. If we want to fix that we need to raise minimum wage.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
*rant on*
First, give an average person a 'free' thing but with a very finite time horizon and expect them to change their behavior is ridiculous.
Widely differing amounts and types of self interest drives most peoples motivations, trying to derive a conclusion based on a single type of 'carrot' is again ridiculous.
*rant off*
I appreciate that they may actually be able to make a useful prediction from their test but on the surface I find it weak.
Their shows suck and they've been getting rid of all of the good content, of course they aren't going to stop piracy. They probably won't stay in business too much longer at this rate.
I would use legit services if they offered the same functionality as torrents, but they just don't...
Most limit you to streaming rather than downloading... My connection isn't fast enough to stream at any decent quality, especially at times of day when i'll actually be awake. I can happily torrent overnight and watch the following day.
Sometimes i want to watch when i don't have internet (eg while travelling), downloading and watching later is useful.
Netflix has limited content and arbitrary limitations on where it can be accessed from, most other services are the same. Useless when travelling. A lot of these services don't walk at all in some of the countries i regularly visit.
DRM restricts what kind of devices and players you can use, the content available from torrents can be played on anything.
So long as the legit services are inferior to torrents, people will torrent. Make them as good or better and people will have little excuse for using torrents.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The reality is a kid growing up with $6 Netflix is unlikely to pirate anything in future.
And why else would you commit piracy? For the love of country? No, that's privateering. To be popular with the ladies? Hardly, the ladies love your gold, nothing more.
It does not seem like the article addresses the fact that Netflix content can be pirated as well. As far as I can see, the only way that Netflix or another online streaming service would cut into piracy is if their DRM was so strong, and their content so compelling, that the pirates were forced to pay to access it.
For example, Game of Thrones seems pretty popular among people who are tech savvy enough to pirate content. If there were a way to lock down Game of Thrones, some subset of pirates would choose to pay for it because they want it THAT badly. (I know that GoT is on HBO not Netflix, I'm just using an example of popular content).
If only those pirates would stop boarding the boats, robbing, raping, and murdering people!
Oh you meant copyright infringement? Calling it piracy is like Ajit Pai conflating an open Internet, with one that is free of ISP regulation.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
My wife does not like the 'difficulties' of dealing with torrents, so we have a subscription to HBO. That comes with HBO Go, their online content portal.
I wanted to watch one of their new shows (The Deuce. If you liked the Wire, check it out. It's pretty good.) I was able to watch the first couple episodes online just fine. Then one night, I had a glitch with my USB port and I pulled my headphones out in the middle of watching an episode. After I reconnected them, the sound didn't work.
I worked with HBO tech support. They pointed the finger at Frontier, my ISP. They pointed the finger at Adobe (who makes the Flash Player plug-in required to watch their stream). They pointed the finger at Microsoft (I was using IE because Chrome doesn't support Flash). I tried Firefox as well, but the problem persisted. (Sound worked just fine everywhere else. Windows. Browsers. Games. Applications. Just not the HBO Go website / Flash Player on the site.)
After spending the better part of 3 hours over the course of a week troubleshooting the problem, I gave up and torrented the show. I am only going to jump through so many hoops to watch content, that I am PAYING FOR, on my computer. I pay the monthly fee to HBO. If they can't deliver the content to me on the device I want to watch it on, I will do it myself.
The thing with piracy is that it is the best technical option. Computers want to play the media. The content companies try to lock it behind layers of DRM and other hurdles. Those layers are flakey and cause problems. In the end, the content becomes more difficult to consume legally. And that is a problem. People want simple. As human beings we will always take the path of least resistance.
Duh, because it's not easy to save a video from a streaming service to your hard drive, so it's easier to get it from someone who already put in the effort for you. That's not piracy, that's using a remote DVR.
Every film and tv show ever made, with no DRM (so it works on Linux and BSD) in all countries, on one service, for a reasonable monthly fee. Until that service exists, piracy will fill the gap.
So I'd been a Netflix customer and firm proponent since they went online. Not a heavy user, by any means, but I did enjoy shows at the gym, and I spread the gospel to anyone I met who still had legacy Cable TV.
About 6 months ago, Google added an option in the Play Console (for app developers) to exclude devices that fail to pass their so-called "SafetyNet" provisions.
Unfortunately, I and many others are unable to meet that requirement. "SafetyNet" isn't some simple checkbox agreement like "device modified; I know what I'm doing [Y]," but rather a set of secret scripts Google runs as root on your device to determine if Google has full control. Activities like patching security vulnerabilities, rooting, running AOSP, or even unlocking your bootloader disqualify you. The entire list of checks is, to date, secret. Their code updates happen automatically, in the background, without user control if you have the Play Store installed.
Once upon a time, the excuse for "SafetyNet" was that soon, Android devices could be used to pay for things. Fair enough. Just like my PC.. but it's mobile, so I guess different rules apply (?) ... I can use cash, or a credit card. Frustrating, but not a huge deal.
Of course that wasn't the end goal, as we've seen. The end goal was to discourage rooting, so that they could guarantee that their products (also known as users) would be forced to watch ads. Ad blocking is designed to be incompatible with "SafetyNet."
Lo and behold, back in June, Netflix started requiring "SafetyNet" certification in the Play Store. If your device doesn't qualify for any reason, you're excluded. Sideloading may still be an option, but I'm not sure.
Lucky for me, there are alternatives; I went to Amazon Video and YouTube, and cancelled my longstanding Netflix account. If the others follow suit, I will abstain from mass media and spend my money elsewhere.
Not everyone is willing to jump through such hoops though, and it's entirely possible this little stunt will bring back piracy from its death throes. All so that Google (and one day, surely, Netflix) could force more ads on us all.
Side note: yes I know Magisk can help. It's an arms race, for sure... but a great departure from what made Android successful in the first place.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
I like having full access to the media I buy. I like my games, programs, music, movies and tv free of DRM restrictions. I don't want to rely on a service that can shut down at any time, or have to deal with connectivity or activation. I buy most of my games from DRM free sources. I buy all of my music from DRM free sources. I even buy most of my books from DRM free sources.
Now I'm waiting for the ability to buy movies and TV DRM free. I've purchased several movies from Arrowstorm online because they offer that option.
I believe that one way to reduce piracy is to offer legal DRM free options. For those that believe making things DRM free would increase piracy, DRM is not stopping piracy, I doubt that DRM is even having a noticeable effect on piracy.
I do subscribe to Netflix. I'm not going to subscribe to Hulu, Amazon, Vudu, Apple, HBO, etc. just to be able to watch the various shows I enjoy.
If Netflix was thought to possibly kill piracy it would mean that pirates were supposed to saturate their pirating urges with Netflix services. So the research was in a nutshell asking "Is vast majority of pirates going to pay for Netflix?"
Duh!!!
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
Fucking hell. Reddit is like the dumbass millennial hideout. They have and will ruin everything. Do these sullen, selfish, dumbass, kids even understand how the world works?
1) What was this premium service? Did it have a good selection of content? A nice interface? Did it let people binge-watch a series?
2) If I was getting a premium service for free for 45 days I might binge watch some things or watch some movies, but I wouldn't use it to watch a regular series since I'd lose it after a few episodes.
3) Habits are hard to break. I'd expect the torrenting to decrease more over time as they grew more familiar with the subscription service and developed new viewing habits.
I stole this Sig
I haven't bought any physical or digital media since I got Netflix a while ago.
I have only purchased used physical media for about 20 years. So MPAA and friends don't make a cent off of me, except what they can extort from Netflix.
The difference is that I will not be controlled. I don't mind paying a FAIR price for content. I will view the content on the operating system and player of my choice legally, or I'll do so illegally. I will not be charged twice for same content. If I paid for it once I will not pay for it again under any circumstance. i.e. a CD of music. If I am charged the same for "un-owned/rented/streamed" content as I am for owned content, I'll just have to be illegal. The streamed/rented content needs to be WAAAAY cheaper. There is a better/cheaper alternative, although illegal so they have zero negotiating power. But even if I had to do without, I would not be forced to Windows or Apple. I just cancelled my Spectrum cable, not because I have gone completely over to Netflix or something else, but because I can no longer run a home grown DVR on linux with a cablecard tuner because of the encryption. I'll be illegal or even do without before I would give them my money.
I am ALL for a completely unencrypted, unblocked open format that is uniquely fingerprinted and traceable back to me. If I give the content away to someone else, by all means come after me. But I simply will not be sandboxed into using any operating system or player that is not open and under my control.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
Piracy will always exists. The only thing that could kill it is to make all movies freely available (and without pub) for all (which will not happen).
I can't call that English
Anyone who thought a proprietary streaming service, where we can't even write our own clients/players, would be an "alternative to piracy" is somewhere around forty years behind in tech. It's just overwhelmingly absurd. If you aren't selling plain files, you aren't a serious alternative to piracy.
We (well, most of us) can read our books the way we want to. So we keep buying books.
We can listen to music the way we want to. So we keep buying music.
But only pirates can play video the way they want to. So we don't buy video, and in fact think of spending money on it as something almost obscene, distasteful, and unethical. If video producers want to compete with the music producers for my money, they need to either sell files, or at least sell un-DRMed optical disks (where everyone can legally read the disks and turn 'em into files, without worrying about DMCA or keeping up with cracks).
The idea that I would go back to streaming (worse, proprietary streaming so you have all sorts of limitations and can't even use your own player) is just laughable. I paid my final Comcast bill in 2006 because I was done with that kind of shit, and that was still when it was analog and standardized and relatively easy. I will pirate until the producers open for business. Should they choose to never open, then they need to be ok with not getting paid.
The customer is always right.
If you want to argue about that preceding sentence, that's cool, but you have to accept that the person you're arguing with isn't going to be a customer! Choose: argue xor customer. You can only have one.
OTOH, if you're an actual, real, legitimate businessperson, then it's really simple: sell me my files. I'm going to have them, period; we're merely discussing whether or not I'll be buying them from you.
BTW, everyone: it's a new month, so it's time again to teach someone else how to pirate TV and movies. Are you going with a neighbor or a co-worker this time? Perhaps a relative? As for me, it's the family of one of my wife's co-workers. Betcha they cancel their TV service by the end of the year. And in so doing, we either move further into video piracy, or create additional incentive for someone business-oriented to introduce the first alternative to video piracy. Which will it be? Time will tell...
Where netflix actually HELPED pirating... 'nuff said.
The important missing detail from the summary:
> The video-on-demand service in the study had an average “fit” of just 12% with people’s viewing preferences, which means that they were missing a lot of content.
Really? Go post in the correct story, dullard.
Did the confirm whether or not the shit being pirated was also available on one of the free premium services that were gifted? Was there a spike in the downloading as the period started to come to an end?
Not available to most of the world. The UK had Lovefilm but Amazon shut that down unfortunately.
Of course you aren't going to get rid of ALL piracy. You will always have the persistent degenerates that will pirate no matter what. They aren't really worth bothering with. They aren't even worth punishing. The only reasonable thing you can do is just write them off and deal with the part of "the problem" that you can actually solve.
This "study" sounds like an excuse to discount what progress has already been achieved with "the problem".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If they stopped dicking around with licensing and custom streaming services and generally being assholes about it, and just put their shows/movies on Netflix, I wouldn't pirate it.
I'm considerably tired of having to search Netflix just to find it doesn't exist there and consider the option is to create a whole new account with a subscription and a bunch of hassle. Or I just can't watch it without a cable subscription and "on demand" which now somehow has a bunch of commercials on it.
Fuck that. I'll go to some shady streaming site list, watch it the one time I ever care to see it - probably in 480p - and be done with it. I just want to know where the story goes. I don't care at all about HD/replayability/profits.
It doesn't have all the content, it's missing episodes, seasons, movies, and shows disappear...
To get everything you are eventually going to have to spend more than cable at the rate that steaming services are splintering off.
Twinstiq, game news
And they were cleverer and funnier, too. http://theoatmeal.com/comics/g...
The movie / TV industry needs to follow the music industry's lead. It took years, but today nearly any song you might want to listen to is available on Spotify, Apple Music etc. If I want to hear "Tarzan Boy" by Baltimora followed by some Fats Waller I just punch it into the search and there it is.
There needs to be a similar service for video - $30 a month (or whatever) and everything is there. Everything. Betwitched episode? It's there. Star Trek Discovery? It's there. Wonder Woman movie? There. The Goonies? The Sopranos? You name it. I realize it's a licensing nightmare the music industry figured it out. Time for TV / Movies to do the same.
Remember CD's?
When Downloading or streaming music became a thing (Napster), the music industry panicked, and did all kinds of bad things in order to get their users back to their drug of choice (music industry's choice), they where old fashioned, not with the times and actually totally out of touch with their user base.
Same with traditional media like newspapers and television, it was the hardest time for them to realize everything is up to the customer and not what THEY want to sell you.
Televison and Newspapers as we know it - is a dead horse. No use trying to revive it. Get on with the program already. Netflix was at least innovative and went with the movie concept online, and every connected device could let you watch your (limited) favorite movies everywhere, The reason I say Limited...every netflix owner in the world already knows, it's because they're themselves fighting all the traditional media (that also happens to own a lot of the content netflix want's to show you), and licenses are only available in certain countries at a certain time, this is why you so often experience eg. that there's much more movies to watch in the U.S. version of Netflix rather than say...the Swedish version (or insert smallish country of your choice here). It's all about the population (larger numbers of people = more movies & serie) because the number of subscribers in that particular area is the ones who foot the bills for the license/rights to the show and availability.
And the price of Netflix is STILL low for what you get, you have a certain amount of freedom - you can watch it whenever you feel like it, on whatever you feel like watching it on. Traditional TV is not like that.You've gotta pay huge cable-fees and get tons of channels you don't even need or want, but you'll still have to pay these huge hook-up fees and licenses - traditional media LOVES that, because it gives them a guaranteed source of revenue, and they control the content.
This is when pirating occurs, because people want to be in control of their own content, and lo and behold...most don't even mind paying for the content.
But Traditional TV don't want you to be in control, they want to control WHAT you watch WHEN you watch it and WHERE you watch it, and they want to feed you advertisement you can't run away from or skip. They say it's for your own good and for the content quality - but Netflix proves that that's far from the actual truth, since you can pretty much get pretty good quality content for a 3rd of the price and totally without the advertisement.
The money is simply too good to resist, and almost certainly (to them) worth the fight against you,
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
As a kid I was really into computers. My first one was a TImex Sinclair my dad and I put together, and shortly after we bought an Apple ][+. From that point on I was completely hooked, and little did I know back then that it would so strongly define who I am later in life. I used to look at the blocky, blurry graphics on the screen and DREAM of a day when we would just simply select a tv show and it would appear on screen. Now I am much, much older and technology has long been capable of providing the kind of service I dreampt of as a child. Yet I can't get it and might never in my life time because some multimillion dollar corporation can't decide how to get paid enough. They withhold it because they can. So fuck that, I'm getting the service I want because I CAN.
Article on techdirt-related highlights some rather significant limits of the 45 day free sub used in the study.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20171129/15190038699/
What this partial bit fails to mention is that the "free service" offered barely, if at all, met what the people wanted to watch.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20171129/15190038699/no-shit-groundbreaking-study-shows-that-giving-people-12-video-content-they-want-doesnt-magically-stop-piracy.shtml
If you don't give people anything that they want to watch, of course they will continue to pirate things. A free clump of grass clipping isn't going to cut it if you're looking for a new car!
Remember CD's?
Yup. Still use em. Remains the cheapest way to give someone (in person) an album, or likewise a DVD for a movie. Sure, I could upload them to a cloud storage and share from there, but burning uses no bandwidth, and USB drives are not yet as cheap as disks if you are giving them away.
That's what does it for me, Netflix is moving towards their "original content" so older programs n movies gone. Amazon, least in Canada has a piss poor selection. Hulu geolocation for Yanks only. Only other choice to watch Magnum P.I on a Sunday afternoon is stream or torrent.
The problem is that they didn't contol for two things they should have:
1) Movies not available on netflix. If a movie isn't on netflix, netflix obviously wont stop piracy of it.
2) Legal uses of torrents. Most people who use torrents for piracy probably also use them for legal things too. I doubt that they'd stop using them for legal purposes even if they stopped pirating. (Contrary to Big Media Propaganda, torrents have many legal uses.)
Let's do a thought experiment. What if piracy of both software and media could be made absolutely impossible? I know, pooh-pooh, this can't be achieved, but that's why this is a thought experiment. So suppose piracy was made absolutely impossible?
What would happen is that low-end competitors would enter the market, driving down the prices of software and especially digital media goods. Which would be terrible for Netflix.
So of course Netflix doesn't want piracy to go away, just like Microsoft didn't really want it to go away in the 1990s. Because it siphons off the techies, i.e. the potential early adopters of a new, low-end, low-cost service, significantly raising the barriers to entry for potential startup competitors.
I was enjoying amazonâ(TM)s music service and listening exclusively to it. Then Iâ(TM)d notice I hadnâ(TM)t heard a song in a while. They removed it from my play list to Iâ(TM)d have to pay more for another service. So after 5 or 6 iterations of this I ga e up and went back to the torrents.
When they started their little crackdown on proxies, that was the end for me. I made a choice to bail out of the cat and mouse game of proxy hopping and just jumped head first back into torrenting.
I haven't looked back since, and I have unfettered to everything Netflix and everybody else has to offer. In this age of affordable 100+ mbit uncapped home internet and media players that come built-in to TVs, it's easier than ever.
What killed dvd? Having to watch previews before the movie menu. Unskippable commercials. Annoying.
It seems that they also call legal downloading got timeshifting purposes practice, when it is actually acceptable under fair use.
The cable and copyright cartels saw those un-cool Silicon Valley types doing well and decided to try to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
1) Comcast and Verizon broke with standard ISP peering to extort money they weren't due from Netflix. This caused Netflix to have to raise prices. And some people who used to, or still would, pay for Netflix left. And now that they have their puppet running the FCC, this problem is unlikely to be fixed for at least 3-7 years.
2) The copyright cartels decided to launch a bunch of their own fake Netflix-like services. To go along with these, they pulled a bunch of shows and movies away from Netflix and made them exclusive to their own knock-offs. This made even FINDING the show you want to watch into a royal PITA. And it made it necessary for Netflix to start producing their own content; which, of course, costs money and raised the price, driving more people off the service.
People don't like being nickel-and-dimed to death. They don't want to have to maintain a dozen different subscriptions just to watch the one show they want from each. They want to just turn on Netflix and watch their shows. And they DON'T want to have to waste their time hunting through Hulu, HBO Go/Now, CBS All-Access, Disney streaming, Amazon Prime, Crunchyroll, Dramafever, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah. For more than a few people; if something is not on Netflix, the next step isn't a quest to find which fake Netflix it IS on. The next step is The Pirate Bay. This should come as a surprise to no one.
Imagine all the people...
Not due to subscribing to all the major streaming services, which I do, but due to the lack of time to watch anything.
Instead of downloading 10 new movies a month, it's been about 1 every 2 or 3 months.
Dear sarcastic nerd,
I found something you might like. It's like Redbox only web 2.0. https://dvd.netflix.com/Welcome
Love,
Yer mom
yep, I don't believe in intellectual property. Ya got me! Property is physical. Information is Free(tm). Copyright is a privilege, not a right much like Spandex(tm). (c) 1997 Anonymous Coward. Your mom is my intellectual property in my spank bank.
Does your mom know you learned all those fancy words watching family porn?
Back when I subscribed it was before streaming and they had EVERYTHING. This was the allure. When they launched the streaming it was included as a bonus, so it didn't matter that it was a little thin. Then it took off and they split it into a separate product which again was cool because it had ALMOST EVERYTHING.
Today's Netflix is different. There is something for everyone but there is no more finding specific things that you want to see. The back catalogs that were on there are gone; the studios have pulled everything with the dream of starting their own $10/mo service with a private silo. Even the disc service is neutered now with the special 'rental' editions of movies that take out the extras. Like I have ever once rented a movie and loved it so much that I ran out and bought it so I could listen to a couple of the supporting actors sit around getting drunk while they watch their own movie.
You know what costs me $10/mo and gives me access to everything? A VPN service.
Oh my fucking god, really? Seriously? I've seen the same pirate debate for about 40 years. I'm sure it's older than that. I'm not.
I have never seen anyone justify piracy based on "my friends will be talking about a show I haven't seen if I don't pirate it!"
Please tell me you're some dumb ass millennial idiot. It would be twice as shameful if you're a real adult saying completely idiotic nonsense like that.
Real pirates steal because they just fucking want to. They don't justify it with "but then my friends will be a few e-Isolde's ahead of me! Wah!"
Grow up and just steal shit like we used to and stop with the lamest justification ever seen in the never ending piracy debates.
In nearly every technological household that I know there is Netflix. In those same households there is little piracy as compared to before. But there is piracy of any crappy streaming systems like CBS's. Not that Disney makes much other than crap, they too will see that their crap streaming service will not reduce piracy. Organizations like CBS don't seem to realize that the old is unacceptable. You can't put bugs on the screen, you can't relentlessly market at people through a service they are paying for. You can't abuse your customers to fit you needs. Sell them a great product and they will pay you. Sell a completely half assed MBA driven attempt at manipulation and pirates will cherry pick the few good bits and leave you empty handed.
It is those little things that Netflix does like skip intro that completely shows that they are tuned into their customers. With organizations like CBS they dole out the shows one a week and there is no skip intro because some MBA long ago identified that you could literally show 2 minutes of the exact same crap to people and it cost nothing more to make and filled 2 whole minutes of your 44 minutes.That is like 5% of your show for free. (frat boy MBA chest bump time).
So this should read, bad old school streaming does not reduce piracy, good healthy streaming does.
For me, at least as far as TV and movies is concerned, the reason I pirate is because of ease of use. I left the piracy scene behind for years when Netflix still offered almost every TV show and movie I wanted to watch in a single website and a good price. Once Hulu came out and all the other companies became greedy and went 'Me too!', I began having to remember which shows were available where and login to separate accounts or different applications or different devices just to be able to watch my shows. I despise the fragmentation in media that exists today.
As a very early cord cutter, I want a one stop shop for every movie and TV show I want to watch; one application or website that gives me everything in an easy to view package. Right now, torrenting/streaming and Kodi accomplishes that task. Even then, piracy is a huge pain in my ass. If Netflix or (insert company here) successfully licensed all TV shows and movies and provided a legal option to have unlimited access to everything, I would ditch media piracy in a heartbeat and I'd probably be willing to pay as much as 70 dollars a month for this.
So Netflix killing piracy? Not anymore. Maybe if corporate greed wasn't such a huge issue...
First, the offer was for a temporary discount on a service.
Once that temporary status expires, who here wouldn't drop the pay-for-service option and go right back to torrenting their content? Besides, who'd grab the free service knowing it would cost them later?
Second point: Bell has had their system available on their PVR boxes for restarting a show, but you can't rewind or fast forward any program you restarted.
Seriously.
This also applies to any show you're watching where you have rewound past a certain point (seems random to me) thus ruining the experience.
Personally, I'l stick to recording what I want to watch, and downloading the rest to watch when I am good and ready for the content, and most of the downloaded stuff has the added bonus of not having any commercials to skip!
Just sayin'
Like seriously where do I get a grant to "research" into a quandary with such a painfully obvious outcome/result? Anyone with two neurons to rub together could have told you this.
Short of making content free forever, nothing is going to stop/kill piracy.
Since you cannot find everything on Netflix, how many subscriptions would someone need to see everything he's interested in?
And what about countries for which Netflix blocks its contents?
It's not "netflix" vs "free", it's "netflix + VPN, amazon, hulu..." vs "single source".
Netflix very likely wont be around for too much longer anyhow.
Sooooo you just shut up and take big corps cock up your ass?
Glad Martin Luther King didn't think like you. Glad our founding fathers didn't think like you.
Just roll over and die already you corporate fucking shill.
# of things i need to log into to watch pirated things: zero
No special software, no bandwidth needed to watch, works on any device, and what i'm watching will never be 'removed' from my service.
I stopped using netflix because the content I was planning on watching would disappear before I had to chance to watch and DRM will always be a headache.
The REAL problem is that distributors are always crying about "MUH DISTWIBUSHUN WIGHTS ;.;", it needs to be changed so that if someone broadcasts X show, they pay Y a certain amount of money determined by the age of the media and nothing else. You know how you can pay a fee for the rights to a cover for a song and they're not allowed to refuse you? We need something like that for digital distribution.
Well, it seems that 95.5%, +/-, are related to something else than copying movies, music...
The 45-day window is nowhere near enough time to be able to determine a change in behaviour. Talking about shows, in particular, I will usually watch a show in the same pattern for the entire season. The download and search before watching the show is part of the viewing experience.
I won't try to assume I am the same as the rest of the population, however, I do know that context and patterns are important for people. I think I can make a pretty safe assumption that a lot of people watch TV in the same way.
If you want to be able to see a change in behaviour, you will have to release shows in the same time frame that they are released in both streaming and TV (no binge-watching on streaming, or all binge-watching on TV), and give people enough of a window to finish the season for a few different shows from beginning to end (90 - 120 days).