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.

Comments

because what you want to watch isn't on netflix

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Re:because what you want to watch isn't on netflix

[mark-t]

Explain where it says that you have an entitlement to the content that you want simply by virtue of wanting it

Also, see rationilzation #25, the Coercion Myth:

When people say they had to behave unethically because they had no choice, it is almost always a lie. What they mean is that they didn't like the choices they had, and taking the unethical option involved less sacrifice, less controversy, less criticism, less effortâ¦in short, less courage, than doing the right thing. Ethics often requires pain; if making the ethical choice was easy, there would be no need to practice being ethical. You may decide that doing the right thing is too costly or requires more personal misery than you can bear - a lost job, a ruined reputation, financial capacity, punishment for breaking with tradition or rules - sometimes that is a reasonable choice. But you still had a choice, and you are still accountable for the choice you made.

If you don't agree with the ethics of copyright in the first place, then just admit that you don't care about intellectual property in the first place instead of hiding behind the notion that you didn't have a choice in the matter, because it's plainly obvious that you do.

Re:because what you want to watch isn't on netflix

[Strider-]

This is where I wish that TV/short form entertainment would go the same way as music. Have broad/permissive licensing. Any service can stream it out, they just pay a royalty like you do with music. Netflix could happily provide GoT, or The Expanse, or whatever, and just pay the appropriate people a normal, non-discriminatory royalty for the play.

I buy "The Expanse" from iTunes because I enjoy the show, and want to support it, but I'll still snag episodes to add to my media player because, well, the iTunes version dones't play everywhere, and often comes out several days later.

Re:because what you want to watch isn't on netflix

[war4peace]

I personally don't care about being 1 year behind, but for the life of me I can't stand the "content not available in your country". I don't have leprosy for fuck's sake, and no, I don't give a flying fuck about your "exclusive content deals" which prevent you from making said content available in my country.
Movies should be available worldwide, not based on past shitty contracts or exclusive deals.

Is it possible...

[roc97007]

...that what they were offered to watch for free was not what they wanted to watch? That they found new titles that interested them with the free offering but not the titles they had previously been downloading? That, in summary, the objective was not "free tv", (most of us can get that with an antenna) or even "free tv on demand", but to watch a certain collection of titles that either (a) weren't conveniently available, or (b) somewhat available, but across several pay TV services?

Legal Alternatives Suck

[dave562]

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.