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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.
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)
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.
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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).
Using BitTorrent is not equal to piracy.
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.
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
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.