Not Even Free TV Can Get People To Stop Pirating Movies and TV Shows (qz.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Since the internet made it easier to illegally download and stream movies and TV shows, Hollywood struggled with people pirating its works online. About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to piracy globally last year, Digital TV Research found (pdf), and it's expected to approach $10 billion by 2022. Streaming-video services like Netflix and Hulu have made it more affordable to access a wide-range of titles from different TV networks and movie studios. But the availability of cheap content online has done little to curb piracy, according to research published in Management Science (paywall) last month. Customers who were offered free subscriptions to a video-on-demand package (SVOD) were just as likely to turn to piracy to find programming as those without the offering, researchers at Catolica Lisbon School of Business & Economics and Carnegie Mellon University found.

The researchers partnered with an unnamed internet-service provider -- in a region they chose not to disclose -- to offer customers who were already prone to piracy an on-demand package for free for 45 days. About 10,000 households participated in the study, and about half were given the free service. The on-demand service was packaged like Netflix or Hulu in layout, appearance, and scope of programming, but was delivered through a TV set-top box. It had a personalized recommendation engine that surfaced popular programming based on what those customers were already watching illegally through BitTorrent logs, which were obtained from a third-party firm. The study found that while the participants watched 4.6% more TV overall when they had the free on-demand service, they did not stop using BitTorrent to pirate movies and TV shows that were not included in the offering.

Comments

Bullshit

[slazzy]

Smells like bullshit to me. I've been offered so many "free" services all the time I turn them down without even thinking. I pay for Netflix, though rarely watch anything there or anywhere else. I'm sure I'm not the only one who is conditioned to turn down free services knowing there's a catch.

Re:Bullshit

[networkBoy]

Actually I thought this was the real tell:

The on-demand service was packaged like Netflix or Hulu in layout, appearance, and scope of programming,

I still pirate some stuff because I can't get it on Prime or Netflix.
I'll readily admit to being lazy and honestly pirating content is a PITA compared to just grabbing the remote for a fire stick and streaming content... but when the library of streams is totally missing the long tail that made Netflix (DVD) popular in the first place, then the alternative is piracy.

Re:Bullshit

[rogoshen1]

not to mention they come up with these SCAAAAAAAAAAARY numbers for lost revenue; and you just have to wonder what the *real* impact would be.

The overlap between "sure i'll download it because it's free" and "i really want this program, i'd totally pay for it if i had no other option!" is NOT even close to 100%. It's more like .000000000000000000001%

Or maybe they juke the numbers to use as leverage when trying to ruin poor schmoes life. Probably using a shitty legal threat that the average person has absolutely no ability to fight. Because someone pressing bootleg DVD's for commercial sale is *exactly* the same as a guy torrenting simpsons episodes to watch on his plex server. right? yep, totally equivalent, therefore that settlement in the many thousands of dollars range is absolutely fair.

But if they did have the temerity to fight it; some dickhead judge with 0 understanding of the technical issues would virtually automatically side with the IP holder.

Re:Bullshit

[fluffernutter]

This research could actually be interesting if they offered a few different bundles in a few tiers grouped by ratings. To one group offer your basic Netflix selection. To the next group, offer shows of around average popularity and to a third group offer absolute premium content. You would start to get a more interesting picture of where the breaking point is to start to pull people away from piracy.

Re: Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

We should just start calling it sourcing instead of pirating.

Re:Bullshit

[rogoshen1]

that's a good point... I can say anecdotally since the TPB started having periods of being knocked offline, my piracy has gone to roughly 0.

Just like my spending on media/entertainment from Hollywood.

Re:Bullshit

[Arzaboa]

The numbers are ridiculous. If people didn't watch it because they had no money, or would have never spent the money to watch something in the first place, they can't be counted as lost revenue. My guess is that it would actually increase viewership and people who paid to watch, from people that saw something they never would have seen, telling others to check it out. -- Its a bird, it's a plane.

Re:Bullshit

[ceoyoyo]

The real tell is:

"they did not stop using BitTorrent to pirate movies and TV shows that were not included in the offering."

Re:Bullshit

[murdocj]

Of course they can be counted as lost revenue. You really telling me that people who can't afford $10 a month are the pirates? The people with no money are a little more worried about their next meal than they are about scanning torrents for the latest episode of some TV show.

Re:Bullshit

[ArmoredDragon]

I have a paid hbo subscription, but I still pirate game of thrones. The pirate stream is just much higher quality than what you get from hbo streaming: Full 1080p as opposed to 720p, instant seek/rewind, higher nitrate for clearer picture, no pausing/stuttering.

Being completely honest here, pirates have figured out how to do proper online video distribution way better than anybody else: Their standards for release quality are typically higher, even though at the end of the day they're working with rips as opposed to the source material (what.CD often rejected Amazon mp3 uploads due to Amazon's poor encoding practices) and they've also figured out how to meet the bandwidth requirements for pennies on the dollar. (Passive distribution instead of requiring a fully live playback is HUGE here, and for some reason, content companies refuse to let it happen anyways, even in cases like HBO where they have compete vertical control over licensing.)

Also, pirating is almost completely automatic in my case. I use sickrage and rtorrent, but there are plenty of alternatives.

Re:Bullshit

[youngone]

I get Netflix free with my internet and watch a fair bit of stuff, but because I don't live in the US a whole lot of stuff you guys get, I don't because pay TV owns the rights, and I don't want to pay $120 per month for TV.
The other problem they have is that TV shows are not interchangable.
I have been pirating "It's always Sunny in Philadelphia" because I can't see it at all where I live so if they offered me "It seldom rains in Albuquerque" I probably wouldn't be interested.
Spotify and other streaming music services proved that if you give people what they want at a good price, you can almost kill pirating dead.

Re:Bullshit

[Spazmania]

I earn decent money for my services and I'm all too happy to pay you for yours. Sell me what I want to buy and I buy it.

I don't want to buy your DRM-encumbered crap and I generally don't. For my money I'll watch it my way and if that's not OK with you, I'll watch it my way anyway and you just won't get paid for it.

Re:Bullshit

[greenwow]

Plus, many people don't have connections fast enough to stream video. I know where I live in Seattle, I certainly can't. I paid the $15 per month for HBO Now to watch Game of Thrones, because I want to support it, but I had to pirate it in order to watch it. I received a DMCA letter for every(!) episode, but ignored them.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

You really telling me that people who can't afford $10 a month are the pirates?

No, they are not really telling you that. Person A says "I'd like to watch Game of Thrones but I'm not going to pay $15/mo for HBOGo". That person is not "lost revenue" since they were never going to pay for the subscription anyway. Even if that person goes out and pirates an episode they are still not "lost revenue" since at no point were they even entertaining the idea of paying for HBO.

That's not to say that Person A is in the right at all. If you think they are a terrible person or a criminal that's fine. However, it doesn't change the economic fact that Person A is not "lost revenue" for HBO.

Re:Bullshit

[omnichad]

higher nitrate for clearer picture,

Though a bit more pink.

Re:Bullshit

[Arzaboa]

I've meet a whole lot of folks around the world that don't have an extra $10 a month, that aren't starving. They love movies, but wouldn't watch them if they weren't delivered on a DVD to the neighborhood TV set for free.

--
It's a bird, It's a plane!

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

TPB isn't the only game in town. Rarbg is usually better for current shows/movies, for example.

Re:Bullshit

[Alumoi]

The real tell is:

"they did not stop using BitTorrent to pirate movies and TV shows that were not included in the offering."

Detail, details. We are giving you the last and the best of the crap...erm, movies/shows. If you're a grumpy old fart who can't be fooled into believing the lastest crap... erm, crop of shows is THE shit, then you're a fucking pirate and deserve to die a horrible death!
How dare you cheat us of money we think we could have made?

Re: Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI I took some plates from your house the other day. You weren't using them, so it's not really stealing. Really, they were only your "potential" property. Unless you can prove 100% without a doubt that you would have used them if I didn't take them, it wasn't really theft.

Re:Bullshit

[serviscope_minor]

The pirate stream is just much higher quality than what you get from hbo streaming: Full 1080p as opposed to 720p, instant seek/rewind, higher nitrate for clearer picture, no pausing/stuttering.

Yes this! What the fuck. What the ACTUAL fuck!

I'm still pissed off about this. I paid good money to stream GoT legally and the product was utter shit. Thing that happen with pay services that don't happen with pirating:

1. client forces an update when you turn it on, so you have to wait half an hour to start watching TV because NowTV's application CDN are connected to the internet through two tin cans and a piece of wet string.

2. Dropouts because fuck you that's why.

3. DRM shits itself forcing a reboot midway through the show (twice!)

4. Quality drops to about 160x100 randomly for short periods

5. Rewinding causes quality to be about 160x100 for about a minute

6. 720p not 1080p

7. Sound occasionally fuck up necessitating restarting the client

8. No subtitles

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no lost revenue. Most of the people who pirate would not pay to watch the shows and are not potential customers in the first place.

Think of it this way: if you have MoviePass, how many garbage movies have you gone to see in the theater simply because it allowed you to see it for free, having already provided you tickets for the two films you actually wanted to watch?

An affordable flat rate model is the only way to beat piracy.

Re:Bullshit

[Rande]

I still even pirate some stuff I get with Amazon Prime and Netflix because streaming cuts out often, and when I reload, a lot of the time, there's no audio and I have to mute and unmute the tab. Amazon is worse than Netflix - I'll hit reload a few times and then just go get it from torrent because it's actually faster to download the whole episode than to try and get a watchable stream.

Re:Bullshit

[TheRaven64]

An EU study published a couple of years ago and quietly ignored until a couple of months ago concluded that, aside from a very small number of very popular things for a short window after release, there was no impact on revenues from piracy.

I didn't find that at all surprising. There are basically four kinds of people in the relevant markets:

• People that can't afford the product at all. If these pirate, you lose nothing and you might gain from word-of-mouth advertising. They will often be able to afford not to pirate when they are older, so getting them interested in your products may be a good long-term investment.
• People with a massive sense of entitlement that will pirate if it's at all possible and hate the idea of actually paying for a thing that they enjoy. You don't lose much from these people pirating, because they're not going to pay anyway. They're annoying, but basically nothing you do will make them into paying customers and anything that you try will negatively impact people in the next category.
• People that want to pay a reasonable amount for the product in a form that they can enjoy, but will pirate if it's overpriced / inconvenient / not available. These are the ones that you should be focusing on, because these are the ones that you can turn into paying customers if you remove the DRM, delayed releases, region locking, and other impediments.
• People who won't pirate at all. You also need to be careful about these ones, because for them piracy isn't the alternative, giving up your product entirely is. If someone stops paying a cable subscription and pirates your show (for example) then there's a good chance that you can get them back as a customer later. If, on the other hand, they stop watching TV entirely, then you're much less likely to get them back. Again, customer-hostile policies are likely to push these ones away.

Remember how the music industry said that DRM-free music downloads would kill the industry? And how, when Apple and Amazon started offering DRM-free much downloads their profits jumped to record highs?

Re:Bullshit

[VernonNemitz]

The problem is as obvious as the last sentence in the main article above. All content needs to be available by an advertisement-supported model, essentially making it cost nothing (but some time) to the viewers. Most viewers don't suffer from the "time is money" attitude to the extent that they would prefer to obtain pirated ad-free content --and they generally won't suffer from that attitude if greedy content-providers reduce the amount of advertising associated with content, the older the content. In this day-and-age the delivery cost of existing content is very small, so once the production costs have been recovered from all sources (like movie tickets and pay-per-view and more), for a given item of content, only a few advertisements need be associated with the content, to continue to generate profits. It is that "few advertisements" which will eventually cause piracy to not be worth the effort.

Re: Bullshit

[Dog-Cow]

If someone were to thrust a spike through your left eye, the world would be a better place.

Re:Bullshit

[The Cynical Critic]

The thing about Netflix and most other services like it is that they're only available some of the most developed parts of the world (north america, central and northern europe) where just about everyone can relatively easily afford to pay for all of the content they're going to be pirating. For these people it wasn't about the content being prohibitively expensive, it was about the convenience offered by piracy. Places where the cost of the content is more prohibitive and where services like Netflix could actually have a big impact, simply aren't served by these companies and services.

Re: Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on over, I have a whole stack I never use. If I could copy them for free, I'd give you as many as you want, even though I paid for the originals.

Re:Bullshit

[swb]

I don't pirate but "not included in the offering" is Hollywood's major failure and essential manipulation.

The major TV networks alone had something like 1,500 hours of scripted entertainment per year. Probably at least 30 studio feature films per year. If you just think about a single 10 year period, that's enough entertainment to occupy even a picky person for years.

But where is it? You can barely find older films on streaming services, of if you do it's a minuscule fraction of what' out there. Older TV shows are almost non-existent.

We've been told "Oh vey, the rights are so difficult" and given some random high profile examples like "WKRP in Cincinnati" with all its music licensing problems. I don't think that's it, I think Hollywood is worried that if large back catalogs of programming become available it will kill new revenue for current programming or undermine the ability to essentially remake old concepts with updated slang, fashions and characterizations.

It also makes me wonder where old news programming is -- why isn't 60 Minutes available for streaming its old seasons? After watching Ken Burns' Vietnam documentary (which I'm critical of for other reasons) and some of the extended clips from the news of the era, it makes me downright conspiratorial. The image of the 1960s newsman as a tool of the establishment is false -- Walter Cronkite called Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention a police state ON NATIONAL TELEVISION. I think that if old news programming became widely available, people would really question the nature of what they call "the news" these days -- Brian Williams or any of the other talking heads would *never* do that now.

Re:Bullshit

[AmiMoJo]

They think their content is worth way, way more than it actually is, and then force themselves to pay high distribution costs, and pay for DRM on top of that. Just in case that didn't destroy their revenue stream completely, they make sure you need to buy extra hardware just for the privilege of subscribing to their service.

If they just offered TheLegitBay.org for 5 bucks a month, all distribution by low cost torrent in .mkv format, then piracy would drop as fast as it did with music streaming services. I guess their spreadsheets tell them that it's more profitable to stick with DRM and low quality streaming, while bitching about people not wanting to pay out the arse for it.

Re:Bullshit

[Hodr]

[...] higher nitrate for clearer picture, no pausing/stuttering.

And better taste, longer shelf life.

Re:Bullshit

[AvitarX]

It sounds like the used the free service, and even discovered new things (4% increase), but pirated where it lacked content.

This seems to say that free service does eliminate piracy, simply that you need it to include what people want.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

You really telling me that people who can't afford $10 a month are the pirates

They do around here. Then when they finish school, they get a job and a real income, most of them start paying for movies.

Oh, and where do you find this $10 service that has every single movie? Wouldn't that rather be $10 plus pirating the rest?

Or $10 plus $12 plus $15 plus that a couple of tickets to the movie theater for those movies that they still insist you either pirate or get to listen to someone else talking on their phone?

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. I can't believe we're all still having this argument, because of the propaganda peddled by these guys.

"About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to piracy globally last year". No it wasn't. I'm poor. I wasn't planning on buying a hundred movies this year, because I can't afford a hundred movies this year. I pirated ripped mp3's because I wasn't going to buy a hundred CD's per year either. In fact, I pirated movies on VHS for same reason....and I pirated movies off of the radio using a casette recorder in the 80's for the same fucking reason: I'M POOR.

So you can keep counting the movies I torrent, and saying it's "lost revenue", even though I never would have bought them....say it all you want but that doesn't make it true.

Re: Bullshit

[temcat]

Dude, I'm totally OK with you copying my plates (because that's what you apparently mean by "taking" in the context of where video is discussed). Yeah, that means that I cannot sell you copies of my plates. I don't care, I still have all of them.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah same here. I already pay for Netflix and Hulu, but I'm certainly not falling for yet another "free trial" BS. ~$9/ea for 2 services is about all I'm willing to shell out anymore. Oooh...look a free 45 day trial...and then what? They'll charge you 299.99 a month or something starting on day 46. Nevermind this bit: "movies and TV shows that were not included in the offering"

The study is flawed from the get go. 1) Not everyone's going to fall for the free trial crap with tv services anymore, and 2) they're including results of stuff that WASN'T part of their trial package thereby skewing the results. You can make any conclusion you want if you eff with the results.

There's also quality issues with the current broadcast methods. Say I have fios. Every time I've tried to stream an on demand movie or event through fios it's been utter SHIT. The quality was like what you get from crap pirated content 15 years ago. Today, folks have access to pirated content that is BETTER than the crap we pay outrageous fees for.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not the only one who is conditioned to turn down free services knowing there's a catch.

Ok, that opens the door to the study maybe not meaning much, but no way I would go anywhere near calling it bullshit.

It passes the not-bullshit test. If I could get Netflix+HBO+all_other_proprietary_streaming_services for free, and I knew for sure there weren't any strings, I'd still keep on pirating their shows. Piracy is a lot easier, generally better quality (my internet connection is only 7 Mbps which is ok for streaming, sort of, but still an absolute joke compared to blu-ray rips), less intrusive, more interoperable with all devices, wife-friendlier, and has fewer hassles.

The only way non-piracy is ever going to be able to catch up with the ease of piracy, is when they start selling files comparable to what you get from pirates. And there aren't any real downsides to doing that, but they won't do it, because (this is where it gets hilarious) they're worried about piracy. So piracy simply isn't going away, until the video industry switches to a strategy of trying to maximize their revenue. DRM==piracy. And all the major streaming services still use DRM. In 2017, and I am totally not kidding.

The video industry is doing as much as they can think of, to empower and motivate the pirate scene, and you have to admit it has gotten us some awesome tools that go way beyond the commercial offerings in terms of ease, reliability, performance, and even aesthetics. They have pushed the bar to higher than they, themselves, are willing to supply. Unless there is a sudden huge shift in how they sell their content, piracy is getting enshrined long-term as the best choice for all consumers.

At a sickening level, it's come down to "if you're not pirating, you're not keeping up with the Jones." No streaming service is even in the ballpark. Streaming is what we all started moving away from, around the turn of the century, thanks to tech. We're not going back!

Re:Bullshit

[networkBoy]

If there really was a "theLegitBat.org" option I'd happily pay well over $5/mo
I'd be (barely) in at 10x the price, and would be a slam dunk in at $30/mo.

Cool thing is if it was done right you could still do peer to peer in such a way that rights management (who gets what % of the total pie in royalties etc.) would be nearly transparent to the end users, and sure there would be piracy issues, but they'd be much less than now.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to get a VPN.

Re:Bullshit

[Rhipf]

Its not just a bandwidth problem either it is a data cap problem (for some).

I would do Netflix or similar from home but since I am on a cell based ISP with very limited data cap I download shows at work (where we have no data cap).

Re:Bullshit

[110010001000]

Found the "Seattle" troll. Let me guess you only get dialup?

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

The "providers" don't want a profit, they want an egregiously large profit that never stops increasing in an unsustainable model where income dips never exist!
If this wasn't the case, a 100% reasonable and middle ground solution like the one you presented (and I 100% agree with and support) will never happen.
On top of that, the reason the content isn't available is usually due to bull**** licensing problems that usually costs additional fees and royalties that have to be paid for before the company can start their profit margin from content being consumed.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Hollywood is worried that if large back catalogs of programming become available it will kill new revenue for current programming or undermine the ability to essentially remake old concepts with updated slang, fashions and characterizations.

Personally, I think you nailed the issue right there on the head! *slow clap*

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only do they want you to pay out the arse for it, but they don't want you to have the option of watching it on a "competitors" platform because god forbid if they see half a penny missing from "their" revenue or, *gasp!!*,
  loss of "potential" earnings! oh no, they aren't earning that not-real but completely ethereal and non-existent $$ income they aren't raking in!

Re:Bullshit

[Master Moose]

TheLegitBay just makes too much sense to execute.

unfortunately

Re:Bullshit

[Rakarra]

I'm not trying to be a denier here, I really am not! Everything you mentioned IS a reason to prefer the pirated version. As someone who has a reliable, but fairly low-bandwidth network connection, I can empathize. Most of the problems you experience sound like your network connection is crappy. Most likely yours, less likely theirs. Slow as my network connection might be, I don't get dropouts, sudden resolution changes, etc. Now, I CAN get those dropouts on HBO, netflix, blizzcon, etc streaming if a computer in the house decides it's time to download something. There's just no bandwidth to spare. The would explain #1, #2, #4, #5. There's no excuse for #3, #7, or #8. No subtitles? Almost seems like that has to violate some ADA law.

Re:Bullshit

[vivian]

Copyright holders have fought strongly for extensions on copyright, saying that it is required in order to maintain an incentive for artists to continue making new works - which I am sure everyone here knows is currently 70+ lifetime of the artist.

Copyright is supposed to be a two sided deal though - the works are supposed to be available to the public, or they no longer are "advancing the art", since that art is now locked away and inaccessible. Furthermore, there is a real risk that it may be lost forever by the time it is finally able to enter the public domain, due to deterioration of whatever media it is on, let alone loss of compatible contemporary technology (though this is much more easily solved than deteriorating media)

It should be a requirement that in return for the extremely generous copyright terms, the copyright holders are required to put a master quality copy of their works in escrow with the government or some other neutral organization specifically tasked with maintaining these works.in good condition and in a format that would be currently playable - and in the event that the works are no longer made available to the public at a historically reasonable price, then it should be made public domain. For example if the historical average proce for some old film was something like $20, the owners would still be required to make copies available at something like that - they couldn't start suddenly demanding $1000 per view, in order to wiggle around allowing it to go into the public domain due to lack of availability.

This would then at least ensure these works remain available, the copyright holder still gets to make money off them, and most importantly, we don't have a huge hole in our cultural heritage in 100 years time when the copyright holders have been dead for 70 years, but there are now no longer any viable copies of their works.

 

Re:Bullshit

[toddestan]

That's something that Hollywood and the RIAA still don't get. They aren't just competing with the pirates on price - the pirates also offer a better product.

Re:Bullshit

[joemck]

Bingo. I turn down "free" offers, especially ones like this 45 day package. Almost every time, you give them a credit card number when you sign up, and if you don't remember to cancel it within the free period, you start paying for it automatically afterward.

Free on-demand would also have a far smaller selection than piracy, as well as limitations like streaming-only and DRM. No more being able to take a couple movies with you on a tablet for that long flight. Free also comes with the assumption that is will be filled with ads. Even with a $0 price tag, the service has still failed to offer a better experience than piracy.

The only thing it has going for it is convenience, but if someone is already used to torrenting, it's not much of an inconvenience to them. The most irritating bit is waiting for a torrent to finish before you can watch it, but then you discover Popcorn Time and it's almost as good as normal streaming.

Re:Bullshit

[serviscope_minor]

I'm not trying to be a denier here, I really am not! Everything you mentioned IS a reason to prefer the pirated version. As someone who has a reliable, but fairly low-bandwidth network connection, I can empathize. Most of the problems you experience sound like your network connection is crappy

I was on a crappy 4.5mb connection. A little after fiber arrived (earlier this year), I switched to a nicer FTTC connection (I reliably get 50/20 wired and about 14 symmetric over wireless).

I've stressed the connection heavily. First thing I did was do some online backups, uploading a few hundred GB, which went up fine with zero dropouts (I had no dropout proofing in it).

I would rate my internet connection now as "very good", which is nice because I decided to pay a bit extra to a more specialist company to get one that was 100% hassle free.

No subtitles? Almost seems like that has to violate some ADA law.

I'm in the UK. Apparently if you buy some viewer box from them you can get subtitles, but the Mac client doesn't do that.

Oddly MPlayer on linux and Apple, working from h4x0rr3d MKVs can play subtitles just fine.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no such thing as lost revenue in a digital media format. You don't cry about eyeballs watching the commercials but instead cry about the ones that didn't because they watched a show or movie commercial free. That's what this discussion is about, commercial advertising with a show interspersed in-between.

Re:Bullshit

[KingBenny]

does netflix let me pick ALL the series i want to see on demand ? is it 100% ad-free ... yea i think peple would rather pay for netflix than have free tv with hasbeen shows interrupted every five minutes ... so do the YAARRRRates ... 0day , zero advertising ... no patience ... and once more
that EU-report CLEARLY proved piracy doesnt make a dent ... trolling has one purpose : to keep copyright trolls paid, no one else makes money off of it and if tomorrow ALL downloading would stop, they would barely notice the difference in revenue ...
it's a witchhunt, kept alive by parasites who are the only ones earning on it, convincing old people in suits with cigars how important it is
and lets not forget the "ITS MINE" ego bs ..(its not, you bought it from an artist who got shit and two pennies for it you beech)
i havent watched tv in about five months ... last time was when the old folks got back to belgium and my old man aksed me to set up the tv so he can watch "the news" once a day ... otherwise that expensive piece of gear just stands there gathering dust ... i HAVE one thought, 50 inch plasma (twas a superbargain years ago) it looks GREAT on my games

Re:Bullshit

[MercTech]

If 60 minutes were available online it would be easy to go back with current documentation to show how they have been faking news for decades.

After the third time of having first hand knowledge of a story 60 minutes edited to spin 180 degrees out from reality; you doubt everything they do.

Not prices, ads

[mapkinase]

When I cut the cord in 2004 I did it because of ads, not because I was cheap (I am cheap, no denying that).

Free TV most definitely will mean infestation with ads.

Re:Not prices, ads

[LucasBC]

And so much of that crap plastered on top of the video, not just interjected into breaks.

Re:Not prices, ads

[Dutch Gun]

I actually quit the paid tier of Hulu largely because of the bugs advertising the local affiliate station plastered in the corner of the videos for the entire duration of the show. I think for a lot of people it just disappears, but it always grabs my eye and distracts me for some reason. When I sign up for ad-free programming, I want 100% ad-free programming, and I'm willing to pay for it.

So, yeah, "free" TV would come with lots of advertising, and I don't want to waste my time like that.

Re:Not prices, ads

[Anonymous Coward]

For 15 years I VHS-ed or DVR-ed absolutely everything I ever watched on TV up to and including Super Bowls and World Serieses simply because things took at least 33% less time to watch when you can skip ads (and also because I fundamentally consider advertising a psychological weapon deployed against the general public by corporations). Then one day for the first time in my adult life I found myself unable to do that, and my TV viewing went from several hours a day to absolutely nothing inside of a week. It's amazing, for example, how fucking boring football becomes when you're forced to spread out the 10 minutes of action over 3 goddamned hours.

More generally I refuse to pay for any product or service (or even use a free one, most of the time) that forces unblockable ads upon you.

Re:Not prices, ads

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing that perplexes me to no end is why OTA channels, or basic cable channels require authentication to watch their channels on ROKU or Fire TV etc. If I want to watch CBS or the History channel, and they show me advertising, why would they care how I got it? By insisting on authentication they are, once again, making piracy the better option.

Re:Not prices, ads

[ezelkow1]

Retransmission fees put in place by the owners of all those stations. Same reason dish lost CBS during thanksgiving for much of the country, they refused to pay for the retransmission rate hikes from the companies that own the local stations.

Its fucked up, but thats how it is

Re:Not prices, ads

[Anonymous Coward]

PBS requires it as well. You aren't allowed to watch PBS programming from outside of your area...

Re:Not prices, ads

[slaker]

I agree. Pirates have the superior product. I can choose my interface and delivery method. Ads generally aren't present and I don't have to worry about the content license expiring or becoming region locked or somesuch. I can automate delivery of content. I don't have to be concerned with Netflix bogging down in its prime time because my copy is local. I know not everyone has dozens of terabytes of storage sitting around, but it's still the best choice IMO.

Re:Not prices, ads

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I drive down the freeway/highways with digital signage thanks to fuckin' leeches. Thanks APN for distracting us drivers with overhead digital ADS. Fucking crazy.

Re:Not prices, ads

[Lodragandraoidh]

There is no free lunch. If someone spent significant amounts of money to make it - you're going to pay for it one way, or the other.

This is where creators need to get creative: there isn't one single model that can do that - there are a number of ways, including patronage (e.g. Patreon.com , kickstarter.com ), paywalls (e.g. WSJ.com , washingtonpost.com, netflix.com and the like), and ad supported content (e.g. YouTube.com etc) to name a few. There are other models too - such as 'name your own prices' schemes and the like.

If you want a consistently high quality product - most of us are going to have to pay one way or the other, otherwise it will go away because the people doing it won't be able to continue giving away high quality free content forever. I've seen this happen a number of times over the years.

The corollary to that is you get what you pay for. There is going to be free content out there - but its quality is going to be commensurate with the person's time and effort put into it, so unless they are independently wealthy they will not be able to put in the amount of effort, or hire the necessary people to produce high quality work on an ongoing basis. There may be exceptions to this - but they will be rare indeed. Good on you if you find such an artist.

Re:Not prices, ads

[havana9]

Yes. I have tried a Sky Now TV box to watch some channels, and I have found that the paid channel have the same amount of advertising of similar free to air terrestrial channels. With the pay TV channel I could watch a serial before, but the sad thing is the streaming quality is way less than watching terrestrial or satellite channels. Public broadcaster channels transmitted in HD have less advertising. They are license funded partially, it's true but the Sky subscription is higher. Not to mention the annoying hiccups due DRM/bandwidth/whatever the fact one has the same amount of advertising on a free to air channel or a pay tv channel doesn't make one prefer the pay tv option.

Re:Not prices, ads

[rally2xs]

"When I cut the cord in 2004 I did it because of ads"

Hmmm.... how's that work, anyway? Over-the-air TV doesn't have ads? When you get a DVD of original Star Trek episodes from the late 60's they run around 50.5 minutes. Get episodes of the latest NCIS and they run around 42.5 minutes. What do you suppose occurred during those 8 less minutes of programming? Yep, commercials.

Commercials are the reason I mostly stopped watching over-the-air TV. I can tolerate commercials on stuff like Fox News which just blathers in my background as I really entertain myself with my computer like right now, and when it goes away for commercials, I just ignore it. I don't have to hold plot-lines in my head for an extended period of time while they try to sell me 16 different thing, nor maintain my interest during the interruption. For regular drama / comedy etc. I often ended up channel surfing rather than waiting for the commercials to end, and never really got to watch the end of whatever it was I started watching.

And my "cord" brings me movies on HBO / Showtime / Cinemax / Starz with no commercials. No, it ain't cheap, but it is commercial-free.

And my non-cord is Netflix DVD. NCIS Season 13 Disk 3 is in the computer right now, and it doesn't have commercials either. They're sucky-short at around the 42 minute mark, but they don't have commercials either.

Soooo... dunno what you're talking about, "ads forcing you off the cord." Doesn't make sense.

Re:Not prices, ads

[AmiMoJo]

Interestingly 2004 was also the year that several DRM-infected music "stores" went offline. I seem to recall that the Microsoft one, with it's presumably ironically named "Plays for Sure (but not on a Zune)" DRM, sent out an email advising people to burn their music to CD and re-rip it to MP3 to avoid losing access to all their "purchased" music.

It was a strange time. Music companies seemed to be scared shitless of computer files, apparently unaware that CDs could be copied just as easily.

Re:Not prices, ads

[AvitarX]

Because the ads are worth more if they know who you are (in theory).

Re: Not prices, ads

[Anonymous Coward]

If you admit to watching Fox News, nobody really cares what you have to say.

Re:Not prices, ads

[kilfarsnar]

I fundamentally consider advertising a psychological weapon deployed against the general public by corporations

Marry me!

Re:Not prices, ads

[Rick Schumann]

'Free OTA broadcast TV' + Tivo + '30 second skip turned on' = 'rarely if ever see commercials again, unless you really want to'. You might see a few frames here and there but otherwise they won't really sink in.

Re:Not prices, ads

[Quirkz]

I cut the cord to be cheap, but losing my tolerance for ads may have been the biggest benefit. I can't bear to watch TV in hotel rooms anymore, and the maybe 5 or 8 times a year I put on a live football game, I'm half-dizzy by halftime from all the bopping back and forth between game and other stuff. It's amazing how much of your life can tick away letting someone else try to sell you stuff.

Re:Not prices, ads

[mapkinase]

Well, first of all I spent a large part of 2004 and 2005 without any TV content. WIth or without cable. That was the best time of my life.

Then at 2005 all major broadcasters already had their content streamed from their websites. ABC showed Lost, etc.

"About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to piracy"

[corychristison]

About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to piracy globally last year

It's been proven time and time again that people who download "illegally" wouldn't actually pay for it in the first place, so you can't assign a dollar value to it.

In other news

[vux984]

Giving people what they don't want at any price, including "free", is not a substute for giving them what they want.

Seriously, we've all been there... I feel like watching, I don't know... "Dr. Strangelove" and netflix doesn't have it so it suggests "Dr. Strange", "Young Frankenstein", "House of cards", "Pulp Fiction", "Oliver Stone's Untold History of the..."

So I torrent Dr. Strangelove, because I've already seen, or do not care to see any of those titles; and I *want* to see Dr. Strangelove.

Re:In other news

[fluffernutter]

This. The other day I searched for the TV show Highway Thu Hell and the best Netflix could give me was Highway to Heaven. Now that I think about it that's rather comical irony!

Re:In other news

[mea2214]

Dr. Strangelove is available on Netflix DVD if you can wait a day or two for it.

Re:In other news

[tepples]

But what I want to watch isn't available on Netflix streaming or Netflix DVD. Let me know when the film Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night, the film Song of the South, or the TV series Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea gets released on region 1 DVD. The streaming metasearch sites just say "is not available now.".

Re:In other news

[vux984]

netflix dvd is only available in the states.

Re:In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly why, no need to read further.

Re: In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

I love Song of the South. What a great movie.

Too bad it's banned in the U.S.

Re: In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 on sun beneath the sea. Watched it as a kid.

Re:In other news

[nnull]

It's not only this. Many media outlets do not provide the format that I WANT. They all insist I have to use their player to watch it. So, what to do? Pirate it, because the pirates provide a better media format than all of them that I can use to play on any of my devices, any time and anywhere, without having to be connected to the internet 24/7.

Re:In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

if you can wait a day or two for it.

Add "1990s video stores" to the list of things Netflix is shittier than.

Re:In other news

[Caedite Eos]

You say that as if there was anything but wasteland outside the USA. USA! USA! USA!

Re: In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to zipper your doo-da in the land of the free.

Re:In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

"But that makes you a filthy LUDDITE for not using their APPY APP APPS!!" - That one guy

Re:In other news

[The Cynical Critic]

I live in Finland and we've never had a service like Netflix DVD over here... Closest thing we've had are old fashion video rental stores and those have gone practically extinct over the last decade.

Actually, come to think of it there was a pilot program for one of those DVD rental vending machines, but that never went anywhere. The closest one to where I live, located in conjunction to a gas station, was only available for a couple of weeks before it was badly vandalized and then removed. Beyond politically motivated vandalism, mostly done by anarchists, vandalism beyond spray painting is pretty rare over here so so it was probably someone who thought they were going to kill loads of jobs if they took off.

Re: In other news

[rally2xs]

Banned? Amazon, about $34. Ya' just gotta want it $34-worth.

Re:In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

We need entertainment in the wastelands too, you insensitive clod.

Re:In other news

[PingSpike]

Netflix mail in service doesn't even seem to have any competitors even in the states, at least not anymore.

The worst part is netflix DVD is sort of just ignored instead of invested in by netflix itself. It seems when at least some titles in their library get lost or broken they are simply never replaced, meaning the library is rotting away. There are series on there that are missing disk 4 for instance.

And since video stores have nearly vanished with only redbox as a replacement (which has a tiny recent film oriented library) the available options for seeing older films and TV shows are really dwindling.

Re:In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not the point, it isn't one of those "hum, I want to see that within the next week" it's a "I'm in the mood for this right now".

If it was the within the week issue I'd go to the library and give them my patronage instead.

People want a specific content

[Z80a]

And they will get it, paying or not paying for it.
So you're better off not being on a situation where the only way is the "free" way, or people will take it.

Didn't we just do this exact same article

[rsilvergun]

with a different headline that implied the exact opposite result (something about Netflix ending piracy or something)?

Come on /. editors, you can't just change the headline and with it the entire meaning of the article. I mean, some of us are going to at least read the summary, aren't we? I mean, not me, no. But I'm sure someone will.

Re:Didn't we just do this exact same article

[davecb]

A similar one, from tech in asia, https://yro.slashdot.org/story...

Re:Didn't we just do this exact same article

[Athanasius]

Yes, this one https://yro.slashdot.org/story...

From this article:

The researchers partnered with an unnamed internet-service provider -- in a region they chose not to disclose -- to offer customers who were already prone to piracy an on-demand package for free for 45 days. About 10,000 households participated in the study, and about half were given the free service. ... according to research published in Management Science (paywall) last month

And from the one I just linked:

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.

And that one links to https://pubsonline.informs.org... which has a "Management Science" banner on it.

Never Free...

[CimmerianX]

I also would not use a Free Service wrapped up in a black box on top of my TV. You obviously need to let it analyze your viewing patterns for those 'recommendations', plus who knows what is in the eula... probably lets them analyze your viewing data as well as requiring ID/birthdate/Credit card number... who knows what data it wanted. Maybe Joe Schmoe in Dallas doesn't wan't you knowing he watches The Big Bang Theory and knows he can pirate it and watch it in private instead.

I would.

Re: Never Free...

[Anonymous Coward]

I really really want to agree with you and say its all the registration bullshiy and extra set top box monthly fees and carp.. Buy it really just boils down to quality and ease of use. If I could get better use and quality from a legit service for 5-10 a month, I would use it. If not gtfo... I already use mythtv and plex to record and stream anything to any other thing that I want. If you dont support my device of choice and I'm paying you to stream it. On top of which you add commercials... Guess what, ill find ways to view 2hat I want... A prime example just happened to me last week. I paid 99 to get NHL in limited for the season. I'm still subject to blackouts. I'm still subject to NHL commercials... And local commercials a merely replaced with a message saying "Commercial break in progress" ... Ill give you infinity guesses what I will not be paying for again

Re:Never Free...

[mnemotronic]

I doubt if "free" means "commercial-free". I pay through the nose for Comcast, which means I'm paying to watch Mr Robot on USA. I've payed for that content, and yet I still have to endure the commercials. No fast-forwarding. That means I'm paying again with my time.

The next killer app will be a way for me to make Comcast, AT&T and others have to sit through 5 commercials in order to get my monthly check or payment. I sell those commercial slots and make a bit off each one.

So not really equal service?

[Anonymous Coward]

So it appears the service did not actually have the TV shows they were watching via BitTorrent, since they then used BitTorrent to watch the shows they had been watching. If you're going to do a study, at least measure what you say you are gonna measure, just sayin.

Stupid article.

[Mike Van Pelt]

Oh, why oh why, we give them free streaming TV and they still pirate.

We just can't understand it.

Last sentence of the summary above: "they did not stop using BitTorrent to pirate movies and TV shows that were not included in the offering."

Well **DUH!!!**

Netflix yawn

[fluffernutter]

I watch very little TV, and as such I want to make sure that I will completely enjoy anything that I do sit down to watch. I don't know about Hulu, but Netflix just seems like a bargain bin. Never has there been a greater selection of movies and shows that didn't quite make it. I consider the subscription fee inexpensive, but it is fairly spot on for what you get. As such, there doesn't tend to be much in Netflix that I want to watch ever. Not surprised it didn't fill the needs of people who pirate.

Well now

[93 Escort Wagon]

The customers continued to pirate the movies and shows they couldn't get via approved channels? Knock me over with a feather.

Did they really expect people were going to say "I don't want to watch the Wonder Woman movie after all, since my streaming service offers Super Girl"?

Re: Well now

[Anonymous Coward]

Super Girl did porn.

Just FYI.

Re: Well now

[edtice1559]

More details please.

Shows that were not included in the offering.

[AHuxley]

People don't want to wait for a show to get played in their region of the world years later.
One show a week with some shows missing, censored, dropped for another week for a nations sport or news?
The monopoly days of a nations private sector TV broadcasters is over.
Buying low cost shows that are years and decades old. People now know of the new content and don't have to wait for it on vhs.

Re:Shows that were not included in the offering.

[Anonymous Coward]

basically it was a study if they could bait-n-switch people, turns out people aren't that stupid. The era where people feel bad about pirating content went out with the y2k. Imagine the kids born after 2000. Genie's out of the bottle, personally i think they should switch to cheap streams for quality product. That is if i wanna watch a fox movie from ANYWHERE in the world, i goto fox.com, pay them $1 to stream the movie once. This is what people meant by a-la carte, not being locked into a disney catalogue or some other vague bullshit. The problem is the media company is also the service provider, very little incentive to negotiate with other studios when you're doing in-house production. But then again we should have had anti-monopoly rules kick in, as there is clearly a conflict of interest. But the truth is there IS NO GOOD SOLUTION TO THIS, more government overreach is certainly unwarranted, its a waste of limited expensive gov't resources to pursue such action. They're gonna have to let the market decide. There is no more neutral middle party. Netflix started out as one, but because of resistance from incumbent studios had to produce their own content. So it's gonna be very tricky to get Disney/Universal/Fox to play nice with each other. But until they do, there will be piracy. Truth is there's also a fall off, even if they did come together and offered super cheap one time streams for 0.10$, they might be making more at the current level with rampant piracy. TLDR keep government out of this.

Re:"About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to pira

[LucasBC]

Well, you could put a value to it, but it would be more accurate to state, "people pirated $5.5 billion worth of content" rather than, "$5.5 billion in revenue lost," because, as you say, most of those people wouldn't have paid for it. They just seized the opportunity to get it for free.

When did "Do what we tell you to!" ever work?

[sehlat]

Every "provider" seems to think that offering what THEY want to offer instead of what their customers/citizens/serfs want is a road to $uce$$ and riche$. In the modern era, they want us to watch what they want us to watch, read what they want us to read, and listen to the music they want us to listen to.

If that's not a recipe for inciting rebellion, they haven't bothered to study history from bunchteen years B.C. to now.

Re:When did "Do what we tell you to!" ever work?

[mikael]

They were encouraged too by the government. During World War II, they saw the importance of propoganda through all those war movies. Then they saw how a movie could influence things like fashion, political opinion and public perception. Just by depicting one stereotype in a good or bad role could affect the whole country. Then they see that as a way of trying to impose progressive politics.

It's the ads, stupid

[Snotnose]

A month or so ago SyFy did a Futurama marathon. Watched one, tons of ads. Actually timed it. 4 minutes of show, 2 minutes of ads. 2 minutes of show, another 2 minutes of ads. I gave up.

The last ep of Orville did the same thing. Break for commercial, show a block of ads, show 3-4 minutes of show, and another block of ads.

If your idea of "free TV" is "a block of ads every 3-4 minutes", then, well, fuck you with a pointy cactus. I've got a bookmark for Pirate Bay, and not only know how to use it but also know how to throw things from my laptop to my TV.

Re:It's the ads, stupid

[viperidaenz]

It's not supposed to be that bad.
It's designed to be 7 minutes of show, 3 minutes of ads. That's why half hour time slot episodes are 21 minutes and hour long shows are 42 minutes

Re: It's the ads, stupid

[c6gunner]

Yeah, I occasionally have the misfortune to catch an hour or so of "Tee Vee" in some public location, and am always blown away by how much advertising there is. As well as by how idiotic most of that advertising is. After some 15 years of exclusively watching online, ad-free content, it's like being teleported into some horrible alternate dimension.

Hell, it's even worse than using a browser on someone else's computer and finding out they didn't install AdBlock.

I don't know how people can stand it ...

Re:It's the ads, stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

>We're sorry you got raped with the 12 inch spiky dildo, it was actually only supposed to be 9 inches.

Re: It's the ads, stupid

[whoever57]

Yeah, I occasionally have the misfortune to catch an hour or so of "Tee Vee" in some public location, and am always blown away by how much advertising there is.

My TiVO has a 30 second skip button, which translates into skipping one ad. For some programs (where the ad skipping data isn't available yet), I find that I may have to press this button 9 times, meaning there are 9 ads, taking up 4.5 minutes.

Re:It's the ads, stupid

[murdocj]

Cry me a river.

Re:It's the ads, stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

You're dumber than you sound, mate.
'Half hour episodes' are supposed to last 30 minutes and 'hour long shows' 60 minutes. Give me commercials after the show and I'll gladly skip them.

Re:It's the ads, stupid

[Megane]

The last ep of Orville did the same thing. Break for commercial, show a block of ads, show 3-4 minutes of show, and another block of ads.

It's more complicated than that. I know, because I cut the commercials manually in MythTV from a lot of shows so I can do a lossless re-encode that saves as much as 20%, counting the extra minute I need on each side for the current trend of no commercials between shows. That's around a gigabyte per half hour of just commercials at HD OTA bit rates.

Last week's episode timing was weird enough for me to notice. They had a loooooong run of show, then a block of ads, then a short run of show only as long as the ad block, then more ads. The last segment of show was also unusually long. But the total amount of commercials was normal. I have seen people say that Orville is trying to emulate the odd commercial break timing of ST:TNG.

Re: It's the ads, stupid

[Kielistic]

I often feel pretty insulted by the inane stupidity of many TV ads. I'm definitely not going to pay for something that insults me.

Re:It's the ads, stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Started streaming old TOS Star Trek episodes in the background while I work recently. I've discovered that I have an internal clock that's relatively aware of how long the 42 minutes of a modern show streamed without commercials should be, because I find myself expecting the end of the show when there's always 10 minutes left. It's amazing how much extra content can be crammed in those 10 minutes.

Software quality? Scope of content?

[Dan East]

So they just "threw together" their own Netflix or Hulu, as if that is a trivial thing to do? Did they offer every movie ever made? Apparently not - what exactly was their "scope of programming" that they offered?

If their software sucked, and /or if their selection did not offer the specific movies and shows that the already-prone-to-piracy person wanted to see, then guess what? They're going to use the mechanisms they already know how to use to watch the exact shows they want. I'm really not sure what this study was supposed to show, besides the fact that offering a random assortment of video content will not satisfy the specific viewing desires of the average person.

Super "duh"

[RyoShin]

they did not stop using BitTorrent to pirate movies and TV shows that were not included in the offering.

...duh? And that's from years ago, when Game of Thrones started.

They can ramble all they want about things like Hulu or Netflix, but even with relatively-cheap services Hollywood still treats convenience like the plague. The show or movie you want to watch isn't available with your preferred service, or it is but is device restricted, or it is but only part of it (like one season out of seven in a TV series), or it is but you have to wait at least 24 hours after the live airing to watch it. There is a demand, but giant media corporations refuse to offer supply, and they complain when an alternative one is found.

Just because something is cheap does not mean it is good. And the more segmented streaming services get, the more people will turn to alternative sources for the entertainment they want; I expect that two or three services is the limit for most people, and as more studios start launching their own offering the consumer becomes more choosy about what they subscribe to.

Not all entertainment is equal, either in quality or in individual preference. Just because you gave someone free access to Jersey Shore season 3 doesn't stop them from wanting to watch Mr. Robot.

"Free" for 45 days....

[WolfgangVL]

After 45 days, your account will be billed the full charge of $89.95, with a 2 year contract and 400.00 cancellation fee.

Seriously, every damn thing in 2017 has been some kind of underhanded anti consumer one sided deal, or a scam. Is anybody surprised nobody jumps at "Free" anymore? It's lost it's meaning. This is what happens when you fool an entire generation by redefining the meaning of words.

"Free for 45 days" means You can borrow it for a month and a half and all you pay is the processing fee, box rental fee, America fee, local fee, internal, and external fee, media tax, box tax, local and state tax and federal tax. The free 45 days also has a value of cash value 700 dollars (because we said so) and that's also going to count a income... so more tax.... and if you don't return the box and cancel service by 2AM on sunday (we're closed) you will be liable for the whole 700 dollars, btw Wendy the service cancel specialist and box processor will be out of the office that week so sorry in advance for that minor inconvenience. What a deal. Tell your friends and your welcome.

All this study proves is that bit-torrent is the most honest about the cost of the media, is reliable, less annoying, less conniving and underhanded, and has a better media selection.

If you wan't people to respect your laws, you need respectable laws. Artists death+70 year copyright owned by some corporation or media titan aint respectable even a little bit. Suck less big media. Nobody buys your bullshit anymore.

Re:"Free" for 45 days....

[AnalogDiehard]

Not to mention that BitTorrent is free of distribution license BS. If I want to watch a Warner Bros movie on an on-demand service that doesn't have a distribution deal with Warner Bros but it's on BitTorrent then "free" doesn't give me much value.

Re:"Free" for 45 days....

[Anonymous Coward]

> Artists death+70 year copyright owned by some corporation or media titan

not to mention that at this rate, copyright will be extended forever... thanks Disney /s

Re:"Free" for 45 days....

[edtice1559]

Most things that are being downloaded on BT aren't situations where the author has been dead for 49 years. Usually it's stuff that's been out for 49 minutes. Most of the pro-piracy arguments come down to watching whatever you want whenever you want being a basic human right. More than food and clean water it seems. Yet we still expect people to pay for food and water.

Re: "Free" for 45 days....

[Reverend Green]

C'mon, you know the difference.

The cost of copying and distributing cultural data is nearly zero. Food and clean water cannot be copied at all - every "copy" of a hamburger costs as much to make as the original - and have a decidedly non-zero cost of distribution.

Re:"Free" for 45 days....

[Anonymous Coward]

What did you expect of a "free market"?

Fairness? *choke* oh my, coffee all over my new keyboard!

Captcha: overhead

Re: "Free" for 45 days....

[edtice1559]

The incremental cost of water is nearly zero. If you have any doubt about that, look at your water bill. In fact the incremental cost of enough water for a day is probably about the same as the incremental electricity from downloading and watching a movie. And most "cultural data" is already free. The popular movies on BT aren't classic documentaries!

Re:"Free" for 45 days....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet we still expect people to pay for food and water.

Food and water are actually for sale, so buying them is pretty easy.

If today's video industry sold food and water, the drinking water would be a solution of 25% benzene 75% water. The food would be dog food with 25% cockroach shit. And it would always weigh less than the amount printed on the package, and the dog food would spoil overnight. And they would complain about "lost revenue" when people stopped buying it.

Video pirates have shown the way as to how the system ought to work, and more importantly, basic quality/performance/reliability standards. It has totally raised the bar, and people aren't going back. Why would you go back to benzene in your water after you've tried clean water?!

The music industry learned this very quickly and decided to keep catering to their customers, which is why that ended up a viable situation, so you don't hear much about music piracy anymore. I can pay for music and actually get what I want. For whatever reason, video is steadfastly maintaining its anti-customer, anti-sales attitude. So the number of customers will continue to decline. If people want food and water, you should sell them food and water, not benzene and cockroach shit.

So yes, it's believable: if you give away FREE benzene-laced water, thirsty people don't line up.

Re:"Free" for 45 days....

[Anonymous Coward]

The word "free" has not changed. It just gets thrown around in different medium. Remember the paid commercials advertising [super amazing gadget] for a low, low price of twelve easy payments @ $19.95? But wait, there's more. Order now and you get the second set of [super amazing gadget] ABSOLUTELY FREE. [voice speed=10000x] Just pay the shipping and handling of another $19.95 [/voice].

You mentioned about the terms and conditions for this box. However, this is also how it is for the phones from any of the wireless carriers. $0 phone (@ $95 per month over 2-year contract).

This streaming box is simply trial-ware. I find the word "free" (as in trial) lot in websites as well. Things have not changed one bit.

Feels like yesterday

[war4peace]

Yeah it feels like yesterday I commented on this... or was it two days ago?

Re:Feels like yesterday

[fluffernutter]

Shut up and enjoy the content! :-)

Digital TV Research

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like an unbiased research company..

Streaming is starting to suck too

[Anonymous Coward]

Used to be you could get almost everything you wanted between three services. Now everybody and their uncle id's pulling their content from the big three and charging 10 bucks for less content. If free included this content desert it's no wonder people pirated

Clippy

[AnalogDiehard]

It had a personalized recommendation engine that surfaced popular programming based on what those customers were already watching illegally through BitTorrent logs

I would welcome that as much as Clippy. I don't need some damn AI pestering me with suggested programming "It looks like you just finished watching Deep Throat, would you like to view reruns of The Rosie O'Donnell Show?"

Senile media execs

[Anonymous Coward]

I have several streaming services and still pirate shows that are on them. Partly because the idiots in charge feel it's a good idea to postpone streaming to a later time than when something airs and partly because I want to watch shows on different devices.

Cost of service is only a small factor

[Anonymous Coward]

Reasons people turn to piracy: 1. Too many services. Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon are the big ones. But CBS has a service, HBO has a service, even WWE has a service. Even Disney and Stargate?!?!?! are soon to have a streaming service. At least Amazon throws other perks in with it. 2. Convenience, this relates to #1, but I really want to be able to go into one app. It has gotten worse than cable with ease of access. 3. When is Free ever Free? I forget to cancel the service at the end of the free period and now I'm stuck paying extra $$$ 4. Available Content right NOW: "pirate movies and TV shows that were not included in the offering." People do not want to wait and they won't limit themselves to a small selection. Most networks and content providers have a few good programs and a bunch of filler. Why settle for the filler?

Re:Cost of service is only a small factor

[Wycliffe]

Reasons people turn to piracy:
1. Too many services. Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon are the big ones. But CBS has a service, HBO has a service, even WWE has a service. Even Disney and Stargate?!?!?! are soon to have a streaming service. At least Amazon throws other perks in with it.

Amazon also at least attempts to offer you everything. Sure, a lot of it is still over priced but at least it's available for a price. Netflix resisted a search box for the longest time because they knew people would discover that none of their favorite movies are actually there. My kids find it insulting when they type in a specific movie and Netflix offers an alternative title. My ideal service would offer everything less than a year old at $2/hour and everything more than 10 years old at 50cents per hour. IF someone offered a service like this and offered everything ever made, piracy would die tomorrow and it would still give a nice $4/movie for new release rentals and $1/movie for old release rentals which is about what the going rate is anyways. The problem is noone wants to hunt across 5 services and then find out that it's not available anyways.

Re:Cost of service is only a small factor

[Anonymous Coward]

Too many services? Isn't piracy just another service?

The basic reason is the same for all banned products--banned product in high demand have a black market. There are probably a lot of movies you can't pirate because there isn't a market for them. What do the pirates gain when they offer up free content? What is the market? Why do host content that has basically only downsides? I mean, Pirate Bay was probably a full time job. Where was the upside?

Availability and quality

[tdelaney]

I pay for FOXTEL, NetFlix, Stan and Amazon Prime (basically all the major video services available in Australia). If a show is available on one of those services at the best available quality, I will watch it on that service.

Despite paying for all these, there are many shows that are either not available, or are only available with a significant delay (weeks or months), or are only shown in standard definition or 2.0 audio (when I can get HD video and 5.1 audio by downloading).

I've fulfilled my side of the deal - I pay for their services. If they don't want me to download then they can fulfill their side of the deal - provide the shows that I want in the quality that I want in the timeframe that I want.

I fee

Re: Availability and quality

[Anonymous Coward]

I pay for Amazon Prime, which includes Prime Video, but they won't let me play it on my TV using Chromecast because fuck you. So I'm not going to renew my membership.

I don't want to use a service that exists with so many goddamned fucking caveats even when I PAY for the motherfucking thing. Free? Even MORE bullshit.

Piracy offers better service. End of story.

Re:Availability and quality

[Anonymous Coward]

I've fulfilled my side of the deal - I pay for their services. If they don't want me to download then they can fulfill their side of the deal - provide the shows that I want in the quality that I want in the timeframe that I want.

Judge: Did you read what you signed?
You: Read? What for? I pay money to see whatever I want, whenever I want, in what format I want.
Judge: Let there be noted that the claimant shows no understanding of real life. Case dismissed.

Re:Availability and quality

[Anonymous Coward]

I've fulfilled my side of the deal - I pay for their services

Why?

Don't you see that it would be better, if you were to stop?

If you ask your dog to do a trick, he stares at you instead of doing the trick, and then you give him a treat anyway, then you are why your dog doesn't do tricks.

If people like you were to withhold payment, the situation might improve. It's really important that everyone stops paying these motherfuckers until they comply.

Lack of incentive

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking for myself, I do not want what they offer.

I am interested in only the shows I wish to watch commercial free high quality and when I want to watch it with the ability to pause and re-watch later.

Regular television will not let me store, pause, re-watch and asks me to pay an exhorbitant fee for content I do not want.

I like the comfort afforded by streaming sites, it is free, the quality levels can be adjusted, closed captioning enabled, pausing, reloading, watching 'off air' old shows, international shows, paywalled shows etc is something many of us have been seeking for a long time, this is the free market in action. People wanted something and pressure built until action was taken.

Would that the networks at large have seen this roughly 30 years ago the situation today would be vastly different.

Re:Lack of incentive

[Anonymous Coward]

And if everybody shared that attitude how would we get any content at all?

Somebody has to pay to create content, but there's got to be a less obnoxious way of doing it than the current system where you have to subscribe to a dozen different services to get what you're looking for.

Re:Lack of incentive

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody has to pay to create content...

No. False assumption. Nor does anyone have to BE paid to create content. The rest is utter unfettered greed, 'murkin-style.

Re:"About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to pira

[Anonymous Coward]

"people pirated $5.5 billion worth of content"

If I torrent RecentShittyHollywoodMovie.mp4 and fill up a hard drive with a thousand c&p'd duplicates of it, is my hard drive now worth tens of thousands of dollars?

Captain Obvious strikes again

[jerry33]

"they did not stop using BitTorrent to pirate movies and TV shows that were not included in the offering." They had to do a study to figure out that people will watch what they want to watch. They must have been very hard up for subjects to study, because the result is just what anyone would expect.

Unfortunately, it's not so easy get rid it

[mapkinase]

The crap plastered on video I can skip, I mostly listen to TV programs, not actually watch them.

In case of real quality program, yes, we have to live with it.

Fortunately they use it for now for mostly their own station related announcement - upcoming programs, etc.

When they start to sell it to outside, then I will just stop watching TV programs altogether.

Re:Unfortunately, it's not so easy get rid it

[Anonymous Coward]

Y'know that network watermark that is occasionally placed in one corner of the screen? I've seen that get replaced with fastfood trademarks.

..."for free for 45 days"

[Anonymous Coward]

tl;dr

people who're sick of cable, refuse garbage (higher rates in 2 months) offers.

More news at 11.

Re:"About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to pira

[Anonymous Coward]

"people pirated $5.5 billion worth of content"

If I torrent RecentShittyHollywoodMovie.mp4 and fill up a hard drive with a thousand c&p'd duplicates of it, is my hard drive now worth tens of thousands of dollars?

I see you have grasped the fundamentals of Hollywood accounting.

Once knew of a guy who had over 10k Apple 2 progs

[Wild_dog!]

Up front I am not a huge proponent of peoples rights to pirate/share even though my commentary below would tend to contradict what I am saying here. But there is some nuance to the issue. And I say this at a time when I am now replacing all of my 800 plus legit DVD's with legit 1080P and 4K copies.

Way back in the day everyone bought a bunch of programs and games for their computers. They cost like $50 bucks each and so as geeky teenagers with not a lot of funds from lawn mowing and oddball chores we also collected programs. Personally, I bought up stuff as my money allowed and collected lots of game copies from other collectors.

But the thing is the bulk of what I collected was largely an archival collection .... I never even used most of the programs and I didn't play many of the games other than to see the disk worked. I generally had to own my favorites which I purchased and played all of the time.
I even find myself seeking out copies of the games I enjoyed wasting weeks and months on now to play again under emulation or as apps.

Just got Dragons Lair on iOS. Got Worms Armageddon also because I was obsessed with that game. Got Duke Nukem from GOG.
What I posit is that, I am not certain the actual damage to the industry is. Is such damage really so great as the numbers the industry puts forth? I remain doubtful.

Now I knew of a guy who was supposed to have collected over 10K programs for the Apple 2. He was a true collector. Made me a mere speck in terms of collecting.
How many did he actually use? Probably not many since he was spending all of his time collecting programs.

Sometimes when I hear how much damage to the industry is going on, I think about this guy because he really wasn't doing damage to the industry at all. Just the amount he was spending on Floppies and Hard Drives was maxing out his budget. So to me, the industry was getting his money on aggregate anyhow.... just in a tangential way. His joy was in collecting... not so much in playing or using. To collect, one spends an inordinate amount on hardware and media.

Were those 10k content creators losing out on real sales from him? Perhaps marginally or maybe not at all, but if you think of a guy collecting 10k games and programs, he isn't actually deriving benefit from the copy sitting in floppy case. He is merely collecting because of an odd penchant to collect. More of a fetish.

DUPE!

[Zxern]

https://yro.slashdot.org/story...

It's not about price...

[DeBattell]

It's not about price. It's about selection. If the powers that be want to kill piracy they should all get together and offer reasonable online purchase and and rental of ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING EVER MADE. If people knew everything was available from a reliable source for a reasonable price there would be no temptation to pirate. But they won't do that, because they all want to try to squeeze out the other guy and think that will some how magically give them more money. So piracy continues because people want what they want.

Re:It's not about price...

[fluffernutter]

I'd pay at least $25 a month for that!

Re:It's not about price...

[Anonymous Coward]

A VPN/proxy is about $12 a month. That would provide a pirate with virtually every game, movie, app, TV show, movie, song, and book. That is the price point media providers need to compete with.

No ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... this makes no sense. A pirate is someone who dosn't pay for content. Loss to piracy is $0 precisely because pirates don't pay. It's a falsehood to assume that pirates will pay for content. Even a "free" service isn't free -- there was some damn box to install, there are ads, and they might be tracking you and whoring you out to the internet. Regardless, the pirate has no money for content. Besides, Monty Python proved this was untrue when they remastered all their DVDs for YouTube and asked for donations via DVD purchase. Sales went up 500%.

Re:No ...

[Anonymous Coward]

A pirate is someone who dosn't pay for content. Loss to piracy is $0 precisely because pirates don't pay. It's a falsehood to assume that pirates will pay for content

Hello, my name is redacted; I'm a pirate.

I would pay big money for the shows I want, in reasonable quality, available when I want, in whatever language I want (I live overseas).

My network is slow and has horrible latency, which means I'll need to buffer most of the show! I don't need or want long-term storage, to store a stupid disc of plastic, or to see stuff in a big room that smells of mildew and old popcorn. I want to sit on my couch and watch something relatively recent. I'd accept a few ads if they're not interminably repetitious, are relevant to my location and language, and have decent production values.

I bought a movie on my Apple TV once... a day and a half later, it had landed, and I could watch it. Torrents take about 2 hours usually.

Lost

[easyTree]

About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to piracy globally last year

Maybe they ought to work on basic comprehension before embarking on a business venture. It's only lost if you had it in the first place.

Re:"About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to pira

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you could put a value to it, but it would be more accurate to state, "people pirated $5.5 billion worth of content" rather than, "$5.5 billion in revenue lost," because, as you say, most of those people wouldn't have paid for it. They just seized the opportunity to get it for free.

Yes, this is much closer, but it still misses the mark, and for the same reason.

Consider: I create a 2-min home video which I own the copyright to and attempt to sell copies of. I ask $20 trillion per video. I choose to share the video for free with my immediate family. Suppose my sister decides to share the video with one of her friends. This is one unauthorised copy of a video with an official price of $20 trillion.

It is inaccurate to say that $20 trillion of revenue was lost exactly as you observe. However, it is also quite wrong to suggest that $20 trillion worth of content was pirated.

idiotism at best

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a stupidly simple solution to all media broadcasters, provide ALL available HD content ( all the stuff they call premium with no exceptions ) so I dont need 10 subscriptions to watch 10 different favorite shows and price it proper , like 15usd at best + provide apps for android / kodi / ios and mac/pc with quality hd streming and thats it.. you eliminated 90% of piracy...
People would gladly pay if it was available at a click of a button instead of waiting for lower quality content to load and ( if it actually does )

As long as they play geo availability, multiple content providers game .. yea people will watch illegally .. because nobody has the patience to wait half year for a show to appear locally or subscribe to some service to see just one show...

Re:"About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to pira

[murdocj]

Really? Proven??? How?

Isn't that obvious?

[hawguy]

The study found that while the participants watched 4.6% more TV overall when they had the free on-demand service, they did not stop using BitTorrent to pirate movies and TV shows that were not included in the offering.

It hardly seems shocking to discover that when you give people free access to content they don't care so much about, they'll still use Bittorent to find the content they really want to see.

I used to think that Netflix was going to stop movie piracy, then the studios decided that they didn't want one streaming provider to have access to everything, so to really watch everything I want to see, I need to subscribe to Netflix, Amazon Video, Hulu, HBO, Starz, Disney's upcoming streaming service and more.

While I *could* track down all of the services I need to use and subscribe to them, why bother when with a few clicks, Bittorrent has the content for free?

Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with paid services and free services is they are too hit or miss. Often legit services are lacking entire collections of shows or offer one good show but nothing else. Bandwidth is another problem. Streaming a show is great and I am willing to watch the commercials... If it works. Often non legit methods provide a smoother more complete solution.

Plex

[Berkyjay]

I pay for Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO, and a basic cable package. But I still download all of my shows and put them on my Plex server. I do this for two main reasons. 1) Avoid commercials.....I hate commercials. 2) To have all my shows in one app for my viewing pleasure. Regardless of what these media companies think, convenience is king and jumping around from platform to platform isn't fun. Yes yes, I know cable provides the convenience but the horrible service, commercials, and paying for content I never intended to watch ruins the convenience.

commercials

[Anonymous Coward]

get rid of commercials. on demand content doesn't let you fastforward over them. whats the point of on demand if not to bypass commercials. i'll stick to torrent etc.

Re:"About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to pira

[edtice1559]

Your example is poor, because nobody actually *paid* you $20 trillion so (shock) your video isn't worth that much. People *do* pay $19.99 for a ticket to see a 3D movie in a theater. For those who balk at those prices, you can buy the BluRay a few months later for that price. So there clearly *is* a market for the movies and they do have a well established price and a lot of volume at that price.

Re:"About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to pira

[Anonymous Coward]

You could also more more accurately say "people pirated 0.0 billion worth of content".

the fact, that you think the market sets the price, but fail to include the users that sets the price at -zero-, is a bit, retarded.

particularly, since your statement, is about that "market" demographic.

pirates didn't pirate 5.5 billion worth of content. pirates, pirated, exactly 0.0 worth of content.

get over it, already.

fuck your ip.

Re:"About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to pira

[amiga3D]

A lot of what I've pirated I didn't even watch more than 15 or 20 minutes of it. Hell, it wasn't worth the bandwidth I wasted on it. They should try improving the quality of their product. Right now it isn't worth free.

Re:"About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to pira

[omnichad]

They sue for distribution, not downloading. The number of people you seeded to is the number of infractions they go after.

Re:"About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to pira

[Anonymous Coward]

$5.5 Billion / 250,000 = 22,000 cases of copyright infringement worldwide.

Streams dry up & vanish, or get polluted.

[Anonymous Coward]

The content I've archived doesnt have that problem.

The do not get it

[OneHundredAndTen]

What we want is access to all the material, all the time, everywhere, in simple, easy to do ways. The current industry refuses to understand that. It keeps creating artificial scarcity, by pulling content out all the time. The keep constraining where you can play the content. They make it more burdensome than it would to play that content. Finally, they charge too much for said content. Piracy solves all those problems. The industry could solve all those problems as well, and charge some money for it. They do not want to do so. Piracy will continue.

What they produce is garbage

[EmperorOfCanada]

I was watching a show on someone's TV and nearly 1/3rd of the screen kept telling me that there was some concert now live on their web site. This was a Canadian TV channel. Over and over they kept putting this on the screen. It made the show shit to watch. Then there is the bug in the corner. These people simply do not respect my desire to not be continuously marketed at.

Netflix is free from this. Once in a blue moon netflix takes up the top half of my iPad app to blast some stupid series at me, and I resent that enough. I want to choose what I want, I don't want some MBA who has weaseled and backstabbed his way into getting his company to put his product in my face.

For instance, a number of people that I know are complaining about netflix continuously recommending Korean TV. None of us want it. If I find out that some exec did a Korean deal and is screwing with the recommendation system to push that crap, I will drop Netflix and go back to piracy in a heartbeat.

Set Top Box vs Computer/Mobile Bound...

[TemporalBeing]

So they're comparing a Set-Top-Box which must be connected to a TV versus an Internet service deliverable via browser or mobile app...yeah, even if it's comparable movie catalogs it's still not the same thing.

People pirate movies to take them on-the-go - via computer or mobile - when traveling or out-and-about.

Want a good study? Offer *identical* services.

netflix helps a lot, but...

[higuita]

netflix helps a lot, but... of course it not solve everything, not even close to that!

i do have netflix, but many movies or series or programs that i do want to view are not there. If it's not on the my fiber TV, nor on my netflix, i will search for alternatives.

Also, netflix now works in linux browsers, but when i go to vacations, i do not want to take a laptop so i can connect it to a random TV. my RPi3 with xbian is easy to carry and connect to almost all TVs... netflix needs to work there too (yes, there is progress there, but netflix must be able to run in any device)

Finally, netflix portfolio is shrinking, not expanding, big part because of studios limitations, greed and competing solutions ... no one wants to pay or even manage different 5 accounts and platforms to see movies and series... so yeh, where is demand, there will exist piracy, as it is still much simpler than the few legal options.

Again and again and again...

[XSportSeeker]

Ok, let's start with the obvious - predicted revenue "lost to piracy" is just bullshit. You start the article with that kinda crap I already see it as leaning to some agenda.
Let's put this clearly out there: there is absolutely no reason to believe that even a fraction of people pirating content would pay for everything they get if there was no other option. It's as absurd as claiming an open party with all expenses paid would attract as many people as if you charged everyone 50 bucks for entrance.

Moving on - for people who already knows and have a routine for pirating, it's just that more convenient. Changing habits will be just as hard, there's no way around this.
Othe reasons: I dunno exactly what they used, but for instance, I pay for services like Crunchyroll yet I often have to pirate the content that is streaming there, getting content slower than the streaming service offers and oftenly at lower quality... because even though I'm on fiber, with very fast speeds that most of my country don't have access to, the reality of it is that if I try watching it using the service itself, I'm stuck with buffering issues and whatnot. It's on their side, not mine. So I pay for it yet I never use, and have complained multiple time to no avail.
And I imagine Netflix, Hulu and other services have similar problems. I mean, it can work perfectly for americans, for europeans and whatnot, but what people have to get is that not all countries have optimal service, or even libraries of content.
Which is understandable for the most part - streaming backend is ultra hard, specially if you have a huge audience, and content is bound to the contracts made in the country.
But those are things that gets overstepped by piracy. P2P systems and whatnot will take care of this in an almost impossible to beat way, specially for new content. Not to mention that once you get it, it's there to watch offline and whatnot - which I do know is something that some streaming services are offering nowadays for part of their content.

I keep repeating this all the time, but let's just put this out once more: for the most part, piracy didn't come up because the vast majority of people are ok with stealing the hard work of others, not compensating directors, actors and whatnot, or worse, profiting at the cost of others. Yes, there are some people who would definitely go that route, but it isn't the majority of people. Most people just want some convenient system that works. And the industry has been slowly getting better at providing exactly this - I've been saying this long before iTunes or Netflix came into existence. And studios, industries and whatnot are not only victims of this: piracy played a huge role in spreading out content to places that it would never get to otherwise. This is evidenced by the growth in all entertainment and software industries over the years. If piracy was killing anything, all of those industries would be dead by now. The marketing effect is something that will be left unexplored and unmeasured, thanks to the interests in hiding it.
But on the industry side, there's still a whole ton of catch up to do. Systems that in one way or another supports piracy has matured a whole ton over the years, and it got to a technological performance that is unmatched by proprietary commercial systems. And it breached barriers that commercial systems can't. So, if you think piracy will die just because there has been some changes in how industries commecialize their stuff online... fat chance. Because even those changes have been marred by old industry practices.
Just look at what Steam did for game piracy, and look at the differences between a system like Hulu or Netflix, and Steam. The clues are there.

I got plenty of $$$$$

[future assassin]

to buy older movies at $2 each with no DRM and I wouldn't even care if I lost them since at $2 I'd probably re-buy them.

Here's how retarded some media companies are. On my YT channel I uploaded a cd called Dogwhislte Life and Time Of An After Hours DJ. This is something that came out in 1994. The chances of someone who bought it after 1998 are slim to none. So I upload it and it got censored in 270+ countries by what even label owns the copyrights. So instead of making it available to the world once again at no cost to them and making money from it they completely censor it.

Re:I got plenty of $$$$$

[Anonymous Coward]

It's high time rights holders were told "Distribute or it becomes public domain".

Re:I got plenty of $$$$$

[Anonymous Coward]

It wasn't yours and you had no right to distribute it to others from the company that owned it so naturally it would get taken down. The fact that it's from 20+ years ago doesn't really make much of a difference when the copyright law states you are not allowed to reproduce it until many years after the producer is dead. I'd argue that the copyright length is absurd but the law doesn't operate on common sense.

45 days is not enough

[GESUS]

45 Days is to short to change behavior that has been practiced for several years.
Did the service compete in content, quality and platform compatibility like pirated content?
Did it integrate with home user media servers like PLEX?

These pirates have setups that they have spent time and money on over years.
The service must render useless for them to change there behavior.

Highly flawed test designed, probably flawed by design.

The money lost argument has been proven false so many times now that it should be common knowledge. Pirates do not have Billions of USD to spend every year on media and if you found a way to stop them they would just do something else with there time. Perhaps even something productive.

Sigh

[ledow]

Okay, I'm a "legitimate content" person. I don't pirate. I see no point - I earn good money, I have enough spare to pay for what I actually want, which gives me titles I can play where/when I want to, and for which I don't have to worry about viruses, huge downloads, being marked by my ISP, or whatever.

I know, everyone does it, but I'm one of those odd people who just pays for my stuff. In fact, for the stuff I like, I've often paid several times over over the years. I have Amazon Prime so I get their Instant Video, and I have Google Play for a load of other things. I don't do Netflix as I don't see what they add for me and even with a friend's Netflix in the same house, I see no reason to use it.

But... this is my problem. If I want to watch it, I want to watch it. Every ad in front of the thing I paid for is an abomination. Every restriction on device, etc. is a pain in the butt. And every time you don't have the content I want, it's even more frustrating. I'm often standing in front of a online store, wanting to give them money, for maybe the crappiest old movie that's available everywhere and easily for free and I can't because it's not on offer for that service.

Two things pop to mind. Aliens: Special Edition. I love it. I'd love to have it on either the Google or Amazon account. But you can't. You can have Aliens. You can have boxset which include Aliens (but which you can only tell the version of by the runtime, and it's not Special Edition). You can have Alien: Director's Cut. But you can't have Aliens: Special Edition. Go into a shop, however, and that's all they sell, even in the boxsets.

Another is an old sitcom from the 1970's called The Two of Us. It's UK-specific but so is a lot of the content I buy and the online stores don't have a problem obtaining or selling it. But they released one series on DVD only, nothing else, and then never released the second series (despite it being listed as a pre-release item on Amazon for 8 years now and various dates promised). I can't find either online.

Now, I'm sure if I really Google hard, I could come up with somewhere selling the first as an online streaming movie, and I could download the latter in a minute via a torrent, I'm sure. But... I'd quite like to own them legitimately and on two of the largest services in the world today. And I can't. It's simply not possible.

Until the media industry gets together to make a rights consortium that can handle such things so that all the relevant players can licence content properly, and that the same levels of content are available across services, it's really just wasting my time and money. I'm literally trying to give them money for products they already have, but they have no interest in taking it, no way to gauge my interest, no way for me to give feedback.

By contrast, all the top line of Google Play Movies / TV and most of the stuff I see on Amazon Instant Video I have absolutely zero interest in. Literally I have stopped looking, because it's all just "latest cinema release", six months later, at premium prices, advertised only at the rental prices, that I wouldn't want to watch if they were free to do so anyway.

Given the amount of tech involved, I don't get why it's so hard to tap into a licensing database, of official content, allowing me to buy anything and everything that's ever been digitised, while recompensing all those people involved fairly, via any service I like, and to actually make sensible recommendations based on what I like to buy.

To be honest, it's totally worked against them. I just stopped watching movies instead.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree on most part with what you said.

As long as they'll fight each other for exclusive content and make us pay twice. (pay for the service and pay by watching stupid advert) they will never be able to compete against piracy.

I personnaly dont pay for TV... I pay for my games, because I found its easyer to pay and play than pirate and play even tho sometimes they really mess up, most of the times I get what I want from my money.. but in TV... no way ... I wont pay 12 services to get everything I want. I expect to pay once and get what I want just like with my games.

The piracy problem is the entertainment industry own creation, by making weak TV and movies and charging way to much for it.
And also making bad bad content... I dont watch movies anymore it just all suck soooooo bad. (Hollywood mostly tho)

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

What someone needs to create is a bittorrent client/media viewer app with a back end for tracking viewing data via some kind of fingerprinting of the content, then paying royalties out to the media companies/artists directly from some account you prepay into. Get those media companies and artists behind it, then you can torrent/view whatever media you can find, the artists would then be identified and paid each time you viewed.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Another is an old sitcom from the 1970's called The Two of Us. It's UK-specific ... I can't find either online. .. could download .. in a minute via a torrent,

Does this sound like it?

Ashley Phillips (Nicholas Lyndhurst) lives with his girlfriend Elaine (Janet Dibley). He wants to marry her, but she keeps turning down his proposals. Ashley gets plenty of advice and encouragement from his grandfather, Perce (Patrick Troughton, later Tenniel Evans). In the last series, Ashley and Elaine are finally married and a baby is expected.

If that's the one, then yep: tvc has it. All FOUR seasons. You could start binge-watching it tonight.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

> tvc has it

What's tvc? What is the link to this 4 season stream?

I tried googling and still couldn't figure it out.

https://archive.is/jK08j

https://archive.is/hFG6V

Re:Sigh

[ledow]

Exactly my thought.

I come up with a Nigerian TV channel, or nothing at all relevant, depending on what keywords I add.

Thus I can only believe this compounds my problem - available on obscure and hidden away services that are almost impossible to find even when you have a hint, but not visible on the main content players for actual purchase.

Swap that situation around, and several middle-men could see a lot more of my money.

Bull.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hollywood does not "struggle", they make billions upon billions upon billions every single day, are extremely connected, and everyone involved with them is so famous they are regularly protected from prosecution for crimes that would land people in jail for half their lives. Someone involved in Hollywood could make a huge amount of money by auctioning off their literal shit.

They are not "losing money" either, people who pirate their movies are doing so because they had no intention of buying it in the first place.

And that is a surprising revelation? For real?

[Opportunist]

Allow me to quote from TFS:

"The study found that while the participants watched 4.6% more TV overall when they had the free on-demand service, they did not stop using BitTorrent to pirate movies and TV shows that were not included in the offering."

(emphasis mine)

You're REALLY surprised that people kept downloading the stuff they couldn't get from your package? How on earth is this in any way a miracle? Or a proof that people would still "pirate" if they could stream it for free?

Here's the problem, let me put it in bold so you actually might get it: You did not offer what people wanted.

If you stream I Love Lucy for free, it will not convince anyone wanting Game of Thrones to stop downloading it.

I honestly wonder whether you're so stupid or whether you hope lawmakers are stupid enough to believe you.

50 user interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone really want to deal with 50 user interfaces? Mostly bad ones at that. I tend to pirate even things I've paid for, to have a single UI on my screen and of course, no commercials.

You Tube TV almost had me with their basic cable/cloud DVR package until I read "some commercials cannot be skipped.

 

Re:"About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to pira

[rally2xs]

Just because people pay the $19.99 for the movie ticket doesn't mean they're paying $19.99 to watch the movie. Many are paying $19.99 for the moviegoing experience, and it doesn't matter so much what is moving on the screen as long as it isn't too boring or ridiculous or maybe even offensive.

I see most everything at the movies, and have a great entertainment experience. What I like is the huge screen that fills my peripheral vision, a sound system where I _feel_ the artillery shell that lands closeby rather than just detect it like a lot of watching-it-on-the-computer or watching it on a TV that doesn't have a high power surround-sound (that anyone else at home will yell at you to turn down) gives, its dark and not-home so no phone is going to ring, I don't need to be concerned about the noise outside the house that I need to investigate and it therefore distracts from watching, and I can eat popcorn without having to make it and drop the occasional kernel on the floor and someone else will clean up after me. That's the moviegoing experience, and you actually occasionally meet people at the theater to boot. If you're home, you're either going to see no one if you live alone as I do, or the same people you always see, who incidentally may work overtime to disrupt your movie watching if they're not interested in the same flick you are.

There's a whale of a lot of reasons to pay $19.99 to go to the movie that don't have the remotest thing to do with actually watching the movie.

Thats because...

[Anonymous Coward]

Streaming cant fix buyers remorse. More and more shows and movies are just terrible; and so people need a way to "try it before they buy it"; and then, even if they like the content, they probably still won't buy it because "they screwed me last time; so its my turn".

RIAA/MPAA/Hollywood has created this problem; they must now accept it.

Netflix?

[Anonymous Coward]

Watching netflix is like pawing through the $5 bargain dvd bin at Walmart. Yeah there's lots of movies, and once in a while you might run across one you'd like to watch. But it is never the movie you were there looking for.

Re:"About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to pira

[edtice1559]

That's fair enough. But certainly the reason to pay $19.99 for the DVD is to watch the movie. And I'm pretty sure you wouldn't pay $20T for the OP's home video!

cloud schizophrenia

[Anonymous Coward]

I call it cloud schizophrenia, or maybe it should be paranoia? More likely a mix of both.
When I watch a video online, then include it in a playlist or make note of it. But a couple of weeks or month later, it's gone.
All I remember is enjoying it or that it looked interesting but now it's nowhere to be found.

This will happen on basically all cloud service (although steam seems to be OK for now) and social media.
Facebook user will delete/change permission their stuff.
google search will stop showing up some result.
youtube will get it's vids deleted.
reddit will get it's sub banned.
random website will close down.
most wikipedia source link are dead.

See what I mean? The whole internet is heading this way (except the NSA but that's another story) and it's slowly making me lose my sanity.

I am saving up a lot of stuff but I often feel it's a compulsive behaviour.

Re:"About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to pira

[Anonymous Coward]

Not from an economic point of view.

Things are worth what people are willing to pay for them. So "people pirated $5.5 billion worth of content" clearly shows that people were NOT willing to pay $5.5 billion.

"that were not included in the offering."

[hAckz0r]

It doesn't matter how cheep you push the stuff we don't want to watch. People want to watch what they want to watch. If your not offering it at a reasonable price then people will be doing something else. Why is this so hard to understand? It doesn't exactly take a PhD in rocket science to figure this out.

Re:"About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to pira

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a market, and those movies were in fact worth $19.99 to the people who bought them. But that's not lost revenue. That's actual sales.

Those same movies were not worth $19.99 to everyone, that's why not everyone bought them. An item has a different value to everyone. You cannot count all those people for whom the movies were NOT worth $19.99 as a lost revenue of $19.99. For some of them, they were worth $14.99, and that's the lost revenue - BUT said lost revenue is caused by the price BEING TOO HIGH for those people, not by piracy. Basic supply and demand: Lowering the price results in a higher demand. What these movie studios are really doing is trying to work around supply and demand, by law.

The only lost revenue you can honestly blame piracy for is where piracy displaced an actual sale. That does happen, but measuring is a lot harder. And it's no different from all those times where people buy a Ford instead of a Chevy. And that's why, with every other product, when measuring out damages, we look at the cost price, not the sales price. Since the dealer still has the Chevy, there was no cost (other than the time of the sales person), and thus no damages.

Missing the point.. Availability and Cost.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll start by saying have never pirated Movies, but I can certainly understand why other people do.

Movies and TV are expensive and only getting more so - why?

It's now cheaper (in a lot of cases) to buy physical media that to buy digital content - that's nuts!
Why aren't customers benefiting from the fact that publishers don't need to physically produce copies of their work or purchase store space to sell it?

Renting a digital movie used to cost 2 or 3 bucks, now it's 5 or 6!
I've always had issues with digital rentals, mainly because if I decide to buy after renting, I get no credit for my rental, but why the hike?

Digital movies cost 20 bucks (often more!)
What the heck! Why should the latest Disney movies cost 23 bucks?

I own a ton of physical movies (well over 1,500) and a whole lot of digital content 300+ VUDU movies and TV shows, but as the costs keep rising it's getting harder for me to justify. I already resist the urge to buy new releases and wait until they're on offer.

The solution to piracy is simple, make ALL content more affordable, make your money through higher customer volume, not higher content prices.
This would improve streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu too because contracts would be cheaper making more content available.

Free content is not the solution, we all know there is no such thing as free - I will pay, I want to pay for something that has value, just don't extort me.

Re:"About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to pira

[Anonymous Coward]

An EU study for one, fairly easy to google

How do they get these numbers?

[Anonymous Coward]

"About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to piracy globally last year".

No, that's not true. If a magic technology developed that made piracy impossible, they would not make an extra $5.5B in revenue. There probably isn't $5.5B in disposable funds in the pockets of those pirates, so they would simple be forced to do without.

Re:Once knew of a guy who had over 10k Apple 2 pro

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the '80s, pirated software was pretty much automatic when you bought an Apple 2 (Apple ][? Apple //?) "Welcome to the club, here's a hundred copied floppies filled with cracked software." Growing up, we must have had at least a thousand copied disks, double-sided, many with multiple programs per side. We needed an index just to keep track of it all. It was like cassette tapes, one person buys a copy and then dozens of people have a copy of it the next day. And chances are, most of it was never used and has been gathering dust for the last 30 years. It's just what people did back then.

Re:"About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to pira

[Anonymous Coward]

Proven how? Where? Show us the numbers. Why do I ask? Because I've downloaded stuff in the past and turned around after 15-20 min of watching and ordered the bluray on amazon for both myself and other family members after deciding it was worth it. I know others in this boat as well. Did that happen with all of them? Of course not. Some of them after downloading it was patently obvious that I wished I could get the first minute and thirty seconds of my life back before doing rm *.ext.

I refuse to watch/support commercials.

[werld]

Commercials are mostly all poison and the fact that we allow someone to repeat the same commercial over and over and sometimes back to back is sickening. I try my best to vote with my wallet.

WRONG WRONG WRONG!

[Anonymous Coward]

Estimated 'cost' values of pirated material, should NEVER be considered lost sales. That is a positional LEAP of logic equated to selling a perspective. It has little to no basis in reality!

There is no proof to confirm that someone who pirated content, would now or ever, purchase said content legally equating a lost sale.

This is once again, an incorrect interpretation being applied as a position of agreement among all parties involved. And it's WRONG.

Re:"About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to pira

[badboy_tw2002]

That's stupid. "Worth" is determined by the market. It wasn't "worth" 20 trillion in the first place. And "worth" decreases or increases with time, with scarcity, etc. Its not just the sticker price.

I know why piracy wont go away

[DarkRookie]

Do I want to go to a slow, over design site, type in my info and CC info to be sold to third parties, browse there terrible selection with the terrible interface, and have it be slow when trying to seek a specific part of a movie. Or I can install a client, go to a torrent site, click on a magnet link, wait 5 minutes, and play it in VLC where I can seek to my hearts content. With no typing in any of my info.

Re:"About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to pira

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been proven time and time again that people who download "illegally" wouldn't actually pay for it in the first place, so you can't assign a dollar value to it.

Yeah sure... and all the people who pirate Windows would immediately switch to Linux if they couldn't pirate Windows, because they're not going to pay for it anyway!! lol.. you people are delusional..

There aren't too many services

[Cajun Hell]

1. Too many services. Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon are the big ones. But CBS has a service, HBO has a service, even WWE has a service. Even Disney and Stargate?!?!?! are soon to have a streaming service. At least Amazon throws other perks in with it. 2. Convenience, this relates to #1, but I really want to be able to go into one app. It has gotten worse than cable with ease of access.

This is why the video industry so desperately needs to standardize, immediately. Pirates' tools search for releases by many competing groups, can source from many different locations and protocols, but because there's no DRM and the content is standardized, it gets thrown into one collection with one front end, chosen from many competing front ends. Some people might use something as "spartan" as file manager and mpv, and some people use something as "fancy" as Kodi, and there are a shitload of choices in between. From a user point of view, this is a great situation. You have simplicity and diversity.

It's ok if there are lots of competing services as long as they're standardized. But if instead, you have to use their app, then it's dead in the water. I'll use my app (whatever that may be this year), thanks. Your service doesn't work with my app? Then your service doesn't exist .. except as some release group's source. They have the time and inclination to endure your app; I don't.

Re:"About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to pira

[Anonymous Coward]

Explain how the study was conducted, why the study is relevant, and how many people were able to reproduce the results of the study.

Otherwise you can simply use it during your next wipe..

Re:"About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to pira

[JesseMcDonald]

But certainly the reason to pay $19.99 for the DVD is to watch the movie.

Close. The reason to pay $19.99 for the DVD is to be able to watch the movie as many times as you want, with the option to resell the used DVD when you've tired of it. That does not imply that a single viewing would be worth $19.99.

Anyway, the key metric here is not what might you have otherwise payed but rather what will it cost to "make the victim whole"—and in the case of copyright infringement the answer to that is nothing. The "victim" hasn't lost anything and is already whole; no restitution is owed. That just leaves retribution, and on that score the "victim" is welcome to infringe on the "pirate's" copyrights in turn—assuming that they claim any.

and here's more bullshit:

[Anonymous Coward]

And here's more bullshit: "$5.5 billion in revenue was lost to piracy globally last year." Right, I could have made tons of money if every bird eating seeds off my tree had paid for it.

Re:and here's more bullshit:

[oh_my_080980980]

LMOL - priceless!

"Free" has nothing to do with it

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't download everything I watch to save money (I was never spending that money in the first place, no matter what.) I download everything I watch because I can watch it whenever and wherever I want, commercial free, without needing to be connected at the time. Living in a place like Canada with terribly expensive mobile data options and heavily restrictive content carriers, this kind of thing matters.

Besides, "FREE" and low cost services have a habit of becoming pretty damn expensive.

Where does Amazon sell SOTS?

[tepples]

Let me know when [...] the film Song of the South [...] gets released on region 1 DVD

Song of the South

Amazon, about $34.

What format, and what region?

If you're referring to this listing, I doubt that it's a lawful release. For one thing, when I zoomed in on the front cover, the "Disney DVD" mark was misaligned. For another, one review states: "The problem is the audio/video sync is totally off, at times by 5 seconds or more." I've seen a lot of other bootlegs of this film for sale on the web and in person.

Re:Where does Amazon sell SOTS?

[rally2xs]

It was $34 yesterday, $59 now. Yeah, I'd stay away from it...

Drive-In movies

[Anonymous Coward]

This 5.5 Billion number is a pretty farcical number- these are the same people that would've added people hiding in trunks and looking over the fence at a drive-in as "lost revenue" and claimed they were defrauded.
Secondly, I enjoy watching my pirated copy of Lego Batman with my son and love knowing Steve Mnuchin and his wife Cruella didn't get a red cent from me for it.

Bittorrent has historical value

[rot16]

Nowadays pretty much everyone is streaming or using some other about-to-be bankrupt service (sooner or later they all will cease to exists). I am wondering if we aren't going to loose huge amounts of our cultural history this way.

It's the fucking commercials

[rpresser]

I have binge-watched season after season, using Netflix or a premium channel like Showtime.

I cannot possibly imagine binge-watching a season on OnDemand. I would gouge out my eyes somewhere in episode two.

If a season is free on Netflix, I'll watch it. If I can buy it on Amazon Prime video, I'll grumble but I'll watch it. But if there's no Netflix or Amazon or premium channel for it, I'll torrent or skip the whole thing. This has cost me The Expanse, Dark Matters, Killjoys, and other series that I would otherwise enjoy.

The fucking commercials are INSANE on broadcast TV, and still too fucking annoying on OnDemand.

Re:"About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to pira

[edtice1559]

Why would anybody buy a used DVD if you can just pirate the movie? Per your argument, the victims are anybody who bought the DVD rather than the studios. This makes piracy even more problematic. Really there's no good justification to pirate something that you can buy.

Ads in a free download

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just use it to your advantage? Cut out the middle-man of terrestrial TV and streaming services, and have a worldwide downloadable video available for free, from the official website? Then you can charge exorbitant amounts to have people insert worldwide advertisements in your very own ad-breaks.