Slashdot Mirror
The Rise of Netflix Competitors Has Pushed Consumers Back Toward Piracy (vice.com)
A new study from network equipment company Sandvine finds that BitTorrent usage and piracy is increasing after years of declines. The reason appears to be due to "an increase in exclusivity deals that force subscribers to hunt and peck among a myriad of streaming services to actually find the content they're looking for," reports Motherboard. From the report: Sandvine's new Global Internet Phenomena report offers some interesting insight into user video habits and the internet, such as the fact that more than 50 percent of internet traffic is now encrypted, video now accounts for 58 percent of all global traffic, and Netflix alone now comprises 15 percent of all internet downstream data consumed. But there's another interesting tidbit buried in the firm's report: after years of steady decline, BitTorrent usage is once again growing.
According to Sandvine, file-sharing accounts for 3 percent of global downstream and 22 percent of upstream traffic, with 97% of that traffic in turn being BitTorrent. While BitTorrent is often used to distribute ordinary files, it remains the choice du jour for those looking to distribute and trade copyrighted content online, made easier via media PCs running Kodi and select plugins. Back in 2011, Sandvine stated that BitTorrent accounted for 52.01% of upstream traffic on fixed broadband networks in North America. By 2015, BitTorrent's share of upstream traffic on these networks had dipped to 26.83 percent, largely thanks to the rise in quality, inexpensive streaming alternatives to piracy. But Sandvine notes that trend is now reversing slightly, with BitTorrent's traffic share once again growing worldwide. That's especially true in the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, where BitTorrent now accounts for 32% of all upstream network traffic.
According to Sandvine, file-sharing accounts for 3 percent of global downstream and 22 percent of upstream traffic, with 97% of that traffic in turn being BitTorrent. While BitTorrent is often used to distribute ordinary files, it remains the choice du jour for those looking to distribute and trade copyrighted content online, made easier via media PCs running Kodi and select plugins. Back in 2011, Sandvine stated that BitTorrent accounted for 52.01% of upstream traffic on fixed broadband networks in North America. By 2015, BitTorrent's share of upstream traffic on these networks had dipped to 26.83 percent, largely thanks to the rise in quality, inexpensive streaming alternatives to piracy. But Sandvine notes that trend is now reversing slightly, with BitTorrent's traffic share once again growing worldwide. That's especially true in the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, where BitTorrent now accounts for 32% of all upstream network traffic.
The old adage is true, competition is good, but too much competition is bad and leads to market fragmentation.
Listen up you Weekend Harvard MBAs.
NOT EVERY COMPANY NEEDS THEIR OWN STREAMING SERVICE, YOUR CONTENT ISN'T THAT VALUABLE. You don't have to fragment the market just to justify your existence and try to show everyone how you saved a penny by not letting Netflix rob you blind.
Seriously, negotiate a long term deal with one of the following and go play golf or mine cryptocurrency:
Netflix
Amazon
Hulu
YouTube
Done...
New flash! people can only watch one show at a time. We realize your catalog is Huuuuggggeee, but remember, only one show at a time, and people pretty much want the NEW shows.
If everyone in the USA watched a show simultaneously, that would be 300 million shows. That is the max.
Remember, no matter how you slice it, Amazon and YouTube own the streaming cloud, so you are paying either Amazon or YouTube indirectly at some point. Even Netflix hosts in the Amazon cloud.
So stop it already, pick a streaming partner and go play nice. Stop the fragmentation before it bites you in the ass.
My new and improved cable PVR box.
We recently switched to a service called "Shaw Blue Sky" up here in Canada, and oh my god is the on demand system ever fucking shite. Like, I-can't-believe-I'm-actually-paying-extra-for-this-shit levels of crappiness. I've already cancelled everything I could relating to this particular "feature" (and bumped my internet plan accordingly), but let me give you a rundown of the overall experience:
1) Find a show you want to watch on demand
2) Click the show icon box art
3) Click the "episodes" button
4) Scroll through the seasons, click a season and unfold all the episodes
5) Scroll to the episode you want, click on it
6) Click on "Watch Options"
7) Find out the only options listed are for some random subscription service or some package I don't own
There is no way to filter for shows only actually available to me. I have to spend on average 35 seconds just figuring out if I can watch something. Then there's all the shows that I partly get- either one or two seasons but not the rest, or worse- some episodes but not others within the same season.
You can literally piss away hours just LOOKING for somehing to watch on that flying shitbox of a platform. I think they actually want to piss off people so they eventually subscribe to 4 different streaming services and tack on another $120/mo to their bills just to "get everyhing", because that's the only way to ensure that everything you hit in the browser will be watchable somehow.
This is why I've gone back to piracy. I tried going legit for 4 months, and just got shat on by Shaw's wonderful system. Sorry, but when I want to watch TV, I want to watch it- not browse through your shitty ass on demand browser that doesn't even have the decency to tell me what I can watch up front. It's way easier to just setup some torrents with an RSS feed watcher and dump everything to my media server instead.
The studios again can't figure out how to get it right. None of them thought Netflix would amount to anything so they allowed it to germinate. Once it took off they did what any clueless, unimaginative Hollywood exec always does when faced with a competitor's success: copy it.
Only it doesn't work out so well. The fragmentation and exclusivity is turning off consumers, myself included. It becomes such an amazing pain to find the content legally that it's just easier and faster to get it in a torrent. I'd pay for it if I could get it from a single source (or a reasonably small number of them, perhaps 2-3 tops), if it came in a high-bitrate H.265.MKV file with lossless audio, and without ads or onerous copy protection. I have about 1,300 HD movies on my Plex along with about 3,000 TV episodes. I don't even own a Blu-ray player anymore. I doubt I ever will. That is how consumers want to consume content.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
No one is going to sign up for half a dozen streaming services just so they can watch all the exclusive content.
One . . . . MAYBE two. After that, fuck it. I'm not going to bother with it. I'll go find it on Yarr Matey TV.
It's like Sony vs Microsoft vs Nintendo in the console market. I'm not buying another GD console just for exclusive titles.
It's the same for Oculus vs Vive vs Sony in the VR world. I bought ONE. That's it.
When they finally installed FIOS in my neighborhood, they door to door salespeople were greeted as heroes. We invited them in and made them tea or something. We gave them cookies. We signed up with whatever the hell they were selling. Neighbors made offerings of their first born.
Don't get me wrong, Verizon sucks. But holy hell, Comcast is even worse. They are so bad that we were happy to do business with Verizon.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.