As Gabe Newell once said:
Piracy is an issue of service, not price
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Yep. The video entertainment industry had a great solution to piracy in Netflix and it had moved piracy out of the mainstream... Then companies got competitive and content became fractured across a multitude of platforms.
"now that we finally solved one of the hardest problems we've ever faced, let scrap the solution!"
No, it's actually:
"Now that we've gotten everyone locked into one service, let's squeeze them for every single cent we can until they pop!"
It's literally capitalsim's job and it will never change.
I would have continued to pay a steadily increasing price for Netflix if they kept being a "one stop shop" for content.
I was very annoyed when they dropped Mythbusters and Dr Who halfway through me watching them, and then loosing all the Disney movies was just a nail in the coffin.
Even if it cost less, I could not be bothered to maintain multiple subscriptions/accounts/passwords for the content I want.
I mean, it'd not like it was their choice. I'm sure they would have loved to remain the place where everything was.
The reason why public companies were a mistake
Yeah that's definitely more accurate. That's the step 3 everyone's always missing in those 1 2 3? 4 profit! things.
My preferred solution is to only subscribe to one service at a time, and then switch, when I run out of things to watch.
This also means the providers get less money when they have less content.
And companies just don't seem to get it. They saw Netflix boom in popularity and said, "Hey, I wanna do that," without realizing that having all your content in one platform was what made it so successful.
Ehhhhh, sorta'. I've spent WAY more money thanks to Steam than I would have without it, but I'm still buying everything on sale and cheaper than anyone I know with a console. I think price is still a bit part of the equation for me. Some games that refuse to ever have a decent sale are making me consider the high seas again as they stagnate on my waitlist.
Same for music for me. Only difference now, I get to choose where my money goes. Instead of some streaming company giving next to nothing to the bands I listen to and everything else going to some super popular stuff I don't enjoy.
Yeah, I've spent more money on smaller bands through Bandcamp then I ever have on streaming services, all thanks to piracy, since I realized it's much better for offline files.
So...you're going to post torrents and seed all those movies...right?
Same here. YIFY torrents were just a gateway drug to 4k HDR blurays.
That was shown in the early days of Metallica's (fuck Metallica, btw) bullshit with Napster. The music fans were downloading music, as well as buying music, more.
Fucking Lars. Metallica just did not get it and attacked their fans. Nobody had a problem paying for the music, they just wanted to be able to download it. They didn't want a CD they wanted an MP3.
I was a huge Metallica fan. Saw them for both Ride the Lightning and Justice when they toured. Most of us got into them by pirating (ie, copying album->tape or tape->tape for/from friends). I spent more on their tickets and concert tees than I would have buying their albums. But after Lars and that Napster shit, I just figured they were dead to me. Haven't listened to them since.
Oh man, you brought up a really good point. There's the albums, and then there's the merch. Metallica junkies would have like 20 band shirts and so much Metallica swag all over their places. Those guys would drop thousands of dollars. They lived for that music. When Lars came out and was basically "it's about the money" so many fans stopped caring about the music. When they stopped caring about the music they stopped buying the merch.
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Various studies showed the same over the last 20-25 years. Pirating does increase revenue for companies and articles torrented.
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Are there any good services like bandcamp, but for video? Even if it doesn't have blockbuster/popular movies I'd be interested. I spend a lot of money on bandcamp because it's easy and simple: I give them money and in return get bits that I do what I want with.
If you're looking for DRM-free digital distribution, the best I can think of is Vimeo on Demand. You pay one-time for a movie, and in return you get the option to download the movie as a MP4. There's mainly arthouse films and documentaries, but you may be able to find a few gems.
Thanks! That's the sort of thing I'm looking for
Thank you, I'm going to spend so much money buying indie movies
The problem is you're obsessed with movies to do such things. Just download 1080 and watch it on your tv or mobile and that's it, you watched a movie. And if you're willing to help the community, encode, seed, distribute and that's enough.
My local wall-mart has a large number of older blockbusters on their bargain bin. Got all 3 John Wicks for $15 total, and then directly ripped them into my server
I read an article about this many years ago. They had found that pirated games can increase sales:
2017 is many years…I’m old
Same idea with video games. There are many game franchises that I never would have gotten into as a kid if I hadn't been able to pirate them. I usually still pirate games to try them out, and if I end up enjoying it or want features like online play, I might buy it during a Steam sale.
me too, but usually only with indie games, because triple a studios can go fuck themselves. but like Stardew valley costs $6, imma buy it
Command & Conquer was like that for me. I pirated Red Alert 2, but ended up buying it like six times via various collections. None of that would have happened had I not had that first pirated copy.
Yeah I used to game on console but I got a steam deck thinking I would pirate shit. Then steam sales hit me like a fucking truck.
Anymore it's a roll of the dice whether the game is functional to a point where you would enjoy it. Most publishers don't seem to bother with demos anymore (probably because their games are half broken) so we are largely left to create our own demos.
I've ripped a good number of blu-rays to network storage. If you're looking for older, less popular stuff it's the best option. And older releases are usually just a few bucks. The new stuff I torrent because I can usually find a decent rip, but for stuff I want to put in my library a rip from optical disk is the best, but not free of course. You can even do it for free, public libraries often have a good collection of older releases on optical disk.
I wouldn't be the faithful Final Fantasy patron I am today had it not been for a ROM of FF VI my old room mate put on my computer back in college. Now I own nearly ALLLLL of them (the ones available on modern platforms). I've also started investing in the Trails series for a similar reason and I don't regret it.
Every video game I've ever pirated and played for more than 30m I now legitimately own.
I bought more CDs while Napster was in its heyday than the entire rest of my life combined.
Avid reader here, and I sometimes browse books on pirate bay. When I find one I like I download the ebook and if I read it I also buy a print edition. Not everyone does that, of course, but in my case piracy generates sales.
I suspect your story is not unusual. Piracy is, at worst, a morally neutral action.
Many others have said before people who pirate spend more on media than those who don’t.
I pay for cable tv (get off my lawn) in addition to several other streaming services.
And sometimes I still can’t get the thing I want. You think I’m going to spend even more when my half dozen existing subscriptions don’t cover this one thing? I don’t think so.
So much this. Watched so many anime for free that I ended up spending a bunch of money on figurines, mangas and other merchandise!
I started pirating around 2000. Early days of bittorrent, before that Napster and others. Maybe I'm out of touch and/or old. But YT premium/music has be very convenient and cost effective for me. As far as movies, paying for a couple of streaming services is way easier than delving through scummy torrent sites waiting for movies to download.
I'm fairly tech savvy but I've been off the high seas for awhile. If anyone knows a way to get movies/music with the same ease of use as the paid stuff I'd love to know about it.
Fair. I use YouTube almost exclusively on PC and my phone, and setting up an ad-free environment on both was fairly easy for me. But if I were to switch to a TV, I just might have bought yt premium. It's not that expensive, after all.
Also, I still pay for netflix. It just has the right amount of convenience that I am ok with to pay money for.
qBittorrent + Plex makes it pretty easy; you can search for torrents from within qBittorrent, so no scummy sites
Super cool that you can search for torrents with in qBittorrent. I'll check it out.
It takes a little bit of dicking around, you have to add the torrent sites you want to search, but it's not hard.
This is the guide I followed
Thanks. Trying to use my steam deck for media so this is very helpful.
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The problem with older media is that you have to actively create torrents, the tracker might fold, etc.
With eD2K, it's very old school P2P filesharing, just give it a directory and the files on it are shared on the network.
Of course, the "push" part to torrent tracker sites isn't as active.
I use both torrents and eD2K, depending on what I'm looking for.
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