Good
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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2013 Netflix competed just fine. Piracy was mostly dead back then
But 2013 Netflix didn't have to compete with Prime Video, Disney Plus, Paramount Plus, HBO Max, Apple TV, Hulu, Peacock, or any of the million "add-on" channels that Amazon uses as an excuse to paywall you off from the content.
The fact that they all run in their own UI, desperate the shove the next instalment of mediocrity down your throat, means that I've gone back to piracy. It's just much easier to type what I'm after into Radarr or Sonarr than it is to go through the services to see what's available. Sure, I can use Justwatch, but 80% of the time what I'm after isn't on anything I have.
I would like to see some evidence that the competition resulted in Netflix losing a lot of subscribers, and thus money, rather than not hitting their predicted revenue targets. Because I would bet it's the latter and not the former. I don't know of too many people who said, "well, I had Netflix, but Disney is doing streaming video now so I won't be watching Bake-Off anymore." They just ended up getting Netflix and Disney+.
For a while anyway. Now people are dropping these services due to the price hikes. Unless you downgraded your Netflix service when they added lower tiers with fewer options and ads, to maintain the basic Netflix service you had in 2016, you're paying an additional $5 a month today.
Netflix and all the other streaming services are built upon the insane idea that there are an infinite number of new customers that will continue to sign up regularly. Some of them don't even think you need all that much programming to draw them. Paramount+ has a fraction of the original programming of Netflix, Peacock, Apple, Amazon, etc. but still costs $10 a month and will most assuredly continue to raise its prices based on the idea that there are either an infinite number of Star Trek fans or they will have to raise their prices.
More competition should mean lower prices. How is competition diving prices up? Seems rigged.
Same amount of content, more players, outbidding each other, passing on those lovely reverse savings.
See if it was like music, with a massive back catalogue available to everyone, you'd have four or five services competing on price. But it isn't. And it will suffer for that.
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It's only competition if they provide similar products.
The current landscape is like farmers markets and butchers. Sure they both provide food, but they don't really directly compete with eachother.
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It is rigged. Exclusive deals keep content restricted so they're not directly competing; if you want that show you have to pay for service X. Or, you know, yarrrr.
prices are lower, piracy is nearly free for most, no?
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Same thing for me. I can also use Findroid on my Android phone with microG to watch stuff from my Jellyfin server. I think the Netflix app wouldn't even work on my phone.
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As Lord Gaben once said: Piracy is a service problem.
Make better service, have less piracy.
Spotify is a good example of this imo, I can listen everything, so it's not necessary to pirate music. I do have some issues, but never had the problem of not being able to listen what I want
Is that with a paid plan? My brief experience using it was very much not like that. I'd search for a song and it would tell me something along the lines of "you can't choose a song to play but you can listen to a channel based on it" and a lot of stuff didn't seem to be on there at all. This was probably 5(maybe more) years ago now, so I have no idea how it's changed since then.
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Music piracy also seems to be on the rise again though. By far not as severely as with video but still… And while music streaming got a little more expensive over the last few years, it’s not by that much.
Music streaming is also much cheaper to run than video, so they can offer more reasonable pricing.
Yea, even HiRes audio is a fraction of the size of even a potato quality video. But spotify seems to still lose money…
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And they have Spotify DJ, which not everyone likes but I think it's great, worth the £10 a month to me
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