Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Steam has never tried to battle piracy head on, yet it succeeds. Please take note, Netflix, it is your card to lose.

..If you are expecting wild profits, year after year, ever increasing. Turns out that's unsustainable.

Make Netflix more convenient than my ARR setup and I'll happily come back.

Netflix: “Should I get short term profits by price gouging and forcing commercials on people (thereby driving people to piracy) or should I forgo year over year profit increases by continuing to provide decent tv with no commercials and no price increases and delivering consistent profits?”

Also Netflix:

Piracy isn't stealing if buying isn't owning.

There was a resounding chorus of "DUUUUUUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH" that echoed across the land as Netflix discovers this reality.

Piracy isn't even free! People pay thousands of dollars for hardware, and hundreds per year for electricity and various service providers.

But they actually get what they want for that money: Being able to watch whatever you want, anytime, on any device, in high quality and without ads. It must be really hard for streaming services to compete with features as futuristic as that!

Gee whiz, can't imagine why...

Says the guys that reduced piracy to a fraction of its former self before getting too greedy. Piracy wasn't affecting them, but it's a side effect of what they have become.

Netflix should've realised this would be the end result. The moment you needed 5-6 different streaming platforms to watch all the movies and tv shows you want, was the moment it became easier and significantly cheaper to pirate the content.

None of the big companies that decided to cash in ever stood a chance.

Infinitely reproducible digital media has little inherent value. As the article acknowledges, the value proposition Netflix offered was convenience. If pirate sites offer more convenience than Netflix offers legitimate users, Netflix will lose. I find it baffling they are fucking around with ads and locking down access, making their experience worse. Same with Amazon Prime. It's like they forgot their own business model.

OH NO BOO HOO!!

Maybe you shouldn’t have become the monster you fought to destroy.

"Lets make 50 competing services while people have less buying power than ever. Everything will be $15 if you want anything of value. P.s. the thing you wanted leaves next month HURRY"

Cant imagine why people pirate /s

No - piracy, since it always carries at least some amount of difficulty and risk, is easy to compete against. And in fact, paid services, including Netflix, have proven that over and over. All it takes is to offer dependable convenience and quality and to treat customers well. People are always willing to pay a reasonable price for that.

The problem is that piracy becomes difficult to compete against when, as Netflix is currently doing, you shift from a business model of providing good service under fair terms for a reasonable price to a business model of providing crappy service under onerous terms for too much money, because the greedy, selfish, short-sighted sacks of shit at the top want to make even more obscene amounts of money. That's the point at which piracy gains enough of an advantage to outweigh its difficulties and risks.

And when that's the case, it's pretty obvious what the real problem is.

CEOs: *Do a greedflation, raking in historic profits.*

Also CEOs: "Why does no one want to pay for a subscription?"

Step one, provide good service.

Netflix: Welp, I guess we should just pack it in.

So here's a novel idea, maybe stop driving people away from your business with constant rate-hikes, removal of content, killing new shows after 1 season, etc...