isn’t it funny how the entertainment industry basically stamped our piracy entirely by offering a comprehensive, more easy to use and affordable solution in the form of well-functioning online streaming, but then fucked it all up by IP cockfighting that splintered the market faster than the Weimar Republic? And if that wasn’t enough stupidity to do the trick, they force so much piracy protection up the throats of content providers til it’s unusable of a third of their clients
I wouldn't say it's funny. They had most of the stuff people wanted - easy payment monthly. Good ux. Lots of movies and tv. then they figured they could get a few more pennies than Netflix was giving and that they could do it better. Read: so far no
Seems like it's a universal law of media companies: They constantly and seemingly deliberately won't allow any distribution channel to get good enough to beat "piracy".
As soon as something comes along that has the potential of being a one-stop shop, they fuck everything up by splintering into many services you have to pay for individually.
As soon as something comes along that offers a huge catalog, they fuck everything up by fighting among themselves over IP rights and exclusivity and randomly removing random shows from random seasons.
As soon as something comes along that is cheap enough to make the risk of piracy not worth it, they fuck everything up by jacking up the price.
As soon as something comes along that delivers piracy-like video quality over streaming, they fuck it up by over-compressing it and otherwise nerfing the video quality.
It's like these media executives are meeting every year to ensure that their products are all just shitty enough to keep piracy alive.
Netflix saw the amount of cash going out the door to studios and thought, hey we can do what they do, started shoveling their own content and overnight became the richest studio in Hollywood.
They also saw the writing on the wall when the president of HBO said that they would never license their content to Netflix. The reaction to create their own content was in response to that, among other things.
Paying customers are treated like criminals, can't download stuff to watch offline, can't even screenshot their screens without some sort of "protection" kicking in, have access to a shitty selection of titles which often lack subtitles and extra content if they aren't straight up censored or "revised", are forced to use the corporation's shitty video player software and on top of all that they get horribly compressed encodes to the point it's got artifacts in 90% black frames.
Meanwhile "pirates" get everything humanity has ever created for free in the highest quality available packaged as simple DRM-free files they can do anything they want with and that they can play on any device or with a well configured mpv.
They defeat themselves with this copyright nonsense. It gets to the point they can't match the level of service offered by a bunch of "pirates".
> Meanwhile "pirates" get everything humanity has ever created for free in the highest quality available packaged as simple DRM-free files they can do anything they want with and that they can play on any device or with a well configured mpv.
Some of the private torrent sites also serve as the most comprehensive library of any given media.
Exactly. And thats not even the full extent of the sadness. Even though i despise existing in modern academia, the broader idea of scientific curiosity as in the human trait is possibly my favorite attribute humankind has to offer. Its such an embodiment of what makes us what we are and i feel drawn to it ever since being a kid and watching space documentaries on tv with my dad.
It makes me genuinely sad that myself and pretty much everyone i know has to make use of scihub and library genesis to access the majority of our greatest achievement and culmination of unthinkable multiples of a human lifespan that went into systematically poking our enviroment and writing down its reaction.
And for what exactly? Do our contributions actually reach the ones furthering our (previously) collective knowledge, a way of financing the needed work without compromising its method? Nah. The exact opposite.
The money exclusively pays middlemen, rich enough to buy their way into a market chokehold in the first place, that contribute nothing beyond their self-made reputation mill called "prestigious journals". They gleefully allocate themselves 100% of the cake without any care in the world, consequences be damned.
Do you know what the final layer of insult looks like? After creating the very perverted system, purpose built to extract every last point of profit, after reaping the benefits available to the ones ruthless enough to be okay with making H1B slave labor their modus operandi, they come back crying to us that china stole their intellectual property.
How dare the chinese researcher, the one you forced to work themselves into burnout for half pay, treated like an indentured servant with their Visa held over their head by their mast- i mean sponsor, how dare he to head back to their home country without any feeling of loyalty towards you? Screw them. They would do and did the same and worse to us in a heartbeat.
i fortunately never have to endure this situation, but i grew up to afghan immigrant parents, so the thought of being trapped like this in a foreign country, after your entire family had to work themselves sick for your chance at a better life, all the hope and dreams you embody for your loved ones, the shame that comes with that and being confronted with loosing at all again, just because you refuse to be held as a modern day slave, jeez man.. i have tears in my eyes just thinking about it and i feel like i wanna puke. screw them.
They are trying to force a horse shit model onto consumers and a lot of technically aware consumers told them to pound sand.
Today, buying media means you are forced to watch an fbi warning that literally doesn't apply to the consumer, then the forced previews, all for a price that would be considered high, 10 years from now.
Or
Pirate it for nothing, and not have to deal with marketing garbage forced upon you.
