Anon got it backwards, networks noticed how profitable Netflix was and bumped the price for Netflix to stream their stuff. Netflix responded by producing their own content rather than leasing others’ at exorbitant rates. Then Netflix later got greedy and bumped their prices, lowered their quality, and cancelled all of their good shows.
I think it's a bit of both. Netflix knew that companies choosing to pull their content would be a threat, so they prematurely started producing content (famously starting with House of Cards and Orange is the New Black). Whether because they saw this as a threat or because of the perceived greater profitability of their own platforms (probably a bit of both), other studios started pulling their content from Netflix and setting up their own streaming sites.
And naturally, other companies pulling their content accelerated Netflix's desire to produce their own content to ensure they weren't left in the lurch.
It's remarkable how people can see right past what was actually happening and only see what they want to see. Netflix was never trying to be the good guy. Netflix didn't offer low prices out of the goodness of it's hearts. It doesn't have a heart, it has a ledger. The reason why Netflix offered a lot of content for a low price is because the company was trying to disrupt traditional cable. It was always the plan to increase prices, Netflix didn't become greedy, it always was. It's just that for a time the companies greed aligned with the publics greed. Once that relationship was no longer beneficial to Netflix it raised the prices, that was the plan all along.
There certainly are some companies that seek to do good, or are run by good people. Arizona Green Tea is the current favourite but there are for sure others. The thing is though that there’re huge incentives to being greedy and awful, and a distinct lack of punishment for that behaviour, to the point where so fucking many of these companies are either evil or committing enough evil actions that it doesn’t matter at all the difference anymore.
Also they weren’t saying that the argument is unique to Netflix but ok then.
It doesn't really matter, though. The only cause of companies pulling their content is Netflix's success. There was no way Netflix could have prevented it.
Yeah I consulted for the cable industry around the time that everyone was just starting to try to build their own services to compete with Netflix. It wasn't a secret that production companies would be pulling their content. There were licensing agreements signed that had expiration dates.
So it was more like a race on both ends. Production companies were like "we get exclusive streaming rights to our movies back in X months, so we need to have our own platform up and running." And Netflix was like "we lose streaming rights to these movies in X months, we need to make some content to replace it with."
Unpopular opinion, but I wasn’t a fan. Was it a bad show? No! Did I enjoy it? Sometimes. How it developed the cult following that it has, I can’t quite piece together. Fantastic voice acting and sound design can only pull so much weight!
Fantastic acting and production quality can elevate any media but especially TV shows. Look at Shrinking for a prime example. It has the production quality of Dispatches From Elsewhere but it's essentially a three camera sitcom like Modern Family or hell All in the Family. And it's KILLING right now.
People like the humor of Inside Job and the fantastic quality made it so much better.
I guess if you’re in the market for cola, you’ll look for the cola with the best taste. But seeing a discontinued cola lauded as a fallen behemoth is a bit odd, from my perspective
An excellent concept with some interesting opportunities, butchered by regressing it to the same kitschy formulaic plotlines as every other uninspiring adult animation show. I don't want Big Bang Theory, I want Twin Peaks.
Direct download piracy and streaming is surprisingly popular.
With a bit of effort you can stream any movie directly to your TV for a few moneys a month (or free, but paying for the essential bits removes the jankiness)
Basically you select the movie, a system finds the torrent or DDL, a service downloads it (or has it cached) and you stream it to your device.
With a bit of effort you can stream any movie directly to your TV for a few moneys a month (or free, but paying for the essential bits removes the jankiness)
Something I learned back in the day: "Never pay for warez". Pirate all you want, the moment you are paying, pay the creator of the product you're interested in, not someone who pirated it and wants to profit from distributing it without a licence.
Except the value proposition still needs to make sense, so resigning to just pay the creatorlicense holder exorbitant rates for ever-more-enshittified services is learning the wrong lesson.
They have used their control over the system to grotesquely distort copyright from its original intent of getting more cultural works into the public domain for people to use and build on, to instead lock everything away for lifetimes. Don't buy into their lies and propaganda that they have any moral high ground.
While I agree with the trend for the average person, I think in pure numbers there are always going to be more tech savvy people in the foreseeable future.
Sure, 80% of people online in the 2000s and 90s were all tech savvy hobbyists, but their numbers was low (let’s say a million).
Now only 0.5% might be tech savvy, but that is 0.5% of a billion people, which would be 5 mil compared to 800k above.
I obviously picked convenient numbers but the point still stands, there are lots of tech savvy places today and it’s growing, just not as fast as the non tech savvy crowd unfortunately.
I am personally still friends with two people who even know how to navigate their filesystem beyond clicking the downloads or my documents link in the start menu. I hope you're right, but all I see around me at work and personal life is ignorance. People can't even figure out how to use their phones beyond the basics.
Yeah, but what's the relative quality of responses? I feel like the bar for "tech savvy" or "competent at programming" has dropped precipitously. And unfortunately, the number of people confidently asserting a wrong answer online is high in my experience, including on programming forums.
Has the total number of C++ experts gone down since 20 years ago or has it gone up? The total market share has gone down, but total amount of systems running C++ has increased.
Today is more lucrative to be an expert than 20 years ago, and there are far more positions that offer good money.
It’s also easier to make money by knowing very little programming.
So the question is, would the people capable of being a true expert avoid that path today even though it’s more lucrative, I don’t think so.
The only difference is, 20 years ago, only the true experts were online, now they probably don’t enjoy being online as much and are probably big fans of old school hobbies (like wood working)
I'm also inclined to believe what the other person was saying, because nowadays like you say people don't know how to use their devices to their full potential, but then I remember there used to be a time when I was the only one with a smart phone and everyone else was looking at me like I'm a weirdo for being on this phone during a commute for example, something that today is normal.
The nerdy people are still there and know how to use these tools, the general masses are still as clueless as always, they are just late adopters that never learned anything past what the walled gardens feed them. At least that's my feeling.
I think the end is where some people are moving but I think its a bit too pessimistic. While kids are becoming more tech illiterate there is always gonna be a certain amount of people that know a bit more than the masses and they are not gonna let themselves be pushed around.
One assumption I made is that there will be a continuous demand for self build PCs which will be an entry point for a lot where you can run your own operating system and own choice of hardware. My next assumption is that custom ROMs are gonna stick around or at least Linux phones will become usable in the future since tech savvy privacy people are interested in this. Then I hope the EU will continue to step up and the administration after Trump will support certain right to repair legislation. It doesn't need a giant group of people for a viable alternative to exist and I think there can be compromises between going stallman or giving up on ownership. Media servers and NAS for example are also really loved in a specific subset of people and I do not think people are willing to give up what they have. I get why you think the way you do and maybe I am too optimistic... I just think I'm not
tbf, there are alternatives to torrenting now. I usually recommend fmovies, sudo-lol, or other streaming websites because the barrier to entry for those sites is just knowing the URL and having ublock origin.
I agree with you though that today's young adults are not as technologically inclined as young adults of the early 2000s where torrenting was rampant. But everyone understands a website.
Torrenting is hard compared to a visiting a website. Not only do you have to vet each torrent, you have to download a second piece of software (torrent client) to make sure it works, all the while making sure your router is set up correctly. And even if they set all this up correctly, they'll get a letter/email saying that they downloaded a file illegally since they didn't use a VPN. That will scare a novice user and stop torrenting.
I personally don't have too much of an issue for paying for piracy. It's money I would pay to Netflix if their catalog was decent.
Servers cost money.
If anything, these assholes streaming companies should see people paying for pirated content and say, "We should do better" instead of "ThEy ArE sTeAlInG oUr CoNtEnT!"
Edit: I looked up Real Debrid. Their website is sketchy. What exactly is it?
They cache torrents, magnets and ddl links at an astonishing scale.
You can put in pretty much any even decently popular magnet or ddl link set and get a direct download link with near infinite bandwidth (my 500Mbit connection is saturated every time)
I think your doom and gloom scenario is a little dramatic considering we already have Linux. The free platform where you have full control over your technological experience already exists and has been well maintained for decades at this point. Sure, proprietary software not working on Linux sucks and will continue to be an issue, but there's typically FOSS alternatives for the useful programs.
It'd be more accurate to say we'll have two Internets, especially since that's expressly what Google wants. The ignorant people will all flock to the corpo slopping trough, and people like us will be using Linux devices to access federated sites like this one.
Right but you can still build your own PC. I already don't bother with a laptop or any of that other garbage because they are just worthless tech garbage. Sure, the new MacBook/Chromebook/etc will be locked down, but they're already a bitch to get a different OS running on so I'd argue we're already there.
Essentially what would be required is DRM from Intel or AMD on their CPUs to prevent you from ultimately installing whatever OS you want, and I don't think that fits their business model. I think they just want to make a bunch of money selling overpriced silicone, and don't need control of the platform. Sure, your software will be a few steps behind the cutting edge corpo stuff, but you make it sound like people will be trapped on their 2010 Thinkpad. You can still have a high powered computer, you just have to be part of a different ecosystem.
Linux is not on mobile. And before anyone says "Android/LineageOS is Linux", 1) Android is proprietary (and AOSP is not a real substitute for Android), and 2) LineageOS isn't a substitute for Android without microg, and also isn't Linux (last I checked, app development on LineageOS REQUIRED ANDROID STUDIO for the signing bullshit).
Now, if anyone says "Linux is on mobile, I daily-drive my PinePhone!" (and is actually being honest), then congratulations and I respect the hell out of you but you're more of a masochist than Drew Devault and that makes you a unicorn.
Torrenting is less common but thats because most piracy is just streaming now. Its more profitable to host a streaming site, youre less likely to get a virus streaming compared to torrenting now, and its easier to access and find.
That was when VHS and cassette tapes started to hit the market and there was no copy protection on those. Following that, people copied floppy disks enough that they had to make that "dont copy that floppy" jingle.
There was a brief period with the switch to digital and CDROMs where piracy stopped, but then CD burners hit the market and it started again.
Copyright predates corporations. Many corporations need copyright to extract profit. If you're anti-corporation but pro-copyright, you're the only with the big ol' giant hole.
Amazon was the place to buy manuals(art,hobby, do it yourself etc.). Now authors have pulled their books from print and expecting people to sign a subscription on patreon. Now there are sharks overpricing any remaining physical print second hand by 2000%.
pirates have scanned these books and selling access to uploaded jpgs for a fraction of what the manual would have cost had it just stayed in print.
I feel like people are ignoring that Netflix was bleeding money during their "golden age". They only switched to being profitable a couple years back. A lot of times what people describe as enshittification is just unprofitable companies having to come up with an actual business model as venture capital dries up.
You can also argue that silicon valley has that particular business model of purposely making a product look great and cheap until enough people sign up.
It's distinct from how most companies run in the red at their inception in that those traditional businesses would gladly be in the black but are waiting for economies of scale or building a reputation among consumers.
And that's probably why people get so disappointed w/ tech companies.
It's not that the prices they switch to are unreasonable, but that they hike prices after getting a user base, so it feels like a bait and switch instead of an early bird discount. If they made it an actual early bird discount, people would probably be fine with it.
Or maybe they keep prices the same, but drop content while keeping prices the same. If they instead structured it as a base tier and an "early bird" free access to a higher tier, which then starts costing money after some time period, I also think people would be okay with it. I have always thought Netflix should have packages, so you could opt-in to additional stuff like maybe Disney or HBO content. If Netflix did this early on, maybe Disney and HBO wouldn't have bothered making their own streaming platforms and instead just raked in revenue from these higher tier customers, because they get most of the benefit of having their own streaming platform, with none of the costs.
In pretty much every case, I'll point to Valve's business model as an example. Gaming companies generally don't feel the need to run their own platforms, and the ones that do often still distribute through other stores.
Valve was the first, their business model was basically removing retail (the actual reason for Steam was to make updates trivial, so a Counterstrike update didn't break half the servers for 2 weeks), for everyone after Steam the business model was removing Steam by replacing it with a Steam clone.
Netflix has a market cap of 300bn. Public markets picked up right where venture capital left off no bother. The problem I think was the competitive forces as much as enshitified business model, though perhaps one cannot exist without the other. Certainly without doing their own content they could easily have become ludicrously profitable as a redistributer only, though I'm not convinced it would have stopped everyone and their dog moving in on the space.
Facebook is really the cleaner example of enshitification. They could have happily printed modest money for ever as the preeminent social network, but they took the greedy approach and morphed into a cesspool.
If you take venture capital, you sacrifice your ability to not be greedy. Could Facebook have even existed without VC? Facebook didn't have ads during its startup IIRC, which meant they had no revenue.
That's a really interesting hypothetical. They always had ads but obviously the early scale and scope was smaller, so revenue was piddling early on. They had pretty limited costs though and were a super hot ticket to give capital to. I mean they needed some kind of financing for their trajectory, which maybe anyway would have pushed them to monetize aggressively any which way.
Ultimately I don't think we'll ever know and the examples of people choosing not to get filthy rich off the back of these innovations are extremely rare. Even when e.g. openAI gets set up explicitly as non profit it gets bastardised, so what chance does a regular joint stock company have of operating in the interests of consumers.
Theu saw the writing on the walls. They knew the big dogs would want a slice of the streaming game and they needed to pivot before the rug got pulled out from ubder them. Hulu was already being constructed when they were recalling shifting into making their own products IIRC. It wasn't just VC that got them to their golden era, they also relied on the industry bot taking streaming seriously enough and giving them deals that they never would today.
This (though you need to fix your typos). Movie companies saw Netflix as a garbage rerun channel. They were chasing after opening weekends. It took a long time for them to finally launch their own service.
Hulu was already being constructed when they were recalling shifting into making their own products
Hulu has been around for a very long time (it's also part of why their UI sucks ass while being owned by Disney. It's the same UI they've had for years) they just didn't fully invest in the marketing and content until Netflix proved to C-Suites how viable a streaming service actually was
It was launched on October 29, 2007, initially as a joint venture between News Corporation (later 21st Century Fox) and NBC Universal (later bought by Comcast), Providence Equity, and later The Walt Disney Company, serving as an aggregation of recent episodes of television series from their respective television broadcasting. In 2010, Hulu launched a subscription service, initially branded as "Hulu Plus", which featured full seasons of programs from the companies and other partners, and un-delayed access to new episodes. In 2017, the company launched Hulu with Live TV—an over-the-top streaming television service offering access to broadcast television channels.
Netflix also launched their Internet streaming service in 2007 and in 2011 is when they separated the subscriptions so that the DVD service and the streaming service were different subscriptions, as well as when their first batch of originals/exclusives were released (House of Cards, season 5 of Arrested Development and they were the exclusive North American distributor for the Norwegian TV series Lilyhammer) and it really wasn't for a few more years before all of the content licensing deals started expiring and being non-renewed, somewhere around 2018ish by my memory.
Anon never copy vhs, cassette tape, cd, and dvd. I lived in southeast asia and pirated cd/dvd is openly sold in night market and low foot traffic part of the mall throughout the late 90s till early 2010s, only occasionally they got raid. Before that we basically record show from cable and rental then copy for each others.
But yes, as GabeN proved again and again, piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. Almost.
Even into the 90s, I remember making cassette tapes of the local college radio shows.
One of my earliest memories as a little kid was my father putting a tape recorder in front of a record player speaker, and telling us all to be quiet because he was recording it. (Later on we got the fancier stereo with direct audio hookups.)
I remember feeling so excited when I got a shitty toy tape recorder with a microphone. The first thing I did was record all three Tetris songs from my Gameboy.
When I found Netflix, I subbed and stayed a customer for years because they provided the content I wanted at a low price. Now, however, the content has been split across a bunch of different streaming services, and juggling subscriptions and finding the content I want is a PITA, so I don't bother. I cancelled everything except Netflix, and I plan to cancel that next month once my SO finishes the Netflix originals they want to watch, and we just buy what we want and I rip them to our Jellyfin server (or if I can't find it legally to own, we pirate).
I'm a bit less concerned about the price and more frustrated by the change in user experience. I understand they can't have everything all the time, but now it seems like they rarely have what I want, so we end up not using the service much. Screw paying for something I don't use.
Valve has the right idea. I could jump between services and get a bit better deal, but I actually end up rebuying games I got free on other platforms because the Steam experience is so good. I have a Steam Deck, and it's really nice to just pick it up and play. My desktop is Linux, and it's really nice that most games just work w/o fiddling. I still shop around a little, but most of my gaming money goes to Valve because the service works well.
Kinda inverts inverted the causality of Netflix starting their own production and other companies pulling their licences. Netflix started their own production to survive the licences getting pulled, which was inevitable as soon as Netflix looked profitable.
They didn't get greedy, they probably started out greedy, ran a good service to grab market share, then had to make moves to defend against the predictable greed of the incumbents.
This is basically it except the trick was Netflix wasn't actually all that profitable based strictly off of customers to start. It was a long con. It was ostensibly funded by people placing a bet. They offered a service that wasn't just disruptive, it was operating at a loss. People piled into the service so licences started to get dicey. Netflix started producing and filming, initially at independent rates amd sweetheart deals in my union territory because everybody looked at as being a little baby studio that needed nurturing and to be fair working a Netflix show back when it started had perks. They placed bets on creators who wanted to make something different. Not nessisarily great but different giving their production teams a lot of creative freedom. Paid lunches, cell allowance, sometimes better hours and crew gifts when a number of studios like Disney were pulling penny pinching bullshit and trying to pretend they were an independent studio to get lower rates while letting their producers act like skeeze.
Thing was it was a cuckoo all along.
They flushed the market with a business model sustained by outside money so everybody else started doing the same thing. It destroyed all the union and contract protections syndicated television once had particularly erasing residuals. That was the main thing. Creators used to make money off of the amalgamation of their lifetime work by being owed a small amount everytime a rerun was aired... But streaming didn't do that. They had those sweetheart deals that made streaming services exempt from on demand access counting as replays. So you cut off the career curve of creators from building security and only paid them for stuff they made once turning them effectively gig worker.
Once everyone was playing by the same rules the funding at the top cut out because they got what they wanted out of it they started jacking prices, removing titles, selling advertising because what the hell were you going to do, go back to cable? Now the boom is over and our local Industry is a bloody dust bowl. My seniority has jumped up more in the past year than it has in the full ten years before as folk have been retiring or dropping from the union to find new careers.
I'm not even pirating because it's cheaper, or easier. I have near 100TB in storage, and it takes hours per week to search material, have it downloaded, checked, etc. I just am done with the marketing, the branding, the advertising, the bullshit rules. I just want to watch what I want to watch and media companies made this impossible so I'm forced to sail the high seas
Im looking into an arr stack but it seems there are a LOT of moving pieces. I'm technical enough to pull it off but also old enough to roll my eyes at seeing how many systems I'll need to install, setup, configure, etc. sonar, bazaar, radarr, arrarr..
I dont suppose there is a single docker container to install that pulls and connects it all? I dont mind a bit of work but this sure seems a lot at first glance
There's several that you can customize to your liking, and several megathreads about it on the old site we shall not speak of.
Thing is, the specific units you install can bedifferent depending on personal preference; I use qbittorrent instead of transmission for instance, Jellyfin instead of Plex, and so on.
Once you get it set up, though, everything else should go smoothly, and you'll practically never have to do manual searches ever again (except those really niche shows nobody's ever heard of).
There's an example docker file from Rick45 on github, but as I noted, he uses stuff like Plex and Deluge instead. Feel free to just copy the example file and edit as needed for your preferred services.
Me, my preferred stack includes Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, Prowlarr, Jellyfin, qBittorrent, SurfShark, JellySeer, Flaresolver, and Organizer. Again, tweak as you'd like.
Netflix didn't get greedy (well not in that way). The movie companies wanted to make their own platform, which would have left Netflix with nothing. So they had to become their own production company. They said "we have to become a production company faster than production companies become streaming companies".
I really wish I was a consultant for these fucking jokers.
Back when Disney+ was just "Rumor has it Disney wants to launch their own Netflix-like streaming service.", I called this shit. I said "Well that's just going to cause this whole thing to fall apart, no one's going to juggle 50 different streaming services just to be able to find something to watch."
And I was fucking right.
The only ethical streaming service is Tubi as it doesn't charge relying on ads alone, and it's a neat little bonus that Tubi has actively aided in the restoration of lost media.
If it aint on Tubi, then I'm going to yo-ho-ho with a bottle of fuck you.
Yes, but they also brought back piracy, eroded faith in the brand, and while Disney+ is making money.....
Disney's newer efforts are kinda showing it's not the powerhouse it used to be. With the only thing they really have going for them are the legacy media that they're holding hostage on a platform, they arbitrarily removes things from time to time for seemingly no reason (the Willow series for example, which makes very little sense since that was original to Disney+ to begin with and for some reason Buzz Lightyear of Star Command isn't on the platform despite all the other Toy Story media being present... and there are several episodes of The Simpsons that are just straight up memory-holed; most infamously the Michael Jackson episode)
If this trend continues, Disney will be left with people pirating the legacy media that people at home have shaky access to at best (Monthly fee for content that may be removed with no notice and for no reason), especially as prices soar and wages stay the same, and interest in newer project dwindling.
Or to be blunt, one of the most classic blunders: High short term profits at the cost of being unsustainable in the long term.
Sure it's easy to think of Disney as laughing its way to the bank, but.. think of it this way.
Disney's been king of the world, especially in animation (Which has been getting sidelined in favor of live-action. I guarantee if Mufasa was animated it'd be running neck and neck with Sonic 3 instead of lagging behind). They're a luxury limousine running fast on a road that has no other cars (because Disney bought those cars), and the tank's running out of gas. You won't know it's running on fumes until it comes to a complete stop, but at the speed it's going it will take awhile...
And the second it stops, a simple fuel service isn't going to get it running again. It will get running again, too many people need it to run. So they'll call a mechanic, and it will take to the streets once more.
Is Disney cooked? of course not, but they will see a return of their darkest days. A decade or two of the Disney brand no longer being that shining seal of quality people take it for.
I see it comparable to Nintendo's Wii-U days when the company was a joke with no 3rd Party support and consumers who weren't even sure what the Wii-U was even supposed to be. (Too many passed on it, believing it to be an overpriced gimmicky tablet add-on for the Wii... The launch title being NSMBU instead of something fans hadn't already seen before I think is a big part of the blame for that.)
Nintendo didn't wind up in bankruptcy, but they'd need to reinvent the wheel via the Switch, win back 3rd Party Support, and rekindle the faith of the fans, to get back to being a power house.
I love that IGN reviewed both movies and gave Sonic a 6 out of 10 despite saying it's the "Best movie of the franchise" and that Jim Carey was amazing as both Dr. Robotnik and Dr. Robotnik. (For the record Sonic 1 and 2 were given a 7)
And that Mufasa was given an 8 out of 10 despite IGN's review struggling to come up with anything nice to say.
It not only validates my own (low) opinion of IGN and their track record of hating on Sonic just because it's Sonic, but it makes me laugh. We're seeing big corporations slowly losing control.
They can't tell us what we should like and not like anymore. The market has never been freer to decide what movies they like and what games to play. (Balatro being the only real game at the Awards with Remake, DLC, and Tech Demo being the other options is kind of hillarious)
Also it's kinda weird, a movie inspired by Hamlet that demands to be taken seriously is considered low grade shlock, and an adaptation of a twenty year old old video game who's greatest literary contribution is children's comic books made to promote games, toys, and t-shirts is considered the PEAK of Cinema.... Especially when such a thing is actually a sign of society recovering from brainwashing and not falling deeper into it.
I can hear Ebert rolling in his grave and I'm here for it.
I'll also say this, Sonic 3 is a god damn masterpiece. It got me to take Maria's death seriously.
In the games Maria Robotnik is such a shallow one-note character who I don't even dislike, because there isn't enough of her to form an opinion on one way or another.
Now sure, I'm happy to slap the shit out of anyone who'd dishonor her memory, but.. I'm doing that as Shadow, to SHADOW she's the only real friend he's ever had. To me, she's just a cheap attempt to get invested to take a story trying WAY too hard to be grimdark when all I really wanna do is go fast and eat ass grab rings.
Most Sonic characters serve a gameplay function, so all you really need is their archetype. Flying tech guy, Punchy boy, Lovesick Hammer Girl, Kicky boob lady, Skatebird with a skateboard, Trunks-from-DBZ and his crazy physics engine! (Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Rouge, Jet, and Silver)
Shadow however needs his narrative to back him up or else he's just "Emo Sonic"
So I've seen Maria die many, many times, and honestly it keeps getting funnier as she slowly devolved from "Cheap tearjerker bait" to "Meme"
Sonic 3 gave Maria a character, actually showed her bonding with Shadow, and took her so seriously that if she were in any other movie franchise; This would be a film about a girl who makes friends with an alien and with the power of friendship is able to show everyone that he means no harm, and that it doesn't matter what you look like, and all that with everyone singing a silly song over a campfire...
Sorry Maria, but this aint your faerie tale, it's Shadow's grim fable.
So when she died, she did something no Maria story, not in games, comics, or anime has ever done before. Even though I knew it was coming she made me feel, shock, anger, and misery to such an extent that it was all too easy to sympathize with Shadow's pain.
Don't forget another thing in common between Nintendo and Disney: lawsuits. And obsession with intellectual property. Not required to be against their own fans, but it is preferred.
Given Disney's stranglehold on animation and general lack of interest in high quality 2d animation it's been quite interesting seeing the market for high quality foreign animation grow so much. At one time Studio Ghibli relied on Disney for distribution in the US, but now they're a name that can stand on its own (and with the gkids acquisition/merger we should be seeing more Japanese animation hitting American screens and theatres)
I have to expect foreign and indie animation studios to continue to grow in market share as Disney continues to ignore 2d animation and continues it's overly rapid production schedules that don't allow for the quality.
Simply put, you watch a non-disney animated film or even just any of Disney's animated films from before they killed hand drawn animation and there's so much quality lost, where you go from every single frame being it's own masterpiece of artwork to just enough set dressing to not look out of place but good luck finding a still you'd want to hang on your wall.
I give it about 10 years before Disney is forced to course correct. Just long enough for kids who haven't seen a good animated film released by Disney their entire childhoods to become teens/adults and start paying to consume competitors content instead
I can't prove the data wrong, but I will say it's not particularly uncommon for businesses to move money around in an effort to make new product seem better or more profitable than it is. Tons of incentives to do so, little reason not to.
Piracy isn't theft, because on modern media platforms, "buying" doesn't actually sell you permanent copies. It just gives you temporary access to a DRM'd file that they can remotely disable at any time. If buying isn't owning, pirating isn't stealing.
Yeah, that's what I said. It's not stealing but technically it is copyright infringement which is not same as stealing. I mean I'm not judging anyone I also sometimes pirate.
People are willing to pay at least some amount if priced appropriately. Otherwise, we're going to take it for free. Remember, companies we're reporting record PROFITS during a pandemic when most people were struggling.
I watched the entirety of Blair witch project the week before it came out in a real player at 300 by 200 pixels. I kept rotating between watching it thumbnail sized and watching it regular player sized. Both were equally inferiorating
Yeah this was going on before that. Media Piracy really set-off in the late 90s when DSL, and cable, internet services became mainstream. Also Netflix started making their own content in response to a growing number of competing services, all fighting over the same pool of production companies' work, and having exclusive rights to one IP, or another, rather than other services being the result of netflix making their own content.
Blatantly wrong. Netflix started producing their own shows because studios suddenly realized they could make more money charging for their own back catalog rather than leasing it to Netflix.
Allowing production companies to be distribution companies / streamers is inherently problematic given that copyright is based around monopolies.
Netflix correctly knew they were first to market with a streaming service but every production company would quickly pivot to a streaming service, leaving Netflix with no content. So they preemptively started making their own content to try to keep their market share. Sadly their production bets often didn’t pay off.
Even ignoring P2P predecessors to torrenting like Kazaa or Napster, there was still piracy early on. I guess it counts as piracy adjacent, but I got started buying bootleg anime boxsets off ebay, because the actual boxsets were like $200/season, and minimum wage was under $7/hour when I started, but I could get the same season on three DVDs from Hong Kong for $30. It wasn't too long after that, I found out about fansubs and started spending far too much time on IRC, downloading anime, manga and music off XDCC bots. I wasn't allowed to use bittorrent on the family machine, because "That's like Kazaa, we'll get sued into ruin," but those bots in fansub group channels were fine, especially since it wasn't immediately apparent looking at mIRC that I had one running too.
My first home computer was an Apple IIgs. It had no hard drive. You need to use a "boot disk" that loaded the operating system, and then once that was in RAM, you could swap out that disk for the one with your program on it. The OS looked a little like early MacOS; it was called ProDOS. You could technically use it to copy floppy disks (the program for that was "Copy II Plus"), but it took forever, because the copy program had to copy a chunk of the disk into RAM, then get you to swap to the target disk, write that chunk, get you to swap back to the first disk, load a new chunk, get you to swap disks again... It generally took about 40 swaps for a 3.5" high-density (by which they meant 800kb) floppy. It was incredibly tedious. If you had two disk drives, though, it could just work continuously without needing to wait for you to swap disks all the time.
It was more of a convenience thing. If you had 1 drive you had to babysit the read portion to then install the CD-R after. If you had two it was just load both and carry on for 20 minutes and come back to it.
That was just if you were burning a copy and not ripping. But you're right it wasn't necessary. I just remember more than once wanting a second drive so I didn't have to sit and wait to put the CD-R in after.
ad blockers are as easy as searching ublock in firefox addon stores.
Nowadays one does not need anything out of browser to stream content (except perhaps a vpn), so most likely your_favorite_show.exe(/apk) is malware. But even if it is legit but potentially contains malware you can always use a vm/android emulator (vm actually) depending on the software type.
Kodi + Fen Light plugin + Alldebrid + Trakt account. This setup is the easiest for people who don’t want to torrent or setup a NAS. It’s basically a pirated streaming service with the highest quality of streams. Alldebrid is a paid for service though but it is super cheap.
Oh, You want to use Firefox with ublock origin and a few other privacy add-ons if your not already, then just find a shady streaming site form the FMHY link that doesn't sketch you out too much. Your going to have to browse a few until you find one that's cozy and has what you want. You may also want a paid VPN for privacy if your worried, but I haven't heard of any one getting in shit for streaming and its very rare for torrenting.
Yes. If you don't have hardware that supports AV1 decode, it gets sent to the CPU instead.
For homelab stuff, the responsibility falls on the server to transcode the media to whichever format the client device requests.
That usually means being able to have ~2 simultaneous AV1 streams and maxing out the CPU.
Solid bitrate? I used 400 kb/s AV1 constant bitrate for HD anime, 750 for HD realfilm, results in 300 MB and 500 MB files for 2 hours video, no artifacts. Why does Handbrake default to 6000 kb/s?
Compare with the music industry, where there are a good number of streaming services, and pretty much all of them offer the same selection of music, all of it.
I don't think I know of anyone who pirates music at all.
The answer is greed. They make more being vertically integrated doing their own streaming than they would make taking a cut from a third party to host the same content.
I live in a place where people don't have money to pay for music streaming services, and even here, no one knows about soulseek or similars. What people do is listen to music via youtube. The only reasonably popular music piracy method around here is using telegram groups.
Netflix entered into the already existing sphere of greed based commodification / exploitation that legacy media created decades ago. these legacy media conglomerates (owned circularly by the same big players in wall street black rock, vangaurd, state street et all.) dominate and control multiple industries and now Netflix is just part of that same ecosystem amassing wealth for their own self centered agenda without much, if any oversight at all. Theres just few greedy old cigar smoking men or rather boardrooms lead by these same men controling a majority of the world. Blackrock, blackston, state street and vanguard circularly own about 20% of disney and they own around the same percentage of netflix as well. Nevermind all the other media outlets they own large shareholding positions of. Greed is not the accidental result its the primary objective
piracy is legit the one example where the free market truly balances itself out.
However, since it is technically illegal, this means we should legalize revenue losing practices against large corporations similar to piracy, such that we can simply fix capitalism once and for all.
Anon got it backwards, networks noticed how profitable Netflix was and bumped the price for Netflix to stream their stuff. Netflix responded by producing their own content rather than leasing others’ at exorbitant rates. Then Netflix later got greedy and bumped their prices, lowered their quality, and cancelled all of their good shows.
I think it's a bit of both. Netflix knew that companies choosing to pull their content would be a threat, so they prematurely started producing content (famously starting with House of Cards and Orange is the New Black). Whether because they saw this as a threat or because of the perceived greater profitability of their own platforms (probably a bit of both), other studios started pulling their content from Netflix and setting up their own streaming sites.
And naturally, other companies pulling their content accelerated Netflix's desire to produce their own content to ensure they weren't left in the lurch.
Yall are overcomplicating things. Let me simplify.
Capitalist corporations + infinite greed = cannibalism
It's remarkable how people can see right past what was actually happening and only see what they want to see. Netflix was never trying to be the good guy. Netflix didn't offer low prices out of the goodness of it's hearts. It doesn't have a heart, it has a ledger. The reason why Netflix offered a lot of content for a low price is because the company was trying to disrupt traditional cable. It was always the plan to increase prices, Netflix didn't become greedy, it always was. It's just that for a time the companies greed aligned with the publics greed. Once that relationship was no longer beneficial to Netflix it raised the prices, that was the plan all along.
But that's a zero sum argument. Every company is evil following that logic. No company does anything except for money.
You can make that argument, but it isn't unique to Netflix.
You’re getting there! Just a little further, now.
There certainly are some companies that seek to do good, or are run by good people. Arizona Green Tea is the current favourite but there are for sure others. The thing is though that there’re huge incentives to being greedy and awful, and a distinct lack of punishment for that behaviour, to the point where so fucking many of these companies are either evil or committing enough evil actions that it doesn’t matter at all the difference anymore.
Also they weren’t saying that the argument is unique to Netflix but ok then.
That's not overcomplicating it. That's the exact impetus for Netflix to make their own content (nothing premature about it).
Yes, Netflix famously said they need to be HBO before HBO could become Netflix.
It doesn't really matter, though. The only cause of companies pulling their content is Netflix's success. There was no way Netflix could have prevented it.
Yeah I consulted for the cable industry around the time that everyone was just starting to try to build their own services to compete with Netflix. It wasn't a secret that production companies would be pulling their content. There were licensing agreements signed that had expiration dates.
So it was more like a race on both ends. Production companies were like "we get exclusive streaming rights to our movies back in X months, so we need to have our own platform up and running." And Netflix was like "we lose streaming rights to these movies in X months, we need to make some content to replace it with."
RIP Inside Job
Unpopular opinion, but I wasn’t a fan. Was it a bad show? No! Did I enjoy it? Sometimes. How it developed the cult following that it has, I can’t quite piece together. Fantastic voice acting and sound design can only pull so much weight!
Fantastic acting and production quality can elevate any media but especially TV shows. Look at Shrinking for a prime example. It has the production quality of Dispatches From Elsewhere but it's essentially a three camera sitcom like Modern Family or hell All in the Family. And it's KILLING right now.
People like the humor of Inside Job and the fantastic quality made it so much better.
I guess if you’re in the market for cola, you’ll look for the cola with the best taste. But seeing a discontinued cola lauded as a fallen behemoth is a bit odd, from my perspective
An excellent concept with some interesting opportunities, butchered by regressing it to the same kitschy formulaic plotlines as every other uninspiring adult animation show. I don't want Big Bang Theory, I want Twin Peaks.
I didn't care for it either.
I gave it like 3-4 episodes but couldn't do it. I thought given the cult following and reputation it'd be right up my alley.
#everybodysawful
Direct download piracy and streaming is surprisingly popular.
With a bit of effort you can stream any movie directly to your TV for a few moneys a month (or free, but paying for the essential bits removes the jankiness)
Basically you select the movie, a system finds the torrent or DDL, a service downloads it (or has it cached) and you stream it to your device.
Something I learned back in the day: "Never pay for warez". Pirate all you want, the moment you are paying, pay the creator of the product you're interested in, not someone who pirated it and wants to profit from distributing it without a licence.
Except the value proposition still needs to make sense, so resigning to just pay the
creatorlicense holder exorbitant rates for ever-more-enshittified services is learning the wrong lesson.They have used their control over the system to grotesquely distort copyright from its original intent of getting more cultural works into the public domain for people to use and build on, to instead lock everything away for lifetimes. Don't buy into their lies and propaganda that they have any moral high ground.
Stremio?
While I agree with the trend for the average person, I think in pure numbers there are always going to be more tech savvy people in the foreseeable future.
Sure, 80% of people online in the 2000s and 90s were all tech savvy hobbyists, but their numbers was low (let’s say a million).
Now only 0.5% might be tech savvy, but that is 0.5% of a billion people, which would be 5 mil compared to 800k above.
I obviously picked convenient numbers but the point still stands, there are lots of tech savvy places today and it’s growing, just not as fast as the non tech savvy crowd unfortunately.
I am personally still friends with two people who even know how to navigate their filesystem beyond clicking the downloads or my documents link in the start menu. I hope you're right, but all I see around me at work and personal life is ignorance. People can't even figure out how to use their phones beyond the basics.
Yeah, on average you will find less and less tech savvy people in real life moving forward.
But if you were to ask a programming question on the most popular coding site, you would get more responses today than 20 years ago.
Yeah, but what's the relative quality of responses? I feel like the bar for "tech savvy" or "competent at programming" has dropped precipitously. And unfortunately, the number of people confidently asserting a wrong answer online is high in my experience, including on programming forums.
Think about it this way,
Has the total number of C++ experts gone down since 20 years ago or has it gone up? The total market share has gone down, but total amount of systems running C++ has increased.
Today is more lucrative to be an expert than 20 years ago, and there are far more positions that offer good money.
It’s also easier to make money by knowing very little programming.
So the question is, would the people capable of being a true expert avoid that path today even though it’s more lucrative, I don’t think so.
The only difference is, 20 years ago, only the true experts were online, now they probably don’t enjoy being online as much and are probably big fans of old school hobbies (like wood working)
I'm also inclined to believe what the other person was saying, because nowadays like you say people don't know how to use their devices to their full potential, but then I remember there used to be a time when I was the only one with a smart phone and everyone else was looking at me like I'm a weirdo for being on this phone during a commute for example, something that today is normal.
The nerdy people are still there and know how to use these tools, the general masses are still as clueless as always, they are just late adopters that never learned anything past what the walled gardens feed them. At least that's my feeling.
I think the end is where some people are moving but I think its a bit too pessimistic. While kids are becoming more tech illiterate there is always gonna be a certain amount of people that know a bit more than the masses and they are not gonna let themselves be pushed around.
One assumption I made is that there will be a continuous demand for self build PCs which will be an entry point for a lot where you can run your own operating system and own choice of hardware. My next assumption is that custom ROMs are gonna stick around or at least Linux phones will become usable in the future since tech savvy privacy people are interested in this. Then I hope the EU will continue to step up and the administration after Trump will support certain right to repair legislation. It doesn't need a giant group of people for a viable alternative to exist and I think there can be compromises between going stallman or giving up on ownership. Media servers and NAS for example are also really loved in a specific subset of people and I do not think people are willing to give up what they have. I get why you think the way you do and maybe I am too optimistic... I just think I'm not
I've made a similar comment on r/austrian_economics and got called a communist for it lol
But yeah, well said.
tbf, there are alternatives to torrenting now. I usually recommend fmovies, sudo-lol, or other streaming websites because the barrier to entry for those sites is just knowing the URL and having ublock origin.
I agree with you though that today's young adults are not as technologically inclined as young adults of the early 2000s where torrenting was rampant. But everyone understands a website.
Torrenting is hard compared to a visiting a website. Not only do you have to vet each torrent, you have to download a second piece of software (torrent client) to make sure it works, all the while making sure your router is set up correctly. And even if they set all this up correctly, they'll get a letter/email saying that they downloaded a file illegally since they didn't use a VPN. That will scare a novice user and stop torrenting.
Real-debrid is a weird one, it’s clearly you paying for piracy, but they’ve been around since forever.
I personally don't have too much of an issue for paying for piracy. It's money I would pay to Netflix if their catalog was decent.
Servers cost money.
If anything, these assholes streaming companies should see people paying for pirated content and say, "We should do better" instead of "ThEy ArE sTeAlInG oUr CoNtEnT!"
Edit: I looked up Real Debrid. Their website is sketchy. What exactly is it?
My understanding is that it's torrent and direct download caching on a massive scale, by file hash or something like that.
They cache torrents, magnets and ddl links at an astonishing scale.
You can put in pretty much any even decently popular magnet or ddl link set and get a direct download link with near infinite bandwidth (my 500Mbit connection is saturated every time)
War on general purpose computing
I think your doom and gloom scenario is a little dramatic considering we already have Linux. The free platform where you have full control over your technological experience already exists and has been well maintained for decades at this point. Sure, proprietary software not working on Linux sucks and will continue to be an issue, but there's typically FOSS alternatives for the useful programs.
It'd be more accurate to say we'll have two Internets, especially since that's expressly what Google wants. The ignorant people will all flock to the corpo slopping trough, and people like us will be using Linux devices to access federated sites like this one.
Right but you can still build your own PC. I already don't bother with a laptop or any of that other garbage because they are just worthless tech garbage. Sure, the new MacBook/Chromebook/etc will be locked down, but they're already a bitch to get a different OS running on so I'd argue we're already there.
Essentially what would be required is DRM from Intel or AMD on their CPUs to prevent you from ultimately installing whatever OS you want, and I don't think that fits their business model. I think they just want to make a bunch of money selling overpriced silicone, and don't need control of the platform. Sure, your software will be a few steps behind the cutting edge corpo stuff, but you make it sound like people will be trapped on their 2010 Thinkpad. You can still have a high powered computer, you just have to be part of a different ecosystem.
Linux is not on mobile. And before anyone says "Android/LineageOS is Linux", 1) Android is proprietary (and AOSP is not a real substitute for Android), and 2) LineageOS isn't a substitute for Android without microg, and also isn't Linux (last I checked, app development on LineageOS REQUIRED ANDROID STUDIO for the signing bullshit).
Now, if anyone says "Linux is on mobile, I daily-drive my PinePhone!" (and is actually being honest), then congratulations and I respect the hell out of you but you're more of a masochist than Drew Devault and that makes you a unicorn.
Torrenting is less common but thats because most piracy is just streaming now. Its more profitable to host a streaming site, youre less likely to get a virus streaming compared to torrenting now, and its easier to access and find.
This is spot on.
Try the 70s.
That was when VHS and cassette tapes started to hit the market and there was no copy protection on those. Following that, people copied floppy disks enough that they had to make that "dont copy that floppy" jingle.
There was a brief period with the switch to digital and CDROMs where piracy stopped, but then CD burners hit the market and it started again.
It turns out in every era, copyright is a sham. Information in its natural state is free - our legal system tries to change that.
The laws around copyright are designed to prevent citizens from doing things.
The laws around human rights are designed to preventing the government from doing things.
The later expands your agency while the former restricts it.
Yall left a big ol' giant hole in your simplification about these itty bitty things that have an equally outsized impact on all of our lives :
Corporations.
Copyright predates corporations. Many corporations need copyright to extract profit. If you're anti-corporation but pro-copyright, you're the only with the big ol' giant hole.
Copyright is a sham is my next tattoo. Maybe with Mickey doing something lewd and that's the banner underneath.
Does this make Marion Stokes this most prolific pirate of all time?
sony v universal still stands, afaik. fair use.
even at that scale, she did it privately for non-commercial purposes.
Anon: 2007
The music industry ca. 1981:
Also the book piracy that existed in universities through photocopying and sharing pages.
This is making a comeback with scanning.
Amazon was the place to buy manuals(art,hobby, do it yourself etc.). Now authors have pulled their books from print and expecting people to sign a subscription on patreon. Now there are sharks overpricing any remaining physical print second hand by 2000%.
pirates have scanned these books and selling access to uploaded jpgs for a fraction of what the manual would have cost had it just stayed in print.
So we left side b blank so you can help!
I feel like people are ignoring that Netflix was bleeding money during their "golden age". They only switched to being profitable a couple years back. A lot of times what people describe as enshittification is just unprofitable companies having to come up with an actual business model as venture capital dries up.
Also, merry Christmas:)
You can also argue that silicon valley has that particular business model of purposely making a product look great and cheap until enough people sign up.
It's distinct from how most companies run in the red at their inception in that those traditional businesses would gladly be in the black but are waiting for economies of scale or building a reputation among consumers.
And that's probably why people get so disappointed w/ tech companies.
It's not that the prices they switch to are unreasonable, but that they hike prices after getting a user base, so it feels like a bait and switch instead of an early bird discount. If they made it an actual early bird discount, people would probably be fine with it.
Or maybe they keep prices the same, but drop content while keeping prices the same. If they instead structured it as a base tier and an "early bird" free access to a higher tier, which then starts costing money after some time period, I also think people would be okay with it. I have always thought Netflix should have packages, so you could opt-in to additional stuff like maybe Disney or HBO content. If Netflix did this early on, maybe Disney and HBO wouldn't have bothered making their own streaming platforms and instead just raked in revenue from these higher tier customers, because they get most of the benefit of having their own streaming platform, with none of the costs.
In pretty much every case, I'll point to Valve's business model as an example. Gaming companies generally don't feel the need to run their own platforms, and the ones that do often still distribute through other stores.
Valve was the first, their business model was basically removing retail (the actual reason for Steam was to make updates trivial, so a Counterstrike update didn't break half the servers for 2 weeks), for everyone after Steam the business model was removing Steam by replacing it with a Steam clone.
That package thing they do on prime video
Yeah, but Prime sucks in other ways. I wish I could combine what I like about Prime and Netflix into one service.
Netflix has a market cap of 300bn. Public markets picked up right where venture capital left off no bother. The problem I think was the competitive forces as much as enshitified business model, though perhaps one cannot exist without the other. Certainly without doing their own content they could easily have become ludicrously profitable as a redistributer only, though I'm not convinced it would have stopped everyone and their dog moving in on the space.
Facebook is really the cleaner example of enshitification. They could have happily printed modest money for ever as the preeminent social network, but they took the greedy approach and morphed into a cesspool.
Merry Christmas to you!
If you take venture capital, you sacrifice your ability to not be greedy. Could Facebook have even existed without VC? Facebook didn't have ads during its startup IIRC, which meant they had no revenue.
That's a really interesting hypothetical. They always had ads but obviously the early scale and scope was smaller, so revenue was piddling early on. They had pretty limited costs though and were a super hot ticket to give capital to. I mean they needed some kind of financing for their trajectory, which maybe anyway would have pushed them to monetize aggressively any which way.
Ultimately I don't think we'll ever know and the examples of people choosing not to get filthy rich off the back of these innovations are extremely rare. Even when e.g. openAI gets set up explicitly as non profit it gets bastardised, so what chance does a regular joint stock company have of operating in the interests of consumers.
Theu saw the writing on the walls. They knew the big dogs would want a slice of the streaming game and they needed to pivot before the rug got pulled out from ubder them. Hulu was already being constructed when they were recalling shifting into making their own products IIRC. It wasn't just VC that got them to their golden era, they also relied on the industry bot taking streaming seriously enough and giving them deals that they never would today.
This (though you need to fix your typos). Movie companies saw Netflix as a garbage rerun channel. They were chasing after opening weekends. It took a long time for them to finally launch their own service.
Hulu has been around for a very long time (it's also part of why their UI sucks ass while being owned by Disney. It's the same UI they've had for years) they just didn't fully invest in the marketing and content until Netflix proved to C-Suites how viable a streaming service actually was
Wikipedia
Netflix also launched their Internet streaming service in 2007 and in 2011 is when they separated the subscriptions so that the DVD service and the streaming service were different subscriptions, as well as when their first batch of originals/exclusives were released (House of Cards, season 5 of Arrested Development and they were the exclusive North American distributor for the Norwegian TV series Lilyhammer) and it really wasn't for a few more years before all of the content licensing deals started expiring and being non-renewed, somewhere around 2018ish by my memory.
Since the last decade has been a blur, I'll just summarize that HBO Max, Paramount+, Discovery+ and Peacock all didn't launch until the 2020s, meanwhile Disney+ and Apple+ both launched in late 2019, accidentally timing themselves perfectly to grow immensely during the pandemic (and Disney+ was smart in bundling with Hulu since by that point they owned 2/3 of Hulu via their 21st Century Fox acquisition)
So while yes, Hulu probably was a hedge by legacy media companies, they didn't really invest in it until Netflix already owned the streaming landscape
2007? Anon is a sweet summer child.
I'll say. I was sailing the seas back in the late '90s. By 2007, I had amassed quite a hoard of treasure.
Motherfucker was unborn while the rest of us were downloading Darude - Sandstorm on Napster.
Nah, AudioGalaxy. Or DALnet.
eDonkey
Do not cite the deep magic to me, I was there when it was written.
FTPs
One word. Usenet
The first rule of Usenet is….
OP forgot Napster, as well as the p2p networks of old like WinMX, Kazaa, etc, nevermind Usenet.
Add LimeWire and BearShare to the list for nostalgics.
Even before that, BBS, WaReZ sites, IRC. Dialup internet wasn't a problem when RAR files could be split up for a release.
IRC was a wild level of automated for its time too
Shared drives on a LAN!
There was even search terms for finding open servers on search engines such as: “parent-of” “open-directory” MP3 AVI etc
Anon never copy vhs, cassette tape, cd, and dvd. I lived in southeast asia and pirated cd/dvd is openly sold in night market and low foot traffic part of the mall throughout the late 90s till early 2010s, only occasionally they got raid. Before that we basically record show from cable and rental then copy for each others.
But yes, as GabeN proved again and again, piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. Almost.
Also too, using cassettes to max mix tapes from the radio
Even into the 90s, I remember making cassette tapes of the local college radio shows.
One of my earliest memories as a little kid was my father putting a tape recorder in front of a record player speaker, and telling us all to be quiet because he was recording it. (Later on we got the fancier stereo with direct audio hookups.)
I remember feeling so excited when I got a shitty toy tape recorder with a microphone. The first thing I did was record all three Tetris songs from my Gameboy.
Exactly!
When I found Netflix, I subbed and stayed a customer for years because they provided the content I wanted at a low price. Now, however, the content has been split across a bunch of different streaming services, and juggling subscriptions and finding the content I want is a PITA, so I don't bother. I cancelled everything except Netflix, and I plan to cancel that next month once my SO finishes the Netflix originals they want to watch, and we just buy what we want and I rip them to our Jellyfin server (or if I can't find it legally to own, we pirate).
I'm a bit less concerned about the price and more frustrated by the change in user experience. I understand they can't have everything all the time, but now it seems like they rarely have what I want, so we end up not using the service much. Screw paying for something I don't use.
Valve has the right idea. I could jump between services and get a bit better deal, but I actually end up rebuying games I got free on other platforms because the Steam experience is so good. I have a Steam Deck, and it's really nice to just pick it up and play. My desktop is Linux, and it's really nice that most games just work w/o fiddling. I still shop around a little, but most of my gaming money goes to Valve because the service works well.
Kinda inverts inverted the causality of Netflix starting their own production and other companies pulling their licences. Netflix started their own production to survive the licences getting pulled, which was inevitable as soon as Netflix looked profitable.
They didn't get greedy, they probably started out greedy, ran a good service to grab market share, then had to make moves to defend against the predictable greed of the incumbents.
It's greedy turtles all the way down
This is basically it except the trick was Netflix wasn't actually all that profitable based strictly off of customers to start. It was a long con. It was ostensibly funded by people placing a bet. They offered a service that wasn't just disruptive, it was operating at a loss. People piled into the service so licences started to get dicey. Netflix started producing and filming, initially at independent rates amd sweetheart deals in my union territory because everybody looked at as being a little baby studio that needed nurturing and to be fair working a Netflix show back when it started had perks. They placed bets on creators who wanted to make something different. Not nessisarily great but different giving their production teams a lot of creative freedom. Paid lunches, cell allowance, sometimes better hours and crew gifts when a number of studios like Disney were pulling penny pinching bullshit and trying to pretend they were an independent studio to get lower rates while letting their producers act like skeeze.
Thing was it was a cuckoo all along.
They flushed the market with a business model sustained by outside money so everybody else started doing the same thing. It destroyed all the union and contract protections syndicated television once had particularly erasing residuals. That was the main thing. Creators used to make money off of the amalgamation of their lifetime work by being owed a small amount everytime a rerun was aired... But streaming didn't do that. They had those sweetheart deals that made streaming services exempt from on demand access counting as replays. So you cut off the career curve of creators from building security and only paid them for stuff they made once turning them effectively gig worker.
Once everyone was playing by the same rules the funding at the top cut out because they got what they wanted out of it they started jacking prices, removing titles, selling advertising because what the hell were you going to do, go back to cable? Now the boom is over and our local Industry is a bloody dust bowl. My seniority has jumped up more in the past year than it has in the full ten years before as folk have been retiring or dropping from the union to find new careers.
Exactly this and more.
I'm not even pirating because it's cheaper, or easier. I have near 100TB in storage, and it takes hours per week to search material, have it downloaded, checked, etc. I just am done with the marketing, the branding, the advertising, the bullshit rules. I just want to watch what I want to watch and media companies made this impossible so I'm forced to sail the high seas
Why not just... Automate that with an Arr stack? And use Jellyseer to find new and popular movies and shows.
Im looking into an arr stack but it seems there are a LOT of moving pieces. I'm technical enough to pull it off but also old enough to roll my eyes at seeing how many systems I'll need to install, setup, configure, etc. sonar, bazaar, radarr, arrarr..
I dont suppose there is a single docker container to install that pulls and connects it all? I dont mind a bit of work but this sure seems a lot at first glance
There's several that you can customize to your liking, and several megathreads about it on the old site we shall not speak of.
Thing is, the specific units you install can bedifferent depending on personal preference; I use qbittorrent instead of transmission for instance, Jellyfin instead of Plex, and so on.
Once you get it set up, though, everything else should go smoothly, and you'll practically never have to do manual searches ever again (except those really niche shows nobody's ever heard of).
There's an example docker file from Rick45 on github, but as I noted, he uses stuff like Plex and Deluge instead. Feel free to just copy the example file and edit as needed for your preferred services.
Me, my preferred stack includes Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, Prowlarr, Jellyfin, qBittorrent, SurfShark, JellySeer, Flaresolver, and Organizer. Again, tweak as you'd like.
Wow that's a lot.
How do you not think too much about hard drive failures 😅
Serious question though, how much do you spend on drives, they're getting cheaper but it's still around like 25€/TB where I live?
Not really worrying about it. Bought 5 20TB drives about a year ago, and a year from now I'll buy 5 new ones
He spends about 2500€
100TB? Why?
Because that's like 20,000 movies and I need two new movies to watch every night until the day I die, thanks.
More like 2500 and 250 complete series at the quality that I'm getting them.
Yeah, I won't ever will watch half of that but at the moment it's a nice hobby
I know when you can get petabytes, why stop at 100TB.
Build your own Netflix gets expensive after a while.
I found I watched a lot more once I installed Jellyfin rather than faffing around with files and folders whenever I wanted to watch anything.
Because its fun. Because i get obscure movies in high quality, maybe for posterity? I dunno, it's a hobby. Why does anyone get a Warhammer 40K army?
pr0n
Netflix didn't get greedy (well not in that way). The movie companies wanted to make their own platform, which would have left Netflix with nothing. So they had to become their own production company. They said "we have to become a production company faster than production companies become streaming companies".
2007 ? Everybody around me was pirating every single piece of media in 2000 and we were late to the party
Napster was a household name and made mp3 piracy mainstream in 1999!
The golden days of the net 🥲
People were pirating games over bbs in the 80s. I have a shoebox of 5.25" floppies for the commodore 64 with hand written labels.
Don't copy that floppy
Take that 3.5 floppy you got in the mail and break the tab so that you could read / write.
Doom and Wolf3d for my buddies. Rise of the Triad.
I really wish I was a consultant for these fucking jokers.
Back when Disney+ was just "Rumor has it Disney wants to launch their own Netflix-like streaming service.", I called this shit. I said "Well that's just going to cause this whole thing to fall apart, no one's going to juggle 50 different streaming services just to be able to find something to watch."
And I was fucking right.
The only ethical streaming service is Tubi as it doesn't charge relying on ads alone, and it's a neat little bonus that Tubi has actively aided in the restoration of lost media.
If it aint on Tubi, then I'm going to yo-ho-ho with a bottle of fuck you.
Disney Plus generated $8.4 billion revenue in 2023, an 13% increase year-on-year.
lol
Yes, but they also brought back piracy, eroded faith in the brand, and while Disney+ is making money.....
Disney's newer efforts are kinda showing it's not the powerhouse it used to be. With the only thing they really have going for them are the legacy media that they're holding hostage on a platform, they arbitrarily removes things from time to time for seemingly no reason (the Willow series for example, which makes very little sense since that was original to Disney+ to begin with and for some reason Buzz Lightyear of Star Command isn't on the platform despite all the other Toy Story media being present... and there are several episodes of The Simpsons that are just straight up memory-holed; most infamously the Michael Jackson episode)
If this trend continues, Disney will be left with people pirating the legacy media that people at home have shaky access to at best (Monthly fee for content that may be removed with no notice and for no reason), especially as prices soar and wages stay the same, and interest in newer project dwindling.
Or to be blunt, one of the most classic blunders: High short term profits at the cost of being unsustainable in the long term.
Sure it's easy to think of Disney as laughing its way to the bank, but.. think of it this way.
Disney's been king of the world, especially in animation (Which has been getting sidelined in favor of live-action. I guarantee if Mufasa was animated it'd be running neck and neck with Sonic 3 instead of lagging behind). They're a luxury limousine running fast on a road that has no other cars (because Disney bought those cars), and the tank's running out of gas. You won't know it's running on fumes until it comes to a complete stop, but at the speed it's going it will take awhile...
And the second it stops, a simple fuel service isn't going to get it running again. It will get running again, too many people need it to run. So they'll call a mechanic, and it will take to the streets once more.
Is Disney cooked? of course not, but they will see a return of their darkest days. A decade or two of the Disney brand no longer being that shining seal of quality people take it for.
I see it comparable to Nintendo's Wii-U days when the company was a joke with no 3rd Party support and consumers who weren't even sure what the Wii-U was even supposed to be. (Too many passed on it, believing it to be an overpriced gimmicky tablet add-on for the Wii... The launch title being NSMBU instead of something fans hadn't already seen before I think is a big part of the blame for that.)
Nintendo didn't wind up in bankruptcy, but they'd need to reinvent the wheel via the Switch, win back 3rd Party Support, and rekindle the faith of the fans, to get back to being a power house.
But mufasa IS animated
You know what I mean
It's also shit. Animation only goes so far.
Say what you will about Sonic. No one involved in those films is having a bad time. There's a lotta heart there and it shows.
Mufasa is shlok incarnate.
I love that IGN reviewed both movies and gave Sonic a 6 out of 10 despite saying it's the "Best movie of the franchise" and that Jim Carey was amazing as both Dr. Robotnik and Dr. Robotnik. (For the record Sonic 1 and 2 were given a 7)
And that Mufasa was given an 8 out of 10 despite IGN's review struggling to come up with anything nice to say.
It not only validates my own (low) opinion of IGN and their track record of hating on Sonic just because it's Sonic, but it makes me laugh. We're seeing big corporations slowly losing control.
They can't tell us what we should like and not like anymore. The market has never been freer to decide what movies they like and what games to play. (Balatro being the only real game at the Awards with Remake, DLC, and Tech Demo being the other options is kind of hillarious)
Also it's kinda weird, a movie inspired by Hamlet that demands to be taken seriously is considered low grade shlock, and an adaptation of a twenty year old old video game who's greatest literary contribution is children's comic books made to promote games, toys, and t-shirts is considered the PEAK of Cinema.... Especially when such a thing is actually a sign of society recovering from brainwashing and not falling deeper into it.
I can hear Ebert rolling in his grave and I'm here for it.
I'll also say this, Sonic 3 is a god damn masterpiece. It got me to take Maria's death seriously.
In the games Maria Robotnik is such a shallow one-note character who I don't even dislike, because there isn't enough of her to form an opinion on one way or another.
Now sure, I'm happy to slap the shit out of anyone who'd dishonor her memory, but.. I'm doing that as Shadow, to SHADOW she's the only real friend he's ever had. To me, she's just a cheap attempt to get invested to take a story trying WAY too hard to be grimdark when all I really wanna do is go fast and
eat assgrab rings.Most Sonic characters serve a gameplay function, so all you really need is their archetype. Flying tech guy, Punchy boy, Lovesick Hammer Girl, Kicky boob lady, Skatebird with a skateboard, Trunks-from-DBZ and his crazy physics engine! (Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Rouge, Jet, and Silver)
Shadow however needs his narrative to back him up or else he's just "Emo Sonic"
So I've seen Maria die many, many times, and honestly it keeps getting funnier as she slowly devolved from "Cheap tearjerker bait" to "Meme"
Sonic 3 gave Maria a character, actually showed her bonding with Shadow, and took her so seriously that if she were in any other movie franchise; This would be a film about a girl who makes friends with an alien and with the power of friendship is able to show everyone that he means no harm, and that it doesn't matter what you look like, and all that with everyone singing a silly song over a campfire...
Sorry Maria, but this aint your faerie tale, it's Shadow's grim fable.
So when she died, she did something no Maria story, not in games, comics, or anime has ever done before. Even though I knew it was coming she made me feel, shock, anger, and misery to such an extent that it was all too easy to sympathize with Shadow's pain.
Don't forget another thing in common between Nintendo and Disney: lawsuits. And obsession with intellectual property. Not required to be against their own fans, but it is preferred.
At this point I'm surprised I haven't been sued for wearing a Waddle Dee hat that I paid in public. (I don't have the Kirby License)
Given Disney's stranglehold on animation and general lack of interest in high quality 2d animation it's been quite interesting seeing the market for high quality foreign animation grow so much. At one time Studio Ghibli relied on Disney for distribution in the US, but now they're a name that can stand on its own (and with the gkids acquisition/merger we should be seeing more Japanese animation hitting American screens and theatres)
I have to expect foreign and indie animation studios to continue to grow in market share as Disney continues to ignore 2d animation and continues it's overly rapid production schedules that don't allow for the quality.
Simply put, you watch a non-disney animated film or even just any of Disney's animated films from before they killed hand drawn animation and there's so much quality lost, where you go from every single frame being it's own masterpiece of artwork to just enough set dressing to not look out of place but good luck finding a still you'd want to hang on your wall.
I give it about 10 years before Disney is forced to course correct. Just long enough for kids who haven't seen a good animated film released by Disney their entire childhoods to become teens/adults and start paying to consume competitors content instead
I give it five
And they somehow just became profitable... while also already legacy owning thr vast majority of content
I can't prove the data wrong, but I will say it's not particularly uncommon for businesses to move money around in an effort to make new product seem better or more profitable than it is. Tons of incentives to do so, little reason not to.
Also since you quote revenue not profit, they were still net unprofitable as of 2023 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/streaming-profit-report-netflix-disney-warners-paramount-nbcu-1235868631/
Didn't Xbox do something like this? I heard they converted all remaining Xbox Live subscribers to Xbox Game Pass.
🏴☠️🎶"Yo! Ho! All hands, hoist the colours high!"🎶🏴☠️
That's a weird as heck christmas song.
The One Piece is real!.... and can be seen on [Streaming Site REDACTED]
Pluto is also free with ads
But piracy is not theft, it's copyright infringement.
Piracy isn't theft, because on modern media platforms, "buying" doesn't actually sell you permanent copies. It just gives you temporary access to a DRM'd file that they can remotely disable at any time. If buying isn't owning, pirating isn't stealing.
Yeah, that's what I said. It's not stealing but technically it is copyright infringement which is not same as stealing. I mean I'm not judging anyone I also sometimes pirate.
it's only theft if they lose it when you take it
theft enjoyers unite
People are willing to pay at least some amount if priced appropriately. Otherwise, we're going to take it for free. Remember, companies we're reporting record PROFITS during a pandemic when most people were struggling.
https://www.vendavo.com/all/willingness-to-pay/
https://fortune.com/2022/03/31/us-companies-record-profits-2021-price-hikes-inflation/
I haven't stopped sailing those seas. A pirate's life for me. :)
Same same same yaaaar
2007? I remember watching a DivX of The Matrix back in 99. Prior to that I remember watching south park episodes in the RealPlayer.
Those RealPlayer Southpark episodes were 15mb and had 8 pixels
South Park's graphics were so bad back then that probably almost sufficed.
I watched the entirety of Blair witch project the week before it came out in a real player at 300 by 200 pixels. I kept rotating between watching it thumbnail sized and watching it regular player sized. Both were equally inferiorating
Yeah this was going on before that. Media Piracy really set-off in the late 90s when DSL, and cable, internet services became mainstream. Also Netflix started making their own content in response to a growing number of competing services, all fighting over the same pool of production companies' work, and having exclusive rights to one IP, or another, rather than other services being the result of netflix making their own content.
Yes, but you are old as a rock.
Those times are lost in the unknowable pre-history of what we call "the internet" today.
We're just as stable!... Maybe.
it would certainly make me feel better about myself if I knew rocks complain about their backs as much as I do
How do I know you're not just a rock in a trench coat, complaining about human foibles like back pain to blend in???
Actually, how can I be sure I'm not?
Dun Dunn dunnnnnnn
Blatantly wrong. Netflix started producing their own shows because studios suddenly realized they could make more money charging for their own back catalog rather than leasing it to Netflix.
Allowing production companies to be distribution companies / streamers is inherently problematic given that copyright is based around monopolies.
Netflix correctly knew they were first to market with a streaming service but every production company would quickly pivot to a streaming service, leaving Netflix with no content. So they preemptively started making their own content to try to keep their market share. Sadly their production bets often didn’t pay off.
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler Y :::
lol 2007.
Hell, we were on Napster in 99.
Dling metallica…
Bootlegs in the 80s
I miss that most of all
These fucking dumbass kids. Whyyyyy won't they just open up a book-shaped website and read the actual history?
Of course I say that in a country that literally forgot what happened just four years ago so...nvmd, back to "human race deserves itself" mode.
Even ignoring P2P predecessors to torrenting like Kazaa or Napster, there was still piracy early on. I guess it counts as piracy adjacent, but I got started buying bootleg anime boxsets off ebay, because the actual boxsets were like $200/season, and minimum wage was under $7/hour when I started, but I could get the same season on three DVDs from Hong Kong for $30. It wasn't too long after that, I found out about fansubs and started spending far too much time on IRC, downloading anime, manga and music off XDCC bots. I wasn't allowed to use bittorrent on the family machine, because "That's like Kazaa, we'll get sued into ruin," but those bots in fansub group channels were fine, especially since it wasn't immediately apparent looking at mIRC that I had one running too.
It’s currently at $7.25 so think about how much you could afford now!
All I'm going to say is every computer I had was equipped with 2 disk drives until 2010. Elder Millennials and Gen X know why.
My first home computer was an Apple IIgs. It had no hard drive. You need to use a "boot disk" that loaded the operating system, and then once that was in RAM, you could swap out that disk for the one with your program on it. The OS looked a little like early MacOS; it was called ProDOS. You could technically use it to copy floppy disks (the program for that was "Copy II Plus"), but it took forever, because the copy program had to copy a chunk of the disk into RAM, then get you to swap to the target disk, write that chunk, get you to swap back to the first disk, load a new chunk, get you to swap disks again... It generally took about 40 swaps for a 3.5" high-density (by which they meant 800kb) floppy. It was incredibly tedious. If you had two disk drives, though, it could just work continuously without needing to wait for you to swap disks all the time.
It was more of a convenience thing. If you had 1 drive you had to babysit the read portion to then install the CD-R after. If you had two it was just load both and carry on for 20 minutes and come back to it.
That was just if you were burning a copy and not ripping. But you're right it wasn't necessary. I just remember more than once wanting a second drive so I didn't have to sit and wait to put the CD-R in after.
It went marginally faster
So you can play videogames while burning disks? Idk.
Don't tell me you copied that floppy
I want to watch Dark Matter without a million popups, malware or shady "trust me bro" programs.
FMHY (Free Media Heck Yeah) has a pretty solid guide for beginners on how to find most forms of media safely.
ever heard of ad blocker and sandbox?
elaborate.
ad blockers are as easy as searching ublock in firefox addon stores. Nowadays one does not need anything out of browser to stream content (except perhaps a vpn), so most likely your_favorite_show.exe(/apk) is malware. But even if it is legit but potentially contains malware you can always use a vm/android emulator (vm actually) depending on the software type.
Kodi + Fen Light plugin + Alldebrid + Trakt account. This setup is the easiest for people who don’t want to torrent or setup a NAS. It’s basically a pirated streaming service with the highest quality of streams. Alldebrid is a paid for service though but it is super cheap.
Going to have to pirate it or pay for ad free.
oh sorry, I thought this was the piracy community. my question would have suggested that I wanted to learn how to do it, if I was there.
Oh, You want to use Firefox with ublock origin and a few other privacy add-ons if your not already, then just find a shady streaming site form the FMHY link that doesn't sketch you out too much. Your going to have to browse a few until you find one that's cozy and has what you want. You may also want a paid VPN for privacy if your worried, but I haven't heard of any one getting in shit for streaming and its very rare for torrenting.
I thought you were having a laugh.
r/piracy is still the best piracy community. Unfortunately there is no match in lemmy.
Well, not that one can see from lemmy.world anyway, since they block [email protected]. But for everyone else on lemmy feel free to stop by!
shit, time to make an alt.
[email protected]
Gentle reminder that i2p exists where torrents can be downloaded anonymously.
https://lemmy.world/c/i2p
I2p is great , definitely the future
Join i2p? What do you mean?
I'm just as confused as you are
so right, I can't believe how right you are
First rule of usenet. Dont talk about usenet
Good point, fixed
Why be so combative?
Edit:_why he be?
Literally the only thing missing is full migration to H265 or AV1 with a solid bitrate.
It's still a bit inconsistent due to hardware acceleration capabilities and final file size targets.
Most torrents are too compressed or too huge.
Luckily bandwidth and storage is cheaper than ever, so going for full size quality rips is viable for many.
My I present https://trash-guides.info/
Once Intel ARC cards are supported natively in UnRaid, I'll be transcoding everything to AV1.
Hardware encoding for AV1 is really all that has been missing for it to be widely used for homelab setups.
To someone not knowing anything, how big a deal is the difference?
Super oversimplified, but take an imaginary 1GB video file and it will compress roughly to the size below with minimal visual degradation.
H.264 -> H.265 -> AV1
1GB -> 600MB -> 350MB
Thanks!
Is it (more) cpu expensive to decode the AV1?
Yes. If you don't have hardware that supports AV1 decode, it gets sent to the CPU instead.
For homelab stuff, the responsibility falls on the server to transcode the media to whichever format the client device requests. That usually means being able to have ~2 simultaneous AV1 streams and maxing out the CPU.
With hardware decode, you could have 10+ streams.
Solid bitrate? I used 400 kb/s AV1 constant bitrate for HD anime, 750 for HD realfilm, results in 300 MB and 500 MB files for 2 hours video, no artifacts. Why does Handbrake default to 6000 kb/s?
I mean, yeah. More or less.
Compare with the music industry, where there are a good number of streaming services, and pretty much all of them offer the same selection of music, all of it.
I don't think I know of anyone who pirates music at all.
The answer is greed. They make more being vertically integrated doing their own streaming than they would make taking a cut from a third party to host the same content.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Well Soulseek isn't existing you're saying 😊?
Not too many people know of it.
I live in a place where people don't have money to pay for music streaming services, and even here, no one knows about soulseek or similars. What people do is listen to music via youtube. The only reasonably popular music piracy method around here is using telegram groups.
Netflix entered into the already existing sphere of greed based commodification / exploitation that legacy media created decades ago. these legacy media conglomerates (owned circularly by the same big players in wall street black rock, vangaurd, state street et all.) dominate and control multiple industries and now Netflix is just part of that same ecosystem amassing wealth for their own self centered agenda without much, if any oversight at all. Theres just few greedy old cigar smoking men or rather boardrooms lead by these same men controling a majority of the world. Blackrock, blackston, state street and vanguard circularly own about 20% of disney and they own around the same percentage of netflix as well. Nevermind all the other media outlets they own large shareholding positions of. Greed is not the accidental result its the primary objective
piracy is legit the one example where the free market truly balances itself out.
However, since it is technically illegal, this means we should legalize revenue losing practices against large corporations similar to piracy, such that we can simply fix capitalism once and for all.
2007... that guy was late to the game. And before this we had burned CDs and Zip Drives
I feel bad for the artists.
I’m doing my part 🫡
fuck streaming, long live piracy
This post is basically all wrong