You’re not allowed to buy the content anyways. You’re only allowed to pay for the illusion of ownership, until they decide they don’t want to host it anymore, and then you lose it. They’re such bullshit artists that they redefine common words like “buy” and “own” in their ToS.
I believe their justification would be that you aquiring the media is a definite loss of sale vs you not subbing/buying the media is a potential sale in the future.
Edit: Not my opinion. Just imagining how they would justify it before court should it come to it.
Which is stupid, because I’ll happily buy content I like with the guarantee it’ll never be taken from me. That’s not a real risk with physical media so why should that be acceptable with digital media?
He may have been an asshole but Steve Jobs said it best:
Customers want to own their content
And to reuse the same Gaben quote often repeated here:
“Customers want to own their content”. It’s amazing to me that execs don’t grasp this? Or that they think if they stop allowing it people will stop caring, but maybe they will eventually. But it seems obvious, I’ve know many families that had massive dvd collections they were proud of. Bookshelves with dozens of books they probably never even read. It’s just comforting to have a thing and know it’s yours.
Every development in business consolidates their power and increases anxiety for the people.
My theory is they’re just trying to stifle the ability to own any content to normalize the concept of not owning content, which over time will make the masses complacent.
I gotta say I love this meme. I think about it every time a tech company does something really scummy to take away features and products that people have purchased (and not rented/leased).
My mind is turning on the piracy front. I’ve paid for Netflix for like a decade, and it was good.
I tried not to pirate, but there was no legal way to stream Game of Thrones, so we would do watch parties. Eventually HBO came to Canada through bell and I could watch it online.
That moment was pretty great, I could watch all my shows, and HBO, and Netflix was putting out some strong content.
Then everyone decided they wanted a piece of the pie. Netflix has continued increasing prices while everyone pulled their content out, Amazon turned prime video into a roulette wheel of “can I watch this or not”, and Disney+ launched and very quickly turned into only shovelling garbage quality star wars and marvel projects, and now everyone is stuffing ads into their shitty content fiefdoms.
We’re back to where piracy is the better experience and now I can’t watch the content I want because it’s at most 2 shows a year per platform.
Disney+ is the only one i subscribe to here in BC. Since it comes combined with STAR (almost-Hulu) it is a fair value. TV service from Telus is stupid expensive and I still would not get to watch my hockey team. Not that I want to right now with them backpedalling so fast. Fucking Kings…
Had a very similar experience at the end of last year. Was sick of the bullshit all the providers were pulling and set up jellyfin.
Now running that on a pi so we’ve got our own streaming platform with movies and shows that you’d either need at least three separate services for or just outright won’t find if you don’t pirate.
To be fair, streaming was never buying. It was always paying entry to a library. If stuff gets removed from the library that’s the way it is.
That isn’t to say I don’t agree. Piracy is a service problem, as Gabe Newell so eloquently put it. Streaming started losing the moment it started splintering into cable networks.
Yup. You can pay Netflix for 4K, but you can only get 4K with Edge on Windows and even then only if you have the right hardware. Like, what’s the point? On Linux you can only get 1080p by spoofing your just agent. Otherwise they only give you 720p.
Sony allowed you to purchase episodes and seasons of shows like Mythbusters. They specifically stated you were purchasing that content.
Then they removed that purchased content from people’s account’s after they went separate ways with Discovery. Sony and Discovery stole from their customers
Hey man I have a question for you! Is this service download only or does it offer streaming too? Seems like a traditional torrent site to me, but just wanted to ask! Limited info on the site obvi.
You should definitely avoid XtremeHD IPTV (xtremehdiptv.org). For $15 a month, it’s way too cheap to offer all the live TV, movies, and series that it does. The article specifically mentions low pricing as a red flag, and I can definitely say that compared to what you’d normally pay for every live channel (including the premium ones and pay per view), series, and any just about any movie you can think of, this is most definitely a service that you should steer clear of.
Again, it might be news for you, but it’s a huge business with many layers. There are plenty of professional rippers and crackers who earn a living one way or another. There are plenty of underground translators and streamers. Ads, hostings, seed boxes, TV boxes, different partnerships - there’s a lot of money flowing.
Just go to any public tracker and you will see ads. Download some subtitles and they often contain ads as well. And then you have partnerships like targeted attacks on software developers, etc. Then there are normies who are getting scammed into buying pirated content for full retail price by physical media vendors. All kinds of handy people who will install you a dish to receive pirated satellite TV “for free”.
No subscription fee to use Steam. Games are available to download and play offline. 3 clicks of the mouse to buy, install, and play a game. It’s so damn easy to use Steam, I don’t miss buying physical PC games and I certainly don’t miss rolling the dice on russian cracks.
Steam also has so many features that cracks usually can’t or don’t offer. Friends system, anticheat, workshop modding, cosmetics, multiplayer (although this is actually a case of it usually being locked behind Steam), fast updates, Proton, just to name a few.
Steam and Netflix are the sole reasons I stopped pirating as a teenager/young adult.
I canceled Netflix long ago at this point and have been on the brink of going back to pirating films/TV. Too many streaming services… it’s just like TV packages before Netflix disrupted the model.
The only viable strategy for Netflix in the long run to stay in the game is to exploit people’s FOMO. You’ll sell way more subscriptions if you have a hot brand new show that everyone wants to watch. There will always be pirates, so if they want to stay one step ahead of them, they have to make sure there’s an abundance of quality programming on their platform coming out pretty much constantly.
Eh, that only goes so far. Any appeal to their original content is eroded by their practices surrounding streaming packages.
I canceled when they bumped their price up a lot, and had it structured to where the HD streaming was paired with the package for a bunch of devices. It’s bullshit that they don’t allow HD streaming with a package with only 1 or 2 devices.
I am also deterred by their password sharing crackdown, because I used to share subscription payments with my brother in another household.
I read that they’re planning on doing away with the commercial free subscription, and I have no interest to resubscribe if it’s a payment plus commercial model.
The convince of having quality original content in one place is nullified by their sleazy bullshit practices. There’s no way that their “convince” outweighs the little effort it takes to pirate the content IMO.
Honestly, with services like Jellyfin/Plex and the Sonarr suite, pirating has never been more convenient.
I add something to my Plex watchlist, and it automatically appears on my Plex server in 1080p or 4K (whichever format I prefer, with subtitles and metadata ready to go,) in like 20 minutes. And I can stream that to as many devices as I want. Hell, I can even give friends access to my server, and I can access theirs too. All through a single UI, with no regional restrictions or “sorry you can’t watch that without signing into your home wifi, because we want to make sure you’re in the same household” BS.
Streaming services were supposed to save us from the hassle of physical media, and be better than cable TV…
This has to be stopped. Just look at what Napster did to the music industry. That’s right, there used to be a music industry and now it’s just…gone. No more music, no more money to be made in music. Don’t let these evil streaming services do the same to poor defenceless Hollywood, bastion of women’s rights!
Jokes aside, I have paid for Google’s music service since it launched (RIP Play Music), but I am a millisecond away from canceling my subscription because Google does not provide me with any way to randomize playlists. I don’t mean shuffle play. That shit is broken and always has been. It would not be a big deal if I could randomize my playlists on demand, but no.
Pure randomness isn’t great for music playlists. The algo needs to account for recency so you don’t hear the same some 6 times in a row. Technically still random but no one wants that.
That’s the difference between randomizing a playlist and shuffle play. If you randomize a playlist, the songs will never repeat unless you have them in the list twice. YouTube Music’s shuffle play often plays the same twenty songs over and over out of a playlist with over six hundred songs.
The people who are stealing our movies and our television shows and operating piracy sites are not mom and pop operations,” says Charlie Rivkin, chief executive officer of the MPA, who adds that some of the operators also engage in drug trafficking, child pornography, prostitution and money laundering. “This is organized crime.”
I like how they always have to fabricate a connection to organized crime. Trying to convince the reader that is not just copyright infringement.
Hollywood was founded on IP theft of European filmmakers’ work and funded by various mobs, which then went on to lobby (bribe) politicians into changing certain regulations on gambling in AZ, et al, to pave the way for Vegas and the like.
I just spent like an hour trying several methods to install this on Android, sadly I was not successful. If anyone can inform me on how to install this on Firefox for Android (not a fork), please let me know.
Is this talking about stuff like private torrent trackers and Usenet providers, or are there more Netflix-like things out there that people are paying for?
So Hollywood copyright lawyers will target illegal subscription services rather than individual downloaders? Fine by me.
I can understand paying for a legal streaming service where at least a tiny percentage of profits goes into producing new material. I pirate out of convenience and availability, because movies and series aren’t released immediately in my region.
Paying somebody for streaming film and TV shows that they have no hand in producing, and thus not supporting new productions — same as I can download for free myself? — that makes no sense to me.
If someone makes it so I can stream all the shows and all the movies and such in one convenient place, without having to find them myself, hunt down the right versions, etc, I’m good with paying them for that.
It’d be better if it was from a legal service, but as long as exclusives are allowed that can’t happen. If the owners of the content were required to allow anyone who wants to distribute it to do so, at the same cost with no special deals for one distributor over another, then every streaming service could have everything, if they choose. They could then compete on quality of service and which content they choose to have, not on what content they can lock down for themselves alone.
Paying somebody for streaming film and TV shows that they have no hand in producing, and thus not supporting new productions — same as I can download for free myself? — that makes no sense to me
It makes sense for me. The one i’m using is $20 per year. I just think of it as convenience fee. It has netflix features but for all movies and tv shows.
And like I said, I get convenience/availability. I guess paying for stolen goods is one step too far for me. Like, “Dude, pass it around, but it’s not yours to sell”.
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