this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Netflix Buddy, friend, matey. If I have to pop open Google to find where I can watch something, find the best offers on pricing, and how to circumvent ads or whatever, or how to get Netflix to run on my devices without installing invasive crap or derooting my phone etc, and it's actually quite expensive.
I'll just do one search and not worry about whether I'll have to fight ads, or automatic iffy quality settings, weird compression algorithms, device compatibility etc.
I was happy to hang up the peg leg when I could just VPN to usa and watch everything for the price of a lunch a month. I like simplicity, I enjoyed your more arty shows. It was you who changed the deal Netflix, not I. you decided being insanely profitable wasn't enough and you needed infinite growth.
Trying to run a VPN through a streaming service because the content you’re trying to watch is straight up unavailable in your region – but it’s trying to block the VPN, is the worst.
To be fair to Netflix before other networks took streaming seriously they were charging very little to license their content on Netflix. That's why it had everything and was so good to be better than piracy. The royalties from Netflix couldn't be enough to fund these networks. Even Netflix themselves as the studio has struggled substantially promoting these price hikes and the effective recreation of cable TV.
As they lose more of the licensed content they're forced to focus on their own. Unfortunately for the just part they can't compete with constant new mediocre shows and movies. The streaming industry as a whole has lost sight of what made it popular in the first place.
The problem with this argument is that it's still the same content, but studios and streamers expect more money for it. They aren't asking for more money because they're adding value, they're asking for more because they feel entitled to more simply because they exist. With so many different streaming services and mostly nothing but exclusive content, there isn't much to combat price hikes apart from piracy as these companies don't compete based on service. Imagine if Walmart had exclusive rights to sell cereal or bread and it's easy to see how tainted this market is. Pirating sidesteps the bullshit which is why they want to crush it.
Sure but it's not like networks get anything from piracy so they have to content themselves with some rather than infinity. Especially for old content, it's just not worth much individually. There's also a looooot of massively overpaid and wasteful people involved in the major networks.
I know it's not just Netflix but you know, poetic licence or something. also I don't really give a shit about being fair to multibillion dollar corporations that do basically nothing pro social :p
It's the point that these jerk wuads are trying to run their own studios that's causing the mainstay of the failure.
They're expecting us to pay for their content failures.
Prior to everybody running their own crappy studio, They licensed what we wanted to watch, they negotiated decent prices and we watched it. If a studio didn't make good content it didn't get purchased.
It's the whole discovery channel aliens, reality TV enshitification all over again.
They're hemorrhaging, money they'll stop producing the more expensive stuff they'll produce the cheaper stuff people watch the cheaper stuff, the whole time screaming it's the pirates fault.