You know the traditional business model of Hollywood is well and truly broken when an open source application like Popcorn Time comes along and does everything right. What Popcorn Time has done by making accessing content on demand easier than ever before is nothing short of impressive.
They're the Netflix of piracy and I think Hollywood can learn a lot from Popcorn Time (but as history has proven, they won't).
No one is obliged to give you money. Finding a business model that works is your problem, not your customers.
Forced lock-in is a model, but it's a violent one that makes people want to leave, and it's entirely predicated on there never being an escape hatch for your trapped customers.
There is now an escape hatch for content customers. They're no longer beholden to the choice of cinema or TV for their content, and haven't been for years. Whining about how much more money you made in the old days when people couldn't escape the cage really doesn't enamor you to people.
It's on hollywood to find a new business model that works in a post-cage world. If they can't, they'll go bankrupt and vanish, and I won't care. There's a lot, and I mean a lot, of good content out there that's either low investment (think Primer) or can pay for itself in box office and/or merchandising alone (marvel, star wars, lord of the rings).
If your content creation is predicated on selling DVD's or subscriptions, and your DVD/subscription mechanism is so bad people are willingly buying VPN's to other countries to avoid using it (netflix in aus), that's not your customers problem in any fashion, it's yours.
No one is obliged to give me money -- unless they consume the content I created. At that point, they are.
Anything else assumes that because content exists, people have the right to consume it -- for free if they can work out how.
Let's be clear: I fully agree that Hollywood needs to catch up, and make content accessible in the way that Popcorn time has. But I don't have the right to consume content illegally, just because I find their business model inconvenient.
I'm happy to pay, as long as the terms are reasonable. (I have a Rdio account that's been active for years now - I can't remember the last time I pirated music... I can't remember the last time I pirated software, either).
However, in Canada, the only way to watch (for example) Game of Thrones is to
a) get a massive cable subscription which includes 1000 channels you don't want and HBO (which itself has 100 programs you don't want to watch and GoT),
b) wait for the episode to show up on itunes and pay $4.50 per episode (whaat?) (and oh, season 5 isn't available yet),
c) pirate.
Is it a huge surprise that a lot of people choose option C? And can you blame them? At a certain point, non-Americans specifically just get fed up with being told "sorry, no, that content isn't available in your region."
Not being able to watch a TV show isn't exactly oppression. If I didn't get into a closed beta of a highly-anticipated web service or video game, it wouldn't be "a form of protest" to brute-force someone else's login, or to crack the signup system. It would be wrong.
It's not oppression, you're right. It's way, way smaller than that. My little act of 'defiance' is way smaller than it would be if it were exactly oppression, too.
I'm pirating content. I'm watching something that I want to watch, and at the same time, I'm hoping that my small increment of the 'pirated_copies_of_got' metric causes someone at HBO to go and sort out the way they distribute content outside of the US.
Literally no one else is harmed - because, no, I'm not going to pay the prices they've set. It's just nowhere near worth it. I'll go read a book instead.
Btw, hacking someone else's account is considerably more 'wrong', in my opinion: you're breaching someone's personal info and preventing them from using their account.
Look, you don't want to pay for it. For you, free is better than having to shell out money.
I wish people would just stop with their dumb moral workarounds. The show costs $X. You don't want to pay. You know how to get the content via other means. And so you do.
Don't embarrass yourself further by claiming you're somehow helping HBO out by going against their wishes and pirating the show they produced. You don't know what effect you (and other pirates) are having on HBO's business.
You apparently work for a company that aims to empower musicians. I would expect you to have a deeper understanding of how difficult it can be to make a living producing entertainment in this day and age.
And one last thing: It is actually quite insulting to be reduced down to 'free is better than having to shell out money'.
No, it's not. I buy books (audible.com is amazing), I buy music, I buy software - all of which are just as easy to pirate.
I go to shows, I buy prints of photographsy that I like, I support artists. I am fully aware of how hard it is as an artist (my wife is an illustrator).
So, please don't reduce me down to "cheap bastard just doesn't want to pay". It's insulting and untrue.
I apologize -- I went off on you as a straw man instead of as someone who had literally just said that they didn't pirate music or software. That was unfair.
You touched a nerve. The "I'm not doing any harm" line is the general defense to the piracy question and I think it's very much wrong. I think I'm right in saying that too many people attempt to use it as a moral cover for the fact that they just want stuff for free.
And there's definitely a part of me that is biased to "free is better than not-free," so for sure, that's a part of my decision-making process. But unless the content companies actively work to make it difficult for me to consume their content, I try very hard to inhibit that "i can get it for free" mentality.. Precisely because I do know how hard it can be for artists.
Anyway, thanks for the apology (and sorry for getting a bit defensive there). Cheers.
I'm not trying to help HBO at all. Seriously, not. Couldn't care less about HBO. And you're right, I don't want to pay for it, not when it's priced like that and the distribution mechanisms in Canada are so broken.
But look: all of these American companies look at Canada, Australia, the UK, etc and go "you know what, we're just going to focus on the US." <Sorry, that content is not available in your region>.
That's so amazingly frustrating. So, yes, I honestly do hope that HBO sees the international piracy numbers and sorts out its sketchy content deals with Bell Media and launches HBO Go in Canada. Until the TV/Movie industry gets its act together, I'll pirate. (Since music is available to stream in Canada, I don't pirate music. Simple as that.)
As for my job: a) my personal opinion has nothing to do with my company, but b) I'm pretty comfortable with how Wavo empowers musicians and artists. We're a small company, so the fully-realized vision is still a ways off, but fundamentally the goal of Wavo is to help artists. There are no contradictions here.
These arguments are so stupid to me. Joe Consumer has X amount of dollars to spend on entertainment.
Joe Consumer can find various ways of maximizing his dollars. $15 of that goes to Spotify so that he and his wife can listen to whatever music they please whenever, wherever they want (except Taylor Swift because she has a mansion in Rhode Island to pay for).
Joe Consumer would rather not pay $70 to buy Frozen on three devices, one on Blu-Ray to watch on his television, the Apple Store to watch it on an iPad on the way to Disneyland and Google Play on the Nexus Tablet after taking the kids to the theatre to watch said movie for $50 all the while hosting a Frozen themed birthday party... He would rather tell the studios to go fuck themselves and download it.
so yea, I don't want to pay for it because I feel a bit cheated that I must pay three times for the same thing.and apparently I'm an asshole because Disney isn't getting every god damn cent of entertainment dollar they are entitled to according to piracy police like you. The Rent is too damn high.
As for the musicians not getting paid, please... anybody can pick up a guitar and become a musician and post it on the internet. That does not entitle anyone to be paid for it. Nobody is shedding tears for Taylor Swift's inability to make money.
I actually do. I'm arguing a lot in this thread, but I stopped watching game of thrones around season three. I maybe pirate a movie every 8 or 10 weeks or something? I have young kids and a startup job. :) And I have Netflix (Canadian version, no vpn, so like 1/4 the content as in the US) for when I have some free time. But frankly I do prefer books (again, audible.com is the best)
That said, content distribution is completely broken outside the US, so I'm going to shed exactly one tiny crocodile tear for HBO when I do decide to get back into game of thrones. And I sure as hell won't be paying for it, unless they give me some sane options.
I pay for HBO and a few times I've still had to pirate Game of Thrones because their delivery is so poor. For a while it was impossible to watch on HBO Go when it aired because they were somehow unaware that their popular program would draw a lot of viewers to the site and it would crash. Now that doesn't happen, but instead I get poor quality video that pauses and stutters with annoying grey bars on either side of the screen that pop in and out and distort the video. This past Sunday I was fed up enough after 15 minutes that I just decided to wait an hour and download it in HD.
The terms aren't the only things that have to be reasonable, the quality of service must be as well.
Is it a surprise? No. What you've described is downright annoying. It seems nonsensical to me that hollywood makes it so difficult for me to give them money to watch Game of Thrones.
But, Piracy isn't a form of protest, any more than stealing a car is -- regardless of how reasonable you consider the price.
Laws aren't all equal. Stealing a car is zero-sum: if I take your car, you no longer have a car, which is a very, very expensive toy.
If I download Game of Thrones, the outcome for every single person in the world except me is exactly the same as it would have been if I had simply gone and read a book instead. HBO gets no money (I'm reading a book), and you still have the ability to watch GoT (I haven't done anything to prevent that).
Sorry, that's not entirely true actually. The outcome is ever so slightly different because I contribute to a metric that content producers do pay attention to: estimated pirated copies of GoT downloaded.
They make decisions based on that (like the launch of HBO go, which is not available in canada), and eventually, my hope is that they'll realize that there is a problem with the way they're selling their content and they'll fix it for everyone.
(Meanwhile, yes, benefit for me: I get to watch GoT).
If you would've otherwise read a book. Had the ability to pirate not been available, a non-zero number of individuals would've paid. Hollywood is stupid thinking everyone would have otherwise paid. But anyone who insist that everyone pirating would've read a book instead is making the same mistake.
It's the biggest logical fallacy to compare stealing digital content to stealing a car. It's a shame the word "steal" is used in both cases. The original owner of a stolen car no longer has his car after it's stolen. That is not true of digital piracy.
Can we instead compare it to illegally duplicating your car?
I had a rdio account once.
But it turns out he price they publish is not what they charged (at least were I live), nor was it the currency they displayed (which added a huge extra on bank charges). I was charged around 200% of the published price, all due to them not holding up their end of the deal. I called Visa and rejected the payment, and immediately closed my account.
As for HBO. It's too expensive for me. In the US it may be cheap, but it isn't in other countries. And the web-based version is unavailable "in my region".
I wouldn't mind paying for decent terms, but putting a huge amount of money to watch a single series at a time they dictate, is unacceptable. HBO broadcasts at a certain time, and I have to stick to their schedule. Awful. I've a life. Stuff happens.
Piracy is the only affordable way, and comes with a huge amount of extra bonuses (replay, pause, watch later, no installation cost).
You've decided that, under no circumstances whatsoever is it ok to pirate content. (Or, perhaps more generally, under no circumstances whatsoever is it ok to break the law)
That's cool, and that's a fair position.
I disagree. There are plenty of reasons, big and small, to choose not to follow the rules. The more pressure on Hollywood to provide reasonable options, in my opinion, the better.
But, that said, how about lets be respectful about it?
>No one is obliged to give me money -- unless they consume the content I created. At that point, they are.
Historically no, they're not. Paying for a concert before you saw it was unheard of 150 years ago, and your ancestors would have considered you a mug for giving over your money before you knew if it was going to be a good show.
The norm for human history is that you see the show first and then decide afterwards how much it was worth, hence artists passing their hat around the audience. Bad shows got no money, which is how it works for literally everyone else today. We get paid at the end of the month, not the start, and bad enough fuckups get you fired.
In your country/region: maybe. Everywhere: definitely not. The only time I got a refund at a theatre was when a film was dubbed and the ad said subtitled. I left during the first two minutes, and even had to argue to get my money back on such an obvious case.
Is that appropriate though? Just because it is done that way doesn't mean it should be. It's not that uncommon for people to pay their internet in advance, only for a line outage to go unfixed for a fortnight.
Patticularly in the US, internet access is a cage. There's often only one provider, and their terms and conditons declare service not guarenteed. What choice do you have?
Then google fibre and municipal wifi start showing up, and look how hard comcast et al are screaming.
Maybe your rent, cable and phone need escape hatches as badly as your movie collection?
I don't know. On the one hand, I don't like pre-paying for electricity considering the potentially huge fluctuations in use. On the other hand, I don't use gas and then pay for it. I eat at a restaurant first, then pay, but I buy groceries before I eat.
So I don't know. I can see phone as being a purchase of a block of X to use. The same with rent. Almost all internet comes with an uptime guarantee - say it's 99.9%, if it's down for more than 45 minutes, even Comcast will provide a credit.
I suppose it comes down to how you agree to consume it. I don't mind the 24 hour model on video rentals, when I can start that 24 hours any time within 30 days. I'm purchasing the right to watch the movie as many times as I want in a 24 hour window sometime in the next month. That said, I also believe that if I purchase unlimited video in the form of a DVD or download, I have the right to device-shift it wherever the heck I want.
> No one is obliged to give me money -- unless they consume the content I created. Then, it's my call, whatever business model I pick.
Buskers are giving their content away for free.
You don't have the right to attend their concert, just because you don't like the website they're selling their tickets on.
Would it be a good thing for society to allow you to pick a business model where you blare your music from loud speakers and then pay large burley men 50 cents to collect 1 dollar from anyone within earshot, on the premise that they heard your music so thus owe you?
I've never accidentally watched Game of Thrones, or unintentionally been within earshot of it - I had to explicitly choose to include that programming.
That's probably a fair assessment, but a bit beside the point: if they were watching it on their television that fails the analogy as the cable company wouldn't be shaking me down for it. As a matter of fact, I have an HBO Go subscription via iTunes and I don't watch the show - I mostly got it for Silicon Valley and some movies, and I wanted to support what I think is a move in the right direction.
While I do follow your logic, and really don't disagree on a principle issue, I do think it's important to note that the concept of copyright and payment is a 'forced / legally created' scarcity problem. As in, the only reason there are laws that dictate creators get paid is because there are laws on the books that say so. It's a tricky subject, and a delicate discussion I think, but fundamentally important to keep in mind that barring natural scarcity, there's really no fundamental law of nature that indicates a creator must be compensated for creating.
The law may say they are, but the law is clearly impotent and I personally don't remember having signed the Mickey Mouse act, so no I don't think anybody owes Hollywood anything, especially because Hollywood was built on piracy.
I feel this black/white scenario of "pay us for content or its illegal" ignores the reality of the market. There are plenty of social dynamics in play that are conveniently ignored.
Music pirates in particular tend to buy more music than non-pirates. I would wager this holds true in any media-field of pirating (but perhaps not software pirating). [0] There is a reason for this!
Pirates are enthusiasts. They love the content they consume and are likely to pay/buy things they really enjoy/enjoyed. Due to not having an unlimited income they pirate some things. For music pirates - there is a good chance that the music they are purchasing is from the same music label as the music they are pirating.
Pirates are also likely to tell their friends about a show they enjoyed. Pirates are also likely to buy merchandise from shows they enjoy.
For example - an extremely large portion of the American market for Japanese Anime-related goods is because of pirated fan-subbed anime. Shows that would have never been released or heard of in America and thus led to 0% revenue from America are pirated and their merchandise purchased. The number of figurines from おれいも for example. Or the number of だきまくら purchased from American-fans.
This simply can't be denied for the anime market in particular - and many fansubbers eventually get hired by the studios. Some studios try to shut down the fansubbers but most allow it to happen because fansub groups largely do not sub anime slated for an English release. It's an unspoken code of sorts of "Support the official release" - and since many anime fans don't necessarily speak Japanese, if someone isn't translating it for them they can't/won't watch it.
Pirating is beneficial for the anime scene. It's likely more beneficial than harmful for music for similar reasons. I'll concede that for Movies/TV Shows it gets a little iffy (do enough people buy merchandise who wouldn't if they hadn't pirated the show to see it?)
Then we can also look at video games. Amnesia: The Dark Descent or Minecraft. Games that were heavily pirated and the creators even went so far as to say "If you can't afford to play our game. Pirate it." Why? Free marketing and free publicity means more sales. It made economic sense to let your game go viral that way. What might be $20 in a lost sale to a pirate might win you $80 in 4 new sales from his friends (even if another 6 of his friends just pirated the game)
If you don't let him pirate the game you just lost $80 in sales and free marketing/publiclity from 7 people which likely lost you even more in sales.
Which brings me to the important part: Pirating doesn't mean a lost sale. It means free marketing and free publicity from someone who wouldn't have been a customer. If you can convert a "non-sale" to a "promotional consumer", why wouldn't you?
The economic spin usually given to pirates is it is "costing sales" which is, frankly, bullshit. They make more money off suing mass pirates than any "lost sales", so it's beneficial for them to keep pirating illegal.
I dispute that in the realm of video games, infringement has been demonstrated to be a net positive. Concrete examples abound of game developers who have quantifiable damages by infringement. [0]
The examples cited all resulted in servers being overloaded due to piracy which is a fault of not authenticating who is connecting to the server. This is one facet where pirated copies can do harm and I will concede that.
Had the pirated copies been sold - the same server issues would have happened. Though they would have had more resources to handle the situation and it would turn out better for everyone (especially the iOS devs who had to go offline for 4 months to deal with the situation).
However, "offline" games (ie. solo campaigns) or distributed servers (ie. minecraft) that do not connect to a centralized server won't take away company resources. The idea behind piracy is that nothing is being stolen or taken, only duplicated. Taking away server resources has a negative impact and although it is also considered "piracy" I would consider it closer to "theft" (the same as stealing a physical server might be!)
Without arguing over semantics of the meanings behind the word 'piracy' - will you agree with me that the shared issue of all of your examples was unpaid server space being 'stolen' by pirates? We may disagree on whether lost sales matter or don't matter in this scenario, but I hope we can both agree that the stolen server space was definitely an issue.
The Gamasutra article where money was spent on making piracy harder doesn't give any metrics for a meaningful conclusion to be drawn.
Did Spyro 2 being cracked in a week actually harm sales at all? Difficult to quantify. How about the profit from the next Spyro? Was it more or less profitable? If it was less profitable - was that a result of spending money on piracy protection? If it was more profitable - was that a result of adding piracy protection or because the Spyro series had surged in popularity after the success of Spyro 2?
The answer is difficult to quantify, especially without relevant metrics given. What was the cost of adding the piracy protection? Can you quantify "popularity growth" between the two games? Can they estimate how many people would have bought the game if they could not pirate it?
If I may go into a slightly related tangent for game devs.
Some game devs spend a lot of time and money trying to prevent people from modding their games. Some game devs make it easier to mod their games or even encourage it.
If a mod gets popular and gets a community growing around the game - is it doing good or is it doing harm? Assuming that a large amount of the community growth is from people pirating the game to play the modded version (and assuming none of the above server issues)
There are 2 sides with difficult-to-measure metrics.
1) Is the mod and the pirates playing it bringing enough attention to the game and free publicity/advertisement as to onboard new paying customers?
2) Is the time and money spent on preventing such a mod community from growing going to cost more than potential "lost sales" of pirated copies of the game? In addition, what is a "lost sale" and how are they measured?
To expand upon the issue of "lost sales" a bit:
Plenty of pirates argue that if they could not pirate a game - they would not purchase it either. I fall into this crowd. Outside of the stupid amount of money I've spent on League of Legends, I've only spent money on games I originally pirated. I purchased the game, purchased DLC, or purchased merchandise related to the game. If I could not pirate the game - I would not bother playing it, telling my friends to buy it, or buying merchandise from it (since I wouldn't know I liked it!)
By allowing people like me to pirate you actually win an otherwise lost sale. This is what makes these metrics so hard to quantify. Too many game studios consider all piracy to be a lost sale when people like me are the exact opposite. Without piracy we would have been a lost sale.
So it comes down to "which game studio/game dev do you want to take their word for?" Many of them attribute their success to piracy of their games. Some of them say piracy killed their game.
Without quantifiable metrics... how do we know the "killed games" didn't die simply because they were bad games that, piracy aside, nobody wanted to purchase?
From a business perspective, that's the far more likely scenario than the good games that the game devs claimed piracy helped selling well regardless of piracy because ???
TL;DR
My argument is that piracy doesn't kill bad games due to lost sales. They don't get any sales because their game is bad and few people are willing to pay for it. On the contrary, popular pirated games still do amazingly well because they are good games that people are willing to pay for even with the availability of pirating. To myself, makes more sense from an economic perspective for gaming media.
I read GP's comment as "Popcorn Time is popular because it's free. They have no business model." I tend to agree with that. If I started giving away $5 bills for only a $1 each, my "business" would be popular too. That doesn't mean it's a good business to be in, or that it would last any length of time.
I am in no way in favor of our current system, and I agree Hollywood needs to find a new model or die, but Popcorn Time is not that business model, which is what I believe GP is saying.
Yes they are, if you create something that they derive value from. Whether it is to be given away for free or paid for is your prerogative as the value creator, not theirs.
You gave it away for free by playing it without an agreed upon contract. Had there been a contract, then yes, you could've taken them to court to enforce their side of it.
This sounds a lot like you're suggesting downloading copyrighted works is acceptable, and that only the uploaders have done anything wrong. Regardless how you and I feel about that sentiment, I assure you Hollywood feels and sues differently...
Only the uploaders have broken a contract. Downloading information is never wrong, and they are under no contract. Hollywood sues differently, but they are still wrong.
>>No one is obliged to give you money. Finding a business model that works is your problem, not your customers.<<
This struck a chord with me and is exactly the reason why Hollywood and the Music Industry are flailing. They are trying to continue their business model that worked for so long into this new day and age. Adapt or die essentially.
But what is that new model, exactly? If "paying money in return for receiving goods" doesn't work, how will they make these multi-million dollar cultural phenomenons?
I agree that the current system is broken, but saying you'll pirate until the studios work out it feels like an irresponsible point of view, to me.
Throughout history, there have been things that were hard to do: create a picture that looked like a landscape, create a complex piece of music from nothing, give somebody a ride 20 miles to the next town, correspond with somebody halfway around the world.
During this time, it was very common for people to come and pay just for the experience of the event, which was , in some cases, truly magical. Open-air powered carriages? Who wouldn't pay a lot of money to see and ride in one for a few minutes? A room with a few painted landscapes from far-off shores? It's a cultural event.
People and companies paid lots of money to increase the spectacle and social attractiveness of these experiences. Not only could you hear a collection of a dozen stringed instruments play, you could do so in the presence of a duke!
This is exactly where Hollywood is today. They're doing their damnedest to prevent the inevitable slide into commoditization that has occurred with every other art form and experience. The market eliminates inefficiencies. Today I can see pictures of just about anywhere in the world for nothing. I can listen to hundreds of instruments play -- any one of tens of thousands of songs -- for free. I can travel in luxury in a modern vehicle owned by my neighbor, while doing all of these other things, to the nearest town for pennies.
So the question isn't "how do you make these multi-million dollar cultural phenomenons". That's like asking "Who will be the next Beethoven?" Beethoven's dead, and the symphony, while it lives on as a cultural phenomenon, is no longer the primary means of consuming music.
So there's your answer: movies will no longer be the primary means of consuming long-form audio-visual entertainment. They will continue to exist for a long period of time just as the symphony does, and the experience of being with the actors and director for a first showing in a glitzy theater will probably never go away, but the bits and bytes of the thing will have virtually no value at all. Things change. That's just life. Always been like this.
One of the key problems that studios are having is overinvestment.
When you're investing hundreds of millions in your movies, and tens in your tv shows, the bar is set very high.
Now, when the distribution of that content required factories and fleets of trucks, it funneled all the money in the world into a small number of operators, because the cost of entry was so high, so very few people could operate in that space. That allowed very high investments, because the worlds disposable income was being split between a small number of people.
Today, the cost of production and distribution has dropped like a stone, and there are more players as a result. However, these companies are still investing like it's the 1970's.
It's not a monopoly any more. Small studios can beat big ones. It's not about finding a different way to charge the customer, it's about restructuring your investment strategy.
"Paying money in return for receiving goods" still works fine. Most people are willing to pay if given reasonable terms and ease of access. Steam is a pretty big flagship of how to make a business that competes with pirating.
Media companies are stuck in the dark ages where instead of trying to increase value of their product/service, they instead double down on increasing revenue per viewer with horrible anti-customer policies like 10-minute unskippable ads on a DVD you bought.
A more expensive netflix with up to date content. Make sure it has everything (like spotify) and charge me 4 times the price of netflix. Have a cheaper tie for those who wants to pay less and get what netflix has now.
The key point is everything (or close to it) in one service.
Second, structure new programs to include more merch. Disney probably makes more on stuff from frozen than they did on frozen itself. Lossleaders aren't unheard of.
But above all, be bold, be decisive. Don't just run around and act like a bunch of babies.
You mean you don't like watching all those unskippable previews and commercials on your blu-ray, or "downloading" the included digital drm file off your disney DVD so you can take your copy of cinderella with you anywhere, anytime.* Or what about renting that great movie and having a 24 hour window to watch it.
*Maximum of 2 downloads. Approved devices only, Void where prohibited
No one is obliged to give you free content in the form of movies, music, books, video games, television shows, etc. Just because you can pirate or steal something doesn't mean it's morally or legally justifiable.
I'm not after free content, I'm after accessible content.
This discussion is basically about how content industries, with all their clout, are somehow unable to match the usability of some dudes with a bit of spare time.
You just announced how you don't feel obligated to pay people money for content. You're after free content.
Yeah, it's probably easier to make content accessible when you're willing to completely break the law and ignore the rights of the people who have invested in creating the content in the first place.
well, in this context no one is really "giving", it is there anyway and yours to decide if you just take it or pay for it.
In a society where products are intentionally and willingly overproduced to maximize profit (while at the same time trying to dump wages and social securities), the moral boundaries on piracy and/or stealing are getting a bit hazy, at least in my opinion. Of course, the legal situation is pretty clear in most cases.
Every time I see comments like this I wonder if most people here are advocates of "unfair competition". You want everything now and it has to be cheaper and you sometimes have to stop thinking only about the consumer but also the producers. This not only goes for cinema but also for food, services, etc...
Exactly. Free is on the competitive battlefield with paid, just as nonmonitized (open source, volunteer and nonprofits) can be competitive to monetized endeavors. It's a continuum along the axis of price, which does not necessarily have to be a positive number.
Content distributors are at liberty to uniquely watermark all content and hunt down every last pirate with massive penalties AND/OR threaten to stop producing content, if they so choose. Content viewers can also make choices, one of which could be to organize collective negotiation.
Given the technical restrictions on sharing illegal content, due to copyright laws shutdown of websites etc., sharing illegal content isn't that easy to do. That someone has managed to do it in as user friendly a manner as they have, putting everything in the industry to shame (apart from Netflix) is in an indication of the failings of the industry.
Netflix is a great product that falls down only in terms of content. If Netflix had more TV shows as box sets, and new episodes of currently being broadcast TV seasons, I would happily pay 10 times as much as I do (no exaggeration) and never use anything else legal or otherwise. The resistance that the established industry has to making deals to enable that sort of service is the reason that Popcorn Time can beat them.
So break one law instead of another. There's no advantage to a VPN versus TPB, and you're still ilegally downloading the show (since the licence for the mentioned websites state that it cannot be exported, etc).
Hollywood isn't in the moving bits around industry. That was never the hard part. It's like saying you improved Photoshop by making a cracked version that's easy to download.... Users might be happy, but imagine you work at Adobe.
That's not really true. The big studios are distributors of the content. They traditionally sold to Cinemas, and had DVDs made, etc. The fact they missed the boat on digital distribution is completely their fault...
> Netflix is a great product that falls down only in terms of content
...and app UI. Have you ever tried to drive your chromecast with the netflix app? It's buggy as hell, doesn't display comments, doesn't display related content, and has a horrible search experience. I half believe that it's bad deliberately as a way to cover up holes in their content.
At least they have shown that it's possible to distribute movies on a massive scale with a minimum of infrastructure. When distribution cost is close to free, it could open up a lot of possibilities that could potentially benefit customers and film makers.
>> Everything right? Except of course monitize it.
And funding/creating it. Anyone can take something they don't own and give it away for free. Investing in its creation and ensuring that investment is successful is much more difficult and limits your options for distribution.
I don't think anyone is advocating giving work away for free. Netflix has a large customer base and continues to grow it, but their library falls short for many people. It's also not available everywhere, and some work is only available in certain regions.
My comment was not meant to participate in the free vs paid discussion. That's indeed a whole other thing.
Your question itself, snarky or not, makes me sad. Doesn't that imply you spend a large part of your day doing something you don't like just for the sake of making money?
Your question itself, snarky or not, makes me sad. Doesn't that imply you spend a large part of your day doing something you don't like just for the sake of making money?
What world do you live in where businesses exist to advance humanity and people work on things they like? I'd really like to move there. The world I live in, only a handful of companies believe in their feel-good mission statements and it's a luxury for someone's passions to overlap with an obtainable well paying job.
I hope the same as you. At least in the one where the goal is to have people work on the things they like. Both parties benefit from this, no?
Just to be clear: I'm not expecting everyone to always be able to work on what they like. But as _a goal_, it sounds better to me than making as much money as possible.
You'd always take a better paying job over one which overlaps with your passions?
why do you assume me asking for money means i didn't like doing it ?
i'm asking for money because i think what i'm doing has value not because i didn't like doing it. And the fact that people like it so much they're ready to pay for it makes it even more enjoyable to me.
I understood your question as a description of this situation: the combination of you/someone having a constant desire for "more money" and the other party turning you down by default.
That sounded like a sad cooperation to me.
For you/someone: the other party is never interested in an constructive cooperation/dialogue. For the other party: you/someone sees the work itself as second (or less).
But as I now read you enjoy it by itself, I misunderstood.
Is it not reasonable to judge a course of action by asking, What would it look like if everyone tried to act like me? In this case I think the Hollywood blockbuster goes away.
People pay for netflix, which has a worse catalog. As a minimum people would pay for this instead of netflix (and I would certainly be willing to pay more).
The question isn't whether it's possible to charge anything. They're not compensating the content creators. If I steal cars and resell them for a fraction of their typical price, does that prove the car industry is broken?
Except when you steal a car, the owner doesn't have it anymore. If you would manage to clone a car and then resell it for a fraction of its price, it would mean the car industry is broken.
If the price of a movie were composed out of the cost of the materials for the DVD, this argument would be correct. But the price is needed to compensate the people who made the movie. (I don't say that current movie pricing is equitable.)
Content creators deserve to be paid for their work. Taking it without payment and without their agreement is stealing.
I agree this car analogy is flawed because it correlates a movie to a car as if they are both goods. Media is actually a service (a recorded performance). This not only causes this analogy to break down but your underlying argument that because the owner still has a copy it is therefore acceptable.
Ok, lets say I instead decide I don't like how companies sell their cars, so I 'protest' by stealing a copy of the schematics for the new 2016 model of some car. I construct and sell them for the price of materials, meaning I make no profit from them. Many people who wouldn't have paid 100k for the car now get the car for much cheaper. I'm robin hood now, right?
I think you want to argue with an answer to a different question. Gp asked about monetising - that's getting people to pay the service provider. What happens to the money later is a completely different issue of artist compensation, contracts, etc
I'm not claiming it's legal or a valid business, only saying that the service will not be free soon. If they get paid afterwards, than it's probably something distributors should look at in the future.
How does this differ from iTunes? There's a business model that works, and the experience is pretty much exactly like Popcorn Time, except iTunes has those pesky Rent/Buy buttons.
At least with iTunes for Windows, the experience is pretty horrid. I've found iTunes to be extremely hard to navigate, and generally difficult to use. Aesthetically, the app looks like a mix between an OSX app and a website, very out of place on a Windows machine. The UI is slow and unresponsive. It seems like every time I open the app, it wants to update, with a new EULA for me to read. They used to bundle the installer with unwanted crap. Somehow whenever I want to buy a movie, I need to click through 3 or 4 dialog boxes to confirm the purchase. The download I finally get is DRMed, and wont play on my devices.
In general iTunes manages to be bad in almost all ways software can be bad. In my mind, it's one of the worst applications I've had to deal with in recent years.
Imagine a world where content providers made content available for purchase over an open protocol, and allowed anyone to build apps to buy content on top of it. With real competition on the app side of things, non-piracy apps would be more usable than Popcorn Time, and things like iTunes would die in a heart beat.
I've been trying to watch a movie I bought on iTunes on my AppleTV all afternoon. I've committed the cardinal sin of moving between two different countries (!!!) so this movie is on the iTunes account in the country I lived in before. Playing it from iTunes with AirPlay it kept stopping for some reason, playing it with home sharing worked for a while, and then I tried to buy a song I liked from the movie on my computer and it stopped and lost where it was in the movie.
I got pissed off and just pirated it and used Beamer.app to send the video to the AppleTV, it played back flawlessly.
I'm happy to pay for a movie. I've funded several documentary projects on Kickstarter. Just give me an MP4 or MKV file so I can trust that I can play it today and 10 years from now on any device I own.
DRM doesn't work. It only punishes the actual customers.
I disagree. iTunes offers a massive amount of convenience that bluray doesn't offer. When you buy something on iTunes, you can start consuming it almost immediately. Versus a bluray, which you have to either wait to receive, or go to the store in person to buy.
This "on-demand" nature of iTunes is enough of a value-add to justify the increased price, at least in my eyes.
The comment compared Popcorn Time to Netflix; I don't think you can really compare iTunes to Netflix (or Popcorn Time). Netflix provides broad access to a range of work for a fixed monthly cost, iTunes is more of a storefront where you can purchase rights.
Popcorn Time seems like what many people want from Netflix: a much larger library. Something more like Spotify, but for movies and television.
I don't think there is a movie I can buy in iTunes that I actually want, although I haven't looked in years. I assume it is different in the US but, sadly, the US isn't the entire world.
Oh no, not that price <=> scarcity theory again.... A van gogh isn't more expensive than my drawing because they're rarer or built with rarer materials. Intrinsic value is much more complicated and subtle than that... Giving money for something is also a mean to encourage people to produce more content, for example. It's also a way to say "thank you, keep going on please".
edit : or maybe that's what you meant too, in which case i'm sorry for the comment.
I'm pretty sure if it were possible to create atom for atom identical copies of every van gogh the value of the "original" would plummet. Of course in the real world we have no-cloning theorems, so that isn't possible, information however can be copied at (almost) zero cost and therefore the value of a copy should approach its share of the production cost, which rapidly approaches zero as more copies are made.
I disagree. People would still pay more for the one Van Gogh laid his hand upon. After all if you just wanted to look at the painting you can buy a very high quality reproduction today -- you'd need an expert to know it's a fake. Even experts can be fooled by good forgeries.
By tracking the location history of the object. That's actually how much of the art world protects against forgery. Forgers are very good at copying art works, but artists' estates keep a record of what an artist actually produced.
Just to add on to dash2's comment, the art collection world relies on provenance. Most large art museums (in the US, at least) rarely buy from private collectors for this reason. Items from private collectors are usually donated, and if an item is purchased, it is either through auction (usually the big houses like Sotheby's) or from well-trusted dealers.
You can copy atom for atom, but you can't copy sentimental value.
Of course, the problem is that we could actually lose the ability to assign sentimental value to any one of them. Immagine 10 identical Mona Lisas, only one of them real with the knowledge which since lost. The collection would be worth a lot, but what would be the price of 1 of them?
You should test your theory by starting a a company that makes reproductions of famous paintings and see how fast it takes for classic works of art to become valueless.
The "thank you, keep going on please" argument is a consistent one through out history, but there is a big exception in the last 10 years ago.
Imagine if you want a pay to have a band playing in your bar. If they went in there, broke every table, played music so loud that customers got injured, and then assaulted a few others, would you still feel obligated to pay for their performance? Would you still pay others upfront? A game developer can put malware on your computer, break your hardware, not have a work product, and you are still expected to pay up front for the next game.
Video (as in popcorn time) can do less damage, but then we had the sony root kit and the payment system is also upfront with not guarantee of quality or enjoyment.
One suggested model is a payment system which is "thank you, keep going on please" if you were happy with the service, and a "disputing the credit card charge" if you are not. This has however the problem of being illegal, so it just easier to jump directly to piracy and do donation purchases when/if you like something.
What I mean is that Hollywood treat digital assets as if they are physical assets.
The only thing that stand between Hollywood and a Popcorn like service they could monetize is a decision to treat it as a digital asset and take advantage of it as a digital asset.
> A van gogh isn't more expensive than my drawing because they're rarer or built with rarer materials. Intrinsic value is much more complicated and subtle than that
Actually, value is subjective. For example, if I didn't know I could sell a Van Gogh for a lot of money, it would be just as worthless to me as anything else I don't want.
In other words, a Van Gogh, just like everything else, has no "intrinsic value" that everyone would recognize.
Now if I could buy a Van Gogh for $5000 and sell it for $10000, I'd be happy to buy one. But if I could only sell it for $5500 it wouldn't be worth the trouble for me.
That's subjective value at work again. In the latter case, I'd value the time needed to buy and sell the painting higher than the $500 I could get from the exchange.
I know one thing for sure, you definitely couldn't sell a digital image of a van gogh for a lot of money.
But there are things that are bought, sold, and traded for reasons other than reselling them to someone else for more money. You seem to have a vision of all human economic activity as a pyramid scheme.
The bits aren't scarce but the idea and content is.
The idea of intellectual property is no more artificial than real estate property or personal property. In my opinion it is even more defensible than real estate. The IP was created out of nothing by the creator. Land? The universe created it and someone just took it by force.
We aren't lacking ideas neither content, quite the contrary. And they aren't created out of nothing but that's a whole other discussion I am glad to have in another thread.
No we aren't lacking ideas for that. There have never been so much music despite it being much harder to make a living on it.
I have played music many many years, and I can tell you from experience that its not something thats created out of nothing. Thats just not how this works.
So if you want to have a real fundamental discussion about this you need to understand how these things are made and what it means to create them.
Even barring monetization aside, Popcorn Time is far from doing everything right. Have you tried watching a show/movie that isn't among the most popular? Chances are there wouldn't be enough seeders to get a decent experience.
I can only guess here, but availability of content must surely be one of it. In 2015, a brick and mortar store for renting physical videos still have content which online services do not, including some movies that was in the cinema over a year ago.
In 2015, a brick and mortar store for renting physical videos still have content which online services do not
In 2005 or even 2010 I would absolutely have agreed with you. However in 2015 all those really great independent brick and mortar video rental places I used to go to anywhere near me are long since bankrupt and closed down.
I've always suspected that was due to their porn selection. A few years ago, I knew someone who worked in a video rental store in the heart of Kansas City that had an extensive "back room". It always seemed to me that the back room was the only area to get traffic. Somehow, the internet hasn't killed porn disc rentals, and I think it shows for both that small shop in Kansas City (which is still open) and Family Video.
Sounds like you're talking about Westport Video Mania. A couple friends and I go to that store about twice a year to browse around. Each time we're there, nearly all other customers that come through the front door go straight to the back room. After a few years, we finally decided to see what was on the other side. It was like the Tardis of porn...I don't know how they fit a whole other video store in there.
Paradoxically, torrenting sometimes is the only way to get an obscure show/movie they don't even sell anymore. I'll take few seeders over nothing at all.
When Popcorn Time produces it's own content and distributes it in a consumer friendly way, then I think Hollywood has something to learn. Until then, this is just theft.
Quit with the shitty release schedules, regional locking/delays, etc etc.
There's a lot to learn about what people want to use, now they have to work out how to do something that's as easy but monetised/legal. Netflix did it, and people are willing to pay. Not, perhaps, as much as they'd like though. That's where the real rub is. I won't pay £4 to rent a movie from iTunes. I won't pay £12 for a DvD (full of extras I don't want, unskippable shit and general inconvenince).
Of course, they can always just choose to carry on as before, and assume they can scare people out of doing the easy thing instead of the "right" thing. The larger the gap between the two though - the less likely that is.
Popcorn Time didn't do ANY of that.
Do a Google search for intitle:index.of mkv -html -htm -php -asp -txt. Popcorn Time is THAT with a pretty UI. That's it. It in no way addresses any of the complication with releasing a movie in a consumer friendly way without theft.
Yes, the movie industry needs to change. But one cannot compare the hurtles they have to jump (and figure out how to eliminate) with a site that does nothing but put a pretty image on content theft.
There's whole catalogs of movies I bet the movie industry would love to make available but can't simply because they can't get streaming licenses from some now defunct band that did the musical score for it (for example). You cannot just gloss over these kinds of challenges by saying, "Well, some thief who knows PHP can do it!".
> You know the traditional business model of Hollywood is well and truly broken
It isn't just Hollywood, even HBO Go/HBO Now is so fenced in I can't just pay them to get streaming access but have to go through Apple which won't allow me to sort it out unless I actually have an iDevice
None of these companies make it easy besides Netflix. And for what? It doesn't even help them substantially [even tho they clearly think it does] it just drives me to wonder why I ever talked myself out of pirating things on moral grounds.
The west at least has apps like Netflix to legally watch movies. In countries like India, the only legal options we have are YouTube and a bunch of smaller companies with a small collection of Hindi Movies (<10000 movies). You want to watch Hollywood? You're best off buying a DVD for 6$, which for a country like ours is a lot of money.
They have painted themselves into a corner, because they have sold exclusive rights to so much of their content - e.g friends can only ever be on netflix - so they can't make what people want: spotify for movies (which is what netflix isn't).
> Hollywood can learn a lot from Popcorn Time (but as history has proven, they won't).
This happened to the music industry with Napster, but they learned a little too late. Now Spotify is the dominant force in the music streaming business.
> Coinado is a remote torrenting service. We do the torrenting for you, worry
about seeding, keep your privacy and deliver the file over an encrypted
connection. Requesting a file is simple. You just append the info hash of the
torrent to the Coinado domain and when you start the download, the torrenting
happens transparently on our servers and a minute later the file starts streaming to you.
That sounds like a solid idea all around. I though this was the javascript torrent client implementation, instead, it relies on yet another service that can be taken down.
Popcorn Time has succeeded in streamlining the delivery of content, providing a smooth and fast experience for sorting through a list of movie and start watching instantly. I really wonder why the movie studios cannot take a cue from this and build something that people actually want to use.
It's much easier to streamline something when you don't have to follow any of the rules. The movie industry has to think of distribution agreements, localising content and maximising profit - just like any other business. When you have nothing to lose you can do what you want. I guess they've gotten close to this with Netflix. There are still geo-restrictions there and not all content is available but for most people with access there is enough. Also if you want the latest content (which isn't on Netflix) you can probably buy it from iTunes. Again not available everywhere but available in quite a lot of places.
When you look at how easy this content is to access now compared with 10 or 15 years ago when you had to have a video store membership, hope no one else had rented the copy, pay crazy prices, and remember to bring it back when you were done, I find it hard to believe people's biggest problem (and main reason for pirating) is ease of access. It's price plain a simple. People have the option of not paying so a lot of them won't. I've done it in the past and it was almost never about ease of access. It was about money.
Note that it's easy to get a false dichotomy here, to think it's just between "paying" and "not paying" - if forced, people also have the simple option to "not watch".
I think what's needed is something like Steam or GOG, but for Movies. Preferably with un-DRM downloads because fuck if I'm watching movies in Flash. (Same goes for Silverlight - mplayer or fuck you. Torrents let me watch with mplayer. On finicky graphics drivers who occasionally fail at vsync, choice of player matters.)
Why is it that in 2015, I can't go to a site, give them money, and get a high-quality mkv download - but I can go to a site, not give anyone money, and get that download anyways? Movie industry, why do you not want my money? Hell, set up an "indemnity service"! Select a movie, pay them, and they promise to not sue you. Zero distribution infrastructure required.
>> "Why is it that in 2015, I can't go to a site, give them money, and get a high-quality mkv download"
Because it's costly and unnecessary for a business to cater to every specific need. How many people even know what an MKV file is? And if they did how many people have the bandwidth to download one?
There are so many options available to people now (theatres, DVD, Bluray, iTunes, Amazon, Netflix) that people are resorting to insanely specific demands (MKV files, availability while in theatres, all I can watch for $5 per month, the technology used to stream the content must be one I like) in order to justify their piracy.
I don't see anything unreasonable about asking the studios to provide their product in a particular format. What if you wanted to purchase a movie, and the studios only offered it on Betamax?
Relying on Flash or Silverlight is similar. I use Linux, and Flash is officially unsupported on Linux. Silverlight has never been officially supported on Linux. If these are the options, then I cannot watch the movie out of the box, I have to find a flash installer (I had better hope one's in my package repositories), or I have to install wine and build Silverlight into my browser or some such.
I think it is totally reasonable that you would ask the studios to provide content in a manner that you can actually watch. Let's not even get in to the Blu-Ray encryption snafu and how that affected those of us who use non-commercial operating systems.
I don't see anything unreasonable about asking the studios to provide their product in a particular format.
So if I hand built my own codec I could then ask Netflix to provide videos to me using it?
Of course, that's an extreme example. But they're not obliged to cater to your every whim - they're a business that makes business decisions, like losing X% of customers because they don't want to support Y codec/platform/whatever.
It's also totally reasonable for them to not provide their product in a form that only a tiny percentage of people actually need. Might as well complain that they no longer sell VHS tapes because "all I have is a VCR and I just want content in a form I can watch". At some point you have to recognize that you need to meet them halfway. I mean heck, you even recognize that Flash isn't supported on Linux. How hard is it to replace the word "Flash" in that sentence with "Hulu"?
Well if they provided a MKV file for sale then anyone could use it on their devices how they see fit. Similarly to how people can download mp3 files and play them on any device they want.
The current situation is that I have to watch TV shows via EME within Chrome or Flash or Silverlight (non of which I would otherwise have near my computer) or not be able to pay the content producers any money (which I like doing because I want new content created). It is as if I had to own a sony TV to tune into certain channels and a panasonic TV to watch others.
If they want to prevent piracy then simply watermark the MKV files individually, register the sales and sue the buyers who's MKVs end up being torrented.
My point is that they should at least try to compete with piracy as far as user experience goes. I can download a movie and play it on Linux. But apparently providing a legitimate means for me to do so isn't worth their time.
> There are so many options available to people now (theatres, DVD, Bluray, iTunes, Amazon, Netflix) that people are resorting to insanely specific demands
All of your options fail either for (a) not working in my country and (b) are physical and non-digital.
"Digital content I can watch right away" is not a instanely specific demand.
Regarding (a) I mentioned in my earlier comment that I understood not all of these services were available in all countries. However they are available in a lot of them now. Netflix and iTunes are both available in over 50 countries (I believe it's much higher for iTunes but I can't find the specific figure right now).
As for (b) I don't think that's an insanely specific demand and don't believe I said it was. In fact I listed a few of the demands in my comment. However it's also not a good justification for piracy imo. The content is still available to you with (for most people) very little effort.
While those problems are real, they are also self inflicted by the movie industry. I don't agree it's about money. Recently Netflix became available in my country (the netherlands) and many people I know stopped pirating content. It simply was not available legally before Netflix. You had to wait two years to watch a TV series and then you had to watch it at a time when some TV station decided to broadcast it. It was the same for games. When steam came lots of people stopped pirating games. Same for music.
For some it's about money yes, but for lots of people it's about the user experience or simply about availability in the first place.
Netflix, Amazon Instant (both Prime and the store), Steam, GoG, etc., are all slippery services. If they have a particular piece of content available, it's easier to consume it on their services than it is to pirate. That's really what Hollywood needs to focus on.
Amazon instant has damn near everything. Hollywood does provide it. They just can't compete with free.
PC game piracy proves this. Games on steam get pirated in large numbers even when the pirate copy is harder to download, install and use. And often it has reduced functionality.
> People have the option of not paying so a lot of them won't.
But a lot of them will. They will pay for ease of access, legal access, and a good user experience.
If the industry had focused its energy on those willing to pay instead of those not willing to pay, maybe the UX Popcorn Time provides today would have been available as a legal subscription based service.
Just look at Spotify. Yes, a lot of people still don't pay for the music they consume, but a lot of people do. Pirating of music has certainly seen a decline, even if we may never get rid of it completely.
They lost over €150m last year and their losses have been growing. Content creators seem to dislike them and want an alternative. Just because you can do something and some people will pay doesn't mean it makes business sense.
The movie companies enforce the rules and could easily change them however they are stuck in their old world distribution model which is no longer relevant in a digital society.
Lack of legal pathways to content are the only reason I watch any pirated content at all. Plenty of TV shows that I want to see are made in foreign countries and don't come to my country at all or come years late, and even when they do require me to sit behind a TV screen at a particular hour, or remember to program a recorder to write it to a hard drive, which is impossibly archaic. Ofcourse, the best shows are behind pay-walls, but even if I pay the hundreds of euros per month to get past all the paywalls of all the services, the combined offering is quite poor.
It's quite simple: give me spotify premium or give me itunes, but for video content. I want to have everything ever made, as soon as it is made (none of that "it's in the theatre so you have to wait" B.S.), either for a fixed reasonable monthly rental fee, or for a fixed reasonable purchasing price. I want that content on every device I have, on-demand, in the best possible quality. I'm ok with DRM for rental as long as it does not prevent access on the devices I own (ipad, windows tablet, laptop, apple tv, etc...). I'm not ok with DRM for purchasing, because when I buy something I want to own it forever. Give me that and I'll gladly pay for it, but the movie and TV industry simply doesn't want my money it seems. I pay for netflix, because that's basically the best I can get, but it's not even close to what I want.
The music industry eventually figured this stuff out and I don't pirate any music at all anymore. I still hold out hope that eventually the movie and TV industry will stop refusing to take my money.
I honestly do not believe that the movie studios are motivated to improve the current system. Perhaps they feel that the current, fractured delivery system serves their interest more than something central and comprehensive. It certainly encourages the customer to subscribe to a service like Netflix, perhaps also to rent a new release on iTunes and eventually possibly buying that same release when its price drops. That's getting paid three times for the same content!
Movie studios have the least exposure to piracy risk other than online multiplayer games and console games.
You can't get a good copy of a movie until DVDs and brs are released. Cams and TSs are terrible.
If something like popcorn time went mainstream they would just stop releasing disc media and downloads until well after the theatre stopped playing.
TV is the industry that should be worried. If popcorn time goes mainstream we'll never see high budget cable content ever again. Just 100% low budget sitcoms, soap operas and reality TV. But not with constant in show advertising that scenesters can't edit out.
Bingo. The goal of the movie industry is simply to make more money, and to prevent any challenge to their stranglehold on content... if that is achieved by balkanized delivery systems, that's what they will push for.
As somebody in the same predicament and locale, I often find myself wondering whether it is any less objectionable to rent a VPN connection through the States.
I'm pretty sure the problem wouldn't be the VPN but rather the payment. Iirc they only accept US based credit cards/paypal for Netflix US. I researched it briefly a while back before Netflix was available here.
It's not impossible to get around but getting a CC from another country and the like quickly leads to pretty shady websites.
I've done the same thing. Used a VPN to access Netflix US in Britain, for some newer BBC stuff that I've already contributed to through the license fee...
This 1000x. iPlayer is lauded, and generally works well, but it has incredibly restrictive, short term availability of content entirely paid for by taxpayers.
It is unclear how anyone in the UK can benefit from TV programmes removed from this service, or WHY any content for which the BBC doesn't have permanent distribution rights (via iPlayer) should ever be funded or produced by the BBC.
Netflix has a very limited, poor selection of content. Every single movie I've tried to watch on Netflix in the past month hasn't been available for streaming.
I very much enjoyed Netflix while staying with family in the US. In Belgium, however, the available content is so limited that it's just not worth it. Not even Friends, Simpsons, X-Files, nothing.
I really don't think this is a better experience than Netflix or pay-per-view on my tv. The only thing that is better is that I don't have to pay for it. The movies actually take a lot longer to load on this.
Every few months, someone builds a site like this. It lasts for a few days (or weeks) at best before it's shutdown due to legal pressure or sheer cost for the owner.
I'm going to ignore the piracy aspect of this site (since I don't support copyright infringement) and just talk about the implementation. This site is connecting to a centralized service to fetch the torrent data. It's not P2P, it's easy to censor, and it likely won't be around for long.
What we really need is a true P2P implementation of BitTorrent in the browser. I'm working on just such a project: WebTorrent (http://webtorrent.io).
WebTorrent is powered by WebRTC, the de-facto standard for connecting two peers in the web browser. It even works in desktop apps (via Electron or NW.js) and mobile apps (via embedding the webrtc.org library).
With WebRTC, we can connect all types of endpoints (desktop, web, mobile) directly and completely P2P. This is the underlying transport that all future P2P protocols should be built upon.
Right now, the primary limitation of WebTorrent in the browser is that you can't just paste in any random magnet uri or .torrent file and have it work. The torrent must be seeded by a WebRTC-capable client, i.e. webtorrent-hybrid (https://github.com/feross/webtorrent-hybrid) or https://instant.io.
We plan to build a desktop client (soon!) that can connect to normal BitTorrent peers, as well as WebRTC peers. These long-running peers will ensure there's lots of content available in the network that the shorter-running web peers can access.
This is the vision: All torrent clients (desktop, web, mobile) talking directly to each other. If you're interested in learning more about the idea of "WebRTC everywhere", here are some links:
Thanks for your awesome work ! I guess when the WebTorrent protocol will be implemented in libtorrent, suddenly, everything is going to change. Right now it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem but I'm really confident your project will enable a whole new class of applications which are not possible to build easily currently.
Instant.io is pretty much, hands down the best way I've found to transfer a file to a friend or coworker. No waiting for uploads to finish, no mucking about with accounts and permissions, just copy a hash and go. Really simple, very effective.
I guess the main problem is that browsers are not allowed to connect to random IP addresses using anything other than standard protocols. Otherwise, every website could potentially turn itself into a botnet.
This problem is not likely to go away very easily, I suppose.
This reminds me of joker[1], with the benefit of not expecting you to feed it a torrent (or expecting you to know what a torrent is).
I genuinely wonder, though, if these services are published just to annoy the copyright owners or for some benefit to the author that I sadly cannot see.
edit: They also do not seem to serve ads. Maybe an experiment for a potential legal version? Who knows...
Because fuck media conglomerates, that's why. Sorta like Google Chrome: because fuck Microsoft, that's why. When an entity achieves dominance they only innovate in order to keep it. The difference between this situation and the one I compared it to is that there's no way to legitimately compete. Even in the contrasting example it took an entity the size of Google to revive competition. In this one they control the content and dictate the platform. The most competitive platforms, in terms of user preference, can be starved of content and displaced by alternatives only the media conglomerates could desire. Do you honestly think we'd have gotten Netflix without torrents? The people who desire progress or otherwise to actually do things have two choices. They can either repress that desire or they can out-hack the regressive empire builders who desire only to have things.
Coinado should be legal as far as I can tell - in the same way a torrent client is perfectly legal.
They may have to respond to takedown requests or similar though, but seeing as how they only know the hash it will be a lot easier for them to claim ignorance
I'm not sure what your privacy concerns are... You can track clients downloading torrents pretty easily, if anything this would help as it adds another layer of indirection
I think that it has something to do with distribution. Most of the business was about distribution. Before it was dificult to distribute the information (music, movies etc) so you needed to hire someone to distribute your product and you paid a company which had the infrastructure to do so. This middle man soon became a cartel controlling distribution. Now distribution is easy and abundant so obviously it changes everything. They were selling a solution for something that used to be dificult that now is easy. Its like if your business was selling water in the desert and one day someone finds easy acces abundant water. Lets remember that most of the money is going to distributors not creators.
I love the idea, but what about copyright issues? It's easier for Hollywood to take down a single site than to take down thousands of people having an installed application.
Other than that - great implementation. I didn't know this was even possible! Good job.
You can also save them, since it has no DRM. That's "innovative" (semi-sarcasm intended). Meaning that it's actually consumer friendly, unlike what is normally offered.
That's how one should make a video service. Simple, user friendly and DRM-free. Until the backwards thinking film industry will learn this, they'll remain in the dark ages.
is this traceable to an individual computer? for instance, if i am using this on a college campus that traditionally bans the use of torrents, am i likely to get caught?
I don't think the college would be able to detect it as normal torrent traffic, but it would be pretty trivial to catch you using this specific site/service once your campus hears about it.
I found that at least in qBittorrent you can download media in sequence and consume it as it downloads. VlC seems to work fine even though it will prompt you about building a index first.
They're the Netflix of piracy and I think Hollywood can learn a lot from Popcorn Time (but as history has proven, they won't).