We are contacting you regarding a past Prime Video purchase(s). The below content is no longer playable on Prime Video.
In an effort to compensate you for the inconvenience, we have applied a £5.99 Amazon Gift Card to your account. The Gift Card amount is equal to the amount you paid for the Prime Video purchase(s). To apologize for the inconvenience, we’ve also added an Amazon Gift Certificate of £5 to your account. Your Gift Card balance will be automatically applied to your next eligible order. You can view your balance and usage history in Your Account here:
Remember, streaming only has a business model as long as it has a better user experience than piracy. That’s why iTunes took off in the era of Napster. When a streaming service’s user experience drops below that of digging up pirate treasure off a shitty ad-ridden torrent site, that service is not long for the world.
I cancelled Netflix and prime and went back to piracy a few months ago, it’s been a nice blast from the past
In addition to piracy, I’ve also been checking out DVDs from my local library. It’s kinda fun.
Surprised myself because I half expected I’d miss the convenience of Netflix, but I haven’t missed it even a little.
“Was I a good streaming platform?”
“No.”
The benefit of the library DVD is it takes away the “What will we watch tonight?” conversation. You’re going to watch the DVD.
It was nice when you could actually watch almost everything on it. Once everyone else started taking peices of the pie it just feels like cable with more hoops now
The only reason I keep Netflix is kids.
We don’t really watch it otherwise.
Even my in-laws are now pirates using hacked amazon fire sticks that are being hawked around their retirement community.
My mother in law is like “I get every streaming service and channel for 1 dollar a day, isn’t that great”.
I’m all “if it’s simple and works for you yeah, absolutely. “
The thing that sucks is that a lot of new stuff isn’t on physical media at all.
Use yts.mx, if you use any other site, try checking comments first if they have them, if not you can use torrent file viewer to check the download is actually a video file before downloading
Lastly you could try anti virus, but don’t rely on it to do your job for you, they can catch most but not always all viruses
Paying 0.99 per song was how a better user experience? Music piracy was pretty big till Spotify. No service was even close before.
Being able to easily purchase a single song from a reputable source in the comfort of your home instead of going out to physically buy an entire album and then rip it to your computer was a better user experience, yes. Most users are technologically illiterate, and trying to pirate stuff just lead to them getting viruses.
Because you were guaranteed that what you were downloading was what it said it was, and was high quality, and would have the correct tagging and album art and all of that.
It’s been shown repeatedly that a large part of piracy isn’t about cost, it’s about convenience. It was easier to pay $0.99 and get what you wanted when you wanted it, than download 8 files off of Napster and hope that one of them was actually a decent bitrate and was the song the title said it was.
Back when eMule was a thing, it was super common to spend an entire day downloading a 700MB video file at 5kb/s, only for it to be Fight Club instead of whatever you thought you were downloading. It’s the same thing with music.
It’s been shown repeatedly that a large part of piracy isn’t about cost, it’s about convenience. It was easier to pay $0.99 and get what you wanted when you wanted it, than download 8 files off of Napster and hope that one of them was actually a decent bitrate and was the song the title said it was.
“We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.”
-Gabe Newell
Or, with Napster, the person you’re downloading from signs off when you’re 40% done with the download.
Music piracy was big till spotify apprared. iTunes had a limited selection, music remixes, small band stuff were not available. iTunes only had what Sony and some other music distributors supplied. I understand what you are saying but still, piracy was there and iTunes was not primary source. Spotify came and now music piracy is basically limited to high quality audio albums which is a niche market.
If you have the local MP3 file you can do just about anything you want with it. Use it in just about any device. Transfer it anywhere. And never lose it.
I have Mp3s that are over 20-30 years old and have never needed to get them again.
And yes I go to piracy almost immediately if I can’t get a local file. Just because of how many different ways i’ve used them over the years.
That was my first thought too. A seedbox, Sonarr & Radarr and a Usenet site and I’ve got everything I need for $15/month.
