Everyone is blaming Netflix, but it’s not their fault.
It’s the fault of the content owners. Disney, fox, paramount etc……
Rather than make a little money off of Netflix, they decided they could scam more money by launching their own competing service
I probably wouldn’t have cancelled Netflix if it weren’t for their password policy change. That’s Netflix’s fault, but the content wasn’t great, so it made it easier to pull the plug.
It’s the fault of copyright. Restricting what shows you can stream to your users instead of, for example, being required to pay a royalty, inevitably leads to this situation. Netflix being the sole company allowed to stream every show and film would result in a monopoly that would be bad for everyone as they progressively sought to increase profits year over year. One company having all that power would not be a good thing for anyone, including content holders.
The solution is simple: every streaming service should be allowed to stream every show/film in every country. Then, piracy can only compete on price. That requires significant copyright reform, however, and is very unlikely to happen.
It’s a branding issue, ultimately. If I make a product, I should be able to choose where I sell that product and the brands I associate with. Now imagine I sell a pen with a special ink only
Uniball and Pilot make ink, but that they weren’t really using it so sold it to me at a discount. Everyone starts using my pens and the ink shows up everywhere. As a consequence, the ink industry slowly starts pulling their ink from my pens and raising prices. With everyone now selling the fancy ink pens and me without the original ink, it’s no longer just a branding issue, it leans to common carrier provisions. The ink is like the network, it is common currency in the market, like laid infrastructure. Treating it like a brand now will reduce competition and stagnant the market.
The ink is also the streaming content. Prevent companies from preventing fair use and you fix the issue. What stops Disney from making 5 “competing” streaming services and “licensing” to itself and blocking others? It’s a media creating monopoly, you can’t let that slide.
Being first does not make you the legitimate proprietor of a flawed system.
In the 90s, my cable company kept adding new channels but the price didn’t keep shooting up.
Yeah it did, they just weren’t upfront with you about it. They just billed you at a higher rate
As Lord Gaben once said: Piracy is a service problem.
Make better service, have less piracy.
Spotify is a good example of this imo, I can listen everything, so it’s not necessary to pirate music. I do have some issues, but never had the problem of not being able to listen what I want
Music piracy also seems to be on the rise again though. By far not as severely as with video but still… And while music streaming got a little more expensive over the last few years, it’s not by that much.
Yep. Spotify and such are getting expensive. And the service is getting worse.
Trying to shove podcasts and other features down your throat all in one UI.
Please just show me tabs with artists, songs, and playlists. Spotify is so cluttered.
Music streaming is also much cheaper to run than video, so they can offer more reasonable pricing.
Is that with a paid plan? My brief experience using it was very much not like that. I’d search for a song and it would tell me something along the lines of “you can’t choose a song to play but you can listen to a channel based on it” and a lot of stuff didn’t seem to be on there at all. This was probably 5(maybe more) years ago now, so I have no idea how it’s changed since then.
“Piracy is Difficult to Compete Against”
Have you tried
Not Enshittifying
?
Tbf, a lot of the problem is from content producers making their own platforms
I’m not sure I buy it. Just because content producers wall+jerk themselves off doesn’t mean you have to enshittify your own product, not when you are winning. Besides, Netflix already became a content producer themself partly as an answer to that.
People wouldn’t care nearly as much about password sharing crackdowns and random limitations if Netflix had a complete content library. Netflix with their originals aren’t going to match Disney’s decades-long catalog of content regardless of how much money they pour into it. Tack on Paramount, NBC, and Warner Bros, and that task becomes impossible. Piracy came back because people couldn’t get the content they wanted on Netflix or Hulu, and they couldn’t get that content because producers got super greedy.
doesn’t mean you have to enshittify your own product, not when you are winning
Since Netflix is a publicly traded company now, they pretty much have to.
Gotta pursue that infinite stock growth…
The really stupid thing is that everyone knows Netflix succeeded by offering - for the first time - a better product than piracy. A decade ago, Netflix offered a huge library of high quality, ad free content, which was easy to navigate and relatively free of bugs and viruses. People signed up because it was better than piracy where content could be difficult to find, time consuming to download or slow to buffer, with risks of malware or questionable websites.
People are willing to pay for a better experience that supports the people making art and entertainment.
Netflix already knows how to do this, built a company around it and launched an industry based on the knowledge that people will pay for a product that is better than free options. Now, it’s gone all the way back around. Streaming services are fragmented and expensive, content is hard to find and disappears without warning, streaming apps don’t always work on the devices they’re supposed to, quality gets unexpectedly throttled, and the ads are inescapable and unskippable.
Aint nobody pirating Netflix shows.
They had piracy all but beat. It was their insatiable greed that drove people back to the sea.
One should acknowledge that this is not on Netflix alone.
Other media companies pulling their content to set up their own streaming services has fractured the market and made each individual service much worse in the process.
You’re correct. I actually did acknowledge it further down in the comments chain here: https://lemmy.world/comment/7277901
To be fair, for me the fact that they content is now spread across many subscription services is the problem more than Netflix’s price or current quality.
Once I set are services, torrent and jellyfin for all of the others, I’m not making exceptions for Netflix
Yeah, by “they”, I meant the studios more than Netflix. Netflix itself was negatively impacted by studio greed, since a lot of them pulled their content from the platform so they can push their own shitty subscription service. It’s frustrating that these studios fought streaming tooth and nail, while Netflix pioneered the industry and proved a profitable streaming model. As soon as it was impossible to dispute that the model works, all the individual studios suddenly want to run their own streaming service. They fragmented the content across a dozen different services, and drove the industry back to unaffordability and inconvenience.
Its ironic. On a decentralized platform we are discussing how a big issue with streaming services is that they are not centralized -
I dont even disagree with you. I just think its interesting that we dont apply the ideological standard of centralization and monopoly being inherently bad evenly across the board.
Im not really sure I have a greater point to make here. I’m not trying to knock or dissent what your saying at all.
Just a stoned observation.
I see your point, but I don’t think this would qualify as decentralized. It went from 1 to maybe 8 players depending on where you are, but they are separated and closed. Each one of them is centralized, it’s just that there are several competing ones. Each one is taking away their shows or making some third party ones exclusive, so the more there are, the less vale each provides.
And of course the issue is that each one has to be paid separately, so there’s a economic incentive to participate in as few as you can.
With Lemmy for instance, you might want want an instance that’s very connected with others, one that’s quite closed and focussed or even create several users or even spin your own instance to have it your way.
It’s exclusivity deals that are the problem. Governments should legislate them away so that there can be competition.
Then we’d all choose the marketplace of our preference. Like supermarkets.
Video streaming, music streaming, games consoles, even mobile OSs all could benefit from some anti-monopoly legislation.
