No - piracy, since it always carries at least some amount of difficulty and risk, is easy to compete against. And in fact, paid services, including Netflix, have proven that over and over. All it takes is to offer dependable convenience and quality and to treat customers well. People are always willing to pay a reasonable price for that.
The problem is that piracy becomes difficult to compete against when, as Netflix is currently doing, you shift from a business model of providing good service under fair terms for a reasonable price to a business model of providing crappy service under onerous terms for too much money, because the greedy, selfish, short-sighted sacks of shit at the top want to make even more obscene amounts of money. That’s the point at which piracy gains enough of an advantage to outweigh its difficulties and risks.
And when that’s the case, it’s pretty obvious what the real problem is.
I’ve never seen a magnet link respond with “this is not available in your country”.
Step one, provide good service.
Netflix: Welp, I guess we should just pack it in.
Weird, Netflix used to compete with piracy so well that many people stopped pirating altogether, by offering a more convenient service at a reasonable price that was hard for even the most stubborn of pirates to refuse and resulted in a massive boom for its own industry. I wonder what could have changed that caused the people to leave Netflix and return to piracy. Hmm. I wonder.
Netflix: This problem we practically solved ten years ago but have been steadily and diligently working to bring back pledge to double down on those efforts and eventually make it the only viable option for a good consumer experience.
Netflix used to have plenty of content people wanted to watch, and you could share your account with family in different physical houses. Now neither is true.
Netflix: “why would pirates do this?”
It wasn’t Netflix’s decision to pull the content people wanted to watch. That was content creators like Disney that pulled their content to start their new streaming services. Netflix was stuck with creating their own content, which as it turns out is hard.
It was Netflix’s decision to add ads to paid subscriptions and limit browsers to 720p even for accounts that pay for 4k. Neflix isn’t the only cause, but they are part of the problem
2013 Netflix competed just fine. Piracy was mostly dead back then
But 2013 Netflix didn’t have to compete with Prime Video, Disney Plus, Paramount Plus, HBO Max, Apple TV, Hulu, Peacock, or any of the million “add-on” channels that Amazon uses as an excuse to paywall you off from the content.
The fact that they all run in their own UI, desperate the shove the next instalment of mediocrity down your throat, means that I’ve gone back to piracy. It’s just much easier to type what I’m after into Radarr or Sonarr than it is to go through the services to see what’s available. Sure, I can use Justwatch, but 80% of the time what I’m after isn’t on anything I have.
More competition should mean lower prices. How is competition diving prices up? Seems rigged.
Same amount of content, more players, outbidding each other, passing on those lovely reverse savings.
See if it was like music, with a massive back catalogue available to everyone, you’d have four or five services competing on price. But it isn’t. And it will suffer for that.
if it was like music
If it were* like music
When using be in an if clause for an unreal conditional sentence, always conjugate it as were, no matter what the subject is. Even if the subject is first-person singular (I) or third-person singular (he, she, or it), still use were with an if clause in unreal conditional sentences.
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/conditional-sentences-was-instead-of-were/
Calling people out for their grammar isn’t cool anymore; now we just let one another live in peace. You should try it.
I hope this is sarcasm. They weren’t being a dick, just educating people, which is a good thing
Piracy is really easy to compete against. Ask GabeN. Steam has singlehandedly taken me out of the piracy game because they have what I want, it’s super easy to get and if it’s not reasonably priced today I’ll wishlist it until it goes on sale (and it will). If it sucks, or my hardware can’t run it, I just dm someone and I get my money back. I know they can disappear shit from my library like any online store but they haven’t abused that privilege with me yet and that makes me confident they won’t.
With Netflix, there’s a small chance that they actually have what I want. If they do, it’s gonna disappear soon. Prices only ever go up, not down, and that series you love is gonna be cancelled as soon as it stops driving new subscriptions. To watch everything I want I can spend a hundred dollars a month on a rotating set of accounts on several streaming services or I can go LOOK for the MOVIE 2 stream for free without even messing with a DOT TOrrent file.
Piracy is easy to prevent if you provide a better service than the pirates. What he meant was that it’s hard to get people to pay you to shit in their mouths when someone else is giving out sandwiches.
until it goes on sale (and it will)
Except Factorio. It has never and will never go on sale, and they were able to use that policy to get money back that they lost from G2A.
That being said, Factorio is worth the price tag
When overpriced streaming services keep becoming worse and worse, it’s hard to avoid piracy
“We keep raising our prices and having content splinter off between dozens of competitors, I don’t understand why the people won’t just pay!”
There’s nothing Netflix can do about content splintering except make their own content and revenge splinter it.
They could’ve paid more for the rights to stream it, especially if theyre price hiking anyway.
