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- cross-posted to:
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2013 Netflix competed just fine. Piracy was mostly dead back then
Most accurate piracy meme I’ve ever seen
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.
Or use jellyseerr/overseerr, and browse for media. Just like the streaming services.
I would like to see some evidence that the competition resulted in Netflix losing a lot of subscribers, and thus money, rather than not hitting their predicted revenue targets. Because I would bet it’s the latter and not the former. I don’t know of too many people who said, “well, I had Netflix, but Disney is doing streaming video now so I won’t be watching Bake-Off anymore.” They just ended up getting Netflix and Disney+.
For a while anyway. Now people are dropping these services due to the price hikes. Unless you downgraded your Netflix service when they added lower tiers with fewer options and ads, to maintain the basic Netflix service you had in 2016, you’re paying an additional $5 a month today.
Netflix and all the other streaming services are built upon the insane idea that there are an infinite number of new customers that will continue to sign up regularly. Some of them don’t even think you need all that much programming to draw them. Paramount+ has a fraction of the original programming of Netflix, Peacock, Apple, Amazon, etc. but still costs $10 a month and will most assuredly continue to raise its prices based on the idea that there are either an infinite number of Star Trek fans or they will have to raise their prices.
More competition should mean lower prices. How is competition diving prices up? Seems rigged.
Streaming services are middle men with exclusivity rights on products. They sell simular but different things, think of them like dealership repair shops, they both fix cars but they fix different cars.
It’s only competition if they provide similar products.
The current landscape is like farmers markets and butchers. Sure they both provide food, but they don’t really directly compete with eachother.
They certainly do compete with each other but it’s just a general misconception that competition lowers prices.
Pepsi and Coke have been competing with each other for decades and Coke has larger market share. So why doesn’t Pepsi just lower prices? Pepsi even has the diversified income of doing more than drinks. Lowering prices doesn’t lead to market share and Coke can just match the price.
Look at Apple’s growth in the American market, they can sell a product that is significantly more expensive than competitors and still gain market share.
I still think you’re looking at competition slightly wrong.
Coke and Pepsi do compete with eachother, along with the rest of the drink market. And overall prices in that industry are pretty low, some people will buy other competitors (the store brand Cola’s). But overall competition is working.
Apple only kinda competes. Sure a phone is a phone and a laptop is a laptop. But unless someone is entering the market for the first time. They already have applications they are looking to use, so if you need an iPhone, you need an iPhone, and same for a Mac. But if you’re an android or Windows user, suddenly you have a lot more choice because there is lots of competition!
The reason companies setup walled gardens, or pay for exclusive access to a piece of media is to erode competition. If a user wants that thing, they can only get it from that one place.
Are you’re saying competition doesn’t exist because products aren’t the same?
I’m trying to not disparage your argument here but if I go with your reasoning then I feel like there is no competition so that you can justify prices not going down. Where I believe competition simply doesn’t lower prices because capitalism desires more profit not less profit. Why fight over scraps when you can create a market by manipulating people into thinking: Green chat bubble mean poor so me no use RCS or open blue bubble because green bubble mean poor.
If competition didn’t exist for apple then they could give android an imessage app.
I’m saying the competition can only exist because products that actually fill the same need.
If you decide that you need product A, and have multiple options on where to get that, you have competition.
So if you’re looking for a Cola, you have options.
If you’re looking to play StardewValley, you have options where you want to buy it and which platform you want to play it on, you don’t need to buy a new game system to play it.
If you’re looking to play the latest Zelda game, you don’t have options, you need to buy a Switch.
If you’re looking to watch Ozarks, you don’t have options, you can only watch Netflix.
If you’re looking to just have something playing on TV and don’t really care what it is, you have options.
If you’re looking to listen to music, you have options, most of the steaming services have most of the music.
If you’re looking to be able to text friends, you have options, any phone will work.
If you’re looking to be able to iMessage friends and for your case only iMessage will work, iPhone is your only option.
Competition is complex and is more dependent on a consumer needs than just classification of what a product is. In your earlier point you used Apple as an example of a company that can increase prices despite competition, but really Apple is a prime example of a company putting up walls to an ecosystem making it really hard to leave once you’re in.
Generally in the current tech landscape there barely is any competition outside openish platforms. But with tech, you often can’t look at competition as product A vs Product B. Like while we can say that Window competes with OSx, it’s harder to say that a Mac laptop competes with a given Dell laptop (because what you can do with each OS is different to different people).
This is why I like to think of all the tv streaming services as different types of food stores. There is no supermarket that supplies everything, you’re forced to have memberships to the single butcher, the single milk man, the single bakery, etc. if you want a particular food, there is currently no (or very little) competition. You can certainly survive on just bread, and people are happy to do that, but that bakery can and will increase prices whenever because they aren’t really competing with the butcher.
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.
Your comment makes no sense to me. It was never cool, and it isn’t now.
If it was never cool, there’s no need to extra uncool it now.
I hope this is sarcasm. They weren’t being a dick, just educating people, which is a good thing
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When using be in an if clause for an unreal conditional sentence
*When using “be” in an “if” clause for an unreal conditional sentence
When referring to words, use quotation marks for clarity.
Great suggestion, thank you
It is rigged. Exclusive deals keep content restricted so they’re not directly competing; if you want that show you have to pay for service X. Or, you know, yarrrr.
prices are lower, piracy is nearly free for most, no?
Same thing for me. I can also use Findroid on my Android phone with microG to watch stuff from my Jellyfin server. I think the Netflix app wouldn’t even work on my phone.
I used to pay for Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and Paramount+. Then me and m wife noticed that every time we wanted to rewatch a show or a movie, it was not available on any of those. So now I only pay for Newsgroups.
Access to pirated media hasn’t changed all that much since Netflix rose to prominence… Hmm, I wonder what has changed since then.
Netflix literally will not take my money anymore. I had cancelled my subscription during covid because money was tight, but I was willing to temporarily re-subscribe when the next season of select shows came out. I tried to re-enable my original account, but I couldn’t because they wouldn’t accept my credit card. I tried different cards, then tried to make new accounts with different emails and different credit cards, but still couldn’t. Netflix kept rejecting all my cards. I ran out of credit cards.
Look, I was willing to give Netflix my money, it’s not my fault they were unwilling to take it.
What a mystery this is
Wow! It’s almost as if greed and hubris caused all the media companies to split everything up so they wouldn’t have to share with netflix and now no one can keep track of which services are hosting what shows in which countries.
So learning how to pirate things and paying for a VPN that won’t snitch is easier than paying for a dozen different streaming services in addition to your internet connection.
MULLVAD! ProtonVPN! QBITTORRENT! POPCORN-TIME! KASPERSKY!
Sorry…I have Tourette’s syndrome. FUCKING QUANTUM RESISTANT ENCRYPTION WITH MULLVAD! PORT FORWARDING OFF WITH PROTON! Sorry…I meant to say that piracy is immoral and wrong! How are billionaires supposed to afford their diamond studded, solid gold toilets or their giant mansions on huge plots of land if we pirate things?!
I find that sarcastically interesting.
I initially signed up for Netflix all those many years ago because it was finally a solution that was easier than piracy.
Didn’t take long for them to completely fuck me and the service over, and I left to go back to piracy and I’ll never look at Netflix again.
They had piracy all but beat. It was their insatiable greed that drove people back to the sea.
Netflix was a core part of my life for well over a decade. The vast majority of my entertainment came from there.
In other News my Plex server is coming along great!
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
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.
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.
This, why did the government stop on prohibiting studios from owning cinemas?
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.
Excellent point. Calling the current streaming landscape decentralized is like calling the current social media landscape decentralized, since you can choose between twitter, reddit, tiktok, or meta. It’s unfortunate that it’s unlikely that a properly decentralized network for video will exist, since the hosting costs are so astronomical.
A centralized service’s hosting costs are astronomical because they are trying to serve the whole world. Is your Plex server hosting cost astronomical? What if you share it with friends? Everyone contributes to a decentralized service. Piracy is decentralized, and the hosting costs are not astronomical.
You can read things from all servers on the server you choose to connect with though. Bad analogy.
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.
Yet streaming music has basically the same artists no matter which service you use. And Tidal integrates with Plex seamlessly with my own local collection. Worth the subscription for that.
Do that. (But they won’t)
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
Netflix, steam, and Spotify got me out of piracy. Companies who owned the IP just decided they all wanted to replicate what Netflix did without understanding that it was impossible for more than one company to accomplish that.
It’s possible for more than one companies to thrive in streaming space. Just look at music streaming industry. There are healthy competition there with several global music streaming apps and various regional/country-specific music streaming apps. All they have to do is not locking contents behind exclusivity deals and compete on price and features instead. Also, not cracking down too much on family sharing usage also helps.
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.
when gaben dies the enshittification of steam will happen in short order. don’t put all your eggs in one basket
If that happens well then Piracy still exists. None of the other baskets aside from GOG are worth putting eggs in
in fact for the games that have been removed I actually still have full access, like rocket League still in my library just not purchasable anymore
Isn’t that just because RL went free to play?
It’s because Epic bought the Rocket League devs, Psyonix, in 2019. In 2020, they pulled it from Steam, to drive traffic to the Epic store. And yes, it’s also free to play now, but you still can’t get it on Steam, unless you bought it there before they pulled it. If you did, it still works fine on Steam today.
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
G2a?
Gobble two asses
but you usually get paid for that
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Yep, Steam is my “video game piracy canary”. The day I lose access to my games on Steam will be the last day I ever buy any video game, and probably any non-physical piece of media for the rest of my life.
Mostly the same for me. I’d still be open to it if it’s convenient, DRM-free, and easy to back up somewhere, but far less likely to put effort into finding out.
Hahaha, good
I love taking from all these billionaire companies.
🤏🎻
Good
Cable TV 2.0: “Boohoo, pirates are eating my profits!”
As long as Netflix doesn’t do 1080p on Firefox and reduces their price considerably and gets rid of stupid limitations on account sharing and ads, I’m never paying for it. Same for games with DRM. I’m not suffering from DRM bs when I can pirate the same without DRM. Why should i pay these asshole companies more and be more restricted than a pirate lol.
Also Netflix: We should raise our prices again.
the entire industry: “…and also fragment our offerings across a dozen different subscription services.”
Also Netflix: “Let’s cancel all the popular series that we hyped up all last year because they are too expensive.”
