The pirates are back - Anew study from the European Union’s Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) suggest that online piracy has increased for the first time in years. In fact, piracy rates have bee…::We analyze a new study where the EUIPO suggests online piracy is on the increase within the European Union.
Love how it doesn’t mention the fact that services are getting objectively worse content as they stretch thin, are increasing their prices across the board, and cracking down on password sharing which was previously touted as a benefit.
Exactly. There’s too many platforms, not enough quality content on any one of them, and weaponized greed. Worse, these streaming services have “inspired” every asshole executive out there to make everything under the sun a subscription model.
That plus actively removing older shows
No new ones…
Star Trek prodigy
People aren’t also willing to spend as much on Oreo’s due to inflation so it’s also probably that if theres a game or movie everyone’s playing, sailing the seven seas is tried and true…and free.
Exactly. That’s when I went back to the seas. My family across 2 states uses Netflix and I already paid for the $20/month high tier. When they told my sister that it wasn’t about to be more expensive, I put my foot down and said I’m gonna setup a plex/overseer box on my on PC. It’s been working mostly alright.
Weird thing to love but you do you
The EUIPO speculates that financial pressures, like inflation, means that people have less money to spend on entertainment. This can be seen in the way that fewer people are signing up for Netflix or Amazon Prime – and some are even cancelling their subscriptions altogether.
Ah yes, that’s the only reason. Not that streaming services are offering less content and functionality for more money, that can’t be it.
As someone that went initially got back into piracy for the “no you just raised your prices for this one service I only use for this one show anyway, I’ll download it instead” reason. I have significantly increased my piracy because it’s honestly a much better user experience. For me to easily set sonarr/radarr to grab what I want and have a beautiful and customizable UI/UX like jellyfin to consume that content, which works on all my devices. Fucking Hulu, Disney, Amazon, peacock, max all suck in comparison from a pure UX perspective
Netflix has +9 million users in the past quarter
That’s not enough growth. It’s never enough. It literally can’t ever be enough.
So they raise prices and pay for astroturfed articles blaming everything but the executives charged with infinite growth forever.
First thing that came to mind. I want to see back to back to back quarters of falling subscribers
It’s worth noting that although piracy is up, the rates are still far lower than they were 20, 10 or even five years ago. Whether people continue to access content illegally remains to be seen – hopefully this is just a ‘blip’ and rates of theft begin to fall again as the economy recovers.
I can’t be bothered to pull back all the layers of naive optimism in just these two sentences.
I 100% believe this. The video streamers are getting too greedy and pushing out too much subpar content. When it was affordable and easy to find what you want streaming was great. Now it’s expensive and stuff in on 12 different platforms.
Also most of what I watch is older so everyone on the creative and production side has been paid the only ones making money at this point are the studio fat cats.
Ads. It’s all because of ads. There is a low tolerance by way more people now, and piracy is more convenient than putting up with platforms that can’t build a UX to save their lives, and then put in ads. Fuck em, let them die.
I disagree in that I don’t necessarily think all of the content is subpar. But making everything on a different service and each service continues to jack up its prices makes it very difficult to justify subscribing to any one of them. Like, I’m never gonna subscribe to peacock even though it has a few things I’d watch on it, that’s ridiculous.
Everything doesn’t have to be a different service, studios are just being extraordinarily greedy.
Wow that wording, trying to make pirating sound like an evil crime lol. I feel no moral negativity pirating. In fact, my conscience is clean and I feel morally obligated to, considering how expensive they are making services.
I think reading between the lines is the real story: when they get greedy, pirating puts them I check and causes pricing to become affordable and people stop pirating. Once people are not pirating, greed increases and pirates have to return to put them in place again.
In conclusion… we need pirates to balance things out, this pirating is a necessity in our modern age…
You are welcome everyone, I am doing my part for myself and I am doing my part for you.
Another reason why piracy is needed is to prevent pieces of culture from being erased from history to satisfy some perverse corporate accounting requirements.
Fucking rights
They call “refusing to be exploited” piracy. Generally industries where there are huge monopolies like media, groceries, and other such thing are most sensitive to this because they lack the ability to deal with outside pressures any more.
Vilifying people fighting back is the cheapest way to manage this.
I’m kinda looking forward to seeing what replaces things like Netflix and Spotify
Yeah it should be interesting. I’m also looking forward to see what new trackers come into relevance as the userbase increases.
Redacted as the only viable music tracker is a real shame. Just like everything else, we need more options not less.
Companies are stealing from you every single day of your life from the second you’re born to the moment you die.
No harm in returning the favor.
I believe it was Gabe Newell who said the best way to avoid piracy is by making legitimate purchasing easier and/or better.
In the early history of streaming services, you could get access to a lot of content in a straightforward way for not much money. People started doing that instead of pirating. The corporations got greedy, they made the services worse and increased the price to the point that piracy is preferable again.
And I don’t have the least amount of sympathy. Yarr matey.
And Steam is a show of success
It’s funny because I pirate everything… except PC games. Because it’s so cheap and convenient on steam to just buy them, I like the tracked achievements thing and comparing to friends, and I can play the games on any PC or my steam deck with a quick login and install. I can easily download and install PC games from my private trackers but steam is just so easy and cheap. If movies and TV were as convenient and affordable as steam I wouldn’t pirate any of it. But as it stands, I’d have to pay over $200 a month just to have access to all the streaming services that have shows that I like. Fuck that noise. Someone needs to make a version of Steam for media. Kind of like Vudu but less crappy. Just let me pay a few bucks to own a series or a movie, have lots of good sales and deals, let me access the content on all platforms easily, and I would definitely start building a library over time like I’ve done with steam.
edit: I still do pirate games on PC sometimes just to try them, but usually end up buying on steam because it works better and it can be played on multiple devices easily.
And now that I switched to Linux, Steam releases Proton, like If I needed another reason to only get my games from them.
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Almost all games these days have a requirement to be online to play them, even in single player, and are absolutely ridden with DRM, sometimes even to the extent that it installs rootkits like in the case of Uplay and Valorant. By not voting with your wallet and pirating it yourself, you’re doing yourself and the community at large a disservice. ^♪
edit because they deleted:
“Poopkins” wrote
Almost all games these days have a requirement to be online to play them, even in single player, and are absolutely ridden with DRM, sometimes even to the extent that it installs rootkits like in the case of Uplay and Valorant. By not voting with your wallet and pirating it yourself, you’re doing yourself and the community at large a disservice. ^
And I replied
Okay then. I guess you didn’t even fucking read what I wrote.
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Nothing of what you wrote related to my comment, which wasn’t deleted—after all, you replied to it. I guess you didn’t read what I wrote.
With the advent of self hosted streaming services and the arr services the option is even easier now. If 1 in 20 ppl are motivated/tech savvy that’s 20 streaming products not being paid for.
It’s not just streaming services that have turned to shit. Society as a whole has been enshittified because shareholders and directors are chasing the dollar.
Reddit started charging out of their butt for API access, and had killed off 95% of third party apps in the process.
YouTube is downright unusable without a Premium subscription or uBlock Origin. Every content creator meanwhile risks demonetization if their videos are too kid-friendly or too inappropriate, and now have to fill half their videos with endorsements for shitty mobile games like Raid: Shadow Legends if they want to break even.
Porn sites are now astroturfed by e-girls shilling their $20/month OnlyFans pages.
Online dating apps are now a carbon copy of one another, are owned by an oligopoly of big corporations and charge you the same price of four WoW subscriptions for basic features like unlimited swipes, seeing who liked you, etc.
Even real life sucks now. Enjoy paying 70% of your monthly income to pay off some filthy rich landlord’s mortgage while the rich continue to snap up properties, all while the wealthy continue to brainwash sheep into voting against their best interests.
It’s tot BUY SOME SHIT! ally nothi BUY SOME SHIT! ng to do BUY SOME SHIT! with th BUY SOME SHIT! ere be BUY SOME SHIT! ing way to BUY SOME SHIT! o many a BUY SOME SHIT! ds to ma BUY SOME SHIT! ke stuff wa BUY SOME SHIT! tc BUY SOME SHIT! ha BUY SOME SHIT! bl BUY SOME SHIT! e.
I wish I could up AND downvote this, as it gets the point across well, but MAN do I hate that point. Also, the fact that EVERYTHING has its own streaming service now… No, I’m not paying you a subscription to watch 1 show. If you dont want to give the main streaming players a cut, just sell each season as a oje time purchase
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Yeah. It was nice having a period of time where obtaining things legitimately wasnt a pain or felt like you were being milked for all you were worth though… Oh well, yo ho it is!
Man was this very hard for me to read. Still up voting it, though
what a ride
I just cancelled my Netflix that I had for like 10 years. Total shit nothing to watch.
Now there’s a million services, everything is plus. Paramount+, Disney+, Nutsack+
Even if I wanted to pay for all that shit, everyone has their own shitty app I have to install and configure and have a login and fuck you.
It’s just easier for me to torrent what I want.
Thing is, I’m not averse to paying for good content, I like to support the creators. But
When every show is on a different app and they’re all $15 a month…buying a couple hard drives and saving every show just makes more financial sense and I don’t need 15 different login credentials so fuck off yarrr
Now there’s a million services, everything is plus. Paramount+, Disney+, Nutsack+
I think the + is to streaming services what the i prefix was to electronic junk.
I pay for them still. But still download and watch on Plex. Oh shit I meant a friend of mine does this.
hopefully this is just a ‘blip’ and rates of theft begin to fall again as the economy recovers.
If not, we can expect to see legal channels raising their prices again to cover the losses caused by piracy.
This is a crazy thing to write. Every streaming service already has their prices set at whatever they think will maximize profit. If they raise prices in response to piracy, they’ll push even more people away.
If anything, piracy will serve as competition, and it will cause the streaming services to lower prices.
piracy will serve as competition
for shows sold exclusively to one streaming service then piracy is indeed the only competition
Wow they’re just straight up calling it theft now. They can’t even pretend to understand the difference.
That’s nothing new. “You wouldn’t steal a car” was in the 90s…
Piracy doesn’t compete on price. Maintaining a server, Internet, and VPN access has a cost beyond the technical knowledge needed to set it all up.
Piracy competes on service. Sick of ads? Sick of your favorite shows disappearing from your services? Tired of the Disney vault (they have the content but won’t let you stream it any more) problem? Can’t find the thing on any service? Like obscure and rare content? Like fan edits? Like to curate collections and playlists? Like HD on any and every device you own? Like easy offline content syncning for when you’re traveling to a spot with spotty Internet? Like sharing your library with friends and family? Tired managing multiple streaming subscriptions and navigating the content to find what you really want to watch? Your friendly neighborhood pirate community has a solution for you. Lower prices aren’t even in the top ten reasons lots of people pirate.
I have subscriptions (and shared subscriptions) to… seven services that I can think of in 20 seconds.
Yet, time and time again, I try to figure out if what I want to watch is covered by one of them (not trivial to figure out), and end up falling back on piracy probably around 50% of the time.
Now that every fucking content owner has its own subscription plan, it makes subscriptions pointless because it’s spread so damn thin.
Cancel all those subs man. They are eating your money without return. It’s better to download the specific show you want to watch.
Guess what’s also been increasing? Prices.
Guess what also has refused to go up? Wages
Guess what also been increasing? The number of streaming platforms trying to out bid their competitors. You know what else is increasing? The number of streaming platforms going after account sharing and they wonder why people are going back to piracy. Piracy is king and no one will be able to stop it.
That’s what I’m worried about….billionaires will convince governments (who haven’t banned them yet) a “think of the children act” which will ban VPNs
Way too many businesses rely on VPNs to ban them.
Oh you sweet child. They only need to ban them for citizens, not for business / shareholders.
Well….how does China and Russia and other authoritarian shitholes that have banned them operate?
I don’t know about China, but Russia has not banned VPNs. They banned specific VPN services. I’m guessing it’s similar in China. And there are plenty of grey and black market VPN services for people in those countries to use. And they use them.
VPN is basically just a encrypted channel between 2 systems, while one of them forward traffic to the internet and unless they block/filter every encrypted connection, there is no way to block it at mass…
Yeah, it’s scary. France and the UK are already well on their way to heading down that path.
The convenience of streaming services disappeared, this is just a natural consequence.
It’s like no longer having one cheap and convinient way of seeing content makes people rather pirate things than paying 7 different platforms each one more expensive than the next and all of them trying to mess with you and your wallet in new and unexpected ways.
