Yeah I've been making this case for a while. The more exclusivity deals and services they make, the more the consumer is gonna realize it's just not worth the bother and will just go back to pirating because piracy offers something much more convenient. It harkens back to Gabe Newell's statements about how piracy is a service problem.
Super interesting bit at the end about how movie theaters were the same way once, owned by movie studios and showed certain films exclusively before that was outlawed. Maybe we're about to see history repeat itself with streaming services.
Because yeah, services should get me to sign up through features, convenience and innovation, not because their platform has something specific I want to watch.
This is my biggest frustration with Netflix. I really don’t care for 95% of the ‘Netflix originals’, I would not be surprised if most of them were dumped by other producers when they realised just how rubbish they were, and Netflix bought them for a bargain. All I want from Netflix is a catalogue that is at least a fraction of the size of the US catalogue.
It’s getting increasingly harder to justify my $18 per month subscription when there’s never anything good to watch, and I could instead rent virtually any film through Google Play for just $5.
Netflix would be nice if they didn't have different regions with different programs available.
Like, when I'm bored and google "Good *genre* movies on Netflix* like 90% of them aren't available for me.
And like said, most Netflix originals are uninteresting to me.
Piracy is straight up more convenient than a paid service. I think that summarizes the issue.
Pirates can just download almost any movie or series in 4K, store it on a pendrive or any cloud service, and watch anytime they like it (without being dependent on an internet connection outside of the cloud option)
You can't really do that with netflix
Streaming really is all about trading reliability for the convenience of the service doing the hard work for you. But if this "exclusivity of the distribution of an idea" keeps happening with video streaming services, and if streaming is supposed to be the future of video games, then god help us all.
Content problems aside, anyone else find the Netflix Win10 app and website suck for both browsing and playing video content and often in different ways?
The app feels a bit better for browsing, but it lacks customization. The website plays shit in garbage sub-HD quality but the app has flawless quality (something to do with DRM in the app vs in-browser). Both the app and website make me set my audio and subtitle preferences every single time I watch something. I never want to use 5.1 audio with my stereo headphones, yet it defaults to 5.1 audio every time. The app has crappy skip forward/back functionality where it gets stuck.
Also doesn't help that there's about a hundred different streaming services now all with their own exclusive shows. Why pay for 3-4 streaming services to get the shows you want when you pirate them in a few minutes?
Every time I wanted to watch a movie on Netflix, the movie wasn't available in my region.
That was fine for a time when I could use a proxy, but since they've blocked all the ones I've used, I just unsubbed
Literally don't want my money, so it seems
Here's a random take on this, specifically the part about him stating that intellectual property (copyright) being inherently flawed: This is kind of a weird tangent, so just kind of stick with me for a second.
Intellectual property is very important, because you need to be able to claim the right of ownership as the original creator of an idea - not limited to music, books, choreography, etc. Take music, for instance. A lot of youtuber lately have been angry about their videos being flagged for containing small snippets of music that they don't own. What people don't know is that you can literally just get written permission from the original owner of the item for usage, and they can give you permission with any deal they want - including free. You make money off of usage of intellectual property, and the original creator of that property needs to be correctly compensated for the usage of their art.
If you argue that the snippet that you use is "fair use" because "isn't long enough" to matter, then there's no benefit to using the item in the first place and there should be no issue.
So, I'm saying, there's nothing inherently wrong with copyright or intellectual property, but rather the abuses of copyright.
For instance, look at things like google play store, iTunes, Amazon Music, etc. These places offer the SAME PRODUCT (IP/Copyright held item) on different stores with different benefits.
I use Google Play because I can download my purchased album twice - DRM free - in a maximum .mp3 format. iTunes doesn't allow that, but I can still find the same product on their service.
I can also use a subscription service such as Spotify to listen to the same exact product.
The issue isn't copyright, it's actually what he calls the ... oligopoly. Exclusivity of IP through storefront.
I think the difficulty here is that we've been in a society that enforces that TV is exclusive. You can access all the same channels on pretty much ANY cable service, right? But you can't get the same shows on any channel. The issue hadn't existed until we removed Cable from the equation. Now it's all about paying them directly for their IP.
Games are working the same way, but they've always had an issue with exclusivity - but it has never been EVERY game - only those produced by the exclusivity holder. Except now it's storefronts like Epic Store, Origin, and Steam. The storefronts that WORK are things like GOG in which they offer some of the same products as other storefronts, but they have alternative features. This is why Epic Games is an issue, because they are forcing exclusivity without giving any sort of competitive feature for their share of the market, just strongarming themselves in.
Imagine if a HUGE publisher of music, such as ASCAP, decided the only way you can access their music library was to subscribe to the worst possible store at $30 a month. All those artists would fail, their store would fail, but you'd also never see that product again.
TL;DR it's not Copyright or Intellectual Property that's the issue, it's just the abuse from exclusivity that needs to be solved.
I can't blame Netflix though in large part because at the onset; they were getting dicked over by the companies who made the shows.
Yeah it's super unfortunate because it's not up to them at all. The property holders only give them the rights to show the content in X amount of regions.
One thing he doesn't really cover in the video (maybe lack of awareness in this case) is that when it comes to license holders and their content, they often nail down very specifically what can and can't be done with their content and anything new requires individual consent per-media / license. What this means is any new features you roll out may require explicit consent from the property holders and once you've accrued a large library of content - doing this for any older content becomes troublesome.
This is why you also see Netflix Originals often releasing with interesting quirks / features first, often long before they're rolled out elsewhere. Corporate contracts in these settings are ironclad and are absolutely punishing if you even dare stray from the original agreement without prior consent.
This is basically the same problem as the epic games store controversy, storefront exclusivity is very similar to streaming service exclusivity. Each service gets monopolies over certain properties and competition stops happening in favor of quibbling over exclusives.
The solution sounds like a bill that bans storefront exclusivity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_dealing
It effectively is already against competition law.
I'm sure netflix/other streaming sites get around this since they aren't actually selling what you're streaming, just the ability to stream. I don't see how Epic gets around this though, what they're doing is a pretty textbook example.
Anime has a similar problem nowadays.
Basically each season you would have to subscribe to like 4-6 different services just to watch all the shows you want.
https://i.imgur.com/BzGoDxk.png
Plus you can run into the same issues as Netflix where some of those services are officially not available in your region.
The rise of everything being a paid service is also problematic and thats not limited to just tv shows and anime.
So many services that might just cost 5-10 bucks a month but quickly add up to a stupid monthly sum.
The more those sites fracture because each publisher/rights holder wants a piece of the cake on their own, the worse the overall "service playfield" will get as people only have a limited amount of money they are willing to spend.
In the end it just leads back to increased piracy.
Not only that but private trackers offer versions of movies, albums, etc that are difficult to even find legally
As someone who has HD copies of Song of the South and the Theatrical Versions of Star Wars, it's a shame that i had to struggle to even get copies of these films owned by major studios.
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