219

Can’t pay, won’t pay: impoverished streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 2 days ago by Ninjazzon@infosec.pub to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

25 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com 120 points 2 days ago

“Piracy is not a pricing issue,” Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve, the company behind the world’s largest PC gaming platform, Steam, observed in 2011. “It’s a service issue.” Today, the crisis in streaming makes this clearer than ever. With titles scattered, prices on the rise, and bitrates throttled depending on your browser, it is little wonder some viewers are raising the jolly roger again. Studios carve out fiefdoms, build walls and levy tolls for those who wish to visit. The result is artificial scarcity in a digital world that promised abundance.

This hits the nail on the head...

I wonder if these greedy fuckers know this but don't give a shit in favor of short term profits,or if they're actually so dense and holed up in their own world disconnected from reality that they don't see it?

[-] deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 54 points 2 days ago

They know it, but refuse to belive it, because they've built an empire on a faulty premise and can't conceive that they may be wrong.

Source: two decades in the industry. But I got ~~better~~ out.

[-] MudMan@fedia.io 28 points 2 days ago

I don't know that I'd say they refuse to believe it, it's more that there are short term goals and milestones to hit because literally every single industry is held to the standards and timelines of speculative investors rather than actual investors.

Everybody understands you should be servicing your audience and keeping them happy, and everybody is happy with you doing that... as long as it's within the constraints of hitting quarterly goals. In a world where content routinely takes 3-5 years to make that is not a great fit.

Newell doesn't have any investors to answer to so he gets to say those things when he's in billionaire club. Everybody else just goes "no shit, Gabe" and keeps working on squeezing something out to keep pretending to have done better year on year.

It's a remarkable example of the aggregation of incentives going against every single individual person involved, including those setting the incentives.

[-] onslaught545@lemmy.zip 13 points 2 days ago

The problem is mostly that the C-suite is only capable of thinking a quarter at a time, which is a side effect of the desire for perpetual growth.

It doesn't matter if a policy can net them huge profits in a year if it makes this quarter look worse than last quarter.

[-] Banzai51@midwest.social 13 points 2 days ago

They don't care. They know they'll lose subscribers but they'll make more money overall on the suckers that stick out the monopoly pricing. Same thing is happening in the auto industry where they sell less cars but are more profitable.

[-] ushmel@piefed.world 7 points 2 days ago

99% of the general public will not pirate anything because they lack the ability to do so. Of the 1% left, 99% of them use public trackers with variable results regarding quality and shady website shenanigans. The most common form of piracy going forward will probably be like those hacked fire sticks that would stream pirated content, because it's easy and low barrier, like the hacked cable box cards/chips from the 90s.