I worked at a used media store 10+ years ago, and I remember worrying about what would happen when everything was conveniently available on good ol’ reliable Netflix, which at the time seemed like the logical thing that everyone would eventually sign up for, and then what would I do?
Fast forward to today, and streaming has certainly changed the market. Huge TV show box sets are almost impossible to sell, though it’s not a totally dead market. DVDs and Blu-rays sell about as well as they ever did, if not better. Maybe everything is on a service somewhere, but most households aren’t going to sign up for every service, so as a result of all the streaming services fighting like dogs for library rights, there’s almost always someone looking to get a cheap, used, physical copy of a movie they can’t get elsewhere.
If anything, I feel more secure about the future of physical media today than I did ten years ago.
The tv show box sets often have commentary tracks, which is something you will be hard pressed to find even in pirated versions, so they still have their advantages.
I cherish my The Wire dvd box set (found ridiculously cheap at a charity shop), so much good commentary there, particularly from David Simon, who always have interesting anecdotes or facts to say about particular scenes etc.
Commentary tracks are the underappreciated treasures of physical media. Lord of the Rings gets a lot of deserved praise, but The Matrix has a philosophers commentary track which is awesome, and the 1989 Batman has Tim Burton geeking out over his own movie in a delightful fashion. Also, Jonathan Frakes does a hilarious commentary on Star Trek: First Contact where he sounds simultaneously like a popular high school jock and a gigantic Star Trek dweeb, and I adore him for it.
The tech and entertainment industries have slowly eroded any and all moral arguments against piracy.
Streaming and digital distribution have led to situations where we no longer own the media we buy. We could buy a licence to access an app, song, show or movie and then have our access revoked at any time for any reason, and maybe we’ll get a refund if we’re lucky…
Landmining terms of service with clauses banning class action lawsuits and imposing forced arbitration have become increasingly common and is further eroding our consumer rights so if a company does fuck us financially, we’re SOL.
Then we have companies like Nintendo that have litigated hard against emulators, ROM sites and third-party flash carts which have given access to old games that Nintendo otherwise have little interest in making available on modern hardware - in some cases bankrupting people like Gary Bowser for life with seven-figure judgements in the process.
We now have a substantial risk of more shows, games, songs, movies and other forms of media becoming lost because of this.
But the biggest kick in the teeth has come from the AI industry.
Hosting pirated streams of PPV events or sports matches locked behind expensive cable channels, or even selling modded Fire Sticks that enable piracy can earn you significant prison time and a massive fine. Yet training LLMs on copyrighted works without the rightsholders’ knowledge, consent or compensation is apparently perfectly fine and not landing people like Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg behind bars?
Fun thing I’m now dealing with.
Crunchyroll raised their prices this month and when they did they emailed me a promotion to upgrade to a yearly plan for quite a bit less than normal.
It didn’t work, so I went to their support which is now an ai chat bot. It has to transfer you to a real person for you to get one as far as I can tell. It told me, since I’m subscribed in Google play that’s why it didn’t work, and I can cancel, wait for it expire, then use the promotion to get the deal.
Ok stupid but hey, it’s not working for me now, whatever. I do that, yesterday is when it ended so I go to try it again. Same issue, I talk to the glorious chatbot again and now after describing the issue and confirming a couple of things it offers to get me to an agent. “Son of a bitch”.
So i get to the agent and they review a few things. NOW that the subscription is CANCELED… They can’t FIX THE PROMOTION. But they could have if i didn’t! (I specifically asked that). I’m so GLAD this is customer service now!
Also kinda funny their whole entire purpose is to add subtitles and they were trying to secretly use AI generated translations.
I just use ani-cli.
You’re absolutely right! You shouldn’t’ve cancelled that!
I was so happy that I could successfully cancel Crunchyroll a few years ago when I was cutting down on pointless subscriptions.
They’re the only service I’ve subscribed to that had frequent payment shenanigans going on. Most of the service works fine, but if you look at the payment side - why, look at the time already, it’s jank o’clock. Payments sure went through as far as PayPal and my bank were concerned, but stuff on Crunchyroll’s end was often just “pending”. Wouldn’t let you unsubscribe while there were outstanding issues, of course!
So if Crunchyroll had promotions that never went through, I would just say, well, that sure sounds like Crunchyroll all right.
I pirated Free Solo the other year. Loved it so much I tried to pay for it afterwards. Only on Disney+/National Geographic subscription service.
There’s some great movies/shows out there, which I’m willing to pay for, but to watch them you need to agree to those Terms and Conditions, which I don’t agree too. So… 🏴☠️
You have to be careful what you pay for digitally as well. I once bought a digital copy of a Star wars movie and a physical copy just to see what it was like. I could only watch it on the Cineplex browser/website and they deleted it after a year or two anyways?! What a rip off.
Maybe you can grab a DVD or Blu-ray?
Does an amazon reseller count as “supporting the crew” cause that’s the only link I found…
I hate that series are so freaking expensive on disc. It’s cheap enough that you can afford to stream it to me with $5 a month with commercials or OTA for free with commercials where I’m allowed to record it, but now that it’s on a disc, it’s worth $90. That box of 7 disks cost them $10 to make.
Breaking Bad IS worth the 100+ AUD price tag. (I think I already have it. Either that or Better Call Saul) but ripping each disc, and seperatimg each episode, is ALOT of work.
Either way, I paid for the blue rays of one of the series. I’m sure Vince is OK if I “borrow” the show show to move to my jellyfin server
It was just the ads for me. If I pay for a service, I should be able to watch without commercials. Since that’s not possible, I’ve dropped all the streaming services and just sail the seas now. Saving almost $100 a month.
Been thinking about sailing the seas again as well as buying physical medium and ripping it to digital for a personal collection. These streaming services keep increasing the prices while offering less.
Streaming service: “You’re lucky, this show is available on this service this week! Who knows which service will have it next week. It’s up to the bosses, sorry.”
Me with my ADHD brain: (Ready the sloop, check the rigging) “Aye, I know where it’ll be, right tharrr on me USB stick”
I more often than not pirate content I pay for just so I don’t have to watch ads too.
Third panel doesn’t belong at all imho. We need a GOG for movies and shows. Sure physical is still around but I don’t have the space for all that.
You misunderstood the panel, Prime Video has plenty movies that are outside of the subscription you already pay and you need to pay extra to watch them. That’s the complaint, that the baseline subscription doesn’t offer all the content, and that they don’t clearly communicate when you are going to pay.
I think the third pannel is those times when you’re already paying for a streaming service but then certain popular movies/shows get sold seperately anyway in addition to needing the subscription.
Yea I don’t mind digital purchases if I can download it. When they are trapped to “subscription only” I get annoyed.
theres a reason why the only services i sub to are dropout, beacon, and passport; everything else is smooth sailing
Add a debris service. Then you are golden.
mhh did not know this was a practice.
But won’t real debrid suspend your account since you are using it against the policy? and isn’t it easier to fine you since you have an account on their platform?
But I use TORbox not real debrid.
What’s wrong with “this show is only available for rent or purchase”? That’s how I grew up 😬 back in the good ol’ days
edit: never mind, I misunderstood
Did you pay a subscription to five different services while also doing that?
no, I didn’t, thank god. I misunderstood the post, will edit my comment
Yeah I’ve been using unofficial streaming services for a while now, only issue is the lack of an algorithm.
I’m more pissed about shows you can’t watch or buy.
if you aren’t selling I can’t pay for it.
Making your IP available to purchase somewhere, somehow should be a requirement for maintaining copyright and trademark protection. Use it or lose it.
Can’t claim you’re losing money from lost sales if you’re not even attempting to sell it in the first place!
(Needs to be a bit more thought out than my half-baked plan, though. Because, otherwise, every IP owner who wants to park something without offering it for sale will put it up for sale in some obscure place at an extremely high price, just to technically qualify and preserve their copyright.)
Nothing pisses me off more than shows, movies, or games that you literally cannot buy with legitimate means yet every single time someone tries to preserve it they get in trouble with whoever holds the rights. It’s like bro, I am more than willing to pay for it if you’d let me. The reason people are trying to preserve your show, movie, or video game is literally because you won’t let us give you money for it and even when you do let us pay for it you make it worse on purpose to make more money (I.e. ads and subscription tiers)
Often this is because neither streaming nor selling physical media is “worth it” for the parent company. Setting up even a simplified BD release takes tons of money because it’s not as simple as the copyright owner taking ready to use final renditions and burning it to a disk, there’s a whole process that goes into taking the masters and getting the highest possible quality digital copies off them, encoding appropriately for the disks, etc., and that’s not even mentioning the physical production of the disks, cases, booklets, etc., and getting a distribution deal with the right sellers and so on. What seems like a no brainer “you have a product, I want to buy that product, sell me that product” isn’t so simple after all.
Same goes for streaming albeit differently. The rights owner needs to create a streaming compatible release from the master (or sometimes even from the existing physical copy masters!), pay residuals after every playback, AND it has to bring new viewers to the platform for it to be profitable. Adding content just because existing users demand it - users who will 95-99% of the time will still stick with the platform even if they don’t get what they want - is not profitable, as it brings in no extra revenue.
Then there’s licensing. A lot of TV shows and movies are stuck in perpetual licensing hell because even though the trademark and franchise ownership lies with one company, long term rights usage has been sold to third parties as a way to have the IP generate revenue. Foe example, Paramount didn’t start their own streaming for years because all their IP has been sold for 5-7 year terms to e.g. Netflix. Why start a platform if you can literally not put your own product there? Or take HBO - since all Warner Brothers licensing was done in 10 year exclusive blocks with SkyTV, HBO (Go, Max, Plus, etc.) literally couldn’t enter the UK market because ALL the content was licensed out to another company who was promised exclusive rights within the UK for that time period…
I fully agree that going after piracy when you’re not willing to provide your content for legal procurement, is a bit hypocritical, and shouldn’t be a thing.
Setting up even a simplified BD release takes tons of money
You’re triggering my Cyberpunk PTSD…
That was anime in Canada for a bit.
That’s still a ton of movies and shows.
Fuck em if they don’t want my money
Yar har fiddlety de
I love how the go-to pirate theme song is a 50/50 split between Disney and LazyTown.
It’s such a banger
I must be old cause for me it’s “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of Yum!” and I was already babysitting the target audience for The Rugrats by the time the movie came out.
It’s because of this (or related) memes
lol limewire
