Say what you will about stealing, illegality, unsavouriness.
If the film industry would collectively take their head out of their arses and provide such a simple interface and wide catalogue to the masses, they would make hundreds of billions.
I would literally pay $50 a month for an official and legal version of this.
The end users don't really care that it is not possible because "legal reasons". This app proves otherwise and I wholeheartedly approve of their mission.
EDIT: if I would pay $50 a month, why am I not buying/renting movies on iTunes or Amazon for the same amount? For the same reason Spotify or Apple Music are making a killing. Give me a flat rate and let me watch _everything_, it's hard to decide if that new movie just out is worth spending $15 on. Might be crap.
The whole business model of the content industry is based on perverting the idea of copyright and extending it beyond any reasonable limit. And with copyright terms extended to eternity and beyond, they are effectively stealing the cultural intellectual property of every living generation, depriving us of the basic means to creatively comment on our own cultural heritage.
Having used various streaming apps (Netflix, Watchever, Apple TV, the media libraries of T-Online here in Germany and various libraries of local TV stations), I am surprised that the interface, usability and stability of my basic home entertainment center (Kodi running on an old Raspberry Pi 2) are still vastly superior.
I, too, would happily pay 50 EUR / month for ANY streaming service with a decent interface and a movie library that covers the 20th century. The easiest and cheapest (and mostly legal) way to watch classics for me is still to go to the public library (with an extensive DVD / BluRay collection), rent the movie, rip it and watch it via Kodi. This costs me 10 EUR a year.
That being said, what we need is a standardized way to stream movie and music content, and handle payments. This would include a standardized API to list available content with descriptions, images and prices. This would make it possible to use a private home entertainment system like Kodi efficiently and legally and would get rid of the need to use / install 100,000 different apps for each streaming service. It completely eludes why the current level of abstraction between the different providers is the app, the only explanations I can come up with is branding, a total lack of collaboration between the providers and copyright protection.
>I think the bigger issue than paying for multiple services is duplicate licensing. If I sign up for DirecTV, Amazon Prime, and CBS how many shows am I triple licensing? If all these companies want me to sign up for multiple services, there needs to be a way for them to pass "already licensed" information to each other, and pro-rate their bills accordingly.
>ATT, Comcast, Disney, CBS already own almost all the historical content. Id rather pay a small licensing fee to those 4 and then be able to watch their content on any platform, rather than deal with multiple middlemen that have CBS, Comcast, Disney, ATT licensing costs built into their product price. IF I select DirecTV/ATT as my "licensing manager" then any time I sign up for Disney+, Peacock+, CBS All Access, I want a discount off one of the two ends (would make more sense to give all my subscription info to DirecTV and get a DirecTV discount. Then DirecTV can go to Disney and say "17% of our customers dont need to pay Disney licensing costs, weve adjusted our payment to you accordingly.)
> fouric: This is actually really important. While it's immoral to take the results of someone else's work without compensating them, it's also immoral to charge your customers multiple times for the same product.
It would really benefit the viewer to decouple "what am I licensed for" from "what app do i need to play this" and just allow my media player to access all my libraries regardless of which licensing/billing manager and video player I choose to use.. Movies Anywhere, Vudu, Roku, Apple and Amazon have made some progress on this front, but its still way too convoluted.
It is not stealing. It may be illegal, but it isn't stealing nor robbery. You may be violating the copyright law, but nobody is taken away any object and there is no threat of violence. When people get access to copyrighted works, then at first, it is good for people. Only then the idea is that the creators can't make a living by producing those works. We can solve that differently, without using copyright. Copyright is a weirdly anti-market and authoritarian concept where the government artificially makes something scarce by punishing supply. In any case, distributing stuff is not stealing. /rant
An official and legal version of this wouldn't be $50/month, it would be more like $200/month. It includes movies from every major company, and films while they are still in the cinema.
Streaming music has set the price floor. For the price of an album a month you can stream all the music you want, even new releases.
What makes you think movies should have a multiple of 10 instead of 1 for a monthly subscription fee?
I'll attempt an answer, the cost should be whatever the market will bare. The market could likely boom at $50/mth, but at $200 it would be niche. The industry seems to even be coalescing around $30/mth (my guess) through consumers paying for multiple services.
True. Now, compare the number of music albums produced per studio to the number of movies. We’re explicitly talking about paying per time rather than per work here; one movie versus one album is misleading and/or irrelevant.
To me, $50 seems more realistic because of data caps. You simply cannot stream enough content nowadays without forking over more money to ISPs. Pricing would become a balancing act. It’s an interesting thought experiment to wonder how those two giants would battle out the responsibility of bandwidth.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. First, when I had cable it was more like $100/mo, which included internet access. I also didn't get films still in the cinema with my package.
I don’t know what things are like in other parts of the world, but the US market has shown a preference for renting large-library access over buying individual works. There are exceptions, when the costs got skewed too far and the perception grows that the “large library” is actually a small library plus a lot of dross (see Cable TV), but even then it took decades of Worst-in-the-nation service issues, billing ‘hijinks’, and predatory pricing to convince Americans to start cutting the cord.
I absolutely agree on the rental risk factor. It discourages discovery of new things. In addition to that, the rental terms on these services suck.
Here's an example:
A month ago, my wife and I rented Casino from Amazon Prime for like $3 or whatever. It is a long movie, so we paused half way through with a plan to finish it the next day. The next evening rolls around and we discover we only had 24 hours to finish it once we had started it. We just paid again cause its only $3, but also resolved to never rent from Amazon Prime again.
These systems are a worse experience than pirating. It doesn't have to be that way.
That's two conversations mixed up in one: one about what is, as in, a prediction of what we can expect people to do, without any value judgements, and another about what ought to be, as in, what's our moral and ethical opinion of this behavior. And while the second one is a very tempting rabbit hole of flame wars, the first one is very clear cut: if you give people access to everything (or almost everything) for a reasonable subscription price, they won't pirate stuff anymore.
> That's two conversations mixed up in one: one about what is, as in, a prediction of what we can expect people to do, without any value judgements, and another about what ought to be, as in, what's our moral and ethical opinion of this behavior.
Economists are careful to distinguish between 'positive' and 'normative' economics, where positive economics is what's observed to happen and normative economics is what someone things ought to happen, morally, for precisely that reason. There are always the people who can't or won't make that distinction, however, including the people who refuse to distinguish between describing something and expressing approval of it. This has a particular relevance in any online community with a downvote function: If enough people are offended by a description of a state of affairs, any discussion of it will be downvoted to oblivion and will be impossible to hold in that forum, especially if downvotes are tied to how much you can participate in that forum in some fashion.
Here here. Been saying this for years as a satisfied Popcorn time users. Been paying for Spotify already for years too. If a legal Popcorn Time existed, I'd signup directly.
Not trying to be snarky, just something worth considering... Owning physical media is not as popular as it once was due to the multitude of streaming options available. Subsequently, the cost of physical media has gone down due to the popularity of streaming. If you pick up some $5 blue-rays for older films here and there, or hit up a used place, $50/month can go pretty far. Best part, after a year or so, you would have amassed a pretty sizeable collection of media, that is yours to watch, forever (as long as you retain copy of the media). Can't really beat that. Archive it and stream it with Plex or Kodi (which I think is legal, as long as you own a physical copy). Other commenters have noted similar sentiments, but I feel like the subscription services are just the new cable. Until a better option exists, I find physical media to have the friendliest licensing for users.
I'd be happy to keep paying for a legal service if I could watch movies in original language (movies are dubbed here in Italy) with English subtitles. Doesn't seem to be technically impossible so is it due to legal issues? If so, isn't that insane?
> If the film industry would collectively take their head out of their arses and provide such a simple interface and wide catalogue to the masses, they would make hundreds of billions.
They are already making hundred of billions
And will make more now thanks to house confinement
Why should they change model just now?
> I would literally pay $50 a month for an official and legal version of this.
But I'm paying zero right now...
And the chances of getting caught are slightly above zero.
My point is they would make hundred of billions MORE. Some will still illegally download, but most would flock to such a service.
We're not all criminals because it's fun. We just hate the inconvenience of trying to watch a movie legally in 2020, especially if you're outside of US, or worse yet, outside of the Western world.
It's not entirely absurd IMO, it could be that iTunes did so well because Kazaa, et al., had laid the groundwork for an expectation of "any tune, any time" and iTunes came closest to that?
People had gigabytes of free music on their computers and wanted a place to store them that enabled easy playback, hence the iPod. iTunes removed the friction necessary in piracy and priced inventory low enough to emerge as a viable alternative.
If you go too a restaurant and the food is really terrible, then you can refuse to pay, send a dish back, get a reduction/waiver of the bill - even the best places get it wrong sometimes.
Anyone ever got money back from Amazon/Apple/whoever because a movie they sold you sucked?
> Anyone ever got money back from Amazon/Apple/whoever because a movie they sold you sucked?
IDK, I'll find out within 72 hours. I just asked Microsoft to give me my money back for Dynasty Warriors 9 (I'd call it broke as fuck, but it's probably subjective).
I did once get a refund request for a Toy Story 4 ticket because the director and I happen to share some names.
I don't want to do the cost-benefit analysis of "do I want to spend $X for this movie?". I can afford it, I'm not counting pennies, but when I see a price figure I spend a few seconds deciding whether it's worth it or not, and sometimes the answer is NO.
On subscription services you just click and enjoy. I'm already paying for it, the answer is always YES.
But there's a limit. I will not pay for 10 different services at $9.99/mo to have access to 70% of the movie repertoire. No way in hell.
> This doesn't really explain your position on why you don't just buy/rent $50 worth of movies per month.
Isn’t their position that they’d like this thing to exist? I don’t see how you need to have a Spotify or Apple Music account to understand the argument.
You can currently buy or rent whatever you want and watch it. I haven't found anything on a streaming service that isn't also for sale/rent somewhere and have found things for sale that are not available on streaming services.
If you want access to "_everything_", and are willing to pay a premium over existing services, buying/renting what you want is available today. Problem Solved, no?
The media industry collectively thinks what they make is worth the collective cost of all their streaming services (probably hundreds of dollars a month).
They’ve spent BILLIONS making the movies that make up these catalogs.
And before you say “well they already made it back” let me remind you we’re on a tech forum, what industry makes the most money from “selling the same experience over and over again until your margins are nutty”
You feel you have the right to watch EVERYTHING they make, a subset of a few lifetimes of content just won’t do for the modern man.
So instead of sticking it to them and not buying into their game until they’re forced to reform...
you go and spend time illegally downloading their movies so that instead of getting the message “we don’t make stuff good enough to justify it’s price”, they get the message “we’re doing so well that people are stealing our content, go lobby for copyright laws harder or something Legal”.
Because more media than people who spent 100s of dollars to experience not that long ago is not ok, you need to have ALL of it. And if they don’t feel it’s in their best interests, you’re going to steal it
(and yes, it’s stealing enough with the “but I didn’t take the original”, why don’t you go copy all your employer's IP and post it on pastebin then tell the cops you just made a copy”)
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I personally pay for like, 2 services?
There is A LOT of media on there. For 30$ a month I’m getting access to more shoes and movies than cable would provide for 100s of dollars once upon a time. More than any sane person could watch in one lifetime.
Sometimes I have to forgo watching something because it’s not on the service I want. I don’t bother going to steal it. Once upon a time I was a kid with no money and no job, less impulse control and much more time to waste, so I would, let me not pretend I’ve never done it....
But now I’m an adult, I can decide not to watch something and watch something else if I feel it’s not worth my money.
If there’s a movie worth enough to me I can usually pay for access to it specifically (one off payment before someone starts waving the subscriptions are murder stick... on a tech forum).
But that’s actually never happened. Because there’s so much content there, unless you have this mentality of “I must have it all, I deserve it all, nothing less will do” I don’t see how 50$ a month of services (your cutoff) would not be enough.
> The media industry collectively thinks what they make is worth the collective cost of all their streaming services (probably hundreds of dollars a month).
Sure, they're entitled to think whatever they want. The reality is that the marginal cost of making a digital copy is near zero. Their work is widely available for free to anyone who cares to look for it. And it is extremely unlikely that the average person would ever experience any negative consequences for getting it for free.
You can think that's right or wrong or try to shame people all you want, but those are simple facts. Another fact is that for a large portion of the world, the content is not available legally even if you want to pay.
So, the content industry can learn to accept those facts and make a good service that makes some money. (Still many billions of dollars) or they can keep operating under the delusion that people should pay even more billions of dollars and get less.
The marginal cost of a digital copy of a piece of software is almost 0$
The negative consequences of just stealing it are pretty low
Unfortunately so much software has become a thin client for a fat backend, so it’s a little harder, but all said are definitely industries that pay 10,000$ a seat for software that was mostly written 20 years ago and is patched to keep it hobbling along
They’re not really going to besides waging larger and larger wars on copyright and forcing DRM
The thing is, I don’t really “shame” anyone, but I understand when “normal people” steal movies and shows
When technologists do it, it’s the biggest WTF for me.
I've used some of that $10k per seat software (AutoCAD and Revit). While that is expensive, businesses pay it because 10k is the revenue from one project using it. A very small project at that. It is also much easier to track down and sue a business compared to someone watching a movie alone in their room.
Companies that sell that software like Autodesk and Adobe also have the sense not to worry too much about individuals pirating it because more people who know how to use it means more customers later.
DRM will always fail because the content has to get decrypted at some point if anyone is going to see it.
For movies and shows, to me it’s a speed bump to try and keep people who don’t really mean to steal, but would gladly copy the disk and give it to all their friends as a favor.
Gaming and software is also pretty similar, it’s a speed bump. Maybe keep you from casually copying the software onto everyone’s machine.
Denuvo showed the game industry DRM can buy you some freedom from piracy in the most critical sales period, even if only for a few days, but yeah it’s not infallible (and is sold with that caveat)
I actually feel like on commercial software part of it is it let’s the nail you with DCMA if you circumvent their DRM directly, but I’m not a lawyer and that’s just my musings...
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The thing is, they pay 10k a seat because it makes them revenue.
Bur entertainment isn’t about revenue, it’s about enjoyment.
People pay 400$ to get their family into an amusement park for one day of entertainment.
Netflix is what? 13$ a month for access to 3,000+ movies, and how many shows?
Entertainment value is not a fungible good or anything, but to me that’s a very favorable comparison.
I’ve never felt I wasn’t getting my money’s worth for the 30$ I pay to literally always have something to watch on TV...
I also, less happily, pay for Netflix. I refuse to pay monthly fees for the rest of them but I'll pay to rent a movie online sometimes.
My issues with this whole thing:
- things I buy (i.e. not rent) aren't really mine and can disappear at any time if the publisher decides so (or just fail to keep their DRM servers alive.)
- massive abuse of copyright for something it wasn't meant for.
- the idea that it is OK to keep Europeans away from huge parts of the collection for no good reason.
As I've said multiple times: I'll happily pay more for media, but there is one rule
- no more subscriptions: anything subscription-based must replace one of my existing subscriptions.
I also happily pay for Netflix. And Amazon. And HBO. and Disney+. So, if something isn't on one of those services, yeah, I'm going to pirate it. I've already tithed more than enough to the entertainment industry. Most of the time the thing I want to watch isn't available on the services yet, but will be in 3-6 months. Like movies that just came out on video and they want to milk people who will pay $20 to watch it right away before it goes to all the streaming services. Nuts to that.
It’s your choice. If we were on any other forum I would get this mentality a little more but a tech forum of all places.
“I paid this one developer and this other developer and all of them are selling copies of the binaries so it’s not like each copy is worth anything anyways, and it’s ok if I steal a copy of this third developer's software because paying these developers means I deserve all the software that isn’t made by them too because developers in general want way more money than I think their software is worth”
???
It’s kind of like, most of us get to see how the bacon is made, and should get all of this nonsense about “the marginal cost of a movie” is silly. A lot of people here make very good money because 1000 hrs of development can become 1,000,000 dollars of revenue because the output of that 1000 hrs can be sold again and again and again ad nauseum.
To me the movie industry and the software industry are two sides of the same coin, if anything we have the more extreme version of their setup with much better margins.
If you want to steal a movie because you can’t afford it or you feel entitled to have “all the stuff I wanna see right now immediately how dare they make me wait for my movie that I deserve or give me the choice to pay more for earlier access so they can squeeze all the profit from the multi million dollar investment they made” and tell other people what they have the right to price their creative product go right ahead.
That entitlement coming from technologists will still get me though.
That's one way to look at it, I suppose. Lots of software that's for sale also only exists because of open source work that the creators released for free. Some of it is probably even used in the movie industry.
I'm not against making a profit and it doesn't look like the movie industry has any trouble doing that.
Entitlement has nothing to do with it. I don't believe that the movie industry owes me anything. It's just that this option exists and when they make it harder (or in some cases impossible) to pay for something than it is to get it for free, what do you think is going to happen?
Suppose each grocery story required everyone who entered to submit to a body cavity search and complete an application detailing their entire credit history before anyone was allowed to shop at the store. Meanwhile, Fat Tony has some groceries that "fell off a truck" that anyone can walk up and buy. Who are people going to shop at? Again, I'm not saying it's right. I'm just saying, what do you think is going to happen when you make it harder for people to buy your stuff than it is to steal it?
Your options are
1. make it harder to steal - which doesn't really work for digital works. This is the industry's main strategy.
2. make it easier to buy. The music industry seems to have figured this out and it's no longer worth pirating compared to simply subscribing to Spotify. Once they felt that the only way anyone should get their music is by paying $20 for a CD (which was really a price-fixing cartel but that's neither here nor there). They had to come to terms with the fact that nobody is going to pay whatever fantasy price they think they can charge when it can be had for free and the movie industry is going to have to learn the same lesson.
FOSS - fully agreed. It's at the core of many industries (movie-relevant example... guess how many encoders are based on ffmpeg? Answer: practically all of them. Patent restrictions around codecs are so complex that it takes a questionably-legal product used in quiet ways to get real business done).
At least tw0 different perspectives here I think, requiring two different thought processes.
When viewed as a collective social issue, gray- and black-market forces are part of the panoply of market forces, and that is a good thing. If every human on the planet voluntarily conformed to white market forces no matter what the terms, we would be completely, totally screwed. At the very least, the work required to tune the legal system to accommodate everyone's needs satisfactorily would produce a big mess. To some degree, it's the corruption, work arounds and back room dealing that enable the system to keep functioning, given that legislators and enforcers are flawed humans just like the rest of us.
When viewed as an individual, personal issue, we need to draw the line somewhere with our own behaviour. We need to decide when we're going to take the risk and go around the system as it exists, based on our feeling of how fair the system is, and we should consider things like what harm we're doing, and whether we're being hypocritical, as part of that. There is most certainly some hypocrisy in creating and defending IP controls on software products, but calling an open season on digital media; but it's also obviously not 1:1. I believe, morally, that it's important to really think about what the impact might be when you pirate something.
Basically I think as a participant in the system you need to be aware of both. Perspective #1 helps defuse the rage, and perspective #2 directs your personal actions.
Personally, with media, I draw the line at failing to find a reasonably-priced option. In my country, digital delivery platforms are hamstrung, and cable packages are foolishly assembled. I'm caught in a gap created by distribution contracts that mean I need to pay minimum $50/mo cable to watch the one or two shows I actually want to watch with no direct-buy or digital delivery service available. I don't accept that as reasonable, and I'm not going to get in line with it. I'd pay $20 a season/movie, easy. Give me the option and I'll do it.
But, one last note. I work in video tech, and I can assure you that the TV and movie industry is up to its eyeballs in IP negotiations, ownership disputes, technical obstacles and oppressive pre-existing distribution relationships. Content producers have to negotiate with Netflix, theatres, ISPs and cable companies, many of which are co-owned in weird ways and create serious conflicts of interest. Sony needs to negotiate with Warner/AT&T to get their show distributed, but Warner produces their own content, competing for the same pool of eyeballs, and AT&T owns massive portions of the US cable distribution and ISP space, not to mention much of the hard infrastructure those services are deployed over. It's a minor miracle that distribution rights are even negotiated successfully in the first place... I sometimes wonder if MPAA lawyers shouldn't get invited to hostage situations. So have some compassion for the corporations too, they actually can't just up and fix this thing.
The movie industry doesn't lobby because "their product is so good people are stealing it". They lobby because they can, as do other industries no one wants anything to do with.
My country passed laws to have a minimum percentage of national movies showing in theatres at any time. Lobbying has nothing to do with demand.
You’re trying to twist words by saying “so good people are stealing it” and using lobby to encompass literally every type of lobbying, which is ridiculous.
Good or bad, people will steal it because they feel entitled to it.
They lobby for things like DCMA enforcement and DRM because people steal it.
If people didn’t steal it, there would be other things to lobby about, is that your point?
I don’t think that wasn't obvious but sure.
My point is the things stealing leads them to lobby about things related to stealing, which are things that end up not being great for anyone.
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I mean to be clear, the cat is out of the bag and this line of thought is more of a thought experiment than anything.
People steal, DRM exists and DCMA exist, the status quo is set.
I don't use PopcornTime or otherwise pirate, but I completely understand the motivation of those that do. Personally, I just watch fewer movies because the value just isn't there. I subscribe to Netflix and Amazon Prime mostly because they're inexpensive and have a decent selection of kids shows. I occasionally watch a movie or TV series there, but not nearly as frequently as I did when our local grocery store offered DVD rentals for $1-2 with a large selection (much larger than RedBox offers).
These days, if there's nothing good on Netflix, I play video games or read a book because both of those offer far more value/dollar. If the movie industry offered $2 rentals for everything other than new releasees, I'd watch more movies. I'm only willing to pay $5 to watch a movie if it's a new release and I really want to watch it. I also rarely go to the theater as well because $10+ is too much for that experience unless it's opening weekend for a film I've been waiting for (we usually go on Tuesdays for the discounted rate for regular entertainment).
I wish the film industry would recognize the opportunity they have that's evidenced by projects like PopcornTime. If they make a movie platform with a nearly complete catalogue, people will use it. It's annoying to check multiple streaming platforms to see where something is available, and it's annoying to pay $5/movie to rent (that's about discounted theater prices, but without the theater experience).
Given a lot of countries are declaring the state of emergency, « state of war » for Emmanuel Macron (France), a lot of them can and will require the use of hotel, cars, or even « nationalize companies » (Italy and France). Why not also accepting that the confinement shouldn’t be an opportunity for copyright hoarders to become rich, and just temporarily allow or do nothing, so that entertainment at home be available. Perhaps even make them temporarily legal and end up with making them permanently legal.
Sometimes war-times measures become permanent (female vote in France, gun confiscation and the Tignes dam all started during the WWII) when they are good.
If the film industry would collectively take their head out of their arses and provide such a simple interface and wide catalogue to the masses, they would make hundreds of billions.
I would literally pay $50 a month for an official and legal version of this.
The end users don't really care that it is not possible because "legal reasons". This app proves otherwise and I wholeheartedly approve of their mission.
EDIT: if I would pay $50 a month, why am I not buying/renting movies on iTunes or Amazon for the same amount? For the same reason Spotify or Apple Music are making a killing. Give me a flat rate and let me watch _everything_, it's hard to decide if that new movie just out is worth spending $15 on. Might be crap.