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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

No shit. Valve worked out the key to combating piracy in the early 2000s. To quote Gaben himself:

"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."

People pirate media more for convenience than to save money.

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I've said this for years.

Piracy, in many cases, offers a superior product to streaming. If I go to ThePirateBay, I'm virtually guaranteed to find whatever movie I'm looking for, in 1080p (or even 4k nowadays) quality, without any DRM, which can then be easily streamed from Plex or Emby on any of my devices with no regards to regions, often with more options for subtitles and audio tracks (if you're watching anime).

I have Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime, and frankly I already hate having to search all three for a movie, just to find that they don't have it anyway; I already pay enough for these services, I really have no interest in signing up for yet another just to make my search for a movie even longer.

Spotify (and nowadays Apple Music for me) has made it so that I've completely stopped torrenting music, since they offer a superior product to ThePirateBay. It has nearly any song I'm looking for, in decent quality, and there aren't banner ads for "Hot MILFs in my area!" all over the place in a convenient app that works well on my phone. They made the legal option superior, and as a result I don't mind paying the ten bucks a month for it.

I use an online service called JustWatch that searches through all of the platforms at once. Huge time saver.

I agree, the big difference between music streaming services and TV series or movies streaming services is that on every music streaming service you can find almost all the western mainstream songs by all the artists.

For TV series/movies it's very different, lots of shows, series and movies are exclusive to one streaming service and lots of shows, series and movies can't be found on any of them.

But still I don't think a majority of potential customers will be enough annoyed by the current content fragmentation to go back to piracy. Also because the piracy tools have become less and because it's still hard to find what you really want, even when using some simple as popcorn time. I just think customers will start to own more than just one subscription and will probably switch from time to time from one subscription to another to get access to the content that is exclusive to one of the streaming services that are available. The loser here is clearly the customer that will pay more for less, but it won't hurt enough to make piracy popular again.

> It has nearly any song I'm looking for

Why has Spotify/Apple Music been able to accomplish this while TV/movie services can't?

This is speculation on my end, but I'm assuming it has to do with TV and Movies being more expensive to produce and therefore more expensive to license?

Speculation here too, maybe it has something to do with very little willingness to put up with missing songs from users, while it's somewhat acceptable to go to another site to watch a new show?

I haven't wrapped my head around how this could influence the creators and services enough to work together, though.

Valve is right. I haven't pirated a single game since I started using Steam, and I have spent dollars on games I will never ever have time to play. There is no way I will subscribe to 10 different movie streaming services. I want it all in one client. If they want to charge me 50 dollars for the latest movies, so be it. I just want the convenience of one single source available 24x7 wherever I am. Until then, /r/usenet.

Apple TV, I know this is where you are going. Netflix, I know you tried and failed.

Most everything is available on the streaming services now people are just going back to piracy again because they don't want to pay the aggregate cost of all the streaming services combined. Again it all just comes down to folks wanting unlimited everything from everywhere for $12.99/month.

People will pay more than that if it actually had everything on it.

Spotify also nailed it, haven’t pirated a single song in years.

> I want it all in one client. [...] I just want the convenience of one single source available

You nailed it. Sadly, it's also falling apart for games. I like Steam because I'm lazy - no other reason. 3rd party launchers were tolerable, but so obviously anti-consumer and wholly unnecessary. Just big publishers trying to screw us, and I'm not exactly sure why - greed or analytics?

Then Epic comes along with the exclusives. Again, not trying to make the argument Steam/Epic = Bad/Good or Good/Bad. Just that I'm lazy. I'm not a teenagers with endless time, and I can't be bothered dealing with this.

Now, it's possible I'm not the target market any more. But making it easy for lazy but financially stable adults to actually buy games seems like a decent strategy.

there's a cliff though. I pay for prime and Netflix, and once or twice a month I'll rent a movie from Google Play if it's something I really want to see.

however, in my mind paying any more than that approximate monthly total is unreasonable, and not an option.

And to the article's credit, I think about booting my Plex setup back up pretty frequently now.

There absolutely is a cliff. Every general rule of thumb has a limit.

However, what you're describing is not the financial limit. We once paid quite a bit more for cable tv than streaming services. Paying for the big streaming services combined comes to about the same or less than previous cable subscriptions. In this case it's not about cost but convenience.

These companies need to provide an api that allows for services like plex (or similar) to pipe all of the streaming services into one platform, with one auto buy if you watch and stop paying if you haven't watched anything from that network within x months.

This article's title/premise is being very generous to the media companies. It's not "too many choices" driving people to piracy, it's the bloody parasites balkanizing everything and forcing you to pay more subscriptions to more services just to watch a handful of shows.

People are happy to pay for Netflix and/or Amazon Prime, with a model of "you pay a streaming service provider and get shows from many media companies." But the new model is "media companies all want their own subscription service."

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