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Comment by bigiain | Hacker News Reader

And I see it amongst my friends, who're gradually all moving to "pay for a subscription to something, to salve the 'I'm not a pirate!' conscience, and go back to BitTorrent and shared/private Emby server networks for anything you want to watch that's not on the service you're paying for".

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In 2003 Valve determined that piracy, then rampant in PC gaming, was a service problem. They built Steam to provide a better service than piracy. Years later, after Steam has all but eliminated PC game piracy and helped create a thriving market even for the niche-est of genres, their competitors complain about their de-facto monopoly.

There's a lesson in here somewhere.

On that note, is there anything like Steam for movies and TV shows? I would love a platform where I could make a one-time payment for perpetual access to a movie or season of a show at a reasonable price.

iTunes?

Amazon Prime Video was this before fbrh got into streaming original content a la Netflix

It seems that both Steam and Spotify addressed this by becoming the dominant player in their space. Yes there are alternatives to Steam on PC and there are alternatives to Spotify, but those two have the vast majority of the content you are looking for.

Video streaming was like that for a while. You had Netflix and it was the king in town, but then all the other services started to roll in and take their content off Netflix.

I find it to be this wired tug of war between buisneses and consumers. On the one hand as a consumer you almost want a monopoly in the space as all your favorite shows or music will be on one platform (like Spotify). But we all hate monopolies so from the business side you would want healthy competition. The problem is that "healthy competition" means you now have to subscribe to 10 services instead of 1.

The issue is that pirating games is a lot harder nowadays. Almost all multiplayer games have protections in place that make pirated games impossible to play online with people who legally bought the game, and for single player games updating means redownloading the torrent.

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