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I completely agree it is a service problem. Many pirate streaming sites are way better than paid streaming. The site I watch anime on, besides having basically everything, has both dubs and subs for all their programs, auto plays the next episode without delay or prompting, allows you to auto skip intro and exit songs or press a button to do it if you don't want it done automatically, has a timer on on-going shows telling you when the next episode will arrive, links to any sequels, prequels, remakes, or spinoff shows, gives you all the basic info like when it originally aired, genres it belongs to, who produced it, etc., you can sort by multiple genres, multiple rating scores, views and favorites, has recommendations, even comments.

Paid streaming sites are just often not that good, loading slower, harder to view and sort their full catalogues, and often lack anything but the most basic features.

an interesting data point, as that one of the few quality platforms is on a "niche" (if we call it that now) that is very badly serviced by the big streaming players.

I can go on Spotify right now and access music from long dead musicians from decades ago with absolutely no problem. The back catalog is huge. Where is that with streaming services? It's absolute a service problem.

Yep, Spotify, even at its current pricing of $12 USD is so much more convenient than using torrent websites to download music that it's a no-brainer to purchase it.

Whereas even booting up Netflix, and trying to find something to watch in their limited catalogue (I am in Australia), is a lot more hassle than just typing what I want into a torrent site and downloading it.

> It's not about long tails or any other argument, it's much simpler than that. People are willing to pay for a decent service, people are unwillingly to have extra work.

> When each film studio didn't have its own streaming service, the piracy was falling.

On top of this, something my co-workers and I were talking about some time ago: We were all several times more likely to pay for something than we were to sign up for something free. Being able to just pay for something without having to create an account and a subscription - like how physical media works - would probably also help.

The examples you listed are (were) all centralized places where the account creation is a one-time thing, and when streaming fractured into so many places that model broke. Now you need to sign up for each of them, which adds a lot to the friction.

If there were no DRM at all, it'd be trivial to host content with a few ads and the UX would be just fine.

Spotify only came to exist because of the massive piracy problems of MP3 - it was all available there for sale, but people wouldn't pay.

Spotify just provides a model that will work in the age of privacy, aka 'next to zero pricing' aka 'ad supported unlimited streaming' which sucked the money out of the business.

Consider if all films had to try the 'Spotify model' which is to say it's all free with a few ads, the industry would be wiped out.

This is 100% about a game of laws, DRM, 'accessibility' and price.

'Piracy' is absolutely unnecessary for the market to operate effectively, the evidence for that is all around you: physical goods can generally not be pirated! How does the 'economy' work for your Milk and Cereal producers? Just fine.

"if you actually care for the customers, no pirate app/website can compete with you. "

Again, a fallacy, Netflix provides a great service, they already face 'piracy' of people sharing logins, and if those movies were available at 'piratedmovies.com' without any IP laws etc. it'd be the #1 site the the world, bigger than Google, the UI would be irrelevant.

You could make some arguments about broadcast TV, which is abysmal, and the ultra high prices for sports these days when some people just want to watch a game or two, but for most media it's very simple: people don't want to pay.

Netflix UX has been falling year after year.

Netflix is extremely profitable, its stock price droppings are due to our current system of expecting never ending growth, not on business model sanity. It is way more threatened by having to produce its own content, or its new found shitty business practices (that tend to pile up) than account sharing.

> Consider if all films had to try the 'Spotify model' which is to say it's all free with a few ads, the industry would be wiped out.

or maybe not. Why would it? Blockbusters/Pop would survive because merchandise pays much more than tickets, it could even be better for them.

More alternative stuff always had to deal with less funding, and limitations are what brings art forward.

> if those movies were available at 'piratedmovies.com' without any IP laws

the bad pirate bay still has an enormous catalog. And i never mentioned any ablishment of IP laws, just new laws to forbit DRM and its equivalents of restricting usage. I'm okish with mass sharing websites being forbidden, I'm not ok with a random joe not being able to share with his friends or have local copies. Or because of some stupid DRM, gets his SDD worn out, or not getting full quality on certain un"protected" OS/browser/cable.

> people don't want to pay

People pay for actual convenience, always did, always will. If you can't provide better service that a random project that can't even get funds legally, what does it tell about your business? Checkout icloud, plenty of profits, but you could just have your 2TB network disk at home, much cheaper overall, dropbox proved the concept, it just lacked integration, and it all rests on one thing: convinience.

> physical goods can generally not be pirated! How does the 'economy' work for your Milk and Cereal producers? Just fine.

it's about reproduction cost. digital goods are almost free to distribute in a small scale.

> How does the 'economy' work for your Milk and Cereal producers? Just fine.

So fine that without tax payers money they go broke. So fine that they have to destroy the goods to keep prices and subsidies where they want them. Nothing as cool as throwing away milk to not crash the market while getting subsidized to produce more milk. Food industry is the one most reliant on tax payer money and you dared to use it as an example. If media and entertainment are so goddamm important that you have to put so much effort protecting their ventures with DRM and lots of other bulshit, maybe just apply what we do with those "working economies": subsidize.

Non violent civil disobedience vs abstract entities (ie corps, agencies, governments) is more than ok, most of the time is the only way, and power must be kept in check.

I'm sorry but this is upside down on every point.

1) Netflix UX is perfectly fine. You see the film, you click play - that's it.

There is no argument to be made that a) it's bad or b) pirate.com couldn't duplicate it.

The business model fluctuates but they and Disney+ will eke out a profit - but only because of anti-piracy.

2) "Why would it? Blockbusters/Pop" - it's completely glib to suggest that investors would back films with $100M price tags (or any price tag) if the films were available at 'pirate.com' for free, at any time.

3) "If you can't provide better service that a random project that can't even get funds legally, what does it tell about your business?"

I don't think you're grasping the premise here: the 'cost' of the business is mostly the cost of content. Netflix has to pay for content, 'pirate.com' does not.

It's a total misunderstanding of the economics to suggest that Netflix should be able to 'compete with pirate.com or die'.

Getting Mp3s from iTunes was highly convenient - people preferred to not pay and so, the market for Mp3 evaporated, much like the market for films would evaporate.

4) "So fine that without tax payers money they go broke."

Again, a complete misunderstanding of the analogy: markets for physical goods work mostly fine - your arguments about 'subsidies for milk' are completely besides the point.

The point is: if physical goods could all be arbitrarily stolen, even at no cost to the producer, there would be no sales, and therefore no business. DRM enables content business to exist, otherwise, for the most part they would not.

5) "Non violent civil disobedience vs abstract entities"

And there it is: it's ok to steal stuff because 'Social Justice'!

You're just protecting yours and other people's rights!

This is actually the moral flatulence at the heart of the argument, and it exemplifies the ridiculous hoops people will jump through to justify it.

In IP culture, it's a theft of sorts, it's not the end of the world, but it is the end of content if there are no regs there.

As far as we know - there are zero economies that product good content without some form of IP regs - until someone comes along and proves otherwise, this is roughly how we need to do it.

Hopefully the EU will not lose their marbles over it.

> 'Piracy' is absolutely unnecessary for the market to operate effectively, the evidence for that is all around you: physical goods can generally not be pirated! How does the 'economy' work for your Milk and Cereal producers? Just fine.

Yeah, but... imagine your Milk could be pirated - some friendly alien civilization drops by to say hi and leaves 8 billion - one for each human - of matter transmuters behind. These contraptions tap into universe's dark matter supply through a micro-wormhole and are able to materialize anything the user wants, seemingly out of nothing (there's a lot of dark matter out there). Would my Milk and Cereal producers, along with the whole economic environment they inhabit, still be able to run on the pre-transmuters rules and principles?

Whether something can be replicated for near-zero cost or not is such a huge, vast difference that trying to apply rules that work in either case to the other cannot possibly yield good results.

> physical goods can generally not be pirated! How does the 'economy' work for your Milk and Cereal producers? Just fine.

Also, if those could be pirated we had the solution to hunger, I think solving that is way better than some profits.

Same applies to any kind of good. If it's easily recreated at home, wouldn't it be nice? The possibilities for humans would be utopian.

But obviously that can't apply to digital goods right? Money/capitalism should be about _generating_ value, not _capturing_ value. They are very different things. I'm pretty sure that the Mafia does indeed have some benefits, but they are still keeping the population hostage. Same applies to digital goods, to IP, to Copyright. No doubt there are benefits, but in the current landscape, we are just "serfs" of proprietary software, DRM, closed AIs, etc. All about moats and value _capturing_. Thank god for lock in!

> How does the 'economy' work for your Milk and Cereal producers? Just fine.

By "Just Fine" you mean there's currently a hullabaloo about what can legally be called Milk? In a story of naming rights and lawsuits, various non-dairy milks have come to market, and the traditional dairy farmers, unable to hack it, have taken to the courtroom instead of actually competing. Sound familiar?

Again, the completely inconsistent argumentation here: have you every had difficulty finding and buying Milk? No?

The market for Milk, like most other things works perfectly fine - like any other market.

The mental gymnastics going on here is like Cirque Du Soleil.

People don't want to pay and that's that.

'Anything' that you like, given the choice to have 'for free' , well, people will 'get it for free' if that option is available.

And that's it.