Movie publishers you heard it here first: Piracy causes high box office turnout.
Kidding aside, is it that surprising that the theatre viewing rate matches the home viewing rate? Both are just the same indicator of popularity.
Kidding aside, is it that surprising that the theatre viewing rate matches the home viewing rate? Both are just the same indicator of popularity.
- Pay to "rent" movie from service A, paying full price.
- Find out service A decides we are not allowed to have HD on our device even though it's 2023 and we have plenty of bandwidth and pixels
- Try renting on service B. Find out that our ISP is throttling service B to 2.5 mbps and we only can watch in stuttering potato quality.
- Give up and search for magnet link. Wait about 30 seconds and we can start watching the high bitrate blu ray rip that looks and runs better than anything we paid for.
My friend tells me that in a decade of seedbox usage, my friend has had maybe 3-5 lemons with data corruption.
Edit: Clarified that it’s my friend who has a seedbox.
Or alternatively pay, ideally in Bitcoin... after nearly 2 decades of watching Japanese Kickboxing/MMA etc... I found a spot that delivers most of those events (plus way more than I care to watch) and its everything I ever wanted out of a service and gladly renew every year--though I'm incentivized to seed as long as possible in order to decrease membership costs, but I'm usually the last to DL so my ratio suffers since it's pretty niche.
It's like these promotions don't want our money, and go out of their way to make it difficult for non-Japanese platforms tpo show them legally in other markets, so instead we pay a team to curate the recording in various formats (720/1080) and upload it next day or two.
When I was younger half the fun was staying up late, chatting with people from all corners of the World on forums PBP and reacting to a knockout or decision and seeing the sun come up with fights still on the card left and deciding if I can make it to school/work etc... but sadly those days are over and my version of convenience(s) comes from watching something at my leisure at sane hours days/weeks/months later in order to not mess up my sleep cycle these days (I pay a lot more for that by comparison).
To quote one of these die-hards on the forums:
> If I'm the only dude in the PBP on NYE I'm going to have a meltdown. Should be an interesting read when it happens, anyway.
The problems I see never show up if I play with VLC (“plays for sure”) but they did show up on debugging videos played on the XBOX ONE which has was been finicky no matter if I was using Plex, Jellyfin and various client software on the XBOX. A few out-of-spec frames din’t bother most players but the XBOX freezes up for two minutes for the slightest anomaly. With Jellyfin and the new Jellyfin client playback is fine unless there is something wrong with the file that I can detect with other tools.
Badly encoded videos are all over the pirate space, frequently they promise lossless audio but skimp on bits for video, for instance.
With that XBOX all the legit video apps (BluRay player, Peacock) have the problem of trying some handshake that cuts off video with my old Samsung TV and pandemic special Denon receiver (decontented POS compared to my old one which has the video output burn out). Power cycling the receiver brings back the picture but it is one more humiliation I face in front of my tech skeptical family.
Went into app settings and force closed the app, restarted app...black screen, no response.
Rebooted TV and opened Disney+ app. Black screen, no response.
Eventually just switched inputs to the laptop sitting under the TV stand. Clicked Popcorn Time icon (I leave VPN always on for this laptop). Clicked Loki. Clicked episode. Within 1 minute the show was playing.
This is one reason why I keep this as an option. Other times I admit I just can't be arsed to subscribe to yet another service to check out a show I heard about. Not claiming any moral high ground. I just don't want to pay for another streaming service when I already have paid access to 3 (at least until they offer something I know I want to watch for a month's subscription at minimum.)
Doesn't that sound like you're doing it very wrongly?
In order to combat piracy, you need to out innovate them in terms of convenience and features.
Music piracy is almost a non-issue because it is way more convenient to get music via Spotify and streaming.
Not saying your statement about Movie industry is inaccurate - yes, one (or few) super convenient platform(s) to contain all movies to rent/buy with high quality and reliable delivery would be amazing - but one flat price for streaming everything ala Spotify is not going to work for movies.
Piracy killed the profits in record sales and created a bimodal distribution for musicians wherein you're either Taylor Swift or the equivalent, or a struggling indie.
Let's not pretend that record labels weren't massively warping the playing field for decades before the internet took off; or that piracy hasn't helped indie artists get discovered / blow up. There are studies on this, and the ones that weren't sponsored by record labels are pretty consistent in showing your statement to be false.
Record labels bled musicians, sure. Piracy just all-out stole their music - I doubt you'll find any documented instance where a musician was actually paid for their music by a kind pirate.
Events, festivals, concerts should not be the only way a musician should hope to recoup some of the effort they put into creating music.
That happens literally all the time. That's why there are studies about it.
If you want to argue with the various study authors and find flaws in their methodology; go ahead. But the idea that no one who steals music would ever then pay for that music is absurd; on par with denying the moon landing, or that Azerbaijan exists.
> Events, festivals, concerts should not be the only way a musician should hope to recoup some of the effort they put into creating music.
I don't disagree in the slightest, but once again, the blame for that situation is squarely on the record labels. Bandcamp conclusively proved that independent musicians can make money from album sales, without the predatory industry machine, even as piracy continues unabated.
To be entirely fair, I think we ahvae reached a parody with Hollywood and Streaming services in terms of content: sure, some comic book movies requires 500 million to make and require studios to pump things up and a bloated marketing tour, but A26 is a perfect example of something being made for low budget, word to mouth and often quickly on streaming services that rivals most stuff in the theaters.
After this year, I've been to the movies more times since I was a teenager, I really don't feel like I missed much during that time: I'm still incredibly out of touch with what comes out and other than Oppenheimer I don't think I watched anything that had much of a budget.
As for piracy, it'll never go away, some of us just refuse to comply with these norms and find ways around geo-restrictions and IP bans half the fun, hence why these communities still thrive before Netflix started to self-canobolize itself.
PS: Last season of Black Mirror made me regret being in the loop, after COVID there was so much more to work with than it's entire existence, but this was perhaps the sign that Charlie Brooker needs to reach for fan-art scripts and should help get them green-lit.
Do you mean A24?
1. Look up which of the five streaming services have the film. 2. Give up as I'm not subscribing for one movie.
Take Cyberpunk 2077 for instance, it was leaked not long after it's launch; most people (even here) called it trash and gave up on it due to the bugs. Then after grinding away at it for 2+ years CDPR just sold more than 25 million copies after the last expansion. [0] That is ~25% of it its total sales.
While it's unlikely to determine exactly how much of an effect it had, it certainly wasn't zero. Consider also the massive community modders had greater access and CDPR garnered lots of new info (and code) from this source.
It maybe its a niche to the communities I've been around, be it in tech/games/music, but this a norm not an exception. Paywalled/DLC BS is a recent phenomon and its entirely off-putting, I didn't get PL this time around (I just don't have time to game) I did like how much of an impact it has made not just for the game, but the genre itself.
0: https://www.kitguru.net/tech-news/mustafa-mahmoud/cdprs-game...