What's there to learn that isn't already widely known? Existing (copyright) laws are asinine and all corporations eventually become consumed by greed. That's America in a nutshell.
It's not even copyright laws, it's everyone insisting on exclusive contracts. There's no reason a piece of content couldn't be on Netflix and Disney+ at the same time. It would be a lot better for consumers if streamers could compete on price and service instead of which content they managed to create/licence.
Music streaming has proven this for years now, all the major brands have massive collections that make its super easy to pay and listen to just about anything.
Early Netflix proved this when everything was readily available for an affordable pricre.
Yep, you choose between Spotify, Tidal, etc based on price and how well the app works, not because one service has the band you like while the other one doesn't (not that music streaming isn't its own shitshow for other reasons, of course).
The situation is a lot better with music, but it's not perfect. There's still issues with region locking content, and content only existing on one service and not another.
Yeah its almost like if we didn't keep extending copyright protections a bunch of stuff would be in the public domain and any streaming service could offer it without having to deal with licensing.
It's true that Hollywood is corrupt and csuite pay is absurd, but those deals are the only mechanism by which ANY money makes it to the writers, actors and staff who deserve it
It could be: New movie is released! Anyone who pays the price tag gets to stream it!
But no, we must bidding war gouge.
On top of that, X Y and Z services exist in America, but not in other countries, so in this other country, everything is on Netflix, while I had to jump between three different services at one point just to watch Stargate
Hey, you're just salty that you didn't get in on the ground floor when Stargate was being exclusively streamed in a dedicated Stargate streaming service
Technically YouTube exists because three horny nerds wanted a dating site with video integration. It only turned into a video sharing site when they realized they couldn't find the clip of the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction and they decided they wanted to build that platform instead.
Not really. I can undersgand licensing but at this point it's become a distopian practice completely separated from the basic need to monetize the content an make a profit.
That's why those companies become such gargantuans monsters.
Nope. People will still make content. It'll be on far less of a budget, but that didn't stop the Film School generation of independent films in the 1970s (before which you had to sell your life and soul and beating heart to a studio). In between all the schlock were the occasional arty films we consider classics today.
And then there's government subsidization of art projects, as per the National Endowment of the Arts.
I think the MCU movies, the DC movies, the many studio iterations of Spiderman have shown us what capitalism eventually churns out. Sony actually chose this path content as product the same resort to formula that plagued the music industry in the 1980s (and drove the Hip Hop Independent movement of the next half-century).
We just need to empower artists. Make sure they don't have to moonlight as restaurant wait staff in order to eat and pay rent while they create, and make sure they have access to half-decent (not necessarily high end) hardware with which to do their thing. And yes, as Sturgeon observes, most of it will be schlock, but through sheer quantity of content we'll get more gems than Hollywood is putting out.
Not in the US or the EU. If you make music in the States, then RCA or Sony owns your content, not you, and when they decide they've paid you enough (which is much less than they're getting) then they still own your stuff. Also, if you make an amazing film or TV series ( examples: Inception, Firefly ) and the moguls don't like it, they'll make sure it tanks or at least doesn't get aftermarket support, which is why Inception doesn't have any video games tie-ins, despite being a perfect setting for video games.
Artists are empowered in their ability to produce art. If they have to worry about hunger and shelter, then they make less art, and art narrowly constrained to the whims of their masters. Artists are not empowered by the art they've already made, as that has to be sold to a patron or a marketing institution.
No, we'd get more and better art by feeding and housing everyone (so no one has to earn a living ) and then making all works public domain in the first place.
Intellectual property is a construct, and it's corruption even before it was embedded in the Constitution of the United States has only assured that old art does not get archived.
I think yes, an artist needs to eat, which is why most artists (by far) have to wait tables and drive taxicabs and during all that time on the clock, not make art. The artists not making art far outnumber the artists that get to make art. And a small, minority subset of those are the ones who profit from art or even make a living from their art, a circumstance that is perpetually precarious.
But I also think the public needs a body of culture, and as the Game of Thrones era showed us, culture and profit run at odds. The more expensive art is, the more it's confined to the wealthy, and the less it actually influences culture. Hence we should just feed, clothe and home artists along with everyone else, whether or not they produce good or bad art. And we'll get culture out of it.
You can argue that a world of guaranteed meals and homes is not the world we live in, but then I can argue that piracy (and other renegade action) absolutely is part of the world we live in and will continue to thrive so long as global IP racketeering continues. Thieves and beggars, never shall we die.
Sorry, I'm not going to read all that, but it seems like you're upset about the shitty deals made by record labels and other large corporations, not intellectual property rights.
The notion of the latter informs the former. The public domain is intellectual property rights of the people. Restricting the public domain takes that away.
So if an artist creates a piece of intellectual property, do you not think they should have control over how it's used? Including who can make profit off of it?
Infringement of IP is a crime according to specific states, but if you make art, and I replicate it, it doesn't affect you.
If you write a story and I read it without paying you, it doesn't affect you.
The only reason IP is a thing is because short-term monopolies on media (or inventions or methods) were enshrined by specific states as law, and then spread through trade agreements, and they were expanded on without concern for their original purpose or for the good of the public. In fact, we're seeing fair use rights fade since states aren't willing to enforce them, and platforms like YouTube over censor.
So at this point, in the US, the EU and the eastern market, no IP law would be better than what we have.
So no, you have not demonstrated any reason I should have respect for your IP.
However, if you're going to insist, and be an IP maximalist, there is one thing I can do for you /to you (or Sony, or Time Warner, or Disney) that is worse than pirating your product.
And that, of course, is not pirating your product.
You are thinking about IP with tunnel vision. You just want to gain entertainment for free. There's more than that to IP laws. How would you like it if you made art that was then used in a manner that you philosophically disagree with. For example, Meghan Trainor had a song that was used against her will in a political campaign against same sex marriage, she was able to cease and desist this use because of IP laws.
There's initial investment on the initial servers (and the software), and afterwards it should be a linear increase of server costs per user, with some bumps along the way to interconnect those servers.
The cost also scales per content. Because that means more caching servers per user and bigger databases, and licenses.
So this service has less users and more content, it should be way more expensive. The only reason they are cheaper is because they don't pay those licenses.
The cost of storage in this case is more or less irrelevant - traffic is what matters here. You're also not getting any mentionable bulk discount on the servers for that matter.
The key is that you can engineer things in completely different way when you have trivial amounts of traffic hitting your systems - you can do things that will not scale in any way, shape or form.
Like Boeing's CEO making 300 million.... imagine 300 people who worked their ass off could make million. Or 1500 hard workers could be making 200k. But nah, let's just drag these huge bags of money into this one asshole's account. Oh there were a couple of crashes right? 👍 Our thoughts and prayers 🙏. But not our money wagons.
Does Netflix make shows? Or does it slam its name onto filmmakers it pays to make content? If so, one of those things simply requires throwing cash at people, which I think is a skill that most people can learn.
So Netflix actually pays for shows to get made, so when everyone pays for Netflix, it lets everyone enjoy them. Pirate sites only extract value from the hard work of the producers, without paying them.
producers don't make the content, they speak to the right people in their exclusive circles to finance it, put their name on it, and then pay the directors and actors a tiny fraction of what it earned
They make the shows actually accessible so that they can reach the desired audience and generate a fanbase in the first place, which producers could then use to exploit for revenue.
If you covet a precious jewel behind closed doors, people will just walk on by without knowing its value
Love how they make this sound like some incredible feat. When you aren't bound to license agreements, turns out it's actually very easy to have a "massive" content library. Literally the only hurdle is storage space.
I've never gotten Handbrake to do anything I wanted. DVD Shrink, on the other hand, is one of my top five most-used apps. It's quite old, but DVD encryption hasn't changed since its release.
I run a massive streaming service too, which is also way bigger than all the streamers combined. It's just only distributed over my private home network. Jellyfin for the win!
For the first one at least you could solve it by running JF with a Chromecast or similar device.
Feels cleaner than a wireless mouse in the living room too, IMO
I find it convenient, but I've had pc's hooked to tv's since broadband became a thing. I can watch anything, download anything, play games, check banking, ect.
I have one of those Google streaming devices but I hate giving up my privacy. Also, I saw fast food ads on the device's home screen one day and I couldn't disable those. That was the last straw.
So now I use a raspberry pi 5 running arch with Firefox to stream everything to my TV. I even got a remote working with it that works fairly well, moves the mouse and everything. It was a lot of work but now I own my experience and don't have to give Google my data in that particular way anymore.
I have one of those as well for one desktop system. And I will stream to TVs as a second monitor from laptops sometimes. But I don't think that's the setup they have.
Which of course is a good setup if it works for them! Or for you :)
Already back in the 00s you could get a media player box, with a remote, that hooked to you TV and played video files from any share in your network or an HDD hooked up to it.
Nowadays you can get an Android TV media player box with Kodi on it (or you can install it), again with a remote and hooked to your TV to do the same as that 00s media player box but looks a lot more fancy.
Or instead of an Android TV you can get a Mini PC or older laptop, ideally with Linux, with an HDMI output which you connect to your TV, install Kodi on it and get a wireless air-mouse remote (if you get one with normal remote buttons rather than the stupid "for Google" ones, the buttons seamlessly integrate with Kodi so you don't really have to use the air-mouse stuff).
Alternativelly if you want to avoid Android but don't want to spend 150 bucks on a mini PC, you can get one of those System On A Board devices like one of the Orange Pi ones, put LibreElec on it (small Linux distro built around Kodi) and do the wireless remote thing with it.
The back end of any of this is either files on a NAS, on a share on a PC, a harddisk connected directly to the device or even something like Jellyfin running somewhere else (which can be outside your home network) or even any of the many IPTV services out there.
It has never been this easy to put together a hardware and software solution, entirely under your control - read: just as easy to use for corporate streaming services as for "personal" media - to watch media in your living room with the same convenience as purpose built devices for that, and it has never been this convenient to use or looked this good.
I think it's just easier to use a cheap computer. You can use your vpn, adblockers, takes zero setup time to watch whatever you want to watch.
The 00's comment, I modded the original xbox to run xbox media center (XBMC) which turned into Kodi. My friends where blown away I could download movies and watch them on my tv.
Well, the easiest IMHO is the Android TV box (mainly because it comes with a remote) but I personally have a cheap Mini-PC because I used it to do a lot more than just being a media box and it still just sits in the living room in the TV stand.
Way back when I started (trying to have something in my living room, rather that absolute started which was way before that) all that I had was a cheap media box with an interface that was basically a file browser, accessing files over Samba.
Stuff is way fancier nowadays AND you can do it with much cheaper hardware if you want to.
it's not weird at all, for one, you get to use a keyboard, for second, you get to use actual real hardware that isn't spying on you and selling your data. You also get to use a real QWERTY based, or whatever other layout you want that isn't ABCDE what a fucking abomination that layout is.
plus you get a whole desktop OS if you please, or if not you can cold roll something specifically for a TV. You just have so many more options, than you do when using a smart tv or generic streaming box.
You might want to consider streaming it on your TV. Modern TVs should have a Plex app at the least. Or use a Chromecast or other setup. I watch on my couch with the TV remote. Its the same experience as watching Netflix.
Plex isn’t Jellyfin though. Lots of TV’s/TV OS’s have Jellyfin app but it’s pretty basic. I’d recommend an AppleTV with Infuse, it’s super built out with all sorts of great features. It’s a better app than all of the streaming services
Macbooks beat the shit out of any comparable windows laptop. And iPads beat the shit out of any android tablet. And AppleTV is the best TV OS by far. Life must be hard when you just hate things because its popular to hate them.
I guess what I meant was to run it on a TV-native platform that you control with your remote, instead of streaming your PC display to the TV and still using the mouse and keyboard. Xbox has a Jellyfin app for example. I use Plex and my TV has an app for it. Also I can use Chromecast and throw it up from my phone or PC and control that with the remote.
Can’t use the scroll wheel for volume. It’s a pain aiming for the volume from across the room on the couch.
apparently this is supposed to be coming in the 9.0 feature release. So soon™ I'd have to look to be sure, but apparently it's coming.
Volume is weird, i feel like i'd almost like either a "volume target" option, to match volume levels between content, or some sort of fixed audio boost level. Idk.
Volume is weird, i feel like i’d almost like either a “volume target” option, to match volume levels between content, or some sort of fixed audio boost level. Idk.
Adding replaygain tags to your content could help here, but it's a manual process, particularly since it's not normally included in released videos. And I'm not sure if jellyfin supports replaygain tags from video (presumably it does for audio only files).
mpv definitely does support it at least, with "--replaygain=track".
Of course, none of this helps with OPs situation, because enabling replaygain will actually lower the volume on most files, so it can account for high dynamic range content.
yeah considering i have literal terabytes of youtube content on my jellyfin, i think i'll probably abstain, unless i do some really dirty automation on it, in which case i might not, because that would be funny.
Uh it’s just me and whoever is on my local network. I don’t port anything or have any users outside my home. When I go on trips I just download movies and shows from my network to my devices
183,200 TV episodes is pretty modest compared to alternative "non-approved" sources.
One datapoint is one source (that has a rule against any TV/show content released in the last 5 years) has a total number of 19.5K shows and TV movies/specials, with ~80 K releases. For many shows a single release can be a full season.
My guess is because they did all the pirating for you so you didn't have to worry about dealing with the technical hurdles of doing so.
If a service like this came around that allowed me to pay with Monero and did not require any personally identifiable information, I would totally fucking use it.
My guess is It's probably cheaper and has much greater variety. You can watch anything from any streaming service through one single interface at the price of one service.
because IPTV is like $6 per month and has every single channel known to earth.... it's a tiny fraction compared to any cable especially if you watch sports (the only real reason to pay for cable anyway)
The entire system exists for the benefit of business, not customers.
Just look at what happens with accused theft in a store. You get accused of theft? Cops are there in no time, take you to the ground, throw you in the back of the cop car. only after they've gotten the humiliation and brutalization in might someone come and take your proof that you didnt steal anything.
You accuse the store of stealing from you? Due to not following their own policy on returns, or overcharging and an item and not fixing it Police won't even show. just tell you its a civil matter and to suck it up.
I dont subscribe to any streaming service (except the occasional free prime trial, to be full disclosure), not even the one in the news story... but I can still answer your question..
Because I want to pay a single service to watch everything. Like Netflix used to be. Watch everything I want, for one monthly price that was reasonable.
But its not like that anymore. Every company looked at how well Netflix used to do, went "Fuck them! I want all that money for my self!" and took their content off Netflix, and made their own streaming services.
Now if you want to consume any media, You have to subscribe to 50 different subscription services, for hundreds of dollars a month, Which is just Cable 2.0 but with worse service and options.
You pay like $5/Mo for the content of all streaming services and more instead of the $500/Mo it would cost to subscribe to each of them individually. Plus you're not taking any legal risk as a customer.
The pirates provide a better service with more content for cheaper than the legal options; and pirating yourself takes effort as well as cost (hardware, trackers, usenet, etc).
Some people are happy to just pay for decent service; others like to learn about the process, then setup and run their own servers.
Oh I don't care that the IP owner don't get money.
IDK, I just don't like the ethics of pirating media for profit, the entire idea is that it should be accessible to everyone, not just those with money. Cover your operational cost? Sure....Making millions in subscriptions? That is an asshole move IMO. If you're paying, you might as well pay the people who are making the media in the first place instead of some rando that had nothing to do with it.
This doesn't seem that different from paying for usenet. It's not like they're making DVDs of pirated movies and selling them on the street corner; they were basically just aggregating content and the service they were providing was making it easily searchable and accessible, not doing the actual pirating, from the sound of it, unless I'm misunderstanding the situation.
This doesn’t seem that different from paying for usenet.
i would think it would be a little different from usenet, considering that usenet would be a service that you pay for, and people who use that service would host content on it, so that other users can download that content. Which effectively removes the immediate liability that you would have in this case, where you are explicitly hosting a pirated streaming service, and then charging for it, for the explicit purpose of streaming said pirated content.
Yeah, I suppose I should clarify - that was in response to the objection to paying for pirated content; it's different from the service provider's point of view, but from the end user's point of view, they're paying for pirated content either way.
I don't have an issue paying ISPs to access pirated content either, that's the same as paying for Usenet access IMO. You're paying for network access for a lot of different things, pirated content just happens to be part of it. Paying a streaming service specifically for pirated content is vastly different from paying for general network access, even from an end user perspective.
It's sad that these people got taken down. Maybe the next people to do it will do it from a country that does not have extradition with the United States, so they would be safe.
Edit: As for payment providers attempting to take such a service down, Monero would be the answer to this.
