Tangential, but I've recently noticed that due to huge fragmentation in the streaming industry (Netflix, PrimeVideo, Hulu, Disney+ et al.), I'm only using two - Netflix and PrimeVideo, and a third torrent streaming service (PopcornTime) when I can't find a specific movie/TV series.<p>I prefer to use the third option as few as possible, but I find myself having to use it more and more often as the years go by - geolocked content, huge swathes of content being removed on the whims of providers (The Office comes to mind), and 'originals' that are beyond even the so-bad-it's-good category that cannot even <i>begin</i> to fill the void left by the good content leaving.<p>I cannot <i>ever</i> see myself subscribing to a plethora of services - the best case is subscribing to a service when it's absolutely necessary (HBO/Hotstar) and then unsubscribing when you're done, which is not at all conducive to fulfilling long-term revenue plans of such services.<p>So what is the endgame of such services? Is it simply to build a huge catalog of content that you'll mindlessly devour whenever you're bored? Or something else?
Thanks to content owners/distributors we’ll see a resurgence in piracy.<p>After Fox, Disney et al pulled content from Netflix, coupled with regional restrictions, there’s literally nothing to watch on Netflix in Sweden except Netflix’s own original content.<p>Hulu isn’t available outside of US.<p>HBO is just as bad as Netflix outside the US.<p>Even iTunes Store is subject to regional restrictions (but the selection yhere is still much larger)
How do these pirates make money?
It seems like so much work is/has gone into their operations that it can't just be for karma points.<p>Edit: I'm referring to the content ripping groups. Apart from the technical and legal challenges depicted in the article, they need to seed their files which (must be) very costly. Also, content is released consistently and extremely quickly.<p>The common answer is that the motivation is non-monetary: Fun, community service, group pride etc. But I find that hard to believe entirely. The product is just too polished, subjectively resembeing in quality a revenue generating operation rather than a(n illegal) side hobby.
The article says that "Subtitle files... are not encrypted". Netflix subtitles are really interesting to me, because they're aligned in different languages. A lot of unofficial SRT files have different timestamps.<p>The reason is that I'm trying to collect data for learning languages, especially Chinese. Kind of like VoiceTube [1] and Youglish [2] are doing for English. So far it's only for personal use, not a revenue-taking company.<p>I tried investigating a Netflix stream, but the subtitles weren't plain text! They were distributed as PNG files [3].<p>Does anyone have more information about this? Do the pirates really OCR the subtitles for their MKV files? (I doubt it). Is there another way to get the plain text? Contact me directly if you're afraid to comment publicly.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.voicetube.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.voicetube.com/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://youglish.com/" rel="nofollow">https://youglish.com/</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/RohitPuri23/timed-text-at-netflix-58522643" rel="nofollow">https://www.slideshare.net/RohitPuri23/timed-text-at-netflix...</a>
"The Scene" here also have a close relationship with the Demoscene, CrackmeScene and KeygenScene. These groups work/compete on challenging technical problems involving extreme and artistic programming. Almost all of these groups work with similar (and sometimes closely shared) custom compression, graphics, debug and platform code.
I live in Canada, where regional laws force the majority of even casual users into piracy. One could not even subscribe to enough number of services to get the amount of content Netflix has in the USA alone. This may be an exaggeration, but honestly, it's been this way for years. I've honestly put a lot of effort into seeking out legal sources for material here in Toronto, and had little luck in certain cases I easily find through a proxy.<p>It's literally self-deprecating behaviour.
Did anyone watch the WebTV series called "The Scene" ? <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scene_(miniseries)" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scene_(miniseries)</a><p><a href="https://youtu.be/xIs_5nfJKu4" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/xIs_5nfJKu4</a>
The big inconvenience of encrypted netflix content is that I cannot run it through madvr for better upscale 1080p->4k, the paradox is that a free torrent content might in the end take less size and look better. And let's not forget about some phones (poco f1) where netflix only allows lq because of missing Widevine L1.
I own subscriptions for both Netflix and Prime Video and (try to) use them most of the times from my Linux desktop on a 21:9 monitor. I have to force proper full hd resolution using a browser extension but can't find a way to fix aspect ratio / black bars problems. Just yesterday I tried to watch the third season of Stranger Things and I had black bars on all the 4 sides. After boring my SO for about 10 minutes messing around with extensions I just fired up qBittorrent and fixed the problem in 2 seconds using the autocrop feature in mpc.
I end up the torrent way so often that I'm starting to doubt the reasons that push me to support these platforms and their broken features.
Is the desktop userbase a niche so small they can afford to ignore?
So, on PC hardware, outside of Windos and Macos, <i>Widevine</i> it's the only option available and it's capped at 720p, but the same DRM is used on Android and it's OK to stream at 1080p...<p>P.S. on Netflix, I should verify on Amazon Prime<p>Edit: after posting I recalled a plugin for Chrome/Firefox that forced 1080p playback on Netflix, the github page has the details <a href="https://github.com/truedread/netflix-1080p" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/truedread/netflix-1080p</a>
>After starting with a large raw file, the finalized version ready for release is around 30% smaller, around 7GB for a 1080p file.<p>Huh? Are they recompressing it? How else would it shrink? If they're recompressing it, why don't they just use a capture card and avoid the hassle of reverse engineering stuff?