A similar thing is happening in the music space. For quite a few years, I was happy with Spotify for my streaming needs.<p>Now, thanks to outages, an increasingly crappy app, and a conscious decision to constantly shove podcasts in my face (despite the fact that I am a paying customer for a <i>music</i> service), I've quit Spotify in 2022. At this point it's safe to say that I don't miss it at all.<p>Growth will be the death of the entire technology sector eventually. It erodes quality services, you can never rely on anything because they'll eventually be mined out for profit.
I have seen the modern version of piracy and there is no way to compete with it.<p>Full polished web-apps to browse and select titles to download, automatically, which appear almost instantly in your plex/emby/jellyfin server, which give a superior UI for queuing up titles and tracking progress, that play on any and every device in your house. Full quality, (usually) the exact same bits, no DRM.<p>Here’s the killer - there is now a multitude of services that will do ALL of the above for you without having to lift a finger. They run the backend infra, put the media server on a 1 Gbps pipe in a datacenter, run a reverse proxy somewhere nearby that you have decent peering with, and it just works. If they have a large enough base of users, you hardly ever have to do the request step and just have a firehose of literally everything being released, plus the back catalogue of almost everything released on Bluray.<p>You basically have the dream of Netflix (aka Spotify for video) right now and it can cost as little as $10/mo. Share your media server just like your Netflix login with your friends and family even. It’ll spread just like that, and it’s impossible to compete against.
I think the lack of content worthy of payment has pushed people back to piracy.<p>Or pushed people to complacency. Indeed, I think Hollywood and other streaming providers are overly flattering themselves if they think piracy is why their numbers are down - the vast majority of new content sucks. It lacks all storytelling, creativity or any other compelling reason to justify it’s consumption.<p>Indeed when you see sneering comments made about “fan service” that tells you all you need to know about the decline in numbers - and piracy isn’t the main reason.<p>Talk about copium…
Needs (2018) tag. I wonder how this trend has changed (if at all) since this article was written? If anything, the trend towards more and more exclusivity and the proliferation of streaming services seems to have continued unabated.
Give me something like the Netflix DVD plan recommendations, but allow me to download a DRM-free video file (with configurable subtitle options) for like $5-$10/movie. I'd be all over that service. And since I'm paying per movie, doesn't even really matter if it's five services.
TL:DR<p>"The content industry spent years trying to battle piracy via all manner of heavy handed-tactics and lawsuits, only to realize that offering users inexpensive, quality, legitimate services was the best solution. Many users flocked to these services because they provided a less-expensive, more flexible alternative to traditional cable. Now, if the industry isn’t careful, it could lose a sizeable chunk of this newfound audience back to piracy by making it overly expensive and cumbersome to access the content subscribers are looking for."