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Aotearoa Daily Kōrero 23/9/2023
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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Pretty amazing how, even in the streaming era, certain TV series are simply not available in NZ (legally). e.g. the 2 most recent seasons of Star Trek: Lower Decks are not on any service in the country. It's on Paramount+ in a lot of countries, but they decided not to operate in NZ (for some reason).
Stuff like this is pretty much why piracy will always exist. Streaming services are becoming the new sky/cable TV. I read Amazon is going to be including ads with prime video now as well.
Yeah, it was an inevitable enshittification cycle... the likes of Amazon were clearly running their streaming service at a loss. Now streaming has largely "won", they will want to reap as much profit as they can. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an alternative on the horizon that would replace streaming and allow new players to enter, restarting the enshittification cycle (which would at least mean we get something decent for a few years).
We will probably see another round of attempts to clamp down on piracy over the next few years, including draconian measures, since this is now their main competition. They will probably employ AI/ML to make it cheaper to track people down, and literally ruin peoples lives, even if there are false positives (which there absolutely will be).
I wonder how much of it was it running as a loss or more that they realised they could make even more money with ads, now that everything is fractured and other platforms are doing the same.
I don't see it as much to worry about to be honest. As long as I've been using the internet, they've been trying to fight piracy but someone always finds a way around it. For people just consuming media I doubt they will bother with. It must be a lot harder to prove now days with ISP's using shared public IP addresses and the prevalence of VPN's. Not to mention that even with piracy they're still raking in millions and there's enough precedence now that piracy is not equal to a lost sale.
There were a few cases in the US where people faced extreme consequences for piracy/IP infringement during the 00s. I expect we'll see that again. The 3 strikes law here only failed because ISPs refused to do the content companies' bidding for free.
Big Tech has a lot more power/money now, and will be better prepared for the fight this time. You're right, the more savvy people will probably be fine. But some people will make mistakes and have to face bans from the internet, huge fines or even jail time (hopefully not in NZ).
They don't give a shit about this. Their greed knows no bounds.
Do you know if there have been any cases like that recently? I know there have been for those running sharing sites or servers but haven't really heard of them going after single users like they used to.
I can see them going after crackers/encoders or those that run piracy services and are part of scene groups, but it doesn't seem worth it for users any more. With the perpetually online world most people who aren't even that techy know how to pirate these days.
I mean it probably costs them more in lawyer fees than any money they can get from joe bloggs downloading a few movies or tv shows.
Not recently, but my view is that a big reason why they eased up on piracy was because we had the transition from cable/broadcast TV to streaming. There was a lot of competition, so the companies were focussed on each other.
We are rapidly approaching a point where there will be a handful of streaming/content companies that control everything, not just in the US, but the entire world. The more stable that market becomes, the more the execs will be forced to look elsewhere to grow profits (since they can't win over viewers from traditional TV any more). That's when attention will turn to piracy, and we'll have a return to the anti-piracy efforts of the 00's, but this time (in my opinion) it'll be worse.
It doesn't have to be rational for them, i.e. it won't matter that it actually loses them money going after pirates. It just matters that they can tell their board/shareholders "we would have a bajillion more in profits if it wasn't for those pirates, who we're actively pursuing".