None of them. More than enough content on the established free to air channels to satisfy my watching habits without subscribing to others.
None of them. More than enough content on the established free to air channels to satisfy my watching habits without subscribing to others.
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My broadband speed - 750 Meganibbles/minute
Sure..sure.. As in people won't pay for services that already provide them with what they would rather pirate for free. Saying something as "fact" doesn't actually make it so. The "Fact" is that in North America and the UK people can watch whatever they want for a small monthly fee. Want lots of recent film releases.. Grab a disc rental plan and get them through the post. Want to see the latest Tv shows, grab a HBO Now or Hulu plus subscription (U.S.) or a Now TV subscription (UK). Don't want to wait for a disc release for something that is on at a movie theatre.. Then go to the movie theatre!!
Last edited by Smackos; 19-04-2015 at 09:03 AM.
I subscribe to Amazon prime, have done for a few years now. Although previously it was a game disc subscription, once they stopped game discs i switched to stream only subscription, as I love some of the TV shows. Vikings and Black Sails. I'm happy to pay the subscription for them two shows alone. They don't update the movies very often, which is annoying. They are doing more shows, but I do t have the time.
Tried Netflix for a month the a while back, it was basically the same as lovefilm at the time
You are wrong. You can't get anything you want for a small monthly fee because there are a number of restrictions on content through various means. It doesn't benefit content producers to make their content easily and widely available in what ever way we would like to access it, restricting access allows them to force you to acquire the content through means which benefit them the most.
The oatmeal has a good example of content being unavailable: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
It may be old but this is still the case for lots of content. Artificial restrictions on content in an age where borders and regions are meaningless will continue to encourage people to overcome the restrictions through piracy. It has less to do with people not wanting to pay and more to do with taking the path of least resistance. It is easier, quicker and more convenient to pirate content and it doesn't look like that is going to change any time soon.
aidanjt (19-04-2015)
Another vote for Netflix here - works extremely well, the apps are good quality on just about every platform, it has many great shows and a reasonable selection of films. I find the streaming quality to be excellent and I like the little features such as subtitles and autoplay of the next episode.
Tried Amazon Prime Instant Video but didn't think the selection or interface was as good. Never tried Now TV but I used to have Sky and thought Sky Go was abysmal, the quality was so poor it was laughable, don't know if Now TV is any better.
Come to think of it, I watch Netflix a lot more than live TV, and if I didn't happen to be a sucker for sport, I'd be inclined to cancel my TV license and rely solely on Netflix.
It's sad but true.
A lot if the head honchos (Murdoch being the prime example) will do anything they can to try and maintain the status quo. They don't know how to effectively monetise and adapt to these new brave platforms so instead they just cripple them.
I don't pirate music because the music industry has effectively adapted, so now I can get whatever I want, in the format I want, for a reasonable price.
Such a service does not exist for television and films. We are still forced into this antiquitated idea of exclusive services, when in fact the television studios would be better off if they released their content, globally, at a reasonable price.
Would piracy still exist? Hell yes, the aim is to reduce it, not eliminate it at that is an impossible task.
I get the point about Geo-blocking and agree on that completely. That isn't a PIRACY argument though in the countries mentioned.
Look at the top pirated films at any given time, and you try and tell me you couldn't watch those by a legal means.. You can't. There's always a Netflix, Amazon Instant, iTunes, Google Play, disc rental or disc purchase option available for the majority of content that is actually pirated. I get the "insert out of print title that nobody wants to stock/provide" type of downloads up to a point, I do. But it is hard to justify grabbing a major release with that same excuse and it is that content that makes up the vast majority of Piracy.
Let's put it in perspective. Here in the UK I could subscribe to Netflix for £6.99, Now TV for £6.99, Amazon by Post rental for £7.99. I could grab a unlimited monthly cinema ticket for £14.99. I can also mix and match, swapping between any of the above each month throughout the year whenever I spot something I want to watch on any of them. Or I could top up and rent the latest release on say iTunes. In a country where a pack of 20 Benson and Hedges Gold cigarettes costs £9.40, the relative cost of watching content for a month on any of these is a pittance. (And no I'm far from a high earner.)
Here is the full list of top 20 pirated movies of the year ranked by number of downloads (along with studio and original theatrical release date):
1. “The Wolf of Wall Street”: 30.035 million (Paramount, Dec. 25, 2013)
2. “Frozen”: 29.919 million (Disney, Nov. 27, 2013)
3. “RoboCop”*: 29.879 million (MGM, Feb. 12, 2014; and Orion, July 17, 1987)
4. “Gravity”: 29.357 million (Warner Bros., Oct. 4, 2013)
5. “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”: 27.627 million (Warner Bros., Dec. 13, 2013)
6. “Thor: The Dark World”: 25.749 million (Disney/Marvel, Nov. 8, 2013)
7. “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”: 25.628 million (Disney/Marvel, April 4, 2014)
8. “The Legend of Hercules”: 25.137 million (Summit, Jan. 10, 2014)
9. “X-Men: Days of Future Past”: 24.380 million (20th Century Fox, May 23, 2014)
10. “12 Years a Slave”: 23.653 million (Fox Searchlight, Oct. 18, 2013)
11. “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire”: 23.543 million (Lionsgate, Nov. 22, 2013)
12. “American Hustle”: 23.143 million (Sony/Columbia, Dec. 13, 2013)
13. “300: Rise of an Empire”: 23.096 million (Warner Bros., March 7, 2014)
14. “Transformers: Age of Extinction”: 21.65 million (Paramount, June 27, 2014)
15. “Godzilla”: 20.956 million (Warner Bros., May 16, 2014)
16. “Noah”: 20.334 million (Paramount, March 28, 2014)
17. “Divergent”: 20.312 million (Lionsgate, March 21, 2014)
18. “Edge of Tomorrow”: 20.299 million (Warner Bros., June 6, 2014)
19. “Captain Phillips”: 19.817 million (Sony/Columbia, Oct. 11, 2013)
20. “Lone Survivor”: 19.130 million (Universal, Dec. 25, 2013)
I don't think anybody can argue that any of those above would have been hard to get hold of legally one way or another..
Last edited by Smackos; 19-04-2015 at 08:33 PM.
Netflix all the way. Kids and wife love it. I don't watch much but what i do watch is documentarys. Need updated now as watched most of the ones that interest me.
Its possible, but the methods are far from ideal. Cost is only one element of the problem, its also convenience. It's easier to pirate than to juggle subscriptions and the service available to pirates is better that every single one of the legitimate services by a country mile.
So we've established that it isn't actually hard to setup, and that the majority of mainstream pirated content IS easily available on these services to people (going by TorrentFreaks own stats above as an example). I'll argue that as a barrier of entry a dedicated pc or a jailbroken iPhone/android phone with popcorn time etc costs more than a £35 streaming stick or £30 Blu-Ray player for example. So that really just leaves content cost itself, and like I say you can get a disc rental plan for £8 a month. Hardly a fortune is it. The truth is, the longer all this goes on, the less and less genuine excuses people have for pirating now. So it should be that way too.
How on earth do they come by those figures? Those top figures, that is as if every single adult in this country downloaded the movie. OK, spread worldwide is seems more believable, except only 10% of the world population has fixed line broadband. I can't see people torrenting on a mobile, do they?. I'm ruling out dial-up as well.
So, 7100M people exist, 10% with broadband, 710M possible downloaders worldwide. So one in 24 people with broadband worldwide downloaded The Wolf of Wall Street. That seems possible, but rather high figure.
I think I am just annoyed by the five significant figures "19.817M" type numbers here. Can they really claim accuracy to one part in 10000?
You seem to think you have tricked me into agreeing with you.... You haven't.
No one said it was hard to set up a service, its just not as convenient as pirating and it never will be. The content is available across a variety of services but there is never everything on one, no waiting for delivery, no limits to how many devices can be registered or simultaneously watching it, can be put onto any device for offline watching.... The list goes on.
This isn't an excuse or justification, its simply a statement of truth and no amount of explaining will change it.
Until the industry realises it needs to provide people what they want, when they want it, how they want it (much like the music industry has had to) it will never change. All they can ever hope to do is minimise the piracy.
They use firms like Excipio who track torrents online worldwide. They announced the other week that since its release 470,000 people have downloaded Netflix's Daredevil in the U.S. UK, Australia and France for example, All Netflix territories. People are not so much "anonymous" anymore, that is a myth what with deep packet snooping etc. Where we are heading now are trolling companies that use that info to send threat letters out to those ip addresses, with demands for money or legal action (Dallas Buyers Club llc for a perfect example), which involves getting court orders for the names and addresses of the tracked ip addresses. The court orders are now starting to be granted so the precedent has been set, so I dare say we'll hear a lot more of this sort of thing in the future.
Anecdotally speaking, I'd say where I work out of around 40 people more people torrent (or get their children to do it for them WTF?!) than those that don't. So I can quite believe the numbers are getting pretty high now.
Last edited by Smackos; 19-04-2015 at 07:46 PM.
Netflix good for US drama.
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