this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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It kinda is though.
in a pretty limited, cultural archival and dissemination point of view, mayyyyyyyyybe.
the vast majority just want free entertainment.
No, they want easily accessible entertainment for a reasonable price.
Currently I'm supposed to pay 3-4 services at 10-15€ to get a somewhat reasonable library. There's up to 60€, each month. For a collection of services, that I'm realistically using maybe 2h a day. That's completely unreasonable.
And if you see, that especially Netflix seems to spend 90% of that money on extremely low quality crap, this price tag seems even less reasonable.
This. Why would I go through that whole rigamaroll when I can go to one site and it has everything, often with robust search that’ll actually find what I’m looking for when I misspell Benjamin Cucumberpatch’s name.
*Benadryl Cucumberpatch
What are your thoughts on borrowing DVDs from a local library?
It's interesting that even though technology advances and public options could evolve with them, people are still expected to jump through archaic hoops. Even if there needs to be a quota for lending, that could be handled digitally too.
The way media companies act today, if libraries weren't already a thing, they would not allow them to be invented.
Agreed, we definitely could not make libraries today if they were not already around.
There aren't any in my area.
Oh. Well that's a bummer.
How much would you be willing to pay for your entertainment? Historically 1$/hour isn’t a bad deal. Games used to cost double that on average. Movies have always been 5-10$ per hour if adjusted for inflation. A book is cheaper (say, 20$ for maybe 60h of reading), but an audiobook is around that 1$/hour you’re complaining about.
If you’re really complaining about how you cannot afford to be entertained, I’d surmise it’s a salary problem where the minimum wage hasn’t followed inflation almost everywhere on earth, and not the price of entertainment itself.
My issue with streaming isn’t a cost but a categorization. Even if I subscribe to five services there always seems to be two problems; 1. how do I find shit to watch and on what service, and 2. there always seem to have that elusive content that I haven’t subscribed to and would take me ten minutes to add all my information which honestly is just a blocker. I want TV to be more like music is right now (from a UX), even if I have to pay extra for that convenience.
I'm absolutely able to pay 100€ a month, for me personally it's not a salary problem.
But I'm comparing streaming to public access TV here in Germany, which is currently 18€ per month and household and somehow manages to produce something like 20 TV channels, 50 radio stations, tons of podcasts, top notch news coverage, pensions for thousands of old journalists and doing all of that within the famously efficient German bureaucracy. So, how exactly is Netflix spending its money? Especially if you keep in mind that they can distribute most of their self-produced content worldwide.
I know your question is rhetorical, but they are paying it on the owners' salaries.
Or you could act like a grown up and accept not having everything always?
If you're on a budget, what's wrong with subscribing for a month or two to a service, then switching to another for a few months, etc.?
Or you could act like you have a spine and don't accept every abuse companies throw at you.
I'm absolutely ready to pay for entertainment, but not that much for such a bad experience. Either I pirate at least some of my content, or I simply don't watch it. It's that easy.
Companies have to understand that the free market works both ways. If you don't deliver, I won't pay.
It's interesting how "acting like a grown up" here entails to submitting to the demands of corporations and rejecting the reality that they don't have absolute control, no matter how much they want to.
Are you going to tell me a poor minimum wage worker is the spoiled immature one, compared to a media executive?
You sure like to argue against arguments I didn't make.
So you just wanted to do some vague moralizing without thinking of what that would imply? Alright then.
And you're at it again!
I said what I said, and theirs is nothing vague about how you got to make choices in what you can and can't have.
You're the one starting to make vague statements about "submitting to their demands", and comparing the poor to the CEO (which is totally beside any points...)
It's quite simple: there are a billion ways to entertain yourself, some are cheaper and some are more expensive, some are worth your money and some aren't.
These companies don't "demand" anything. They're offering a service for a price. If you're unhappy about that, move on?
If you were talking about something with very few players, or in essential services, it would be a different discussion. Here we are talking about entertainment, so Netflix is in the same market as Wizards of the Coast, CD Projekt Red, Penguin Publishing, and a few hundred thousand others.
What do you mean, "at it again". If you don't want me to make inferences about what you said, you want me to just stick exactly to your words and forget my own understanding of the world, what is left to do but call it but vague moralizing?
People can "act like a grown up and accept not having everything always"... or they can pirate. You can not like that, but that is an objective possibility that they have in our world. Just as you don't seem to be moved by the idea that poorer people want entertainment too, I'm not particularly morally shaken by massive media companies like Netflix not getting as much money as they possibly could. Especially when people cannot afford it, why does it matter if they still watch it or not? Netflix can't lose money that it would never get to begin with.
I could say that this sort of moralizing seems to come from the assumption that the market is fair and just but you are probably gonna whine at me that "I never said it was", and if that's how you want to go about this conversation I don't think there's much a point in continuing. You said what you said, I said what I said and that's it.
Right now, I pirate mostly because I can't afford paying for my entertainment (like the vast majority of people where I live). But even if I had disposable income, I would not pay for some media because I don't want to spend money and be restricted more than if I didn't. I would not mind spending money for DRM-less copies. And even if this wasn't possible, I would rather pay for the piece and then pirate it DRM-less to truly own it (like I already did with some games when I was better-off).
Sorta.
At a very narrow per-tree level it's indeed about a selfish desire of the pirate.
At a broader forest-wide level it's about the available choices having been artificially narrowed by legislation that creates a monopoly on copying. As seen more in the gaming world (mainly with GoG, Steam and indie titles) and even streaming video a few years ago, even with artificially narrow choices by law if the competition is still broad enough to provide lots of options at good prices, far fewer individuals will engage in Piracy, though as we see with streaming video, the artificial monopoly legislation ends up being sooner or later leveraged to narrow the available choices and Piracy flourishes in response.
It's not by chance that the very same individuals who have simpletion takes on just about every subject (not saying you, just some commenters here) also seem have the simpleton "piracy is bad because the law says so" take when commenting on this.
It's not the pirates that are Robin hood in this analogy, it's the support network enabling piracy.
There's definitely people only looking for free content, but others like me pay a fair amount of money for the services needed to get going a Plex server, for example. I pay for a VPN to stream outside my network, I pay for JDownloader, a MediaFire account, a Plex subscription, etc...
It's cheaper to just stick to Netflix and their horrible catalog and practices than to run my server the way I do, but it's not just about the money.