Hell, we were on Napster in 99.

Yeah except nobody fucking lets you join lol

This is making a comeback with scanning.

Amazon was the place to buy manuals(art,hobby, do it yourself etc.). Now authors have pulled their books from print and expecting people to sign a subscription on patreon. Now there are sharks overpricing any remaining physical print second hand by 2000%.

pirates have scanned these books and selling access to uploaded jpgs for a fraction of what the manual would have cost had it just stayed in print.

The golden days of the net 🥲

I can’t prove the data wrong, but I will say it’s not particularly uncommon for businesses to move money around in an effort to make new product seem better or more profitable than it is. Tons of incentives to do so, little reason not to.

Also since you quote revenue not profit, they were still net unprofitable as of 2023 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/streaming-profit-report-netflix-disney-warners-paramount-nbcu-1235868631/

Yes, but they also brought back piracy, eroded faith in the brand, and while Disney+ is making money…

Disney’s newer efforts are kinda showing it’s not the powerhouse it used to be. With the only thing they really have going for them are the legacy media that they’re holding hostage on a platform, they arbitrarily removes things from time to time for seemingly no reason (the Willow series for example, which makes very little sense since that was original to Disney+ to begin with and for some reason Buzz Lightyear of Star Command isn’t on the platform despite all the other Toy Story media being present… and there are several episodes of The Simpsons that are just straight up memory-holed; most infamously the Michael Jackson episode)

If this trend continues, Disney will be left with people pirating the legacy media that people at home have shaky access to at best (Monthly fee for content that may be removed with no notice and for no reason), especially as prices soar and wages stay the same, and interest in newer project dwindling.

Or to be blunt, one of the most classic blunders: High short term profits at the cost of being unsustainable in the long term.

Sure it’s easy to think of Disney as laughing its way to the bank, but… think of it this way.

Disney’s been king of the world, especially in animation (Which has been getting sidelined in favor of live-action. I guarantee if Mufasa was animated it’d be running neck and neck with Sonic 3 instead of lagging behind). They’re a luxury limousine running fast on a road that has no other cars (because Disney bought those cars), and the tank’s running out of gas. You won’t know it’s running on fumes until it comes to a complete stop, but at the speed it’s going it will take awhile…

And the second it stops, a simple fuel service isn’t going to get it running again. It will get running again, too many people need it to run. So they’ll call a mechanic, and it will take to the streets once more.

Is Disney cooked? of course not, but they will see a return of their darkest days. A decade or two of the Disney brand no longer being that shining seal of quality people take it for.

I see it comparable to Nintendo’s Wii-U days when the company was a joke with no 3rd Party support and consumers who weren’t even sure what the Wii-U was even supposed to be. (Too many passed on it, believing it to be an overpriced gimmicky tablet add-on for the Wii… The launch title being NSMBU instead of something fans hadn’t already seen before I think is a big part of the blame for that.)

Nintendo didn’t wind up in bankruptcy, but they’d need to reinvent the wheel via the Switch, win back 3rd Party Support, and rekindle the faith of the fans, to get back to being a power house.

And they somehow just became profitable… while also already legacy owning thr vast majority of content

That’s a weird as heck christmas song.

The One Piece is real!.. and can be seen on [Streaming Site REDACTED]

I know when you can get petabytes, why stop at 100TB.

Because that’s like 20,000 movies and I need two new movies to watch every night until the day I die, thanks.

pr0n

Build your own Netflix gets expensive after a while.

I found I watched a lot more once I installed Jellyfin rather than faffing around with files and folders whenever I wanted to watch anything.

He spends about 2500€

South Park’s graphics were so bad back then that probably almost sufficed.

We’re just as stable!.. Maybe.

And that’s probably why people get so disappointed w/ tech companies.

It’s not that the prices they switch to are unreasonable, but that they hike prices after getting a user base, so it feels like a bait and switch instead of an early bird discount. If they made it an actual early bird discount, people would probably be fine with it.

Or maybe they keep prices the same, but drop content while keeping prices the same. If they instead structured it as a base tier and an “early bird” free access to a higher tier, which then starts costing money after some time period, I also think people would be okay with it. I have always thought Netflix should have packages, so you could opt-in to additional stuff like maybe Disney or HBO content. If Netflix did this early on, maybe Disney and HBO wouldn’t have bothered making their own streaming platforms and instead just raked in revenue from these higher tier customers, because they get most of the benefit of having their own streaming platform, with none of the costs.

In pretty much every case, I’ll point to Valve’s business model as an example. Gaming companies generally don’t feel the need to run their own platforms, and the ones that do often still distribute through other stores.

If you take venture capital, you sacrifice your ability to not be greedy. Could Facebook have even existed without VC? Facebook didn’t have ads during its startup IIRC, which meant they had no revenue.

Theu saw the writing on the walls. They knew the big dogs would want a slice of the streaming game and they needed to pivot before the rug got pulled out from ubder them. Hulu was already being constructed when they were recalling shifting into making their own products IIRC. It wasn’t just VC that got them to their golden era, they also relied on the industry bot taking streaming seriously enough and giving them deals that they never would today.

Yall are overcomplicating things. Let me simplify.

Capitalist corporations + infinite greed = cannibalism

Yeah I consulted for the cable industry around the time that everyone was just starting to try to build their own services to compete with Netflix. It wasn’t a secret that production companies would be pulling their content. There were licensing agreements signed that had expiration dates.

So it was more like a race on both ends. Production companies were like “we get exclusive streaming rights to our movies back in X months, so we need to have our own platform up and running.” And Netflix was like “we lose streaming rights to these movies in X months, we need to make some content to replace it with.”

Yes, Netflix famously said they need to be HBO before HBO could become Netflix.

It doesn’t really matter, though. The only cause of companies pulling their content is Netflix’s success. There was no way Netflix could have prevented it.

Unpopular opinion, but I wasn’t a fan. Was it a bad show? No! Did I enjoy it? Sometimes. How it developed the cult following that it has, I can’t quite piece together. Fantastic voice acting and sound design can only pull so much weight!

With a bit of effort you can stream any movie directly to your TV for a few moneys a month (or free, but paying for the essential bits removes the jankiness)

Something I learned back in the day: “Never pay for warez”. Pirate all you want, the moment you are paying, pay the creator of the product you’re interested in, not someone who pirated it and wants to profit from distributing it without a licence.

Stremio?

I am personally still friends with two people who even know how to navigate their filesystem beyond clicking the downloads or my documents link in the start menu. I hope you’re right, but all I see around me at work and personal life is ignorance. People can’t even figure out how to use their phones beyond the basics.

The less likely to get a virus point is arguable but I get what you’re saying

Really the thing is private trackers kind of put themselves out of the game. Like let’s look at a common path to get to some of the more well known coveted private trackers:

Do an irc interview about the rules and culture of a site with a staff member. You will have to study, sit in irc for god knows how long for someone to be available, and pass. Alternatively, know someone already in who trusts you and will burn an invite

Then you’re in. Now you have to upload music, which is much less commonly pirated bc music streaming isn’t fucking stupid and fragmented these days (though pricing keeps rising so maybe we’ll see a return). To get to the point where you can be invited to sites that would actually have movies and tv and games and shit you need 25 gigs uploaded and a 0.7 ratio minimum. Also the sites been around a while and the people on it are meticulous music collectors so finding something to upload is actually challenging, when you do you have to make sure you meet the strict guidelines, etc

That’s a lot! Like learning to use a torrent client is easy. Asking a 2024 tech dummy to learn irc? Come on. At the same time the filter is needed, the people who truly want to be there are what make the communities so great, and the vetting process is what keeps feds out (for the most part they go for low hanging fruit sites like rarbg)

What are they going to do? Manufacture their own silicon? The ability to make a computing device of reasonable power is fairly prohibitive and as things move forward manufacturers seem intent on doing things that are more and more hostile to consumers. You say people won’t let themselves be pushed around and that sounds nice but people have consistently done exactly that to date.

Our power as individuals is minimal here; we can vote politically and financially. These companies do amazing financially so voting with our wallets doesn’t work. Voting politically also hasn’t done in terms of enacting regulation aside from some small wins in a few states with right to repair (and big losses in many more states as well as federally). And given the fact that those wins are small and fragmented with only a very small handful of states having any policy (like less than 10) it’s likely that big tech will push back hard rather than simply comply. And we are heading into political times where regulations will likely continue to erode.

So as things worsen the people who “know a bit more” can have the choice of using cutting edge hardware that is more locked down, or being a stallman type that uses relatively ancient hardware full of compromises because it is compatible with an ideology. That is just but it also means they will be constantly hampered and the problem will only be compounded as technology becomes more advanced, which is inherent and constantly occurring

This is also not just a generational thing to be clear. People my age, younger, and older, who were into this stuff have become tech illiterate as time progressed because they’ve allowed themselves to move away from their computers and go to their phones which have become a reddit/youtube/tiktok/pintrest/amazon/twitter/instagram/etc box. The etc is whatever skinner box game they’re playing at the moment, because most of them who played actual games don’t even bother to play games anymore. They’re so caught up in the cycle of “engagement” that they don’t care about much else. they come home and doom scroll then complain about how they feel aimless and anxious all the time and never get stuff done

You’re right that there exceptions, but they seem to be dwindling

Linux is not on mobile. And before anyone says “Android/LineageOS is Linux”, 1) Android is proprietary (and AOSP is not a real substitute for Android), and 2) LineageOS isn’t a substitute for Android without microg, and also isn’t Linux (last I checked, app development on LineageOS REQUIRED ANDROID STUDIO for the signing bullshit).

Now, if anyone says “Linux is on mobile, I daily-drive my PinePhone!” (and is actually being honest), then congratulations and I respect the hell out of you but you’re more of a masochist than Drew Devault and that makes you a unicorn.

This is true but is only applicable as long as manufacturers still allow alternative OS to exist. It sounds crazy now but the idea of not being able to use an alternative is something that manufacturers are clearly toying with (see the x elite laptops with locked boot loaders, hp secureboot, etc).

They’ve seen the control they can exert over users with mobile devices and they want that across the spectrum. Then it goes back to a point I made in another comment; Linux/foss users can and will still exist but they will be restricted to ancient hardware that prevents them from working on certain tasks. This already occurs: look at a true foss idealist that will only use hardware that can run coreboot/libreboot. You’re generally running hardware well over a decade old at this point. If you want to work on any computationally complex task (ml models, high poly 3d modeling, anything requiring a modern discrete gpu really), you’re out of luck unless you compromise your ideals

The thing is Linux users and other power users think “if manufacturers lock the bootloader there will be a huge outcry and people won’t buy it”. And there is truth to that, there will be a lot of noise online. But most users won’t care and they’ll still buy the stuff. And apple/google/hp/lenovo/etc will push/pay their buddies at facebook/reddit/etc to downplay the discussion/outrage so it will blow over quick and become a normal thing. Then all it takes is a new dmca extension or modification and now overriding a manufacturer lock on a bootloader is an illegal modification

Real-debrid is a weird one, it’s clearly you paying for piracy, but they’ve been around since forever.