Popcorn Time has succeeded in streamlining the delivery of content, providing a smooth and fast experience for sorting through a list of movie and start watching instantly. I really wonder why the movie studios cannot take a cue from this and build something that people actually want to use.
It's much easier to streamline something when you don't have to follow any of the rules. The movie industry has to think of distribution agreements, localising content and maximising profit - just like any other business. When you have nothing to lose you can do what you want. I guess they've gotten close to this with Netflix. There are still geo-restrictions there and not all content is available but for most people with access there is enough. Also if you want the latest content (which isn't on Netflix) you can probably buy it from iTunes. Again not available everywhere but available in quite a lot of places.
When you look at how easy this content is to access now compared with 10 or 15 years ago when you had to have a video store membership, hope no one else had rented the copy, pay crazy prices, and remember to bring it back when you were done, I find it hard to believe people's biggest problem (and main reason for pirating) is ease of access. It's price plain a simple. People have the option of not paying so a lot of them won't. I've done it in the past and it was almost never about ease of access. It was about money.
Note that it's easy to get a false dichotomy here, to think it's just between "paying" and "not paying" - if forced, people also have the simple option to "not watch".
I think what's needed is something like Steam or GOG, but for Movies. Preferably with un-DRM downloads because fuck if I'm watching movies in Flash. (Same goes for Silverlight - mplayer or fuck you. Torrents let me watch with mplayer. On finicky graphics drivers who occasionally fail at vsync, choice of player matters.)
Why is it that in 2015, I can't go to a site, give them money, and get a high-quality mkv download - but I can go to a site, not give anyone money, and get that download anyways? Movie industry, why do you not want my money? Hell, set up an "indemnity service"! Select a movie, pay them, and they promise to not sue you. Zero distribution infrastructure required.
>> "Why is it that in 2015, I can't go to a site, give them money, and get a high-quality mkv download"
Because it's costly and unnecessary for a business to cater to every specific need. How many people even know what an MKV file is? And if they did how many people have the bandwidth to download one?
There are so many options available to people now (theatres, DVD, Bluray, iTunes, Amazon, Netflix) that people are resorting to insanely specific demands (MKV files, availability while in theatres, all I can watch for $5 per month, the technology used to stream the content must be one I like) in order to justify their piracy.
I don't see anything unreasonable about asking the studios to provide their product in a particular format. What if you wanted to purchase a movie, and the studios only offered it on Betamax?
Relying on Flash or Silverlight is similar. I use Linux, and Flash is officially unsupported on Linux. Silverlight has never been officially supported on Linux. If these are the options, then I cannot watch the movie out of the box, I have to find a flash installer (I had better hope one's in my package repositories), or I have to install wine and build Silverlight into my browser or some such.
I think it is totally reasonable that you would ask the studios to provide content in a manner that you can actually watch. Let's not even get in to the Blu-Ray encryption snafu and how that affected those of us who use non-commercial operating systems.
I don't see anything unreasonable about asking the studios to provide their product in a particular format.
So if I hand built my own codec I could then ask Netflix to provide videos to me using it?
Of course, that's an extreme example. But they're not obliged to cater to your every whim - they're a business that makes business decisions, like losing X% of customers because they don't want to support Y codec/platform/whatever.
It's also totally reasonable for them to not provide their product in a form that only a tiny percentage of people actually need. Might as well complain that they no longer sell VHS tapes because "all I have is a VCR and I just want content in a form I can watch". At some point you have to recognize that you need to meet them halfway. I mean heck, you even recognize that Flash isn't supported on Linux. How hard is it to replace the word "Flash" in that sentence with "Hulu"?
Well if they provided a MKV file for sale then anyone could use it on their devices how they see fit. Similarly to how people can download mp3 files and play them on any device they want.
The current situation is that I have to watch TV shows via EME within Chrome or Flash or Silverlight (non of which I would otherwise have near my computer) or not be able to pay the content producers any money (which I like doing because I want new content created). It is as if I had to own a sony TV to tune into certain channels and a panasonic TV to watch others.
If they want to prevent piracy then simply watermark the MKV files individually, register the sales and sue the buyers who's MKVs end up being torrented.
My point is that they should at least try to compete with piracy as far as user experience goes. I can download a movie and play it on Linux. But apparently providing a legitimate means for me to do so isn't worth their time.
> There are so many options available to people now (theatres, DVD, Bluray, iTunes, Amazon, Netflix) that people are resorting to insanely specific demands
All of your options fail either for (a) not working in my country and (b) are physical and non-digital.
"Digital content I can watch right away" is not a instanely specific demand.
Regarding (a) I mentioned in my earlier comment that I understood not all of these services were available in all countries. However they are available in a lot of them now. Netflix and iTunes are both available in over 50 countries (I believe it's much higher for iTunes but I can't find the specific figure right now).
As for (b) I don't think that's an insanely specific demand and don't believe I said it was. In fact I listed a few of the demands in my comment. However it's also not a good justification for piracy imo. The content is still available to you with (for most people) very little effort.
While those problems are real, they are also self inflicted by the movie industry. I don't agree it's about money. Recently Netflix became available in my country (the netherlands) and many people I know stopped pirating content. It simply was not available legally before Netflix. You had to wait two years to watch a TV series and then you had to watch it at a time when some TV station decided to broadcast it. It was the same for games. When steam came lots of people stopped pirating games. Same for music.
For some it's about money yes, but for lots of people it's about the user experience or simply about availability in the first place.
Netflix, Amazon Instant (both Prime and the store), Steam, GoG, etc., are all slippery services. If they have a particular piece of content available, it's easier to consume it on their services than it is to pirate. That's really what Hollywood needs to focus on.
Amazon instant has damn near everything. Hollywood does provide it. They just can't compete with free.
PC game piracy proves this. Games on steam get pirated in large numbers even when the pirate copy is harder to download, install and use. And often it has reduced functionality.
> People have the option of not paying so a lot of them won't.
But a lot of them will. They will pay for ease of access, legal access, and a good user experience.
If the industry had focused its energy on those willing to pay instead of those not willing to pay, maybe the UX Popcorn Time provides today would have been available as a legal subscription based service.
Just look at Spotify. Yes, a lot of people still don't pay for the music they consume, but a lot of people do. Pirating of music has certainly seen a decline, even if we may never get rid of it completely.
They lost over €150m last year and their losses have been growing. Content creators seem to dislike them and want an alternative. Just because you can do something and some people will pay doesn't mean it makes business sense.
The movie companies enforce the rules and could easily change them however they are stuck in their old world distribution model which is no longer relevant in a digital society.
Lack of legal pathways to content are the only reason I watch any pirated content at all. Plenty of TV shows that I want to see are made in foreign countries and don't come to my country at all or come years late, and even when they do require me to sit behind a TV screen at a particular hour, or remember to program a recorder to write it to a hard drive, which is impossibly archaic. Ofcourse, the best shows are behind pay-walls, but even if I pay the hundreds of euros per month to get past all the paywalls of all the services, the combined offering is quite poor.
It's quite simple: give me spotify premium or give me itunes, but for video content. I want to have everything ever made, as soon as it is made (none of that "it's in the theatre so you have to wait" B.S.), either for a fixed reasonable monthly rental fee, or for a fixed reasonable purchasing price. I want that content on every device I have, on-demand, in the best possible quality. I'm ok with DRM for rental as long as it does not prevent access on the devices I own (ipad, windows tablet, laptop, apple tv, etc...). I'm not ok with DRM for purchasing, because when I buy something I want to own it forever. Give me that and I'll gladly pay for it, but the movie and TV industry simply doesn't want my money it seems. I pay for netflix, because that's basically the best I can get, but it's not even close to what I want.
The music industry eventually figured this stuff out and I don't pirate any music at all anymore. I still hold out hope that eventually the movie and TV industry will stop refusing to take my money.
I honestly do not believe that the movie studios are motivated to improve the current system. Perhaps they feel that the current, fractured delivery system serves their interest more than something central and comprehensive. It certainly encourages the customer to subscribe to a service like Netflix, perhaps also to rent a new release on iTunes and eventually possibly buying that same release when its price drops. That's getting paid three times for the same content!
Movie studios have the least exposure to piracy risk other than online multiplayer games and console games.
You can't get a good copy of a movie until DVDs and brs are released. Cams and TSs are terrible.
If something like popcorn time went mainstream they would just stop releasing disc media and downloads until well after the theatre stopped playing.
TV is the industry that should be worried. If popcorn time goes mainstream we'll never see high budget cable content ever again. Just 100% low budget sitcoms, soap operas and reality TV. But not with constant in show advertising that scenesters can't edit out.
Bingo. The goal of the movie industry is simply to make more money, and to prevent any challenge to their stranglehold on content... if that is achieved by balkanized delivery systems, that's what they will push for.
As somebody in the same predicament and locale, I often find myself wondering whether it is any less objectionable to rent a VPN connection through the States.
I'm pretty sure the problem wouldn't be the VPN but rather the payment. Iirc they only accept US based credit cards/paypal for Netflix US. I researched it briefly a while back before Netflix was available here.
It's not impossible to get around but getting a CC from another country and the like quickly leads to pretty shady websites.
I've done the same thing. Used a VPN to access Netflix US in Britain, for some newer BBC stuff that I've already contributed to through the license fee...
This 1000x. iPlayer is lauded, and generally works well, but it has incredibly restrictive, short term availability of content entirely paid for by taxpayers.
It is unclear how anyone in the UK can benefit from TV programmes removed from this service, or WHY any content for which the BBC doesn't have permanent distribution rights (via iPlayer) should ever be funded or produced by the BBC.
Netflix has a very limited, poor selection of content. Every single movie I've tried to watch on Netflix in the past month hasn't been available for streaming.
I very much enjoyed Netflix while staying with family in the US. In Belgium, however, the available content is so limited that it's just not worth it. Not even Friends, Simpsons, X-Files, nothing.
I really don't think this is a better experience than Netflix or pay-per-view on my tv. The only thing that is better is that I don't have to pay for it. The movies actually take a lot longer to load on this.
