with a sample size of one, there is no obvious problem.

presumably any given household wants to watch more than just pokemon, though and this is where things become unstuck. suddenly, to satisfy the demand for the range of things people in the household want to watch they are forced to make subscriptions to multiple services, perhaps sometimes for one-offs.

scale this up, and you have a population forced to make multiple subscriptions to multiple streaming providers to satisfy their demand for content.

or people just choose a couple of them and that's that. either way it seems that there is a symbiotic relationship between the content authors and the streaming companies.

but wait, read the page carefully, multiple seasons of the same thing spread across different streamers forcing consumers to subscribe to multiple streamers .... and now we are into Phoebus cartel territory.

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mxfh 6 days ago | parent [-]

That's not how streaming worked, ever. You had to deal with what Netflix had to offer and that was it. These were the happy monopoly days. It was simply the lack of choice and nobody felt left out at watercooler talks.

The paradox now, is that if you're FOMO inclined you feel the need to subscribe to multiple ones at all times to satify all needs in a household. You don't have to. You can keep baseline Disney if you really have to, but everything else can be easily rotated or just cought up on for a month or three on the usual discounted offers. The social pressure was not some invention of the streaming companies.

Also pirating has a hardware and energy cost, that's not trivial and mostly subsidized by parents. On a ROI basis of adults with disposable income "buying" (aka personal licenses, ideally shareable with some other accounts what some might call a family) 4-5 movies for like 5 dollars on platforms like Apple TV each a month is actually cheaper than pirating. Streaming is not everything. And don`t kid yourself that your DVD or Bluray collection is worth something or usable in 20+ years. That's a niche hobby. Go visit a flea market. People are that lazy when it comes to couch and home entertainment stuff.

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wiredpancake 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Now you are delving into small intricacies and "gotchas" which are just meaningless.

The problem is simple. People don't want to switch between 10 different streaming services, pay 10x a month, swap every second month, unsubscribe from X and re-subscribe to Y after going through a torturous process of unsubscribing. Different sites with different DRM, some might block Firefox, some might not work on an older MiniPC, some might not work or exist on the built in apps on my TV.

We as consumers shouldn't have to go through all these hoops just to watch stuff. Originally, I would buy a DVD (or even rent it) and then plop the DVD in the DVD player and it would work. It would work 10 years from now (assuming no disc-rot). It would work on my PC's DVD player, it would work on my TV. It wouldn't tell me my OS is out of date or that my internet connection is unstable. I could then go give you the DVD and you could watch it. It was simple.

For the sake of your argument, even if piracy was 100x harder and 10x more expensive than Subscriptions services (which its not), watching the entire series of Pokemon is still a pain and is still stupid and deserves to be called out for it.

	▲	6 days ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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crote 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> On a ROI basis of adults with disposable income "buying" (aka personal licenses, ideally shareable with some other accounts what some might call a family) 4-5 movies for like 5 dollars on platforms like Apple TV each a month is actually cheaper than pirating.

Yes, and I still pirate. It's more expensive, but the user experience is substantially better. It has always been a supply issue,

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thaumasiotes 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You think pirating videos will raise your electric bill by $25 / month?

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mxfh 6 days ago | parent [-]

Storage isn't free. running a 50 Watt anything 24/7 costs like 10 Dollars a month in Europe already if you don't want to be an anti-social leacher or want the convenience of an netflix-like media server.

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mystifyingpoi 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I never understood (even in homelab circles) why people insist on running these toys 24/7. Just turn it off for the night, or use one of these timer sockets.

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thaumasiotes 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Your comment is a bizarre tangle of different concerns, of which none make even a tiny amount of sense.

- If you download without uploading much, what does that have to do with the costs of piracy?

- If you upload as well as download, how will that increase the amount you pay for 50 watts of electricity?

- In what possible sense is storage not free? You already have the storage. Putting things on it is free, unless you get to the point where you need to buy additional storage. You don't need to retain the things you pirate any more than you need to retain the things you stream.

-- Even if you decide to do that, storage is an utterly trivial cost.

- Stipulating that 50 watts a month costs $10, your network stack draws less than 25 watts. Given that storage will never add up to any amount you'd notice, it will take less than one month before piracy blows rental out of the water on costs, after which its lead will increase forever.

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Dylan16807 6 days ago | parent [-]

They're saying if you keep things on to seed it'll use more electricity.

But yes you can fit a torrenting machine into 25 watts. Or fit a reasonable amount of uploading into the time your computer is already on.

And yes storage is somewhere between free and $30.

	▲	frollogaston 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		5W with a Mac mini, 50W with a typical PC tower

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gjvc 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

read the page carefully