Even with all of this onerous encryption and DRM, it's not hard to find pirated copies of movies. It makes me think that the sacrifice in ownership rights for the theaters over their equipment isn't worth it.
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For 15 years you let paid options progress. Then fewer people pirate, then you catch the rest. At the beginning you don’t see it putting its clamps; then suddenly you don’t find piracy anywhere.
And then they completely ruined it with fragmentation. When all I need to watch everything I wanted to watch was three subscriptions (Netflix, Hulu, and HBO), I was totally fine with the ~$40/mo and reasonably-ok-UX offered.
But now it's a mess. I need subscriptions to 7 or 8 different services (which now each cost twice what they used to for an ad-free experience), and the experience is crap. Netflix no longer plays on my Linux/Firefox setup (same thing happened with HBO years ago), and their anti-password-sharing mis-features constantly trigger for me even though I don't share my Netflix password. The Android apps for most of them are glitchy and buggy, and Chromecast has somehow gotten less reliable over time.
The irony is that usually I would say more competition is a good thing. I suppose if we had lots of streaming services, but studios were required to license all their content under RAND terms to anyone who asks, we'd have real competition, and streamers would compete on the quality of their platform, lack of ads, etc., and not just on what titles they were lucky enough to be able to license.
I do agree that pirating became less popular for a while, but that golden age is over. The piracy scene seems stronger than ever these days.
I know Netflix doesn't support anything beyond 720p or so on Linux, but that never bothered me. Otherwise it just works. Is your Firefox out of date?
> The piracy scene seems stronger than ever these days.
I hope so. A lot of damage was done. If it wasn't for archive.org a lot of older, regional stuff would not even be accessible. We need piracy if only for the collective digital archives.
I refuse to take out more than one subscription. We just hop services.