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Proving Netflix could be replaced by five hard working people.
Proving Netflix could be
replacedoutdone by five hard working people.Proving Netflix should
couldbereplacedoutdone by five hard working people.ProvingNetflixshouldcouldbereplacedoutdoneby five hard working people.
Things are easier if you can steal stuff. And operate on a small scale.
They didn’t need the army of lawyers to get license deals, so that’s not a fair comparison.
Its almost like its unecessary shit made up in order to keep profits away from working people artificially
Yeah its almost like if we didn’t keep extending copyright protections a bunch of stuff would be in the public domain and any streaming service could offer it without having to deal with licensing.
I mean that’s all well and good, but then how would the very deserving shareholders get dividends?
Won’t somebody think of the shareholders!?
PLS KEP LNE GOE UUP
- Take over a failing company
- Hold a shareholder meeting
- Show the line going down
- Turn the chart upside down
- Become a hero to the shareholders
maybe if they actually invested some money somewhere they would make some money for once.
Or fund new content
Their scale was also an insignificant fraction of what Netflix has, making the point even more irrelevant.
The best figure I could find on Jetflicks user count was 37k, where as Netflix has 269 million users.
Prices should go down with scale not up though.
There’s initial investment on the initial servers (and the software), and afterwards it should be a linear increase of server costs per user, with some bumps along the way to interconnect those servers.
The cost also scales per content. Because that means more caching servers per user and bigger databases, and licenses.
So this service has less users and more content, it should be way more expensive. The only reason they are cheaper is because they don’t pay those licenses.
The cost of storage in this case is more or less irrelevant - traffic is what matters here. You’re also not getting any mentionable bulk discount on the servers for that matter.
The key is that you can engineer things in completely different way when you have trivial amounts of traffic hitting your systems - you can do things that will not scale in any way, shape or form.
If we get rid of the licensing we get rid of the lawyers.
If you get rid of licensing you get rid of the content
Certain types of content. But YouTube’s own existence started because people made content without licensing rights.
Technically YouTube exists because three horny nerds wanted a dating site with video integration. It only turned into a video sharing site when they realized they couldn’t find the clip of the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction and they decided they wanted to build that platform instead.
I wonder what youribe would have been like if they didn’t sell to google
probably redtube
I don’t think YouTube really compares to Netflix
Not really. I can undersgand licensing but at this point it’s become a distopian practice completely separated from the basic need to monetize the content an make a profit. That’s why those companies become such gargantuans monsters.
Nope. People will still make content. It’ll be on far less of a budget, but that didn’t stop the Film School generation of independent films in the 1970s (before which you had to sell your life and soul and beating heart to a studio). In between all the schlock were the occasional arty films we consider classics today.
And then there’s government subsidization of art projects, as per the National Endowment of the Arts.
I think the MCU movies, the DC movies, the many studio iterations of Spiderman have shown us what capitalism eventually churns out. Sony actually chose this path content as product the same resort to formula that plagued the music industry in the 1980s (and drove the Hip Hop Independent movement of the next half-century).
We just need to empower artists. Make sure they don’t have to moonlight as restaurant wait staff in order to eat and pay rent while they create, and make sure they have access to half-decent (not necessarily high end) hardware with which to do their thing. And yes, as Sturgeon observes, most of it will be schlock, but through sheer quantity of content we’ll get more gems than Hollywood is putting out.
If you take away the ability to own and control your intellectual property, then you won’t be empowered.
Licensing art allows creators to earn a living off of their hard work.
Not in the US or the EU. If you make music in the States, then RCA or Sony owns your content, not you, and when they decide they’ve paid you enough (which is much less than they’re getting) then they still own your stuff. Also, if you make an amazing film or TV series ( examples: Inception, Firefly ) and the moguls don’t like it, they’ll make sure it tanks or at least doesn’t get aftermarket support, which is why Inception doesn’t have any video games tie-ins, despite being a perfect setting for video games.
Artists are empowered in their ability to produce art. If they have to worry about hunger and shelter, then they make less art, and art narrowly constrained to the whims of their masters. Artists are not empowered by the art they’ve already made, as that has to be sold to a patron or a marketing institution.
No, we’d get more and better art by feeding and housing everyone (so no one has to earn a living ) and then making all works public domain in the first place.
Intellectual property is a construct, and it’s corruption even before it was embedded in the Constitution of the United States has only assured that old art does not get archived.
I think yes, an artist needs to eat, which is why most artists (by far) have to wait tables and drive taxicabs and during all that time on the clock, not make art. The artists not making art far outnumber the artists that get to make art. And a small, minority subset of those are the ones who profit from art or even make a living from their art, a circumstance that is perpetually precarious.
But I also think the public needs a body of culture, and as the Game of Thrones era showed us, culture and profit run at odds. The more expensive art is, the more it’s confined to the wealthy, and the less it actually influences culture. Hence we should just feed, clothe and home artists along with everyone else, whether or not they produce good or bad art. And we’ll get culture out of it.
You can argue that a world of guaranteed meals and homes is not the world we live in, but then I can argue that piracy (and other renegade action) absolutely is part of the world we live in and will continue to thrive so long as global IP racketeering continues. Thieves and beggars, never shall we die.
Sorry, I’m not going to read all that, but it seems like you’re upset about the shitty deals made by record labels and other large corporations, not intellectual property rights.
If you save the cheerleader you save the world.
If you save the cheerleader then the creepy serial killer will join the team.
If you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to ask for a glass of milk.
Precisely. So much added expense for zero, or rather negative, added value.
The only reason all companies prices go up these days is for CEO pay packages
I think it’s more for major shareholders (which includes CEOs, of course)
Like Boeing’s CEO making 300 million… imagine 300 people who worked their ass off could make million. Or 1500 hard workers could be making 200k. But nah, let’s just drag these huge bags of money into this one asshole’s account. Oh there were a couple of crashes right? 👍 Our thoughts and prayers 🙏. But not our money wagons.
Regulate monopolies and eat the rich.
but wait… there’s more
astronauts
Did they make the shows too?
Does Netflix make shows? Or does it slam its name onto filmmakers it pays to make content? If so, one of those things simply requires throwing cash at people, which I think is a skill that most people can learn.
Did the pirate site pay anyone to make new shows?
They had to operate under the radar to avoid the law, so you know the answer to your question
So Netflix actually pays for shows to get made, so when everyone pays for Netflix, it lets everyone enjoy them. Pirate sites only extract value from the hard work of the producers, without paying them.
producers don’t make the content, they speak to the right people in their exclusive circles to finance it, put their name on it, and then pay the directors and actors a tiny fraction of what it earned
Okay, now tell me how pirate sites contribute to creation of said content
Does Netflix? Or do they pay production companies for content?
They use the subscription money to pay production studios. What did the pirate site use the subscription money for?
Servers, electricity, bandwidth, blackjack and hookers.
“substantial harm to television program copyright owners,”
Give me a fucking break
Won’t somebody think of the television program copyright owners??
I think of them when I dream about them facing a firing squad.
But then who would finance the production of television programs?
I dream of a world where we are free to create art without having dance for Capital
There will always be tasks that people don’t want to do, and they will require compensation for motivation.
The level of compensation determines your level of society.
It already does
Those poor, poor, TV execs… They all had to settle for gold plating in their heated in-door pools and Rolls Royces instead of platinum. 😔
Love how they make this sound like some incredible feat. When you aren’t bound to license agreements, turns out it’s actually very easy to have a “massive” content library. Literally the only hurdle is storage space.
Yeah it costs, depending on quality of course.
My 14 TB disks are filling up faster than I expected and I am not close to Netflix’s catalogue.Yeah, I got a 14tb drive back in February and it’s 90 percent full already. My media collection will always grow to fill the space available.
You guys wouldn’t happen to have any tips on DVD ripping would you? I’d like to go all digital but I just can’t make Handbrake work.
This is my fork of an existing solution
https://github.com/JustAnotherIdea/MakeMKV-Auto-Rip-Concurrent-Ripping-and-Blu-Ray-Fix
I’ve never gotten Handbrake to do anything I wanted. DVD Shrink, on the other hand, is one of my top five most-used apps. It’s quite old, but DVD encryption hasn’t changed since its release.
I couldn’t either… I ended up using dd, though it’s probably not the best way by a long shot.
Nobody gives a shit, you’re not doing enough to punish trump for his obvious, literally filmed and recorded crimes.
This is the equivalent of the cops celebrating after beating peaceful college protesters while pissing their pants and freezing while the uvalde kids were slaughtered and psychologically tortured.
You’re focusing on the non victory and ignoring the failures. Cowards.
You’re focusing on the non victory and ignoring the failures. Cowards.
That’s not true, they successfully did their job of protecting capital and the owner class. Same reason they don’t go after Trump. He’s in the owner class, so their job is to serve and protect him.
When cops only legal responsibility is to enforce the law, and the laws are written to protect corporate interests, of course they will stand outside the school and arrest protesters. SCOTUS has ruled that way so many times that “to serve and protect” is literally gaslighting.
Say it again, friend.
Nobody gives a shit, you’re not doing enough to punish trump for his obvious, literally filmed and recorded crimes.
This is the equivalent of the cops celebrating after bearing peaceful college protesters while pissing their pants and freezing while the uvalde kids were slaughtered and psychologically tortured.
You’re focusing on the non victory and ignoring the failures. Cowards.
say it again, friend, but in french
Tout le monde s’en fout, vous ne faites pas assez pour punir Trump pour ses crimes évidents, littéralement filmés et enregistrés.
C’est l’équivalent des flics qui se réjouissent d’avoir abattu des manifestants pacifiques à l’université tout en se pissant dessus et en se gelant pendant que les enfants d’uvalde se faisaient massacrer et torturer psychologiquement.
Vous vous concentrez sur la non-victoire et ignorez les échecs. Lâches.
say it again, friend, but in dutch
Non
well alright, but I’m going to have to report this
This guy GETS it.
“The group used “sophisticated computer scripts” and software to scour piracy services”
They used the basic tools that most(?) pirates use today like sonarr and radar??
I don’t mind people pirating…i do mind people pirating and profiting from redistribution.
Guessing they used Sonarr, Radarr, qBittorrent, maybe an NZB client…
Would you look at that, I’m sophisticated now.
Maybe even Jellyseerr
Yes. Charging money for sharing content like that makes them little better than grifters
Five men convicted by the court of the high seas for being absolute chads
It probably also had better user experience than all of them
That’s the thing about all the pirate apps (apps like Weyd, Syncler, the now-defunct TVZion, etc). They’re made by people that actually care, not by companies that are only in it for the money. The user experience is usually a lot better. One of those apps plus a Real Debrid subscription and you’re set.
Where should I go to learn more about what you’re talking about
I’ve heard that you can download stuff from filmfans.org and serienfans.org with jdownloader. Reportedly it’s then possible to host it locally on your own Synology NAS and use Infuse on your Apple TV for a magnificent user experience.
Rumor has it that apps that use Real Debrid are way easier to use since you can just go to a TV show and watch it. Even a non technical person can use apps like Weyd. Real Debrid supposedly caches torrents on their server so you can instantly stream them over an encrypted connection.
damn you just shit all over my nuts thank you
Sounds like reliable hearsay
I’ve heard that Google might have information about Real Debrid and apps that support it. I cannot confirm or deny this myself.
So that I can avoid using them. Od course
He is saying that people that get rich selling others people’s stuff without paying for it are not “in it for the money”. What don’t you understand.
It’s amazing how I can run a better streaming service from my basement than the ones I pay for.
Start servicing millions of users. Then we’ll talk.
If they’re servicing that many users their UX should be better, but it’s not. Search should work better, but it doesn’t. They should let me make playlists, but they don’t.
Yes, scale is hard but it shouldn’t be hard to put a clock in the pause screen showing me what time the show will be done. And that’s just a tiny way Plex is better.
The only thing I’m pisseed about is the fact that I was unaware of its existence. Fuck the system
You might be overestimating how much content that was. Streaming services try to maintain an illusion of neverending content but last I saw except for prime, the amount of content they offer has been trending down.
Those numbers are fairly accessible for an average person with 3 or 4 large hard drives.
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You can always start creating your own personal media server, using apps such as Plex or Jellyfin, and qBittorrent, SABnzbd, etc.
I’ve been trying to do just that and it’s slow going with qB, if one was looking to avoid dens of sins where you might find a usenet key, where should I stay away from?
Same, what a shame
You gotta be stupid as shit to run something like this from the US and keep a financial tail of credit card payments to you.
You also gotta be stupid as shit to actually pay 10 bux for this.
It ran functionally uncontested for ten years. And it would hardly have been the first underground streaming service to pivot legit and cash out.
Napster was sold for $85M back in 2002. Justin.tv rebranded as Twitch in 2011. Hell, AWS has it’s share of pirate hosted files.
Wait, is that actually Twitch’s history - Justin.tv?
It is. Until recently it actually still used the domain to serve assets.
Wild. What an obscure piece of internet history to have missed out on as an old Justin.tv user.
Was Justin.tv doing copyright infringing things? I seem to remember it was just a guy streaming his everyday life. He would literally wear a hat with a camera on it and record everything he did all day. It makes sense that it became twitch because they solved a technical problem around mass streaming that empowers twitch today.
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I see… I only remember the very early days of Justin.tv and kind of lost track of it between then and when it became twitch.
Yeah but megaupload was legit but was still shutdown despite being massive
They’re here doing everyone a service. Why are there resources to prosecute this but not like elon musk’s insider trading?
Because our society is profoundly corrupt
Jetflicks, which charged $9.99 per month for the streaming service, generated millions of dollars in subscription revenue and caused “substantial harm to television program copyright owners,
The ownership class will tremble before a communist revolution!
Yeah that competition really did demonstrate what an awful service all those media monopolies provided.
To be fair, the service they provide isn’t hosting the videos, it’s making them, which I assume costs a bit more
To be fairer nobody asked them to produce content. They decided to create it because it’s cheaper that licensing the actual good stuff.
eh some of it is good, I personally wouldn’t want to just watched licensed shows from 50 years ago
Hence why copyright was originally in the 10-20 year range.
Movie star isn’t supposed to be a dream job that makes you fabulously rich, but a decent living.
Interestingly, musical artists who work off the web will do exactly that: Tour and make hundreds of thousands instead of millions (in the aughts and 2010s, so pre-inflation), rather than rolling the dice with the record labels.
Movie star isn’t supposed to be a dream job that makes you fabulously rich, but a decent living.
I mean, supposed to according to who?
Capitalist ideologues, for one. I remember in Macroeconomics class that wealth desparity will destroy your economy and then your civilization if you let it get out of hand.
So when (for example) we have eight guys that own more than the poorer half of the world population, that’s a bad sign for every economy on the planet, and is going to cause way more problems than merely discontent and social unrest.
Netflix service started as hosting only.
correction… Netflix started by mailing DVDs, even before Redbox was a thing
Ah. Analogue hosting. But they definitely didn’t start producing content.
Yeah, imo it was also a bit more difficult then. But yeah as others said, the licensing was hard too
The service they provide (from a perspective external to obligatory capitalism) is less about making them, but providing a framework by which people engaged in artistic expression and development get paid and permitted to survive.
As the COVID-19 Lockdown furloughs demonstrated to us, art manifests so long as people are fed and need something to do. Healthy humans can’t couch-potato for two weeks without fidgeting and whittling wood into bears. And the great resignation that followed showed that enough people were able to make it lucrative (that is, work out marketing and fulfillment enough to make it profitable enough to quit their prior job) that it lowered worker supply that we were able to contest the shit treatment, low pay and toxic work environments that were normal before the epidemic.
It gets worse in other industries like big pharma in which the state provides vast grants for R&D of drugs and treatments, but the company keeps all the proceeds. Contrast the space program, which is why memory foam (the material) is in the public domain, as is a fuckton of electronics and computer technologies.
The service they provide (from a perspective external to obligatory capitalism) is less about making them, but providing a framework by which people engaged in artistic expression and development get paid and permitted to survive.
If it is art that other people value then that framework already existed(and there are many others who created similar tools for it) so I don’t see it as particularly valuable.
Contrast the space program, which is why memory foam (the material) is in the public domain, as is a fuckton of electronics and computer technologies.
There is a compelling argument that tens of billions of dollars being used productively to research anything would have at least some useful results. Memory foam, cordless drills, etc could have been developed much more cheaply than the Apollo program, GPS is extremely valuable, but Apollo wasn’t a necessary precursor to geostationary orbit.
If it is art that other people value then that framework already existed
From Wikipedia on Vincent Van Gogh: Van Gogh’s work began to attract critical artistic attention in the last year of his life. After his death, Van Gogh’s art and life story captured public imagination as an emblem of misunderstood genius
The art we get from pre-made frameworks emerged because people figured out they like art, and then someone capitalized on that. Or in cases of monarchs and governments, they created a fund to allow artists to do their thing instead of waiting tables.
There is a compelling argument that tens of billions of dollars being used productively to research anything would have at least some useful results.
For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14. Feel free to look for other investments, but big science really has proven itself.
From Wikipedia on Vincent Van Gogh: Van Gogh’s work began to attract critical artistic attention in the last year of his life. After his death, Van Gogh’s art and life story captured public imagination as an emblem of misunderstood genius
I don’t really understand how this follows from what I said.
For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14. Feel free to look for other investments, but big science really has proven itself.
Do you have a source for that? (And what that claim actually means), afterall, plenty of “essential” inventions in the modern day(including the base of modern rocketry) came from weapons development- does that make war a good investment? (Of course its not 1-to-1 because war is destructive, but my point is putting a lot of effort and smart people into almost anything will lead to a lot of innovation)
I don’t really understand how [The bit on Van Gogh – that he was only posthumously appreciated in the art sector] follows from what I said.
My following paragraph is about that. Art often happens before the framework made to create it. In fact, when we have set up studio, they’re already doing knock-offs, trying to repeat prior successes.
For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14
Do you have a source for that?
This came up during a TED talk on the benefits of investing in big science. On an unrelated research effort, I found the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 which Eisenhower signed during his freak out over Sputnik, and the big grant to Fairchild Superconductor which kicked off the electronics boom in Silicon Valley (~San Jose, California), so the $14 value is certainly plausible.
To be fair, the service they provide isn’t hosting the videos, it’s making them, which I assume costs a bit more
As per Das Kapital our industrialists always move to capture regulation and seek to eliminate competition, which are the two aspects that can make capitalism work for the public. Then you have what we have today, late stage capitalism which is about tiers of rent, so everything is both shoddy and expensive.
That’s how Disney and Warner Brothers (Warner Sister too!) end up owning all the franchises. It’s how Sony owns all the music and sues to take down dancing baby videos.
The EU and California have both made in-roads to slowing down the steady takeover of regulatory bodies and the mulching and mass merging of megacorps into monolithic monopolies, but they can’t stop it, and both are seeing the bend into precarity that is symptomatic of late stage capitalism.
That said, true post scarcity communism is realistically a pipe dream well beyond a few great filters we’ve yet to navigate, but we will see small victories, of which piracy – what is essentially crime against ill-gotten gains – offers more than a few.
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caused “substantial harm to television program copyright owners,_
Maybe? People willing to copy and distribute this content will always be around and you will never catch them all. People willing to pay a discount or seek not and find said content will always be around. And there will be those who will watch a show or a movie because it is freely available, who would never pay a dime for it.
They will never end piracy and I’d argue it might actually be bad for business if they did.
Get your communism here! Only $9.99 a month, or just $99.99 for a year!
If they had more content on offer than the big legal streaming services combined, should that not tell us something about the quality of legal offers?
What’s there to learn that isn’t already widely known? Existing (copyright) laws are asinine and all corporations eventually become consumed by greed. That’s America in a nutshell.
It’s not even copyright laws, it’s everyone insisting on exclusive contracts. There’s no reason a piece of content couldn’t be on Netflix and Disney+ at the same time. It would be a lot better for consumers if streamers could compete on price and service instead of which content they managed to create/licence.
Music streaming has proven this for years now, all the major brands have massive collections that make its super easy to pay and listen to just about anything.
Early Netflix proved this when everything was readily available for an affordable pricre.
Me in the 90s and 00s: yarrrr!
Me in the 10s: it feels good to be legit
Me in the 20s: YARRRRRRRRR!
It felt good to live in a world where being legit was reasonable.
Yep, you choose between Spotify, Tidal, etc based on price and how well the app works, not because one service has the band you like while the other one doesn’t (not that music streaming isn’t its own shitshow for other reasons, of course).
The situation is a lot better with music, but it’s not perfect. There’s still issues with region locking content, and content only existing on one service and not another.
There are also issues paying creators instead of rights holders
Exactly. I like Netflix’s service, but Disney’s content. Why can’t I just pay for a Disney bundle on Netflix? Likewise with Max, Peacock, etc.
Lawyers are why we can’t have nice things.
Capitalism wherever it is found. Not just the USA.
It harmed no one and nothing.
TV and Film are just angry that competition did it for a reasonable price and provided a superior service for it.
I have 0 sympathy for the studios/distributors but they also did not pay the licensing fees.
then i guess the studios should stop enshitifying streaming and make a service thats affordable and worth using, huh?
This is despicable. What specific service was this? So I know how to avoid it if it should resurface.
Not only does it say that in the first paragraph, it says it here
Five men were convicted for their part in operating Jetflicks, one of the largest illegal streaming services in the U.S., officials said.
Why in the world would you do this in the US?
I mean we’re dumb kids until they raid us.
There are resellers in the US who will set you up with the infrastructure to do it yourself. You don’t need much and it’s less expensive than you’d think, almost turnkey.
Demand is more than high enough in poor areas too, they probably made a really good return before it shut down.
they probably made a really good return before it shut down.
Part of the sentence was to forfeit $1million in profits, I’d say they did pretty well for themselves.
I’m pretty sure the similar exists in other places too. You could host it in AWS in China or Bahrain and save yourself a bunch of risk.
My use of the word despicable instead of disgusting probably threw you off
I just didn’t think the meme fit when it already said where
I see. Sorry for the offence.
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Yeah. I bet he wasn’t looking for a Boeing maintenance video.
