Journal publication referenced in video:
Sarah J. Frick, Deborah Fletcher, Austin C. Smith, Pirate and chill: The effect of netflix on illegal streaming, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Volume 209, 2023, Pages 334-347, ISSN 0167-2681, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2023.03.013. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268123000793) Abstract: Over 188 million people in the United States use a subscription video streaming service, yet digital piracy remains prevalent and costs the U.S. economy an estimated $29.2 billion annually. This paper investigates the relationship between a movie’s availability on Netflix, the largest video subscription service, and intent to illegally stream the movie. We leverage a contract dispute that caused Epix (a cable network company) to move all its movies from Netflix to Hulu, representing a substantial decrease in the legal streaming availability of these movies. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that reducing legal streaming access via the removal of Epix movies from Netflix results in a 20% increase in piracy intent relative to movies that remained on Netflix, as measured by Google search volume. This study contributes to the understanding of the substitution between legal streaming services and movie piracy and has implications for content owners deciding what platform to offer their movie on. Keywords: Piracy; Online streaming; Digital goods; Netflix; Google searches
I’ve always hated that quote.
Piracy has never been stealing, it’s copyright infringement.
How so?
As I understand, stealing implies denying someone use to their property, whereas piracy is a copy and is copyright infringement.
digital piracy remains prevalent and costs the U.S. economy an estimated $29.2 billion annually
That’s based on the false assumption that if pirated materials weren’t available, people would then be forced to buy them. That’s not true, they just don’t buy them. If someone has no intention to spend money your content, you aren’t losing anything when they find it for free.
Their number also makes no sense if you look at the previous figure “Over 188 million people in the United States use a subscription video streaming service”. Average of 10 bucks a month makes 1.8 billion revenue per month, which means the bring in roughly 21.6 billion per year in revenue… Are they suggesting that MORE people choose piracy over streaming services? That feels like a ludicrous claim. More likely they are estimating the number of “illegal downloads” and assigning the price to buy a digital copy instead… Like if piracy was impossible the people that do it would be buying digital copies instead of signing up for streaming services.
And that is all before you look at your point, that a vast majority of the “illegal downloads” they are likely claiming would have never been sales, they would have just been people that never consumed their media.
im not pirating im testing the durability of bits and bytes
Don’t call it a comeback
I been here for yearsBut it’s not all about you and your experience 😅
“You would think piracy is coming back because the streaming experience is shit, but that’s not it”
Proceeds to spend 14 minutes telling us how it’s ultimately because the streaming experience is shit
What’s hilarious is Netflix first ended my piracy practices. It was so cheap and easy, and it was a little more technical back then to pirate safely (at least it felt that way).
But a few years ago I got sick of the dance, back on the high seas 🤷♂️
Same story here. Between Netflix and Hulu everything I wanted to watch was available for like $25 a month. Then all the other streaming services started coming out, less and less of what I wanted was available. 40TBs later I’m not subscribed to a single service and everything I want is back in one place. The arr stack made everything so easy. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, well, can’t get fooled again
If these services want to act like an al a carte service, then their pricing needs to reflect that. If they had a plan that allowed someone to subscribe to 2-3 shows for $5 a month (but only those shows could be accessed), people would flood their platforms. The problem is the service’s greed would take hold and they’d try to find a way to ruin the experience to push people to the higher price plans. They don’t get that people don’t want 100s of janky shows to watch, they literally are only there for maybe 1 to 2 shows and that’s it.
Same. I’ve never been much of a tv/movie person in general, but netflix in its prime was fantastic. But nowadays there are like 30 different streaming services, every single one is egregiously priced, and everything has their own exclusive libraries. Hell I’m surprised they’re not streaming genAI slop “movies” yet at the rate they’re all going (or maybe they already are, who knows). Fuck all of that noise.
Spotify did the same thing for me years ago. Went from a hand-maintained local library to Spotify, held on to that for like 10 years, ditched them at the start of this year when they were overwhelmingly supporting fascists with political donations. Switched to Tidal for a bit since it has higher quality and better artist payouts, but today I’m right back to hosting a local library (which is better than ever these days), buying what I can directly from artists to support them rather than subscription fees.
Ha almost mentioned Spotify as well. Currently trying to get off it but I share it with my wife so I need to really have an automated system going for her to deal with plex and Plexamp lol just been hard to find time with kids and all that. One day I’ll get Jellyfin outside our network too but frankly I just don’t have a lot of experience with opening and protecting ports and all of that nonsense, so I just haven’t been assed to do it.
Bandcamp solves all problems - you buy the CD as before, but digitally, including lossless FLAC, like 90% goes to the artist or their small label instead of Sony or Universal or Spotify, you can download the album or stream it with the app. It’s good enough for me that I only store the files for backup and use the app for listening to most of my recent music purchases.
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I have almost the same story but im afraid i will need to get you into a guillotine. This way, please…
Took me a second to catch that you were riffing on my username lol
and costs the U.S. economy an estimated $29.2 billion annually
does it though?
Can’t see how it can, it’s not like if that money isn’t spent on entertainment then it’s just lost, it’s just spent on other goods and services or put in savings that the banks loan out to other people to generate economic activity. Unless people are literally burning the money or exclusively spending it on foreign goods and services it’s not costing the economy per se.
That assumes that everyone who pirates would become subscribers if they weren’t pirating. In reality, many people still wouldn’t pay if they couldn’t pirate what they want. Others may sign up for a month, binge watch what they want, then cancel for the rest of the year.
Even if they would otherwise have subscribed, that money will be spent elsewhere in the economy, its potential revenue the streaming companies couldn’t secure, it’s not a loss to the economy unless it’s a foreign user.
Parasites got a wild imagination
He makes great videos BTW
