People are paying to use Netflix. It’s easy and simple. Nobody is going to want to track down one of the myriad ways to legitimately rent a movie on an a la carte basis (especially if the first step involves finding out which movie studio owns the movie so you can rent it directly from them). People will turn to piracy instead, and then we’re back to square one.
But I’m curious, given the wide availability of instant, illicit streaming of almost every TV show and movie ever created, how many of you have already turned to piracy for at least some of your video needs?
Personally?
Never.
But I know oh so many many people who do.
Even though I know the likelihood of being caught and/or prosecuted is slim, I still don’t do it.
I know a boatload of people who do, though.
if it’s not on netflix, it’s considered…
I actually pirate pretty regularly. But the video I pirate is almost all stuff I either can’t get in a timely fashion in the US, or isn’t available in HD here. Almost all of it is British Television.
@4,
Hmm. That raises a question. Does using FoxyProxy to let me watch the BBC iPlayer count?
I haven’t had commercial cable in 6 years. For a while I had completely ceased piracy due to the easy, awesome availability of content on Hulu and Netflix. But since the content providers have started dicking around with their policies (Really, Hulu? I can pay you $8/mo., but I still get commercials AND I can’t watch Community on my TV or the earlier seasons of many shows at all?), I’ve gone back to piracy for a few shows.
@Goldy
Yes it counts. BBC iPlayer is going to be available for a price here soon. But I refuse to watch Top Gear and Doctor Who late and in SD. I also like a lot of other BBC shows that are never going to see the light of day here, or if they do are horribly edited.
I’m still in the mindset of having an ancient computer with a painfully slow Internet connection, so, despite now having a fast computer and a manageably slow Internet connection, it doesn’t really occur to me to pirate anything. Besides, I can get whatever I want for free from the library, albeit with a significant time delay.
@6,
I wouldn’t mind the commercials, but not allowing all shows to be watched on TV is some serious bullshit. So much for my paying for Hulu Plus.
This says it all:
http://i.imgur.com/GxzeV.jpg
PS – it’s actually worse than that chart says. The last movie I rented had FIVE unskippable previews.
@6, yes yes yes. When I get Hulu’s “you can watch more than 90 seconds of this stupid SNL clip if you pay us”, I turn right around and try YouTube.
Of course. Information yearns to be free, especially when it has been cut up into millions of zeroes and ones.
@Fnarf,
Unskippable previews are never actually unskippable. Google the movie name, and you can usually find the answer as to how to skip them.
@8 Hulu content providers can actually individually select if you can watch their shows on your computer, TV, or phone. Community is notably web-only.
I am a technology professional; I am entirely capable of seeking out and using pirated content. But I don’t.
I’m not willing to register with dodgy pirate search sites, participate in dodgy P2P networks, visit dodgy fileshares, and download dodgy files with uncertain content. All to avoid shelling out less money than I spent on lunch that day.
I do occasionally browse from overseas machines to defeat geo-location restrictions.
Hell, I never even get around to watching the one movie a month I legitimately rent from Netflix.
It’s a flowchart:
Is the movie/show available on netflix?
YES: watch it on netflix
NO: do I care enough about this thing to own a permanent copy on DVD or blu-ray?
YES: amazon one-click
NO: torrent the fuck out of that thing.
Would I pay double, even triple netflix’s (ridiculously cheap) digital-only subscription rate in order to have access to a larger library of titles? Yes, happily. Would I pay an extra premium on top of that for access to special features (commentary tracks, making-of docs, etc)? Again, happily. Will I, however, willingly deal with juggling subscriptions to multiple sites with semi-overlapping libraries, or suffer through unskippable commercials? Fuck. No. Piracy: The Better Choice™
If it was on TV at some point, I’ll check Netflix first, but I won’t feel any guilt whatsoever. Same for anime that is not available in the US, or when the US version has crappy dubs and no subtitled option. I don’t watch much, so this is pretty rare.
I do use AnyDVD HD to unfuck Netflix discs, though — @9 is definitely illustrative. Unskippable previews and bullshit warnings are all the license I need to commit DMCA violations.
When I look at the money saved by pirating videos compared to the time it takes to do so, I’m making less than minimum wage.
@5 yes.
Especially since you’re supposed to pay a license fee for the Beeb.
But, medeii for the Freedom Means Being Free win.
I also love Scarecrow, so I will always go there anyway when I want media.
I’ve sampled the on demand services for multiple providers and they are all limited (e.g. I can watch Mean Girls 2, but others…well), the content is not always ideal (e.g. Oldboy dubbed in English with no options for subtitles on Netflix) and the prices still seem outlandish for TV show rentals.
I bought an AppleTV for Netflix, but I wanted the on demand services that iTunes offers. It turns out that the iTunes content you get with AppleTV sucks. I am taking it back. Similar problems with Amazon, Hulu+–no unified content through one platform (i.e. on demand cable/satellite replacement). I blame this on the industry, of course.
So, I’m bending over backwards to watch shows legitimately. Other people are not going to try as hard.
Scarecrow rocks.
Given the $10 a monthly cost of a Netflix subscription ( unlimited streaming + 1 dvd) and free Hulu access to the best shows like Community and Jesse Ventura’s Conspiracy Theory, at some point only the most arithmetically challenged would continue downloading illegally where you can subject to hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.
@13, you do realize you are adding steps to the process, not taking them away?
@15, much of the content I want to watch isn’t available on any kind of US media at all, no matter how much you want to pay (well, maybe I could rent the 35mm film reels from a distributor or something, but really now). It’s not a matter of cost; I’m happy to pay a fair price. I love Scarecrow.
This is true of music as well — a good half of our 5,000-odd records is not for sale anywhere in the Seattle area; a fair portion of it never has been. And probably 7/8ths of the music I “pirate” I’ve already paid for at least once, possibly three or four times already.
@23: arithmetically challenged?
To date, there have been a few tens of thousands of people that received a settlement letter or a notice of litigation. Very few of that number actually made it to the courtroom, and the majority were dismissed. Of those that made it to a complete trial, not one of the “hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines” verdicts have ever been collected on … if they even managed to survive appeal, which most have not.
Even by conservative estimates, tens of millions of people commit copyright infringement in a given year.
Do your own math. It’s hard to even call those odds a calculated risk, AND you get a superior product.
Killed my cable 3 years ago, & I’ll never go back. No way am I paying for cable and internet, that’s double payment in my book. The one thing contains the other thing and the studios should wake up and realize it. I check Netflix, then Hulu, and if it’s not there I go off the reservation.
I enjoy too many British shows that will never air on this side of the Atlantic, mostly panel games, that I feel no guilt snagging them online. And the shows that do come out, I’ll happily buy on DVD.
This is going to make me sound like a weirdo combination of old, anal, and law-breaking, but I regularly download SNL from torrents because I hate how some skits don’t make it to Hulu. I use a registration torrent site and I’ve never had a problem with dodgyness, though I suppose the registration aspect does make it easier to track me down? Seems like TV is a bit safer than movies, anyway. There are some movies I’d really like to torrent, but I’m a little scared.
Netflix is one of the rare companies that I love. Cheap and good service. If a movie I want to watch isnt on there then I’ll snag it online. Never setting foot in a blockbuster again.
Maybe I’m old and resistant to some technologies. I’ve never streamed/downloaded a pirated movie/TV show. I don’t actually know how to do it.
*sigh* I have become my grandparents.
@15, shenanigans.
No Hulu or Netflicks in Australia.
Cable is expensive and sucks (Ads as well? Really?).
FTA TV is a joke. Sometimes they interupt the ads to show a small part of the butcher edited movie or whatever.
DVDs, as Fnarf points out, with all the measures to punish legitimate users (not no mention most computer games here).
I give up. Hollywood and the music biz have really screwed the pooch over this.
Q! I! Q! I!
As QI is my favorite TV show (I’m rewatching A series right now), I pirate on a regular basis. I’ve downloaded a boatload of stuff and I’ve never gotten any kind of bad file.
Since there are so many British TV fans out there, any other panel shows I should be checking out?
I don’t have cable or a television, but I have a 24″ widescreen monitor. Everything I watch is either downloaded or streamed – legally or illegally, whatever works… except for the things I get on Netflix.
@17 has it right.
I’ll happily watch media on my pay subscription-channel of choice (netflix), but if it’s not there I have a dilemma. Do I care enough to own it or not? If I care, I’ll buy it on amazon and have it delivered via tote in a day or two. If I don’t care, or if it’s not available on amazon, I’ll pirate the Blu Ray version in a heartbeat and not feel guilty in the slightest. The way I see it, the distributors are not meeting my needs as a customer and it’s their fault they didn’t get my money.
One word: usenet. Faster and harder to track than bittorrent.
iTunes made it considerably easier to buy music than to pirate it, grocery stores make it considerably easier to buy eggs in a carton than to secret them about my person, and by god when the various barriers to buying movies online and keeping them have been lifted, I will buy the hell out of a lot of movies.
I’m never paying $25 for a goddamn eight-page peer-reviewed article, though.
@37 The first rule of usenet is you don’t talk about usenet. So don’t talk about usenet, dammit.
Given the recent number of court cases where sites have been forced to turn over information on “anonymous” posters or subpoenas have been issued for people simply visiting a site (Sony v. geohot, for example), admitting to piracy here would be foolish at best.
So no, I don’t pirate anything. But if I were, p2p/torrenting would be the last place I’d go. Too many spies on the trackers, harvesting IP addresses in order to send nasty letters and lawsuits.
I saw a list of how much money from your cable bill goes to what company. When I saw that the few channels I watched got less than 50 cents, while channels like ESPN and FOX got well over half of the bill, I stopped feeling any guilt for the piracy I commit. My roommates have netflix, and I can tell you with complete confidence that if you take away Netflix and any service like them, they will all become pirates just like me, or just not watch anything.
Hollywood is stuck in a 1980’s mindset, one license equals one user. The only way to increase their bottom line is to sell heavily “protected” media that ONE SINGLE PERSON HAS ACCESS TO (their biggest accomplishment was the self-destructing DVD that never caught on, SHOCKER). This idea that you can get with a group of your friends and watch the movie you just paid $20 for, doesn’t fly with them one bit, THAT’S THEFT. You’re stealing all those customers from them, who they expect should each pay $20 for that movie. If the movie industry could attach some kind of blinders to your eyes such that only you can view the movie you paid for to watch in the privacy of your own home they would have tried it by now. These assholes are crazy and only care about increasing their bottom line. Nevermind the artists who claim rightfully that there is no such thing as piracy, only such thing as a LOST customer. Whatever you were selling wasn’t what the customer wanted, so they went elsewhere. They don’t see it that way, they see themselves as the only one licensed sell this product, and they’ll sell it any damn way they please, and we have to take it because they hold a monopoly on that product. It’s why the studios go all star struck and make shitty movies, they actually think if they’re the only studio making a movie with CAPTAIN X, that we’re forced into buying it regardless. It’s clearly our fault if they didn’t make enough money.
I found a great graphic I put in a paper showing the unskippable previews and advertisements for cola products and bulky menus that take ages to load on the DVD’s you just paid money for at the store. Yet a pirate, who has in essence stolen this material they aren’t licensed to view, gets none of that. They play the movie, and they’re done. We know it can be done, and until it is done, piracy will be the norm.
Disney, at least used to with their special rental version, would take off the closed captioning. So, fuck you deaf people? Seems like a great business model.
i make my own movies with shadow puppets =D
Unlicensed free distribution (“piracy”) is free advertising, and fuels far more sales of licensed products than it loses. I’ve discovered and subsequently purchased a lot of video and music I wouldn’t have known of otherwise. Entertainment companies are just cutting off their noses to spite their faces with the big piracy crusade.
Fnarf’s link (#9) and watchout5 (#40) are also part of the story. Paying, legal customers usually get the worst entertainment experience with the most hassle and are treated like criminals. Plus, most of your money is probably going to Murdoch and the MPAA douchebags instead of the creators. I do use Netflix if a title is available there, and I will buy dvds/blu-rays to get a film in higher quality, if it is hard to find, or if I plan to watch it more than once. New releases are generally overpriced, so I wait for sales. I only visit the theater once or twice a year because of the ridiculous amount of ads and price. You also can’t pause and get up or add your own commentary, and the volume has gone up so much that I have to wear concert earplugs in most theaters.
Most of the things I want to watch are foreign or out-of-print, thus unavailable by any legal means. If something I care about gets a decent release in the US, I’ll buy it to support it. There’s also a significant delay between the original release date and a US licensed version, and it might be SD only, censored, poorly translated, or dubbed.
I download TV shows, but I rationalize it by considering the fact that I don’t own a DVR and I don’t really want to be assaulted by overly loud commercials. Sure the networks aren’t “earning” ad revenue from me, but if I like the show enough (and I usually do in order for me to bother with downloading it) then I’m probably going to buy it on DVD/Blu when it comes out. It evens out.
I don’t download movies though. I’m fine with sticking to Netflix for that, and there are thousands upon thousands of movies I’ve never seen, so waiting to see the newest summer blockbuster isn’t an issue for me. I saw four movies in theaters in 2010 and only 2 in 2009. It’s a far cry from the 40-50 movies I used to see each year in the late-90s/early-00s.
Sometimes, never for movies but for TV I will. I do try Hulu first (well, my cable on demand first, Hulu second) so they still have the option of showing me commercials but sometimes, for reasons I don’t understand they choose to pass up that option and take the “make no money” route instead of the “make a little money” route.
When Hollywood would like to stop acting like their shit doesn’t stink, I’ll be happy to start paying for movies again.
I would rent it if I could, but there are some movies or shows that have been forgotten by everyone but YouTube. I could search for days, buy the VHS for twenty dollars, and wait two weeks for it to show up (as I did for a much-beloved childhood favorite, The Halloween Tree), only to discover that the VHS won’t play. Or I could turn to YouTube.
If they make it easier to get the shows and movies that I want, I’ll buy them. Nothing beats a physical, legit copy of something like that. But why don’t they release so many of my favorites? It’s frustrating…
Oh, and all of this was said much better by @42.