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by 65934 3064 days ago
I don't think these services will affect Torrents in a significant way. I know people who have Amazon prime,yet torrent some shows because they are censored heavily in my country.

Also, nflx doesn't offer some movies I want In my country, so I use torrents and haven't had any noticeable problem regarding seeds.

2 comments

It is very hard to gather statistics on this, but my intuition (casual observance) is that torrent seeding has been declining for the last 10 years, and I suspect streaming services play a non-trival role in the decline.
Anecdotally, it's illegal free streaming services that I see people using as much as legitimate ones like netflix.
I agree. Kodi boxes and transient streaming sites seem to be the way most people pirate now. It makes sense that people pirate in ways that match global trends. When BitTorrent started piracy and legal consumption both meant actually downloading files, possibly over days. Now people are used to it all just being there, right when they want it.

Plus most popular games are multiplayer, so piracy is unlikely or niche. A lot of software is on mobile devices, or licensed as a SaaS. A lot of the underlying machinery of media distribution has changed, and so has piracy.

In France Netflix acts as a limited 1-season preview to tease me into torrenting the full series. House of Cards only had season 1 when the 4th was out in the USA.
Could it be that it's because Netflix arrived late in France and by that time it had already sold the rights to broadcast House of Cards in France to some pay TV network? In Australia we had similar issues. If that's the case, the situation should "normalise" in a couple of years, since the rights are usually time-constrained.
That’s when Netflix was starting out, no? Do you get both seasons of Stranger Things for example? Initially they selling rights to shows much more than I think they do now.