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by freeflight 2469 days ago
> I really don’t understand how piracy is the default answer to convenience with people claiming they have the willingness to pay.

Subscription services fees can quickly add if not managed properly, so the convenience they offer completely evaporates if you force customers to juggle their subscriptions between different services to cover all their needs.

To customers that "services juggling" is pretty much the exact opposite of "convenience", but signing up for everything, all the time, is not an option for many as that would cost some serious money.

So what will most likely end up happening is that people stick to one, maybe two, services covering most of their needs, and just get whatever else they want trough means that don't require them to manage a subscription, like piracy.

It should also be mentioned that even piracy does offer paid subscriptions, where users pay money to get more convenient and reliable access to content, that's pretty much what Usenet and all debrid are.

But unlike legal streaming services, their libraries are not compartmentalized and limited by publishing rights.

1 comments

Your comment doesn't address the parent's question.

Forget about streaming services, you can rent nearly every big screen movie ever from iTunes, Google Play, or Amazon, instantly for $3-6 dollars. Adjusting for inflation, these prices are very much comparable with what video rental stores used to offer. iTunes alone has more than 100k movies (for perspective Netflix doesn't even have 10k).

Many in this thread (and to a lesser extent the article) are acting like movie watchers want to pay money, but it's just too complicated to do so. Renting a movie on iTunes/Play/Amazon is at least as easy as torrenting something, and the selection is massive.

"If I can watch any movie ever for $10/month, I'll do it, but otherwise I'll just pirate them" is a very strange viewpoint IMHO. I would like unlimited groceries for $10/month, but I'm not going to just to stealing them because that's not an option.

Renting is an even worse exercise than subscribing to a streaming service.

For heavy consumers, the renting fees will add up quickly and the selection on those stores is not as flawless as you make it out to be.

To this day Amazon still demands more money for anything better than SD quality, information about supplied subs/dubs is spotty at best, if they are even supplied at all. Bonus content? Completely missing.

Why deal with that when for nearly the same amount of money you can often order a complete Bluray and own the movie in a physical format? Not just a "temporary license to stream"?

> "If I can watch any movie ever for $10/month, I'll do it, but otherwise I'll just pirate them" is a very strange viewpoint IMHO.

Then it's good nobody here claimed anything like that. But you are still stuck in this "all pirates are cheap freeloaders" mode, when in reality piracy usually happens in addition to the user already being a heavily paying fan of the medium [0]. Piracy supplements that when it's more convenient/not legally available/past the monthly budget.

[0] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evkmz7/study-again-shows-...

But you can download the movie for free, watch it as many times as you want and spend that money on other stuff...