| I do wish prices would come down, but even at equivalent pricing, I think it's a net win. I think a lot of people have forgotten how god awful cable was. * I can watch what I want whenever. No more sitting down because I have a half hour to kill and there's nothing better than Pet Police on. * No more screwing with DVR settings if you want to watch something while you're gone. * No more dealing with needing to watch things before they get purged from your DVR. * No more dealing with someone else in your house deleting your show off the DVR. * No more dealing with wanting to watch your show in the bedroom, but you recorded it on the DVR in the living room. * No more ads (largely). * If your wages are keeping up with inflation, static pricing is actually a decrease in cost over time. Cable was $100/month like a decade ago; $100 is less money today. Similar situation to video games. I would have to flip through a lot of apps before the apps were more annoying than trying to configure the DVR through a remote with no keyboard that only reads my keypresses a third of the time. Cable sucks. Streaming is better. I do think piracy is more convenient than streaming in the current layout, though. > No wonder piracy is in a resurgence. The media portrayal of this has been bad. That reporting is based on a report that showed Bittorrent is the #1 source of traffic in EMEA and APAC, and #2 in the Americas in 2018. The first problem is granularity. The US is only about a third the population of the Americas, and Sandvine never published more granular data that I can see (presumably they charge for that?). Any effect on the US is going to be muddled by effects in other countries. The second is that they're measuring it as a % of total internet traffic. That makes sense for the segment they seem to be in (advising ISPs and the like), but it's hard to translate that into the amount of stuff people are pirating. File sizes are variable; 4k content making it's way into pirating might have an effect. VPNs and seedboxes will also cause traffic to be misattributed. It's entirely possible that the amount of stuff people pirate in the US never changed, it just started to be tunneled to Europe when ISPs got stricter. Fourth, they're equating Bittorrent traffic and piracy. The common use of the Bittorrent client is undeniably piracy, but P2P apps have become more common (for video streaming and game update distribution for example) and I'm curious whether they actually differentiate between the two. Again, the target market for this report is interested in how to handle the traffic, not whether it's illegal. There would be no reason for the author of the report to bother with that. As an inverse of the above, it does not count piracy via sites like Mega, or watching/downloading movies on YouTube, etc. Lastly, the media reporting completely ignored that internet access is still spreading in developing nations. Due to the granularity, it's impossible to say if people in the US are pirating more, or if more people in South America have gotten internet access and are torrenting stuff. |