[jchw]

At risk of sounding optimistic, I think EME has really bolstered adoption of the open and DRM-free BitTorrent protocol for media streaming. I didn't do any actual head-to-head comparisons, but movies that come out on services like Paramount+ also tend to get a simultaneous release on BitTorrent trackers, albeit for some reason it usually isn't mentioned in the trailer. Despite the lack of advertising, though, it really seems to work: on some recent movies, stats I've seen on trackers show very impressive results for the BitTorrent box office. One movie I looked at had been seeded possibly millions of times in just a few days.

So I am really thankful for EME for helping to support open standards in that regard.

[zinekeller]

Nope, I don't think EME is the reason piracy has another boom. Looking at music stats, while there is still a thriving piracy community most people now gave up and pay for music streaming services, and it's easy to see why. Most record companies and artists (reluctantly) accept that it'll be better if there's something rather than nothing and you could access the same catalogues from one app to the next (there are obscure asterisks but for 80-90% of people it's not a bother). On the other hand, studios are still deep in denial about that simple fact and have tried to slice-and-dice access to movies, which as you might have seen led to the revival of movie piracy.

To simplify, for music you just choose if you want the additional services offered by Spotify or Apple and not focusing on what catalogue it has (barring some obscure asterisks), while this is the polar opposite has happened on music industry and now you are either actively researching where goes what or just gave up and pirate. As Gabe Newell has said, give the consumers a better service and they'll use it. Record companies succumbed and quietly accept this, studios don't (and I'll wager that they will eventually accept to have a single service).

[CharlesW]

> I didn't do any actual head-to-head comparisons, but movies that come out on services like Paramount+ also tend to get a simultaneous release on BitTorrent trackers…

When you say "released", do you mean they're pirated almost immediately? Or is there now a legit way to get non-pirated content that I'm not aware of?

[DasDing]

Yes, it's satire.