[marcus_holmes]

Spotify killed music sharing, not the RIAA.

There's still plenty of video and book pirating happening. Until the streaming industry gets its shit together and coalesces into a single provider, or allows peering, then that's going to continue.

The legal and privacy risks of P2P are both mitigated very simply with a VPN.

[mjevans]

They also need to just sell a 'license for a "personal private viewing copy"' of a work and provide non-DRM files that users can self archive and maintain.

No, DRM is not necessary, it's already proven that someone, among the 8 billion monkeys (with some really smart ones) hammering away _will_ figure out a way of liberating the data from the shackles. The whole premise is fundamentally broken in that the viewers are distrusted from seeing the data in the clear. It just adds cost, friction, and failure points.

Convenience (EASE OF USE!!!), a fair price, and content that doesn't go away are how alternative distribution methods die. Just low how bootleg booze largely doesn't exist outside of prohibition since the market functions.

[zer00eyz]

>> Just low[sic] how bootleg booze largely doesn't exist outside of prohibition since the market functions.

Tell me that you hang out with law abiding citizens without telling me...

Moonshine, home brew... people are out there sticking it too the man as much as they can.

If you have made home made cider, or beer, or yogurt, pickles, canned anything you know that its a labor but the product is better and far cheaper than what you can buy.

Convenience, quality, ease of use... People will pay a massive premium for these things. This (to this dismay of HN) is the Apple model. You can bleed the customer if they love you, if you have a good product.

This was a problem in early film, and the paramount decree was a thing: https://www.promarket.org/2022/12/12/the-paramount-decrees-a...

One would think that this should apply to streaming services, but sadly no, they get treated like network television did (does).

And I know that one of you will glom on to the paramount decree as an argument for the iPhone App Store shenanigans of late. Sadly they aren't remotely close to each other Apple isnt restricting your timing, or telling you what your price should be.

[apitman]

They had a single provider. They purposefully moved away from that model to make more money, and it's working.

[marcus_holmes]

Maybe, but it's also encouraging people to move back to pirating.

And as I understood it, the streaming wars are more about not wanting one service to dominate the whole industry (or if there is, it's my streaming service) rather than a co-ordinate plan to extract more money from subscribers.

[crtasm]

If everyone's on VPNs, nobody can connect to each other. I'm only aware of a couple of VPN services that offer port forwarding.

[marcus_holmes]

If enough people need port forwarding, VPNs will support port forwarding