[eastbound]

Totally possible that watermark identifies cinemas and showtimes uniquely, and that pirates are due for a lifetime of prosecution. Or that studios will shut down some cinemas, until it stops.

For 15 years you let paid options progress. Then fewer people pirate, then you catch the rest. At the beginning you don’t see it putting its clamps; then suddenly you don’t find piracy anywhere.

[ajsnigrutin]

Yes, and those paid options were one subscription that had "everything". Then paid options broke up into 5 different subscriptions, some not allowing more than 2 devices, some having ads in paid plans, some not available in your country, some only having seasons 3 and 5 of the series, some having the series you wanted to watch but remove it half way through, some give you a "buy" button for the media, but then take the movies away after a few months, etc.

And people go back to piracy, because the user experience is better.

[Mindwipe]

> Yes, and those paid options were one subscription that had "everything".

It really didn't. It's incredible this collective delusion exists when it's not true.

[alabastervlog]

It was a lot closer when they still had a streaming + disk option, but even then, they were missing lots (and lots, and lots) of stuff. I think people don't realize how many tens of thousands (maybe into the hundreds, IDK, I wouldn't be surprised) of films there are, let alone how many hours of TV content.

This is like when people talk about how everything's on the Web, when it comes to books. 1) This is only even sort-of true if by "on the Web" you mean "piracy sites have an epub/pdf of it", and 2) even then, extremely not close to true, the time from "I'm going to deep-dive this topic" to "... and now I need to go to the library, and possibly a specific library, maybe on another continent" is often not long at all.

[baud147258]

> "I'm going to deep-dive this topic" to "... and now I need to go to the library, and possibly a specific library, maybe on another continent"

I remember an history professor saying that for a subject he was working on he had to borrow a book from the library of Congress (through the library of his university), where the only publicly available copy in the US was. Of course it was an academic book, so it's not exactly a common situation.

[kelnos]

> For 15 years you let paid options progress. [...] then suddenly you don’t find piracy anywhere.

And then they completely ruined it with fragmentation. When all I need to watch everything I wanted to watch was three subscriptions (Netflix, Hulu, and HBO), I was totally fine with the ~$40/mo and reasonably-ok-UX offered.

But now it's a mess. I need subscriptions to 7 or 8 different services (which now each cost twice what they used to for an ad-free experience), and the experience is crap. Netflix no longer plays on my Linux/Firefox setup (same thing happened with HBO years ago), and their anti-password-sharing mis-features constantly trigger for me even though I don't share my Netflix password. The Android apps for most of them are glitchy and buggy, and Chromecast has somehow gotten less reliable over time.

The irony is that usually I would say more competition is a good thing. I suppose if we had lots of streaming services, but studios were required to license all their content under RAND terms to anyone who asks, we'd have real competition, and streamers would compete on the quality of their platform, lack of ads, etc., and not just on what titles they were lucky enough to be able to license.

I do agree that pirating became less popular for a while, but that golden age is over. The piracy scene seems stronger than ever these days.

[Freak_NL]

> Netflix no longer plays on my Linux/Firefox setup […]

I know Netflix doesn't support anything beyond 720p or so on Linux, but that never bothered me. Otherwise it just works. Is your Firefox out of date?

> The piracy scene seems stronger than ever these days.

I hope so. A lot of damage was done. If it wasn't for archive.org a lot of older, regional stuff would not even be accessible. We need piracy if only for the collective digital archives.

I refuse to take out more than one subscription. We just hop services.