Very telling how the article ends with a snippet about how the previous season had record-breaking revenues and how La Liga is one of the most profitable sports competitions in the world. It is never enough.
Football leagues are in a bit of a weird position here where one league (English) being drastically stronger in pure monetary terms than the rest means the others can't really let up.
Similarly there's quite a lot of push from the most powerful teams in some of these leagues to break off and form a European Super League; with Spain's two biggest teams being the biggest backers of the project.
ETA: not agreeing with how aggressive they are exactly, but do think long term they're probably in a lot of trouble if/when money starts to properly force a European Super League into existence.
It's bad to steal things and we should try to prevent it.
(I'm generally pro-piracy and don't know the details here, but am also old enough for "the people like MONEY" to not be a particularly noteworthy quality. The things that jump out to me here are A) is Cloudflare's attempted implication that they just need a better injunction true? B) The sophomoric argument that "people will die due to this" is my "people like MONEY" smell)
I’m gonna argue that piracy is the only thing keeping platforms somewhat in check to not get completely enshittified.
I stopped pirating stuff when content platforms gave a compelling easy to use product, I’m back to pirating because it’s genuinely a better product compared to the endless hoops you have to jump through to use streaming services
The appeal of Peak Netflix was that it had everything in one place with reasonably working discovery mechanisms. You could pay $10 or so per month and be satisfied. The current streaming era is "if you want to see all your favourite shows, it will cost $60 per month and you'll have to bounce around among 12 apps to find what you want."
If we had a mandatory-licensing regime, I'd expect multiple choices would work great. Services couldn't survive on "Only we have The Office/Game of Thrones/Bluey" alone and would have to differentiate based on other factors like "best discovery tools" or "built to better suit your specific devices"
The comic depicts "Netflix" -> "Netflix Amazon Apple Disney+ Hulu YouTube", and you later implicitly say there are multiple choices, but, you don't think it works well. "If we had a mandatory-licensing regime, I'd expect multiple choices would work great."
> Services couldn't survive on "Only we have The Office/Game of Thrones/Bluey" alone and would have to differentiate based on other factors like "best discovery tools" or "built to better suit your specific devices"
I'm not sure how either of those are differentiators for people selling content, rather than people coding apps.
Let's avoid that simple argument.
Let us instead assume mandatory licensing exists, which I presume means that as soon as content is released, it is a right to be able to license it, i.e. pay the content creator to have it on your service.
I have a hard time understanding how that would lead to all content being on all services - surely, this adds up to some finite sum, but is that finite sum enough to mean its trivial to license everything, so there's no differentiator anymore?
And that's before we bring in that, presumably, we have some shared understanding that it's more expensive to license, say, Bluey Game of Thrones Edition, than, idk, hmmm...Karate Kid.
Let's set all those little things aside.
A screen is a piece of glass with pixels behind. A video takes up the pixels.
Is there room to "build to better suit your specific devices"?
Can we avoid an example that ends up creating exclusive content in the process?
Let's set that aside: what are discovery tools?
Are they differentiable? Or does it boil down to "a way of presenting N choices I might like"?
Yeah, split payments across multiple streaming services can get tedious. Though I agree with you for the most part, piracy comes with more hurdles even with a fancy automatic setup.
But really the most important benefit of piracy is the one you're already taking advantage of. The cost would be significantly higher if they had a true content monopoly, instead they have to price with the idea that should the cost be too high, the inconvenience of piracy becomes increasingly worthwhile.
Shitty non-platform-integrated UI 8: my particular bug bear. I want a native Apple TV app using native controls if I’m to pay money for a streaming service. That said, I just don’t bother watching if that isn’t available.
I have the subscriptions and it works for me. I do resent on principle needing so many different services, but once set up, I haven't hit a film that wasn't covered.
My subscriptions: Hulu (with a bunch of premium channels), Prime Video (with MGM, Acorn and BritBox), Netflix, Max, Peacock, Apple TV, Criterion Collection, Fubo, ESPN+
In the off chance something is not available on one of the above (again, really hasn't happened), it is usually on PPV via either Prime Video or Play for 4.99.
To the point of piracy -- I don't like the poor UX argument, personally. But, if you're struggling to make ends meet and the above subscriptions are just unaffordable (which they are for many), I'm not going to think any less of anyone for perusing some torrents. The world is hard and entertainment can really help people through the bullshit. The very last thing people need when struggling is to be deprived of their escape.
It's a little harder to justify not paying for any reason other than inability to pay.
My words and art are constantly being stolen and mined for AI.
People being stolen from most likely aren't going to advocate for the class stealing from them. Capitalism has one rule to wit: an in-group that is not bound but protected by the law and an out-group that is bound by but not protected by the law.
As a working class person if you 'pirate' materials you could be facing fines or even jail time.
If the capital owning class wants your IP, they'll just take it.
