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by toomuchtodo 4444 days ago
> $8 a month is very, very cheap for legal streaming video.

Media pricing is subjective. Yes, its cheaper than buying outright on iTunes; but its still more expensive that pirating it. It'll make a great pricing experiment.

Everyone values content differently.

EDIT: Easy on the downvotes y'all. I don't pirate my content, I'm saying people will.
1 comments
chc 4444 days ago
Any price is more expensive than pirating it. Nobody is going to compete with piracy on price.
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arbitrage 4444 days ago
Personally, I find the most interesting thing is that the quality of pirated content is often superior to that aquired by legal means.

If the legal distributors can't compete on price, and refuse to compete with quality or convenience, what else have they got?

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jpollock 4443 days ago
Actually, there are substantial secondary benefits to going legal. Giving back to the creator, guaranteed quality, avoiding legal entanglements, cheaper traffic, higher speeds, etc. All things that aren't typically offered by pirated content providers.

The problem is that legal sources have issues around trying to controlling when/where/how the content is viewed, which might be the majority of the value in the media (over and above the content itself).

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toomuchtodo 4443 days ago
> Giving back to the creator

Does the creator truly win out when the content is paid for? I'm using music as an example; not sure how its panning out on the Netflix/video side.

> guaranteed quality

Can you always reliably get 1080p from Netflix? Because you can from TPB.

> avoiding legal entanglements

Which is now a moot point considering the number of judges who have indicated that an IP address in a log can't be tied to a specific end user.

> cheaper traffic, higher speeds

Again, as with quality, I think this depends on your ISP. You'll only get frustrated so many times with Netflix rendition switching or buffering before you'll fire up your bittorrent client, let it suck down 10-20 episodes, and watch at your leisure.

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toomuchtodo 4444 days ago
Arguably, you can compete on price (Hulu).

The ads model works as long as its not too painful. 2-3 ads/show? Reasonable. 12+ ads per show (because you're addicted to ad pricing on broadcast, and for the love of god please can't we get that on the web)? Pirate Bay.

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