No - piracy, since it always carries at least some amount of difficulty and risk, is easy to compete against. And in fact, paid services, including Netflix, have proven that over and over. All it takes is to offer dependable convenience and quality and to treat customers well. People are always willing to pay a reasonable price for that.

The problem is that piracy becomes difficult to compete against when, as Netflix is currently doing, you shift from a business model of providing good service under fair terms for a reasonable price to a business model of providing crappy service under onerous terms for too much money, because the greedy, selfish, short-sighted sacks of shit at the top want to make even more obscene amounts of money. That's the point at which piracy gains enough of an advantage to outweigh its difficulties and risks.

And when that's the case, it's pretty obvious what the real problem is.

[–] variants@possumpat.io 48 points 9 months ago

The trick is to make as much money as possible then jump ship to a newer competing company that has the ability to grow more before you leech it to death again

[–] xpinchx@lemmy.world 21 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Fr stop producing c-tier content for millions of dollars and just pay for better content and/or make it cheaper. I don't need 14 generic action movies starring Ryan Reynolds and dozens of forgettable shows.

[–] Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world 21 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Also, don't greenlight 100 shows if you only plan on giving 5 of them a second season, and you base that decision entirely on algorithms instead of genuine human feedback.
And please, for the love of god, let me look at a movie for longer than 1 second before you start automatically playing it because your almighty algorithm determined that it would force users to pick a movie faster. It's the most annoying "feature" that makes me inclined to avoid Netflix as much as possible.

[–] Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 6 points 9 months ago

And please, for the love of god, let me look at a movie for longer than 1 second before you start automatically playing it

This is a setting that's on be default and buried in the user settings. It might also only be available to change on desktop (but will then set per profile for all devices), but this setting does exist and it's so much better once you toggle it

[–] jjlinux@lemmy.ml 2 points 9 months ago

What Jupiter Ascending are you talking about here?

[–] doctorcrimson@lemmy.today 12 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

It also doesn't help that the studios all band together under banners that each launch their own streaming services and withhold all of their titles from the others. Maybe Netflix should spend less time fighting consumers and more time fighting the other cutthroat corporations who effectively make it impossible for their artists to choose their own distribution networks.

[–] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 9 months ago

I'm back on the seas. Once I couldn't leave my Netflix account set at my work site and my house, then they upped the price and added ads, it's just easier to pirate anything I'd like to binge. My phone has like 640 GB of space. I can carry my own Netflix, with beer and hookers.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago

There was a decent 5 year span in my life where the only time I ever pirated was to see British TV shows I wouldn't be able to watch in the U.S. And if I could have paid the British TV license fee to see those, I would have paid it too. Because that would have been a total of two streaming services.

Even now that we're down to one income we can afford two streaming services- one for video and one for music. But we sure as fuck can't afford the dozen streaming services you need to have if you expect to watch all the programming people rave about as amazing.

I can't afford Max and Disney+ and AppleTV+. If I want to find out why The Last of Us is so good and why The Mandalorian was a terrific show and how funny Ted Lasso is, and have the temerity to expect no ads when I'm already paying to watch, that alone would cost me almost $40 a month. Add Netflix and Amazon to that and it's another $30+.

That is what I was paying for cable except with far less programming. On-demand and no ads are definitely advantages, but pay the same amount for a fraction of the programming advantages? Not for me.