If content owners want to fight piracy, make content easier to get at a price people are willing to pay. There will always be a certain contingent of people that will never pay for content and will always choose piracy.
I personally stopped pirating music when iTunes Music came online. It was much easier to pay $0.99 for a song than to scour Napster,Kazaa, Limewire, and the rest of the p2p software. Now with Apple Music, Spotify, etc. why bother pirating music?
I subscribe to Netflix,Hulu with no commercials, DirectvNow and Amazon Prime. I could find most of the content on pirate sites, but why would I bother? I would much rather just pay $65 a month (well actually I get Netflix free via T-mobile so $55/month).
Movie Pass was too restrictive and too much of a hassle to bother with, but I have no reason to pirate new releases anymore now that AMC has AMC Stubs A+. I signed myself and my wife up for the subscription the day it became available. A movie is now a cheap date night when we just want to get out of the house and do something.
55$ is still quite a lot of money in majority of the world. Plus some content is not available in some regions. I pay for Spotify but for movies (anime in particular) I still need to resort to torrents sometimes. I'd much more prefer to simply pay and avoid the hassle if only I had such opportunity.
Of course you have to cater to the local market realities. Doesn’t Chrunchyroll cater to anime fans? If you have to resort to piracy because their is no legal alternative but you would pay for one if it existed, it kind of proves my point.
In the end, though, piracy can solve "easier" a lot faster than legitimate services, especially as you get more into niche content.
There's no way to build a legal "everything in one platform" service, just because of the logistics of trying to find rightsholders, and deal with ones who may be outright hostile (think of all the TV/movie firms who are desperate to bootstrap their own streaming services, rather than just being another section inside Netflix's catalog).
For a lot of services, we've seen "it doesn't have everything, but it has 90% of the most popular things" and that's been good enough. But is it really? I suspect a significant number of customers will gradually return to piracy-- at least as a supplement-- as the legit catalogs get exhausted and their tastes reach for more and more obscure stuff that's not available anywhere else.
I suspect the only real solution would be some sort of mandatory licensing-- let the platform owners scoop up everything and just submit a royalty to some escrow system based on how often it's consumed.
I don’t disagree. But the more obscure tastes are usually on the margins. You will never get rid of piracy but you could take a big bite out of it by making it easier and more affordable to get the 80% of content and just ignore the long tail.
I personally stopped pirating music when iTunes Music came online. It was much easier to pay $0.99 for a song than to scour Napster,Kazaa, Limewire, and the rest of the p2p software. Now with Apple Music, Spotify, etc. why bother pirating music?
I subscribe to Netflix,Hulu with no commercials, DirectvNow and Amazon Prime. I could find most of the content on pirate sites, but why would I bother? I would much rather just pay $65 a month (well actually I get Netflix free via T-mobile so $55/month).
Movie Pass was too restrictive and too much of a hassle to bother with, but I have no reason to pirate new releases anymore now that AMC has AMC Stubs A+. I signed myself and my wife up for the subscription the day it became available. A movie is now a cheap date night when we just want to get out of the house and do something.
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