Yes, THIS!

I think this is the crux of the entire argument that is completely ignored by nearly every content producer. People value things differently for a huge number of reasons. With things with a personal appeal like music, or maybe TV/Film but I imagine less so, some people will pay more for their favourite band, others won't. That means the band is undervaluing their product to their greatest fans (good for the fans) and over valuing for their lesser fans.

Normally, when I download things, it's because I don't value the product at the price it's being sold, but I do still value it! Film is a great example of this. I'll happily pay $5 to rent a great film like Django unchained, or Avatar, etc. But am I going to pay the same amount for the (boringly bad) Bourne Legacy? No. But I would still pay something to see it.. perhaps $1, maybe $2. But I can't because there is no option to do this. So instead, I would consider downloading it.

So what have the film company lost when I chose to pirate instead of purchase? Not $5 because I wouldn't have paid this in the first place. So they've lost $2. And what have I lost? I've had to spend some of my time hunting down and waiting for the film to download (A minor inconvenience) but that's it. So seems like the only loser is the film company.

For evidence, look at the most highly downloaded film of 2012 'Project X'. IMDB gives it a 6.6 rating and it sounds a bit lame but fun. Exactly the sort of film that isn't worth full price rental.

Or perhaps that's just how I see things..

I miss watching videos outside the service-branded players. I get that the floor is lower, but the ceiling is at the floor. None of them are special beyond making the DRM work, their UIs are at best rebranding of the good ideas they steal from the youtube player.

Sometimes I just want the flexibility to watch their video with a feature I know a different player has. Or without uninterrupted access to high-throughput internet connectivity. Like, in the car, the wilderness, or anywhere that the home network is administrated by a normie.

I’m pretty rich and I pirate things rather than having a million separate streaming accounts - out of moral concern as much as convenience.

Let me pay money and download a DRM-free mp4 that I can keep forever and watch anywhere. I'd do it and so would a sizable percentage of existing pirates.

> The latter costs money, but is more convenient.

Not really. If my internet connection is fast, I can download a movie in a few minutes and watch it in VLC, which is more user-friendly than any web player. If my internet connection is slow, streaming won't work anyway. Maybe there's a medium-speed sweet spot in between for which streaming is more convenient, but I suspect only a minority of users occupy that sweet spot.

> Illegal streaming services are not viable because they're centralised and easy to crack down on

No, illegal streaming services are not viable because torrents exist and people prefer downloading movies to streaming them. People who prefer legal streaming services over illegal downloads do so because of the legal vs illegal bit, not because of the streaming vs downloads bit.

I think the only real answer here is unavailability of content in a sufficiently convenient/appealing form. But you've already written off unavailability of content as a reason you want to deal with, so I don't think there are any remaining answers for you.

I dont have to do that with music (spotify works on linux and my phone so its fine) or with games (steam works with linux and valve makes linux gaming better every single day).

I don´t mind paying a fair price for media and i like the convenience of a large, always available, curated, searchable, instantly available etc. But the movie and TV Industry doesn´t offer it. Netflix here in Germany has a pathetic libary and i dont want to subscribe to 5 services to watch the 5 or 6 TV shows i want to see. Thats neither fair nor convenient. I´d rather take that money to my local cinema and pay for the experience instead of just the content.

Piracy is mostly a distribution problem and to a much lesser degree a pricing problem. As long as I can´t buy into a service that is better than pirating content why should I pay for it.

I actually think the opposite. I believe content piracy has gone down because services like Netflix and Spotify have come out and simplified consumption of media. These services has several advantages to torrents compared to the one disadvantage (it actually costs money) - Cross platform support, unlimited media in the tap of a button, etc. If the movie industry created something like Popcorn Time and charged $15-20/mo for unlimited movies, I'm sure they could get millions of subscribers.

Yes. 'Content' certainly isn't consumed from the perspective of the content providers, who can keep streaming the same data until they choose not to.

[Edit] Hmmm. Consumption, in the sense of irreversibly using a one-time resource, is sort of relevant. Once I have consumed food, I cannot re-consume it (in it's original form). Using this meaning, however, I 'use' rather than 'consume' a physical book or other format where I have a physical copy of the data (e.g. in the form of a non-rented DVD or similar).

If there was a legal method which worked as well as the illegal one (including quantity and offline capabilities) and cost the same as the VPN / seedbox, I doubt most would stay with the illegal content.

Many would never switch because they stick with the illegal content for ideological reasons (“information wants to be free”, “I don’t want to give money to The Man”), but those you’ll never get money from either way.

> I believed that argument for far too long, that illegal content would happen less if a good enough service would exist. Netflix happened, it did happen, but then they increased the price just a tiny bit, others subscriptions based content appeared, still freakinly cheap, and more and more people got back to illegal content.

Netflix worked to reduce piracy because you felt they had everything. Now they don’t, and everything is split across several streaming services which you have to pay for individually. For many ex-pirates, it’s gotten to the point where consuming content legally has devolved (again) to be more cumbersome than doing so illegally.

Nah.

Take netflix for example: you pay your subscription and you get to watch movies. ez pz.

Now take the pirating route: you have to find torrents, such torrents have to have seeds, you need disk space, you need a torrenting app, you might have to leave your computer turned on for a long time etc etc.

Netflix is sucessful because they managed to make paying better than pirating.

Content owners really seem to underestimate how far people are willing to go for kudos alone on setup cost if the reproduction cost is zero.

Also for some people it's a point of philosophy / concern about future-proofing. Guy I knew back in the day was the biggest torrenter around... He was stuffing a hard drive full of '80s cartoons. His attitude on it was that the creators and owners did not care if those half-hour toy commercials would be around in 100 years, but he did.

For a few years there; it felt like I could watch ~anything i wanted on Netflix or Crunchyroll. Now it feels like I need 10 services. Maybe my viewing habits have changed; but I haven't started a torrent in a decade and I've been tempted recently.

Whenever I hear someone disregard torrents offhand, I get the distinct impression that they've either never actually tried it or that they're simply being dishonest, because piracy has never been easier.

Have you actually tried torrenting TV shows or movies (or any other type of digital content, for that matter)? Contrary to the FUD that seems to be popular opinion on HN, it's a cake walk. Most importantly, learning how to use torrents is a (rather small) one-time time investment, whereas watching TV means that you perenially waste 1/4th of your viewing time watching ads. And don't forget that you have to keep track of when shows are airing and either watch them then or remember to record them for later viewing.

So if saving time is one of your primary concerns, the numbers simply don't add up in favor of broadcast TV, no matter how you look at them.

In fact, piracy is so easy that I won't even bother with free solutions like Hulu - why should I waste my time traversing 10 different sites looking for a particular episode of a particular show I want to see when I can go to the same torrent site every time and have a virtual guarantee that the content I want will be instantly available, and in HD, at that?

If you have moral qualms with respect to piracy, I can agree to disagree, despite my personal lack of objections to the practice. But claiming that piracy is somehow time inefficient is nothing more or less than pure prevarication.

And I felt I repeated myself too much in my comment. The thing is the illegal market ONLY has to pay for the delivery methods, without any expectation of profit margin, or paying for bandwidth, but I'm okay ignoring that considering that the delivery methods is a tiny fraction in the cost of production.

> Netflix worked to reduce piracy because you felt they had everything.

At each price increase to keep being able to support such a big selection, there just so many people saying they would go back to illegal downloads...

Again, the argument is VALID the thing is, the cost is about DELIVERY methods, not about FULL PRODUCTION. Theses peoples don't care about that. They want the best deal.

When it comes to digital content, I think it is rather gray. Artificial scarcity is a term that comes to mind. Looking at Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, etc., I'm not convinced that the ability to bypass payment (e.g. torrenting) is not simply a fundamental problem with the business.

As much as one might consider paywall bypassing to be freeloading, another could consider that the paywalling content provider is just trying to capture rent for data that's otherwise freely available.

Which is probably closer to the norm. I rarely use torrents, not out of any great moral imperative, but because it's a pain, involves sketchy web sites, etc.

However, the fragmentation of video streaming is also annoying even though it's what lots of people supposedly wanted when they complained about the cable bundle. And, yes, the response will mostly be make do with a few services and either do without or buy a la carte for the rest or actively manage your current subscriptions. (Of course, a typical cable bill will pay for a lot of different services for cord cutters.)

You're making a straw man argument, I made it very clear that I am willing to pay, and I'm not the only one.

> Yet, piracy is stronger than ever.

You know what else is stronger than ever? Online music sales, and record company profits. The easier method of iTunes is killing the old model.

> What makes you think it will be any different for movies?

7% of US citizens now subscribe to Netflix, making it bigger than any single cable company. I would say this is good evidence that people are willing to pay for legal, convenient access to content.

Netflix has a hundred million subscribers. It's hardly a rich man's entertainment.

My hypothesis is the exact opposite. I think that piracy increases total spend in dollars.

With piracy, people get to experience things for free that they otherwise wouldn't have. This opens individuals to newer media, newer niches, newer genres, and so on.

I have known a few people who spent their money for the first time on video games after playing the pirated version of GTA V. They wouldn't have spent a dime on games if they hadn't played pirated GTA V.

I turned into a subscriber after watching The Wire, The Sporanos, and Breaking Bad with a shared password (also a kind of piracy). I would have never even thought of paying for TV if I could not watch The Wire for free.

I believe that pirated content "converts" people into web series watchers, gamers, and more.

Microsoft is fully aware of Windows piracy. Had Microsoft cracked down, then they would have lost tens of millions of future paying customers.

Many people pay for Office for their business because that is what they have used since their childhood- in a legal way or not.