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Impoverished streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy - Guardianwww.theguardian.com/film/2025/aug/14/cant-pay-wont-pay-impoverished-streaming-services-are-driving-viewers-back-to-piracy
192 sats \ 3 comments \ @Scoresby 14 Aug alter_native
According to London‑based piracy monitoring and content‑protection firm MUSO, unlicensed streaming is the predominant source of TV and film piracy, accounting for 96% in 2023. Piracy reached a low in 2020, with 130bn website visits. But by 2024 that number had risen to 216bn. In Sweden, 25% of people surveyed reported pirating in 2024, a trend mostly driven by those aged 15 to 24. Piracy is back, just sailing under a different flag.
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102 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 14 Aug
“Piracy is not a pricing issue,” Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve, the company behind the world’s largest PC gaming platform, Steam, observed in 2011. “It’s a service issue.”
Based.
I haven't kept up but I know they were working on torrent streams. I wonder if that ever materialized.
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby OP 14 Aug
Yeah, the idea that people really just want to watch/listen/play what they want, and don't want to navigate access, seems like it would bode well for lightning payments. But, also: Amazon does single rental for many titles that show up on a variety of streaming platforms, but this doesn't seem to be a solution.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 14 Aug
The pricing for a single rental is too variable ime, TV episodes are often overpriced relative to movies, and it's rare I want a TV episode a la carte unless I'm testing a series out.1
Apple got it right when they mandated $0.99 mp3s. Then again, we went on to stream those too for the most part.
I think my ideal streaming platform let's me watch the first 20% of a movie or TV series season for free, then lets me pay a fixed price for the other 80%.

Footnotes

  1. This is interesting to think about in the context of SN. ↩
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