cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/35892866
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Republished here, as AI content is in the Public Domain. References are available in the original article.
Frustrated by rising subscription costs and fragmented content availability, viewers worldwide are returning to piracy at unprecedented levels, reversing years of progress made by affordable streaming services. Recent data from London-based monitoring firm MUSO shows piracy visits skyrocketed from 130 billion in 2020 to 216 billion by 2024, with the industry facing projected losses exceeding $113 billion.
Subscription Fatigue Drives Digital Exodus
The streaming landscape has transformed from Netflix’s early promise of “everything in one place” into what critics call “Cable 2.0”—a fractured ecosystem requiring multiple subscriptions. According to The Guardian, the average European household now spends close to €700 annually on three or more video-on-demand subscriptions. With Netflix’s standard plan reaching $15.49 monthly and competitors following suit, consumers are increasingly viewing piracy as a rational alternative.
“Piracy is not a pricing issue, it’s a service issue,” Valve co-founder Gabe Newell observed in 2011—a prediction that appears prophetic as streaming platforms struggle with content fragmentation and rising prices. In Sweden, birthplace of both Spotify and The Pirate Bay, 25% of people surveyed admitted to pirating content in 2024, predominantly driven by those aged 15 to 24.
Content Wars Create Consumer Casualties
The fragmentation crisis has worsened as studios create exclusive content silos. Viewers face scenarios where favorite shows vanish from one platform only to appear on another, or require separate purchases despite existing subscriptions. Even purchased content can become unavailable due to licensing disputes, prompting consumer lawsuits against platforms like Amazon Prime Video.
MUSO data reveals that unlicensed streaming now accounts for 96% of all TV and film piracy, representing a fundamental shift in how content theft occurs. Modern pirates leverage sophisticated tools including AI-driven search engines and encrypted networks that adapt faster than anti-piracy measures can respond.
Industry Scrambles for Solutions
Streaming executives are experimenting with bundled offerings and cracking down on password sharing, but these measures often backfire by further alienating users. According to Antenna research, one-quarter of U.S. streamers are “chronic churners,” frequently canceling subscriptions due to cost and frustration.
The resurgence marks a stark reversal from the mid-2010s when convenient, affordable streaming services nearly eliminated piracy. As one industry analyst noted, studios have created “artificial scarcity in a digital world that promised abundance”, suggesting that without addressing core affordability and access issues, the piracy revival may continue reshaping entertainment consumption patterns.
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<Insert piracy is a service issue Gaben quote>
I was recently travelling and tried to sign up for Netflix and couldn’t. Because I didn’t have a phone number in the country I was in. And they block vpns.
You can see where this is headed. Mullvad needs the money more than Netflix anyway.
Hopefully this won’t get me too much negative reaction: I’m not a proud pirate. I’d rather not pirate at all. I’m kind of ashamed that it’s come to this.
There were a few solid years where I literally did not do it and felt no desire to, back when streaming was new, and there were only a few serious players. I’d love to return to that era, but I know it will never exist again.
So now, I and other members of my family, pay a ridiculous amount of money for a rotating suite of services, trying to do things the right way, and still, there are way too many times when we can’t find anything we want to watch on any of those services and/or the thing we wanted to watch is not available on any of those services.
Finally broke down and just said fuck it. I tried to support this mess as best I could in hopes it would get better, but fully knowing it wouldn’t. When it definitely did not get better I said no more.
Oh noes! Who could have seen this coming?
/s
sarcasm aside, literally, our lord and savior, Gabe Newell.
Hey, the Supreme Court said it’s cool for LLMs to pirate stuff for their bullshit so it’s free game. I’m not paying for shit. Just like that bullshit article that has been posted, which I won’t open
I am working on a prototype purely organic LLM called myself. In order to be able to interact with prompts that include popular media references I will train the model on TV shows and movies.
Large Brain Move
Action?
Reaction.
Choice?
Consequence.
Streaming issues aside, what is this?
Republished here, as AI content is in the Public Domain. References are available in the original article.
Why the hell are we posting this crap instead of linking the original article?
“We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.”
- GabenN
When what you’re selling isn’t appealing, then people won’t buy it. It’s not super complicated.
I don’t think I’ve pirated a game since I started working and actually spending on Steam. Except Borderlands 3, because fuck Epic Games Store, their dumb fucking exclusivity deals, and their shitty launcher - they won’t EVER see a penny from me.
I bought it on Steam a year later when it came out, on sale, with DLCs.
Realistically, if there was a service that had everything on it that was past the cinema/pay per view stage, and was a reasonable price (say £35 a month, the price of two current streaming services), then I would probably be on that instead of Jellyfin.
And I mean everything back to the dawn of time. Anything you want, TV series, movies, the lot. Original versions, directors cuts, etc. George fucking Lucas, I’m looking at you here.
But there isn’t. There never will be. Because they’re all in a race to grab as much money as they can, before literal heat death engulfs the whole planet.
This was close enough to what the og Netflix was and unsurprisingly it was incredibly popular.
They could make a Steam style store for movies to buy individual movies that then stay on your account. Deep deep discounts on some oldie movies intermittently. People would eat that shit up and buy whole movie libraries to keep. Way more movies than they could watch (like people do with a Steam library).
I’ve got my server more stable now so it works a lot more reliably for Jellyfin. Before now, my wife would wholeheartedly agree with this and insist on paying for Netflix
Maybe she doesn’t know it, but how she reacts to this situation is my main test of her suitability as my partner. Nothing is more attractive to me than a woman who can just chill for 15 minutes without complaint while I exportfs -a and restart nfsd.
I recently upgraded my Jellyfin server from GTX 970 to GTX 1660 because I wanted to have HEVC 10bit support for transcoding on the fly (40 Mbps uplink is not ideal), it cost me $60 and I sold my old one for $20 to a buddy with GTX 600ish.
It turns out people don’t want to pay cable prices for streaming.
deleted by creator
Of course they had it good. Studios didn’t understand streaming and so sold long term rights to Netflix for pennies. Now, everyone is cutting out cable, making it impossible for those studios to fund new production on cable and broadcast alone.
New production is going to hit a cliff as streaming isn’t going to be able to fund golden era of television any more.
Shocking.
No mention of advertising in streaming services now? That was a big factor in making me shut of my subscriptions. The price increases made me cut back but the ads have made me turn them off. I’m not paying to watch commercials.
Industry Scrambles for Solutions
Anything but solve the main issue: pirate sites offer a better service, with no stupid licensing problems, having everything on a single app and without geolocking bullshit.
When the pirate alternative it’s not just cheaper but also way more convenient, it’s no wonder they are losing customers.
Netflix: Pay for 4k, max at 720p in Firefox or Librewolf
Trackers: Don’t pay, actual 4k
DRM limiting the quality is the main reason I won’t pay for streaming.
That was my reason for cancelling. I can afford the service, but it better let me stream at full resolution through LibreWolf or I’m just gonna download the movies and shows.
Exactly, if they came up with some open standard for payments, subscriptions, so that most users got seamless one stop shopping for all content without barriers the convenience would beat the price.
They don’t have a piracy problem, they have a convenience problem.
It’s so damn stupid. Every time i hear of a new show, I must look for which platform will have it in my country. And also which seasons, because it happens (with old shows specially) that they are fragmented, having some seasons here, some there, and some unavailable.
Then, I open stremio and the whole show is there, a single app with all the content.
Now tell me, if I want to watch that show, what should I do?
Like Gaben said, piracy is service problem.
There’s an easy solution to this. I pay for Apple Music because I get access to pretty much all the music I want. I can sideload what they don’t have, which isn’t much. They have better audio quality, and aren’t stiffing artists to pay some right wing nutjob science denier like the other streaming platform of note. I pay because I love music and want to support what I love. Why isn’t there a similar service for TV and movies? That’s the solution. Let us pay for what we love and make it easy. Apple figured it out with music. Valve figured it out with games.
I think they don’t want to solve the problem. I think they want to solve a different problem. I think they’re making this a problem so they can push legislation to protect their profits.
Why isn’t there a similar service for TV and movies?
Because Steve Jobs died before he could hypnotize the executives into do it.
Only half kidding, people forget that’s how we got all the music labels together, it was Apple iTunes Store which later became streaming.
There were a few weird awkward music stores but Apple did it better and this was early 2000’s when their brand was barely recovering from near bankruptcy.
Netflix streaming didn’t launch until 2007 and didn’t really take off until 2011, the same year Jobs died.
Netflix was the only one that was positioned to do it but they couldn’t pull it together because they didn’t have the reality distortion field that Jobs had. Netflix had to push into original programming instead to survive and the brand has long since enshittified.
Can’t help but wonder if whatever pitch Jobs used to sell record labels couldn’t have been reworked to convince the movie studios.
Why isn’t there a similar service for TV and movies?
Because the Artists involved don’t see the royalties in those industries. They’ve already been paid and the rights holders want to extract every drop of profit possible. and the sad truth is that splintering streaming worked for a very long time to this end.
As a musician who sees royalties, I thank you cos apple actually fucking pays out
Absolutely. But to clarify, Apple Music pays more per stream than Spotify and others. Spotify trends to cut bigger checks to popular musicians because they have more subscribers.
Also — someone feel free to fact check this — I’ve heard that if, say, you put an album out on BandCamp but not streaming, and I buy it and sideload it into both services, and you later add it to both services, Spotify won’t pay you for my streams because I’m streaming the sideloaded copy whereas Apple will match it. I keep the metadata if it’s different but you’d get paid for the streams because it matches it.
Oh how could this happen? who knew…
the problem is that we haven’t been sticking to the plan! - mgmt
Quick, insert more ads to keep revenue up!
or how about another plan that costs a little more and it has a little less ads? then increase the ads and price!
I can literally pay for every service available in my area and still not watch everything (not to mention anything) I want. Geo-blocking as well as expired rights made me never want to pay for one of those overpriced services again as there is one option that’s way more convenient, and by chance much cheaper too.
Alright, kinda fucked that everyone here is just like “AI generated news articles! Yay!” and not questioning the validity at all of an LLM. bruh.
Nobody reads the articles.
AI is piracy by corporations, kind of makes sense that this community doesn’t care so much.
