Could you imagine how great these services would be if copyrighted works fell into the public domain after 28 years instead of the nearly 100 years they are now?

I just got back from vacationing in Greece and Croatia. Though I can't say whether the number of movies was higher or lower than in the states, I can say that the quality of films was much higher. Both my girlfriend and I complained multiple times that the movies we were watching in Europe were not available to us in the states.

The major difference is that the EU does not behave like a unified body when it comes to purchasing the distribution rights. So Netflix negotiates with each country individually.

Unless you share it with family so more people get value out of it, it is indeed hard to justify the subscription for many people.

Edit:

> make the shows and movies available on servers in Canada

Is this a real protection against getting caught? I would have imagined Russia or the Ukraine to be better options for being outside of the reach of the FBI.

I know it isn't quite as bad, but in the US, many European (or other foreign) are practically impossible to watch legally. Streaming services don't stream them, and dvds and blu rays are region-locked.

Just yesterday I read something about the show "White Collar" and checked it out on Amazon Prime Germany. In German language it is available for free. I like to watch shows in their original language though. English costs 4€ per episode. Alright then, torrent it is.

Frankly the cost in the US isn't necessarily worth it anymore. I've been a Netflix user since 2008/2009. Back when no one took VoD seriously, the catalogue was huge. You could actually get lost trying to find something because there was so much good content. Now, with every company attempting to cash in on their own platform, choices on a single platform are very, very limited. I've also noticed that many titles are shared between Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon so the illusion of choice is really just that.

I think original titles and foreign distribution (ie getting content from not your nation) are quickly becoming the only differences. That's what cable was when I moved away.

I have, quite honestly, consumed everything I'm incredibly interested in on the majors. None of them turn out originals fast enough to keep my interest and new/returning content comes in a trickle so I've recently turned to just buying old shows I like and watching those. It's just like the nineties/aughties all over but without the hope of what was then cable cutting.

I'm in the US and currently scratching my head as to why the hell I haven't canceled my subscription years ago.

For as long as I can remember now, every Netflix experience boils down to spending 15-30 minutes looking for something remotely interesting before finally giving up and reading a book or playing a video game instead.

I'm not sure how much of the problem is them not having enough content, versus just their (at least on Android) godawful UI making it impossible to find, but the end result is the same.

Is the price cheaper in regions where the catalog is slim?

Copyright and patent authority is explicitly granted to the Federal government by Art. I, Sec. 8 of the US constitution:

The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

As such, state courts and police forces have no jurisdiction over copyright issues; they must be handled by the federal courts and police force (the FBI).

(Text from https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcri... )

Who else is going to do it? Your local municipal cops?

I believe it's because it's an inter-state crime. Once crimes cross state borders you have to get the federal level police involved, which is the FBI.

Think of the FBI as the police for the federal government. Roughly, as soon as your typical crime goes across state lines, they can get involved (because a state's jurisdiction ends at their borders).

Well, TFA says:

> "Specifically, Polo used sophisticated computer programming to [get pirated stuff] and then make the shows and movies available on servers in Canada," officials said.

So the fact that they were in the US is irrelevant.

But I'm sure that they got caught because they didn't know how to stay anonymous. Or were too lazy. Or got too greedy.

I mean, there are far better hosting alternatives than Canada. I guess that they wanted low latency for US customers. But still, they should have isolated themselves from the damn servers.

I'm guessing that it was their payment setup that got them pwned.

Because the current streaming service landscape is kind of awful?

My mind is blown that these sites were actually getting paid subscribers. I thought the beauty of piracy is the whole "not paying for it" thing.

I refuse to pay for more than one subscription service, I'm not going to end up paying more than I did for cable tv. Hulu still wins for me because it has the live/local tv, and I'm not giving Disney anymore money.

Except I can cancel anytime, pay for just a month, watch whenever I want, watch however I want.

I'm surprised some foreign power hasn't done this just for the sole reason of messing with the US movie industry, which is one of America's more significant export industries, and thereby harming the American economy.

The DOJ presser said the site was "larger" than Netflix, Hulu and Amazon combined in terms of available content - some media reports have misreported it as larger by subscriber count

Or law enforcement trumping up a number that’s larger than any reasonable number of subscribers they actually had.

I think it was a typo, later in the article they mention this service had more content than Netflix, Hulu etc. I share your scepticism that two individuals could build a streaming service catering to >160m customers.

Not to mention the infrastructure, even if they didn’t host the video content themselves (which I doubt?) just handling that many paying customers would be a major operation.

Agreed. And what frustrates me to no-end is that they constantly move the last thing I watched away from a single click when I return to the app.

You had noticed that too? I have it on my APple TV, my "smart" TV, Android and iOS/iPad OS. I am baffled by the constant updates to it.

I literally cannot work out why they need to "update" it once a week (at least!). Since its inception, it has let you add films to a list, remove them from the list, browse said list, and watch a film and scrub/seek. What else is there that possibly needs "updating" every single week???

Does Netflix still have the “keep test”? If so, this might be why all the constant changes. If you’re not providing as much value as the next dev, you lose that well paying gig.

Have you used any pirate streaming websites? They're pure garbage, bad UX, bad image quality, choppy video. The only reason anybody uses them is the price or lack of legal options

> Total revenue was less than a couple million dollars.

I think you mean that the revenue of a 2 guy company was over a million dollars.

I think it is in an error in the reporting. The press release from the FBI only mentions content, not subscribers.

I actually remember JetFlix and wondering how they had so much content. They were acting like a real company, IIRC.

More content than any of the silos seems plausible, since all they have to do is aggregate.

More paying subscribers would be a huge.

I'd imagine the "more subscribers than Netflix" is an inflated number

What if they were using something like webtorrent to reduce their bandwidth costs?

It's just a software in front of existing torrents.

Bandwidth at any decent metro area colo these days is cheap af. Last I did the math I saved 15x the egress Data charges versus if I just put it directly in AWS.

> Now that EGS is trying to bleed customers, video game piracy is going up again because nobody likes exclusives except those that get money for them.

Big fat citation needed on the piracy numbers there...

I honestly don't mind timed exclusives because they provide stability and income to the studios that make the games I like. While there's a lot to criticize Epic for, the fact that they essentially guarantee a certain number of sales means devs like Coffee Stain studios can make a risky bet like Satisfactory (basically a 3D Factorio).

As a consumer, it's really not material to me whether I'm launching one or two stores, whereas these studios can be freed from the worry of boom/bust cycles, layoffs, etc.

Why would any customer pick the more expensive product? 1) they don't want to be criminals 2) they want to support the art that they enjoy so that more of it can be made

Netflix and Steam don't have a lot in common outside of being a platform for their respective media

Netflix and Stadia (or something like Xbox game pass) are more comparable in my opinion