Five Men Convicted of Operating Massive, Illegal Streaming Service That Allegedly Had More Content Than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Prime Video Combined

TheImpressiveX@lemmy.ml to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 259 points –
Five Men Convicted of Operating Massive, Illegal Streaming Service That Allegedly Had More Content Than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Prime Video Combined
variety.com
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You mean, like cable?

Like early Netflix before they all decided they would make their own shitty streaming services and didn't renew contracts.

Let me take this opportunity to get on my soapbox to sat this:

Peacock Sucks Ass

NBC / Universal were one of the first movers in streaming with Seeso. Did they learn lessons from Seeso about how to run a good streaming service? No they abandoned it almost immediately basically saying "this whole streaming thing is just a fad, anyway"

The results? Now its hard to watch those old (genuinely excellent) Seeso shows, and NBC / Universal has managed to make itself late to the streaming party when they were a first actor. And the service itself? Ass. Total cheeks. Major butt. Absolute balloon knot. It always has technical issues AND scanning within an episode is hard because it doesn't do it in chunks, it acts like a slider in constant motion.

Conclusion: don't look at Peacock as the idiot child of the streaming landscape. View it as the logical conclusion to media companies' corporate greed. They want you to pay money for a service that sucks, that's chock full of ads (oh! That's another thing. Where do you get off showing me three minutes of ads, Peacock, who do you think you are?), and doesn't even work decently right while a lot of these UX problems have been solved for over two decades (DVD scanning is easy and fine).

There's a very functional middle ground between all in one cable, and a hundred different services.

Yeah. We were there! Or close enough... It was a glorious week where everything lined up perfectly... Then we overshot and we are in this clusterfuck of nonsense.

"We" didn't do anything wrong. The people controlling the companies involved did. Don't include yourself with a group of bad people if you're not part of them.

Turns out we were almost there 40 years ago with CBS, NBC, PBS, and ABC.

No there isn't. Companies are incentivised to extract as much money as possible from any given buyer. There is never a "this is enough money, I won't charge you more" situation. Inevitably every buyer will become a non-buyer, because they were outpriced.

Competition should solve this issue, but it doesn't work in media because there's no two rights holders for star wars content, or marvel content, or whatever. So services cannot compete on the same content, because the rights holders simply won't let them.

Copyright is a pest.

More like how all the music streaming services work. All got pretty much the same content, just different quality and prices.