There's this site with really great ux (no sign up required, little to no ads, it keeps track of your watched list, etc) the hassle for torrents might not even be needed
I would argue for many people they no longer did, until the the movie and television markets began to fracture once again. Now that folks have to think about where to go to watch something, they're being resurrected once again for them.
For a long time I’ve subscribed to a bunch of streaming services and used Popcorn Time as a front end for watching torrents out of convenience. I have a friend who until a few years ago would torrent at the same time as buying the DVD on Amazon. He had a library of shrink wrapped DVDs.
Piracy is just more convenient. Streaming was beating that in the early days, now it no longer is again. They ruined it.
I can only hope that music doesn’t go the same way as video has. Right now for most listeners, any of the major streaming services have anything they’d want. Imagine needing two or more music libraries.
Video streaming services need to take Gabe Newell's words to heart. Steam still heavily beats pirating games, and so I pay up for games, and I feel that my money is spent well. Though, my only complaint is that I don't actually own those games. If Steam's services disappear, my games do too. I guess that's a price I'm willing to pay, since I literally do.
Movies and TV shows though? People paid for streaming services because, like you said, it was so convenient. Now every company needs their own streaming service, and every good show is on a platform you don't subscribe to yet. I just stick with pirating these days, and I feel no shame in it. Fix your business model, or I'll still use it for free. Simple as.
> Video streaming services need to take Gabe Newell's words to heart. Steam still heavily beats pirating games, and so I pay up for games
Absolutely. I do think there are subtle differences and bits of strategy that are often overlooked here though.
First off, the risk of using pirated games is significantly higher than that of pirated music/films/tv. You can't put malware in a video/audio file (modulo codec bugs), but it's fairly trivial with a game binary.
Secondly though, Steam has sales, regularly. The amount I care about content exists on a spectrum. I'll pay $30 to see the new Dune film in an IMAX cinema, but the 87th episode of House MD is probably not worth $1 to me. TV/Movie companies never seemed to understand this, with things like buying on iTunes, and it was left to retailers to sometimes price down DVDs, but even then there were restrictions (e.g. Disney). Streaming sort of solved this, but is now un-solving it with so many streaming services having their own pricing setup based on their perceived value of their content.
Steam nicely side-steps this with a range of sale prices – I can buy stuff I care about soon/predictably at high price, or I can buy stuff I don't care about later/unpredictably at a low price. And I do buy across a range of price points based on how much I care about the content.
Edit: another aspect that is maybe under-valued is that Steam doesn't seem to do regional releases. I've never experienced a game not being available in a region. However with TV/movies/streaming this is regularly the case. It's so common for a hit TV series to come out in the US, for the online discourse to be in full swing, and for the studio to just have plans to maybe possibly launch it in select other countries in a year's time. How did they think most people in the world were watching Game of Thrones?
