To be fair, I think the fractured rights thing is a big thing a well. I can subscribe to one music service - Spotify, Amazon, Apple, Tidal - and pretty much every new release is available on all of them (or risk a terrible opening week/zero buzz if you go for the 'exclusive' - but ever then, available a week or so later).

The movie/TV companies sell their show to the SVOD platform that offers the most in the territory. Or it's developed by the service themselves. So if you have to subscribe to a handful of services to watch everything your friends recommend.

Most of us can afford one music service. If you're forced into 5 streaming services a lot of people will just pirate. And even for those that do pay - the "we'll show this in the UK a week later than the US" means unless you pirate it, it's spoiled on social media within a few days.

I don't think it's DRM. When you subscribe to a music streaming service - you get 90+% of the music you'll ever need.

But you can't get the same subscription with movies/TV shows. You get a fraction of content with each subscription. When there will be a reasonably priced subscription for most of the video content - it will change the situation.

So in my opinion, it's not about DRM. It's about convenience.

> "Music has been purchaseable now without DRM for quite a while. Why has music piracy essentially died but movies/TV shows/etc is still as hot as ever?"

If music piracy hadn't essentially died, how would you know?

You can go to several different streaming services right now and listen to the music of your choice. They'll send you the file and you pinky-swear that you aren't saving a local copy. But if you do save a local copy, that will look identical to you not saving one.

So we have several things going on:

1. You can purchase DRM-free mp3s from major vendors;

2. You can stream the music in a notionally non-lasting way, also from major vendors, for free;

3. If you pirate music directly from the major streaming platforms, that doesn't show up in the piracy statistics.

I suggest that points (2) and (3) are more significant than point (1). Point (2) depresses piracy because the benefit of having a copy of your music is lower when you can use someone else's copy for free whenever you want. Point (3) artifactually depresses piracy by not counting it when it happens.

Point (1)... doesn't do much to depress piracy.

The DRM thing is interesting, for a while if I was watching a show on PC it would detect a screenshot event and turn the show window black. This stopped working. I've seen it used on Netflix and Prime. Not sure if it works still now.

How many musicians make their living off of recorded music anymore?

OG HN mainstay Joel Spolsky put it incredibly presciently back when Napster was a thing in 2001. The music studios were all raving about theft, but he pointed out that people weren't filesharing mp3s to save a buck, they were filesharing mp3s because, his words: You can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...

TV still doesn't get this for TV shows. Yes, I can type the name of a show. There are two options, one is some streaming service, the other is Prime. So I select Prime. Psych! It offers me the option to go to that streaming service. And subscribe. Which means thinking about the long term, not this show I want to watch.

Or I open the lid of my Mac, type the name of a show, and almost right away I can watch it on my Apple TV.

I wish Apple TV did that. It has a global search feature. My kids push the button on the side of the remote and say what they want to watch. Then they get a screen saying you can rent it for $6.99 or whatever, and I'm thinking "didn't you just watch that the other day, and I didn't have to approve any purchase..." Well of course Netflix doesn't appear in the Apple search results. You can search in their app separately, but it's not integrated into the system. Even if you pay all of the services their $15 a month or whatever, you still can't just watch what you want because something something engagement metrics. It's tiresome.

I use IPTV on an AppleTV box. Works great.

It works for music. Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music. They all have pretty much the full catalog that most people are looking for. In the video world however, we have dozens of providers. Why is that? Also, it used to work like that in the early days of Netflix. But then everyone and their dog wanted their own streaming portal (for video) and here we are.

> you're the one that wants multiple subscriptions, you just dislike the cost/inconvenience. Economically speaking, there's no solution here that can satisfy you...

Yes there is, it's called piracy

> ... the cost to negotiate with all of them and consolidate on a single platform would be extraordinarily expensive, because that's what convenience often is: exorbitantly expensive. There's no game theory strategy here where you get everything you want, where all the production companies get everything they want, and it all happens at modest prices.

The music industry can do that just fine and there's a ton more content and parties to talk to.

> t's the same thing that people complain about with video games with the "why do I have to have internet for a single-player game" gripes.

Why is this an invalid complaint? I don't understand. I buy most of my games on GOG anyways. No DRM crap.

> In 1985, if I wanted shows, I did have to subscribe to cable... the infrastructure for shows was absurdly expensive, no individual could have it. Now? The big 12-bay NAS filled with hard drives, and I have copies of movies and television (and music and software and games and books) that my great-nth-grandchildren will be able to enjoy for free (16K ultra-giga-mega-gold-bluray re-re-remasters notwithstanding

Exactly! It's become accessible to everyone so companies like netflix and Amazon have to compete with piracy whether they like it or not. The sooner they get their heads around licensing content to each other, the sooner people will go back.

It's not even about cost. People pay fortunes for cable channel packs.

You can go like "business doesn't work that way" but yeah if it doesn't then it'll just get bypassed. It's as simple as that.

Yeah it’s pricy to run the services, but it’s especially expensive to buy the rights to things. Watching tv and movies will probably remain as expensive while the legal substructure remains the same. That’s why the streamers asymptomatically approach the business model of cable companies. I’m just gonna pirate because fuck all that.

I have some pretty aggressive filters on Firefox/uBO, and relaxing my dynamic filters as much as I can conveniently this page still loads blank. It's not worth digging any further to figure out what's getting in the way (I'm assuming something in a static filter list)

There is a drawback with using adblockers in that it is not as trivial to notice if a site is hostile. It is about the only reason to not use it I can imagine.

Firefox with ublock and I still get the modal.

If there's a demand, someone will sell them ready to use, with preloaded microSD card, case, and cables.

There are a lot of Chinese devices out there with official android TV that do what firestick does and better with less ads and maybe even less tracking. People wanting to pirate will move to those. Raspberry pi is not cheap or the solution I agree.

I mean even among android tv sticks alone there are plenty of no name chinese options out there, these things are dirt cheap to make and are basically commodities.

We're headed for Max Headroom territory, where having an off-switch is a capital offense.