cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/30015573

The order here is a little wrong, but it's mostly correct.

Production houses started to see Netflix raking in cash hand over fist and decided that they could do that too and started pulling their shows.

This made Netflix need to pivot hard into in-house content in order to not look like a barren wasteland.

For me, there was never any move to netflix or any streaming. Piracy has always been cheap and convenient, and I don't want to deal with big corps

Also, piracy not popular before 2007? Pirate dvd/cd/vhs/etc stands were a very popular thing, at least around here. There was already a lot of piracy before the internet became popular

It's not fully accurate to lay the blame at the feet of Netflix. At the time, they just saw the writing on the wall and did what they had to do to survive. Their catalog was massive because, early on, no one thought streaming would work. They had a massive collection of shows and movies that didn't pull enough of an audience to air on TV for ad revenue. Netflix was able to get a TON of long-term deals that they used to grow, but when those contracts were coming due, the rights holders pulled out and started trying to make their own services. At that point, Netflix basically had to become a studio and pivot to original content, or else they wouldn't have content at all.

The long and the short of it is that because Netflix was first, it got to set the stage for the golden age of streaming, but because it worked, it was inevitable that streaming would become cable.

It's not Netflix's fault. It's just the course of the entertainment business. They suck now, but back then, I couldn't think of a single bad thing to say about them... well, maybe that they got rid of the 5-star rating system. That system was definitely used to get metrics for their early programming.

I watched so much scifi on Netflix back in the day. It was really an end of an era moment when they lost Star Trek and Stargate.

Piracy didn't start in 2006, before that there was limewire and Napster, and before that bootleg DVDs, and before that the MPAA spent billions lobbying to ban VHSs with a record function and get draconian punishments for recording movies.

I was downloading cracked video games from BBSes in the early '80s.

There was plenty of it going on around here. Even after Napster was taken down, there was Kazaa, Limewire, and your choice of Gnutella client. It was mostly us downloading stuff to listen to on the bus because high speed internet was rare unless you were in a city.

Yeah piracy was everywhere during the cassette tape and floppy disk era, I don't think it just was called piracy yet back then

OP must be a 2000s kid, because we were definitely pirating stuff over the Internet long before that.

They also didn't mention Netflix's DVD service, nor that it was really Steam that did what they described.

Bootlegging is what we called it as kids

Anyone who had a dual cassette deck back in the 80's didn't have much issue copying music or game cassettes. Floppy disks were easy to copy too.

I would argue that what Steam did for video games is what Netflix did for movies and tv shows. They made the legal option way more convenient and affordable it wasn't worth the hassle to pirate. That has changed now (at least in Netflix's case).

Atari 800.

Yeah I was about 5 seasons into stargate when it left. Later added it to Jellyfin, ezpz. You can go pretty far with a library card, or a vpn, or Usenet, or…

Can confirm we definitely did not pirate anything before 2007.

I never used netflix either. Their DRM won't let me watch in 1080p because I'm not using a spyware infested browser and OS. Back when they had a good selection, my internet was too slow to stream HD video anyways.

History? That's cute.

OP says ~2007 internet (asumming bandwidth and avail content) got good enough to become mainstem, not that I started around then.

That's between me and your dad's penis

I was downloading episodes of Jackass back in about 2001, using I think it would have been eMule.

You'd get a 240p MPEG-1 file, and you were happy with that.

Hilariously, for people who didn't own computers that could handle playing videos from CD-Rs, as my PC's video card had composite output I used to make VHS tapes from those files. And then put the adhesive label sheet for the tape cassette through the printer.

Y'know, normal stuff.

BCE? Yes, correct, most probably.

ahhh, the halcyon days of downloading Utada mp3s via dialup cuz no store outside of Japan, neither online nor brick mortar, even sold them.

and bragging about it on AIM!

I remember paying $30 USD for a DVD with 3-4 episodes at most of an anime series. 26 episode Cowboy Bebop season? ~$120 USD.

Sure I downloaded that episode of Excel Saga once (❤️). It was 320x240 and took more than a day on my 56k dialup.

At some point I remember going on ebay and buying the entirety of Witch Hunter Robin (which at the time, I chose over Naruto that had just started airing as well, this would turn out to be an important tone setting point in my life ...) and getting it for ~$20 USD. Basically just the cost of someone else to download it and burn it to CD for me. Did the same thing with Wolf's Rain.

Good memories. Of the anime. This shit always sucked.

I remember me being 14 and distributing stacks of 3,5" 1,44Mb floppies filled with copies of Doom to whoever wanted one, as long as i got the disks back later on

It was so widespread that around 2004-2005 you could buy dvd players that supported avi/mp4 files with external subtitles. They don't create products like that for niche markets.

While VALVe somehow made piracy obsolete for video games then after that they decide to make gaming on linux easier jumpstart the pc handheld market AND making one of the best first party controllers

never paid for netflix or other services, some people never had the money for it and continued buying some films (DVDs were still sold until 2019 pretty widely here) or renting a film every X time and pirating others until the first became impossible and piracy was the only thing.

then the streaming services go to shit with subscription fees, not getting all the content and such, and you see people who showed off being able to pay for those services before or still keep one struggling to get content and slightly becoming pirates again.

this is the other side of the situation. you warned them, they trusted the corpos, and corpos gave them shit.

I forgot about the controller! I want one.

same story with spotify, except that spotify itself started as a piracy service…

Same with Crunchyroll.

Fun fact: Linux has that "certification" to watch DRM content while Windows does not, which means you can use whatever browser you want on Linux but not on Windows to watch DRM content

The order is a bit off. Production companies starting pulling their content from Netflix after they saw how profitable streaming services could be.

This forced Netflix to start producing their own content.

It wasn't that though. High speed internet was available before that time. What really affected things in 2006 was that peer exchange was introduced to bittorrent, giving it a massive advantage over other file sharing services at the time.

It’s just the course of the entertainment business.

And it works like that for every medium. Guy invents printing bibles and before you know it there are pamphlet and advertisement. Radio wanted to educate and bring peace and soon enough you got propaganda and advertisement.

suddenly Netflix

You can't give a history of online piracy and just entirely skip over music/limewire.

Pirating music was very popular for the short period where limewire could be used without fear. Then corporations started suing the shit out of normal people. Then apple opened the iTunes store, and pirating music became more niche again. No more burned cds from tracks discovered on limewire, but playlists with paid-for music on an iPod

Piracy very much existed before the internet took off. Recording VHS, then burning dvd's and cd's, and the like. Many stores in the hood would openly sell burned cd's even. Others out of the trunk of their cars.

And the need to pirate never went away, fuck netflix, never had them, never will.

In that case I wonder if someone could just lift spotify's entire database and drop it on the internet.

I have been pirating music all of this time.

It's only recently there are problems as the search engines don't share good links anymore.

Idk about limewire, but there are all sorts of cloned sites of places like mp3juices that offer music.

Notably, sometime in the 90's or early 00s they made a law that made if a federal crime to break any sort of encryption on an electronic or data storage or whatever, at the behest of CD manufacturers.

well
https://cyberinsider.com/annas-archive-releases-massive-300tb-spotify-music-scrape/

Sometime around 2007

Bahahaha! Oh, OP, please tell us you're ≈20yrs old without saying it outright. 🤣

To the point: I, and everyone I knew, was pirating everything they could —from the early 90s onward.

Yes, all of us would've "downloaded a car" in a heartbeat (well, maybe a week of them, at those baud modem speeds. 😅)

forced

That's humanizing the corp way too generously. Nothing "forced Netflix to start producing [its] own content" but itself. 🤑

And Anna's is only the most publicly-known resource for similar. Scraping Spotify, et al, has been viable since the jump. ☝🏼

I've got three that don't see any use, with a case & rechargeable batteries for each. Feel free to DM and I'll send you one, not a worry. 🖖🏼

That's... not a contrary point, that's merely an addition to the stated fact from @unitedwithme@lemmy.today . 💁🏼‍♂️

Wolf's Rain

Now there a name I've not heard in a long time... 🥹