You might be overestimating how much content that was. Streaming services try to maintain an illusion of neverending content but last I saw except for prime, the amount of content they offer has been trending down.
Those numbers are fairly accessible for an average person with 3 or 4 large hard drives.
All the comments in here are so damn tedious. Copyright is a mess, but holy shit, people tie themselves in knots to make excuses for pirates being careless and stupid
What’s there to learn that isn’t already widely known? Existing (copyright) laws are asinine and all corporations eventually become consumed by greed. That’s America in a nutshell.
I run a massive streaming service too, which is also way bigger than all the streamers combined. It’s just only distributed over my private home network. Jellyfin for the win!
Uh it’s just me and whoever is on my local network. I don’t port anything or have any users outside my home. When I go on trips I just download movies and shows from my network to my devices
Like Boeing’s CEO making 300 million… imagine 300 people who worked their ass off could make million. Or 1500 hard workers could be making 200k. But nah, let’s just drag these huge bags of money into this one asshole’s account. Oh there were a couple of crashes right? 👍 Our thoughts and prayers 🙏. But not our money wagons.
Does Netflix make shows? Or does it slam its name onto filmmakers it pays to make content? If so, one of those things simply requires throwing cash at people, which I think is a skill that most people can learn.
So Netflix actually pays for shows to get made, so when everyone pays for Netflix, it lets everyone enjoy them. Pirate sites only extract value from the hard work of the producers, without paying them.
producers don’t make the content, they speak to the right people in their exclusive circles to finance it, put their name on it, and then pay the directors and actors a tiny fraction of what it earned
Yeah its almost like if we didn’t keep extending copyright protections a bunch of stuff would be in the public domain and any streaming service could offer it without having to deal with licensing.
There’s initial investment on the initial servers (and the software), and afterwards it should be a linear increase of server costs per user, with some bumps along the way to interconnect those servers.
The cost also scales per content. Because that means more caching servers per user and bigger databases, and licenses.
So this service has less users and more content, it should be way more expensive. The only reason they are cheaper is because they don’t pay those licenses.
The cost of storage in this case is more or less irrelevant - traffic is what matters here. You’re also not getting any mentionable bulk discount on the servers for that matter.
The key is that you can engineer things in completely different way when you have trivial amounts of traffic hitting your systems - you can do things that will not scale in any way, shape or form.
183,200 TV episodes is pretty modest compared to alternative “non-approved” sources.
One datapoint is one source (that has a rule against any TV/show content released in the last 5 years) has a total number of 19.5K shows and TV movies/specials, with ~80 K releases. For many shows a single release can be a full season.
its amazing how good services can be if some just skip the corporation-obligatory adding of enshittification. i remember an article about a downloadable (but not very legal) DVD with an installer for a (worthless but very popular) OS that included heaps of expensive industry software and the installer was point-klick what you want and then all is done in background and fully usable once done. reading that article it seemed to be a better installer than ever produced by any company for any product.
however as that payed streaming service seemingly leaves huge amount of bank records and ran for such a long time, i guess it would have been easy to stop their customers from paying them. it rather might seem that the real intentions of content corporations might not truely be what they officially claim.
maybe we learn in 25 years that the content corporations really were behind such services, maybe like “better get money from ALL markets!” or such.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@lemmy.world
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Direct link
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/five-men-convicted-operating-major-illegal-streaming-service
If there is no need,such places would not exist
The only thing I’m pisseed about is the fact that I was unaware of its existence. Fuck the system
You might be overestimating how much content that was. Streaming services try to maintain an illusion of neverending content but last I saw except for prime, the amount of content they offer has been trending down.
Those numbers are fairly accessible for an average person with 3 or 4 large hard drives.
deleted by creator
All the comments in here are so damn tedious. Copyright is a mess, but holy shit, people tie themselves in knots to make excuses for pirates being careless and stupid
I mean, operate a massive illegal streaming service that has more content than everyone combined, but don’t be so tacky as to charge for it.
If they had more content on offer than the big legal streaming services combined, should that not tell us something about the quality of legal offers?
What’s there to learn that isn’t already widely known? Existing (copyright) laws are asinine and all corporations eventually become consumed by greed. That’s America in a nutshell.
I run a massive streaming service too, which is also way bigger than all the streamers combined. It’s just only distributed over my private home network. Jellyfin for the win!
How many PBs you got and how many clients (humans)?
How much traffic across your network in terms of a daily average?
Do you have a local recommendation system running? For example I found a last.fm clone, self-hosted hut I haven’t found much for video
Uh it’s just me and whoever is on my local network. I don’t port anything or have any users outside my home. When I go on trips I just download movies and shows from my network to my devices
Love my Jellyfin server, but I have 2 gripes over just using VLC.
Can’t use the scroll wheel for volume. It’s a pain aiming for the volume from across the room on the couch.
JF won’t boost volume past 100% like VLC.
Know of any fixes?
You can run your Jellyfin connection inside of Kodi which has a ton of configuration options like the volume control.
Use kodi for last mile?
VLC is great as a file playing app, terrible as a home server…
I don’t watch on my computer, that’s just where it’s hosted. I watch mostly on my AppleTV using Infuse (also great for other Apple products as well)
For when you need to take it to 11
Couldn’t you just make 10 louder?
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It’s weird to me that anyone would use a PC hooked up to a TV from a couch in 2024, but I’m sure it (otherwise) works for you.
This is despicable. What specific service was this? So I know how to avoid it if it should resurface.
Proving Netflix could be replaced by five hard working people.
The only reason all companies prices go up these days is for CEO pay packages
Like Boeing’s CEO making 300 million… imagine 300 people who worked their ass off could make million. Or 1500 hard workers could be making 200k. But nah, let’s just drag these huge bags of money into this one asshole’s account. Oh there were a couple of crashes right? 👍 Our thoughts and prayers 🙏. But not our money wagons.
Regulate monopolies and eat the rich.
Did they make the shows too?
Does Netflix make shows? Or does it slam its name onto filmmakers it pays to make content? If so, one of those things simply requires throwing cash at people, which I think is a skill that most people can learn.
Did the pirate site pay anyone to make new shows?
They had to operate under the radar to avoid the law, so you know the answer to your question
So Netflix actually pays for shows to get made, so when everyone pays for Netflix, it lets everyone enjoy them. Pirate sites only extract value from the hard work of the producers, without paying them.
producers don’t make the content, they speak to the right people in their exclusive circles to finance it, put their name on it, and then pay the directors and actors a tiny fraction of what it earned
Okay, now tell me how pirate sites contribute to creation of said content
Does Netflix? Or do they pay production companies for content?
They use the subscription money to pay production studios. What did the pirate site use the subscription money for?
Servers, electricity, bandwidth, blackjack and hookers.
They didn’t need the army of lawyers to get license deals, so that’s not a fair comparison.
Its almost like its unecessary shit made up in order to keep profits away from working people artificially
Yeah its almost like if we didn’t keep extending copyright protections a bunch of stuff would be in the public domain and any streaming service could offer it without having to deal with licensing.
I mean that’s all well and good, but then how would the very deserving shareholders get dividends?
Won’t somebody think of the shareholders!?
PLS KEP LNE GOE UUP
Their scale was also an insignificant fraction of what Netflix has, making the point even more irrelevant.
The best figure I could find on Jetflicks user count was 37k, where as Netflix has 269 million users.
Prices should go down with scale not up though.
There’s initial investment on the initial servers (and the software), and afterwards it should be a linear increase of server costs per user, with some bumps along the way to interconnect those servers.
The cost also scales per content. Because that means more caching servers per user and bigger databases, and licenses.
So this service has less users and more content, it should be way more expensive. The only reason they are cheaper is because they don’t pay those licenses.
The cost of storage in this case is more or less irrelevant - traffic is what matters here. You’re also not getting any mentionable bulk discount on the servers for that matter.
The key is that you can engineer things in completely different way when you have trivial amounts of traffic hitting your systems - you can do things that will not scale in any way, shape or form.
Precisely. So much added expense for zero, or rather negative, added value.
It harmed no one and nothing.
TV and Film are just angry that competition did it for a reasonable price and provided a superior service for it.
I have 0 sympathy for the studios/distributors but they also did not pay the licensing fees.
then i guess the studios should stop enshitifying streaming and make a service thats affordable and worth using, huh?
They solved a problem people had after the fragmentation :)
5 times the content. Where do I sign up?
It’s called notjetflix.org.gov
183,200 TV episodes is pretty modest compared to alternative “non-approved” sources.
One datapoint is one source (that has a rule against any TV/show content released in the last 5 years) has a total number of 19.5K shows and TV movies/specials, with ~80 K releases. For many shows a single release can be a full season.
Yeah, I’ve got one of those too. Plex is great.
its amazing how good services can be if some just skip the corporation-obligatory adding of enshittification. i remember an article about a downloadable (but not very legal) DVD with an installer for a (worthless but very popular) OS that included heaps of expensive industry software and the installer was point-klick what you want and then all is done in background and fully usable once done. reading that article it seemed to be a better installer than ever produced by any company for any product.
however as that payed streaming service seemingly leaves huge amount of bank records and ran for such a long time, i guess it would have been easy to stop their customers from paying them. it rather might seem that the real intentions of content corporations might not truely be what they officially claim. maybe we learn in 25 years that the content corporations really were behind such services, maybe like “better get money from ALL markets!” or such.
You gotta be stupid as shit to run something like this from the US and keep a financial tail of credit card payments to you.
You also gotta be stupid as shit to actually pay 10 bux for this.
It ran functionally uncontested for ten years. And it would hardly have been the first underground streaming service to pivot legit and cash out.
Napster was sold for $85M back in 2002. Justin.tv rebranded as Twitch in 2011. Hell, AWS has it’s share of pirate hosted files.
Yeah but megaupload was legit but was still shutdown despite being massive