Hello World!
As we’ve all known and talked about quite a lot, we previously blocked several piracy-focused communities. These communities, as announced, were:
- !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com,
- !steamdeckpirates@lemmy.dbzer0.com,
- !piracy@lemmy.ml, and their local counterparts as follow up actions.
In our removal announcement, we stated that we will continue to look into this more in detail, and re-allow these communities if and when we deem it safe. It was a solid concern at the time, because we were already receiving takedown requests as well as constant attacks, and didn’t want to put our volunteer team at risk. We had zero measures in place, and the tools we had were insufficient to deal with anything at scale.
Well, after back and forth with some very cool people, and starting to have proper measures as well as tooling to protect ourselves, we decided it’s time to welcome these communities back again. Long live the IT nerds!
We know it’s been a rough ride with everything, and we’d like to thank every one of you who were understanding of us, and stayed with us all the way. Please know that as users, you are what makes this platform what it is, and damned we be if we ever forget it.
With love, and as always, stay safe in the high seas!
Lemmy.world Team
❤️
the problem i have, that nobody has been able to really explain to me, is how the economics of streaming should be made to work.
content is insanely expensive to make. even with all of Netflix’s recent shitty changes, their operating margin is still only about 13%. that isn’t enough cash left over to fund production of every single show they don’t have. and it’s important that they actually be able to fund production, because unlike 10 years ago, most productions no longer rely on first runs on OTA or cable TV to make their money
so it seems to me there are three paths here:
the industry puts everything on a single service and dramatically increases the base price (remember cable? my parents paid twice as much for it in 2005 as i spend today on streaming services)
the industry puts everything on a single service and dramatically scales back production (remember OTA TV?) to fit within the budget afforded by a reasonable subscription price
studios branch off into competing streaming services
i’m not trying to start a fight or defend shitty corporate behavior (no one will ever get me to pay for ads), i just want to know how people think this could work in a way that balances out
Netflix caused movie pracy to nearly case, because was affordable and convenient. People preferred to pay than hunt and download movies.
Once other studios started creating their streaming services, applying exclusivity for shows, jacking prices for their content (encouraging ads) all went to hell. They successfully managed to ruin the experience, and make it as shitty as cable.
The thing about intellectual property is that you create it once and then you can copy it infinitely and generate profit. The studios want to maximize the profit, it isn’t (as you are suggesting) how hard was to create content, but it is how much people are ok paying. It always was.
They can do this, because there’s monopoly due to crippled antitrust laws in the last 50 years.
Piracy is a natural response to this, but they are using copyright (which was originally meant for different reason).
Antitrust laws as well as laws like copyright, DMCA etc needs to be fixed.
this doesn’t really answer my questions, though.
netflix was able to afford that much content back then for two reasons
they were flush with capital from investors, spending more money than they were making to promote growth.
netflix wasn’t running new content, they were essentially licensing “reruns” of content that already had its primary run elsewhere.
basically, everyone got used to a certain lifestyle being subsidized by cheap capital and investors misplaced belief in perpetual growth. nobody has yet to explain to me how this could have been made sustainable.
The music streaming platforms (admittedly with their own challenges) have to compete based on service offering rather than exclusivity. Imagine if all the streaming platforms competed on quality of service instead of exclusivity.
I’d personally pay a lot more if I could just have one service that had all the content I want, but instead we’re in this situation where the platforms (in my opinion) are lacking innovation and the content is all over the show. Here in NZ I find different seasons on different platforms or plenty of shows that just aren’t licensed for our market. We all know how that problems going to be solved.
the music streaming platforms basically screw over the artists to make that feasible, with the excuse usually being that artists can make their real money touring and selling merch.
the cost of producing music is also infintesimal compared to that of producing film and television. the whole music industry itself is pretty small in comparison, yet Spotify costs about as much as a streaming TV service.
to scale that model up to film and TV would mean either a much higher base price, or a lot less overall content being made. these are viable paths, but both come with big trade offs.
Not saying that you shouldn’t pay people, but the CEO of netflix makes over $50M a year. Actors make how much? I’m sure there are a lot of ways to cut costs and make a more equal society to boot.
obnoxious executive pay is its own problem, but even zeroing all that out wouldn’t do much for the financials. if you brought that $50m down to $0 and passed that savings on to consumers, each netflix subscriber would save pennies on their monthly bill
I’m not saying just the CEO, but the whole structure. Look at the kids from Stranger Things for example. Any of them over 20 yet? If they never work another day in their life they still enjoy a life unattainable to almost everyone. Good for them I suppose, but it’s that really how a society should be? And there are a lot of people behind the scenes that we don’t see that makes an enormous amount of cash while most don’t. There should be a more equal distribution.
Isn’t the money for producing shows included in their operating costs, meaning that their operating margin already accounts for that?
They don’t. They just think content is generated in a vacuum and it’s their right to consume it in whatever way they see fit.
The solution is not one many people want to hear: reduce production costs.
Content is expensive to make mostly because the people making it keep demanding more pay for less work. While it is understandable that people want this, this is not sustainable for an economy. When the economy fails, prices go up. Demanding employers pay more will immediately raise prices the same amount the wages increase, effectively leaving employees who got a raise in the same place they were before but eith bigger numbers, and severely damaging the economy at the same time.
A show can be produced on a shoestring budget. Yes, the quality is lower than a million dollar movie. However, that doesn’t make the show bad. The X-Files was a great show produced on a tiny budget in its first season with phenomenal writing. Yet in the final season, it had a bigger budget but the writing was awful. In fact, most shows these days have awful writing. And the writers of these shows with bad writing are demanding more pay, yet their writing quality does not indicate they deserve increased pay. Certainly if a writer is outputting great work that should be rewarded, but increasing the pay of writers outputting garbage writing can only lead to more expensive garbage.
Then you get to costume, props, and visual effects. First, the damaged economy from before appears in costumes and props material cost. This is unavoidable. In many cases, I would say that good practical effects are cheaper and more convincing than cheap CG. My solution is simply go back to the way films were made in the 70s and 80s. Ditch the bad CG and go for more practical effects.
Last we have actors. Actors do not need more than 100k per film, and thats for the huge actors. Simple to understand, really. So many actors live opulent, overpaid lives, when they could live more simply, more normally, off of much less.
The above aalso applies to directors, producers, streaming company executives and CEOs.
Fix all these and your show production costs plummet. Now you can offer your streaming service at the same cost or cheaper than before while having a larger profit margin.
Idk why you’re leading with writer pay, going into actor pay (most don’t make squat) and then execs at the big companies involved are tossed in as an afterthought. Probably why you’re getting downvoted.
I am getting downvoted because people cant bother to read beyond one sentence.
Also, I dont care about imaginary internet points.
Dude if writers actually made enough money then it wouldn’t be such a huge thing that they get sponsored free lunches during the strike. Thats a fucking meal… However the profit produced on some shows is obscene in comparison. Put 300 mil in and get 500 mil out, thats 200 mil profit… You’re getting downvoted because you don’t understand the economics of the industry while being overconfident that you do.
Why would a writer make a good story for someone paying them in dogshit and loose change?
“Content” at a minimum requires a video camera and people to stand in front of it. It’s involving hundreds of people in a production that’s expensive. People just hurl money at big centralized services, with the same mentality they had with cable TV, and of course they spend ungodly amounts, because they make even more. There’s all kinds of models that can work better than this.
I don’t know where this comes from. Ads are a currency. You choose to allow ads to replace or supplement your payment, or you can choose to pay to forego them, on most all of these services. That’s not an option we ever had with cable (or any type of social media, for that matter).
Running these services costs money and you pay money to fund them. These industries have operating at a loss for many years and they are just getting around to being profitable, and they do that by increasing costs.
If you don’t want to pay for the service, just be upfront and say so.
Cable WAS the solution to adds in the beginning, that’s how it was marketed in the first place. The cycle is not new.
Yes I understand that