New research published in the Journal of Cultural Economics documents how the COVID-19 pandemic created a surge in “new pirates”. Contrary to simple narratives, increased online piracy during the pandemic isn’t always associated with less legal consumption. In fact, the relationship between piracy and legal markets is far from straightforward.
Covid didn’t make people pirate, the studios did. When it was just Netflix and it had everything and it was a reasonable price, piracy went down because Netflix was easier, affordable, and a “fair” price.
Then every studio started taking their stuff off Netflix so they could make their own streaming service, and all of a sudden the streaming world became a very expensive spiderweb of who makes what, what service is it on in my country, is every season on there if it’s a show, etc.
Then everyone just started raising prices like crazy so you’re paying significantly more every single year (sometimes multiple times a year), while giving you less content. It was a match made in heaven for piracy to explode once again.
People appreciated affordable, reasonably priced access to movies and content via Netflix. That was taken away. No surprise what happened next.
Yup perfectly sums it up.
Oh and don’t forget making certain content only available in certain regions (star trek for example).
Yes, one of the two things that pushed me over to go pirate again.
The other one hilariously was Paw Patrol, for the same issue. Please try and explain your 4-year old why they can watch Paw Patrol on their app while on vacation in one country but then not anymore back home.
No. COVID didn’t lead to this. Their insane greed lead to this. We were more than happy to pay a fair price to own a product, but no… they wanted more, and more, and more, and, eventually, we had enough. The fact that it happened during a pandemic is irrelevant, because it didn’t lead to this. Their greed lead to this.
This, very likely the whole thing is a correlation as many services used covid as an opportunity to raise prices and deliver less.
When it was just Netflix streaming wasn’t so bad but now that everyone and their dog wants to get in on it, it’s far to expensive. Greed would cause me to pay $15-25 per streaming service, search for the thing I want to watch and hope its there. If its not on any of them, search where I could try and pay to rent it, and if that fails I… Look for physical on eBay or just not watch it.
Or… My cost per month is about $25 (power, VPN, indexers, Usenet, etc) plus time and hardware to keep my equipment running. To watch something I login to *arr, add what I want, wait a couple minutes, and then start watching it.
Netflix also got a lot worse and more expensive.
People trapped at home downloaded more stuff, news at 11.
The reason people pirate more is because it’s easier than the alternative. Subscription culture can get fucked.
Not just that, but around the same time we saw significant service fragmentation and price hikes.
It was this, it wasn’t just that more people were home more.
Choose your path of happiness:
- owning nothing
- sharing
