Netflix drives customers to piracy by delaying new releases
Greetings Readers!
With the exception of when they raise prices, everybody seems to have a major love of Netflix, myself included. Unfortunately, I think that love affair is about to come to an end. It was announced today that Netflix has decided to let the greedy people over at Warner Bros. keep Netflix from renting new DVD or Blu-ray releases until 28 days after their release. So much for Netflix's willingness to stand up to the buffoons at the movie studios.
In exchange for this stupidity, Warner Bros. will open up more of its catalog of movies to Netflix for streaming. I don't suppose that is the worst trade-off in the world but it certainly hurts many Netflix customers who use the service to check out new movies as they come out. For the customers that don't do any streaming from Netflix, there is no upside to this deal. If these deals catch on, not only will it hurt Netflix subscribers, but Netflix itself. Currently, 30% of Netflix's rental business is new releases, something that this will really cut into. Hopefully they won't bend over to any other studios if they want to keep that number from going down. While this appears to be a big win for Warner Bros, I believe it will come back to bite them.
Warner Bros. stands to make a lot of money off of this deal. A large chunk of the money made from a movie's DVD/Blu-ray sales are made in the first month of release and by taking out a large chunk of the rental competition in the first month, Warner Bros. expects sales to increase considerably. I, on the other hand, am not so sure of this. As a usually happy Netflix customer (except when they increase Blu-ray rental fees), I almost never buy DVD or Blu-ray movies anymore. If there is a great sale on Amazon, then I will buy something but otherwise, if I can't find it on Netflix, I can find it on <insert bittorrent site here>.
This is exactly what many other people are going to be doing as well. If they can't get a movie from Netflix, they won't want to waste their gas going to their local big box store in hopes that they will have the new movie that they want to watch in stock. Owning the movie is nice, but unless you know you want to watch it all the time, it makes no sense to buy it when you are already paying for a Netflix subscription. Paying $20 for a movie when you should be able to rent or stream it is insane. This is the point where most people will have the thought that going to a bittorrent site and getting the movie the night you want to watch it for free is a lot easier, cheaper and more hassle free than going to buy the movie at the store. The fact that Warner Bros. doesn't understand this just shows what kind of idiots they have running the company.
In this decade, content producers need to focus on putting their content everywhere and make the money they can instead of putting it only in a few places because all that is going to do is drive more people to piracy.
Netflix, stand up for your customers, not the fools at the movie studios!
Dark times ahead for Bittorrent
Its hard to find any good news in the Bittorrent community these days. Between the sale of The Pirate Bay to the court ordered mass deletion of torrents on Mininova, it seems that nothing can go right for the popular P2P community.
With groups like the RIAA, MPAA, IFPI, BRIEN and countless others constantly harassing every bittorrent site they can find until they shut down, it is no surprise that the P2P scene is seeing some dark days. I'm not saying this is the beginning of the end for bittorrent, but I do think that the actions of the past two months are going to change the community forever.
I predict that with the court ordered mass deletion of torrents on Mininova and the sale of The Pirate Bay (which will immediately be run straight into the ground), this is the end of massive torrent sites. Numerous large trackers have been shut down over the past couple of years but these two are by far the biggest. Generally speaking, the larger the torrent site, the bigger the target is on their back and the greater desire that the groups mentioned above have to shut them down. I think in the future that the biggest torrent sites you will see are near that of the tracker Demonoid.
I believe that in the near future, we will see a number of new, smaller, torrent sites pop up to fill the void left by the larger trackers. When I use bittorrent, I find that the more niche tracker I can find, the better the experience tends to be and I think that this is the trend that is about to get a big boost in the coming months. Arguably, what made sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay great is their wide range of files, but that has also caused problems in that instead of having just one industry group after you, you have groups after you from a number of industries. It is much easier to stay alive if you only have a few people chasing you rather than a mob of them. The more niche that sites can be, the better experience users will have as well because it will be much easier to find what they are looking for with more seeds and less irrelevant stuff to sift through.
In the end, I think that the current events in the bittorrent community will work out for the best but it is going to be a tough road to get there and things will be much different than they have been in the past. Here is to hoping that the mafia groups don't win!
Game developer figures out how to interact with pirates for its benefit
Greetings Readers!
For years now, we have been hearing of software pirates getting sued for illegally downloading games and other software just like their music and movie downloading brethren. While there seems to be a few people that understand that you can't win against the pirates, most major gaming companies have yet to grasp this and instead end up looking like idiots. Well now an independent developer has decided to take a stand against the pirates and not only is it getting him a large amount of respect from the pirates, it is turning the pirates into loyal customers!
With the gaming market dominated by blockbusters such as Halo, Gears of War, Grand Theft Auto and Madden among others, it is rare that we hear about the smaller, independent developers and their struggle with piracy, rather less how they handle the problem. ACE Team, the developers of Zeno Flash, a FPS game has recently taken to the torrent sites with the knowledge that they won't stop piracy but will hopefully convince pirates that if they decide to torrent their game, use it as a try before you buy experience. Below is the post by Carlos Bordeu, an employee of ACE Team, on the trackers comments.
I’m one of the developers of Zeno Clash. I would appreciate you read this if you are about to download this file.
Zeno Clash is an independently funded game by a very small and sacrificed group of people. The only way in which we can continue making games like this (or a sequel) is to have good sales.
I am aware that at this moment there is still no demo of the game, but we are working on one which will be available soon.
We cannot do anything to stop piracy of the game (and honestly don’t intend to do so) but if you are downloading because you wish to try before you buy, I would ask that you purchase the game (and support the independent game development scene) if you enjoy it. We plan on updating Zeno Clash with DLC and continuing support for the game long after it’s release.
Thanks for taking the time to read this… hopefully it will make a difference.
Carlos Bordeu
ACE Team
It is great to see a small team like this have such an attitude toward piracy. What is really great to see is the response that he got in the comments. People reposted his statement in the comments of other torrent sites as well as post their thoughts about what they are trying to do to fight piracy instead of trying to sue every person they can find. Here are some of the responses that have been posted by the pirates.
"It was a touching comment (seriously) I will dl it and see if I like it and then will see if I buy it or not.”
“Developers like this deserve the money. They didn’t come on here with a preconceived notion that we are all thieves who don’t buy our software. I like that, because I and most of the people who use this actually do buy the software and other goods that we enjoy.”
“I have not bought a game in 5 years, but the attitude of the developers has made me want to purchase their game. F***, if I like this game, I’m gonna buy it!”
Clearly this is a winning strategy for ACE Team against piracy. If more developers as well as the music and movie industry would take this approach, I believe they would see similar responses from pirates and would actually sell more of their product because of it. If you have a company that is in this position and suffering from piracy, I recommend trying this idea and seeing if it helps. Considering you have nothing to lose since you product is already being stolen, try to convert those people in to paying customers in any way you can besides suing them.
-Jeremy "pcnerd37" Bray
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