Daisy chained vcr watch parties.
2007? Sit down junior.
The real winners here are pirates because thanks to companies streaming quality media, we get quality pirated media the moment or hours later, whereas with film we had to wait until DVD until we got quality pirated film.
I definitely don’t miss cam rips. No movie was worth that wonky, noisy, messy version with bozo breathing into the cam mic and people standing up in front of you.
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. 😅)
Even a 20 year should know Napster saga (with all the implications involved) happened in 2001.
Our Apple User Group received a letter from Bill Gates back in the 1980s admonishing people for pirating his compiler. It was hilariously badly done.
How shamelessly ironic of him. 🤣🖕🏼
(Get fucked by an undead horde, Gates. You’re trying to be the Democrat among oligarchs —which hasn’t aged well at all, ya pedo.)
Woefully inaccurate, the entire P2P file sharing craze kicked off by Napster all went down before 2007 and there were plenty of online piracy venues before then too like IRC, 90s copper internet was perfectly capable of all that. And I was torrenting movies right alongside my Netflix DVD rentals. Piracy has always been here and has never left.
Filesharing pre-dates the web.
It never left, but common folks decreased reliance on it substantially. When Netflix was popular my house of IT people slowed and almost stopped pirating video content entirely, there was no reason. After Netflix turned shit and half a dozen services sprung up, we cancelled Netflix and now pirate absolutely everything video. There was a slight drop while crunchyroll was good, but it becasue shit enough apparently that those in my family using it returned to pirating.
Music didn’t shitify as much though, I feel it’s improved now. I have Tidal because it’s cheap and easy to find new music. I seldom find music that I can’t listen to on Tidal.
Elegedly.
You wouldn’t download a car!!! I would if I could and soon with 3d printers you bet I will!
Netflix didn’t have a choice but to get into production and producers were going to see their money anyways and get into streaming. There was only one way forward that was sensible for both groups.
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
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.
forced
That’s humanizing the corp way too generously. Nothing “forced Netflix to start producing [its] own content” but itself. 🤑
“Caused” is probably a more appropriate and less loaded term.
No. That’s still removing the onus from the corpos. Fuck that simping.
re: your handle : I’d totally watch Uncle Buck as Paul Revere (or as the Duke of Wellington), FWIW. I guess I’ll have to wait until the Disney-Sony shite machine pushes it through their botfarm to raise that dead legend for the screen.
Simping? I rephrased my idea a bit for the sake of argument but I understand their motivation and their behaviour.
I’d say you’re one to talk about handles with yours being some reference to Bill & Ted and Joseph Stalin but I think it might be lost on you.
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 demographics for their early programming.
early on, no one thought streaming world work
Yeah, I recall the FUD there being so gawdamn insipid back then. Just gossipy regurge from malinformed archair experts. Thus began my realization that “adults” only got that way by outliving those even stupider —but, every day’s a new chance, eh?
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.
Radio was the latter long before the efforts toward the former began…
same story with spotify, except that spotify itself started as a piracy service…
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.
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.
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.
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.
Let’s not forget those fuckin’ DJs that talked during a song and forced one to wait again for that track to be played —hoping they wouldn’t stroke their persona to the silent, imagined fan base… but they always did. 🤌🏼
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 mean, if we’re not restricting “media piracy” to digital, there was an entire subculture that ran bootlegs of live music events for the diehard connoisseurs, and the archivists had insane collections dating long into those pre-digital decades —including completely unpublished instances of world famous bands like The Grateful Dead, The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, CCR, Jimi Hendrix, etc.
But, hey, it’s not like modern day has seen corpo dumbasses scramble to recover data corrupted by time, shitty storage SoP, etc., only to tap one or more of these driven, fastidious, longtime collectors to ask if they could burn/dub/cut a copy… you know, like pirates. 🤣
