In my case, i went back to physical media. Bought a blhray player and now my boyfriend and I are gradually expanding our movie library when we feel like it. Some movies and shows don’t exist on dvd/bluray, but that’s okay. I think there is something healthy about not having access to absolutely everything you want at all times. Besides, for me, there is also something satisfying in having ti get up from the couch and change discs and so on. I missed the physical aspect of watching movies and remember how much streaming services fried my fucking brain while i still used them.

It was to the point where you barely register wtf you are watching because everything on streaming services is about the next thing.

Movies werent movies on streaming services, but content and I heard people starting to refer to movies and shows as content at some point and was like “this is fucked”.

Content. Content to fill the void. Not to experience or educate, enlighten or provoke your senses and morality. Just content to distract you.

Ew.

I dont mimd piracy, but i prefer physical media. I no longer wish to follow technollgical advancements. I want to go back and stay at a place where there was some level of conscious and physical effort to watch a movie. That way you remember it better, you slow down and you appreciate the piece of art in front of you rather than seeing it as content.

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.

Before 2007, but mostly yes.

He skipped over LUSERnet and LimeWire, which was before 2007. Usenet was a big sharing community too before 2007.

Piracy has always been around. It’s the underhand method of getting what someone wants. Empires didn’t mint coins because it was fun, but they needed to identify forgeries. Also, scales were used (and people would use lead) to trick it instead of coin.

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.

You wouldn’t download a car!!! I would if I could and soon with 3d printers you bet I will!

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. 😅)

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.

Piracy very much existed before the internet took off. Recording VHS, then burning dvd’s and cd’s, and the like. Many stores in the hood would openly sell burned cd’s even. Others out of the trunk of their cars.

And the need to pirate never went away, fuck netflix, never had them, never will.

Never paid for any of these streaming shit

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.

OP must be a 2000s kid, because we were definitely pirating stuff over the Internet long before that.

They also didn’t mention Netflix’s DVD service, nor that it was really Steam that did what they described.

While VALVe somehow made piracy obsolete for video games then after that they decide to make gaming on linux easier jumpstart the pc handheld market AND making one of the best first party controllers

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 metrics for their early programming.

same story with spotify, except that spotify itself started as a piracy service…