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jelizondo [soylentnews.org] writes:

The Guardian recently published a couple of articles about digital streaming services and piracy. The first one [theguardian.com] reads:

With a trip to Florence booked, all I want is to rewatch Medici. The 2016 historical drama series tells of the rise of the powerful Florentine banking dynasty, and with it, the story of the Renaissance. Until recently, I could simply have gone to Netflix and found it there, alongside a wide array of award-winning and obscure titles. But when I Google the show in 2025, the Netflix link only takes me to a blank page. I don’t see it on HBO Max, Disney+, Apple TV+, or any of the smaller streaming platforms. On Amazon Prime I am required to buy each of the three seasons or 24 episodes separately, whereupon they would be stored in a library subject to overnight deletion. Raised in the land of The Pirate Bay, the Swedish torrent index, I feel, for the first time in a decade, a nostalgia for the high seas of digital piracy. And I am not alone.

For my teenage self in the 00s, torrenting was the norm. Need the new Coldplay album on your iPod? The Pirate Bay [thepiratebay.org]. The 1968 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet? The Pirate Bay. Whatever you needed was accessible with just a couple of clicks. But as smartphones proliferated, so did Spotify, the music streaming platform that is also headquartered in Sweden. The same Scandinavian country had become a hub of illegal torrenting and simultaneously conjured forth its solution.

“Spotify would never have seen the light of day without The Pirate Bay,” Per Sundin, the then managing director of Universal Music Sweden, reflected in 2011 [www.svd.se] [in Swedish]. But music torrenting died out as we all either listened with ads or paid for the subscription. And when Netflix launched in Sweden in late 2012, open talk of torrenting moving images also stopped. Most of the big shows and a great collection of award-winning films could all be found for just 79 SEK (£6) a month. Meanwhile, the three founders of The Pirate Bay were arrested [theguardian.com] and eventually jailed. Pirating faded into the history books as far as I was concerned.

A decade and a half on from the Pirate Bay trial, the winds have begun to shift. On an unusually warm summer’s day, I sit with fellow film critics by the old city harbour, once a haven for merchants and, rumour has it, smugglers. Cold bigstrongs in hand (that’s what they call pints up here), they start venting about the “enshittification” of streaming – enshittification being the process by which platforms degrade their services and ultimately die in the pursuit of profit. Netflix now costs upwards of 199 SEK (£15), and you need more and more subscriptions to watch the same shows you used to find in one place.

A fellow film critic confides anonymously: “I never stopped pirating, and my partner also does it if he doesn’t find the precise edition he is looking for on DVD.” While some people never abandoned piracy, others admit they have recently returned – this time turning to unofficial streaming platforms. One commonly used app is legal but can, through community add-ons, channel illicit streams. “Downloading is too difficult. I don’t know where to start,” says one film viewer. “The shady streams might bombard me with ads, but at least I don’t have to worry about getting hacked or caught.”

According to London‑based piracy monitoring and content‑protection firm MUSO, unlicensed streaming is the predominant source of TV and film piracy, accounting for 96% [hubspotusercontent-na1.net] [PDF] in 2023. Piracy reached a low in 2020, with 130bn [muso.com] website visits. But by 2024 that number had risen to 216bn. In Sweden, 25% of people [ttvk.fi] [PDF] surveyed reported pirating in 2024, a trend mostly driven by those aged 15 to 24. Piracy is back, just sailing under a different flag.

“Piracy is not a pricing issue,” Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve, the company behind the world’s largest PC gaming platform, Steam, observed in 2011. “It’s a service issue.” Today, the crisis in streaming makes this clearer than ever. With titles scattered, prices on the rise, and bitrates throttled depending on your browser, it is little wonder some viewers are raising the jolly roger again. Studios carve out fiefdoms, build walls and levy tolls for those who wish to visit. The result is artificial scarcity in a digital world that promised abundance.

Whether piracy today is rebellion or resignation is almost irrelevant; the sails are hoisted either way.

A second [theguardian.com], related article deals with other aspects of the issues:

In the 2000s, I arrived at university to vast libraries, thousands of strangers and the riches of academic life – plus a gigabit broadband connection that would be used on downloading pirated versions of every piece of entertainment ever made. In between essays, I watched classic movies, listened to vast discographies, and binged the entire run of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That particular choice might mark this story out as one that belongs firmly in the past, but piracy itself is far from dead.

We are living in a golden age of streaming. Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+ are pumping out award-winning shows. If you have a niche interest, someone is streaming it for you somewhere: Sony’s Crunchyroll for anime fans, BFI Player for film buffs, Sky’s History Play for those who really like ancient aliens.

But as the new releases keep coming, the bills start growing. If your interests are decidedly mainstream, the basic tiers of the five largest paid-for streaming services in the UK – the aforementioned US giants, plus Sky’s Now TV – will cost you almost £40 a month. Drop any one of them, and you will inevitably miss out on the pop culture craze of the month: no Now TV means no The White Lotus; no Disney+ means no Marvel.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Piracy was meant to follow the path set by the music industry: where technological change initially enabled new forms of copyright infringement, then spurred rejuvenation, settling into a new equilibrium.

Napster, and then peer-to-peer filesharing, were the innovations that rocked music. Global recorded music sales peaked in 1999, at $25.2bn, then bottomed out 14 years later at barely half that. Illegal downloading wasn’t just cheaper than buying CDs, it was also more convenient than traipsing to the high street. But music streaming, arriving with the launch of Spotify, changed everything. Streaming meant instant access and a better user experience than piracy. Where legal downloads peaked at 27% of the industry’s total revenue in 2014, last year streaming made up 62% of music revenue, with 2020 seeing the highest earnings since 2003.

“In any phase of technological development, you see rapid changes in the illegal market, which are quicker than the changes in the legal market,” says Kieron Sharp, chief executive of the UK anti-piracy group Fact (it of the “You wouldn’t steal a car” adverts). “If you don’t continually fight the pirates and those stealing your content, it’s going to be a bit of a free-for-all.”

Netflix’s 2013 adaptation of the Michael Dobbs novel [House of Cards] starring Kevin Spacey was the streaming service’s first in-house production, and an enormous hit. Winning three Emmys, it suggested a future for the streaming service very different from that of Spotify, still two years from facing its first serious competition in the form of Apple Music. Where music streaming services competed to have the fullest libraries possible, Netflix leaned hard on having exclusive, acclaimed shows. As a business strategy, it paid off. For Netflix, and the other streaming services that followed, the upfront cost of an exclusive show is huge – but so is the incentive for new users to hop on board.

That is until the system breaks down. Andy Chatterley, chief executive of the piracy analytics firm Muso, thinks this began in the pandemic: “In 2020 there was this massive increase in piracy at the start of the pandemic, where everyone suddenly found themselves working from home. That’s unusual – we normally see big spikes up on things like 1 January, holidays, but the average is smooth.”

But if the pandemic and a fragmented market are driving people to piracy, it is having less of an impact on what they’re watching. Muso’s data shows that the most popular pirated shows in the UK in July included a few that are available on free-to-air TV, such as Rick and Morty and Love Island. Yes, Disney+ exclusives such as Loki and Star Wars: The Bad Batch are in the Top 10, as is the CW hit Superman & Lois, which is still yet to be legally available in the UK. But the data suggests people are choosing to pirate first, and what to watch second. That’s not surprising, Chatterley says, given the ease of modern piracy. “When people actually apply piracy, they’re completely satisfied in their viewing experience. They’re using a streaming platform with extremely sophisticated user experience.”

And after just a few years of streaming, we now have streaming fatigue: too many different services and not enough time. The problem is particularly acute in the US, where many big broadcasters have brought out their own streaming services – HBO Max, Paramount+ and NBC’s Peacock – each with monthly fees to pay. Analysts are predicting a wave of failures and consolidation over the next few years, likely to drive even more piracy.

When there are things to pay for, there will always be people looking for ways to get them for nothing. The question now is whether, having come so close to being pushed underground, piracy could rear its head not as the only option for thieves but as the simpler alternative for everyone.

So what is your take on the matter? Do you subscribe to multiple streaming services? Have you ever "rented" a movie on YouTube or another digital outlet? Is piracy a way to defend your God-given right to watch movies and series against greedy Hollywood?

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