The study considers two main types of anti-piracy messaging. The first, prosocial messaging, asks pirates to consider the effect of their consumption on others, such as harm to film industry workers and how piracy compromises the quality of future productions.
This might work for some people, but folks who are familiar with Hollywood and Recording Industry accounting practices and payment schemes fully understand that this is a joke and those industries work fucking hard to not pay people a living wage.
It’s an instant turn off and reminder whose pockets I’m really putting money into unless I’m supporting artists directly through something like Patreon or Bandcamp Fridays.
Real pro-social anti-piracy messaging would work on providing me with more options like Bandcamp Fridays, instead of making empty promises that they can renege on easily.
It works on stupid people not in the know.
But it doesn’t when you remind people about what Hollywood has done to it’s workers when AI was introduced. Then remind them of the Writer’s Strike. Then route them back to what the anti-piracy outfits want. Then have a good laugh because it is a good joke.
The discussion around special offers and pricing are actually why I don’t subscribe to a lot of things.
It always feels like there’s likely going to be a better deal if I just go away and wait and don’t bother right now, which typically means I forget I was even interested.
I’d rather places be honest with pricing than play those variable price games because it always feels like I’m going to get scammed if I don’t just do nothing and see if the price gets better.
If they ever come out with a service that has everything, no commercial breaks, and you can download for offline use, those pirates will be in real trouble.
Remember when Netflix almost had it perfect?
At one point it was the answer to piracy, IMO. I only ever subscribed to it and Spotify.
Then every studio and media corp decided to take us back to cable.
Yeah it was awesome. I didn’t download a thing for years because the service was good and price was fair.
This year I finally gave in. Paying for 6 different streaming services and still not finding the movie we wanted to watch made me get a NAS and cancel (almost) all subscriptions. We kept Spotify and Netflix.
They can all get bent, literally.
Some platforms offer better prices in exchange for a one-year subscription commitment, but tiered discounts based on subscriber loyalty are much less common.
It’s literally the opposite most of the time. The longer you stay the more expensive it becomes.
