FUUUUUUCK DAVID ZASLAV!

He is not only hiding things people enjoy watching and playing, he is hiding history.

Imagine how much less we would know about Elizabethan England if all of Shakespeare’s plays were lost to all time.

There was a decent 5 year span in my life where the only time I ever pirated was to see British TV shows I wouldn’t be able to watch in the U.S. And if I could have paid the British TV license fee to see those, I would have paid it too. Because that would have been a total of two streaming services.

Even now that we’re down to one income we can afford two streaming services- one for video and one for music. But we sure as fuck can’t afford the dozen streaming services you need to have if you expect to watch all the programming people rave about as amazing.

I can’t afford Max and Disney+ and AppleTV+. If I want to find out why The Last of Us is so good and why The Mandalorian was a terrific show and how funny Ted Lasso is, and have the temerity to expect no ads when I’m already paying to watch, that alone would cost me almost $40 a month. Add Netflix and Amazon to that and it’s another $30+.

That is what I was paying for cable except with far less programming. On-demand and no ads are definitely advantages, but pay the same amount for a fraction of the programming advantages? Not for me.

In the 90s, my cable company kept adding new channels but the price didn’t keep shooting up.

It really is surprising how bad Netflix’s quality is. I can notice it on my TV and it’s only 1080p.

I would like to see some evidence that the competition resulted in Netflix losing a lot of subscribers, and thus money, rather than not hitting their predicted revenue targets. Because I would bet it’s the latter and not the former. I don’t know of too many people who said, “well, I had Netflix, but Disney is doing streaming video now so I won’t be watching Bake-Off anymore.” They just ended up getting Netflix and Disney+.

For a while anyway. Now people are dropping these services due to the price hikes. Unless you downgraded your Netflix service when they added lower tiers with fewer options and ads, to maintain the basic Netflix service you had in 2016, you’re paying an additional $5 a month today.

Netflix and all the other streaming services are built upon the insane idea that there are an infinite number of new customers that will continue to sign up regularly. Some of them don’t even think you need all that much programming to draw them. Paramount+ has a fraction of the original programming of Netflix, Peacock, Apple, Amazon, etc. but still costs $10 a month and will most assuredly continue to raise its prices based on the idea that there are either an infinite number of Star Trek fans or they will have to raise their prices.

That doesn’t really sound like a premium.

They even often have them streaming for free. All of my wife’s audiobooks are free streamed via the library and she listens to them every day.

I don’t agree that it is ‘morally correct’ to pay $20 for a shitty movie that cost over $100 million to make when that money could have gone to fund 5 much smaller, much better movies just so the studio could shovel money into their Scrooge McDuck moneybin with yet another multimedia tie-in.

Maybe people would pirate less if you let them keep what they pay for.

8.00.8.5

Naughty Bobby!

There are a lot of weird anime fans I’ve encountered who seem to think that everyone is as familiar with anime as they are. I don’t get it. I’m a massive Trekkie, but I wouldn’t expect strangers that aren’t on a Star Trek forum or something to understand what I’m talking about when I discuss Rick Berman’s role in preventing queer characters from being a major presence on Star Trek shows until the kiss between Jadzia and another Trill host in the late 1990s being a microcosm of the television landscape of the 1980s and 1990s as a whole including the acceptability of queer women (such as Ellen) on TV vs. queer men… Because they have no idea what the fuck I’m talking about or who Rick Berman is or what a Jadzia could possibly be even if I could expand upon that and write a nice tight little essay.

Copyright law in the U.S. used to be 19 years with an option to renew after that 19 and was that way until the early 1970s. That should be more than long enough for any copyright to last.

What I would love to find, and haven’t been able to, is a large collection of BBC radio dramas. They do at least one every day, but then they go down the memory hole, sometimes forever. Back in the AudioGalaxy days, I was able to get so many, but I’ve lost them all since. I don’t know who, if anyone, is collecting them now or how to get them.

My wife listens to all of her audiobooks via the library’s online service. She listens to them daily and she hasn’t bought or pirated any in at least a decade.

https://audiobookbay.is/

Aren’t those also anecdotal examples?

What evidence do you have that most children aren’t interested in learning how things work? Because there are a lot of children’s books about how things work.

I loved learning about how computers worked when I was a little kid. My (much) older brother taught me all about how the Apple II worked when I was 6, and within a few months, I knew enough to use it myself. I had important games to play, but I still wanted to know how it all worked.

I’m not saying show them the code. But there are simple ways you can explain to kids what a NFC chip is and how that NFC chip lets them play the movies they want.